EPA set to clean up Smokey Mountain Smelters Superfund site south of downtown Knoxville

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The former Smokey Mountain Smelters site, now a Superfund site for EPA cleanup at 1508 Maryville Pike, photographed on Friday, Feb. 10, 2023.

Anila Yoganathan, Knoxville News Sentinel
Wed, February 22, 2023

The Environmental Protection Agency is set to start work this month on the final phase of the cleanup of a contaminated former industrial site near downtown Knoxville.

The EPA will be in Knoxville on Feb. 13 for a public meeting to tell residents about the next steps in its cleanup of the Smokey Mountain Smelters Superfund site in South Knoxville.

The meeting will be 6-7:30 p.m. Feb. 13 at the South Knoxville Community Center, 522 Maryville Pike.

What is this site?

Located at 1508 Maryville Pike, the Smokey Mountain Smelters site is within 75 feet of Montgomery Village, a low-income apartment community, which includes recreational areas and a daycare center, according to the EPA. There also are single-family homes in the area.

From the 1920s to '60s, the site housed different agricultural chemical and fertilizer companies. Starting in 1979, Rotary Furnace Inc., also known as Smokey Mountain Smelters, operated there until 1994.

The operators used to recover aluminum by melting down metals, according to a 2011 Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation fact sheet about the site.

Local and state officials began focusing on the operation in the 1980s, according to the EPA. The site was used as a landfill for years even after Tennessee's Division of Solid Waste Management told Smokey Mountain Smelters the site was not suitable as an industrial landfill.

During the same period, Knox County's Air Pollution Control department cited the company for multiple air quality violations, while residents also filed complaints.

The operators ended up leaving "hazardous materials" above and below ground at the site before abandoning it, according to TDEC.

Why is it labeled a Superfund site?

Waste left at the site includes materials that could release ammonia gas when wet, as well as a contaminated lagoon and old equipment.

In 2010, the EPA put the site on the Superfund's National Priorities List due to contaminated surface water, sediment and soil.

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"Superfund" was an act created by Congress in 1980 to regulate cleanups of contaminated sites that have popped up over the years as we learn more about environmental safety and implement stricter regulations.

The Superfund program:

Forces companies or parties responsible for contamination to do the cleanup or pay the government to do it.

If the responsible party no longer exists, such as a dissolved business, the EPA is given the funds and retains the authority to clean up the site.

The goal is to protect human health and the environment while returning the site's condition to the point it can be used again in some form.

For the Smokey Mountain Smelters site, the EPA has worked with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to clean up parts of the site as more specific plans were put in place and money became available.

Cleanup work has included removing materials, capping some waste with a temporary cap, repairing fencing and demolishing buildings.

What's the state of the site?

Between TDEC and the EPA, multiple investigations and assessments have been conducted on the site since at least 1997, in addition to the incremental clean up.

From the EPA's assessments:

Human exposure to any dangerous material at the site is under control, though the EPA does not have sufficient data to determine if "the migration of contaminated groundwater" has been "stabilized."

The site is not yet ready for use.

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What will the cleanup involve?

President Joe Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will pay for the cleanup. Work is scheduled to start this month and to be finished by November.

The EPA says there will be increased traffic from heavy equipment in the area, but wants residents to know the contractors on site will keep noise pollution and dust to a minimum.

There are four phases to the cleanup plan:

Starting in February: The site will be prepared for cleanup including building of temporary workstations, clearing of the area and combining soil from two waste piles into one.

From March to June: Soil will be excavated and put into a containment area before an engineered cap is installed on top to prevent stormwater transferring the contamination to other locations. The wetlands and surrounding tributary beds will be restored during this phase.

From February to the end of May: Groundwater at certain locations will be injected with a fungicide. The bacteria reduces "contaminants in the groundwater and immobilizes metals."

From June to November: A report on the remedial action will be created and reviewed.

How can I attend the public meeting?

Residents can attend the meeting in person at the South Knoxville Community Center or online by pre-registering for the Zoom link here: https://usepa.zoomgov.com/meeting/register/vJItc-qhrzgiEuWwiSCdIew3silEl6FFdJ0

More information about the Smokey Mountain Smelters site and its history can be found here: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Stayup&id=0406753#Stayup

Anila Yoganathan is a Knox News investigative reporter. You can contact her at anila.yoganathan@knoxnews.com, and follow her on Twitter @AnilaYoganathan. Enjoy exclusive content and premium perks while supporting strong local journalism by subscribing at knoxnews.com/subscribe.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Final phase of Superfund cleanup set to start near downtown Knoxville

New emergency bid to appeal, block huge Nevada lithium mine



 Melissa Boerst, a Lithium Nevada Corp. geologist, points to an area of future exploration from a drill site at the Thacker Pass Project in Humboldt County, Nev., on Sept. 13, 2018. Conservationists are seeking an emergency court order to block construction of a lithium mine near the Nevada-Oregon line. The new request filed Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023, in federal court in Reno comes after a judge there directed the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to revisit part of its approval of the plans but allowed construction to go forward in the meantime. 

(Suzanne Featherston/The Daily Free Press via AP, File)


SCOTT SONNER
Tue, February 21, 2023 at 1:38 PM MST·5 min read

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Conservationists are seeking an emergency court order to block construction of a Nevada lithium mine after a U.S. judge directed a federal agency to revisit part of its approval of the plans but allowed construction to go forward in the meantime.

Four environmental groups want U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno to temporarily halt any work at a subsidiary of Lithium Americas’ mine near the Oregon border until they can appeal her ruling earlier this month to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

They filed on Tuesday a formal notice of their intent to appeal to the San Francisco-based circuit court and an emergency motion for injunction in Reno pending the appeal. An Oregon tribe that filed a new, separate lawsuit to block the mine last week joined the notice of appeal.

“This mine should not be allowed to destroy public land unless and until the Ninth Circuit has determined whether it was legally approved,” said Talasi Brooks, a lawyer for the Western Watersheds Project.

Du gave the U.S. Bureau of Land Management until the end of Wednesday to respond to the motion or reach an agreement with the conservation groups to postpone any construction until she rules on their request for an emergency injunction.

“Based on the urgency implied by environmental plaintiffs' representation that Lithium Nevada intends to start construction on February 27 ... the court sets an expedited briefing schedule,” she wrote in a brief order late Tuesday.

The company said last week that construction at the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine was “imminent” after Du ruled Feb. 6 the bureau had acted legally — with one possible exception — when it approved plans for the mine in January 2021.

A spokesperson for Lithium Americas said Tuesday they were confident the appellate court would uphold the project's approval.

“Since we began this project more than a decade ago, we have been committed to doing things right," Tim Crowley, the company spokesperson, said in an email to The Associated Press. "The recent U.S. District Court ruling definitively supported BLM’s consultation process, and we are confident the ruling will be upheld.”

Du’s earlier ruling was the latest in a series of high-stakes legal battles pitting environmentalists against so-called “green energy” projects the Biden administration is pushing over the objections of conservation groups, tribes and others.

The White House says the mine planned by Lithium Nevada Corp., a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, is critical to ramped-up efforts to produce raw materials for electric vehicle batteries. Opponents say it would harm wildlife habitats, degrade groundwater and pollute the air.

“It symbolizes BLM’s wrecking ball approach to 'green’ energy on public lands,” Katie Fite of WildLands Defense said Tuesday.

Du ordered the bureau Feb. 6 to go back and determine whether the company had established valid mining rights on 1,300 acres (526 hectares) of neighboring land, where it plans to bury millions of tons of waste rock that would be removed from the open pit mine deeper than the length of a football field.

But she stopped short of granting the opponents' request at that time to block any work at the site until the validity of the claim was established under the Mining Law of 1872 on the adjacent lands about 200 miles (322 kilometers) northeast of Reno.

“There's no evidence that Lithium Nevada will be able to establish valid mining claims to lands it plans to bury in waste rock and tailings, but the damage will be done regardless,” Brooks said in a statement Tuesday announcing the filing of the emergency request for an injunction.

Du said in her Feb. 6 ruling it was a rare instance where it was proper to stop short of vacating an agency's approval of an overall project to allow the bureau to re-examine the adequacy of one element of the plan — the disposal of the waste rock.

She made clear her ruling incorporates part of a recent ruling by the 9th Circuit in a fight over the 1872 law in an Arizona case that could prove more onerous to mining companies that want to dispose of their waste on neighboring federal lands.

In that case, the San Francisco-based appellate court upheld an Arizona ruling that the Forest Service lacked authority to approve Rosemont Copper’s plans to dispose of waste rock on land adjacent to the mine it wanted to dig on a national forest southeast of Tucson. The service and the Bureau of Land Management long have interpreted the mining law to convey the same mineral rights to such lands.

General Motors Co. announced Jan. 31 it had conditionally agreed to invest $650 million in Lithium Americas in a deal that will give the company exclusive access to the first phase of the Thacker Pass mine. The equity investment in two phases was contingent on the project clearing legal challenges in court in Reno.

Lithium Americas said last week that Du's Feb. 6 ruling satisfied the completion of the first phase and that as a result, GM had purchased 15 million common shares of Lithium Americas at $21.24 per share on Feb. 16 for a total of $320 million.

Lithium Americas estimates that the mine can support production of up to 1 million electric vehicles annually. The company expects production to begin in the second half of 2026.

In the Feb. 6 ruling, Du also denied for the third time relief sought by Native American tribes who argued it could destroy a sacred site where their ancestors were massacred in 1865. Last week, three tribes filed a separate lawsuit claiming that the bureau has misrepresented its claims that it's met its legal obligation to consult with tribes about potential impacts to historical and cultural values near the mine site.

SUFFERED IMAGE SLAUGHTER BY REAGAN

Column: Jimmy Carter was an underrated president

The easy shorthand about him — lousy president, outstanding former president — is misleading.

Jonathan Alter
Tue, February 21, 2023

President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1977. 

(Library of Congress/Marion S. Trikosko/Handout via Reuters)

One day in Atlanta, I asked Rosalynn Carter if her husband was stubborn. It was a trait that both helped and hurt him as governor of Georgia and president of the United States in the 1970s.

I expected Rosalynn, who has known Jimmy for more than 90 years and been married to him for nearly 77, to try to spin me.

Instead, she just nodded and laughed.

As Jimmy Carter’s epic journey is almost at a close at age 98, it’s a good time to begin a long-overdue reassessment of this misunderstood man and his much-maligned presidency. In researching his life for five years and questioning him closely about it, I was struck by the gap between the perception of his career and the reality of the historical record.

The easy shorthand about him — lousy president, outstanding former president — is misleading. In fact, Carter was an underrated president and a slightly overrated ex-president, in large part because he had much less power after leaving office to change the lives of people around the world.

Carter and his running mate, Walter Mondale, at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

As president, Carter was a political failure, crushed by Ronald Reagan when he ran for reelection in 1980. But in many areas he was a substantive, even visionary success, far ahead of his time. In one term, he won approval of more major legislation than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, except Lyndon Johnson — more than two-term presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Carter was helped by the fact that his party controlled Congress for his full four years.)

Take the environment. Carter imposed strong new pollution controls and the first fuel-economy standards. He established the Superfund, which has cleaned up thousands of toxic waste dumps across the country. And with the enactment of the Alaska Lands Act, he doubled the size of the national park system. He forged the nation’s first comprehensive energy policy, which included the first federal funding for green energy. To symbolize this change, Carter in 1979 placed solar panels on the roof of the White House, which were later taken down by Reagan.

Shortly before Carter left office, the White House issued a report on global warming with the same carbon emission goals as were adopted 35 years later at the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. If reelected, he had planned to have electric cars on the road by the mid-1980s.

Elsewhere on the domestic side, Carter carried out the first civil service reform in 100 years. He established two new Cabinet departments (Energy and Education) and FEMA. He signed the major ethics legislation that made Donald Trump’s first impeachment possible. He deregulated airlines (which allowed for cheaper fares on major routes), trucking (which spurred the just-in-time delivery that undergirds the economy) and utilities (incentivizing them to use clean energy). He curbed redlining, which had impoverished broad swaths of urban America. He brought the first genuine diversity to the federal workforce and appointed more women and African Americans to the federal bench than all of his predecessors combined, times five, though he never had a Supreme Court appointment.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom he appointed to the appellate court, later said: “People often ask me, ‘Well, did you always want to be a judge?’ My answer is that it just wasn’t in the realm of the possible until Jimmy Carter became president and was determined to draw on the talent of all of the people, not just some of them.”

Carter with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the signing of the Camp David Accords in the White House in 1978.

 (Jimmy Carter Library/National Archives/Handout via Reuters)

In foreign policy, Carter is most remembered for the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis, which, along with high interest rates and inflation and an intraparty challenge for the Democratic nomination from Ted Kennedy, led to his defeat in 1980.

But the crisis didn’t end badly — the hostages all came home safely just as Carter left office — and much of the rest of Carter’s foreign policy was historic.

The 1978 Camp David Accords, made possible by his much-derided attention to detail, is arguably the most successful peace treaty since the end of World War II. Israel and Egypt fought four wars in the previous 30 years but have not fired a shot in anger against each other in the four decades since.

Richard Nixon opened the door to China, but Carter walked through it. By establishing full diplomatic relations with China (which Gerald Ford, his 1976 opponent, would likely not have been able to do), Carter launched the world’s most crucial bilateral relationship and made possible, for better or worse, the growth of the global economy.

In the face of fierce opposition, Carter won approval of the Panama Canal Treaties, which prevented — by the Pentagon’s estimate — the deployment of 100,000 troops to protect the Canal Zone in what would have been a Vietnam War-style conflict in the Western Hemisphere.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, at a 2019 basketball game between the Atlanta Hawks and the New York Knicks. (Dale Zanine/USA Today Sports via Reuters)

Perhaps most important, Carter’s human rights policy, while hypocritical in some respects, set a new global standard for how governments should treat their own people, helped dozens of nations establish democracies and — by the account of many Republicans — used soft power to help win the Cold War.

Carter made plenty of mistakes as president. His stubbornness harmed efforts to achieve health care reform. He let the Shah of Iran into the U.S. for medical treatment, which precipitated the seizure of the hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. He imposed a grain embargo and boycott of the 1980 Olympics in an unpopular and ineffective response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And he mismanaged his relationships inside the Democratic Party.

But most of the criticism of his presidency is, in hindsight, overblown. Now that his long life approaching its end, it’s time to begin the overdue assessment of an honest and decent man who was a better president than most remember.

Jonathan Alter is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”

THIRD WORLD U$A

Biden administration: We bent the curve on homelessness. Here's how we made progress.

Jeff Olivet
Tue, February 21, 2023 

Until you turn off the faucet, a bathtub will never be empty. Until we prevent homelessness from happening in the first place, it will not end in the U.S.

That’s why the Biden-Harris administration’s new homelessness plan goes further than previous federal efforts to prevent homelessness before it happens.

The faucets that contribute to homelessness are criminal justice systems that punish people who have nowhere to live but the streets and make it harder for people to get housing and jobs, foster care systems that fail young people when they age out, health care systems that don’t provide insurance and treatment to all who need it, and a housing supply that doesn’t provide enough homes that people can afford. Unfortunately, there are many more faucets.

We know how to get people out of homelessness. Every year – thanks in part to the long-standing, bipartisan “Housing First” policy – the United States helps more than 900,000 people get back into homes. But for every person who gets housing, another loses housing.

Increase in homelessness is starting to slow

After the Bush and Obama administrations embraced a Housing First policy, homelessness in America began to decline. But in 2016, that progress stopped, and homelessness rapidly rose in the years that followed.

Fortunately, we have begun to slow the rapid rise in homelessness – and we did it during a global pandemic and economic crisis. The number of Americans without a home remained largely flat from 2020 to 2022, proving that we can make progress even during the most difficult times.

'Literally hand them a lifeline': Medicaid expansion is a compassion test many 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls fail

Habitat for Humanity: Jimmy Carter's greatest accomplishments have been in health and welfare

With billions of dollars in new funding from the Biden-Harris administration, communities flattened the curve by investing in evidence-based solutions. President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, which included one of the largest-ever investments in homelessness.

Through these investments, we have reduced homelessness among veterans, families and youth, and turned our attention to eliminating encampments and other forms of unsheltered homelessness.

But flattening the curve is not enough.

The Biden administration’s new plan, “All In,” aims to reduce homelessness 25% by 2025 and charts a course to end it altogether. Our plan lays out dozens of strategies and hundreds of actions to urgently address basic needs of people in crisis, expand housing and support, and build better systems to prevent homelessness – with an evidence-based, all-hands-on-deck approach based on what people who have experienced homelessness say they need and want.

A woman pushes a cart past a tent along the sidewalk on Dec. 20, 2022, in Salt Lake City.

This is an ambitious goal, but homelessness is a life-and-death crisis. Mayors, housing and service providers, and citizens who see their neighbors on the streets know that people are dying from drug overdoses and untreated mental illness, from extreme heat and cold that homes would have protected them from, and from health problems that are worsened by living outside.

Homelessness is a tragedy – not a crime. Let’s treat it like one.

Housing is start of the path to better quality of life

At the root of our plan is the understanding that without a home, every other aspect of a person’s life suffers. How can you improve your health when a good night of sleep is so crucial to it? How can you get a job without a place to store all the documents you need to apply? How can you stay out of jail when having a home is a condition of your parole?

Where's compassionate leadership?: My colleague was stabbed. Homelessness and peril are much closer to home than you think.

Speak up: Good prevails when good people refuse to be silent. When we represent, my mom would say.

Housing is the immediate solution to homelessness – but not the only solution. We must also help people fix their health, employment, legal and other problems that made them lose their homes in the first place.

In a nation where so many live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness, the Biden administration’s plan will work to make systems work for the people who have been left behind. With rents rising – even a full-time salary on minimum wage can’t cover a two-bedroom in any state – and with a shortage of 7 million homes, we will build more housing and make it more affordable.

With people of color more likely to experience homelessness, we will dismantle systems that discriminate against them. We also will make health care (including mental health and substance use treatment), job training and other support easier to get.

I want to live in a country where no one experiences the tragedy and indignity of homelessness – and everyone has a safe, stable, accessible and affordable home. I believe our plan can make that happen.

I ask those who seek to ascribe blame for the crisis of homelessness to join us in finding common ground, continuing to invest in effective solutions and working creatively to fix systems and prevent homelessness before it happens.

Jeff Olivet is executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which works with the White House, 19 federal agencies and communities to set and coordinate the nation’s homelessness strategy.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: US homeless population surged under Trump. Here's how we slowed it

America’s productivity engine is sputtering. Fixing it is a $10 trillion opportunity


U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Asutosh Padhi, Olivia White
Mon, February 20, 2023 

Since 2005, productivity growth has been lackluster, averaging 1.4% a year, compared to the post-World War II average of 2.2%.

That is a problem. Increasing productivity–economic output per unit of input–maintains U.S. competitiveness and improves our quality of life. It is also essential to meet challenges like inflation, debt loads, entitlements, and the energy transition.

Regaining historical rates of productivity growth could generate a total of $10 trillion for U.S. GDP by 2030, or $15,200 per U.S. household that year.

It won’t be easy–but productivity is growing fast in some sectors and geographies. Since 2007, the information sector has grown at 5.5% annually. North Dakota’s economy has grown at nearly 3.5% and Washington’s at 2.3%. We need to improve productivity more broadly.

To get the U.S. economic engine humming, we need to overcome four challenges.

Workforce shortages and skills gaps

There are two separate but linked workforce challenges. One is the lack of workers. U.S. workforce participation rate has fallen to 62.3%, down from 67% in the late 1990s. Only part of this is due to an aging population: More than 5 million Americans are not in the workforce but say they want to work.

The second challenge is that too many current workers do not have the skills they will need to succeed. Skilled talent is essential to productivity growth. In the last 30 years, firms that have invested in people have seen outsized returns. But re-skilling is a process, not a result. As technology changes, so do the skills people need. Hiring for skills rather than credentials–and dropping degree requirements as some states have done–could expand the qualified pool.

Digitization without a productivity dividend

When it works, the link between digitization and productivity is profound: From 1989 to 2019, there was a strong correlation between sectors’ productivity growth and their level of digitization.

Information, finance, and wholesale trade, for example, have all seen rapid productivity growth since 2005, and all are highly digitized. It goes in the other direction, too: the construction industry is the second-least digitalized sector, and has seen next to no productivity growth for a generation. Digitization also helps individual firms grow more productive. In manufacturing, for example, leading firms are more than five times as productive as the laggards.

However, many firms that have invested in digitization are not seeing the benefits. Our research from 2022 showed that most organizations achieved less than a third of the impact they expected from digital investments. Too often, they fail to make the complementary changes across strategy, processes, and training needed to extract full value from digitization.

Leaders distinguish themselves by setting bold business goals enabled by technology. They redesign operational processes rather than augment existing ways of doing business. And perhaps most importantly, they don’t forget the human element: They support individuals and teams to work together effectively in these new models.

Underinvestment in intangibles

Technology by itself is just boxes and bytes: developing it and then putting it to work requires investments in research, intellectual property, and skilled people.

Such expenditure creates a productivity “J-curve” in which the initial benefits may be small (or even negative) but long-term value is substantial. But not all firms invest in the first place. Our research has found that productivity-leading firms invest more than twice as much in intangibles.

Government has a role to play, too, by clarifying and simplifying regulations, and easing constraints on new investments.

Geographic haves and have nots

“The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed,” noted William Gibson. And that is true for U.S. productivity. Some states have performed well above average over the last generation. But too many others have below-average productivity and are slipping.

Within states, too, some cities and regions have fallen behind. Such areas often see more than their share of social ills such as lower life expectancy. Even cities with high productivity, such as San Francisco, have not succeeded in distributing gains evenly. Broadly improving productivity is a social as well as an economic issue.

Restoring U.S. productivity growth to its historical rate is not impossible. We’ve done it before. From 1980 to 95, productivity growth was at 1.7%, then accelerated to 3% for the next decade.

Revving up U.S. productivity should be seen a national imperative. We need it to address workforce shortages, manage the energy transition, raise incomes, improve competitiveness–and enhance the lives of all Americans.

Asutosh Padhi is a senior partner in McKinsey & Company’s Chicago office and managing partner for North America. Olivia White is a director of the McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

In Vermont, a School and Artist Fight Over Murals of Slavery

Jenna Russell
Tue, February 21, 2023

Sam Kerson, who painted the murals at Vermont Law and Graduate School 30 years ago, at his studio in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada, Feb. 11, 2023. 

(Nasuna Stuart-Ulin/The New York Times)

SOUTH ROYALTON, Vt. — For years, when students at Vermont Law and Graduate School came to Shirley Jefferson with objections to the murals in the student center, and their depictions of Black people that struck some as racist caricatures, the longtime Black administrator urged those protesting to move on.

Jefferson, 69, is no stranger to racism, nor to protest. Born in segregated Selma, Alabama, in 1953, she helped integrate her high school, marched for civil rights and graduated from Vermont Law in 1986, later returning to work in admissions and alumni affairs. Still, hoping to avoid division, she advised the students to focus on their studies.

“I told them, ‘You all did not come here to fight over a mural, you came to get educated,’ ” Jefferson recalled one recent afternoon, her Southern accent still evident after more than two decades in northern New England.

Then came the summer of 2020, and for Jefferson and many others, a renewed commitment to confront embedded racism and insensitivity, even where it might be unintended. “When George Floyd was killed, all of a sudden I said to myself, ‘That mural has got to go,’ ” she said. “I called the dean, and he said OK.’’

That might have been that, if not for one complication: The artist who painted the murals 30 years ago as a condemnation of slavery, Sam Kerson — who is white — fought back against the plan to erase his work.

When his attempt to reclaim the murals failed — the paintings could not be removed from the walls without destroying them — Kerson sued to stop the school from permanently covering them, pointing to an obscure federal law that protects artists from certain types of “modification” of their art. After a two-year journey through the courts, the case landed last month before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New York, where the two sides presented arguments Jan 27.

“It’s a major work, it’s my life, and it’s important that it be there,” Kerson, 76, said in an interview. “It’s historically important in what it says about Black people rising up to resist, and it’s important as a record of what we said in 1993.”

Preserving the artworks is also important, he said, “because there continues to be slavery in the world.”

The two murals, each 24 feet long, depict the brutality of slavery, with scenes including a slave market, a slave owner wielding a whip and an attacking dog. They also show white Vermonters protesting slavery and helping people escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Bold and colorful, in a style more expressive than realistic, the works were inspired by Mexican muralists such as José Clemente Orozco, whose murals at nearby Dartmouth College also once sparked calls for their removal.

For now, the law school has covered the paintings with white panels, suspended just above their surface so as not to damage them, pending the outcome of the court appeal.

The case echoes other recent debates around the country, as artworks in common spaces are reassessed in light of changing attitudes — and as courts struggle to reconcile the rights of artists with those of art owners, and of people exposed to such works.

To Justin Barnard, an attorney representing the law school, the matter is simple: “If you own a painting, of course you have the right to decide whether or not to display it.”

The case turns on language in the federal law that says artists can seek to prevent modification of their work if the change would harm their “honor or reputation.” The law school says that covering the murals, even permanently, is not a modification if it leaves no mark.

Kerson maintains that damage will be done to his reputation. “He must suffer the indignity and humiliation of having a cover put over his art,” his lead attorney, Steven Hyman, told the appeals court last month.

Similar sagas elsewhere have come to varied ends.

School leaders at the University of Kentucky decided last year to relocate a 1934 mural that caused years of campus debate, a retrospective of Kentucky history that includes depictions of enslaved people working in a field. (In a twist, a Black artist who was invited to create an adjacent work in response to the mural said her art should also be removed if the school chose to “censor” the older work.)

In San Francisco, school leaders opted to keep a controversial 1930s mural on view at a public high school after art historians protested plans to remove it and alumni sued to save it. The mural, which chronicles the life of George Washington and includes scenes of enslaved people, was painted by artist Victor Arnautoff, described by the school’s alumni association as “an avowed leftist” and social realist who sought to show Washington’s ties to “the sins of early America.”

Kerson, a native of western Massachusetts who lived in Vermont for decades before moving to Quebec 20 years ago, has also been influenced by the social realist movement, which seeks to draw attention to oppression. Founder and artistic director of Vermont-based Dragon Dance Theatre, known for its puppetry, he has created murals and other art projects in Mexico, Nicaragua and Europe, often in collaboration with local artists.

After envisioning a pair of murals that would describe the horrors of slavery and celebrate Vermont’s abolitionist history, Kerson said he searched the state for a place with the right set of walls and a mission that would complement his theme. The tiny, progressive law school on the banks of the White River seemed a perfect setting, he said, and its leaders in the early 1990s welcomed the project to the second floor of its student center, an airy, quiet space used for study and meetings.

It did not take long for some students to feel uneasy with the paintings. Soon after she started working at the law school, in 1999, Jefferson began hearing occasionally from students who were troubled by the murals’ style and content, particularly Black figures that some found cartoonish or reminiscent of earlier racist iconography. Removal of the paintings was discussed in 2013, and again in 2014, when plaques were added to explain the subject matter.

It was not until 2020 that Jefferson, now an associate professor and vice president, concluded that “the mural was part of the problem and inconsistent with the Law School’s mission no matter if the intentions that led to its creation were good,” she wrote in a statement to the U.S. district court in 2021.

To the artist, the discomfort was an affirmation.

“Of course the images are disturbing,” Kerson wrote after the district court’s ruling in 2021 affirmed the law school’s plan to cover his work. “These images represent human suffering, and if you do not find them disturbing, you are not looking at them.” He added: “We appreciate that the students who are complaining are also seeing the murals.”

Known for its programs in environmental law and restorative justice, Vermont Law has prioritized diversity in its small enrollment — a challenge in a rural state that remains among the whitest in the country. Its efforts have slowly yielded results: In 1993, when the murals were painted, students of color made up 10% of the graduating class; last year, they were 25%, according to the school.

Concern about the murals is not universal among the 500 students on campus, especially now that the art has been covered. In interviews, some members of the National Black Law Students Association at the school expressed frustration with those who see the murals as a “Black issue.” Some faulted the administrators who allowed them to be painted in the first place. Others criticized the artist for pushing back in court.

“If someone is saying to you, ‘How you’re depicting me is racist,’ for you to live in your own ignorance, and further aggravate the situation — now you’re showing us who you are,” said Yanni DeCastro, a second-year student from New York City’s Queens.

“We need to stop protecting white fragility,” said another student, Anisa Rodriguez, from Orange, New Jersey.

Rodriguez and other Black students noted, however, that they have larger concerns about the school than what is painted on the walls, such as the diversity of faculty and curriculum. “The mural is covered, but what’s really changed?” she said. “What is the plan to ensure that students of color feel safe and welcome?”

Although the legal battle offers a teachable moment, it also intrigues some art law experts, including Megan Noh, a partner at New York law firm Pryor Cashman. She said the case is unusual in raising a question about the law school’s right to free expression, and whether that right would be violated by an order to display the mural.

Hyman, a self-described “old liberal,” said he was astonished — and deeply troubled — when the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization dedicated to preserving personal liberties, filed a court brief in support of the law school’s right to cover the mural. The brief argued that “an entity’s display of an artwork amounts to that entity’s own speech,” which should not be compelled by the courts.

“We are in a sensitive time with regard to racial justice, but we still need to have a fundamental belief in the concept of free speech and thought,” Hyman said, “and in the idea that we will be better by having discourse than by covering it up.”

After the appeals court rules, the last recourse for either side to continue the case would be a petition for review by the Supreme Court.

Whatever the outcome, some Black students said, it will not bridge the gap between the artist’s experience and their own.

“What is real to me is a painting to you,” said Maia Young, a second-year student from Houston. “The artist was depicting history, but it’s not his history to depict.”

© 2023 The New York Times Company

WAR CRIMINAL

Henry Kissinger at 100: history will judge the former US secretary of state's southern African interventions to be a failure

Peter Vale, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, and Visiting Professor of International Relations, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil, University of Pretoria

THE CONVERSATION 

Tue, February 21, 2023 

Former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 2019.

 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Henry Kissinger, who sexed up the art of diplomacy in the eight years between 1969 and 1977, will turn 100 in May this year.

Given his age, and his long influence on global affairs, several “anticipatory obituaries” have been written. Some laud Kissinger’s role in the shaping of East-West relations while he was in office as US Secretary of State. And many in their commentary on the decades beyond continue to call him a “statesman”.

Radical critics have pointed to Kissinger’s ruthless methods – like encouraging the coup in Chile in September, 1973 – and called for him to be put on trial for “war crimes”.

Traditionally, diplomacy was staid – a near-hidden enterprise for grey-suited men who (mostly by intuition) understood the grave matters of war and peace. Kissinger turned it into a site of celebrity, the jet-set and expert opinion. The world watched where he went.

Kissinger’s diplomatic achievements were quite astonishing – the recognition of China (1971/72) by the US was simply breathtaking. But domestically more important was America’s withdrawal from Vietnam (1973) and the Nixon administration policy of détente (easing of hostility) with the Soviet Union, which led to a series of strategic arms limitation talks.

These helped to secure Kissinger’s global brand. But his track record in the global south – especially in Africa – is dismal.

Not a little of Kissinger’s fame – or infamy, depending on the particular issue at hand – was facilitated by “shuttle diplomacy”, a tactic first used in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In an effort to mediate between the warring Egypt and Israel, Kissinger very publicly jetted between the two countries.

A year later, a form of shuttle diplomacy was necessary in southern Africa as it became plain that Kissinger had misread the region’s place in world affairs and its politics.

This was evident from a 1969 leaked policy document which had set out America’s approach to regional affairs. The policy recommended that the US “tilt” towards the region’s white-ruled and colonial regimes to protect US economic (and strategic) interests.

As the grand narrative of Kissinger’s life story is written, his southern African interventions must be judged a failure as he neither ended colonialism nor minority rule in the region.

White minority rule

Famously, Kissinger’s doctoral thesis at Harvard was on the diplomacy of the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). He argued that “legitimacy” in international affairs rested on establishing a balance between powerful states rather than promoting justice.

But 19th century Europe was no guide to managing 20th century southern Africa, when the legitimacy of states was seized with liberation rather than the niceties of big power diplomacy.

In April 1974, a coup in Lisbon had signalled an end to Portuguese colonialism in Africa. This exposed the vulnerability of white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South African controlled South West Africa (now Namibia). Although hidden at the time, it is nowadays clear that the events in Lisbon helped to prime the fire that was to come to South Africa.

With the stability of the “white South” under threat, US policy required rethinking.

It was Cuba’s intervention in Angola that helped Kissinger reframe Washington’s approach to the region in Cold War terms. South Africa and the United States supported the rebel Unita movement to fight the government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which was allied to Soviet Union.

It required drawing the apartheid regime closer while, simultaneously, urging change in Zimbabwe and Namibia.

The shuttle started with a speech in Lusaka, Zambia, which put pressure on white-ruled Rhodesia to accept the idea of “majority rule”. More gently, Kissinger asked South Africa to announce a timetable to achieve “self-determination” in Namibia. Kissinger then travelled to Tanzania to make a similar address.

A series of high-profile meetings followed with apartheid’s then prime minister, John Vorster. These took place in Germany and Switzerland. The record of these encounters make interesting reading. Over dinner on 23 June 1976, the ice was broken over a racist joke which established a bonhomie between a dozen white men who deliberated on the future of a sub-continent of black people for two hours.

The apartheid regime had catapulted directly into Kissinger’s star-studded orbit.

An official record of the talks suggests the South African delegation appear dazed. Were they overwhelmed by the occasion, or were they reeling from the events the previous week in Soweto, when apartheid police killed unarmed school children protesting against the imposition of the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction?

For their part, the American side seemed keen to learn – at an early moment in the proceedings, Kissinger declared that he was “trying to understand”; at another, he was being “analytical”.

True to diplomatic form, apartheid was not discussed even though some attention was given to South West Africa. The discussion remained focused on Rhodesia.

Eventually a strategy was agreed: Vorster would get the recalcitrant Rhodesians to agree on majority rule; Kissinger would get the Zambians and the Tanzanians to support the deal; movement on the Namibian issue would be slower.

The high moment of the entire exercise was Kissinger’s September 1976 visit to Pretoria. By happenstance, Rhodesia’s prime minister, Ian Smith, was scheduled to be in town to watch a rugby match.

The New York Times reported that Kissinger was received with a small guard of honour – of black soldiers – at the Waterkloof Air Base when his plane landed. And Kissinger and his entourage – including the all-important press – set up camp in Pretoria’s Burgerspark Hotel.

For four days an increasingly isolated and internationally condemned South Africa basked in the spotlight of world attention – undoubtedly, it was the high point of apartheid’s diplomacy.

The drama of the weekend turned less on whether Kissinger met black leaders who were critical of apartheid – the activist editor Percy Qoboza was the only one – than on whether Kissinger, as an envoy of the US, could meet directly with Smith, whose regime was not internationally recognised.

In the event the two men met for four hours on the Sunday morning, and a deal was sealed. A tearful Smith, then prime minister, announced that Rhodesia would accept the principle of majority rule.

But the follow up processes were fumbled. The illegal regime limped on for another four years.

Kissinger had two further visits to South Africa. One was in September 1982 when he delivered the keynote address at a conference organised by the South African Institute of International Affairs. The second was when (with others) he unsuccessfully tried to solve the crisis over Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s rejection of South Africa’s interim constitution in April 1994.

Kissinger’s interest in southern Africa in the mid-1970s was predicated on the idea that balance would return if the interests of the strong were restored. He failed to understand that the struggle for justice was changing the world – and diplomacy itself.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts. Try our free newsletters.

It was written by: Peter Vale, University of Pretoria.

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GOOD NEWS

It could take a decade to undo damage to the Republican Party caused by Fox News promoting election fraud claims, says former GOP official

Fox News pundits are using white supremacist language tied to 'The Great Replacement' conspiracy theory

Tom Porter
Mon, February 20, 2023 

A sign held up at the "Fox can't handle the truth" protest outside Fox News headquarters on June 14, 2022 in New York City.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Georgia's former Lt. gov., Geoff Duncan, discussed Dominion's Fox News lawsuit.

He accused the network of pushing election fraud claims that had damaged the GOP.

Dominion's Fox News lawsuit alleges the network made claims that its executives knew were false.

Republican former Lt. gov. of Georgia Geoff Duncan said it would take a decade to undo the damage to the GOP caused by Fox News in allegedly promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Speaking on CNN's 'State of the Union' Sunday, Duncan, who is an analyst on the network, addressed claims in a lawsuit released last week by election machines company Dominion.

Dominion is suing Fox News for $1.6 billion, arguing it promoted baseless claims that the company was involved in a vast conspiracy to deprive Donald Trump of victory in the 2020 presidential election.



A group of conservative campaigners last year claimed Dominion had changed its voting machines to deny re-election to Trump. There has been no evidence for voting fraud in the presidential election.

The lawsuit claims that top network hosts and executives believed the claims to be be false, and in some cases privately mocked them, yet promoted them anyway in an apparent bid to retain the loyalty of its large audience of Trump supporters.

Duncan said that in pushing the false narrative, Fox News was pandering to its audience's prejudices for the sake of the bottom line.

"What happened on Fox News was hard for the Republican party, right?" said Duncan. "It allowed, it might take a decade to unwind some of those, the fanning of the flames of all these conspiracy theories, and it was painful to watch and listen to."

He said that the news media must find a better balance between the for-profit business model and news that's in the public interest.

Dominion claims the weight of evidence it has compiled is so great that it should be awarded a summary judgement before the case even goes to to trial.

The network in a statement said that its right to broadcast the information was protected by the First Amendment.

"There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion," said a spokesperson, "but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution."

"Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law."

Duncan served under Republican Georgia Gov Brian Kemp, who was attacked by Trump and his allies for refusing to back their bid to overturn the 2020 election. Duncan has previously criticised Trump and his allies for promoting false election fraud claims.

U$A
‘You Should Not Be Allowed to Run the Government You Tried to Overthrow’

Nathaniel Herz
Tue, February 21, 2023

LONG READ

PALMER, Alaska — Before Alaska’s 10 a.m. winter sunrise, in a mostly empty courtroom here in December, Republican state Rep. David Eastman went on trial accused of betraying his oath of office.

The charge: that Eastman, a hard-line conservative and fervent Donald Trump supporter, had violated a “disloyalty clause” embedded deep in the Alaska Constitution — and was thus ineligible to hold office in the state.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Eastman was in Washington, D.C., to rally for the defeated president trying to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman says he never went inside the U.S. Capitol, and he hasn’t been accused of any crimes connected to the riot that day. But he also has ties to the Oath Keepers, the far-right group whose leader was found guilty of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to disrupt the transfer of power on Jan. 6: Eastman purchased a lifetime membership to the group nearly a decade ago.

Throughout the saga, Eastman has shown no remorse or regret. If anything, the civil suit launched against him has emboldened him.

The trial, he said in an interview, amounted to: “You went to a political event that was a no-no, and now we’re going to punish you. And that’s fundamentally not American.”

Another viewpoint, of course, is that Jan. 6 itself — an unprecedented attack on U.S. democracy — was not American. Indeed, the legal challenge to Eastman’s ability to serve was one of numerous efforts across the country to hold elected officials accountable for their conduct that day. And it represented one of the most rigorous tests to date of whether insurrectionists, or those affiliated with them, could be legally disqualified from holding public office.

“It’s so basic,” Vic Fischer, 98 and the sole surviving delegate to Alaska’s 1950s-era constitutional convention, said in an interview. “If somebody comes along and wants to destroy the constitutional structure of Alaska, they should not be elected to the Legislature.”

Eastman’s week-long trial turned into a bizarre spectacle at times, and a very Alaska one at that. Massive snowstorms delayed the start of the proceedings. Joe Miller, the tea party Republican who beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 GOP primary but then lost in the general election, was Eastman’s lawyer. Witnesses included Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers chief who testified from jail; John Eastman, the Trump attorney who tried to orchestrate a way for the former president to hold on to power (and has no relation to David Eastman); and an ex-FBI employee who claimed that Mitch McConnell and Beto O’Rourke were agents of the Chinese Communist Party.

Those figures, along with a Superior Court judge, a local anti-Trump, ex-Republican politician and his attorney from an Anchorage civil rights firm were all there to help answer some fundamental questions: Had Eastman violated his pledge to the Alaska Constitution with his Oath Keepers membership? Did the U.S. Constitution’s free speech and association rights allow Americans to serve in elected government posts while simultaneously affiliating with groups that threaten the existence of the government itself?

Two days after the trial’s conclusion, Eastman won. The judge ruled that the First Amendment barred disqualification of a lawmaker simply for being a passive member of an insurrectionist group — though it would have been different had Eastman taken an active role in the Oath Keepers’ affairs.

That didn’t mean the quest to hold Eastman accountable was over just yet.

In addition to a possible appeal, the state Legislature has its own rules about who gets to be a member, and some Eastman critics hoped a bipartisan coalition would still act. Yet in the end, the politics were too difficult.

Eastman continues to serve in the Legislature, as something of a pariah but defiant as ever. And his presence is a glaring reminder that two years after Jan. 6, the insurrectionist forces unleashed by Trump and his allies have yet to be expunged from American politics.

A Firebrand Arrives

Eastman has been a bomb-thrower since he landed on the Alaska political scene.

Hailing from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Eastman was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 2016 — defeating a five-term GOP incumbent in a primary after attacking him as too eager to compromise conservative principles.

Almost immediately, Eastman earned a reputation for inflammatory statements. In his first year in office, he claimed, without evidence, that women from Alaska’s largely Indigenous rural villages were glad to become pregnant so they could take state-paid flights to Anchorage and Seattle for abortions.

He consistently voted against legislation that otherwise had the unanimous support of his colleagues — he’s been the lone “no” vote dozens of times — including on measures to promote racial equity. He opposed bills honoring Hmong veterans, Black History Month and the Black soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway during World War II. He also became one of the leading advocates of toughening prison sentences by reversing a criminal justice reform bill that passed before he was elected.

Eastman, 41, is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and spent his career as a military police officer in Alaska and Afghanistan before being elected. He’s described his uncompromising principles as guided by the oaths he’s sworn to the state and U.S. constitutions. And he says his colleagues are often “peer pressured” into votes that are not in the best interests of their constituents.

“At West Point, we were taught, and taught others, that any officer who was willing to honor that oath to the point of losing their life in combat should certainly be willing to be fired for honoring that same oath," Eastman has written. “If you are willing to die for your country, you need to be willing to be fired for it as well.”

Eastman’s approach has cost him at the state Capitol. He’s feuded with some of his own GOP colleagues; in 2017, the House, then led by a mostly Democratic coalition, formally reprimanded him for his abortion-related comments; and a joint House-Senate committee voted 9-1 last year against a request by Eastman to intervene in the lawsuit challenging his qualifications to serve.

His antagonism toward the establishment and his loyalty to his principles have made him enormously popular among Alaska’s conservative activists. They’ve even earned him some begrudging respect from his most vehement critics.

“It really has disadvantaged him so much. If it was really all theater, he probably would have moderated his views,” said Ivan Hodes, a long-time Eastman critic who’s campaigned to have him removed from the Legislature. “It’s like The Big Lebowski: ‘Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude — at least it’s an ethos.’”

On the Stand

As Trump’s term came to a close, Eastman flew to Washington, D.C. for the president’s “Stop the Steal” rally in January 2021.

Eastman says he was not near the Capitol during the subsequent riot, and no evidence has emerged that he was involved in trespassing or violence. But when his name later appeared on a leaked list of Oath Keepers members, some Eastman opponents began talking about Article XII, Section 4 of the Alaska Constitution — which bars from public office anyone who aids or belongs to a group that advocates the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government.

The line was added to the document at Alaska’s constitutional convention. Delegates said they understood the provision as an “anti-subversive” clause, amid the anti-Communist Red Scare, that Congress required as part of statehood-related legislation.

One of the Alaskans looking closely at the disloyalty clause was Hodes, who, like Eastman, graduated from West Point; he now works as a civilian employee at the Defense Department.

Hodes, who’s Jewish, had been particularly incensed by what he viewed as antisemitic signaling from Eastman. That included a 2021 social media post comparing President Joe Biden’s impatience with Covid vaccine skeptics to war-mongering by Adolf Hitler, along with a link to a website run by a woman labeled as a Holocaust denier by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Asked at the time if he was a Holocaust denier, he said, “No, there’s nothing to deny. But I do support and defend free speech, because if we can’t talk about those atrocities, then it increases chance they’ll continue.”)

“Ethnic minorities, religious minorities can’t afford to not pay attention,” said Hodes, 40. “When I first moved to Anchorage, the doors of the synagogue were open all the time — you could just walk in. Now, they’re locked.”

Hodes soon started working with an Anchorage-based civil rights law firm, Northern Justice Project, to challenge Eastman’s eligibility to serve. They connected with Randall Kowalke, a retired businessman, to be the face of the lawsuit.

Kowalke had once served on the local borough council and had been a Republican for decades. But he left the party around the 2020 election because, he said, of its transformation into a group of “totalitarian fascists.”

“I still consider myself, on a national level, more conservative than liberal,” he said in an interview. “But not a fascist.”

The trial was supposed to start Dec. 12, but an historic series of snowstorms forced the parties into a short-lived Zoom hearing where Miller, Eastman’s lawyer, pleaded for a delay because of lagging internet service.

The next day, Eastman, Kowalke and their attorneys assembled at the Palmer courthouse.

The legal case against Eastman was thought to hinge on testimony from a pair of domestic extremism experts. Kowalke’s attorney used them to argue that the Oath Keepers advocate for the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government — and that Eastman’s ongoing membership would thus meet the Alaska Constitution’s requirement for disqualification.

The experts’ testimony, over Zoom, methodically examined the group’s organizational structure and its role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. It was noted that 33 Oath Keepers were ultimately charged, including those who joined military formations that entered the Capitol and searched for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

One of the experts, George Washington University research fellow Jon Lewis, referenced statements made before the riot by Rhodes, the group’s leader, about a “massively bloody revolution.” He cited internal Oath Keepers messages, made public as part of members’ prosecution, that said the group wouldn’t get “through this without a civil war.” And he described how Oath Keepers members brought guns to a Virginia hotel in advance of Jan. 6, though they were not used at the riot.

Miller produced an array of defenses of the Oath Keepers: Only a small fraction of the group’s members were present on Jan. 6; the delayed election certification caused by the riot wasn’t the same as an “overthrow”; and the seditious conspiracy charges against the Oath Keepers members referenced the U.S statute against forcefully interfering with the execution of federal laws — not a separate section that applies to conspiracy to overthrow the government.

“They’re looking at some bad things that were said by a few people. And they’re trying to then basically pollute anybody that has any affiliation with the group,” Miller said in an interview at the courthouse. “They can say bad things all day long about what Stewart Rhodes said he was going to do. But all those things were contingency based. He never brought arms into the Capitol. There was no ‘bloody civil war.’”

Miller also took the defense deep into a rabbit hole of far-right conspiracy theories — exemplified by the first witness testifying in Eastman’s defense, former FBI agent John Guandolo. Guandolo is known for promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and calling Islam “barbaric and evil”; he was also once sued for punching a sheriff at a conference during a scuffle.

Guandolo laid out the discredited argument that members of groups on the left like Antifa and Black Lives Matter — who he said he identified by their black backpacks and clothing — were involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Then, under cross-examination, he argued that Chinese Communist groups and agents — whose ranks, he said, include McConnell, O’Rourke, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and former FBI Director James Comey — are a more urgent threat to the U.S. government.

Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, testified on Eastman’s behalf over a scratchy phone line from jail in Alexandria, Va. — breaking away at one point, he said, when a guard sent him back to his cell. Rhodes cited his group’s mission of defending the Constitution and said that members who entered the Capitol were “stupid” and went “off-mission.”

“It was not our mission and it exposed us to the persecution of our political enemies,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, in jail.”

John Eastman, the Trump attorney, was paid $500 an hour to be one of David Eastman’s expert witnesses, and he centered his testimony on the lawmaker’s First Amendment defense. Even if others in the Oath Keepers did incite “imminent lawless action,” which John Eastman didn’t concede, he argued that the U.S. Constitution’s freedom of association rights would still protect David Eastman’s membership as long as he didn't participate in the incitement himself.

David Eastman also took the stand in his own defense, calling the case against him just another form of “cancel culture.” He also expressed no remorse about his membership in the Oath Keepers, saying, “Any organization that will assist us in supporting and defending the Constitution is an asset to this country.”

In a 49-page decision issued two days after the end of the trial, Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna accepted many of Kowalke’s arguments, concluding that the Oath Keepers have, “through words and conduct, taken concrete action to attempt to overthrow by violence the United States government.”

But he still declined to disqualify Eastman, based on the First Amendment. McKenna argued Alaska can only infringe on a person’s association with a group if they have “a specific intent to further the illegal aims of that organization.”

Eastman, McKenna wrote, donated more than $1,000 to the Oath Keepers and bought its merchandise. But he received only “limited communications” from the group like membership-related emails; he wasn’t part of internal chats or meetings, didn’t meet with Oath Keepers on Jan. 6 and didn’t approach or enter the Capitol.

Kowalke could have appealed the decision to the Alaska Supreme Court, but ultimately decided against it. His attorney questioned McKenna’s interpretation of some of the pre-existing First Amendment case law, but concluded that the judge’s findings about Eastman’s intent would be too hard to overturn. Also, he noted a losing appeal might have made it harder to pursue similar cases in Alaska and throughout the country, and that wasn’t worth the risk.

Regardless, Eastman’s victory in court highlights the legal and constitutional obstacles that stand in the way of efforts to disqualify elected officials alleged to have violated their oaths of office on Jan. 6.

A Final Attempt

But the push for accountability for Eastman wasn’t over. There was still another branch of government to consider, and pro-democracy activists in Alaska soon began calling on the state House to bar Eastman from the new Legislature when it convened in January.

And Alaska’s unique politics made Eastman’s fate even more uncertain.

The midterm election had left the 40-member Alaska House almost perfectly split between Democrats and Republicans, with a few independents aligned on each side. As the Legislature convened last month, neither party had been able to form a majority, and Eastman’s continued presence had the chance to tip the balance — but not in the way you’d expect.

Eastman is such a firebrand that Republican leadership couldn’t count on him as a reliable vote. Indeed, some liberal legislators resisted the calls for Eastman’s exclusion, preferring to see him keep his seat than be replaced by a politician more aligned with the rest of the GOP caucus.

“All the principles I care about, from the right to choose, to public schools, to timely food stamp payments would be damaged by a reconfigured Wasilla seat,” state Rep. Andy Josephson, an Anchorage Democrat, said in an interview.

Still, activists hoped that other Democrats would entertain a vote to disqualify Eastman from office.

But kicking him out would also require GOP support in the narrowly divided chamber. Would Republicans seize the opportunity to oust Eastman in favor of a more pliant member, or because his support for an insurrectionist group that helped fuel the Jan. 6 riot was finally a step too far?

As the Legislature convened, Scott Kendall, a well-connected Alaska attorney and political figure, wrote an op-ed pushing lawmakers to act.

Kendall had been chief of staff to former Gov. Bill Walker, a Republican-turned-Independent, and he noted that members of the House actually had two options for pushing Eastman out: They could expel Eastman on a two-thirds vote after he was seated or simply vote to exclude him at the outset of the coming legislative session by a simple majority.

Regardless of the judge’s ruling on Alaska’s disloyalty clause, Kendall argued Eastman’s ouster was required because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That’s a post-Civil War provision that disqualifies from office anyone who swore an oath to support the Constitution and then took part in or backed an insurrection.

A New Mexico judge used the “disqualification clause” last year to remove a county commissioner, Couy Griffin, from his position, after he was convicted of trespassing at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Washington-based group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics helped lead the lawsuit challenging Griffin’s qualifications, and it included Eastman in a recent report as an elected official who deserved scrutiny.

“You should not be allowed to run the government you tried to overthrow,” Debra Perlin, CREW’s policy director, said in an interview, referring to Eastman. The legislative branch, she added, has to do its own “self-preservation.”

Or maybe not.

Ultimately, the Legislature moved on. Republicans cobbled together a majority and though they didn’t want Eastman in their club — he is not a member of any party caucus, and he was stripped of one of his aides — they declined to exclude or expel him from office.

Voting to deny Eastman a seat in the House likely would have incited a backlash from conservative activists. GOP House members were quick to hang up the phone when reached to discuss Eastman’s continued service in their chamber.

“The one thing I have no comment on is David Eastman,” said Anchorage Republican Rep. Laddie Shaw.

Eastman, of course, could have neutralized some of the jeopardy he faced by renouncing his association with the Oath Keepers. But the challenge to his membership seemed to only solidify his resolve.

Not long after beating the legal challenge to his qualifications, Eastman was back in Washington, D.C., where he attended a vigil for defendants charged with crimes related to Jan. 6.

In a phone interview speaking outside the jail where the vigil was held, he vowed to champion those who have faced consequences for their conduct on that day.

“Every single one of my constituents, and every single Alaskan that was there on Jan. 6 that participated in a peaceful rally, that’s their right,” Eastman said. “And I will absolutely go to bat for them.”

Canada women's team set France match for April amid boycott talks

Tue, February 21, 2023 

Reigning Olympic women's football champion Canada will play France on April 11 at Le Mans in a Women's World Cup tuneup match for both squads, provided the Canadians don't boycott.

Canada Soccer announced on Tuesday plans for the match during FIFA's April international window, with both teams set to compete three months later in the global showdown hosted by Australia and New Zealand.

But the Canadian women have asked for equal support for World Cup preparations as their male counterparts received for last year's event in Qatar.

After refusing to train ahead of the ongoing SheBelieves Cup event in the United States, Canada's women returned to work after threats of legal action by Canada Soccer -- though they are playing under protest.

Measures by the women to force action from Canada Soccer could include a boycott of the April match, even though it could rob them of a crucial test against the French.

"Playing a top team like France heading into a World Cup gives us the opportunity to see where we're at, learn and test ourselves," Canada coach Bev Priestman said in a statement.

"We also know the importance and prevalence of European opposition at the World Cup so it will add to our great experiences as it has been three years since playing France."

Canada is set to face Nigeria, Ireland and co-host Australia at Aussie venues in July group-stage matches.

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