England’s farmers to be paid to rewild land

Nature recovery schemes are part of post-Brexit subsidies overhaul, but eco campaigners are sceptical

Farmers in areas such as Dartmoor in Devon, where there is a significant rewilding campaign, will be invited to bid for 10-15 pilot projects. 

Photograph: dpe123/Getty/iStockphoto


Fiona Harvey

THE GUARDIAN

Environment correspondent
Thu 6 Jan 2022 

Farmers in England will be given taxpayers’ cash to rewild their land, under plans for large-scale nature recovery projects announced by the government. These will lead to vast tracts of land being newly managed to conserve species, provide habitats for wildlife and restore health to rivers and streams.

Bids are being invited for 10-15 pilot projects, each covering at least 500 hectares and up to 5,000 hectares, to a total of approximately 10,000 hectares in the first two-year phase – about 10 times the size of Richmond Park in London. These pilots could involve full rewilding or other forms of management that focus on species recovery and wildlife habitats.

Rare fauna such as sand lizards, water voles and curlews will be targeted, with the aim of improving the status of about half of the most threatened species in England.


UK farmers urged to set aside 1% of land for wildlife havens

The exact funding has not been disclosed, as bids will be compared to determine value for money before a final decision on which should go ahead is made this summer. However, the total amount available for such schemes is expected to reach £700m to £800m a year by 2028. By 2042, the government aims to have up to 300,000 hectares of England covered by such “landscape recovery” projects – an area roughly the size of Lancashire.

Ministers also plan to offer English farmers payments for “local nature recovery”. The smaller-scale actions taken on their farms could include planting more trees, restoring peatlands or wetlands and leaving space for wildlife habitats. These payments, which will be revealed later this year, should also reach up to £800m a year by 2028.

George Eustice, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, said the aim was for wildlife and nature protection to run alongside food production as a matter of course for most farmers. He is expected to tell farmers at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday: “We want to see profitable farm businesses producing nutritious food and underpinning a growing rural economy, where nature is recovering and people have better access to it. Through our new schemes, we are going to work with farmers and land managers to halt the decline in species, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, increase woodland, improve water and air quality and create more space for nature.”

As well as the two new schemes – landscape recovery and local nature recovery – farmers will also be able to apply for payments to help them protect their soil and take other basic environmental protection measures, under plans announced last year. Funding for these measures will also reach about £800m a year, as part of the post-Brexit overhaul of the £2.4bn-a-year farming subsidies into a system of “public money for public goods”. This means farmers are paid for making environmental improvements, rather than the amount of land they farm.

The water vole is one of the rare species to be helped by the schemes. 

Photograph: Mark Smith/Alamy

Green campaigners were sceptical over whether the new payments would be enough to meet the government’s aim of halting the loss of wild species abundance and managing 30% of land for the good of nature by 2030, as well as ensuring that farmers help to solve the climate crisis rather than add to it. The Wildlife Trusts, RSPB and National Trust charities said detail on how the schemes would work was still lacking.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, said: “The real test of this agricultural transition is not whether it is a little bit better or moderately better than what came before, but whether it will be enough to deliver on [the government’s targets]. Anything less than that means that this historic opportunity will have been wasted. While we’re hearing the right noises from the government, the devil will be in the detail and the detail is still not published nearly six years after the EU referendum.”

The schemes would fail unless more was done to help farmers move away from intensive practices, said Jo Lewis, the policy and strategy director at the Soil Association. This could include the introduction of ambitious targets for reducing pesticide and fertiliser use.

“These schemes won’t work in isolation. They risk failure if they are forced to compete with mounting commercial pressures that encourage more intensive farming and cheap food production, for which the environment and our health ultimately pay the price,” she said.

Though some are benefiting from high grain prices, many farmers are facing a difficult outlook, with rising input costs, plummeting exports due to Brexit red tape, and potential new competition from prospective importers after post-Brexit trade deals.


Rewilding 5% of England could create 20,000 rural jobs

Martin Lines, the UK chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, said that farmers who already take environmental measures were “left in limbo” before the schemes start in 2024. “Government has been running similar environmental stewardship schemes voluntarily for farmers for 20 or 30 years, yet we still have seen huge declines in wildlife. We need these schemes to be bolder and more ambitious, not just delivering more of the same with minor improvements,” he said.

Tenant farmers, who work on about a third of farmed land in the UK, are concerned over how they can access the new schemes. They also fear that their landlords may take advantage of large-scale rewilding to remove their tenancies.

George Dunn, of the Tenant Farmers Association, said: “It is alarming that, after at least three years of discussions with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it has no clear plan for access to these schemes by tenant farmers. [Current payments] are being removed while we have a vague commitment for further work to be undertaken on how tenants, and those who use common land, can access schemes. It does feel like we are pushing water uphill.”

Mark Tufnell, the president of the Country Land and Business Association, which represents 28,000 farmers, landowners and rural businesses, said: “The government must also ensure that policy changes look towards domestic food production and security. Britain is already at the forefront of agricultural innovation and animal welfare standards, and we must do more to make certain that our great produce is supported here and abroad. We need to guarantee that profitable agriculture remains a core part of the rural economy and feeds the nation sustainably.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Top UK law firm fined record sum for breaching money-laundering rules

Mishcon de Reya agrees to pay fine of £232,500 after investigation by Solicitors Regulation Authority

The entrance to Mishcon de Reya’s offices in London. 

Photograph: Vindice/Alamy


Haroon Siddique and Harry Davies
Thu 6 Jan 2022 

Mishcon de Reya, one of the UK’s most prestigious law firms, has been fined a record amount for committing “serious breaches” of money-laundering rules.

The London-based firm has agreed to pay a fine of £232,500, plus a further £50,000 towards the costs of the investigation, which was carried out by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).

In its decision, published on Wednesday, the regulator said Mishcon de Reya’s conduct had “potential to cause significant harm by facilitating transactions that gave rise to a risk of facilitating money laundering”.

The SRA investigation concerned work the firm carried out for two unnamed individual clients between September 2015 and April 2017, and corporate vehicles connected with the same two individuals.
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The work included the proposed acquisition of two separate entities that had “higher risk of money laundering or terrorist financing” under relevant money-laundering legislation, because they involved companies in high-risk jurisdictions.

The regulator found Mishcon de Reya failed to carry out the required level of due diligence or ongoing monitoring.

Additionally, between 22 July and 28 July 2016, a payment of £965,000 was made into Mishcon de Reya’s client account and three payments – the highest of $1,099,015, equivalent to £810,000 – were made out of it, none of which related to the delivery of services by the firm, contrary to SRA rules that forbid client accounts being used “as a banking facility”.

The firm accepted the SRA’s decision and fine, which is is almost double the previous highest of £124,436, imposed by the regulator on Find My Claims in 2019, for sending six million unsolicited marketing letters to members of the public in respect of mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI).

A spokesperson for Mishcon de Reya disputed that the fine was the largest imposed by the SRA because the penalty covered two separate investigations rather than one.

The settlement will prevent the investigation looming over the firm as it prepares to float on the London Stock Exchange. The company is expected to seek a value of about £750m, based on typical valuations in the legal sector, a price tag that would make it the largest London-listed law firm, with every member of staff becoming a shareholder.

The firm is known for representing the wealthy, famous and powerful. High-profile cases include acting for Diana, Princess of Wales, during her divorce from Prince Charles and for Gina Miller when she took on the government over whether parliament had to approve the triggering of article 50 after the Brexit vote. Keir Starmer advised the firm while in parliament but ended the relationship when he became shadow Brexit secretary in 2016, subsequently turning down the offer of a lucrative second job with the firm.

The level of the SRA fine was based on 0.25% of turnover, in the middle of the band of up to 0.5%, because the SRA said “the breaches were serious but the risks did not crystallise into causing harm to clients or the wider public interest”. Based on Mishcon de Reya’s turnover of £155m, that would have been equivalent to £387,500 but it was reduced by the maximum allowable 40% discount to reflect mitigating circumstances.

A Mishcon de Reya spokesperson said: “We are pleased to have come to a settlement with the SRA relating to two separate and historic investigations in relation to which we have made appropriate admissions. Mitigating factors such as our cooperation with the SRA throughout the investigations and the corrective action we have taken since to prevent a recurrence have been recognised by the SRA in reaching this outcome.”

Mary Alice Thatch, Publisher Who Won Pardon for the Wilmington 10, Dies at 78

At the helm of The Wilmington Journal, she pushed to cover issues affecting the Black community that had been ignored by the mainstream press.


When Mary Alice Thatch took over the reins of The Wilmington Journal, she saw the Black-owned newspaper as a vital source of information for the city’s Black population and a force that spoke truth to power.

Credit...Paul R. Jervay Jr., via Associated Press

By Clay Risen
Jan. 5, 2022


Mary Alice Thatch, a crusading, third-generation newspaper publisher in North Carolina who led the fight to exonerate 10 civil rights activists wrongly convicted of arson in the 1970s, died on Dec. 28 at a hospital in Durham, N.C. She was 78.

Her daughter Johanna Thatch-Briggs confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Ms. Thatch had already had a long career in education when she took over the reins of The Wilmington Journal from her father, Thomas C. Jervay. Like him, she saw the Black-owned newspaper as a vital source of information for the city’s Black population and a force that spoke truth to power, white or otherwise.

“She was particularly committed to making sure that news that often is not represented in the mainstream media was always represented in The Wilmington Journal,” the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a civil-rights leader, said in a phone interview.

Ms. Thatch’s reporters uncovered corruption and took on unchecked gentrification, while The Journal’s editorials pushed for voting rights and education reform. But her greatest achievement came in the early 2010s, when she took up the cause of the so-called Wilmington 10.

A group of nine Black men and one white woman, the Wilmington 10 were convicted in 1971 of dynamiting a white-owned grocery store, then shooting at the firefighters who responded. Although the case against them was flimsy — among other things, three key witnesses for the prosecution recanted their accounts — their appeal failed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it.

The Wilmington 10 became a cause célèbre. Some 10,000 people joined a protest march in 1977 in Washington, D.C., calling for their release. That same year, Amnesty International embraced them as a cause, and Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, cited them in an interview as an example of domestic political prisoners.

A review by the Department of Justice persuaded Gov. Jim Hunt of North Carolina in 1978 to commute the rest of their sentences, and in 1980, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overturned the convictions. What remained was for the state to formally exonerate and compensate them through what, in North Carolina, is called a pardon of innocence.

At a 2011 meeting in Washington, Black newspaper publishers, including Ms. Thatch, listened to one of the 10, Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, plead for their help in publicizing their case.

A few days later, Ms. Thatch called her lead reporter, Cash Michaels, and asked him to oversee a campaign to uncover the truth about the Wilmington 10, and make the case for a formal pardon.

“Being a part of the Black press and knowing that there’s strength in the press, knowing that there’s strength in that pen, I was compelled to fight for justice,” she said in an interview with her husband’s church.

Over several months, Mr. Michaels and his team re-interviewed witnesses and lawyers from the trial, and uncovered damning documents that showed how, for example, the prosecutor, faced with a Black-majority jury, faked illness to get a mistrial, then connived to get a white-majority jury when the case restarted.

Their reporting appeared in The Journal, and it was reprinted in Black newspapers around the country. Other news outlets, including The New York Times, published editorials in support.

What had seemed like history was once again news, and by the end of 2012, pressure was building on Gov. Bev Perdue of North Carolina to issue a pardon of innocence — which she did on Dec. 31, her final day in office.

“Without Ms. Thatch, there would have been a lot less pressure on the governor to do something,” said Kenneth Janken, a historian at Duke University and the author of “The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s” (2016). “I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the press.”



This Jan. 21, 1976, file photo shows the Wilmington 10 at a news conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. From left, front row, they are Chavis, William (Joe) Wright, Connie Tindall and Jerry Jacobs. In the back row are Wayne Moore, Ann Shepard, James McKoy, Willie Vereen, Marvin Patrick and Reginald Epps. 

Credit...Associated Press

Mary Alice Jervay was born on July 6, 1943, in Wilmington. Her family lived in an apartment above The Journal’s offices, and during the day her mother, Willie (DeVane) Jervay, would help with production, as would Mary Alice, before she could even walk.

“My daddy used to say that I started at 3 or 4 months old, when I started crawling around on the floor,” she said in a 2013 interview. “I was hired as the janitor to clean the floor — with my diaper.”

Remembering Hank Aaron, Colin Powell, Stephen Sondheim, Beverly Cleary, DMX, Cicely Tyson, Larry King, Olympia Dukakis, Chuck Close, Michael K. Williams, Bob Dole, Janet Malcolm and many others who died this year.

Her grandfather, R.S. Jervay, had founded the newspaper as The Cape Fear Journal in 1927. It was Wilmington’s first Black-owned paper since The Daily Record, whose offices, once located across the street from where The Journal now stands, were burned down in 1898 when a white supremacist coup overthrew the biracial City Council and killed 24 Black and white residents.

Despite that legacy, Ms. Thatch did not initially pursue journalism as a career. She received a bachelor’s degree in business education from Elizabeth City State University and a master’s degree in the same subject from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. She then worked as a high school teacher in North Carolina and Ohio and as a consultant for the North Carolina State government.

She married John L. Thatch in 1970. Along with him and her daughter, she is survived by two other daughters, Shawn Thatch and Robin Thatch Johnson; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

By the time Ms. Thatch took over from her father in 1996, The Journal had become one of the best-known Black newspapers in the South, widely regarded for its fearlessness in the face of racist violence. A white supremacist had blown up The Journal’s offices in 1973, a calamity that her father quickly brushed off.

“She never forgot how even though the paper’s building was destroyed, he still made sure a paper came out that week,” Mr. Michaels said in an interview. “That’s the sort of strength and resilience she embodied.”

She was honored as publisher of the year in 2013 by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. And she continued to crusade for the Black community in Wilmington: Starting in 2016, she ran a weekly photo of Ebonee Spears, a Wilmington girl who had gone missing, on The Journal’s cover, according to The Charlotte News Observer.

Like most newspapers, The Wilmington Journal has recently faced financial challenges. A campaign in early 2021 raised $95,000, enough for the paper to keep its office building. Where it will go without its indomitable publisher at the helm remains an open question.


Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey." @risenc

There is nothing wrong with Critical Race Theory… except the name

The term should never have escaped the halls of academe. But, a more appropriate name for it would be the truth.

BONNIE GREER

Children in Virginia protest against Critical Race Theory claiming it teaches white people to see themselves oppressors of Black Americans. 

Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/ AFP via Getty Images.

Critical Race Theory is one of those terms you would be given a promotion for coming up with at some Far Right think tank.

Its beauty, in terms of scaring Republican Party deserters away from the Democrats, is exquisite.

CRT even comes with a bonus for Rightists. Since it is an approach to education, they argue, the Left will end up teaching it to very young children.

That last bit is, of course, nonsense. A Big Scare. But the urban myth is strong enough to have given the Republicans the governor’s mansion in Virginia in November, a state Joe Biden won in 2020 by a comfortable margin.

The Democratic Party candidate made the mistake of saying that parents should not dictate to schools. This triggered a huge backlash built on a fraught year of home-schooling, Covid fatigue, and fear of CRT.

Downstate Virginia was no surprise, but the fact that the suburbs just outside Washington D.C. voted Republican is a real big, fat shock – as well as being really bad news for the midterms next November.

In midterms, the President’s party usually loses the House and Senate, or is handed a reduced majority because the elections are a referendum on the White House.

Some members of the press are already comparing Biden’s administration to Jimmy Carter’s in the 1970s, a near-death experience for the Democrats until another Southerner came to the rescue years later: William Jefferson Clinton.

Recently, I suggested, over a meal with a bunch of friends, that the name of CRT should be changed to something less ominous. I got yelled at. “Why should we have to accommodate them,” I was asked.

Why indeed? Well, there is the little matter of votes. Of winning. Of keeping the Republican Party, now almost feral at its grassroots, away from the levers of federal power.

Because the USA is not a great place right now.

Critical Race Theory emerged from legal studies, borrowing analysis of what lay at the foundation of the United States. These legal studies consider race to be at the core of the American experience, and of course, this is correct.

A look at the life of George Floyd, for example, makes this easy to see. Floyd was a descendant of enslaved people who were then allowed to be sharecroppers. He was raised by a single mother who did her best in a neighbourhood from which the white people had fled and therefore the investment, the services, the whole nine yards had disappeared.

He grew up on a decaying Houston housing estate where the young were used to the cops showing up to harass, not to help. His secondary school was underfunded and underperforming, not able to prepare him for the world.

His minor offences got him serious jail time, and his record kept him from being hired. He spent a quarter of his life incarcerated in a criminal justice system that, CRT rightly points out, targets African-Americans and other people of colour.

His longest time inside was spent in a private prison in a predominately white town that got a third of its revenue from having that prison in its midst. That state and federal cash gave plenty of incentive for keeping that prison full to the brim.

He was a victim of several of the ailments that afflict the poor, and poor African-Americans, and he had Covid-19, too. He committed robbery and had a drug problem. He admitted in a video that he was not perfect. But that he was trying.

What Critical Race Theory explains is that the United States is a white settler country. That it is a country settled by Europeans fleeing oppression of all kinds, many just looking for an opportunity and a new start.

The United States favoured, and still does favour, people with white skin. James Baldwin, for example, said that the Irish did not know that they were white until they came to America.

Now, with the nation inevitably and irreversibly becoming a minority/ majority country whose main religion may be “other”, we are witnessing the death of a demographic.

The Unite the Right march in Charlottesville in 2017, where white men chanted: “Jews will not replace us. You will not replace us, ” and the sack of the Capitol in January 2021 are evidence of the death throes of what Trump labels MAGA: Make America Great Again.

The not-so-subtle subtext is “Make America White Again.”

CRT names and nails all of this, but as a producer once told a robust, young, male star-in-the-making: “Look, I know what your real name is. But you can’t use it. You can’t call yourself Marion.”

So the star-to-be renamed himself John Wayne. The package is still the same, you just don’t get put off by the handle.

But I’m afraid that the name Critical Race Theory will stay because there are people out there who believe that to change it would be capitulation and worse.

Yet, unless we listen to those women who call themselves “suburban housewives” and say it with pride, the Far Right will continue to be the political Covid of the Republican Party and maybe of the Conservatives here in the UK. That spells big trouble.

This all matters because the Conservatives are in power here and the Republicans will probably be back in power over there. I have no alternative name to replace Critical Race Theory, a term that should never have escaped the halls of academe.

But when I think of it, it should just be called “The Truth”.

The collapse of American democracy is the greatest threat of our times

The storming of Capitol Hill a year ago has changed how the rest of the century will pan out. Make no mistake, it was an insurrection.

 

A pro-Trump protester carries the lectern of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi through the Roturnda of the U.S. Capitol Building. Photo; Win McNamee/Getty Images

PAUL MASON

A year after the storming of Capitol Hill it’s now clear: this was an event that will shape the rest of the century, not just for Americans but for everyone else on earth. Because this was no mere riot. It was an insurrection.

And though it failed, it has opened the prospect of a permanently fragile US democracy. America is now a state where, every four years, two bitterly hostile political tribes will contest the legitimacy of the elected leader, until something breaks.

Most people are still unaware of how close Trump came to cancelling the result of the election he lost. But the details are coming thick and fast, through memoirs, court documents and a Congressional investigation.

We are certain that Trump’s strategy was to force Mike Pence to enact a vice-presidential coup on 6 January. The plan was set out by his advisor, John Eastman, and co-ordinated from a “command centre” in the historic Willard Hotel by Trump’s close aides Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Seven Republican-controlled states, where the Democrats had won, would submit “alternative” results; Pence would set those states’ results aside, leaving Trump with a 10-vote majority in the electoral college. In the ensuing furore the whole election would be thrown back to state legislatures – leaving Trump as President.

---

You only need to imagine the outrage that would have triggered to understand why Trump needed an angry mass of people on hand.

Trump’s campaign organisations funnelled money into the mobilisation on the day; Trump himself – in an unscripted departure from his speech – urged people to march on Congress and “fight like hell”.

Evidence against the 52 rioters facing conspiracy charges – from the far-right Proud Boys organisation and from the Oath Keepers militia – shows they thought they were there to storm the legislature and take hostages.

No-one knows the motives of the masked man who left two pipe bombs at the two party HQs on the day, because – despite extensive video footage of his actions – he has not been found.

The question remains: was there a direct chain of command between Trump’s people and the insurrectionists? But it’s a secondary question.

It is already clear that, while the violence unfolded, Trump and Giuliani made calls to at least one Republican senator, urging him to delay ratification of Biden as president. That suggests Trump was actively using the pressure of the mob – who at this very moment were roaming the corridors of Congress looking for lawmakers to attack – to achieve his plan.

That is the issue the Congressional 6 January Committee is homing in on: “conspiracy to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law” is a criminal offence in the USA.

In response, both Bannon and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows have refused to testify before it – placing themselves legally at risk of prosecution. Meanwhile there have been no prosecutions, nor even announcements of investigations, into the political figures who designed and implemented the attempted coup.

And that is the potential democracy killer. Trump’s allies have wasted no time during 2021, passing laws to deter voting, to gerrymander electoral districts and to politicise the vote-counting mechanisms at the next election. They are determined to engineer a victory for Trump, or a surrogate candidate in 2024, even as his electoral base of elderly white racists shrinks due to demographic change.

At state level, meanwhile, they are mounting blatant challenges – to abortion rights and to anti-racist teaching in schools – designed to neuter the power of the federal government to uphold the civil rights guaranteed in The Constitution. In response, the US state has merely prosecuted the small fry from January 6th. So, in effect, the insurrection continues.

And this is no elite pastime. There is now a mass movement in America engaged in what I’ve called “performative self-deception” – people determined to believe and act upon the myths of white supremacy, anti-feminism, science denial over Covid and climate change; and addicted to disinformation. This was the movement lampooned to cruelly, and so scarily, in the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up.

In the long-term it’s a question of dissuading them. In the short term they have to be defeated – politically, legally and where necessary using law enforcement. That’s what the German-American legal scholar Karl Loewenstein meant in the 1930s when he urged Western leaders to adopt a “militant democracy” in the face of fascism.

Until we take insurrection decisively off the American political agenda, the instability of USA will go on destabilising the world. The Afghan fiasco happened, ultimately, because Joe Biden needs to be more concerned with defending Washington against men with guns, than defending Kabul. Likewise, Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine is strengthened by the fact that a divided USA cannot project meaningful geopolitical power.

At no point since 1945 have Western democracies faced a threat as bleak as this. The threat lies not in the rise of China or the belligerence of Russia: the emergence of great power rivalries is now a fact, and we can deal with it.

The threat is the collapse of democracy in America, with all the domino-effects that would create for ourselves and our European neighbours.

Paul’s latest book How To Stop Fascism is published by Penguin.

How disinformation around Jan. 6 riot has downplayed violence, divided Americans

Jan 5, 2022 
By —Amna Nawaz
By —Courtney Norris

NPR

The attack on the U.S. Capitol was based on a “Big Lie” about election fraud in 2020, and the hope of supporters of former President Donald Trump that they could stop the certification of electoral vote results. But in the year since, there's been a new misinformation campaign to recast, downplay, and misrepresent the events that unfolded at the capitol. Amna Nawaz reports.

Read the Full Transcript


Judy Woodruff:

The attack on the U.S. Capitol nearly one year ago was based on a big lie about election fraud in 2020 and the hope of supporters for former President Trump that they could stop the certification of electoral vote results.

But starting that day, there's been a new misinformation campaign to recast, downplay, and misrepresent the events that unfolded at the Capitol.

Amna Nawaz reports.


Amna Nawaz:

They broke through barricades, assaulted police, smashed their way into the Capitol, and sent lawmakers into hiding.

Yet, even as the attack was playing out, there were already alternative narratives being spun about who was to blame.

Laura Ingraham, FOX News:

There are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.

Drew Hernandez, Investigative Reporter:

Possibly Antifa insurrectionists possibly could have infiltrated some of these movements and maybe instigated some of this.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL):

The Washington Times has just reported some pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa.

David Graham, Staff Writer, "The Atlantic": In the first hours and days afterward, you could see Trump and his allies and supporters sort of groping for what the appropriate narrative was.


Amna Nawaz:

David Graham is a staff writer at "The Atlantic" magazine.


David Graham:

So, on the one hand, you had Trump coming out with his video on the day of saying: We love you, but now go home.

But you also saw people saying, oh, this is agitators, it was Antifa, it was Black Lives Matter.


Amna Nawaz:

That despite contemporaneous texts between pundits on FOX and the White House showing they thought Trump supporters were responsible.

When subsequent arrests confirmed that publicly, the narrative on the right shifted to downplay the violence that day.

Here's former President Trump on FOX in March.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States: Right from the start, it was zero threat. Look, they went in. They shouldn't have done it. Some of them went in and they're hugging and kissing the police and the guards.


Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA):

There was no insurrection. And to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie.


Amna Nawaz:

Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde at a hearing in May.


Rep. Andrew Clyde:

You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.


David Graham:

It was strange to see somebody like Congressman Andrew Clyde, who — of Georgia, who we saw in videos and footage from January 6 helping to bar the doors, suddenly saying, well, these were just tourists, they were walking through.


Amna Nawaz:

Another recurrent theme, shifting focus away from January 6 and towards protests for Black Lives Matter the year before.

Republican Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana:


Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA):

Nineteen people died during BLM riots last year. Hundreds and hundreds were injured; 2,000 police officers were injured from BLM riots last year.


Amna Nawaz:

Voices on the right have also recast those awaiting trial for their part in the attack as political prisoners.

Here's Republican Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona last month:


Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ):

These are dads, brothers, veterans, teachers, all political prisoners who continue to be persecuted and endure the pain of unjust suffering.


Amna Nawaz:

So too with the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran shot by Capitol Police as she attempted to breach the speaker's lobby.

Here's Republican Representative Jody Hice of Georgia in May:


Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA):

In fact, it was Trump supporters who lost their lives that day, not Trump supporters who were taking the lives of others.


Amna Nawaz:

Former President Trump reinforced that in a July interview on FOX.


Donald Trump:

Who was the person who shot an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman?


David Graham:

The idea that they were all motivated by these good intentions, they believed the election was stolen, which, of course, was false — it was a lie that had been peddled to them by the president and many of his allies — but they were going in and they wanted to stand up for what was right, that they were sort of like the American revolutionaries or like the Confederate rebels, who wanted to really uphold the best of the Constitution.


Amna Nawaz:

In an October piece in "The Atlantic," Graham explored this idea, how those who committed criminal acts to stop a democratic process have been recast by the far right as heroes, patriots and martyrs for a just cause, much like the Confederate soldiers celebrated by the mythology of the Lost Cause.

The fact that those people are referred to by some in these circles as patriots, what does that do to the narrative?


David Graham:

It makes them into the heirs of what was right. It turns something that was one of the darker moments in American history into one of the brighter ones, into a moment of unity and rebellion against what's wrong and standing up for what's right, which I think is really dangerous.

If we can turn that something that's an assault on a constitutional process into a moment of triumph and a moment of — a sort of lodestar for what's to come, I think that doesn't bode well for American democracy.


Amna Nawaz:

These efforts could be working.

An NPR/"NewsHour"/Marist poll conducted last month showed a sharp partisan divide over how Americans view what happened on January 6, the legitimacy of investigations into it, and decreasing blame for President Trump, even as the former president continues to push the lie at the heart of January 6.

The durability of that lie, where does that fit into sort of the larger misinformation campaign, the very thing that brought people out on January 6 in the first place?


David Graham:

Well, it's essential to the legitimacy of Trump as a political actor today.

If he's somebody who had the election stolen from him, that makes him still a sort of heroic figure and a more legitimate leader perhaps than Joe Biden, in the eyes of his supporters. And that makes it — that enables a lot of other information.


Amna Nawaz:

Information or, more accurately, misinformation questioning or undermining everything from measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, to the safety and efficacy of vaccines, from bogus stories about vaccines tracking and controlling Americans, to campaigns to stop teachers from talking about race or racism in schools.


David Graham:

So, when people in the Trumpist orbit spread misinformation about Joe Biden, or they spread misinformation about vaccines or about COVID, all of these spring from his legitimacy as the real elected leader, which depends on the lie of the election being stolen.


Amna Nawaz:

For more on the misinformation surrounding January 6 and how it's spread and evolved, I'm joined by two people who track and study just that.

Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior political strategist at the RAND Corporation. She co-authored the book "Truth Decay" about the rise of misinformation. And Claire Wardle is the U.S. director of First Draft. That's a nonprofit that tracks misinformation online.

Welcome to you both, and thank you for being here.

Claire, I will begin with you.

As we just saw, immediately after the Capitol attack, there were already alternative narratives being spun, despite live pictures, live reports, people seeing it in real time.

In our latest "NewsHour"/NPR/Marist poll, it shows a divide on how Americans saw that day; 89 percent of Democrats say January 6 was an insurrection, was a threat to democracy, but only 10 percent of Republicans agree with that.

How does that happen, Claire?


Claire Wardle, U.S. Director, First Draft:

Because there was a foundation being laid all the way through 2020, and then from Election Day onwards.

This Stop the Steal narrative was emerging, this idea that the election was not safe, that the election was stolen. There was this drip, drip, drip throughout November and December. And so, when we had the events of January, very quickly, very smart people began shaping these narratives that already had a foundation that made sense to people who wanted to believe a certain world view.


Amna Nawaz:

Jennifer, talk to me about the role of news and journalism in all this, because you have studied this about the declining trust in news, Americans' skepticism around news.

How much do you think that contributed to people being willing to say, what you're reporting, what you're showing me, I don't believe?


Jennifer Kavanagh, RAND Corporation:

I think it played a big role.

I mean, people get their information from specific sources. And when they see information coming to them from sources that they don't trust, they tend to discard that information.

It's also really hard to change people's minds once they have made it up. So, when people see additional information coming at them that contradicts that, they're not ready to discard what they have been believing for months or what they have been hearing from their trusted figures.

So, the fact that people have such low trust in media plays a big role in their lack of — their lack of ability to change their mind, and the difficulty that we face in trying to spread accurate information after the fact.


Amna Nawaz:

Claire, we know one of the main ways in which that information was spread even well before the Capitol attack was on social media, right?

We saw even leading up to that day the whole Stop the Steal narrative, how those groups not only organized online, but then mobilized online, got people to show up in real life to commit criminal acts after that organization.

What responsibility lies with the companies behind those social media platforms?


Claire Wardle:

When you look back at the timeline, it was only September of 2020 when Twitter started marking as false tweets from the president, for example, saying that the votes couldn't be trusted.

So, I think the platforms were — absolutely weren't ready for this. And then, as we saw on essentially January 7 and 8, they panicked and, like dominoes, they all started changing their policies and deplatforming.

But the disinformation ecosystem is really participatory and engaging. And that's what's happening on these platforms. Not that much has changed in a year. And that's what we should be more worried about, not to see it as a one-off, and what changes have the platforms made? And I would say, not enough.


Amna Nawaz:

So, Jennifer, you have used this phrase truth decay in your work, and nowhere have we seen that more potently than when it comes to the pandemic and disinformation on social media and other places around the efficacy of vaccines and the efficacy of mitigation measures.

And these are all things that are backed by science. They're backed by data. But, as you lay out, there's declining trust in those two things. So, can that decay, as you lay it out, can it be reversed?


Jennifer Kavanagh:

Well, the challenge is that disinformation tends to have an emotional component. As Claire described, it's participatory. It becomes part of the believer's identity.

And so, trying to reverse the decay, as you described, is not simple. It's very, very challenging, because you're actually having to break into people's world view and change how they see the world. This is a challenge for a whole range of stakeholders.

Social media companies are one. Researchers and scientists are another. How do we make data, whether it's about vaccines or COVID or election integrity, how we do make that data, that narrative compelling to people who are not inclined to believe it?

One piece of that is thinking about who provides the messages. There's a concept of strategic messengers, trusted people within communities that are vulnerable or at risk for believing conspiracies and disinformation.

I think election integrity is one of those cases where identifying allies within the communities that are vulnerable to that information is a challenge. And I don't think it's a challenge that has been addressed yet, which is why this — the conspiracies and disinformation around the 2020 election continue to thrive.


Amna Nawaz:

Claire, you have also done some work on this about how people can arm themselves, right, how they can outsmart misinformation or disinformation campaigns, whether it is around elections or political candidates or vaccines or the pandemic.

What are some of those tactics? What should people know?


Claire Wardle:

What the research shows is, whilst it's important to have fact-checking, what we should be doing is actually, rather than focusing on the individual rumor or conspiracy, teaching people the tactics of those who are trying to manipulate them, because what the research shows is, whoever you are, whatever your political persuasion or even education level, nobody wants to believe that they're being hoaxed or fooled.

So, the more that communities can work with each other to teach them, well, if you see a text message that says, my brother works for the government and he's telling me, dot, dot, dot, an anecdote, as Jennifer just said, that, in itself, teaching people, well, just be a little bit more savvy about that, because that's a known tactic.

So, the more we can teach people tactics and techniques, rather than waiting for the rumor and then kind of playing Whac-A-Mole, we're actually seeing the research show that's a much more effective way of building the resilience that means that, when they see misinformation, they're more likely to identify it as that.


Amna Nawaz:

Claire, I have to ask, after all the work you have done — and, Jennifer, I will ask the same thing of you — with misinformation and disinformation so prolific, now being pronounced and perpetuated from even the highest office in the land at times, do you have hope that that can be brought back under control?


Claire Wardle:

I still have hope. Otherwise, I wouldn't get up every day.

But I think what we have to realize is, this is a very long game. I'd say, this is the battle of our lives for the next 20 to 30 years around climate, elections, vaccines, health. And we need to start thinking that this is a long game. There's no quick fix. We can't just shift the Facebook algorithm and make it all go away.


Amna Nawaz:

Jennifer, what about you?


Jennifer Kavanagh:

I agree with Claire.

I think it's important to recognize that this — that the challenge that we face now has evolved over several decades. And it's going to take just as long to figure out a way to manage the situation, so really thinking about this as a — from a holistic perspective, and understanding that, whatever future we work to, that's hopefully better than what than what we face today.

It's not going to look the same as 20 or 30 years ago. The goal isn't to put the cat back in the bag. The goal is to figure out sort of what we want online spaces to look like, what we want our society to look like, and how we want to interact in that way.

I guess that's what gives me hope, is thinking that we can — we can work towards that better future, rather than thinking about how we make things go back to the way they were.


Amna Nawaz:

That is Jennifer Kavanagh and Claire Wardle.

Thank you so much to both of you for joining us.


Claire Wardle:

Thank you.


Jennifer Kavanagh:

Thanks for having me.

How Many Americans Support Political Violence?

Probably a lot fewer than you’ve been led to believe, but more than enough to make you nervous.

A mob breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, after attending the Save America Rally for supporters of former President Donald Trump contesting the 2020 election results

.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

By Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam
Jan. 5, 2022

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to political news. We’re your hosts, Blake and Leah.

The new politics of rage

As the anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol arrives, we’re hearing a lot about the number of Americans in general, and Republicans in particular, who have embraced the use of violence to achieve their political goals. And, at first blush, those numbers seem alarming:

In February, a poll by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that nearly 40 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.”

In September, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 30 percent of Republicans agreed that, “Because things have gotten so far off-track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

In December, an AP-NORC poll found that majorities of Democrats and independents called the events of Jan. 6 either “extremely” or “very” violent. A plurality of Republicans surveyed — nearly 40 percent — described the events as either “extremely” or “very” violent, while 29 percent of Republicans rated the events of Jan. 6 either “not very violent” or “not violent at all.”

Few have explored this issue more deeply than Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, co-authors of the forthcoming book, “Radical American Partisanship.” Drawing on years of research, they warn that rising public support for political violence is creating a toxic public atmosphere that encourages a tiny but growing number to act.

As they write, “Our results show that mass partisanship is far more volatile than we realized; it may even be dangerous.” Perhaps the book’s most disturbing finding is that, according to a February 2021 survey, “Twelve percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats said assassinations carried out by their party were at least ‘a little bit’ justified.”

The circle of violence

Imagine a series of concentric circles. People who actually commit acts of violence are the smallest circle. The next biggest might include people who attend meetings, donate money or read the website of an extremist group. Then there’s a much larger and more diffuse outer circle of people who identify with some ideas — say, that the 2020 election was stolen — but don’t participate in any activities.

Consider what happened last year at the Capitol.

“It helps to understand Jan. 6 as three different streams of right-wing activity,” said Kathleen Belew, a historian who studies domestic extremism. “There were people who might have gone to express their dissatisfaction with the election results. There were people who became violent that day. And then, there were the people who went there to commit violence.”

Lumping those groups together can lead to confusion — and that can happen if your survey questions are too broad, some polling experts say.

Researchers led by Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth College, in a paper titled “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence,” argue that “documented support for political violence is illusory, a product of ambiguous questions, conflated definitions, and disengaged respondents.” Often, pollsters were just capturing people expressing their partisan tribalism.

So in a new YouGov survey of 2,750 Americans conducted in November, a group of political scientists known as Bright Line Watch took another whack at it.

When they asked more finely calibrated questions aimed at getting around the ambiguity of the word “violence” — which could mean anything from sending threatening messages to overthrowing the government by force — they found that the number of Americans who supported political violence was closer to 4 or 5 percent.




Image



They also divided respondents into two groups: those who identified strongly with their party and those who didn’t. Slicing the numbers that way gives you 9 percent support for the Jan. 6 violence among the most hard-core Republicans and 6 percent for less-partisan Republicans.

Even that lower number is not so reassuring when you map it to the U.S. population as a whole. The bottom line, said Kalmoe: “Millions of Americans — and perhaps tens of millions — think that violence against their partisan opponents is at least a little bit justified.”

Understand the Jan. 6 Investigation

Both the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here's where they stand:

Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.

Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.

A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?

Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”

The violent inner circle

It’s even harder to measure how many Americans are ready to actually commit political violence.

Arrests are one indicator. In the year since the storming of the U.S. Capitol, at least 725 people have been arrested for some level of involvement in the riot. Many of them were Trump supporters who weren’t involved in anti-government militias. But several dozen were members of radical groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, which led the charge into the building.

Both groups saw their fund-raising and membership numbers plummet after Jan. 6, according to The Wall Street Journal. “We’ve been bleeding money since January, like hemorrhaging money,” Enrique Tarrio, a Proud Boys leader, told The Journal. Former Oath Keepers said that the group’s membership had dropped to roughly 7,500.

Sign Up for On Politics A guide to the political news cycle, cutting through the spin and delivering clarity from the chaos. Get it sent to your inbox.

But their true level of support could be higher. In September, more than 38,000 email addresses purportedly from the Oath Keepers’ private chat room were leaked online. The list included everyone from current members to people who had merely signed up for the group’s mailing list, Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, noted. “In other words,” Segal said, “the data was open to interpretation.”

Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has been tracking the growth of local Proud Boys chapters, said the steady normalization of political violence on the right had given the group new legitimacy.

“I think they are operating from a place of strength in our current political moment,” she said.

The White House pushback

Invoking Jan. 6, the Biden administration has tried to reorient federal law enforcement agencies around fighting homegrown extremism:

In March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed that domestic violent extremists posed a “heightened threat.”

In May, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security declared, “The greatest terrorism threat to the Homeland we face today is posed by lone offenders, often radicalized online, who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons.”

In June, the White House unveiled its strategy to combat domestic terrorism, an entire pillar of which is about preventing radicalization before it starts.

The federal government doesn’t officially track the size of extremist groups, because it’s legal to join them. Membership also tends to be fluid, which means it’s hard to gauge whether Biden’s strategy is working.

“They’re just much less structured and hierarchical,” said a senior administration official. “They’re better defined as movements. People flow into them, they could dabble in two at the same time, or go in and out.”

So this official, recounting domestic terrorism incidents like the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, said, “Our hope is to have as few of those bad days as possible. We measure ourselves as trying to avoid the worst possible day.”

MICHIGAN
Activists and historians remember Jim Toy as a pioneering leader in LGBTQ rights


By — Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Education 

Jan 5, 2022 

Narratives around queer history are often told from the perspective of major coastal centers of queer activism, such as the Stonewall Riots in New York City or the openly gay Harvey Milk running for office in San Francisco. But activists and historians across the country this week are mourning leader Jim Toy, widely believed to be the first person in Michigan to publicly come out as gay, who died Jan. 1 at the age of 91.

Toy is remembered as a pioneer who spent his life advocating for LGBTQ people and working for human and civil rights for everyone, though he did not enter the national consciousness as deeply as other wider-known queer activists such as Milk, Marsha P. Johnson or Bayard Rustin.

“Jim Toy’s life is a reminder that LGBT history and LGBT civil rights were also made here in the Midwest, and that Asian Americans and other people of color were a critical part of that movement,” Ian Shin, a University of Michigan assistant professor of history and American culture, told the PBS NewsHour.

Toy was known across the country as a leading Asian American advocate for the LGBTQ community for more than 50 years, working at the community, collegiate, state, and national levels.

READ MORE: The Census Bureau’s first ever data on LGBTQ+ people indicates deep disparities

Toy’s legacy “is the courage he helped so many of us find within ourselves through his support, encouragement, and belief that we each deserved all of what we wanted for ourselves in this life,” Will Sherry, director of the University of Michigan Spectrum Center, told the NewsHour.

Toy’s role as community elder is also important. “It means so much to have elders in queer community. To have people you can see yourself in, who believe in your value and worth and the possibilities for your future that you sometimes cannot see for yourself,” Sherry said. “He represents the opportunity we all have to create space for others to live into who they are. He represents possibility.”

Michigan pioneering LGBTQ activist Jim Toy as a young man. Courtesy of Jim Toy.

Toy was born in New York in 1930 to a Chinese American father and a Scottish Irish American mother. His mother died when he was born, so his father moved them to live with his maternal grandparents in Granville, Ohio, a small village in the central part of the state.

Toy’s father later remarried. Toy recalled that they were one of only three families of color in the village, which at the time had a population of about 1,200. During World War II, when anti-Japanese sentiment was at its highest, his white stepmother sent him to middle school with a cardboard sign around his neck that read, “I AM NOT A JAP.”

But aside from that, Toy would recount in his adult years, there was little discussion of race, and none of sexual orientation, while he was growing up. He said that he did not even know what the words homosexual or gay meant until someone told him years later that he was gay, which he denied for some time longer.

READ MORE: ‘About time’: LGBTQ Olympic athletes unleash a rainbow wave

“My ‘identity’ is a tapestry of many threads — race and ethnicity, color, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability/disability, appearance, age, religious belief, political belief,” Toy said in a 2015 interview with NBC Asian America. “If one of the threads is plucked, the whole fabric is bound to move. Anyone struggling to consolidate and manifest any thread of their identity may find help from allies — and possibly from counseling or therapy.”

An early leader in LGBTQ activism

While living in Ann Arbor and working as a church music director in 1970, he said he saw a notice for a “gay meeting” at St. Joseph Episcopal Church in Detroit, an integrated Episcopal church in Detroit which also supported the Vietnam War draft-resistance movement and was the site of the Freedom School in the 1960s. He said although he was afraid that if he went to the meeting, that would mean that he was actually gay, he went and became a founding member of the Detroit Gay Liberation Movement (DGLM). A few months later, he co-founded of the Ann Arbor Gay Liberation Front (AAGLF).

Toy was also a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. On April 15, 1970, the DGLM participated at an anti-Vietnam war rally at Kennedy Square in Detroit. The person that was supposed to speak on behalf of the group suddenly changed his mind, and at the last minute, Toy stepped up. He said he had never spoken in public before, but he scribbled some notes on a notepad, and he introduced himself with his name, his age, and said that he was gay. The rally was covered by local media, and it is widely believed that Toy is the first person in the state of Michigan to publicly come out as gay.

“Like many Asian Americans of his generation, the racism as well as the homophobia that Jim faced led him to protest injustice and oppression not only here in the United States, but also overseas,” Shin said. “His life is an inspiring example of how all these issues intersect, and how our activism can also.”

READ MORE: Study finds more racial diversity in LGBTQ film characters

In 1971, pressured by the AAGLF, the University of Michigan created the Human Sexuality Office, the first staffed university office in the country – and, as Toy was known to say, “likely the world” — to address sexual-orientation concerns. There, he served as co-coordinator together with Cynthia Gair and as gay male advocate from 1971 to 1994. The office was later renamed the Spectrum Center, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, and currently works for the concerns of transgender, bisexual, lesbian, gay, and queer students and allies.

Michigan LGBTQ pioneer Jim Toy cutting the ribbon at the opening of the University of Michigan Jim Toy Library. Courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

“Jim’s legacy is deep within LGBTQIA+ higher education,” Sherry told the NewsHour. “Jim anchored the work of our office in support and advocacy. He sought to support and help those who were struggling while at the same time hold accountable the institutions and structures that perpetuate harm. He worked to change the world we live in, to make it better, and he did that through his actions each day.”

While working at the Spectrum Center, Toy also completed a master’s degree in social work at the University of Michigan. Sherry, who attended the School of Social Work decades later, appreciated Toy’s dual roles as both community leader and social worker. “He taught me how to center my values and ethics within myself and to live those out all the places that I go,” Sherry said.

Toy’s impact in Michigan

Toy also fought a 21-year battle with the University of Michigan Regents to amend its bylaws to include non-discrimination due to sexual orientation. He worked with the Michigan House of Representatives to try to expand Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Act to include sexual orientation, gender identity and expression as protected classes. He co-authored the city of Ann Arbor’s first “Lesbian-Gay Pride Week Proclamation, believed to be one of the first issued by any governing body in the U.S., and he co-authored the city’s non-discrimination policy in regard to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. He founded and served on many HIV/AIDS organizations and task forces. A University of Michigan library is named in his honor, a community resource center is named in his honor, and the city of Ann Arbor named April 29 — “Jim Toy Day.”

“The legacy of Jim Toy’s work has been one centered on inclusion. He was passionate about visibility, community, and advocacy.” Joe Halsch, president of the Jim Toy Community Center, told the NewsHour.

WATCH MORE: House votes to expand legal safeguards for LGBTQ people

Toy often said he preferred to use the term “TBLGQI” instead of the more commonly used “LGBTQIA” in order to invert the power relationships and to prioritize transgender and bisexual people, whom he said are at the greatest risk of harassment, discrimination, and assault. He said that in the 1970s, it took a decade to convince many groups to list lesbian before gay as in LG instead of GL which he saw as sexist.

Jim Toy speaking on a panel for the U-M Lesbian Gay Male Bisexual Programs Office (now Spectrum Center). Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Roland Hwang, a lecturer at University of Michigan who helped nominate Toy for an honorary doctorate, which Toy received in 2021, noted that despite his many accolades and recognitions, “Jim always, year after year, made time to come to the classroom to talk about his humble childhood in Ohio, about gender and its meaning, and his views for effective advocacy.”

Ron Aramaki, another University of Michigan lecturer, told the NewsHour that Toy was an agent of change as well as a Renaissance person. “He was a musician, a natural leader, a speaker of truth, a powerful force for social change, and a good friend for many years.”

Michigan pioneering LGBTQ activist Jim Toy at the 2014 Ann Arbor Fourth of July Parade. Toy died Jan. 1, 2022, at 91 years of age. Courtesy of Jim Toy Community Center.

After Toy’s death was announced, leaders and organizations across the state of Michigan shared condolences and remembrances, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, State Sen. Jeff Irwin, University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, and more. On Monday, the Ann Arbor City Council dedicated a moment of silence to him.

In a series of tweets, Dingell wrote that Toy was a champion for equality, a trailblazer for LGBTQ rights in Michigan but also across the country, and a dear friend to her and her late husband, former U.S. Rep. John Dingell. “Often I think about Jim’s words, ‘I am committed to making as much trouble as I can to create and maintain justice.’ He fought with every bone in his body to support the LGBTQ community, to fight for marriage equality, to ensure protections for so many.”

“Asian American and TBLGQI issues intersect in all our struggles for justice and equality, our attempts to gain and retain our human and civil rights,” Toy said in a 2015 interview with NBC Asian America. “Human and civil rights are essential to human dignity.”

Michigan’s pioneering LGBTQ activist Jim Toy died on Jan. 1, 2022, at 91 years of age. Courtesy of Jim Toy Community Center and University of Michigan Spectrum Center.

Left: Michigan LGBTQ pioneer Jim Toy speaking at the 2017 University of Michigan graduation ceremony for LGBTQ students known as the "Lav Grad." Courtesy of the University of Michigan Spectrum Center.

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U.K. expands 'Turing's Law' to pardon past same-sex convictions

The new measure will widen the criteria of a 2017 law, making anyone convicted for consensual gay sex under now-defunct laws eligible to be pardoned.

Jan. 5, 2022
By Jay Valle

In a long-awaited triumph for the U.K.’s LGBTQ community, the government on Tuesday announced that anyone convicted of consensual same-sex activity under now-defunct laws will soon be eligible to be pardoned and have their records wiped clean.

This week’s announcement follows a less-expansive 2017 measure that was limited to nine former offenses that targeted gay and bisexual men. The new amendment will widen the criteria to anyone officially warned or convicted for an abolished civil or military offense that was imposed due to consensual gay sex.

British Home Secretary Priti Patel at a media briefing at Downing Street last January.Matt Dunham / WPA Pool/Getty Images file

British Home Secretary Priti Patel said in a statement that it was only right that where offenses have been abolished, "convictions for consensual activity between same-sex partners should be disregarded, too.”


“I hope that expanding the pardons and disregards scheme will go some way to righting the wrongs of the past and to reassuring members of the LGBT community that Britain is one of the safest places in the world to call home,” she said.

According to the U.K. government's statement, those eligible can apply to have their convictions wiped from their records under the condition that the sexual activity is currently legal and that any party involved was 16 or older at the time of the incident. The plan also includes a posthumous pardon granted to those who have died before the amendment's ratification and within 12 months after.

Britain started to legalize consensual sex between men in 1967. Then in 2001, the age of consent for gay and bisexual men was lowered from 21 to 16, bringing it on par with the age of consent for heterosexuals. For comparison, England’s sodomy laws were repealed long after similar laws in France were abolished in 1791, but before all American sodomy laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.

In 2013, Alan Turing, the codebreaker who aided in the defeat of the Nazis, was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II for a same-sex offense he was convicted of in 1952. Then in 2016, the U.K announced its pardon plan, dubbed “Turing’s Law,” which granted posthumous pardons to thousands of men convicted under now-repealed laws.

Approximately 65,000 men were convicted under these abolished measures, according to Lord John Sharkey, a British politician who had been pushing for the pardons. In 2016, Sharkey estimated that 15,000 of these men were still alive, NBC News reported at the time.

LGBTQ advocates welcomed Tuesday’s announcement, but some called for the government to issue a formal apology to those affected by the historical convictions.

“Posthumous pardoning offers only a symbolic gesture to those who have since died without clearing their name,” the British advocacy group LGBTQ Foundation said in a statement, adding that the government must recognize "the pain, trauma and lifelong guilt and stigma these convictions gave many LGBTQ+ people, who were simply trying to live their lives and be their true selves.”

The group also said that the government should not make LGBTQ Britons apply for their convictions to be removed, which “has the potential to bring up past trauma.” Instead, they argued that the government should remove the offenses automatically.

The United Kingdom is not the only country to pardon past crimes involving consensual same-sex relationships. A similar victory swept across Australia in 2008, when all states and territories passed legislation allowing for the expungement of past homosexual offenses. And in the U.S., California Gov. Gavin Newsom created a pardon process in 2020 for LGBTQ Californians convicted under outdated laws criminalizing same-sex activity.