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Q&A: Parks Service chief historian on creating inclusion in the nation’s story

Meet Turkiya Lowe, the first Black person and the first woman to oversee history taught by the agency.

Jessica Kutz 

INTERVIEW April 6, 2023

 

This article was originally published by The 19th 

In recent years, the National Park System has exploded in popularity, with the towering granite monoliths of Yosemite National Park and the beauty of the Grand Canyon becoming bucket-list experiences for millions of Americans. In 2022, over 311 million people visited a national park. 

But, like many American institutions, the parks system exists only because of the violent genocide of Indigenous peoples and their dispossession from their homelands. And for a long time, the stories told at these parks have glossed over these histories and perspectives on the founding of America. 

Over the last few years that narrative has started to change. And the stories of not only Indigenous people, but also of African Americans, women and others with marginalized identities are being incorporated into how the park service tells American history.

Through the sites that receive historic designation, or the guidance given to interpretative staff who lead informational talks in the parks or at historic places, the National Park Service (NPS) plays a significant role in telling many aspects of American life.

From 1931 until 2017, the job of chief historian of the NPS, the person responsible for overseeing the history taught at parks, has been filled by White men. But in 2017, Turkiya Lowe became the first woman and first African-American person to hold the position. 

Lowe, who has been a historian with the NPS for decades, views the job of the agency’s historians as akin to being the nation’s storytellers. With her background as a social historian and a Ph.D. that focused on African-American history and women’s history, she has aimed to resurface some of those histories and emphasizes the communities and everyday people whose stories have been forgotten. 

The 19th spoke with Lowe about her priorities as the principal historian of the park service, the stories she’s focused on telling, and how the service is addressing an often incomplete history of America. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Kutz: Can you tell me a little bit about your path to becoming a historian? 

Turkiya Lowe: I actually grew up believing that I was going to be the next Supreme Court justice, and then Clarence Thomas was appointed as a justice. I'm from Savannah, Georgia, and Pin Point, Georgia, [where Clarence Thomas is from] is less than two miles away from where I grew up, and I thought, “They’re not going to appoint another person from the same area,” so I switched to wanting to become a regular lawyer. 

It wasn’t until I went to undergrad at Howard University, when in the last semester of my junior year I decided to take a public history class. It was being taught by a professor at Howard who was a public historian, and two guest lecturers were from the National Park Service. I was fascinated. 

Even though Savannah has one of the largest historic districts in the country, one of the oldest, I really didn’t know that was actually something that you can do, be a historian and care for the places where history happens. 

I then applied for an internship to a new program with the National Park Service, the cultural resources diversity internship program. I was one of three new interns to this program and the rest just happened from there.

Turkiya L. Lowe, the chief historian of the National Park Service, stands at the
Grand Canyon, one of her favorite historical sites under the agency’s purview.
NPS

JK: Could you tell me more about the role the National Park Service plays in preserving history? What does it mean to be the principal historian of the National Park Service?

TL: In the National Park Service, we like to identify ourselves as the nation’s storytellers. I call us the keepers of our shared heritage, of the places and repositories and the programs that allow local and state communities to preserve their own history. We have 424 NPS units cared for by the service through our national park system.

We also have more than 72 community assistance programs that provide technical assistance for local communities to preserve their own historical, cultural and natural heritage. So we do that work and we assist our country and the globe, because we do have international programs [that allow other countries] to maintain their own history in their own culture. 

The focus of the principal historian is one where I provide guidance and best practices in the practice of history for the National Park Service. Our office is one that provides technical support for individual park units to maintain their administrative histories, to inform their management and operation decision-making, as well as to provide scholarly, relevant and up-to-date information to our interpretive staff to tell American stories from multiple perspectives — the events, the impacts and legacies which informs our present and informs our future.

JK: Typically what is preserved in our nation’s history, whether it’s historical sites or in our national archives, has represented one dominant perspective. How is the National Park Service addressing the absence or misrepresentation of marginalized peoples in our history? 

TL: We are always asking ourselves new questions of existing sources, right? Those of the majority, or those who have been privileged to have their voice be part of the historical record. And in those traditional sources there are a lot that talk about communities that have been marginalized, whose perspectives on events or impacts of events in history hasn't been placed at the center. 

So if you look at plantation records, for example of a plantation owner, and they are listing the plantation’s property, and it has tools, and it has mules and it has human beings listed by their first name. We can ask that source, not necessarily what the wealth was of that planter, but what may have been the experience of that human being that was listed only by their first name, or only by their presumed age and gender, and ask ourselves, “What must that person’s life have been like, as only a first name, or gender and age?” and use those previously read sources to then talk about, think about and describe the lives of that person that was enslaved. 

And then we do know that there are records that were generated by marginalized communities: women, Spanish-speaking immigrants, those who are working-class and poor rather than an elite status. Those records do exist, but we have to tease them out in different spaces, different archives. Oral histories are one of the tools that we use in order to do that. 

We are committed to telling the multiple perspectives and impacts and legacies of historical events ...

Now for the National Park Service, we have an initiative that is called Telling All Americans’ Stories. As an agency we are committed to telling the multiple perspectives and impacts and again legacies of historical events on all of our publics and all of our citizens to be inclusive of those stories. Sometimes they are contradictory. Sometimes the perspectives are in conflict with each other and we have to acknowledge that, but then move forward in the stories that we tell, in order to talk about where we are now and allow communities to express their experiences.

JK: In your Ph.D. program you focused on African-American history and how that intersects with women. How has that informed your work at the park service? 

TL: My specific professional research interest is Black women, but also Black women in social clubs and movements in the West. So even though I'm from Georgia, I was like, I’m going to go in a totally different direction and look at the history of Black people in the American West, and specifically in the Pacific Northwest. 

In terms of being a principal historian, I’m always drawing on questions about what was happening in the West. A lot of our history is East Coast-centric. So that allows us to expand the questions geographically. So I always find myself asking, OK, did the patterns of our history operate this way in the American West? That allows us to draw in more perspectives of Chicano women, and Indigenous women, who have had significant impacts on what would become the United States of America, as the United States moved from the coast.

And I always challenge our historians and the work that we do to be mindful of this movement of the borders of our nation to incorporate all of these peoples and interests. 

In terms of being a principal historian, I’m always drawing on questions about what was happening in the West.

JK: I’m curious how the histories of LGBTQ+ communities are being preserved in the National Park Service. Have there been any new initiatives to resurface that history in the park service? 

TL: We completed a national historic landmarks theme study for LGBTQ+ history in 2017. That theme study gave the historic context for communities to nominate properties not only for National Historic Landmark status, but also for the National Register [of Historic Places]. We have properties that were designated prior to the existence of the theme study, but this was a specific effort by the National Park Service to support local communities with LGBTQ history to nominate their sites. 

Of course, we received into the park system Stonewall National Monument, which we care for, and specifically tells the story of LGBTQ civil rights history. That is one of the foundational places where we undertake our interpretation and public education of this broader history. I can’t give you the numbers on how many LGBTQ sites that are extant in the National Register of Historic Places, but I know several have been added as part of the NHL study effort. 

In our Telling All Americans’ Stories, if you look at that website, we also talk about specific people, places and events which are important in LGBTQ+ history. 

JK: Previous people in your position were military historians, and you are a social historian. How has that background, along with your own focus on African-American history and women, shaped how you view your role? 

TL: I’d have to say that my best practice in terms of how the National Park Service thinks about and does the work of history is to focus on broad events, and their impacts rather than on individual, or elite persons. We highlight the lives of everyday men, women, children, or how they have been impacted by these broader patterns of history within the United States. 

For example, we are undertaking right now a new handbook, which is a kind of a brief, concise examination of a topic in United States history. The audience is for our interpreters and public educators in the parks to assist them with designing new programs or adding new content to their interpretation. But it’s also one that the general public can look to, to get a general overview of historic topics. 

We’re pursuing one for the history of disability in the United States, and that really is about the everyday lived experience of people [with disabilities]. And not only in the political decisions, the Helen Kellers but those activists, those advocates who are living with invisible disabilities and how they have been presented in United States history and impacted U.S. policy, the Constitution, but also labor and those broader patterns of how people live their lives. 

I have to say my tenure as principal historian is one where we look at those who are well known, but also those who have created community.

JK: So my last question for you is, do you have any favorite historical sites?

TL: That’s very easy. I never choose one. I have three. This is very personal to me. 

One is the Grand Canyon because as a woman of faith, it feels like God doodled in the sand in the mountain to create the Grand Canyon. The other is Harpers Ferry, because it has multiple layers of history. It has African-American history with John Brown’s raid, and African-American history with a historically black college and university. It has military history, and it has a history of civil rights. It’s the second meeting place of the group, the Niagara Falls Movement, the group that founded the NAACP. So it has this broad history of fighting physically and politically and through community education for civil rights. 

• 

  From dominance to stewardship: Chuck Sams’ Indigenous approach to the NPS
   Read more

And then the third is the Maggie Lena Walker National Historic Site, in Richmond, Virginia. She was the first woman and African-American woman to found a bank; she was just an extraordinary woman with a somewhat tragic life, losing her husband in a tragic way, becoming disabled later in life. But she was one of the wealthiest Black women of the late 19th and early 20th century [who had been] formerly enslaved as a child.

So every time I’ve visited these three sites, it has renewed my spirit. 

Jessica Kutz is a gender, climate and sustainability reporter at The 19th. Formerly, she was an assistant editor for High Country News. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Why a portrait artist from Ireland started making comics about U.S. police brutality

April 10, 2023

NPR
Jonathan Franklin


Irish artist Pan Cooke combines his love of graphic storytelling with a passion for education and advocacy to create comic strips highlighting prominent cases of police violence. Here, one of his latest strips tells the story of the beating death of Tyre Nichols, who died on Jan. 7 in Memphis, Tenn.Pan Cooke

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in the summer of 2020, the entire United States watched as protests against police brutality rocked cities from coast to coast. And while the U.S. was grappling with questions of race and justice, the rest of the world looked on, too.

That included the Irish illustrator Pan Cooke. As a white man who lived thousands of miles away from the ongoing protests, the racial reckoning gave him the chance to educate himself about why police brutality had been dominating headlines.

"It was a topic that I was very ignorant to and wanted to learn more about it," Cooke said.

While researching cases of police violence, he came across the story of Eric Garner, a Black man who was killed by Staten Island police in 2014. Learning about what happened to Garner, Cooke began to create and share cartoons illustrating Garner's story, as well as other cases connected to police brutality and racism, on his Instagram page.

"I did it only with the intention of just for self-education," he said. "And then, I shared it with a few friends in my WhatsApp group who said they themselves actually learned something from it."

With the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd on his mind, Cooke began to create comics about their lives, and how they'd been cut short by violence.

"It was just something I was doing for myself because I'm more of a visual learner," he said. "I felt that I learned a lot myself just by doing this."
Cooke has had a longtime passion for art

Throughout his 20s, Cooke worked as a portrait painter, illustrating portraits of celebrities that were commissioned by customers. But portrait painting was something he eventually lost passion for, he said.

It wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 that he felt the opportunity to shift in a different direction.

"I got a break and decided to do something else. I started focusing on drawing cartoons," Cooke said.

Each of the single-panel illustrations drawn by Cooke tells the story of a specific police violence-related incident that occurred. Throughout each panel, Cooke recaps what happened during the encounter, while avoiding graphic depictions of the event.

So far, Cooke has drawn comics telling the stories of Atatiana Jefferson, John Crawford III, Amir Locke and Daunte Wright, among others.

Cooke has even drawn a comic to tell the story of Eugene Goodman, the U.S. Capitol Police officer who diverted rioters from the U.S. Senate chamber during the January 6 attack.

Once he devoted his time to the drawings, Cooke quickly realized how much of an impact he was making, as his following on Instagram grew from under a thousand to over 300,000 in a matter of weeks. The response, he says, has been overwhelmingly positive.
"It kind of became apparent that people were learning from it ... it's almost like we were learning together. It grew quite quickly," Cooke said.

And while the comics began to take off across social media, Cooke says he's still continuing to learn about police violence — emphasizing that he's in no way trying to be a subject matter expert on this.

"I try not to speak too much on the actual subject of racism, as I am a white guy in Ireland...all I can do is use my talents and skills to help raise awareness," he added.
Staying informed with less exposure to graphic images

Irish artist Pan Cooke combines his love of graphic storytelling with a passion for education and advocacy to create comic strips highlighting prominent cases of police violence. Here, one of his latest strips tells the story of the beating death of Tyre Nichols, who died on Jan. 7 in Memphis, Tenn.Pan Cooke

Since creating the comics, Cooke says the reception of his artwork has been more positive than negative.

"One of the main [pieces of] feedback that I get is that, through the comics, you can kind of get more a visual idea of the story without having to view the violence directly," he said.

With videos containing violence and death being incredibly stressful to watch and process, Cooke's artwork serves as a bridge between staying informed on the cases without having to directly watch the footage.

"I'm just using art to tell a story that's already available, just in a different way," he said.

The art is something he hopes to continue doing in the future, as he's balancing drawing comics and writing a memoir called Puzzled, which details his experiences growing up with obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety.

Cooke says he hopes his work will continue to bring attention to police violence.

"I just want to be a stepping stone towards people doing positive action," he said.

Can Cooperatives Save Mezcal?

A booming mezcal market, driven by imports to the US, is fueling unsustainable farming and production practices in Mexico. Collective ownership is helping growers protect agave’s genetic diversity, local biodiversity, and mezcal’s ancestral roots.


BY ANNELISE JOLLEY
CIVIL EATS
APRIL 10, 2023

Erika Meneses, director of Aguerrido, stands by a wild agave plant with one of the cooperative’s mezcaleros. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)


Erika Meneses never set out to form her own mezcal cooperative. But a series of setbacks—the pandemic, a job loss, and, most devastating, the death of her husband in 2019—pushed her to innovate. Meneses’s husband was a mezcalero, a mezcal producer. Together they worked at the cooperatively owned brand Sanzekan in Guerrero, a state on Mexico’s Pacific coast. After losing her husband and then her source of income in 2020, Meneses decided to take what she had learned at Sanzekan and apply it to her own community of Chilapa in the mountains of Guerrero.

She asked local master mezcaleros, or maestros, if they were interested in producing and selling their mezcal collaboratively. Meneses believed that if they banded together, they could reach larger markets while remaining faithful to ancestral practices. Four maestros joined her.

They named the brand Aguerrido, meaning fierce or valiant. “The cooperative is a warrior that does not give up, that fights, that defends its culture, but above all, defends traditional mezcals,” Meneses says. By “traditional mezcals,” she means agave-distilled spirits that reflect local terroir and are made in small batches according to ancestral methods, rather than mass produced.

“The boom has done a lot of damage. Traditions are being lost in communities.”

The need to distinguish and defend traditional mezcal is a result of the spirit’s explosive global popularity. Over the last decade, Mexico’s mezcal production increased by approximately 700 percent, with the majority designated for international markets. In 2019, the United States surpassed Mexico to become the world’s largest mezcal market. And as with demand for other Mexican crops—such as avocados and corn—the American obsession with mezcal unleashed a host of downstream effects that impact small producers most acutely.

Many brands are no longer producer-owned, Meneses explains, but rather run by businesses with the capital to invest in flashy marketing. Some foreign-owned brands offer to buy mezcal in bulk from small mezcaleros being squeezed from the market, leading to industrialized production methods.

As a result, many mezcaleros turn to unsustainable practices to produce greater volumes in the short term at the expense of their futures. “The boom has done a lot of damage,” says Meneses. “Traditions are being lost in communities.”

Traditional mezcal production is synonymous with sustainability. Producers have historically practiced rotational agave growing, selective harvesting, and small-batch distillation. But when they try to keep up with unsustainable demand, ecological damage follows. As growers across Mexico and as far north as the Western U.S. are realizing, agave opens the door to a lucrative market.

In some cases, communities are deforesting hillsides to make room for monocultures of fast-growing agave. Meanwhile, rare agave species—which can take up to 35 years to mature—are disappearing from the wild. Overharvesting and monocropping both threaten the agave’s genetic diversity and local biodiversity.

Agave plant photo courtesy of Aguerrido.


In the face of these challenges, mezcal cooperatives are designed to protect small producers. At their best, collectively owned and cooperatively operated brands model a future in which mezcaleros can maintain ancestral and ecologically beneficial practices, while still gaining access to an exploding market.

Preserving Ancestral Traditions

Despite her entrepreneurial savvy, Meneses says that Aguerrido’s members “are not businesspeople—we are farming families looking for a market.” The collective’s core members are lifelong mezcaleros, old enough to remember a time when mezcal faced social stigma.

“They were always fighting to continue making mezcal, even though they hid it, even though it was not well paid,” Meneses says. “They feel proud to say, ‘I make a very good mezcal passed down from my grandfather.’” The four maestros—Don Refugio, Don Ciro, Don Tomás and Don Antonio—carry on their families’ traditions in their own techniques, which in turn inform Aguerrido’s ethos.

Each co-op member complies with mutually established growing, harvesting, and production regulations. Because of agave’s long lifespan, some mezcal producers succumb to the temptation of harvesting immature, unripe agave. These plants have lower sugar content, which requires more of them to produce the same volume.

Rather than “looting the hills,” Meneses says, Aguerrido’s members select only mature plants for production. They plant more agave than they harvest, and all replanting is carried out with close attention to the ecosystem as a whole. “That is another agreement, that you must reforest—but without damaging the ecosystem, removing woody trees, or damaging the soil.”

The members of Aguerrido raise their fists as a nod to the cooperative’s logo, symbolizing their desire to raise their voices and fight to preserve their traditions. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)

The mezcal production season runs from February to June. Then they turn their attention to cultivating other crops such as corn and squash. Meneses says this choice is part of Aguerrido’s effort to maintain soil health and biodiversity, despite the larger growing trend among producers and growers to monocrop agave. The group’s vision is “to protect our mezcal precisely from people who only seek a particular benefit for themselves.”

And instead of focusing on short-term profit, she says they’re working to produce mezcal as they always have—in small batches with ancestral techniques.

Member-led Sustainable Practices

Bordering Guerrero is the state of Oaxaca, the beating heart of Mexico’s mezcal industry. Oaxaca accounts for 85 percent of mezcal production and is also where mezcal’s ecological impact is most visible. “Communities are becoming like dust bowls because of monoculture of agave,” says Niki Nakazawa, co-founder of Neta Spirits.

But this isn’t the case everywhere. In Logoche, a 110-person village in Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur region, traditional practices still rule the day. Neta Spirits represents the 12-family cooperative Grupo Productor Logoche. Neta purchases from the producers and commercializes the mezcal under the Neta brand. The 12 member families oversee everything else, from planting to distilling to bottling to labeling. An elected committee, appointed by the cooperative, organizes the bottling and labeling process.

Unlike some neighboring communities, producers in the village of Logoche prioritize the long-term health of the land. Members plant their fields with multiple varieties of agave in alternating rows to preserve genetic diversity and insulate the crops from disease and pests. They use the milpa system of rotational planting, which includes crops like corn, beans, and squash to enrich the soil and prevent erosion. Using goat and donkey manure, they prepare natural fertilizers to replenish the fields.

The cooperative also follows the indigenous custom of harvesting agave during the full moon, when they believe the plant’s heart or piña is most concentrated with sugar. Pooling their labor, resources, and profits allows the cooperative to preserve ancestral—and often more labor-intensive—methods.

Community members in the village of Logoche work collectively to roast the agave hearts that will then be crushed and fermented before distillation. 

(Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)

Though much larger, Banhez Mezcal follows similar cultivation practices. A cooperative of 44 families in Ejutla, Oaxaca, Banhez adheres to a member-established code of conduct that focuses on the sustainable management of their agave fields. Its collaborative structure also incentivizes responsible production, including better waste management.

Mezcal’s distillation process produces an acidic liquid waste called viñaza, which can pollute local water sources. Not long ago, one Banhez member built his palenque—distillation site—in a location that impacted local groundwater. When the community realized that viñaza was threatening its water quality, the member took out a loan from Banhez and rebuilt the palenque elsewhere.

“When you look at the brands that are able to maintain environmental ethics, it’s really down to ownership,” says Alex Jandernoa, director of education at Banhez. “In order to move [a palenque], you have to keep producing mezcal. If you’re not part of a cooperative, you can’t move. You don’t have the money; you don’t have the safety net.”

Rooted in Indigenous Values

In some cases, it’s less the cooperative business model and more a community’s cooperatively held values that insulate producers from market pressure. Nakazawa says Grupo Productor Logoche’s collective ethos is rooted primarily in traditional customs. Logoche, like hundreds of Oaxaca’s municipalities, is governed by two systems: the federal government and customary indigenous laws called usos y costumbres. Grupo Productor Logoche’s cooperation, Nakazawa says, “is rooted in older ways of participation.”

In communities governed by customary indigenous law, “people participate directly in the well-being of other members of the community and in the stewardship of the land.” Every village member participates in communal work, called tequio, in lieu of paying taxes at the local level. Because mezcal is Logoche’s main industry, everyone pitches in at some step during production, and pricing is set by community consensus. “The idea of cooperativism and collectivism is really embedded in those forms of political participation,” says Nakazawa.

The Cooperative Potential

From a commercial perspective, Meneses believes that cooperatively owned brands have an advantage in their product diversity. In the case of Aguerrido, each bottle is a unique representation of the local ecosystem, the agave, and the producer’s skill. “[Consumers] can find diversity in expressions from each producer,” she says.

Maestros del Mezcal, a nongovernmental organization representing hundreds of small producers across Mexico, provides financial and technical support to preserve traditional production practices and protect the land from exploitation. Maestros recently launched a collective brand under the label MDM Asociación Civil, exporting its first shipment to the U.S. last year.

Members of Grupo Productor Logoche gather in their cooperatively owned and managed bottling plant. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)

“I do think collective brands can help preserve tradition—by pooling fiscal and regulatory resources and providing easier access to the markets, which is much more costly and time consuming for just one person to do,” says co-organizer Rion Toal. He thinks it’s a model that could be applied successfully to other Mexican products for export. In the case of coffee, for example, “if small producers were able to form co-ops and roast their own beans and legally export them, they could make a lot more money per kilo.”

As pressure from foreign demand mounts, Mexico’s mezcal producers face a choice: turn to industrialized methods and damaging cultivation practices for quick economic gain or differentiate by preserving and promoting ancestral methods. The cooperative model makes the latter option easier. Collective ownership helps producers preserve mezcal’s roots, without losing a foothold in the market.

Meneses says that Aguerrido’s cooperative model looks beyond turning a short-term profit and focuses on the community’s future in mezcal production. “The idea is to be aware, to use good practices—not just right now but also for the future, for the new generations.”

In the Age of Megadrought, Farmers in the West See Promise in Agave

Indigenous Agroforestry Dying of Thirst Amid a Sea of Avocados in Mexico

As the US Pressures Mexico to Import GM Corn, Can It Preserve Its Traditional Varieties?

Annelise Jolley is a San Diego-based writer and editor who covers food, farming, travel, and the terrain in between. 

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OPINION   

GUEST ESSAY

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft


The New York Times Opinion section 
By Joe Fassler
April 10, 2023
Mr. Fassler is a journalist covering food and environmental issues.

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to improve our collective climate morale and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice, from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use has surged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)

You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change; they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges, to some extent, on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale, a term coined by the Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. One Twitter user wrote, “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws.”

As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)

There’s a lesson here: Hugely disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.

Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsize impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.

There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’ newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.

Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.

Joe Fassler is a journalist covering food and environmental issues. He is the author of “Light the Dark” and the forthcoming novel “The Sky Was Ours.”

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

I Worked at the F.D.A. The Abortion Pill Decision Is Dangerous.

April 10, 2023


By Joshua M. Sharfstein
Dr. Sharfstein is a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. He was principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 2009 to 2011.

A federal judge in Texas has taken a shocking and irresponsible action: invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a medication used safely by hundreds of thousands of women each year to help terminate pregnancies as part of a two-pill regimen. For what appears to be the first time, a court has invalidated an agency drug approval — an approval that was based on extensive review of scientific evidence, earned the unanimous support of outside experts and retains, after two decades, the full backing of major professional medical organizations.

The decision is so stunning that it is reasonable to ask whether courts should have any role in reviewing the F.D.A.’s scientific decision-making at all. In fact, judges do have an important job: protecting the ability of the agency to use science and expert judgment to support the health of the American people. The Texas decision is a perversion of this role and, by undermining the F.D.A., represents a threat to the safety of millions of Americans.

There’s a name for the day of the week when the F.D.A. finds itself in court: Monday. Also, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Sometimes the weekends, too. The agency’s large stable of dedicated attorneys defends its actions on a multitude of issues. These include routine administrative matters such as whether the agency moved too fast or too slow on a generic drug approval or whether the agency has missed regulatory deadlines.

More consequential cases challenge whether the agency has the authority under statutes or the Constitution to address serious threats. For example, the Supreme Court struck down the agency’s initial attempt to regulate the marketing of tobacco products, leading Congress to later pass legislation permitting the agency to move forward. To the chagrin of many public health advocates, an expanding constitutional doctrine of corporate speech has led courts to limit the actions that the F.D.A. can take to protect the public.

And then there are those cases that seek to overturn actual regulatory decisions, which may be brought by advocacy groups, regulated companies or other affected parties. In determining whether the agency has been “arbitrary and capricious,” the standard of review, courts have long respected the judgments of the F.D.A.’s experts, especially those that are in line with expert advice and the consensus of leading medical organizations. This respect has led courts in rare instances to intervene when inappropriate political interference has disrupted the agency’s normal processes.

Example A is Plan B. In 2009, a federal judge ordered the F.D.A. to make emergency contraception available over the counter to 17-year-olds. The decision came after investigations found that the leadership of the F.D.A. during the Bush administration deviated from normal procedures when it overruled the decisions of multiple staff scientists, the views of leading medical associations and the vote of advisory committees, all of which were supportive of making the product available without a prescription to people of all ages.

By 2011, the agency’s scientists had again determined that it was appropriate to permit emergency contraception to be sold over the counter without age restrictions. This time, the F.D.A. commissioner appointed by President Barack Obama supported the scientists’ position, publicly explaining that it was based on scientific findings, expert advice, and data from well-designed studies. Yet the secretary of health and human services overruled the agency and blocked approval for all ages on the basis of her own review of the evidence, a decision endorsed by the president himself.

Again, the matter headed to court. The judge found that the secretary’s decision was “obviously political” and cited expert testimony stating that the F.D.A.’s scientific decisions shouldn’t “bend to political winds.” The court ordered the F.D.A. to make emergency contraception available over the counter without age restrictions.

Political attempts to interfere in the F.D.A.’s decision-making are rare, but dangerous. During the Trump administration, concerns over political interference at the F.D.A. flared up during the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House reportedly pressured the agency to support ineffective treatments and authorize vaccines before key data on safety had been gathered. Overruling agency scientists could have led to a court battle, with the judiciary needing to step in to preserve the agency’s authority and the trust of the public.

Now, growing ideological polarization, reflected in the Texas decision’s embrace of extreme language about abortion and health, poses new risks to the F.D.A.’s integrity. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires the F.D.A. to approve medications on the basis of “substantial evidence.” Trust in the agency’s work rests on the idea that decisions that affect a nation are based on facts, not ideology or influence.

Courts should protect this principle. If a future administration attempts to evade these requirements, such as by withdrawing medications that have been appropriately studied and approved, courts should strike it down. Such a threat of legal action may have kept the Bush administration from reconsidering the approval of mifepristone back in the early 2000s. Courts should also step in, as they have done in the past, as states like Wyoming try to outlaw approved drugs.

The scientific and regulatory excellence of the F.D.A. is a point of national pride. Because of its independent, thorough and expert reviews of data, the agency remains the international gold standard for approving medications. Confidence that the F.D.A. can do its work is essential for clinicians and patients, who routinely depend on the agency’s decision-making on matters of life and death. It is also necessary for companies and their investors to develop important new therapies for devastating conditions. If judges can interfere with legitimate and well-supported F.D.A. action, there is no reason to believe that the consequences will be limited to abortion medications.

Courts can protect the work of the F.D.A. or they can destroy it. In issuing an order to keep mifepristone on the market in certain states, a federal judge in Washington State is supporting the many millions of Americans who depend on the F.D.A.’s scientific decisions. The Supreme Court will soon have to decide which side it is on.

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2023, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Abortion Pill Decision Is Dangerous. 

More on abortion pill ruling

Opinion | Dana M. Johnson
A New Battle in the War on Abortion Pills
March 5, 2023

Opinion | Mary Ziegler
If You Want to Know What Republicans Think About How Americans Feel, Ask Walgreens
March 17, 2023

Where Restrictions on Abortion Pills Could Matter Most in the U.S.

Grappling with life in post-Roe America

“My life would not have been my own. I would be a prisoner subject to a body’s whims — and not my body’s whims, but the whims of a teenage boy.”
Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”
Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters. Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”
David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.” Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

Mara Gay, a member of the editorial board, in “The Republican War on Sex.” Read the essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.” Read the guest essay.

The New Company Towns

Monopolistic hospital systems now dominate the economies of many cities—and shape public policy far beyond the scope of medicine.

by Brian Alexander

WASHINGTON MONTHLY

April 4, 2023

Large hospital systems like Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland have evolved into quasi–government actors practically colonizing large swaths of urban landscapes while, at the same time, often battling to avoid public scrutiny.

 (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

On the morning I wrote this essay, I received a text message. It contained a scan of a letter written by the president of Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers, a hospital in the rural town of Bryan, Ohio. CHWC featured in my book, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town. Much of the tension in the book centered on whether CHWC would be able to survive as an independent community hospital in an era of stampeding consolidation

.

Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care by Guian A. McKee University of Pennsylvania Press, 392 pp.

For the past 20 years, CHWC, fearing the loss of local control, cuts to services, and higher costs, had been trying to stave off being gobbled up by a big health system. Could it succeed forever? In the letter, the CHWC president gave the hospital’s employees the answer to that question: No. The hospital was exploring a “relationship” with just such a system, rumored to be Parkview Health, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Guian A. McKee, an associate professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia, provides many important services in his new book, Hospital City, Health Care Nation. The most important is delivering an exquisite accumulation of detail that explains not only how the swallowing-up of small hospitals like CHWC has become inevitable, but also why it matters.

McKee’s focus is urban cities—specifically Baltimore, Maryland, home of Johns Hopkins Hospital—not rural towns like Bryan. But in both Baltimore and Bryan, as in many other American communities large and small, hospitals have become leading, if not the leading, employers. Many have also evolved into quasi–government actors practically colonizing large swaths of urban landscapes while, at the same time, often battling to avoid public scrutiny. So the fate of the hospital can dramatically affect the fate of the town or the urban neighborhood.

Johns Hopkins is based in the neighborhood of East Baltimore, which, during America’s great deindustrialization, became majority Black and majority working class and poor. In the post-World War II era, the hospital quickly became both an economic engine and a remodeler of the neighborhood. It became a health care provider and a source of low- and middle-wage jobs for neighborhood residents. As McKee shows us, Hopkins was a prime mover in local urban renewal projects, motivated to help itself, mainly, even as it said, and perhaps believed, that it was trying to help the neighborhood. Over time, it turned East Baltimore into a hospital city.

This facet of McKee’s book is often missed in discussions of hospitals and health care. Hopkins took on the roles of government, something not unique to Baltimore or Hopkins. Toledo, Ohio, has relied in part on ProMedica, a regional health care system, for urban redevelopment. In Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the largest landowner. The Cleveland Clinic has played the same role in Cleveland.

Behemoth health systems have usurped even more obvious government functions, too. In Fort Wayne, for example, Parkview operates a private police department with little public oversight, a trend among big health systems, and, by maintaining “nonprofit” status, it doesn’t pay property taxes.

This transformation from a mission to fix people’s sick and broken bodies to ruling a hospital city sits at the center of McKee’s book, and he’s a terrific guide through the maze. In place of manufacturing, health care has become the number one segment of the U.S. economy, at about 18 percent of GDP, representing roughly $4 trillion. There are many hospital cities and towns. Their economies depend on the high cost of medical care.

This is the result, in part, of consolidation. Big systems want to get bigger because Medicaid and Medicare, which account for about two-thirds of the revenue in a small hospital like CHWC, pay much less for many services than private insurance pays. So hospitals crave a “payer mix” that’s heavier on private payers. By grabbing market power, the systems can muscle those private insurance companies into paying more than they would if there was more competition between hospitals. Blue Cross, for example, could tell one pricey hospital system to shove off if there was another good, less expensive, hospital nearby. Naturally, this is also why insurance companies want to get bigger, too. The bigger they are, the more power they have to stand up to the hospitals. And so it goes. This combination of quasi-government power, economic importance, and often opaque governance and operation makes reining in those costs so politically fraught that they’ve become nearly untouchable.

“This was the true larger issue at the core of the hospital cost problem,” McKee writes.

In a country that during the 1970s rejected national employment policy and that since World War II had failed to develop a viable program for the revitalization of racially—and economically marginalized—cities, major health care-sector institutions such as Johns Hopkins Hospital had become a de facto jobs program.

In this metaphor, hospital costs (or insurance premiums and co-pays that are then paid to hospitals) are really taxes. And, to continue the metaphor, Americans are the most highly taxed people on the planet.

Yet American health care is a dismal failure. Despite some of the world’s best doctors, technology, and drugs, Americans pay much more for medical care than citizens of any of our peer countries. In 2021, the U.S. spent $12,318 per capita on health care compared to our next biggest spending peer, Germany, which spent $7,383. Canada spent just under $6,000. But we die younger and live sicker lives. Life expectancy among white men in the U.S. fell a full year between 2020 and 2021, from 74.8 to 73.7. Yet we go bankrupt over medical bills.

For a century, any attempt to change this absurd situation has devolved into a miasma of confusion and conflict. McKee performs the incredible feat of explaining why this has happened, step by step, policy by policy, missed opportunity by missed opportunity. (At one point, possible health care reforms drown when Fanne Foxe, stripper and paramour of the Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills, jumps into the Washington, D.C., tidal basin.)

McKee’s detailed survey sometimes makes Hospital City a wonky read. We get Baltimore politics, negotiations between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, labor union positions, and many, many payment schemes. But this is the way it happened, and why it happened, and I found myself underlining, marking, and exclaiming as one era’s policy was forced to grapple with the policies of previous eras, as politicians, labor, hospitals, community activists, and business interests all fought to protect turf and benefits.

McKee’s attention to racial discrimination is especially welcome. The largely African American district of East Baltimore was home to Johns Hopkins, but according to McKee, residents did not benefit as much as might be expected from the hospital’s medical expertise, still suffering from a dearth of basic primary care.


After World War II, Johns Hopkins became an economic engine and a remodeler of Black working-class East Baltimore. The hospital supported urban renewal, both to help itself and, it claimed, the neighborhood. Over time, it turned East Baltimore into a hospital city.

Today hospital CEOs talk about “social determinants of health.” This is, at least, a recognition that direct medical care accounts for only about 15 percent of Americans’ health. Income, education, trauma, employment, diet and food access, and family environment all have much more influence. But hospitals live in a larger social, economic, and policy environment that does not reward them for addressing needs that would ideally be the responsibility of government. As McKee explains,


In pursuing this relatively narrow, health-care-based strategy for increasing its community engagement, Hopkins had medicalized its engagement with the neighborhood’s social problems. Such medicalization formed part of a much larger pattern in the postwar United States. Health care spending far outstripped funds allocated to poverty interventions or community development, and in neighborhoods such as East Baltimore, few nonmedical options remained for addressing those issues.

The fact that health is woven into American society itself and that America’s lousy health outcomes are rooted in its vast inequality are much tougher truths to recognize. There’s no profit in resolving the problem, and American medicine runs on profit. The corporatization of hospitals is now so far along that hospitals have subsidiaries. McKee highlights the point at which Johns Hopkins created a for-profit business to “allow … joint ventures with other providers and industrial firms.” Hospitals have gone into the hotel, apartment, insurance, and even golf course businesses. They’ve bought nursing homes and founded for-profit pharmaceutical companies. And as McKee illustrates, they’ve been encouraged to do all this by misguided, if well-intentioned, policies.

Some of these policies were birthed out of America’s religious faith in “markets.” Presidents as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all insisted on basing health care policies on markets. All of them wanted Americans to become wise consumers in such markets, naively assuming that Americans could behave in the black box of medical markets the way they buy cars.

They can’t. Markets have failed, over and over again. And now, there is no market anyway. Rather, we are quickly creating hospital oligopolies with oligopoly pricing power. And it’s not just hospitals, as the $70 billion merger between CVS and Aetna showed. As McKee’s title suggests, we have become a “health care nation.” About 340,000 people work for UnitedHealth Group, and that’s just one company. A scheme like “Medicare for All” would displace an awful lot of well-paid employees. So there’s not much political will to close the cash register. Recall what happened last year when Congress added money for new ships the Navy did not want as a way to keep shipbuilders busy. If, under a plan like Medicare for All, hospitals were forced to give up higher reimbursements from private insurers, resulting in layoffs, we could expect similar opposition from politicians and the hospital cities they represent. We’ve become such hostages to our health care system that killing the monster would destroy the village.


Brian Alexander is a journalist and author. His two most recent books are Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town and The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town.

More by Brian Alexander

Right-Wing Extremism Is Even More Common Than You Think

A scholar who studies white nationalism shares his data and insights on America in the age of January 6 and the Trump indictment.

by David Masciotra

WASHINGTON MONTHLY

April 10, 2023

Courtesy of Anthony DiMaggio

Right-wing extremists threaten the lives of racial minorities and LGBTQ Americans, Democratic officials, and democracy itself. Donald Trump’s encouragement of hate groups, the “Big Lie,” and the insurrection of January 6, along with attempts to downplay the insurrection from Republican officials, have only emboldened fanatics. But one scholar’s intriguing research shows that far-right extremism goes beyond the small cadre of extremists who captured the spotlight at the U.S. Capitol. In fact, the research shows, white nationalist beliefs have set in among ordinary citizens who make up the rank and file of the Republican Party, people who aren’t associated with QAnon or the Proud Boys but nevertheless share some of their core principles.

Anthony DiMaggio is one of the leading scholars studying the far right. A political scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, he is the author of several works on extremists, including Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here and a forthcoming examination of “fake news” and conspiracy theories in the United States. He joined colleagues at Lehigh to form a research team under the sponsorship of Lehigh’s Marcon Institute that scrutinizes right-wing extremism.

I interviewed DiMaggio in March about his team’s discoveries and how they should influence our understanding of American politics.

DM: How do you define right-wing extremism?

AD: Our research at the Marcon Institute is looking at various dimensions of right-wing extremism. These include susceptibility to the men’s rights movement and its heteronormative values, white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism. We look at heteronormative ideology as support for violence and the belief that “real” men use violence to get respect. Our research examines how people idealize the belief in the United States as a white nation. By authoritarianism, we mean support for violence to achieve political goals and a preference for leaders who suppress dissent and indulge in violent rhetoric and actions. With Christian nationalism, we’re looking at people who explicitly want the state to support and adopt a Christian identity and policies.

DM: What are your research methods?

AD: We’re using standard social science methods, drawing on Marcon’s national polling data and questions that we designed. We use “regression analysis” to look at how acceptance of various dimensions of right-wing extremism is correlated with how Americans look at political issues, including support for Trump and policies like the wall, immigration from Mexico, as well as opinions of January 6, attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, and opinions of abortion, among other topics.

DM: Since January 6th, most analysis of the insurrection has focused on Trump, his enablers in Congress, and groups like the Proud Boys. What did your team find about the prevalence of right-wing extremism and hostility toward democracy among the general electorate?

AD: Our polling data and analysis are important because they demonstrate that the effort to focus on a small number of right-wing activist groups and political officials is inadequate to examine how the nation understands January 6-style violence and attempts to subvert elections. We find that susceptibility to various forms of right-wing extremism, including heteronormative biases, white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism, is significantly correlated with positive perceptions of the J-6 participants, of Trump himself, and of efforts to excuse Trump for what happened on J-6. Much of the national discourse on J6 is incredibly limited. We believe that J6 represented a pivotal moment in modern history. It was not only about right-wing activists coming together hoping that Trump would be the president to impose an authoritarian, white nationalist, heteronormative Christian nationalist socio-political order. It’s also about a sizable segment of the population that agrees with these goals. That should concern anyone who believes in secular democracy, equal rights, and the rule of law.

DM: It has become folklore that the MAGA movement emerges from financial insecurity, and your team’s research busts this myth. What have you found regarding the correlation, or lack thereof, between economic insecurity and support for authoritarian politics?

AD: The Trump-financial insecurity thesis has been significantly oversold. It’s pretty clear, looking at national surveys, including ours, that right-wing political values related to immigration, abortion, hostility toward religious minorities (including Muslims), and other sociocultural attitudes are stronger predictors of support for Trump compared to various metrics of financial insecurity. This isn’t to say that economic concerns are irrelevant. One thing I’ve found in my research is that white Americans who hold a second job or work overtime and who share negative views toward immigration and welfare recipients are more likely to support Trump. A plausible interpretation of this data is that much of the Trump base is angry about working harder to make ends meet in an era of rising inequality and that they are looking for scapegoats (the poor and immigrants). Generally speaking, though, Trump’s base is not more likely than the rest of the public to indicate that they are financially insecure. It is primarily comprised of middle to upper-class voters who feel aggrieved about the demographic shift of their country away from a white majority. Our poll finds that about two-thirds of Trump voters (63 percent) identify as middle, middle-upper, or upper class in background, and nearly six in ten (58 percent) say their finances are “somewhat” or “very good” compared to 60 percent of all poll respondents.

DM: Almost half of voters supported Trump. Are they all racists or extremists?

AD: Considering the evidence, it’s difficult to argue that racism—particularly the mainstreaming of white nationalist sentiment—is not central to the politics of the American right today. We know from polling during Trump’s term that more than a third of Americans and a majority of Republicans agreed with the sentiment that “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage.” Our poll’s white nationalism index looks at all types of questions, including some related to the Great Replacement theory—the fears that white voters are being “replaced” by immigrants—and that changing national demographics pose a threat to white Christian Americans and “their culture and values.” We also examine opinions about Confederate monuments as an important part of “our nation’s cultural history and heritage,” demands that the U.S. “prioritize and preserve its white European heritage,” and resentment that America’s “strength” is “diluted” by immigrants “who come from diverse ethnicities and cultures.”

Very few Americans self-identify as racists and extremists. Our survey finds that less than 1 percent of Americans identify as fascists, only 4 percent identify with neo-Nazis, and about one in 10 identify as white nationalists. Related to the last finding, our index reveals that white nationalism is much more common than people admit. Depending on the question examined, nearly half of Republicans signal support for the Great Replacement theory and for prioritizing a white national identity, and three-quarters think the effort to remove Confederate monuments from public places represents an attack on our nation’s cultural history and heritage. So, a sizable number of Republicans—about half to three-quarters—are susceptible to various white nationalist impulses. This doesn’t mean all Republicans are racist or extremist, but our findings suggest it’s a large and very significant number.

The mainstreaming of white nationalism matters to politics. Our research finds that people who identify with white nationalist sentiments are significantly more likely to say they will vote for Trump in 2024, to say they’re sympathetic to the J6 participants and their concerns, to believe that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election, to be hostile toward Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and to support the travel ban against Muslim-majority countries. It’s an even stronger predictor of people’s beliefs than is identification with the Republican Party. In an era when parties largely drive how people look at politics, white nationalism is an even stronger predictor of how people think.

DM: Kathleen Belew, the Northwestern University historian, has written extensively about the far right’s rise in the 1970s and 80s, tracing much of it to revanchist sentiments about Vietnam. Do 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq somehow affect who is vulnerable to a right-wing appeal?

AD: The far right is a mixed bag when it comes to wars driving anti-interventionist attitudes. From what I’ve gathered looking at national surveys of Trump supporters, Trump’s base is not any more likely to be anti-militarist when it comes to military spending and foreign wars. So, there’s little to indicate that wars in the Middle East are driving the extremist segment of Trump’s base (or his base in general) into anti-war politics. Other segments of the far right also embrace the anti-intervention position, including paleoconservatives and libertarians. We saw this recently, with various activists coming together with the progressive left to attend the “Rage Against the War Machine” event. Overall, though, I’d say the evidence that foreign wars are driving most right-wing Americans—particularly those in Trump’s base—to oppose war is pretty thin.

DM: Is there an overlap with the radical left in terms of conspiratorial thinking and antisemitism? The recent anti-Ukraine aid rally was an orgy of left and right speakers. There are also obvious connections with antisemitism and QAnon.

AD: While my team’s survey work doesn’t address this question, I’ve spent a lot of time studying modern conspiracy theories. It’s fair to say that conspiracies affect all parts of the political spectrum. I know numerous people, for example, who identify as left and accept conspiracy theories related to 9/11 “truth,” who think the Democratic primary elections in 2016 and 2020 were “stolen” from Bernie Sanders, and who fall into conspiracies about COVID-19, including the claim that it was developed by China as a bioweapon. What I’ve found, though, is that conspiracy theories are more common on the American right due to the Republican Party’s mainstreaming of them. Whether it’s the birther and “death panel” conspiracies under Barack Obama, or QAnon, “big lie” election propaganda, and COVID-19 misinformation today, we see Republican officials and right-wing media indulge in these conspiracies, and the rank and file are more likely to fall into them than other Americans. Of course, on the antisemitism point, this is also linked to the Republican Party with the rise of QAnon—a movement that Trump has openly identified with—which recycles old Nazi-era “blood libel” propaganda. In the past, the claim was that the Jews were cannibalistic killers who drank the blood of children. QAnon has swapped out “Jews” for “Democrats,” but the antisemitism remains, with about half of QAnon supporters accepting the conspiracy that there’s a secret Jewish plot to rule the world.

DM: What should Americans who oppose the fascistic march of the Republican Party take from your team’s research in terms of stopping it?

AD: Our research documents how people accept extremist ideology without seeing themselves as extremists. The large majority of Republicans in our survey (72 percent) self-identify as conservatives, not as fascists or white nationalists. Yet, extremism is rising, with about half to three-quarters of Republicans identifying with white nationalist values. We believe that the most effective ways to push back against the mainstreaming of white nationalism and other forms of extremism are, first, to speak out to family, friends, and colleagues and to openly take stands against bigotry and prejudice in its many forms. Second, we think this can be most effectively done by people forming social movements and working together for a better future. Whether it’s the Black Lives Matter protest, #MeToo activism, or other action, it’s vital that people collectively work to undermine racism, sexism, and extremism when they’re being rapidly mainstreamed and taking over the politics of one of the two major political parties.

Related
About that DHS report…
ABOUT THAT DHS REPORT…. The right’s response to a DHS report on radical, potentially violent, right-wing extremists has been quite intense, for reasons that have not stood up well to scrutiny. But the more details emerge, the more it seems Republicans who were outraged by the report didn’t think this…April 16, 2009

David Masciotra is the author of several books, including I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters and a forthcoming examination of the politics of exurbia and suburbia. He has also written for The New Republic, The Progressive, and many other publications. He lives in Indiana.

More by David Masciotra

India Decides Fighting Tuberculosis Is More Important Than Johnson & Johnson’s Profits

The country shot down a patent extension on a critical TB drug.

BY RYAN COOPER
AMERICAN PROSPECT
APRIL 10, 2023

MAHESH KUMAR A./AP PHOTO
A doctor examines a man suffering from tuberculosis during a visit at the government TB hospital in Hyderabad, India, March 13, 2018.

Across most of the rich world, tuberculosis is a minor health problem, with estimated cases of about 8,000 per year in the United States, and about 300 in Denmark. That, of course, is thanks to public-health and sanitation measures, plus the development and rollout of antibiotics that effectively kill the tuberculosis bacteria, many decades ago.

However, in many middle-income and poor countries tuberculosis remains a major problem. The World Health Organization estimates that about a quarter of all people alive have a latent TB infection (though only a minority develop an active case). In 2021, it killed about 1.6 million people—the second-deadliest disease in the world, behind only COVID-19. Worse, several countries have developed a large number of drug-resistant TB cases, because the bacteria has evolved to counter previous antibiotics.

So it’s great news that the Indian government has shot down an attempt from Johnson & Johnson to extend the patent on the best treatment for drug-resistant TB, which is called bedaquiline. This will enable the production of a generic version of the drug at a greatly reduced cost. It’s not only a benefit for poorer nations with a heavy TB burden, but a lesson the rest of the world can take.

More from Ryan Cooper

The decision is the result of a challenge filed with the Indian Patent Office by two activists, Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisle, who are TB survivors from India and South Africa, respectively, with the backing of Médecins Sans Frontières. They argued that Johnson & Johnson’s patent extension argument was spurious, since they didn’t make any real changes to the drug. They just fiddled slightly with the formulation, without a real effect on its mechanism of action.

As legal analysts Renu Bala Rampal and Soujanya Sikha explain in detail, the patent office agreed with the challengers’ arguments. It concluded that Janssen Pharmaceutical (the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that developed the drug) was engaged in patent evergreening—that is, trying to get a longer legal monopoly on the drug through technical trickery. This is a common practice around the world, the U.S. very much included.

That’s great news for India, where over 40 percent of the population is TB-positive, and which has the largest number of drug-resistant TB infections in the world. A generic bedaquiline will reportedly cost something like $8 per month per patient in poor countries, as compared to $46 today. While it can cause serious side effects, they are typically less severe than those caused by other last-ditch treatments (Venkatesan lost her hearing from such treatment), and bedaquiline doesn’t have to be taken as long either.

Tuberculosis cases are concentrated in poor neighborhoods, and this will make the finicky business of tracking down new cases and directing people to appropriate treatment much easier for India, which is still quite poor. “Small differences in getting a lower price go a huge way in decision-making at a country level,” said David Branigan, TB project officer at Treatment Action Group, which advocates for the elimination of TB, HIV, and hepatitis C. “Also, it goes a long way to … free up funds for other areas of the TB response that are underfunded.”

“Small differences in getting a lower price go a huge way in decision-making at a country level.”

This is also great news for rich countries. If huge numbers of TB cases are allowed to fester indefinitely, then sooner or later the bacteria will evolve resistance to bedaquiline along with all other drugs, and from there possibly spread to Europe or America where it will be much more difficult to treat. Cutting down TB cases as far as possible where they still proliferate would greatly reduce this risk. Eliminating the disease entirely, which would be difficult but probably not impossible, would be even better.

The case against Johnson & Johnson gets even stronger when we realize that most of the drug development costs for bedaquiline were shouldered by governments, principally the United States. A study estimated that government investment in basic research and clinical trials, plus tax breaks and deductions, amounted to a sum between 1.6 and 5.1 times that spent by Janssen, depending on the accounting assumptions used. So not only did the company get the normal legal period of monopoly profits from the drug—much of it coming from some of the poorest people on Earth—they didn’t even front most of the cash and work to develop it in the first place. Time to share!

Moreover, this high-profile triumph over patent evergreening should give governments around the world the momentum needed to deny the pharmaceutical industry monopoly patent extension for the most trivial of changes. That includes most prominently the U.S., where many of the innovations take place.

But it’s not all good news. India has some of the largest generic pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world, which ought to put it in ideal position to export around the world. But Johnson & Johnson already got their patent evergreening scheme to work elsewhere. “That patent was already accepted in 15 other high-TB countries,” said Branigan. That’s a big obstacle to getting generic bedaquiline where it needs to go.

The last couple of years have been a brutal lesson in the importance of public health. All possible pressure, from outside groups to the U.S government (which should expect more for its investment), should be brought to bear to get Johnson & Johnson to give up its patent at least for these 15 countries. Given how poor they are, it’s not even that much money at stake.

Pakistanis living abroad sent $2.5 billion home in March

By MUNIR AHMED

April 10, 2023

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistanis living abroad have sent $2.5 billion home in March, responding to the cash-strapped government’s appeal for more hard currency remittances, the country’s central bank said Monday.

The sum represents a 27.4% increase compared to February and is the highest in seven past months, according to a tweet by the State Bank of Pakistan. The announcement offered some hope for improving Pakistan’s ailing economy, officials said. The remittances came mainly from Pakistanis living in the United States, Britain and the Middle East.

Pakistan is grappling with one of its worst economic crises, exacerbated by last summer’s devastating floods that killed 1,739 people, destroyed 2 million homes and caused $30 billion in damages.

The impoverished country also has been hit by a wave of violence, which last week prompted top political and military leaders to order new operations against the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that is separate but allied with the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban have stepped up attacks on security forces since unilaterally ending a cease-fire with the government last November.

In an overnight attack, the militant group shot and killed two police officers in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, police said Monday. One of the assailants was also killed when police returned fire. The provincial chief minister, Abdul Qudoos Bizenjo, condemned the attack. In a statement, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Pakistan is in the final phase of talks with the International Monetary Fund to secure a crucial instalment of $1.1 billion loan from a $6 billion bailout package. The tranche has been on hold since December over Pakistan’s failure to meet the terms of a previous deal, signed in 2019 by then-Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Economists fear a failure to get the IMF loan would spark a surge in inflation. About 21% of Pakistan’s 220 million people live in poverty.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif has blamed Khan, now opposition leader, for much of the economic demise, saying the former cricket star turned Islamist politician violated the terms of the 2019 agreement with the IMF.

Sharif has also asked his finance minister, Ishaq Dar, to sit out a trip to Washington on Monday for the annual meeting of the Word Bank and the IMF because of the country’s dire economic crisis. Dar will instead join the gathering virtually.

Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April 2022 and has campaigned demanding Sharif schedule early elections. In a speech to lawmakers Monday, Dar accused Khan of intentionally deepening the crisis to harm the country.

“We will put Pakistan back on the path of progress,” Dar said in Parliament, claiming that Pakistan managed to avoid default “by the grace of God” and “because of the timely measures” taken by Sharif’s administration.

Foreign exchange reserves, which last month fell to below $3 billion, have also witnessed an improvement and now stand at $9 billion, Dar said.

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Associated Press writer Riaz Khan in Quetta, Pakistan, contributed to this story.

First of April …the start of Syrian calendar for ancient civilizations


2 April، 2023

Damascus, SANA- The First of April is the Syrian New Year’s Day as the Syrian calendar is considered one of the ancient one that is still celebrated up till now.

This year marks the beginning of the year 6773 of the ancient agriculture calendar where the ancient Syrian year (Nisanu) in the Canaanite and Aramaic languages began on the first of April.

Eyad Younes , a doctor in archeology and ancient languages at the University of Damascus, said that the Calendar continued to exist in successive Syrian civilizations, including kingdoms of Ugarit, Ebla, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus, and it was later transferred with the Arabs to Andalusia.

He added that the celebrations of the arrival of spring began in the day of the vernal equinox and continued until the first day of April, the Syrian New Year’s Day, and is associated with the celebration at the end of raining season and the start of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits, as the celebration were accompanied with religious rituals, in which offerings were made.

Younes noted that the Syrian calendar related to Ishtar, First Mother Goddess, Goddess of life, and the Morning and Evening Star at the same time, where the ancient texts described it as “in her mouth lies the secret of life’

ِThis day was called Akitu” in Sumerian, and “Akiti Sununum, according to Younes.

He noted that the antiquities which were discovered in Syria and Iraq refer that the first festival for Akitu in history began on the form of agricultural harvest day which was celebrated twice a year, the first one is in April month, and the second in October.

Younes concluded that the ancient Syrian festivals are cultural and social values, and the celebration in Syrian New Year Day, Akitu, is considered an important event in an indication to a new awareness of the Syrian people to rediscover those unknown stages of their history.

Haybah Sleman/Shaza Qreima