Daesh using Afghanistan as a terror base, leaked Pentagon document reveals

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Nearly two years after the US forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country has become a significant coordination site for Daesh (ISIS), from where the terrorist group plans attacks across Europe and Asia, and conducts “aspirational plotting” against the United States, according to a leaked classified Pentagon document that portrays the threat as a growing security concern, the Washington Post reported.

The attack planning, detailed in US intelligence findings leaked on the Discord messaging platform and obtained by The Washington Post, reveal specific efforts to target embassies, churches, business centers and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, which drew more than 2 million spectators last summer in Qatar. Pentagon officials were aware in December of nine such plots coordinated by Daesh leaders in Afghanistan, and the number rose to 15 by February, says the assessment, which has not been disclosed previously.

“ISIS has been developing a cost-effective model for external operations that relies on resources from outside Afghanistan, operatives in target countries, and extensive facilitation networks,” says the assessment, which is labeled top-secret and bears the logos of several Defense Department organizations. “The model will likely enable ISIS to overcome obstacles — such as competent security services — and reduce some plot timelines, minimizing disruption opportunities.”

The Afghanistan findings are one facet of a complex and evolving terrorist threat described in the leaked documents, now linked to a criminal case in which a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard is accused of sharing classified information with friends online. Other reports in the same trove of documents reveal persistent efforts by the Islamic State (Daesh) in other parts of the world to obtain expertise for creating chemical weapons and operating drone aircraft, and a plot in which the group’s supporters would kidnap Iraqi diplomats in Belgium or France in a bid to secure the release of 4,000 imprisoned militants.

The documents will almost certainly be used as a political cudgel by congressional Republicans and others still seething about the Biden administration’s chaotic management of the US exit from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Post reported.

More than 120,000 people were evacuated in the process after the fall of Kabul. Tens of thousands of American allies were left behind, however, and the two-week operation saw horrific suffering. As the mission neared its end, a Daesh suicide bomber killed an estimated 170 Afghans along with 13 American troops before US drone operators, believing they had identified another would-be ISIS attacker, killed 10 civilians in a botched airstrike days later in the north of Kabul.

The Washington Post reports that Biden administration officials declined to verify the leaked documents’ authenticity, but defended their counterterrorism record since taking office.

Despite the ongoing efforts to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, the March 2023 document notes, encouragingly, that the terrorist group’s ambitions were severely undermined by the collapse of the caliphate.

The documents also detail Daesh responding to several recent world events, including consideration for sending a suicide bomber to Qatar to attack the World Cup tournament last year.

As a collection, the documents indicate that US intelligence agencies have succeeded repeatedly in intercepting the communications among Daesh cells. Such intercepts appear to have led to the disruption of plans for kidnappings and small-arms attacks on government buildings in Europe.

The documents also suggest that the al-Qaeda organization once headed by Osama bin Laden continues to decline. While the reports highlight the emerging threat from Daesh in Afghanistan, there is no mention of an al-Qaeda resurgence there, something many counterterrorism experts had feared would happen following the US withdrawal.

The group’s reclusive leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, sought refuge in Kabul but was identified and targeted in a CIA-led operation that culminated in July 2022 in a lethal strike on an apartment where Zawahiri was staying in the Afghan capital in proximity to the former US Embassy.

Daesh activities in Afghanistan

An Amu finding shows that Taliban, despite its repeated denials of Daesh presence in the country, carried out eight operations against militants affiliated with Daesh’s Khorasan branch in a 23-day period from March 3 to March 26.

The operations were carried out in the capital city, Kabul, as well as in Herat, Balkh and Nimroz provinces.

The finding shows that Daesh carried out seven attacks against Taliban targets in the same period.

On March 9, a suicide bomber killed Mohammad Daud Muzammil, the Taliban’s governor for Balkh province, in Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital. In a reprisal attack, the Taliban then claimed that they killed three key Daesh leaders – including Shadow governor for Khorasan Mawlawi Ziauddin; IS-K member Abu Omar Afridi; and a military trainer and bomb-making expert Salman Tajikistani – during a raid in Mazar-e-Sharif.

According to the CENTCOM commander, around 6,500 Daesh fighters are in Afghanistan of which 4,000 militants have been stationed across from the Tajikistan border.

On January 12, the Taliban defense ministry in a letter, a copy of which was seen by Amu TV, told the group’s border forces that around 7,000 Daesh members were expected to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan. According to the letter, these militants, led by a person named Muslim Kotwal, had received “extremist training” in the Korm area of Pakistan.

CULTURAL COLONIALISM
Edward Hopper retrospective goes back to realist painter's roots

By Park Yuna
Published : Apr 23, 2023 - 



"Night Windows" by Edward Hopper (© 2023, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence)



Ever since it was announced early this year that American realist painter Edward Hopper’s exhibition was going to open in Seoul, there has been a huge interest in the show, prompting more than 100,000 early bird tickets to be sold before the opening last week.


The exhibition “Edward Hopper: From City to Coast” at Seoul Museum of Art, which opened Wednesday, marks the first-ever exhibition in South Korea of the New York-born artist (1882-1967), known for his paintings of ordinary people’s urban life -- especially for his depiction of their moments in solitude.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which houses the largest Hopper collection in the world, has brought together more than 160 pieces of the late artist’s works including drawings, oil paintings, etchings and watercolors as well as more than 110 archival materials from the Sanborn Hopper Archive.


"A Woman in the Sun" by Edward Hopper 

(© 2023 Heirs of Josephine Hopper/Licensed by SACK, Seoul)

“We have more than 3,100 works (of his art), and that is more than any number of works that we have by any other artist in the Whitney collection,” said Adam D. Weinberg, director of Whitney Museum at the press preview on Wednesday.

Weinberg also highlighted that the Hopper exhibition was building upon the special bond the museum has built with the Korean art scene.

“Forty years ago in 1982, Whitney was the first museum ever to organize the retrospective of great Korean artist Paik Nam-june. Three decades ago in 1993, the Whitney Biennale (a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art at the museum) traveled to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in Seoul. It was the first and only time that Whitney Biennale ever traveled to another country,” he said.

The Whitney is running another exhibition, “Edward Hopper’s New York,” at the museum in New York that opened October last year and will close on May 5.

While the New York exhibition focuses on Hopper’s artistic process associated with New York City, the Seoul exhibition shows a comprehensive look at Hopper’s art and life, spanning 65 years.

Edward Hopper's cover illustration for Bulletin of the New York Edison Company is on display at “Edward Hopper: From City to Coast” at Seoul Museum of Art. 

(Park Yuna/The Korea Herald)

The exhibition at SEMA goes beyond the artist’s most popular and iconic paintings of modern people. Rather, it explores how the artist started his career as an illustrator for magazines, how his wife and fellow artist Josephine Hopper influenced him and what Hopper was inspired by while traveling.

The “From City to Coast” exhibition takes visitors to the places Hopper repeatedly visited -- Paris, New York City, the New England region and Cape Cod, with four different sections dedicated to paintings inspired by each city.



An installation view of “Edward Hopper: From City to Coast” at Seoul Museum of Art (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald)

Hopper left a lot of oil paintings of nature. Captivated by the charms of New England, Hopper and his wife set up their own home in Truro, southern Cape Cod in 1934. They spent their summers there, and returned to New York City in early autumn every year for the rest of their lives. The "Cape Cod" section shows oil paintings of rustic farm houses and coastlines.

During three visits to Paris, Hopper would observe the daily life of Parisians, including janitors, prostitutes, cafegoers and people dressed in fashionable clothes. The painting “Soir Bleu” shows an assortment of people at a Parisian cafe. A working-class man is shown on the far left, a bourgeois couple on the far right and a prostitute and clown smoking a cigarette at the center, the museum description reads. The painting was created in 1914, four years after the artist’s final trip to the city.



"Soir Bleu" by Edward Hopper

 (© 2023 Heirs of Josephine Hopper/Licensed by SACK, Seoul)

“After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystallize,” the artist once said. Etching was an important part of his artistic career as he turned to etching -- a printmaking technique in which lines are emphasized -- when he was caught in the tedious reality of working as an illustrator for a living. His black-and-white etching is featured at the section titled “New York.”

"Etching for Hopper became a very important medium. We think of Hopper as someone who is so involved with color and light, but he honed a lot of that through the etching medium, working with these kind of dramatic contrasts," said Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, showing etchings created between 1915 and 1923.


Works of etching by Edward Hopper are featured at “Edward Hopper: From City to Coast” at Seoul Museum of Art. (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald)

The section continues to show a number of Hopper's sketches of architectural elements and people in New York City, which the artist would bring together in compositions. From the late 1930s, he began infusing his paintings with images from his memory and imagination.

On the first floor are his writings, illustrations as well as a documentary that sheds light on his artistic career. After her husband’s death, Josephine donated some 2,500 pieces of Hopper’s artworks and materials to the Whitney museum.

The exhibition runs through Aug. 20.

A room dedicated to a documentary of Edward Hopper for the exhibition "Edward Hopper: From City to Coast” at Seoul Museum of Art

 (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald)

HINDUTVA IS ARYAN FASCISM

India governing its religious duties, don’t want to be like US, Russia: RSS chief

BySaptarshi Das

Apr 23, 2023 

He said India is now moving forward with its religious belief and the country

 fighting for religion will not take advantage of any other country

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat said India believes in serving its religious duties and does not want to be an authoritative nation like the US, Russia or China.

“India believes in serving others and this tradition has been followed since the Vedas. Our country is developing to be a righteous nation and governing its religious duties as it paves its way to being a developed nation,” he said during his address at the Ved Sanskrit Gyan Gaurav Samaroh on Sunday.

He said that the developed nations exercise their power over other countries like when the Soviet was in power, it was overthrown by the US. Now China is positioning itself to overpower the US, whereas, the US and Russia are using Ukraine as a pawn, Bhagwat added. He said that India has always supported other nations in need of help irrespective of its relation with the country.

“India just wants to help Ukraine. This is our nation,” said the RSS chief. 

Praising India’s foreign policy, Bhagwat said that earlier India could not take its stand in this manner. Citing the example of how India helped Sri Lanka during its economic crisis, Bhagwat said, “Sri Lanka used to always side with China or Pakistan and always kept India away from their internal affairs but when it was in danger, only India came to its rescue as we will never take advantage of any country’s situation.”

He said India is now moving forward with its religious belief and the country fighting for religion will not take advantage of any other country.

Issuing cryptic a statement over the advancement of technology, Bhagwat said, “Science disregards religion. People fear that tomorrow Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take over the human race and we will become nonexistent. Science even considers humans as biological animals, but not religion.”

Did Futile Line of Research Devastate the World…For Nothing?


Covid-19 Testing (Photo: JHDT Productions/Shutterstock)

Gain of Function Has Never Worked

By Thomas Buckley,

 April 23, 2023

LIKE PPE

Prior to the pandemic, the term “gain of function research” was rarely heard outside the confines of a laboratory or a government bureaucrat’s office.

OR RIGHT WING/QANON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

COVID changed all that and the term, its GOF abbreviation, and the debate over its implications took center stage in the international pandemic discussion.

Researchers, members of the public health nomenklatura, elected officials, and just regular folks whose lives were upended and freedoms stripped by the overwhelming, overreaching, and over-the-top response to the pandemic all grappled with the idea of GOF as they tried to defend, downplay, question, or just get even the vaguest handle on the cause and meaning of the pandemic.

What is GOF? Is GOF dangerous? Who is paying for GOF research? Why is GOF research being done? Is GOF responsible for the pandemic or did GOF help fight the pandemic – or both?

One question – oddly enough – was not often asked: Has gain of function research ever worked?

And even more oddly – more ominously, as well – the answer is no, it has never worked as advertised to the public.

And if something that has never worked, something knowingly pointless, as it were, turns out to be the actual cause of the pandemic – that GOF did indeed lead to the creation of COVID – that adds a level of incompetence, intentionality, and infuriating futility to the misery of the past three years that is truly numbing.

The risk/reward calculation under those circumstances is very clear – zero chance of reward for performing an infinitely risky act. Performing any activity – from crossing the street to breeding superbugs in a lab – with those odds is unconscionable.

So what exactly is GOF? That in and of itself is difficult to specify as the term has been used to describe a number of different concepts, possibly in order to mystify the public and obfuscate the significant risks inherent in the process as it relates to virus enhancement.

The general definition offered to the public by officials during the pandemic was essentially this: GOF takes a virus and enhances its lethality to and/or transmissibility amongst humans in order to be able to study the resulting bug to speed the search for a potential treatment if and when the virus evolves in nature to the same danger point.

In other words, if scientists can work with the possible superbugs now they can get a “head start” and be better prepared to fight them in the future if they should appear naturally (zoonotically) and threaten humans.

By that definition – a common, descriptive, and precise definition – gain of function has never worked.

Admittedly, it may have “worked” if a different goal was in mind. First, a more plausible reason for engaging in the practice – the creation of bioweapons – has resulted in a “success” it will obviously never be made known to the public.

Second, it can be said to have worked if the actual point of GOF is to sell vaccines, etc. in response to a new bug; in fact, in that (admittedly hyper-cynical but far from impossible) scenario, GOF has worked in spades (the recent Senate report that claims China was working on a COVID vaccine even before the rest of the world had heard of the virus may bolster this awful explanation)

“Enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (research) has no civilian applications,” said Dr. Richard Ebright, a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. “In particular, it is not needed for, and has not contributed to, developing any vaccine or drug, preventing any outbreak, or controlling any outbreak.”

Then why do it?

Here is where the slippery definition issue raises its ugly head.

Dr. Ralph Baric is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and has been a self-described “reluctant spokesman” for GOF for nearly a decade.

He has a very different opinion on the matter.

When contacted and asked if GOF has ever worked, Baric, before quickly ending the telephone call, said “Yeah, I don’t think I want to participate in this discussion, but there are examples – look harder.”

“Looking harder” found, among other things, a Technology Review article in which Baric did expand upon the process. First and foremost, he said:

“Human beings have practiced gain-of-function for the last 2,000 years, mostly in plants, where farmers would always save the largest seeds from the healthiest plants to replant the following year. The reason we can manage to have 7 billion people here on the planet is basically through direct or indirect genetic engineering through gain-of-function research. The simple definition of gain-of-function research is the introduction of a mutation that enhances a gene’s function or property—a process used commonly in genetic, biologic, and microbiologic research.”

By that definition, breeding dogs for specific traits (lungs and height for sighthounds like Irish wolfhounds, roly-poly skin and coat for guard dogs like Shar-Peis, etc.) is an example of GOF, as is cross-breeding roses to get different colors.

In the current context, that is disingenuous at best, purposefully obtuse at worst – by that logic, the Earth and Jupiter are the same thing because they are both planets.

Baric does admit that the “classic” definition of GOF changed somewhat about a dozen years ago when the H5N1 avian flu virus was intentionally modified. H5N1 was already known to be particularly nasty to humans but, thankfully, it had a very tough time making the jump to humans. The virus was modified to make it more easily transmittable in order, it was claimed, to be able to better study and develop defenses against it if and when it did make the jump.

Citing that as GOF successes, Baric said in the article that two drugs – including remdesivir of COVID fame – emerged from the process.

Other experts in the field do not see the H5N1 work as qualifying as a “success” for GOF.

“H5N1’s lethality was already known and it was so close already” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and a co-author of the “Great Barrington Declaration” that called for an entirely different, far more targeted approach to dealing with the pandemic. “(Proponents of GOF) cannot take credit for that.”

Bhattacharya also finds it odd that said proponents of GOF must point to such wobbly “evidence” as the H5N1 episode to support their claims.

“Given the amount of investment and the attention GOF has gotten, you would think the supporters would be more forceful in telling the world of their success,” Bhattacharya said. “Given that it is so potentially consequential, the public deserves more transparency.”

Kevin Esvelt, a biology professor at MIT, agrees with Bhattacharya. “The public has never heard about it (working) because virus enhancement has, to my knowledge, never directly contributed to any real-world treatment or intervention,” Esvelt said.

Esvelt also sees different definitions applying to different concepts and processes. For example, he notes that all bioengineering involves a type of “gain of function” but that it is only concerning, or problematic, when the function gained is the transmissibility or virulence of a pathogen. Instead, he defines the specific process that Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology engage in as “virus enhancement.”

Even so, the entire raison d’etre of the “make viruses nastier in the lab so we can be better fight them in the future” concept is inherently, irrevocably, and dangerously flawed.

“The notion that you’d get the same outcome in the lab as will occur in nature is implausible. Evolution isn’t that reproducible even under controlled conditions, and of course nature applies different conditions. So the ‘learn which mutations are dangerous’ argument doesn’t hold much water,” Esvelt said.

In other words, GOF researchers are basically trying to hit the evolutionary lotto – “Hey, look at that – it evolved EXACTLY how we predicted.” Since that has not occurred, that leads to other questions regarding its necessity, including that its usefulness may not at all lay in its publicly-stated purpose.

The fact that – by default – super viruses have inherent bioweapon possibilities and the military-style response to the pandemic have led many to wonder about its real purpose.

Remember – Ebright used the word “civilian.”

As to COVID itself, in 2015, Baric worked with Dr. Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV in China, which created a so-called chimera by combining the “spike” gene from a new bat virus with the backbone of a second virus. (A spike gene determines how well a virus attaches to human cells).

In that article, Baric stressed that his lab did not cooperate too closely with the WIV – “Let me make it clear that we never sent any of our molecular clones or any chimeric viruses to China,” Baric said.

Baric said he believes COVID to have emerged zoonotically but does admit the possibility of sloppy lab work and has steadfastly called for hyper-vigilant lab security protocols globally. He did, however, add that “(A)s the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 is so complex, the thought that anybody could engineer it is almost ludicrous.”

As to the definition of exactly what GOF is, it seems Baric believes it is in the eye-of-the-beholder – or at least the befunder – “Ultimately, a committee at the NIH is the final arbiter and makes the decision about what is or is not a gain-of-function experiment,” Baric said.

Which brings us back to exactly what the NIH thinks qualifies as GOF.

According to this 2021 paper by a trio of Johns Hopkins researchers titled “COVID‐19 and the gain of function debates” that imprecision makes any discussion of the true impact of GOF exceedingly difficult.

“(T)he fuzzy and imprecise nature of the term GOF has led to misunderstandings and has hampered discussions on how to properly assess the benefit of such experiments and biosafety measures,” the paper states.

While the National Institutes of Health did not reply to repeated emails and telephone messages asking for their current definition or even a comment on the subject, it seems the NIH itself looks at it this way, with GOF acting as possible means to enhance a pathogen (nasty microbe, virus, etc.): From a 2017 report (on the proper future oversight of GOF projects after they had been paused in the United States out of safety concerns for four years):

“A potential pandemic pathogen (PPP) is one that satisfies both of the following:

2.2.1. It is likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations, and

2.2.2. It is likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.

2.3. An enhanced PPP is a PPP resulting from the enhancement of a pathogen’s transmissibility and/or virulence. Wild-type pathogens that are circulating in or have been recovered from nature are not enhanced PPPs, regardless of their pandemic potential. “

It is the enhancing of pathogens that the NIH now considers a type of GOF research, though this was not always the definition it used, a fact highlighted by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in a tense exchange with the egregious and inexplicably powerful bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci. Paul noted that shortly before that November, 2021 hearing the definition on the NIH website had been changed; Fauci side-stepped the question of why that was done but did admit the term itself is “nebulous”:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4985061/senator-paul-accuses-dr-fauci-changing-gain-function-research-definition-nih-website

Here is original definition the senator was referring to:

The term gain-of-function (GOF) research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent. Some scientists use the term broadly to refer to any such modification. However, not all research described as GOF entails the same level of risk. For example, research that involves the modification of bacteria to allow production of human insulin, or the altering of the genetic program of immune cells in CAR-T cell therapy to treat cancer generally would be considered low risk. The subset of GOF research that is anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, which are likely to make them more dangerous to humans, has been the subject of substantial scrutiny and deliberation. Such GOF approaches can sometimes be justified in laboratories with appropriate biosafety and biosecurity controls to help us understand the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, assess the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts, including surveillance and the development of vaccines and medical countermeasures. This research poses biosafety and biosecurity risks, and these risks must be carefully managed.

Wayback Machine link here – https://web.archive.org/web/20211019065407/https:/www.nih.gov/news-events/gain-function-research-involving-potential-pandemic-pathogens .

Here is what it was changed to:

This research can help us understand the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, assess the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents such as viruses and inform public health and preparedness efforts, including surveillance and the development of vaccines and medical countermeasures. While such research is inherently risky and requires strict oversight, the risk of not doing this type of research and not being prepared for the next pandemic is also high. While ePPP (enhanced potential pandemic pathogen) research is a type of so called “gain-of-function” (GOF) research, the vast majority of GOF research does not involve ePPP and falls outside the scope of oversight required for research involving ePPPs.

Even with the devastation that was likely caused by GOF, the NIH still appears to be playing fast and loose with the process, the definitions, and the safety regulations.

Ebright said that “(A)t least approximately two dozen current NIH-funded projects appear to include enhanced potential pandemic pathogens research as defined in the P3CO Framework (approximately a dozen involving enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2, and at least approximately another dozen involving enhancement of SARS-CoV-2,)” Ebright said. “None have received the risk-benefit review mandated under the P3CO Framework.”

For a complete look at the current oversight – i.e. risk reduction – framework, see here: https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/p3co.pdf

Take monkeypox, for example. Science Magazine reports that “In a U.S. government lab in Bethesda, Maryland, virologists plan to equip the strain of the monkeypox virus that spread globally this year, causing mostly rash and flulike symptoms, with genes from a second monkeypox strain that causes more serious illness. Then they’ll see whether any of the changes make the virus more lethal to mice. The researchers hope that unraveling how specific genes make monkeypox more deadly will lead to better drugs and vaccines.” For the full story, see here: https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-weighs-crackdown-experiments-could-make-viruses-more-dangerous .

Esvelt also questioned the benefits of the GOF process even if it worked:

“And even if GOF was predictive, what intervention is going to change as a result? Are we going to develop a vaccine because it might accumulate the remaining mutations and spill over into humans? How are we going to test its efficacy against a presumably lethal, pandemic-capable virus that hasn’t yet infected any human and might never do so?” asked Esvelt.

GOF could be an example of scientific “white whaleism,” the maniacal search for something that carries only personal meaning – Ahab’s Moby Dick – just for the sake of the search, the chance to prove something to others that needs not proving, the doing of something out of a tunnel-vision obsession that will bring no tangible benefit and only the very real risk of catastrophe to others.

“There are no cost-benefit analyses and no vaccine manufacturers clamoring for the data. It seems to be entirely driven by the all-knowledge-is-worth-having assumption” said Esvelt.

As with any complicated, insecure, obscure, purposefully obtuse system, a fog-filled gray area exists around GOF and it must never be forgotten that gray areas are very convenient, very deniable places in which to hide questionable conduct.

NOW FOR THE CONSPIRACY THEORY CONCLUSION

And what did this unnecessary pandemic do to California? Much of what it did elsewhere, except to the power of 11, as state and local officials used the pandemic as a pretext to launch an all-out assault on the typical resident.

Job? Only if you can work from home or are a government employee. Education? Debilitating Zoom school unless you can afford to send your kids to private school. Free speech and association? Only if you are a protestor or merely repeated what you were told but if you are churchgoer or a doctor or just a normal sane person asking a legitimate question, forget it. Health care? Pointlessly over-crowded hospitals, lockdowns, and the installation of fear made leaving the house to see a doctor about something else near impossible – good luck with that cancer that developed and went untreated for two years.

Sanity? The isolation, the barrage of official lies, the soul-breaking boredom, the loopy relatives who won’t let you visit unless you wear a hazmat suit, and the grinding tension led to an unprecedented surge in mental health and addiction issues. Keeping things civilized? Increased drug use, keeping the homeless outside, welcoming vagrants from other states, the EDD fraud, the crime, the general feeling of disgust, the exactly-backward state government priorities all made everyone’s life more crude, more brutal, more sad.

Even believing in the California Dream and wanting to stay in the state was demolished by the pandemic – hundreds of thousands of people looked around them and finally said “That’s it – we’re outta here.”

Did COVID spring from gain of function research in a Chinese lab? At this point, it seems somewhere between likely and probable that it did, protestations of the Chinese government and those reliant on government – doesn’t matter which government – funding aside.

Why is GOF being performed? As it has never worked as advertised in the past, a logical possibility is that it could be useful for certain military applications and, of course, it may remain theoretically possible that some remote, ephemeral upside may someday occur…if the researchers get very very very lucky.

Did the United States help pay for the research? Despite Fauci’s claims – which showed him to be either a liar or an incompetent or both – the answer is yes and the NIH is still funding GOF research, seemingly with questionable oversight (see above.) Overall, hundreds of millions of dollars (a precise figure is unavailable for obvious reasons) have gone into GOF research globally.

Is GOF dangerous? Though almost all lab-based scientific research and advancements carry at least a tiny element of risk, nothing like the level of terminal, global, and trans-generational risk of GOF has – to the public’s knowledge – been undertaken since the Manhattan Project and the study of radiation. And even that had very specific, very probable, and very real and tangible benefits (useful “pure” or basic science, ending World War II, power generation, nuclear medicine, etc.) that GOF cannot begin to claim.

Did GOF create and either/or help end the pandemic? Those are million-dollar questions.

Speaking of a million dollars, the effort to contact Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – which took its cut of the money it funneled from the NIH to the WIV for gain of function research for comment for this article was unsuccessful.

But the effort did lead to one of the saddest moments of irony possible, though. When you call the EcoHealth office, this is the message – to this day – you hear: “Our office is currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”



Thomas Buckley is the former Mayor of Lake Elsinore and a former newspaper reporter. He operates a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at planbuckley@gmail.com. Read more of his work at his Substack ‘The Point.’

Forged in Pittsburgh: Unveiling the legacy of Ella P. Stewart, Pa.’s first Black woman pharmacist


Ella P. Stewart

HANNA WEBSTER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
hwebster@post-gazette.com
APR 23, 2023

Welcome to the initial installment of Forged in Pittsburgh, an occasional series about historic notables in Health.

Third-year Pitt pharmacy student Rena Reid was scrolling through Instagram when she came across a post highlighting historical Black women in her field.

The account spotlighted Ella P. Stewart, but Reid had never heard of her, although the 22-year-old often led tours of the Pitt School of Pharmacy and mentored prospective students. When she read in the post’s caption that Stewart was an alumni of the University of Pittsburgh, she was shocked.

“Not my U of Pitt!” she remembered thinking. “I was kind of offended that I heard about it from an outside source.”

Reid contacted Hailey Baxter, another third-year pharmacy student, to ask whether she knew of Stewart; Baxter had only recently read about her as well. The two set out to ensure the Stewart name survived more than 100 years after her own time on the Pitt campus.

A portrait honoring the late Ella P. Stewart by artist Douglas Webster now lives in Salk Hall on Pitt’s campus.(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Ella Nora Phillips Stewart was the first Black woman to graduate from Pitt’s School of Pharmacy, in 1916, and she later opened the first Black-owned pharmacy in the region and became an international figure promoting race equality.

“Nobody handed her anything,” said Sadie Gee, Stewart’s niece, in an interview. “She earned it all. And I think that she was proud of herself, but she never bragged about it. You know, some people try to tell other people how great they are. But she was never like that. She was humble. She just went ahead and did what she had to do. She wouldn’t allow people to intimidate her.”

But as was the case with Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who wrote the code for the Apollo mission, and Rosalind Franklin, who helped capture the image Francis Crick used to “discover” the DNA double helix, history’s women are often eclipsed.

On March 21, the School of Pharmacy held a gathering in a room in Salk Hall to remember Ella P. Stewart. Reid and Baxter stood grinning in long dresses and white lab coats to honor the role model they had nearly overlooked.

“You will see future pharmacists grow in this room because of her legacy,” said pharmacy school Dean Amy Seybert, in a room henceforth known as the Ella P. Stewart Conference Room, with a hand-drawn portrait to seal the deal.

In the black-and-white drawing, done by artist Douglas Webster, who spoke at the ceremony, Stewart’s likeness was backdropped by depictions of Baxter’s handwritten school notes. March 21 was anointed Ella P. Stewart Day in Pittsburgh by Mayor Ed Gainey (who was represented by senior staffer Melvin El).

“What Ella Fitzgerald was to jazz, Ella Stewart was to pharmacy,” noted Anantha Shekhar, Pitt’s senior vice chancellor for the health sciences.

Ella Nora Phillips was born on a farm near Berryville, Va., on March 6, 1893. She was sent to Storer College in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., after grade school. Storer was founded in 1867 as an educational sanctuary for newly freed enslaved people. The missionary school taught Black and white students together; Stewart wrote that it offered liberal arts courses like home economics and music.

Pitt pharmacy students Rena Reid, left, and Hailey Baxter unveil a portrait honoring Ella P. Stewart on March 21.

(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

It was there she met her first husband, Charles Myers, with whom she’d have a daughter. On her way back to school in 1910, she got off a train in Pittsburgh to marry Myers. A 2010 story on Stewart, published through the Pitt School of Pharmacy, said this snap decision estranged her from her father for years.

Their daughter died of whooping cough, which led Stewart to pursue an activity to distract her from grief. She began working as a bookkeeper in Braddock and entered the School of Pharmacy in 1914. Stewart wrote, in an old document scrawled with her blue-pen cursive, that there were four women in her class, and that she was “the first Negro.”

She was originally told there was no space for her in the School of Pharmacy, according to the 2010 story, which also stated that white men were allotted the first row of seats in the classroom. White women were farther back, followed by Jewish students; the Black students used whatever resources were left.

Despite these obstacles, Stewart graduated with high marks in 1916, becoming the first Black woman to pass the Pennsylvania Board of Pharmacy exam and the first licensed Black woman pharmacist in the commonwealth.

She worked in Pittsburgh and then in Braddock, where she purchased a pharmacy. The pressure of the business ended her marriage with Charles. Returning home to Virginia in poor health, she asked a fellow Pitt pharmacy graduate, William “Doc” Stewart, to watch the shop while she was away. She and Stewart wed in 1920.

Ella P. Stewart, left, is surrounded by school children at the Ella P. Stewart Academy for Girls in an undated photo.(The Blade/Amy E. Voigt)

The couple realized that Toledo, Ohio, did not have a Black-owned drugstore. It was there, in the neighborhood of Lenk’s Hill, that they established Stewart’s pharmacy in 1922 and developed the top unit of the building as their living space, holding meetings with community members to discuss civil rights and leadership.

In a 1987 interview with archivist Anne Bowers, Stewart recalls how she came across the building that would become the landmark pharmacy.

“They were putting the for sale sign on,” she explained. “I went up and told them about what I wanted … I liked it very much because it had cement floors and a steel ceiling. It was a big building and it had nine rooms above the drugstore. I said then, I’d bring my husband over in a couple of days.”

Although the couple had opened the store in a predominantly white, German-American neighborhood, it didn’t stop business from flowing, as if a dam had burst.

Pharmacy student Hailey Baxter watches as a portrait honoring Ella P. Stewart is revealed March 21, 2023.(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

“We’d open the store and we had such a crowd out there that they were lined up on both sides, on the City Park side and Indiana side to get in,” she said in the interview. “We were busy all day long … People could hardly get around in the store for the many flowers that people had sent.”

After retiring from pharmacy in 1945, Stewart traveled the world, promoting racial understanding and civil rights. From 1948 to 1952, she was president of the National Association of Colored Women. She later became part of the National Advisory Committee on the White House Committee on Aging. According to the Toledo Blade, in 1951, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed her to the women’s advisory committee on U.S. Defense Manpower, now called the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

In 1957, then-Virginia Gov. Thomas B. Stanley invited her and other notable Virginians to return for a dinner at the Jamestown Festival 350th Celebration, a commemoration of the colony’s founding. But the government rescinded her invitation — along with seven others — upon discovering that she was Black. Stanley described her as an “arch-foe of integration.”

Stewart responded with a letter, stating, “Well I won’t come, but I still have officially accepted your honor, and that honor is still mine.” Home in Toledo, the community held a 300-person dinner at a church for her, during which she was given a standing ovation and declared “citizen of the world.”

As she pursued racial equity, many other honors followed, including induction into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame and a seat on the UNESCO executive board. In 1961, an elementary school bore her name.

She valued education as a form of independence for Black people oppressed by structural forces and discrimination. Not only was she a monolith in breaking ground for others to follow in her footsteps, but she and her husband were, together, role models.

“She was really strong on education,” said Gee, Stewart’s niece, who is now 81 years old and lives in Reedville, Va. “She encouraged other people to work to get into schools. It didn’t matter whether they were going into pharmacy or not.”

Gee grew up in Arlington, Va.. Like her aunt, she was a trailblazer, too, working as an operating room nurse at a time when it was uncommon for Black women to be in the role.

Melvin El from the Pittsburgh Mayor's office delivers a proclamation at Pitt's Salk Hall, declaring March 21 as Ella P. Stewart Day.

(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

“I was the first [Black] person to be in the O.R. that did something other than clean,” she said. “I went through the problem of people not wanting a Black nurse.”

Stewart would visit her family throughout the year while she was traveling. While Gee said they weren’t close, she recalls those visits fondly, saying they’d spend a lot of time talking.

Gee remembers a question Stewart would always ask during her visits: “How are you doing with your education?”

In a 1958 letter concerning Stewart’s honorary membership in Phi Delta Kappa, a national educators sorority, Emory L. Leverette, a Toledo schools administrator, wrote, “Many boys and girls in the city of Toledo have gone into professional fields only because of the counseling and guidance of Mrs. Stewart … I know of no other person in the city of Toledo regardless of their profession, including our own teachers, who have done so much in creating an atmosphere for religious, intergroup and community relations.”

Once sick for two weeks in 1973 after a diverticulitis infection, Stewart wrote thanks to her friends for sending over 300 Christmas greetings and many “get well” cards, a variety of food (“cooked and uncooked,” she wrote), even a Philco color television.

Stewart died Nov. 27, 1987, at the age of 94. Just as when she fell ill, a slew of letters followed. In a Toledo Blade obituary by William Brower, with whom she had a 40-year friendship, the columnist wrote that the tenets of love and respect were sustained throughout Stewart’s life, as calls poured in to the newspaper.

Pitt pharmacy students Rena Reid, left, and Hailey Baxter smile between their speeches honoring Ella P. Stewart on March 21.

(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

It can be an insurmountable task to measure a legacy, but Stewart accumulated a mountain of accolades and gratitude during her life that might come close.

Decades later, her alma mater continued her penchant for stewardship. In 2000, the Department of Biological Sciences at Pitt handed out its initial Ella P. Stewart Award from Stewart’s estate in the form of a bookstore gift certificate to a first-year student. The department has given out the award every year since.

During last month’s room dedication, Shekhar, the senior vice chancellor, said that after a century of fighting, Black people still struggle against obstacles.

“We’re still having to fight for equity,” he said. “I want to take this as a call to action … I don’t want the next generation to be saying the same thing.”

Reid and Baxter are answering that call to action. Reid, who discovered Stewart through the Instagram post, was born in Jamaica, and her family moved to the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y., when she was 5. She was accustomed to a lack of representation growing up and noticed how her high school specifically elevated white students.

Baxter’s parents also were born in Jamaica. She grew up in Stroudsburg, Pa., a town of not more than 5,000 people, which has motivated her to serve rural populations in her career.

Anantha Shekhar, the senior vice chancellor for the health sciences at Pitt, honors the late Ella P. Stewart on March 21.(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

“I went from not knowing white people existed to only seeing white people everywhere,” Reid said during remarks she made at the March 21 gathering. “I was constantly comparing myself, asking questions like, ‘Why does my family have an accent,’ and ‘Why is my hair so hard to deal with?’ Unfortunately this is the story for many Black kids.”

Reid said she’s always been pulled toward helping people, especially Black communities. As a child, her parents called her Dr. Reid.

“Black women have had to fight to be seen,” Reid continued. “One way we can do this is by showing Black people winning. Ella Stewart is that person.”

Hanna Webster: hwebster@post-gazette.com

First Published April 23, 2023, 3:30am

Doctor: If NC bans abortion past 12 weeks, more women will die. Opinion

Dr. Beverly Gray
Dr. Jonas Swartz
April 23, 2023


That’s great.

Our state motto – “to be rather than to seem” – should encapsulate the values ​​of North Carolinians. We must stand for truth, honesty and transparency. But the anti-abortion legislation recently referenced by House Speaker Tim Moore aims to do the opposite and would put women at risk.

Speaker Moore told the media that despite outcry from the medical community about the ban’s effects on our state’s women and families, Republicans have reached an agreement about a 12-week abortion ban. If enacted, such a law would destroy a woman’s ability to exercise reproductive autonomy and control her health care.

We are OB-GYN physicians providing comprehensive obstetrics and gynecological care. We see patients during some of their happiest days and some of their saddest days. We provide both abortion care because we trust our patients to make the best decisions for their bodies and their families. We also know and love people who have had abortions. We’ve seen that the care we provide saves lives and gives people their lives back.

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health US Supreme Court decision, we have also seen how difficult it is for patients in neighboring states to access basic healthcare. We are also witnessing a legal tussle over access to mifepristone, the most common abortion drug, despite decades of safe, effective use.

Now in many states, patients seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in six weeks – a five-minute clinic procedure – must take several days off from work, care for their children, travel to another state, And must find a place to live, not to mention having the means to cover the cost. In just six months after Dobbs, more than 30,000 women were forced to continue with their pregnancies because of these obstacles.

If this anti-abortion effort becomes law in North Carolina, the consequences will be dire for both individual patients and our state’s public health.

Abortion is incredibly safe. These laws hinder our ability to provide evidence-based, safe care. Our country is facing a maternal mortality crisis, and states with abortion bans have a maternal mortality rate three times higher than states that do.

Abortion care is part of comprehensive health care, and restricting access will mean more women will die in our state. There are extreme health disparities in maternal mortality, meaning that the burden of death and injury from pregnancy falls disproportionately on people of color and those living in poverty. These are the same people anti-abortion legislators are punishing by cutting off access to life-saving care.

Who should you trust on this issue? The NC Medical Society, the NC Obstetrics and Gynecological Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association, and the World Health Organization all oppose abortion restrictions. Count on the 1,300 NC medical professionals who co-signed a letter supporting abortion access in our state. They understand that access to care saves lives.

If you don’t trust doctors, trust your fellow North Carolinians – 57% of us either want to keep the laws as they are in North Carolina or expand access. For some, abortion has not been a discussion at the dinner table. But now is the time to bring it to churches, barbecues, and basketball games with your friends.

This potential legislation is detrimental to the health and well-being of women, so we strongly oppose it.

Although claiming to be in the best interest of the health of North Carolinians, it will prove to be harmful to the very citizens it aims to help. Women should have the right to make their own decisions about their reproductive health and have access to essential health services.

This is our opportunity to be a beacon of truth, honesty and health rather than appearances. We must stand up and oppose laws that will harm the families in our state. Call your MLA today. Tell them why you support access to reproductive health care and oppose these dangerous abortion restrictions.

Dr. Beverly Gray and Jonas Swartz are associate and assistant professors, respectively, of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University.

SAUDI ARABIA OWNS STAKE IN FIRM THAT BOUGHT DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S CAMPAIGN TECH

The Saudis had also invested in the private equity firm that sold off the tech companies that power Democratic campaigns.

Akela Lacy

THE INTERCEPT
April 23 2023

THE GOVERNMENT OF Saudi Arabia is an investor in the private company that owns a virtual monopoly on software that powers Democratic candidates — including management of the Democratic National Committee’s all-important voter list.

Sanabil Investments, the company that manages Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, recently published its first list of investments in venture capital, buyout firms, and startups. The list includes two private equity firms involved two years ago in the sale and acquisition of EveryAction and NGP VAN, the companies that make up the Democratic Party’s campaign tech apparatus.

“Saudi Arabia’s investments are definitely strategic.”

“Saudi Arabia’s investments are definitely strategic,” said Paul Rose, an associate dean at the Ohio State University’s law school, who has done research on sovereign funds in Gulf states. “This disclosure is interesting because I look at it and I think, ‘Well, why would you disclose all this?’ The Saudis are really quite shrewd about signaling to not only people in their own country but people abroad what their priorities are.”

Rose added, “Investment for them is in part a brand-building exercise.”

Sanabil runs the Public Investment Fund, the official name for the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund. The fund is one of the world’s largest, with $620 billion in assets.

In addition to investments in Apax Partners, which acquired NGP VAN and EveryAction in August 2021, Sanabil is also invested in Insight Partners, another venture capital and private equity firm that invested in EveryAction in 2018 and sold parts of the company to Apax in 2021. (Another company called Vista Equity Partners that sold assets to Apax as part of the 2021 acquisition is also listed as a Saudi partner.)

“Limited partners in Apax funds are passive investors with no role in the management of portfolio companies,” said a spokesperson for Apax. “While they are entitled to receive information relating to the performance of their investments at fund level, they do not have access to sensitive portfolio company information.”

Other Saudi investments disclosed recently include Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Federal regulations are designed to stop sovereign wealth funds from interfering in domestic politics. If a particular investment includes a national security risk, federal regulators can force the transaction to be undone through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States under the Department of the Treasury. Most of that risk is typically mitigated because sovereign wealth funds tend to be invested in companies through intermediaries like Apax or Insight Partners.


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Investment in a compny that deals with data related to voting and politics could be of potential concern to the Committee on Foreign Investment, even if the investor has no real influence over relevant data, Rose said. The committee could require the fund to use a mitigation agreement that limits interactions with the portfolio company. Rose added that the committee is quiet about its work and generally responsive to potential threats. (A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment.)

It’s not clear why Sanabil published the list of its partner venture capital and buyout firms. Any fund or investment vehicle that invests $100 million or more in publicly traded U.S. companies has to disclose those investments quarterly to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sanabil is not required to disclose several of the investments it made because some were made in funds or companies that aren’t publicly traded.

Sanabil did not disclose the amount of money invested in each firm. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

THE DISCLOSURE OF Saudi Arabia’s investments comes less than three months after Bonterra, the new merged company created by the Apax acquisition, instituted layoffs at EveryAction and NGP VAN. At least 140 people were impacted by the layoffs, which Bonterra CEO Mark Layden attributed to the pursuit of “long-term, efficient growth.” (Bonterra did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Sanabil investment doesn’t mean the Saudi government has an interest in the functions of the companies.

Instead, said progressive strategist Gabe Tobias, the disclosure is a further indication that the fate of EveryAction and NGP VAN is not a priority for their owners.

“They just don’t care. It’s so, so important to the Democratic Party and to progressives organizations and it’s owned by a thing that absolutely doesn’t care about them or even know they exist,” Tobias said. “The priority that Apax puts on all the pieces of those holdings means they’re gonna continue to downgrade the services that NGP provides to political campaigns. Unless they say differently, which they never have.”

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In 2016, Saudi Arabia announced its Vision 2030 plan to transition its economy away from dependence on oil and gas and toward tech investment. Sanabil’s disclosure indicates more spending on that front, with partners including Bird and Oura. The fund invests 50 percent of its assets in venture capital firms like Insight Partners, 30 percent in private equity firms like Apax, and 20 percent in a liquid portfolio.

It’s typical for national sovereign wealth funds to invest in foreign companies as part of their strategy for growth. Apax has also sold stakes to investors from sovereign wealth funds in China, Singapore, and Australia.

Sanabil’s list of partners resembles something more like a venture capital press release than an investment disclosure by a sovereign wealth fund, Rose said.

“This is sort of what a VC firm would do,” he said. They’re trying to signal something about who they are as a brand, who they are as investors. It’s hard to know what to make of it.” The disclosure could be meant to signal their ability as savvy investors to pick good assets, he added. “But beyond that, I don’t know. Who knows what else they could be trying to signal?”

Nikki Haley Took A Stand Against The Confederate Flag. So Why Doesn’t She Want To Talk About It?

The former South Carolina governor, now a 2024 presidential candidate, isn't exactly playing up the move to voters.

Liz Skalka

HUFFPOST
Apr 23, 2023

ILLUSTRATION:JIANAN LIU/HUFFPOST PHOTO:GETTY IMAGES

Doug Brannon knows the blowback you can get for being a Southern Republican who doesn’t embrace the Confederate flag.

In the wake of the 2015 shooting at a historic Black church that killed nine people, including a state senator, Brannon, a state representative at the time, introduced the bill that would ultimately remove the Confederate flag from a monument at the South Carolina State House. The measure passed in both legislative chambers and was quickly signed into law by then-Gov. Nikki Haley.

While the move launched talk that Haley might one day run for president, Republicans like Brannon from hardcore conservative areas who backed the bill took a hit. Brannon was the first legislative Republican to join Democrats in calling to remove the flag. A year later, Brannon was primaried out of office.

In that same election, Wendy Nanney, a Republican from a less conservative neighboring district who voted against the measure, lost her seat — a sign the flag would continue to divide South Carolinians.

“She lost because she voted to leave the flag. I got beat because I voted to take it down,” said Brannon, an attorney from Spartanburg, South Carolina, the anchor city in a county where Trump won the 2016 primary and general election handily.

If Brannon’s fate revealed how ultra-conservative white Southerners feel about the Confederate flag, then it makes sense why Haley, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, isn’t making this aspect of her biography front and center to voters. The flag isn’t mentioned anywhere under Haley’s “record of results” on her campaign website. And it’s not included in the stump speech that Haley delivers to audiences of primary voters in early voting states.

In recent speeches reviewed by HuffPost, Haley mostly sticks to touting stricter voter ID laws and the economic development she oversaw as governor that made South Carolina what she calls “the beast of the Southeast.” When she gets into race issues, it’s to argue the country isn’t racist because voters elected her as the first woman of color to lead South Carolina.

“The one thing that bothers me the most is the national self-loathing that’s taken over our country. The idea that America’s rotten or that it’s bad or that it’s racist,” Haley, an Indian-American, told a crowd in Lexington, South Carolina, this month, standing in front of a gigantic American flag and neat line of hay bales. “America is not racist. America is blessed.”

Her campaign did not answer questions about why the flag isn’t included in her stump speech.

Haley has, however, answered questions about it as a presidential candidate. She told conservative writer Bari Weiss just after her campaign launch that people in South Carolina were split on whether the flag — raised at the capitol in 1962 to protest the civil rights movement — was a symbol of racial hatred or Southern pride. “My job as their governor was not to judge either side. My job was to show them that there’s a better path forward,” Haley said.

“My job as their governor was not to judge either side. My job was to show them that there’s a better path forward.”

- Nikki Haley, in 2023, on removing the Confederate flag

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally who has not endorsed yet in the 2024 primary, said Haley should be happy with how she handled that time. “It showed political smarts and courage,” he told HuffPost.

But Haley clearly has a delicate balance to strike in a presidential primary against Trump and a GOP base that includes many white extremists. “She feels pinched, obviously, by Trump’s base, specifically the white nationalists and white supremacists,” said a GOP consultant from South Carolina, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s really a tough intersection for her to talk about anything, and the notion of amazing grace or courage is not really a highly rewarded political feature these days in a GOP primary.”

In her 2019 book, Haley blames Dylann Roof, the gunman who killed nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, for hijacking the Confederate banner, giving cover to the weighty segment of white South Carolinians who still see it as a symbol of their heritage. “The evil act he had committed had robbed the good-intentioned South Carolinians who support the flag of this symbol of the heritage of service,” Haley wrote. “He had encouraged everyone’s worst stereotype for our state. Clearly, something had to be done. But at the same time, I worried that allowing the killer to define what the flag represented for everyone was a surrender.”

Ross Ward, a Republican who ran for a South Carolina House seat in 2022, told HuffPost at Haley’s February campaign launch in Charleston that he was upset with how the flag was talked about during its removal and didn’t like how Haley handled it as governor.

“You’re saying that the Confederacy was racist, and that hurts me on a lot of levels,” he said. “Could we have changed it at some point? Perhaps. I know it offends some people, and I don’t want to hurt people on that level. However, that is history, and we can’t erase history.”

Greg Perry, the former chairman of the Charleston Democratic Party and only the second person of color to ever lead that group, told HuffPost he was worshipping at a nearby church when he learned of the shooting at Mother Emanuel. At another church service that Sunday, “my eyes filled with water out of fear that someone with hatred in their heart, because of the color of my skin, could just come in and take my life,” he said. “That fear has never left me.”

Nikki Haley doesn't talk much now about signing the law that removed the Confederate banner from the South Carolina State House in 2015.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Much of the flag saga had predated Haley’s time in office. By the time Haley became governor in 2011, the Confederate flag had been flying at the capitol for 50 years. In 2000, lawmakers reached an agreement to move it from its prominent spot on the state house dome to a ground-level monument for Confederate soldiers.

“The flag had the backing of white religion, white business people and white women, and it lost the support of all of those people in the 1990s,” said Thomas Brown, a professor at the University of South Carolina and the author of a book on Confederate monuments who cited the NCAA’s prominent boycott of the state over the flag.

Running for governor, Haley vowed not to reignite the flag issue, which lawmakers had agreed to stop discussing after the monument compromise. But the 2015 murder of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney and eight others in Charleston gave the debate new immediacy. Haley was getting squeezed to take action. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, called for the Confederate banner to come down. Not long after the shooting, Haley added her voice to those calls.

Tyler Jones, a consultant who served as the political director for the House Democratic legislative caucus when the flag fell, described it as the “bow on the top of [Haley’s] career... A lot of us in South Carolina when that happened looked at each other and said she could be president now. This was a very historic move, and it could position her perfectly in a general election. But as we’re seeing now, she doesn’t want to talk about it in this primary.”

That Haley’s decision on the flag boosted her profile within her own party then speaks to how much the GOP later changed under Trump. Whereas in 2015, Haley was celebrated for working with Democrats and demonstrating a moderate backbone, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is currently second behind Trump in a hypothetical primary matchup because he steamrolled opponents to make Florida the epicenter of the nation’s culture wars. Haley, meanwhile, is polling in single digits very early in the race, and is tied with DeSantis in South Carolina.

“Things have gotten worse, and it’s the rhetoric used in politics now,” said former South Carolina state Rep. Gary Clary, the first Republican to sign onto Brannon’s bill to remove the flag. Clary doubts whether Republican lawmakers would act as decisively on the flag today. “You’ve got plenty of angry people walking around, and some of them are serving in elected positions.”

Other Republicans told HuffPost that Haley doesn’t deserve nearly as much credit as she’s gotten for the flag coming down, and that the real courageous actors were Republicans from very conservative areas who ended their careers to get it done.

“I’m thankful that she has kinda backed off, because there was a time when Nikki said, ‘The flag came down. Look what I did. That flag is gone.’ Nikki didn’t do that,” said Brannon, who does not intend to back Haley in the presidential primary.

“I believe there are absolute truths. The sky is blue. You can’t tell me that it’s any other color but blue,” he said. “There was a time when Nikki stood up and said ‘never Trump’ and then became one of his biggest supporters. In my opinion ... Nikki might tell you the sky is not blue.”