Kazakhstan Pivots From Russia Amid Ukraine War – Analysis

 

President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. Photo Credit: Kremlin.ru

 July 17, 2022 

By Geopolitical Monitor

By Nicholas Velazquez

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine emboldened Kazakhstan’s President Kassym Jomart Tokayev to finally step out of his predecessor’s shadow in a bid to chart a new path for his country. Kazakhstan, a state historically under Russian influence, now endeavors to follow an independent foreign policy where Nur-Sultan can pursue opportunities irrespective of the Kremlin’s preferences. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tokayev’s efforts toward this end required appeasing Russia by deferring to Moscow on Eurasian security matters. However, Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine irked Kazakhstan’s decisionmakers and dramatically deteriorated bilateral relations between Moscow and Nur-Sultan. For Tokayev and his government, the Kremlin’s jingoist foreign policy is increasingly too much to stomach.

Tokayev’s ascension to the Kazakh presidency in March 2019 followed two years of protests which eventually prompted Kazakhstan’s first and only president before Tokayev, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to end his decades-long presidency. However, Nazarbayev retained key positions such as the chairmanship of the Kazakh Security Council, a body that coordinates Kazakhstan’s national security and defense policies. As chairman, Nazarbayev maintained Kazakhstan’s foreign policy continuity, which included substantive appeasement toward Russia. For example, Nazarbayev’s government supported Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and echoed Kremlin claims that “neo-nazis” hijacked Ukraine during the Euromaiden Revolution.

Nazarbayev used his position to preserve his family’s dominance in Kazakh politics and exert influence on Tokayev’s nascent government. Nazarbayev and his allies decided who Tokayev’s prime minister would be, upending three decades of precedent where the Kazakh president made the decision. Nazarbayev forced Tokayev to endure a power-sharing system wherein the chairman of the Security Council subordinated the president and robbed Tokayev of autonomy insofar as foreign policy was concerned. Nazarbayev’s decision to restrict the president’s role in foreign policy decision making likely frustrated Tokayev, who spent much of his career as a diplomat.

Kazakhstan’s dual-power system seemingly came to an end early this year amid unprecedented unrest against Tokayev’s government, which eventually resulted in Tokayev forcing Nazarbayev out entirely by seizing the chairmanship of the Kazakh Security Council. Additionally, Russia stunned the world on January 5 when its soldiers entered Kazakhstan as a part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s (CSTO) efforts to stabilize Tokayev’s embattled reign from an attempted coup by pro-Nazarbayev elements in the Kazakh government. After Tokayev secured his reign, he immediately issued a rare criticism of Nazarbayev and arrested several of the former president’s allies.

The CSTO left Kazakhstan on January 19 after securing several government buildings and quelling the anti-Tokayev demonstrations. Analysts initially credited the Moscow-led CSTO intervention as revitalizing the Kremlin’s influence in Central Asia. However, about half a year later,  Putin’s invasion of Ukraine pushed Russo-Kazakh relations to an unprecedented low as Tokayev has opted to break from his predecessor and refuses to legitimize Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Moscow’s decision to support Tokayev’s government in January 2022 is not paying dividends. Tokayev continues to downplay the CSTO intervention in an attempt to distance himself from Russia’s role in securing Kazakhstan’s government. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began to stall, Kazakhstan was the first CSTO member-state to publicly rule out sending troops to assist the botched ‘special military operation.’ Furthermore, Kazakh Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi said on April 5 that his country will not recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent states. Tileuberdi’s statement is an effective refutation of Moscow’s justification for war. Tokayev reiterated this on June 17 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he, while sharing a stage with Putin, pushed back against the recognition of Russian-backed separatist regions in Ukraine and Georgia.

Russian commentators portray Tokayev’s reluctance to tow the Kremlin line on Ukraine as ‘disloyalty,’ and several Russian public figures have advanced a hawkish view of Russo-Kazakh relations. Russian Member of Parliament Konstantin Zatulin responded to Tokayev’s public refusal to recognize Russian-backed separatists by saying, “We say always and everywhere, including in relation to Ukraine: If we have friendship, cooperation and partnership, then no territorial questions are raised. But if that does not exist, everything is possible, as in the case of Ukraine.” Tokayev and his government are likely disturbed by statements such as Zatulin’s which threaten Kazakhstan with conflict and unrest if it strays from the Kremlin’s good graces. As a result of this dynamic, Tokayev seeks to deepen relations with the European Union and China to reorient Kazakh foreign policy away from the toxic dynamics which characterize Russo-Kazakh relations.

In addition to economic opportunities with China, Tokayev aims to deepen security cooperation with Beijing. China, owing to the importance it’s placed on Kazakhstan for its Belt and Road Initiative, has established a foundation for deepening security cooperation with Kazakhstan through bilateral military exercises and investments in the Kazakh government’s surveillance capabilities. Tokayev and Chinese Minister of Defense Wei Fenghe said that Kazakhstan and China will expand military cooperation at a meeting on April 25. At the meeting, Tokayev said that he believes that bilateral relations “between the two countries will see greater breakthroughs and achievements” and that he strongly values opportunities to deepen bilateral military cooperation. Bilateral calls from Nur-Sultan and Beijing to expand military cooperation likely frustrates not just the Russo-Kazakh relationship, but the Russo-Sino relationship as well. Should China supplant Russia as the dominant security guarantor in Central Asia, Moscow’s decline will accelerate as its hegemony in the post-Soviet space will become a distant memory.

Tokayev seeks to present Europe with new opportunities to advance European-Kazakh relations. As Europe struggles with an energy crisis due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tokayev offered to increase Kazakh energy output on July 4 in order to “stabilize the situation in the world and European markets.” Tokayev’s offer is likely a jab to Moscow’s efforts to coerce European states with Russian energy. Two days later, a Russian court temporarily shut down the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s oil terminal at Novorossiysk, Russia. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium is a Russo-Kazakh led oil pipeline that supplies approximately 1% of global oil trade and accounts for two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s oil exports. Though the Russian court has since reversed its decision, this incident is likely a component of increasing Russo-Kazakh tensions.

Though Kazakhstan’s shift from Moscow is just now picking up pace, it’s long overdue. Prior to the expulsion of Nazarbayev from the Kazakh government on January 5, Tokayev slowly pursued policies designed to separate Kazakhstan from Moscow. Notably, Tokayev’s 2021 decision to shift Kazakhstan from a Cyrillic alphabet to a Latin-based script is a key example. Tokayev’s decision to promote the Kazakh language over Russian was likely a component of his aspirations to move away from Russia’s sphere of influence and to fray a cultural tie between Kazakhstan and Russia. In settling the Kazakh language issue, Tokayev accomplished what his predecessor failed to do, despite several promises to the contrary. Tokayev further broke from Nazarbayev by canceling Kazakhstan’s 2022 Victory Day Parade in a clear break from Soviet traditions.

Tokayev’s campaign to set his country on a separate path from Moscow may end in disaster, as a sizable Russian minority exists in northern Kazakhstan and an increasingly belligerent Russia could present a harrowing security challenge. However, it’s clear that Tokayev’s current foreign policy is at last his own and no longer guided by Nazarbayev. With internal divisions settled and Russian prestige at an all-time low, this moment in history may present Kazakhstan with its best chance to pivot safely while Russia focuses on its invasion of Ukraine.

Kazakhstan’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has struck several of Moscow’s “pressure points”. Tokayev’s signaling that Kazakhstan aims to pursue new foreign policy opportunities irrespective of Russia’s preference and his government’s refusal to legitimize the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine represents a serious blow to Moscow’s hold on the largest state in Central Asia. Moving forward, it is unclear how successful Tokayev will be in breaking from Moscow. However, at this point it seems clear that Tokayev will not be a leader that Moscow can count on.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

Geopolitical Monitor

Geopoliticalmonitor.com is an open-source intelligence collection and forecasting service, providing provide research, analysis and up to date coverage on situations and events that have a substantive impact on political, military and economic affairs.

Chinese influencer cooks and eats protected shark on livestream, police investigating

JULY 16, 2022

By MANDY ZUO

A Chinese influencer is under fire for eating what appears to be a protected shark.
South China Morning Post

Police in southwest China are investigating a popular Chinese food vlogger who has come under fire for cooking and eating a shark believed to be an endangered species in her latest video.

The police inquiry in Nanchong, Sichuan province, came after web users pushed for an official investigation into Tizi, a young female influencer with millions of fans on Douyin and Kuaishou, China’s two major live-streaming platforms.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

Tizi is believed to have eaten a 50kg fish that appeared to be a young great white shark, a protected species in the country.

The video posted on both platforms on Tuesday (July 17) has been removed, along with all her previous videos, after it triggered widespread criticism.

A potentially offensive shark’s tale covered in spices getting prepped to be cooked.
PHOTO: Weibo

The woman, from Sichuan province, which is famous for its spicy food, attracted her fans because of her sweet look but bold food choices, such as crocodiles and ostriches.

Tizi denied she was eating an endangered species after some viewers noted that it looked like a great white shark.

“I bought it legally and I am looking for a lawyer. These people were talking nonsense,” she responded to Sichuan local news app Red Star News on Thursday.

She always cooks rarely-eaten animals in a massive wok with a large amount of spices and cooking oil.

In the latest controversial video, she ate the roasted tail of the shark covered with pepper while exclaiming, “This is so yummy!”

The rest of the shark was cut into small pieces and boiled with spices.

Read AlsoChinese 'pangolin princess' detained after allegedly eating endangered animals


At one corner of the video frame was a notification saying the animal was “bred in captivity and is edible”. However, people online have questioned the integrity of that warning label.

Web users have urged for an investigation from the authorities as many found her behaviour “disgusting”.

“I’ve seen her videos before. They were outrageous. She also ate a crocodile and a golden giant salamander … It was extremely disturbing.” one user wrote on Weibo.

Another said: “She literally eats anything to grab eyeballs. I was horrified when seeing her eat a crocodile tail once.”

China once had a booming industry of people watching live streams of other people eating large quantities of food, typically referred to by the Korean word Mukbang.

But, these live streams have come under scrutiny over the past two years after President Xi Jinping made it a policy point to combat unnecessary overeating and food wastage in China.

After censors started to target videos featuring the consumption of absurdly large quantities of food, many influencers tried to earn clicks and followers by eating extremely unconventional foods.

Another popular food vlogger and chef surnamed Zou was detained in May last year after sharing a video that featured him cooking and eating a giant triton, a protected species of sea snail.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.

Elon Musk empire power struggle ended on news one top exec was being investigated by the FBI: report
Tom Boggioni
July 16, 2022

Elon Musk (Photo by Jim Watson for AFP)

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, a power struggle between top advisers to billionaire Elon Musk came to an abrupt end when one senior adviser revealed to the industrialist that his adversary was being investigated by the FBI.

As the Journal noted, Musk has a variety of endeavors going which has led him to delegate responsibility for billions of dollars to a select group of confidants, and that, in turn, created tension as multiple parties jockeyed around each other.

In one such case, Musk's wealth manager and top adviser Jared Birchal expressed distrust of Russian-born ex-professional gambler Igor Kurganov who inserted himself into Musk's inner circle to the point where the businessman wanted him to oversee his charitable giving despite having no experience in financial management.

As the Journal's Rob Copeland wrote, upon hearing the news Birchal told Musk, "Elon. You can’t.”

"The clash between the two men, and their dueling efforts to gain the upper hand with Mr. Musk, provides a peek into the often tumultuous private workings of Mr. Musk’s inner circle," Copeland wrote. "Mr. Birchall is an Eagle Scout and practicing Mormon who doesn’t smoke or drink and grew up traveling California as part of a song-and-dance troupe called “The Birchall Family Singers.” He declined to be interviewed through a representative of Mr. Musk’s foundation. Mr. Kurganov is a high-roller with a reported more than $18 million in poker winnings, with long hair and beard and a peaceful demeanor. He has said in a podcast interview that he dropped out of college because he was smoking too much marijuana. He didn’t respond to requests for comment."

According to the report, Musk settled the dispute between the two, allowing Kurganov to oversee a fraction of his wealth -- $5.7 billion in Tesla shares earmarked for charity -- but that didn't make the friction disappear.

As the report notes, the two men butted heads, with Copeland reporting, "To Mr. Birchall, that was an untenable situation. He was legally head of the foundation, and as he saw it, Mr. Kurganov was a newcomer who suddenly had immense influence on what to do with Mr. Musk’s money, he told people"

Relief came for Birchall on news that the FBI was intrigued by Kurganov, although not because he was under a criminal investigation.

"Mr. Birchall also learned that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had begun making preliminary inquiries into Mr. Kurganov as part of his job to watch for foreign interference in U.S. companies, people familiar with the matter say. The FBI agent was concerned that a newcomer had so quickly been welcomed into Mr. Musk’s inner circle, the people say.

Mr. Kurganov hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing," the Journal report states. "Mr. Birchall, alarmed that Mr. Musk could be drawn into a federal investigation, this spring again pressed his internal case against Mr. Kurganov, people familiar with the matter say. It was inappropriate, in Mr. Birchall’s view, for Mr. Kurganov to have a central role in the $5.7 billion in shares that Mr. Musk had promised to donate."

The break-up came as Musk began his foray into getting into the social media business at which point Birchall pressed his case to oust the ex-gambler once again.

"Mr. Birchall in May asked Mr. Musk to remove Mr. Kurganov from his post at the foundation. Mr. Musk agreed to let Mr. Kurganov go, the representative of the foundation says, " Copeland wrote before adding, "None of Mr. Musk’s money was ultimately spent on projects related to effective altruism, the representative says, and Mr. Kurganov’s Musk Foundation email was switched off roughly six weeks ago."

You can read more here -- subscription is required.

Right-wing militias will succeed with their next coup attempt after learning their lessons from Jan. 6: extremism expert

Tom Boggioni
July 17, 2022




Proud Boy - (Photo by John Rudoff for AFP)

Appearing on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show" early Sunday morning, extremism analyst Kristopher Goldsmith claimed that far-right militia groups like the Proud Boys are paying close attention to House select committee hearings on Jan 6th insurrection and taking notes on what not to do the next time they are given a chance.

Speaking with host Phang, Goldsmith that, for far-right extremists, Jan 6th was a learning experience and the lessons they took away from that day will help them in the future.

"You are very plugged into this world of extremism," host Phang began. "How have members have this group reacted to the January 6th hearings? How will it affect their tactics moving forward?"

"To be frank, they are not reacting, it's like the hearings are not happening," he replied. "Right now, organizations like the Proud Boys are securing seats on the Republican Executive Committee in Miami; this is where Jeb Bush grew his base of power years ago. Now over half a dozen members or former members of the Proud Boys are on the Republican Executive Committee in Miami - Dade."

"We are looking at an evolution of the fascist wing of the far-right extremist Republican Party that is not afraid of law enforcement," he continued. " I mean they learned their lesson, don't fail at a coup and the next time they are going to be successful. And it's going to be because they have people in power who aren't just afraid of them but are truly on their team."

Watch below or at this link.
MSNBC 07 17 2022 

'Systemic failures' in Uvalde shooting went far beyond local police: Texas House report

Zach Despart, Texas Tribune
July 17, 2022

Uvalde Police Department on Facebook.

The 18-year-old who massacred 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde on May 24 had no experience with firearms before his rampage began. He targeted an elementary school with an active shooter policy that had been deemed adequate but also a long history of doors propped open.

No one was able to stop the gunman from carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in part because of “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved who was in a position of power, a new investigation into the shooting has found.

On Sunday, a Texas House committee is releasing the most exhaustive account yet of the shooter, his planning, his attack and the fumbling response he provoked.

The 77-page report, reviewed by The Texas Tribune, provides a damning portrayal of a family unable to recognize warning signs, a school district that had strayed from strict adherence to its safety plan and a police response that disregarded its own active-shooter training.

It explains how the gunman, who investigators believe had never fired a gun before May 24, was able to stockpile military-style rifles, accessories and ammunition without arousing suspicion from authorities, enter a supposedly secure school unimpeded and indiscriminately kill children and adults.

In total, 376 law enforcement officers — a force larger than the garrison that defended the Alamo — descended upon the school in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted for more than an hour. The group was devoid of clear leadership, basic communications and sufficient urgency to take down the gunman, the report says.
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Notably, the investigation is the first so far to criticize the inaction of state and federal law enforcement, while other reports and public accounts by officials have placed the blame squarely on Uvalde school police Chief Pete Arredondo, for his role as incident commander, and other local police who were among the first to arrive.

The report also reveals for the first time that the overwhelming majority of responders were federal and state law enforcement: 149 were U.S. Border Patrol, and 91 were state police — whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places”. There were 25 Uvalde police officers and 16 sheriff’s deputies. Arredondo’s school police force accounted for five of the officers on the scene. The rest of the force was made up of neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. Marshals, and federal Drug Enforcement Agency officers.

The investigators said that in the absence of a strong incident commander, another officer could have — and should have — stepped up to the task.

“These local officials were not the only ones expected to supply the leadership needed during this tragedy,” the report said. “Hundreds of responders from numerous law enforcement agencies — many of whom were better trained and better equipped than the school district police — quickly arrived on the scene.”

The other responders “could have helped to address the unfolding chaos.”

The three committee members — Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock; Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso and former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman — said they sought to create a comprehensive account the Legislature can use to craft policies aimed at preventing future massacres. The trio also sought to present an accurate narrative to the public, in contrast to several conflicting and retracted accounts provided by other officials, including the governor and state police, in the seven weeks since the tragedy that have undermined residents’ trust in the ongoing investigations.

They dedicated the document to the 21 people killed in the shooting, and first unveiled their findings during a private meeting with Uvalde residents on Sunday.

“The Committee issues this interim report now, believing the victims, their families, and the entire Uvalde community have already waited too long for answers and transparency,” the report reads.

Law enforcement failures

The failure of police to quickly subdue the shooter has faced widespread public condemnation and criticism from fellow law enforcement officials. At its core, the committee report echoes criticisms made previously by police tactics experts: that instead of following the active doctrine developed after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which dictates that officers immediately confront active shooters, police at Robb Elementary retreated after coming under fire and then waited for backup.

“They failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” the committee said in its report.

The report lists myriad law enforcement mistakes, which expanded far beyond any single commander or agency. They stemmed not from a lack of manpower, but from an absence of leadership and effective communications.

In interviews conducted or obtained by the committee, police officers said they assumed Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was in command or did not know who was in charge. Several described the scene as “chaos” or a “cluster.”

The report listed several ways that an effective incident commander outside the school might have helped: The commander might have noticed that radios weren’t working well and found a better way to communicate. They might have found a master key to the school faster to get inside the classroom where the shooter was barricaded — or suggested checking to make sure the door was locked. Or they might have urged officers to find another way to get inside the classroom.

But Arredondo told The Texas Tribune in June that he did not consider himself the incident commander after he was one of the first officers to arrive inside the school. He said he assumed another officer outside would fill that role.

The committee did not find this argument persuasive. It cited the school district’s active shooter response plan, co-authored by Arredondo, which states the chief will “become the person in control of the efforts of all law enforcement and first responders that arrive at the scene.” The school district last month placed him on administrative leave.

But blame for the flawed police response extends far beyond the school district police chief of a six-officer department, the report concludes.

The report criticized other officers and law enforcement agencies, many of them better trained, for failing to fill the leadership vacuum left by Arredondo’s inaction.

“In this crisis, no responder seized the initiative to establish an incident command post,” the committee wrote. “Despite an obvious atmosphere of chaos, the ranking officers of other responding agencies did not approach the Uvalde CISD chief of police or anyone else perceived to be in command to point out the lack of and need for a command post, or to offer that specific assistance.”

In testimony to a Senate committee June 21, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Steve McCraw said some officers on scene observed that Arredondo was not acting like an incident commander.

McCraw previously dismissed the idea that his state troopers could or should have wrested control from Arredondo.

“Let's say a DPS captain shows up in a situation, decides he's going to exercise control,” McCraw told senators last month. “Well, first of all, he doesn't have the information. And you know what? He may not be as sharp as the on-scene commander that's there … so I’m reluctant to encourage or even think of any situation where you'd want some level of hierarchy where a larger police department gets to come in and take over.”

Yet when pressed by Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district includes Uvalde, McCraw conceded that confronting an active shooter is more important than deferring to an officer who, according to protocol, is the rightful incident commander.

Instead, the report said Border Patrol agents decided they would breach the classroom without seeking permission from Arredondo. That team killed the gunman at 12:51 p.m., ending the standoff.

Despite the collective failure of police to act decisively, the committee uncovered individual instances where officers acted boldly without instruction.

When officers were driven back by gunfire just after entering the school, Uvalde Police Department Lt. Javier Martinez attempted to confront the shooter again. He advanced up the hallway in “an evident desire to maintain momentum and to ‘stop the killing.’” No officers followed him, and he stopped. Several law enforcement officers told the committee that they believed if others had followed him as back up, he might have made it to the classroom and engaged with the shooter.

DPS Special Agent Luke Williams disregarded a request that he assist in securing a perimeter outside and instead entered the building to help clear rooms. He found a student hiding in a boys bathroom stall with his legs up so he couldn’t be seen. The boy refused to come out until Williams proved he was a police officer, which he did by showing his badge beneath the door of the stall.

Williams then encountered a group of officers clustered at the end of the hallway where the shooter was and overheard someone ask “y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?”

“If there’s kids in there we need to go in there,” Williams said at 11:56 a.m., according to footage captured by his body camera.

An officer in the hallway responded to Williams that “whoever was in charge would figure that out,” the report said.

Inadequate school safety

Robb Elementary School, on its face, had all the pieces in place to slow an intruder. The school is encircled by a five-foot fence. It has an emergency management alert system and school policies for faculty and staff to keep exterior and interior doors locked at all times.

But a culture of complacency weakened these safeguards.

Multiple witnesses told the committee that employees often left doors unlocked, while teachers would use rocks, wedges and magnets to prop open interior and exterior doors. This was partly because of a shortage of keys.

“In fact, the school actually suggested circumventing the locks as a solution for the convenience of substitute teachers and others who lacked their own keys,” the report said.

In March, the teacher in Room 111, through which investigators believe the shooter entered during the massacre, reported to school administrators that his classroom door “was not always locking.” The head custodian testified he never heard of any problems with that door, and maintenance records during the school year do not contain any work orders for it. The teacher, Arnulfo Reyes, was shot twice in the shooting but survived.

Ultimately, the shooter was able to easily scale the fence and enter the school through a series of unlocked doors.“Had school personnel locked the doors as the school’s policy required, that could have slowed his progress for a few precious minutes — long enough to receive alerts, hide children, and lock doors,” the report found.

The question of locked doors came into play again when law enforcement arrived and assumed they couldn’t break down the doors of the classroom to reach the gunman.

They would fumble for several minutes in search of a key, and other equipment to break down the door, that is now believed to have been unlocked the entire time.

The search for the unnecessary key was complicated by the fact that the school, which first opened in 1955, had different sets of master keys for different doors. Lt. Mike Hernandez of the district police department said he carried 50 keys to various campus buildings, though sometimes he had to jiggle them to turn locks. On other occasions, staff changed locks without his knowledge. During the shooting, other officers attempted without success to use Hernandez’s set to find a suitable master key for the wing of the school where the shooter was.

Additionally, some faculty and staff did not initially take the intruder alert seriously because they were desensitized to the alert system which often was triggered by frequent immigration-related police pursuits.

Uvalde is about 50 miles east of Mexico and sits at the intersection of major highways from the border cities of Del Rio and Eagle Pass. Police described a recent increase in “bailouts,” where officers chase a vehicle containing suspected undocumented migrants, who then purposely crash and scatter to avoid apprehension. School district officials told the committee there had been 47 “secure” or “lockdown” events since February 2022. Around 90% of those had been because of bailouts.

There has never been an incident of school violence related to the bailouts.

“The series of bailout-related alerts led teachers and administrators to respond to all alerts with less urgency—when they heard the sound of an alert, many assumed that it was another bailout,” the report states.

Even when there were alerts, it wasn’t certain that everyone would receive them. The emergency management alert system operates by sending out warnings online to teachers and faculty — and many access it through a smart phone app.

But not all teachers received the alert about the gunman immediately, thanks in part to a poor wireless internet signal that made it difficult to send out the alert and the fact that many teachers didn’t have their phones or had them off at the moment they received it.

Principal Mandy Gutierrez never attempted to communicate the lockdown over the school’s intercom system.

Missed warnings signs

The gunman, Salvador Ramos, displayed signs he was unstable and possibly planning a violent attack, yet none of these warning signs reached authorities.

A year before the massacre, he had earned the nickname “school shooter” on social media platforms because of violent threats he would make against other users. With few, if any, friends and a strained relationship with his parents, the report describes him as a high school dropout and social outcast who eventually concluded that spectacular violence could bring him “notoriety and fame.”

Online, the committee found, he became interested in gore and violent sex, sometimes sharing videos and images of suicides and beheadings. His internet search history suggested he questioned whether he was a sociopath.

In real life, he was fired from two fast food jobs. At Whataburger, he harassed a female employee and at Wendy’s he would not talk with any co-workers, except one occasion where he attempted to start a conversation about guns.

In the final months of his life, he was determined to acquire guns, a desire the report says family and friends were aware of. Because he lived with his grandmother and had no expenses, he was able to use his money for this effort.

While he was still 17, the shooter asked at least two people to purchase guns for him, but they refused. Instead, he focused on purchasing accessories, including a gun sight, rifle sling and body armor carrier. He turned 18, the legal age to buy guns in Texas, on May 16. Over the course of the next week, he spent more than $3,000 on two AR-15 style rifles from an online retailer, which shipped the weapons to a Uvalde gun shop.

Because he had no license and did not know how to drive, an uncle transported him to the gun store twice. He said the first time he didn’t know he was going to pick up a rifle, since the store is also a popular restaurant in town and his nephew said he was hungry. But he returned with a narrow box and no food.

The owner of the gun store, Oasis Outback, remembered him and described him to investigators as an “average customer with no ‘red flags.’” Other store patrons told the FBI they thought he was “very nervous looking” and “appeared odd and looked like one of those school shooters.”

The report details no attempt by anyone who interacted with the gunman to alert authorities about his troubling behavior.

Undermining trust

In the days after the shooting, state officials unnecessarily undermined public trust in the ongoing investigations by making false statements about what had happened, the report states. The day after the massacre, a Uvalde Police Department lieutenant tasked with briefing Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders fainted just before the meeting began.

DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon took his place, relaying the secondhand accounts of police, as he had arrived at the school minutes before the shooting ended. Some of this information was inaccurate, which the committee said was the reason Abbott, in a news conference immediately following the briefing, presented a “false narrative” that the shooting lasted as few as 40 minutes thanks to “officers who rapidly devised a plan, stacked up and neutralized the attacker.”

Abbott also said that the gunman had been contronted by a school resource officer before entering the school. At a news conference the following day, a DPS official said the exterior door through which the gunman entered had been propped open. Both statements were false.

The committee criticized state officials for misleading the public.

“A complete and thorough investigation can take months or even years to confirm every detail, especially when this many law enforcement officers are involved,” the report states. “However, one would expect law enforcement during a briefing would be very careful to state what facts are verifiable, and which ones are not.”

The committee also refutes a significant revelation included in a report published last week by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University. That report stated that a Uvalde Police Department Officer with a rifle had an opportunity to shoot the gunman before he entered the school. However, when he asked a supervisor for permission to fire he never received a response and the gunman slipped into the school.

The committee noted that the ALERRT staff conducted no investigation on their own and relied entirely on information supplied by the Department of Public Safety. The committee concluded that the person the Uvalde officer saw was a coach who was ushering children inside, and found no evidence that any law enforcement personnel had a chance to engage the gunman outside the school.

The disastrous police response at Robb Elementary has set this mass shooting apart from so many that have become a regular occurrence in American life. It has renewed the debate over the role of police, and cast doubt on the theory embraced by many Second Amendment advocates that good guys with guns are the best defense against active shooters.

Yet the report concludes with a somber finding: Because the gunman fired the majority of his rounds before police arrived inside the school, about 100 in the space of three minutes, whether the death toll would have been lower had police breached the classrooms immediately is unknown.

Most of the victims died quickly, torn apart by bullets designed for battlefields, and it is unclear whether a flawless police response would have saved any lives. But the report suggests that stopping the gunman sooner could have made a difference.

“Given the information known about victims who survived through the time of the breach and who later died on the way to the hospital,” the committee wrote, “it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.”

The stunning story of the school that defied Nazi ideological control

History News Network
July 15, 2022

American-trained German educator Anna Essinger smuggled her entire school out of Nazi Germany in 1933, and made her school-in-exile in England a haven for refugees and displaced children before and after the war.

The heated debate today over whether "critical race theory" has a place in the American school curriculum highlights the battleground that education can become. CRT was developed over forty years ago by scholars as a way of gaining insight into how racism shapes American society and institutions; today ten American states have altered their legislation or taken measures to restrict its teaching, with many more states planning to follow suit.

Critical race theory has become a flashpoint for broader issues within American society, which strike at the heart of its identity, perhaps even its freedoms. For some, critical race theory is a dangerous way of thinking that exacerbates division between white people and people of color, vilifies white people and indoctrinates children. For others, it is a brilliant tool for gaining insights into the institutional bias that shapes modern society, hinders social progress and mobility and stops America being the best it can be. The theory has become associated with activism and civil rights movements and broadened to encompass not just race but class, gender and disability. Such is the controversy associated with it that, apart from changes in the law, the threats and hate mail that teachers can receive for expressing one view or another can lead to self-censorship. Cancel culture, where a person can find themselves at risk of losing their job, reputation or even their safety should they say the wrong thing, has prompted alarm at cultural shifts in America. Some have even queried whether we are living in an age of “soft totalitarianism” in which arguably even free thinking is suppressed. Is freedom of speech, perhaps even freedom of thought, really in danger in American classrooms?

There is one remarkable example of defiance of official ideological control in education – a story which, although set in the extreme context of Hitler’s totalitarian state, still holds lessons for today. In 1933, school principal Anna Essinger made history as she defied Hitler and smuggled her entire school out of Germany.

With the passing of time, Anna’s story was almost lost to us, but at a recent Kindertransport commemoration in London to celebrate the escape of 10,000 children from Nazi Germany to Britain before the Second World War, I met one former pupil and child refugee, Leslie Brent. Over eighty years previously, Leslie knew all about living with the suppression of the truth in a Nazi totalitarian state. He had been one of the many thousands of Jewish school children in Germany traumatized by Nazi racial ideology and the brutality that ensued. Within weeks of Hitler becoming Germany’s dictator in March 1933, the politicization of education began with all subjects on the curriculum changed to reflect the Nazi racist ideology that so called “Aryans” or Germans were a superior master race. Jews were denounced as untermenschen (subhuman) and laws were introduced restricting their access to education. Jewish schoolchildren like Leslie soon found themselves vilified at school in a multitude of cruel ways: ordered out of class by the teacher and then summoned and questioned on the lesson they had missed to “prove” their stupidity; made to eat their lunch in the toilet because they were “dirty Jews”; or standing in front of the class as their alleged biological differences from their “Aryan” classmates were pointed out. Repeated persecution instilled into children like Leslie that they were part of an “odious race” with “devious minds” and that they were “enemies of the people.” He felt he had almost internalised the endless denigration. “I took it for granted as a fact,” he recalls.

But Leslie’s story was not just about humanity’s descent into evil perpetrated by Hitler and the way this shaped young minds. With great emotion, he urged me to consider writing about the woman who he felt had saved him: the school principal, Anna Essinger. Quite apart from her shrewd judgment in making a stand against Hitler, there was something about her courage and her unselfish vision to help children that Leslie felt should never be forgotten. He put me in touch with others who had been at her school and I began to investigate further.

While other school principals tried to compromise and accommodate Nazism, Anna thought differently, perhaps because of her experience of living in democratic America. Although born in Germany, as a young woman she had taken the unusual step of funding herself through ten years of education in America at the University of Wisconsin. In the early 1900s, progressive American thinkers, including the university’s president Charles van Hise, were challenging the status quo, arguing university research could be used to guide political thinking to improve the quality of life for all. Inspired, Anna embarked on a degree and then an MA in education. For her, education was the key to progress; by inspiring the next generation with all that was good, humanity could advance. In the 1920s when she returned to postwar Germany, Anna turned her back on the old fashioned “rod of iron” approach to teaching and pioneered a modern, child-centred approach at Landschulheim Herrlingen, the progressive country boarding school she created in 1926, near Ulm in southern Germany.

But within days of Hitler coming to power, her life’s work was in jeopardy. Anna was instructed to fly a swastika over her school—a symbolic gesture perhaps, but one she abhorred. In Nazi Germany truth was being turned into lies, black into white. How could she raise children “in honesty and freedom” under a Nazi dictator? For Anna, the violence, hatred and blame openly endorsed by the Nazi party clashed directly with everything she was trying to teach her pupils. She hurriedly ordered a camping trip for her pupils, and only when the building was deserted did she hoist the despised symbol of fascism above her school.

Such actions were dangerous in a Nazi totalitarian state. Hitler made no secret of the new concentration camps; even those whose crime was merely to make “insufficient effort to understand the national socialist revolution” could find themselves interrogated by the Gestapo or incarcerated without charge. Unknown to Anna, there was indeed a traitor at her school who denounced her to the authorities. Helman Speer, the husband of one of the teachers, wrote to the Minister of Culture in Wurttemberg in May 1933 to express his “serious doubts” about Anna Essinger. Her “rather airy-fairy humanism,” he claimed, was “altogether uncongenial” to National Socialism. Since many of the teachers at Anna’s school at Herrlingen were “Aryan” he hoped they could join forces “and endow the school with a spirit different from that of the present director.” He urged that a Nazi spy be placed at the school, “a commissar… who would be prepared to come to an understanding with those members willing to cooperate.”

But Anna was ahead of him. That spring, as Germany’s fledgling democracy was being destroyed with the rapid dismantling of the political system, the legal system and freedom of the press, Anna was secretly working with teachers and parents on her plan to move her school lock, stock and barrel out of the country, right under the nose of the authorities. She knew the Gestapo would never permit the mass emigration of an entire school and started on a secret plan to outsmart them, a feat that no other teacher managed to pull off. By October, 1933 Anna, her core staff, and the first seventy children escaped to a run-down manor house, Bunce Court, in Kent in southern England.

The refuge that Anna created at Bunce Court soon reflected the escalating catastrophe unfolding on the continent. Many children arriving from Germany in the 1930s saw their families impoverished and abused, their parents imprisoned or even killed. During 1938, the crisis spread to Austria and Czechoslovakia prompting a further wave of refugees. After Kristallnacht, a brutal pogrom in Greater Germany in which 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, confused and bewildered children started to arrive on kindertransports, such as thirteen-year-old Leslie Brent. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and, with the start of the Second World War, children like Leslie found themselves cut off from their parents in a wholly unpredictable way.

Later, Tante Anna would offer a refuge to orphans who had survived the war in Nazi occupied territories in concentration camps, labor camps, or living underground. These were children who had suffered extremes of trauma, such as fifteen-year-old Sam Oliner, who had witnessed the brutal liquidation of his ghetto in Bobowa and survived the war hidden in plain sight in disguise as a Polish boy, living in constant terror as Jews were mercilessly hunted down. In his class at Bunce Court was fourteen-year-old Sidney Finkel from Poland, who had also endured the destruction of his family, the liquidation of Piotrkow ghetto, concentration camps and a death train. Sidney felt he had become “more like an animal, with instincts only for survival.

Tante Anna aimed to create a “home school” where such traumatized orphans would feel secure and loved, children like Sam and Sidney who had been stripped of all hope and seen things no child should witness. In the 1940s, little was known about extreme trauma, and Tante Anna understood the best way to help her concentration camp survivors was not to dwell on the past but to focus on the present and their future. “We were basically told to forget all the bad stuff that had happened to us,” recalled Anna Rose, the only girl survivor from Poland. “This was a new day and life would begin all over again and since we had been spared, we had to live a life that would make our parents proud.” Many of these orphaned children found their trauma ran too deep to discuss, but they could respond to the loving environment of Bunce Court. The strong emphasis on practical tasks at the school helped to relieve their stress and build self-confidence. There was always music too, recalls Sidney: “music was the soul of this school.” Above all Tante Anna and the teachers encouraged questioning and freedom of thought as they tried to inspire those who had experienced the worst of humanity with the very best.

Years later, pupils would refer to the “Bunce Court spirit” that infused all their efforts and pervaded the atmosphere. For them the school seemed to stand apart, an oasis in a world that was overwhelmed by the forces of Nazi evil. “I treasure those years… It was transformative,” continues Anna Rose. Sidney, too, found he was changing. Tante Anna was “very loving” he says. “I began to belong in Bunce Court. It was a wonderful thing.” For Leslie, “all the violence I had experienced before felt like a bad dream. It was paradise. I think most of the children felt it was paradise.”

After the Second World War, with the liberation of the concentration camps and the revelation of the evil and depravity of Nazism, the world could see the full horror of Hitler’s totalitarian state. Seventeen million people had been murdered by the Nazis, including Slavs, Soviet prisoners of war, Romani and other minorities, and above all, Jews: two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, including one-and-a-half million children. Anna saw photographs of the great pile of children’s shoes outside the crematorium at Auschwitz. Herown struggles to create something good seemed meaningless against such evil. But in her own modest way, through her own actions, Tante Anna did have an answer to the horror that engulfed her own generation

As she grappled with the destructive forces of a cataclysmic epoch, she tried to show her pupils a path that would lead them away from pain and hatred towards healing and love. Anna herself was not religious and her school was run according to “a complex amalgam of humanism, the Quaker faith, liberal values and Judaism, brought together by the mind of a woman whose one purpose in life seemed to be to serve children,” observed another former pupil, Eric Bourne. Above all, whatever the background, race or religion of her pupils, they were expected to help each other. “Children, you must love one another, and if that is not possible, at least respect each other,” she would say to them.

Her words and deeds echo down the decades and still have something to teach us. As the debate rages today about critical race theory, freedom of speech, cancel culture and all the other pressures of modern living, her simple message to her children still stands. Tolerance. Appreciation of another’s point of view. Respect. Love. These are the freedoms that count and that she dedicated her life to fighting for. “Some have called Bunce Court a second home,” observes Megan Ryan, the wife of a former pupil. “It is more than that. It is a way of life, a state of mind… Tante Anna has made a great achievement.”

Deborah Cadbury is the author of The School that Escaped the Nazis, to be published July 12 by Public Affairs Books

This article was originally published at History News Network

Understanding why people reject science could lead to solutions for rebuilding trust
The Conversation
July 16, 2022

Health-care workers in Toronto protest the Canadian truckers convoy last February that was against vaccine mandates. (Shutterstock)

Rejection of science is a huge problem, with many people refusing to get vaccines and denying the existence of climate change.

Why are so many people anti-science? As experts on attitudes, persuasion and how humans are impacted by scientific innovations, our recent research showed that there are four key reasons people reject scientific information.

These reasons are that 1) the information comes from a source they perceive as non-credible; 2) they identify with groups that are anti-science; 3) the information contradicts what they believe is true, good or valuable; and 4) the information is delivered in a way that conflicts with how they think about things.

Understanding these psychological reasons for being anti-science is critical because it helps unpack the rejection of science across many domains and points to potential solutions for increasing scientific acceptance.

Untrustworthy scientists

The first key reason people are anti-science is that they don’t see scientists as credible. This happens when scientists’ expertise is questioned, when they are deemed untrustworthy and when they appear biased. Although debate among scientists is a healthy part of the scientific process, many lay people interpret legitimate scientific debate as a sign that those on either or both sides of the issue are not truly experts on the topic.

Scientists are often distrusted because they are seen as cold and unfeeling. Scientists’ objectivity has also been questioned, as they are seen as being biased against Christian and conservative values.

How can scientists increase their credibility? They can communicate to the public that debate is a natural part of the scientific process. To increase trustworthiness, they can convey that their work is motivated by selfless goals.


Protesters at a Stand Up for Science rally in Boston held in 2017.(Shutterstock)

Resistance

People also tend to reject scientific information when it conflicts with their social identities. For example, video gamers are resistant to scientific evidence for the harms of playing video games.

People may also identify with social groups that reject scientific evidence and hate scientists or those who agree with scientists. For example, those who identify with groups that are skeptical about climate change tend to be quite hostile toward climate change believers.


To tackle this, science communicators should find a shared identity with their audience. Research has shown, for example, that when scientists offered their recycled water suggestions to a hostile audience, the audience was more receptive once they found a shared identity.

Contradictions

People often reject science because of their beliefs, attitudes and values. When scientific information contradicts what people believe is true or good, they feel uncomfortable. They resolve this discomfort by simply rejecting the science. For people who have smoked their entire lives, the evidence that smoking kills is uncomfortable because it contradicts their behaviours. It is far easier to trivialize the science regarding smoking than to change a deeply ingrained habit.

Often, scientific information contradicts existing beliefs due to widespread misinformation. Once misinformation has been spread, it is hard to correct, especially when it provides a causal explanation for the issue at hand.

One effective strategy to combat this is prebunking — which involves warning people that they are about to receive a dose of misinformation — and then refuting it so that people will be better at resisting misinformation when they encounter it.



It’s easier to communicate science when the audience and the scientists have things in common.(Shutterstock)

Scientific evidence can also be rejected for reasons beyond the content of the message. Specifically, when science is delivered in ways that are at odds with how people think about things, they might reject the message. For example, some people find uncertainty hard to tolerate. For those people, when science is communicated in uncertain terms (as it often is), they tend to reject it.

Science communicators should therefore try to figure out how their audiences approach information and then match their style. They can use the logic of targeted advertising to try and frame scientific messages in different ways to be persuasive for different audiences.

Political amplification

Political forces are powerful contributors to anti-science attitudes. This is because politics can trigger or amplify all four of the key reasons for being anti-science. Politics can determine which sources seem credible, exposing people with different political ideologies to different scientific information and misinformation.

Politics is also an identity, and so when scientific ideas come from one’s own group, people are more amenable to them.

For example, when a carbon tax is described as being proposed by Republicans, Democrats are more likely to oppose it. Additionally, when scientific information contradicts people’s politically informed moral values, both conservatives and liberals vehemently oppose it.

Finally, conservatives and liberals differ in their thinking styles and how they generally approach information. For example, conservatives tend to be less tolerant of uncertainty than liberals. These different thinking styles are linked to different degrees of being anti-science.

Understanding anti-science

All in all, these core determinants of anti-science attitudes help us understand what is driving rejection of diverse scientific theories and innovations, ranging from new vaccines to the evidence for climate change.

Fortunately, by understanding these bases for being anti-science, we can also better understand how to target such sentiments and increase scientific acceptance.

Aviva Philipp-Muller, Assistant Professor, Marketing, Simon Fraser University; Richard Petty, Professor of Psychology, The Ohio State University, and Spike W. S. Lee, Associate Professor, Management and Psychology, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There's a deplorable ideology holding the Trump base together

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
July 15, 2022

President Donald Trump, speaks to the media in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Shutterstock.com)

This week the nation bore witness to an especially shameful episode for Republicans, even by the right's rock-bottom standards. Right-wing media came together to respond to the story of a 10-year-old rape victim by denying her existence and calling those who provided medical care liars. What was surprising about the whole thing was not that conservative media was reckless, hateful, and mendacious. That's a permanent state of play for Republican propagandists. No, it was that the face of these attacks on a child rape victim and her doctor was not the usual doe-eyed Bible-huggers pretending they want to force fourth graders to give birth for Jesus and "the babies." It was the noxious frat daddy Jesse Watters, the former Bill O'Reilly underling who is now forever vying for Tucker Carlson's throne as the Fox News host most like a rich boy villain in an 80s movie.

Sadly, there was a choir of jackasses making false, unevidenced accusations against the doctor who terminated the child's pregnancy, but it was Watters and his smirking visage that was really the star of this clown show.

First, the Fox News hosted Ohio's Republican attorney general falsely implying there was no case on file — even though one was reported in June. Once that falsehood was exposed, it was Watters who falsely accused the doctor of not reporting the rape (she did, even though it had already been reported by the victim's family.) Watters also hosted the Republican attorney general of Indiana, gloating about the legal harassment campaign he intends to launch against the doctor. The move is clearly retaliation against her for — and this can't be stated strongly enough — helping a child rape victim avoid forced childbirth.

Republican propagandists used to drape the anti-choice movement in fake piety, to put a moralistic veneer over what is actually a desire to punish women — and child rape victims — with forced childbirth. Clutching Bibles while making maudlin speeches about "babies" was helpful to lull the press into presenting anti-choicers as well-meaning Christians instead of the sadistic misogynists they are. But that strategy has given way to letting shameless creeps like Watters become the face of anti-choice ideology.

And as with many things, we can blame Donald Trump.

Despite his half-hearted and unpersuasive attempts to feign Christian faith, Trump has mainly been received, with his pussy-grabbing ways, as an icon of secular misogyny. That doesn't mean that the more fundamentalist-flavored misogyny has gone anywhere. This week, in fact, Republicans on Capitol Hill coughed up a stock judgemental church lady, who was previously spotted claiming that fetuses are used to power D.C.'s street lights, as their point person for lying about this 10-year-old rape victim. Trump's entrance onto the political scene empowered every catcalling dirtbag out there who wants to hate women without having to go to church first.

As I note in this Friday's Standing Room Only newsletter, despite the heavy focus on the Proud Boys during the January 6 hearings, almost no attention has been paid by either the House committee or the press to the group's misogynist origins. It's an unfortunate oversight because to truly understand the rising threat of fascism, it's important to understand the role that misogyny and toxic masculinity play in it. That's especially true when it comes to understanding radicalization, as these far-right groups recruit by targeting men who go online to complain about how modern women aren't submissive enough to men.

The Proud Boys continue to be a secular version of the fundamentalist groups that reject women's equality and LGBTQ rights.

Back when most of the media was still treating the Proud Boys as a harmless drinking club, I was reviewing hours of footage, cataloged by researcher Juliet Jeske, of "The Gavin McInnes Show," which is where the Proud Boys got their start. On this online program, the shock jock-style right-wing host pundit frequently waxed poetic about "Western civilization." It was pretty unsubtle as euphemisms go, but much of what drew in his male audience was the overt sexism.

RELATED: Fetus-powered street lamps? Republicans ramp up outrageous anti-abortion lies ahead of Roe's demise

McInnes was unapologetic in romanticizing "traditional" marriage, in which women are submissive and financially dependent on men. He and his followers wallowed in outdated stereotypes accusing feminists of being sad, barren "cat ladies," which really says more about their pathetic fantasies than women's lived realities. Critically, though, McInnes didn't present these as religious arguments. Instead, he appealed directly to the deep insecurities in his audience, telling them that they needed no excuse other than bolstering their own egos to demand women be kept in second-class status.

In fact, the Proud Boys continue to be a secular version of the fundamentalist groups that reject women's equality and LGBTQ rights. As Salon's Kathryn Joyce has reported, Proud Boys chapters across the country have been targeting gay clubs and drag shows for harassment. They've also been joining anti-abortion protests, adding another layer of violent menace to the already notoriously violent movement.

The secularization of misogyny and homophobia as ideologies is an underreported phenomenon, especially in light of how dangerous it is. As the explosive growth of the Proud Boys since the Capitol insurrection suggests, there are a lot of white men who are bitter about gender equality and racial diversity but aren't exactly keen on having to get up for church on Sunday mornings to justify themselves. Defeating Trumpism means grappling directly with the rise of misogyny and homophobia, especially the secular flavors of it, and rebutting those views forcefully.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people in both mainstream and liberal media who are pretty sexist themselves and don't want to admit that women or LGBTQ people are important enough to hate. That makes it hard to have an honest public conversation about how much Trumpism is fueled not just by racism, but by this attachment to rigid gender roles that benefit straight cis men to the detriment of everyone else.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade, however, is forcing a reckoning a lot of people would rather avoid.

As the smirking Watters shows, the people who are willing to go to the mat for forced childbirth aren't just the Bible-thumpers. It's a larger coalition of everyone who experienced nervous sweats during the #MeToo era and sees this as an opportunity to put women in their place. (Or, as in the case of the 10-year-old rape victim, to re-traumatize little girls.) It doesn't matter to the misogynist Trump coalition, however, because the goal is restoring straight male supremacy, no matter how many lives they have to destroy to get there.

Post-Roe gaslighting: The party of QAnon denies the very real rape of a 10-year-old

A shameful episode in right-wing media is a reminder: Republicans only care about kids when they're imaginary

By AMANDA MARCOTTE

Senior Writer
SALON
PUBLISHED JULY 14, 2022 

Fox anchor Jesse Watters speaks during "Jesse Watters Primetime"

 at Fox News Channel Studios (John Lamparski/Getty Images)

The party of QAnon got caught projecting their own sins onto their opponents — with lightning speed this time.

As a reminder, Republicans are increasingly embracing the grotesque tactic of leveling false accusations of child sex abuse at their political opponents. It started in the fringes, with groups like QAnon spreading wild conspiracy theories accusing Democratic politicians and, for some reason, Tom Hanks of being pedophiles who murder children to eat their brains. The "made-up pedophilia stories" thing then went completely mainstream in the GOP this year. Beginning with the office of Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, conservative politicians and media figures started falsely accusing people who support LGBTQ rights of being "groomers," i.e. people who target children for sexual abuse. Drag queens, the Disney corporation, and even Oreo cookies got swept up in the GOP frenzy of painting their political opponents as child sex predators.

This Republican tendency to casually paint any political opponent as supportive of child rape even factored into the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in March, as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri viciously attacked the judge with flatly false accusations that she has some special affection for child pornographers. The use of false accusations of child sex abuse has become so rapidly normalized in the GOP that it would be hard to believe it, if not for the very public and televised evidence of how much they love saying these repulsive things.

RELATED: Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a QAnon circus

Republicans love to work themselves into a frenzy over child sex abuse that exists solely in their fantasies. But this week, when confronted with the very real story of a 10-year-old rape victim, the Republican noise machine went into overdrive denying her very existence.

It started with a story in the Indianapolis Star about a 10-year-old abortion patient who was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion due to the abortion ban in Ohio. Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an ob-gyn in Indiana, told the paper about seeing this patient, who was 6 weeks pregnant.

Republicans love to wax poetic about imaginary child sex abuse, but in the real world, victims receive nothing but GOP abuse.

The story illustrates the sadism and misogyny that fuels abortion bans, and so it's no surprise it started to get more attention. First, CNN host Dana Bash asked South Dakota's Republican Gov. Kristi Noem about it. Then President Joe Biden, his voice cracking with outrage, mentioned the case in a speech denouncing the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade: "Ten years old — 10 years old! — raped, six weeks pregnant, already traumatized, was forced to travel to another state."

At this point, right-wing media decided it was time to start falsely accusing Dr. Bernard of making the whole thing up.

A reporter from the sleazy right-wing outlet Daily Caller triumphantly declared that Dr. Bernard couldn't provide "any details to corroborate her story." This was enough for the larger right-wing press to go on a feeding frenzy. The attempts to discredit Dr. Bernard's story quickly got elevated to Fox News, where piggish host Jesse Watters especially went nuts over it. Then the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal published a story with the snarky headline "An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm," complaining that they were denied access to the name of a child sex abuse victim.

In a truly shameful display, the bothersiderism addict at the Washington Post, "fact checker" Glenn Kessler, decided to grace the right's false accusations with a story headlined, "A one-source story about a 10-year-old and an abortion goes viral." Kessler's entire premise to cast doubt on the rape of a child was his claim that law enforcement knew nothing about the rape.

RELATED: Conservatives tried — and failed — to cast doubt on tale of Ohio child rape victim

Of course, it turned out the story was true — and the police were informed of the rape last month.

Which is unsurprising, considering how common child sex abuse is. The real kind, that is, not the imaginary kind QAnon cares about.

Republicans love to strut around in a self-righteous fury over the fake rapes of imaginary children. But when real kids are actually abused and need real help? Republicans don't just refuse to care, the GOP media establishment — and their allies in mainstream media — go out of their way to erase the existence of these very real victims.

What makes this especially gross is how much this smear campaign relied on known difficulties in dealing with cases such as this. Both federal law and medical ethics prevent doctors from handing over the names and addresses of patients, especially to "journalists" at right-wing rags who clearly have ill intent. Kessler's "fact check" noticeably fails to note that Dr. Bernard, by federal law, could not reveal the patient's identity.

And, as the media figures who pushed this narrative are also aware, rape is infamously under-prosecuted. Only 50 out of every 1,000 rape cases result in arrest. No wonder they were caught by surprise when someone was actually arrested for this rape. Arrest so rarely happens they were smart to bet that it was unlikely in this case. Kessler's "fact check," meanwhile, failed to note that rape cases rarely result in arrest, even as he held out formal charges as the kind of legitimizing evidence he demands from such stories.

So, will the people who accused the good doctor of being a liar apologize?

Hell no, of course not. They are doing exactly what a bunch of sadistic misogynists love to do: viciously attacking a doctor for being the one person willing to help a child rape victim.

The media figures who pushed this narrative are aware that rape is infamously under-prosecuted.

Anti-choice ghouls want no compassion for anyone with a uterus, but they get especially outraged when kindness is shown to child rape victims. As I noted on Twitter, it's one of the reasons that Dr. George Tiller of Kansas was such a focal point of right-wing harassment for so long. Tiller was one of the few doctors in the country who had the skills and capacity to deal with child rape victims whose pregnancies were discovered months after the rape. When it was discovered that Tiller had aborted a pregnancy in a 10-year-old rape victim, anti-choice activists convinced a local prosecutor to take him to court in 2009 over false accusations that he had done so illegally. The jury deliberated for less than an hour and acquitted Dr. Tiller, because ordinary people do not share the anti-choice view that it's good to force 4th graders to give birth.

RELATED: Republicans don't care about kids — just imaginary children

One anti-choice activist, Scott Roeder, was especially angry that Tiller was not punished for helping a child rape victim. Two months after the trial ended, Roeder showed up at Dr. Tiller's church and murdered the doctor in front of the congregation. This is what gets euphemized as "pro-life": homicidal rage at doctors who show compassion toward child rape victims.

We're seeing that rage now, as Fox News and other right-wing pundits work themselves into a lather villainizing Dr. Bernard for daring to spare a child the horror of forced childbirth. It's a gross display, but these are the same people who support and defend Donald Trump, a man who was caught on tape bragging about how he likes to sexually assault women.

It's yet another reminder that what fuels the anti-choice movement is not "life," but plain old misogyny. It's a misogyny that celebrates the sexual predator, like Trump, and castigates both the victims and those who help victims. And, as this story shows, the hate isn't aimed just at grown women, but at girls as young as 10 years old. Republicans love to wax poetic about imaginary child sex abuse, but in the real world, victims receive nothing but GOP abuse.


By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

MORE FROM AMANDA MARCOTTE

 King of Jordan: No security nor stability without guaranteeing establishment of independent Palestinian state

July 16 2022 

King Abdullah II said that economic co-operation in the region must include the Palestinian National Authority to ensure the success of regional partnerships, reiterating the importance of considering opportunities for co-operation by seeking regional integration in food security, energy, transport and water.

QNA/Jeddah

King Abdullah II of Jordan underlined Saturday that there is no security, stability or prosperity in the Middle East without a solution that guarantees the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of the June 4, 1967, with East Al Quds as a capital to live in security and peace alongside Israel.

In a speech during the Jeddah Security and Development Summit, he said that economic co-operation in the region must include the Palestinian National Authority to ensure the success of regional partnerships, reiterating the importance of considering opportunities for co-operation by seeking regional integration in food security, energy, transport and water.
He stressed that the participation of US President Joe Biden in the summit is an evidence of the US keenness on the stability of the region, and an affirmation of the historical and close partnership between the two sides, and it also emphasises the leadership role of the US president and his efforts to strengthen regional security and support the efforts to achieve peace and prosperity.
The Jordanian king pointed out that the Jeddah summit comes at a time when the region and the world are facing multiple challenges, from the economic repercussions of the Covis-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian crisis on energy and food, in addition to the ongoing conflicts suffered by the region, so it is necessary to consider opportunities for co-operation and joint work, by seeking regional integration.