Chinese enterprises make remarkable contributions to South Africa's industrialization

Local employees assemble motors in a workshop in the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park. (People's Daily/Zou Song)

By Zou Song (People's Daily) , April 23, 2023

Wide and flat roads, orderly traffic flow, and neatly built factory facilities - these are the most prominent features of the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park, a manufacturing quarter built by Chinese home appliance giant Hisense in Cape Town, South Africa.

"I've been working in this industry for nearly 30 years, and this year marks the 10th year for me to work in the industrial park. I'm glad to see the young people gaining better and better vocational skills today," said Valeri, Workshop Director of Industrial Park Television Factory.

Valeri is about to retire. She had gone through the hardships of factory shutdowns and unemployment. For a time, she had to do some vending businesses to make a living.

After the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park was built in the Atlantis industrial area in Cape Town, the woman immediately applied for a job there.

She started from the most basic position and became a team leader and then workshop director after training. Valeri now has apprentices. The products manufactured by her factory are available in many home appliance shops in South Africa, which makes her proud, Valeri told People's Daily.


Local employees work in a workshop of the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park. (People's Daily/Zou Song)

The Hisense South Africa Industrial Park was jointly built by Hisense and the China-Africa Development Fund in 2013 with an investment of $350 million. After years of development, the park is able to produce 400,000 television sets and 400,000 refrigerators on an annual basis today.

Now, Hisense televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators and other home appliance products are sold in over 5,000 shops under 18 major chain stores across South Africa, accounting for 30 percent of the market share in the country. Besides, these products are exported to more than 10 African countries such as Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Madagascar, as well as European destinations including the UK.

More and more factories on the supply chain of the home appliance industry have been built in the Atlantis industrial area because of the influence of the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park. The Atlantis industrial area has become an important manufacturing hub for electronic and home appliance products in South Africa and designated as a national-level special economic zone.

Sizo Nkala, a researcher at University of Johannesburg Centre for Africa-China Studies, told People's Daily that the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park, attracting more and more Chinese enterprises to South Africa, has contributed to South Africa's re-industrialization.

While promoting industrialization in South Africa, Chinese enterprises attach high importance to talent cultivation, which helps improve vocational skills of the local workforce.

Local employees work in a workshop of the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park. (People's Daily/Zou Song)

Many local workers including Valeri have joined vocational training programs launched by Chinese enterprises, and now about 70 percent of the management positions are held by local employees.

Besides, to improve the vocational skills of local young employees, Hisense and a local middle school have jointly established an electronics technology research and development training base, which offers electronic, software and equipment operation courses. So far, the base has trained a total of more than 1,400 people.

Today, Valeri and her family are living an obviously better life than before. She said her job has brought dramatic changes to her family. "We expanded our residence, and I can enjoy my twilight years after retirement," she told People's Daily.

A number of residents in the Atlantis industrial area have secured a job near their homes, and many of them have bought their own cars. Since the Hisense South Africa Industrial Park was put into use, it has created around 1,000 jobs for local people and indirectly offered 5,000 jobs.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and South Africa. Alvin Botes, Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, noted that Chinese enterprises have made constant and remarkable contributions to promoting South Africa's industrialization. He hopes that the two countries can achieve more fruitful results in their future cooperation.

(Web editor: Chang Sha, Du Mingming)

Pakistan Pashtuns Have Doubts About New Military Offensive Against Islamist Radicals

April 23, 2023
Pir Zubair Shah

Map of Pakistan showing Islamabad.

WASHINGTON —

Pakistan is bracing for a new military offensive that is expected to target militants in the northwest as ethnic Pashtuns in the area say they are still looking for accountability for the army's last offensives in the region, in 2014 and 2017.

The country's national security committee, comprising top civilian and military leaders, has not said when the operation will start. When announcing it earlier this month, the committee described it as a nationwide anti-militant operation to halt a rise in attacks on security forces by the Pakistani Taliban and other extremist groups.

Pakistan's government has said that previous operations led to a drop in terrorist attacks; however, Pashtun civil society members and peace activists say it came at a steep cost to many innocent people.

"The generals and those involved in bringing back armed men [militants] to the area haven't been arrested and have not [been] held accountable. … We will oppose any [new] operation," an elected member from South Waziristan, Ali Wazir, told Parliament on April 7 after the government disclosed its intentions for another offensive.

Rights activists say previous military-led operations in their region killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, destroyed towns and market centers, and led to the creation of a harsh security law that gives the armed forces sweeping powers in the whole province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the former federally administered tribal areas.

Wazir is a household name in Pakistan for his opposition to extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, illegal detentions, landmines and the Taliban's shadow rule in the Pashtun region. He was in jail for half of his 60-month term in Parliament, purportedly for his opposition to Pakistan's former chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.

Earlier this month, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif responded to Wazir's opposition by saying he would work to assuage local fears over the operation.

Ali Wazir, member of parliament, helps lead a protest against the detention of the chief of the Pashtun Protection Movement in Islamabad, Jan. 28, 2020. He has spoken out against a new military operation, say previous ones hurt innocent people.

"I want to tell members from Waziristan that their concerns will be heard, and they will be answered," the prime minister said on the floor of the lower house.

Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif also supported the stance of the Waziristan members of Parliament and told the house that "they [MPs] are right in saying that those people [involved in talks with militants] should be reckoned with."

News spreads fear

Leaders and activists of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a nonviolent Indigenous organization with serious reservations about the army's series of operations, are skeptical of the motive and timing of the announcement of the new operation, which could come during an election year and would be the military's first offensive since the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan.

"The announcement of yet another military operation has indeed spread fear among locals because what they saw in the past operations was they were the ones who suffered the most," said Idris Bacha, a civil rights activist from Swat and the leader of a local movement, the People's Resistance Against Militancy.

"Someone needs to tell us, what did they achieve in the previous campaigns? 80,000 people have been killed, whole villages destroyed, and their bazaars lay in ruins. They don't want to see that happen again," Bacha told VOA.

Marvin Weinbaum, a longtime regional analyst with the Washington-based think tank Middle East Institute, shares Bacha's concerns.

"I am very skeptical that there will be anything like a campaign they had in 2014, when they pushed them out of North and South Waziristan. I am skeptical of that in part because [of] the feelings in the tribal areas where they suffered terribly when that campaign was on its way. Many, many thousands were evicted from their homes. They became refugees."

Other activists have gone further, saying they will actively oppose a military campaign.

"We are united against another war in our area. The military can force us to leave our houses again, but we won't leave them on our own will," South Waziristan writer and social activist Shehrayar Mehsud told VOA in a Twitter Spaces conversation.

Pakistan economy

Others see a financial benefit in launching such an operation as Pakistan waits for another major International Monetary Fund bailout loan.

"We have said it before that in the past whenever Pakistan needed money, they would launch an operation in Pashtun areas to get funds from abroad," said Mir Kalam Wazir, a former provincial legislator and PTM supporter from North Waziristan.

"Looks like it's the same this time, too. With Pakistan's difficult economic situation, they need funds, especially from the U.S.," Wazir continued.

The U.S. gave Pakistan billions of dollars during the height of the war on terrorism, but aid dropped off sharply during the Trump administration. Last year, the total reported U.S. aid to Pakistan was around $150 million.

That drop in aid and the departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan have led some to question whether Islamabad has the capacity to carry out an offensive while its economy is under severe strain.

Pakistan hopes the suspended IMF bailout package will resume so it can avoid defaulting on its debt obligations. The IMF has stalled its $6.5 billion program since November, while a bruising political battle rages between the sitting coalition government and former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

"We are talking of a campaign which is very expensive, at a time when Pakistan is struggling to read its bills, particularly its debt obligations," Weinbaum told VOA.

AFRICA

Conservative Anglicans split with Church of England over same-sex marriages

‘We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ instruments he leads can ‘provide a godly way forward’ say primates

FILE PHOTO - Morning service at the Canterbury Cathedral. 

Stuart Brock - Anadolu Agency

James Tasamba, Godfrey Olukya |23.04.2023 
KIGALI, Rwanda/KAMPALA, Uganda

Global conservative Anglican leaders withdrew their recognition Saturday of the Church of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, as its leader, amid disagreements about blessing same-sex couples.

The primates announced the move at the fourth Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which ended this weekend in Rwanda’s capital of Kigali.

The Kigali commitment issued at the end of the weeklong conference reflected a consensus among Anglican conservatives, with a majority from Africa and the Global South.

“We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other instruments of communion led by him are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of scripture,” the primates said in a statement.

The primates accused successive archbishops of Canterbury of failing to guard the faith by “inviting bishops to Lambeth (official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury), who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to scripture.”

This failure of church discipline, the primates said, has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless practices contrary to scripture.

“This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible,” it said.

The clerics expressed their hard stance during the conference.

Archbishop Ben Kwashi of Nigeria, described as “troubling for many Anglicans” the Church of England's new move on civil marriages, while Archbishop Laurent Mbanda from Rwanda and newly-elected chairman of GAFCON, told Anadolu the Bible should remain the center of reference.

American primate Foley Beach, GAFCON's outgoing chairman, said Welby and the bishops he leads need prayers.

“You and I must repent and we become Christians again and we follow Jesus Christ,” he said.

For the first time, the Church of England, which is led by Welby, approved in February, prayers of blessing for gay couples -- a move strongly criticized by conservatives.

While Welby has previously acknowledged “deep disagreement” among the provinces and urged the different factions to try to “walk together,” the Kigali commitment said they “reject the claim that two contradictory positions can both be valid in matters affecting salvation.”

The primates representing the overwhelming 85% of global Anglicans demanded that Welby repent "for leading the Church of England away from biblical orthodoxy."

“We have recognized that the Archbishop of Canterbury has abdicated his historic place as the “First among Equals” among the primates and Churches of the Anglican Communion, and we no longer recognize him as our leader,” said Archbishop Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu of the Church of Uganda.

In view of the current crisis, GAFCON promised it will continue to support those who are unable to remain in the Church of England because of the failure of its leadership.

GAFCON pledged to create alternative authority structures.

GAFCON began in 2008 to advocate orthodoxy in the global Anglican Communion. It takes place every five years.

About 1,300 Anglican leaders from more than 50 countries attended the conference.

The incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury has served as the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion since its formation in 1867. Though with no formal power, he was taken as the “First among Equals.”

Gun Idolatry Is Destroying the Case for Guns

OPINION
DAVID FRENCH
CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE

MORNING JOE REGULAR

April 23, 2023

Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

By David French
Opinion Columnist

NEW YORK TIMES

On June 26, 2018, our family experienced one of the most terrifying nights of our lives. It began with a strange and chilling direct message to our son — an image of three Klan hoods. That was strange enough, but sadly not all that surprising. From the moment that I’d first expressed opposition to Donald Trump and Trumpism, our multiracial family (my youngest daughter, who is adopted, is Black) had faced an avalanche of threats, doxxing and vile racism.

Alt-right trolls had photoshopped images of my daughter into gas chambers and of her face onto old pictures of slaves. They had placed images of dead and mutilated Black Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. The threats had not stopped after Trump won. If anything, by 2018 they had escalated once again. So the Klan hoods sent to my son — which would have been chilling under any circumstances — were particularly ominous. What happened next was worse.

Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.

This was not the first such incident. A few years earlier, a man had driven to our house, positioned his car to block our driveway, confronted my wife and kids and demanded to see me (I wasn’t home). He was later seen driving slowly around the parking lot of my kids’ school.



I was born in Alabama and grew up in Tennessee and Kentucky. As a son of the South, I was no stranger to firearms. We had a gun in our home. I learned to shoot at a young age. So did my wife. After the episode of the man demanding to see me, she not only bought a handgun, she attended multiple classes to train in armed self-defense.

So, yes, we had guns. And when my son received the Klan hood messages — as well as in other similar situations — we were glad we did. While we scrambled to determine whether the Klan hoods and street sign images were truly threatening or intended to be merely harassing, and while we considered whether to call the police (we did), I knew that we would not be defenseless if the threat were real and if our stalkers arrived before the police.

Thankfully, no one came to our house. It was likely just more harassment, but the presence of a police car outside our home may have deterred something more serious. I share this story to make two disclosures: Yes, we own guns. And yes, I support gun rights, not just for hunting or shooting sports, but for the purpose of self-defense. I’ve written in support of gun rights for years. I grew up in a culture that approached firearms responsibly, safely and with a sober mind. They were a tool — a dangerous tool, to be sure — but nothing more. In a fallen and dangerous world, a responsible, trained gun owner could help keep his or her family safe.

But the gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values. At the edges, gun owners have gone from defending the rights of people to own semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s to openly brandishing them in protests, even to the point of, for example, staging an armed occupation of parts of the Michigan Capitol during anti-lockdown protests.

But we’re now facing something worse than gun idolatry. Too many armed citizens are jittery at best, spoiling for a fight at worst. In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.

All of these episodes occurred over the course of just six days.

Yet even worse than such shootings, which occurred because of fear or sudden rage is the phenomenon that begins with a person who seems to want to fight, who deliberately places himself in harm’s way, uses deadly force and then is celebrated for his bloody recklessness. Take Kyle Rittenhouse. At age 17, Rittenhouse took an AR-15-style weapon to a riot in Kenosha, Wis., to, he said, “protect” a Kenosha business.

When you travel, armed, to a riot, you’re courting violent conflict, and he found it. He used his semiautomatic weapon to kill two people who attacked him at the protest, and a jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. But the jury’s narrow inquiry into the moment of the shooting doesn’t excuse the young man’s eagerness to deliberately place himself in a situation where he might have cause to use lethal violence.

And what has been the right’s response? Rittenhouse has gone from defendant to folk hero, a minor celebrity in populist America.

Or take Daniel Perry, the Army sergeant who was just convicted of murdering an armed Black Lives Matter protester named Garrett Foster. Shortly after the conviction, Tucker Carlson effectively demanded a pardon. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas responded the next day, tweeting that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

Yet Abbott ignored — or did not care — about the facts exposed at trial. Perry had run a red light and driven straight into the protest, nearly striking Foster’s wife with his car. Witnesses said Foster never pointed his gun at Perry. Even Perry initially told the police he opened fire before Foster pointed his gun at him, saying, “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”

But the story gets worse. In social media messages before the shooting, it was plain that Perry was spoiling for an opportunity to shoot someone. His messages included, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex” and “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

That is not a man you want anywhere near a gun. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a man you want anywhere near a gun.

Our nation’s gun debate is understandably dominated by discussions of gun rights. But it needs to feature more accountability for gun culture. Every single feasible and constitutional gun control proposal — including the red flag laws that I’ve long advocated (which allow law enforcement to remove weapons from people who broadcast deadly intent or profound instability) — will still leave hundreds of millions of American guns in tens of millions of American hands.

I shared the account at the beginning of this piece to help explain to opponents of gun rights that there are times when a firearm can be the only thing that stands between profound evil and the people you love. I also share it to tell my gun-owning friends that I get it. I understand. I’ve faced more threats in the last few years than they might experience in 10 lifetimes.

But this I also know: Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, likely spills innocent blood.

Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion of gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.

\

David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator, and his most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” @DavidAFrench

AMERIKA

Rigged Trials and Tainted Justice: The Plight of the Wrongfully Convicted

April 23, 2023
Bob Kosch

In light of the unprecedented arrest of a former United States President, many will be watching the process play out from arraignment to trial. Many – including hundreds of media outlets nationwide will monitor what the prosecution brings for compliance and strict adherence to constitutional safeguards, but what about the average citizen facing criminal charges?

In the past few years, States have created wrongful conviction units to review matters, mostly when appeals and post-conviction proceedings have terminated. In 2022, over 3200 criminal convictions were vacated, or reversed by Courts throughout the United States. Most of what led to this staggering number was the intentional misconduct or fabrication of evidence by prosecutors and police.

Why does this happen so often?

After graduation from the academy, police swear an oath to their community and the values attendant to their position as a law enforcement officer. Police and prosecutors are acutely aware that what they write in a report or testify to in open court is taken as truth. Knowing that there are those officers who stray from that allegianc

Let’s look at what has been apparent for decades to all reasonable police officers: a police officer who fabricates evidence against a criminal defendant to obtain his conviction violates the defendant’s constitutional right to due process of law.

Likewise, prosecutors are lawyers bound by the Rules of Professional Conduct to ensure fairness in presenting a case to the Courts. Still, many have abused that power-seeking wins in place of justice.

Plotting a wrongful conviction is complex and rarely advanced without the help of other investigative staff. In 1985 Byron Halsey was charged in Plainfield, New Jersey, with the murder of two small children in his care. Halsey maintained his innocence. Not only was he sleep deprived when interrogated, he took a lie detector test and passed. Two Union County Detectives wrote false reports claiming that Halsey had failed the test, stating, “Halsey began to cry, and then confessed in vague terms to killing the children.” Halsey was convicted and given two life sentences plus twenty years. Halsey spent over 20 years in custody until DNA testing proved his innocence.

In 2012 detectives in Sussex County, New Jersey, arrested a group of individuals for selling crack cocaine to an undercover informant. No drug sale was contemplated or concluded by those ultimately charged. In actuality, police packaged pieces of gypsum, or “sheetrock,” in plastic bags to falsely inculpate those charged.

On August 13, 1976, two gunmen robbed the Hi-Way Check Cashing Service in Kearny, New Jersey. One of the robbers shot and killed a Newark police officer. Defendant Vincent James Landano and three other individuals were subsequently arrested. Tried alone, Landano was convicted of murder and other related offenses. Over the next sixteen years, the defendant repeatedly challenged his convictions in both the State and Federal courts. On habeas review, the Judge Ordered the Hudson County Prosecutor’s files related to this case seized by the U. S. Marshalls. Eyewitness accounts identifying someone other than Landano were hidden prior to trial resulting in the defendant’s conviction.

The District Court found the prosecution violated the defendant’s constitutional rights by withholding exculpatory evidence. Landano was released from custody and later acquitted at retrial.

Some in law enforcement advance these practices knowing they are covered by qualified immunity, making it next to impossible to sue for liability damages.

Many released after a wrongful conviction get their “fifteen minutes of fame,” but that’s about it. There is no recovery from the torment and stress of being on death row or spending decades in prison for something you did not do. The injury is incalculable.

“He must have done something wrong” is the mantra that attaches to those exonerated after vacation of a criminal case. Many who have never been involved in a criminal prosecution simply cannot fathom that an official sworn to protect would manipulate the system to cause such devastating harm.

A short time ago, I watched a segment on CNN where Jake Tappers Dad became involved in a case where one of his patients, C.J. Rice, was criminally charged in a shooting in South Philadelphia. Convicted in 1996, Rice would be exonerated in 2019. Unfamiliar with the pitfalls of a criminal trial, Jake and his Father were stunned by what they discovered leading to Rice’s twenty-one-year challenge to his conviction.

This article is not intended to bash cops or others in law enforcement. Those brave people who protect us on a daily basis deserve courtesy and respect. Those who manipulate the criminal process to cause such devastating harm must be stopped and held accountable.

Will any of this put Donald Trump at risk? Of course not! Although we are confronted with a man – who, “if he told the truth once in his life, it was probably by mistake,” will be afforded supreme consideration of what the Rules and Constitution provide while defending his case.

The world is watching, yet daily, while others languish in jail, wrongfully accused and convicted, the chances of a “rigged” trial here are remote.

Dr. Tapper took an oath “to do no harm.” It would be nice if that sentiment caught on.



Bob Kosch
Bob Kosch is the host of Greater Good Radio and Sunday Supper with Vito on WOR in New York City. He is also the Executive Producer of “When Comedy Went to School” on PBS.

AMERIKA

The next voting rights battle could be on a campus near you

College students could soon find themselves on the front lines of a broader fight over who can vote and how


Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images

RAFI SCHWARTZ
APRIL 23, 2023

When Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly in early April to flip Wisconsin's highest judicial body to its first liberal majority in a decade in a half, her path to victory wound conspicuously through the state's prized system of college campuses. Protasiewicz's double-digit margin was "unlike anything that's ever been seen in a spring election in terms of turnout on college campuses," campus voting access organizer Teddy Landis told Wisconsin Public Radio. Data provided to The Washington Post by Landis' "Project 72 WI" voting outreach group showed voting rates in University of Wisconsin campus precincts at levels "near November's midterms," with Democrats in particular "able to increase their vote share from the 2022 gubernatorial race."

While the much-sought-after "youth" bloc has traditionally been a fickle one to motivate into the nearest voting booth, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race showed fairly decisively that, when motivated and given the resources to act, younger voters can indeed have a decisive impact on elections. Unsurprisingly, then, that capacity for decisive impact has not gone unnoticed by Democrats hoping to lock in a key demographic, nor by Republicans worried by the bloc's broadly leftward lean. To that end, conservatives have increasingly begun looking to college campuses like those that powered Protasiewicz's victory as their next target in a broader partisan fight over voting access.

'They just have to roll out of bed'

At a recent Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville, Tennessee, longtime right-wing attorney and activist Cleta Mitchell had a problem.

"What are these college campus locations?" Mitchell, an adviser to former President Donald Trump, asked attendees during a presentation dubbed "A Level Playing Field for 2024," audio from which was obtained by The Washington Post. "What is this young people effort that they do?" she continued in a speech that, according to the Post, focused in particular on several states with large public university systems. "They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed and then just go back to bed." The presentation also allegedly lashed out against states that allow students to pre-register to vote ahead of their 18th birthday.

After the Wisconsin State Supreme Court flipped, radio host Dan O'Donnell wrote a lengthy post-mortem for the conservative MacIver Institute think tank diagnosing the state GOP's condition. He noted that "Republican vote erosion might be survivable in statewide elections if it didn't coincide with an absolute explosion in Democrat turnout in Dane County," the site of the University of Wisconsin's main Madison campus. "The dramatic increase in the use of mail-in and absentee voting in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed for far greater numbers of college students to more easily cast their ballots," he continued. "With Democrats' and liberal special interest groups' huge cash haul, they were able to hire a veritable army of get-out-the-vote activists to canvass dorms and apartments scrounging up every last student they could find and bring them to early voting locations."

While the conservative focus on campus voting isn't, in and of itself, a wholly new phenomenon, the sting of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election comes amid a renewed push to limit post-secondary specific election infrastructure around the country — in Texas, a bill to close all campus polling places is currently working its way through the state legislature. In Idaho last month, Republican Gov. Brad Little signed into law a new measure that removed student IDs from the list of approved voter identification forms, prompting a lawsuit from the youth advocacy group March For Our Lives, which claimed, among other things, that "the number of 18- and 19-year-olds registered to vote in Idaho increased 81 percent between 2018 and 2022, the largest such increase nationwide by far." And in New Hampshire, Republicans this year tried — and ultimately failed — to bar out-of-state college students from voting in the state entirely.

Although the broader Republican effort to tighten restrictions on college-age voters has so far been uneven from state to state, "there is a lot more energy on this issue than we've seen in the past," Voting Rights Lab researcher Liz Avore told Bloomberg earlier this month.

Speaking recently with Fox News' Laura Ingraham, longtime GOP strategist and Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway framed the focus as part of a broader concern that younger voters "think differently on abortion, perhaps, or guns, or climate change" than the general Republican platform. "The left becomes a turnout machine with young people," she added, an acknowledgment that Democrats are poised to best capitalize on this progressive trend. In the wake of Protasiewicz's Supreme Court victory, former Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was even more explicit in linking college voting with GOP losses, tweeting that "years of radical indoctrination — on campus, in school, with social media, and throughout culture" are the reason "younger voters are the issue" for conservatives, while specifically calling out Dane County and its University of Wisconsin at Madison campus as a major factor in the recent election.

'There is a subtle but real bigotry'

Democrats seem well aware of the renewed focus on college-related voting restrictions, with Democratic election attorney and voting rights activist Mark Elias telling the Post to "imagine if in every place in [Cleta Mitchell's GOP donor] presentation where she references campuses, she talked about African Americans. Or every place she says students, she instead talked about Latinos.

"There is a subtle but real bigotry that goes on when people target young voters because of their age," he added.

In some states, lawmakers have begun strengthening campus-related voting regulations. Last year, New York's Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a measure mandating at least one polling place at any campus with 300 or more registered voters, legislation aimed at stopping "practices designed to suppress student voting, including situating polling in locations that are difficult to access and dividing campuses into multiple districts," according to Bard College Executive Vice President Jonathan Becker. Both California and Maryland have similar rules on the books.

New York's new law "lifted a massive barrier," Cornell University student and voting rights organizer Patrick Mehler told the Pew Charitable Trusts' Stateline. "We're setting them up to vote for the rest of their lives."

In 2012, a Tufts University study determined that campus voting suppression often comes in the form of "non-statutory" barriers — that is, ones indirectly related to a specific law or ordinance — in which "officials can facilitate voting, for instance, by placing easy-to-use voting machines in many convenient locations."

"Or," the study continued, "they can deliberately or inadvertently create obstacles to voting."

As the past several election cycles have shown, when those barriers — both statutory and otherwise — are overcome, college students can and do play a significant role in determining their own political representation on both a state and national level. The more those electoral muscles are flexed on campuses nationwide, the more both Democrats and Republicans will focus on capturing and channeling that potent political energy for themselves.

Josie Duffy Rice Investigates Gruesome State Violence at an Alabama 'Reform School'

Her podcast Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children delves into abuse at a state-run institution.

BILLY BINION | FROM THE MAY 2023 ISSUE

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By the time Josie Duffy Rice graduated from Harvard Law School, she knew she didn't want to be a lawyer. Instead, she became a journalist sitting at the intersection of politics and the criminal legal system. Her latest story—Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children—is a podcast delving into Mt. Meigs, a state-run institution where black children suffered "physical and sexual violence, unlivable facilities, and grueling labor in the fields surrounding the school." That history had largely gone unreported. Centered around a moment in the 1960s when five girls escaped and tried to blow the whistle, the podcast is filled with uncomfortable truths that too many people would prefer to ignore. In February, Reason's Billy Binion interviewed Duffy Rice by phone.

Q: Why do you think these stories went untold for so long, despite being pretty shocking?

A: We make a lot of excuses for the way we treat people who we deem bad. I think this stuff also snowballs. If people got out—sometimes they didn't—they never spoke about it again. They never told their families. They were so traumatized. Some of it is just seeing someone else being willing to speak out. One of the things you also realize is how many victims weren't sure if they could trust their memory. They're so young when they go to these places. What has been kind of amazing is seeing people's experiences and memories validated. They've gone 50 years wondering what actually happened. And then you find other people who have the exact same story, who remember the exact same thing.

Q: There are some people who may say, "That's in the past." Why do you think it's important these stories be told?

A: We really like this idea that there was a bad thing, something happened that fixed it, and now we don't need to worry about it because that's not who we are anymore. It's cliché, but those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. I have no reason to think what was happening back then is still happening at Mt. Meigs, but I haven't heard good things. It's really comforting to think that was unimaginably long ago when it wasn't.

Q: A premise of the podcast seems to be that the injustices of the past bleed into the present and future.

A: What made me interested in this story is that exact thing. Many people who went to Mt. Meigs in the 1960s for loitering or breaking curfew, or because their parents died, are now serving life without parole or are on death row for murder. We allow institutions to shape people, and we like to imagine we wouldn't be shaped the same way—and maybe we wouldn't. Not everybody did those things. But a lot of people did.

This podcast is about the specter of state violence. Because what you see are tragic stories of kids who went in as children, got out as children, and it shaped the rest of their lives. They value life according to how much their life is valued. And a lot of people, their lives are just not valued by the state.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you as you were reporting?

A: A lot surprised me in the sense that it was so much worse than I would've imagined. But I am eternally surprised by people's resilience. I think that gets manipulated a lot because the conversation becomes, "People are resilient so you can put them through whatever." That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the resilience of the human spirit is more remarkable than it gets credit for. People manage to make it through such hellish conditions without totally losing their humanity, and there's always the chance they can find that humanity again.

How Will the Mifepristone Case Get Back to theSupreme Court?

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Iowa: A testing Ground for The Handmaid’s Tale-like policies

Lina-Maria Murillo

Apr. 23, 2023 6:00 am

Sheila Knoploh-Odole of Urbandale wears a “Handmaid’s Tale” inspired costume during a rally for reproductive freedom on Sunday, July 10, 2022, at Iowa State Capitol Building in Des Moines, Iowa. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette)

We often hear people invoke “The Handmaid’s Tale” when legislatures make changes to reproductive health policies. Many people have watched the Hulu show based on the novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. I have taught Atwood’s novel in my courses at the University of Iowa and students are amazed by the important nuances missed in the show and by readers of Atwood’s novel.

First, students realize that the impetus for the establishment of the Republic of Gilead — a theocratic government that arises after the fall of the United States — is a massive decline in the “Caucasian race.” Atwood places this critical detail in the book’s epilogue. Next students are surprised by the level of support the patriarchal Gilead receives from the women in this new society. In the years before Gilead, Serena Joy, one of the novel’s protagonists, is a rising religious star. A zealot, who champions a woman’s return to traditional gender roles as doting mother and dutiful wife, Serena and her husband, Commander Waterford, become leading figures in Gilead’s political hierarchy and owners of Offred — their handmaid. For students, the novel’s most indelible scenes remain the sexual assault “ceremonies.” The handmaids endure these rituals at the hands of the commanders watched over by their wives, because the handmaids are meant to birth Gilead’s next generation.

This fall semester, I will be sure to illuminate for students a parallel example of a Gilead-like policy in the state of Iowa. On April 7, Iowa’s Republican Attorney General Brenna Bird halted funding for emergency contraception (Plan B) and abortion for survivors of sexual assault and rape. The funding for this reproductive health care to survivors of sexual assault comes from fines of those convicted of crimes and not taxpayer funding. Still, Iowa’s AG felt it necessary to “audit” the victim fund and cut off access to victims in need. Survivors of rape or incest who cannot afford this crucial reproductive health care will be forced to carry the product of this violence to term.

Bird touted her anti-woman stance from the campaign trail last year as she vowed to reinstate Iowa’s restrictive anti-abortion policy. She defeated longtime Democrat Tom Miller in the attorney general race last November. In an op-ed published in October 2022, Bird vowed to protect the entire state of Iowa from becoming “a Chicago or Minneapolis,” stating that “Those cities are plagued by crime and prosecutors who do not enforce our law, and who look for any reason to release dangerous criminals back on the streets.” She also made mention of the need to protect victims of crimes, writing: “We have to be there for the victims. The Attorney General’s Office should also conduct an audit of all victim services to make sure victims and their families are receiving the support they need. Less than four months after being sworn in, Bird suspended the very support survivors of violent crime need.

It should come as no surprise that Bird cut her political teeth as deputy chief of staff, and then chief of staff to former Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa’s 4th Congressional District. King was stripped of his congressional committee assignments after statements he made about sexual violence, reproduction, and population growth. During a 2019 event in Urbandale, Iowa, King stated: “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?" King was defending his stance denying access to abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

King’s position was met with derision and disgust at the time; Bird’s move to make his comments a reality in Iowa today have also made national headlines. And many have rightly connected them to a Gilead-inspired panoply of extremist GOP-backed laws and policies against reproductive freedom and gender-affirming care.

For many, the greatest surprise of making Iowa in the image of the Republic of Gilead is that, like in Atwood’s novel, women are leading the way. Lest we forget, Gov. Kim Reynolds is the lead plaintiff in the abortion restriction case now before the Iowa Supreme Court.

What’s worse is that the policies proposed and enacted by the state of Iowa seem to exceed even the most draconian laws in the fictional world of Gilead. The state’s GOP majority recently led legislative attacks against trans and nonbinary children through gender-affirming care and bathroom bans. Bird’s recent attack against survivors of sexual assault similarly targets children, since juveniles represent the majority of sexual violence victims in the state. Iowa is fast exceeding even the most vicious representations of theocratic rule. Serena Joy and her ilk would be proud.

Lina-Maria Murillo is an assistant professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and History at the University of Iowa.

How many scandals will it take for DOJ to investigate Clarence Thomas?

BY SVANTE MYRICK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/24/23 

THE HILL

Activists join outcry following recent reports revealing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ ethics breaches during a press conference organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, April 19, 2023 in Washington.

 (Eric Kayne/AP Images for Center for Popular Democracy Action)


Let’s get this straight: If a state legislator accepts so much as a sandwich, they must disclose it. I know; I served in local government for 14 years.

So it’s been very difficult to understand how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has gotten away with accepting free trips on superyachts and private jets belonging to a billionaire, Harlan Crow, not to mention a sweetheart real estate deal with that same billionaire, without disclosing them. For years.


Nevertheless, that is apparently what happened. And now that it’s all come to light, the party should be over for Thomas. I say should because while there is a lot of talk about accountability, it’s been less clear how that will come to pass. Thomas has resisted calls to resign. Impeachment seems highly unlikely given the Republican leadership of the House. Senate hearings may happen, and that’s a positive step.

Fortunately, there are also other options, including one very good one with solid legal underpinnings: a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation under federal statutes that require disclosure of the kind of perks Thomas has enjoyed, and also authorize penalties for violators.

The DOJ should investigate Thomas’s unethical and possibly illegal violations without delay.

Many analysts have pointed out that federal ethics law, which applies to federal officials in all three branches, including Supreme Court justices, has long required disclosure of gifts on a form that must be submitted every year. Congress enacted the statute after Watergate to help safeguard against ethical violations by federal officials. The law defines “gift” as the receipt of money or “anything of value,” including “overnight lodging.”

So far, so good. But the real kicker, in this case, is a part of that federal statute, 5 U.S. Code 13101, 13104, and 13106(a), that authorizes the Justice Department to pursue both civil penalties and criminal fines from government officials who fail to report gifts as required.

The fines are not large. But even more important than the cash penalty would be the significance of a finding of guilt by the Department of Justice. There would be enormous pressure for a Supreme Court justice to step aside or be removed if that person were found guilty of a crime while in office. It took far less than that for Justice Abe Fortas to step down back in 1969 amid allegations of financial impropriety.

Thomas has claimed that luxury trips and stays he enjoyed for free were “personal hospitality” not subject to reporting requirements. This strains credulity. Even if some of the food and fun could be explained away as an exception to reporting rules, certain other perks cannot. Free use of Crow’s private jet for Thomas’s personal travel is one example; all you have to do is read the reporting requirements to see that they clearly do not include this kind of free transportation in the “personal hospitality” exception.

As for the real estate deal, Thomas has belatedly announced he will look at updating his disclosure forms. That’s … fine.

As unsavory as all this is, it’s also not out of character. Thomas and his wife have been at the center of all kinds of ethics scandals for years. It has gotten very disheartening, even disgusting, to watch the never-ending Thomas carnival of corruption bring shame on the Supreme Court. It’s time for it to stop.

There is a larger conversation to be had about how badly we need an enforceable code of ethics for the Supreme Court to prevent any number of possible transgressions by justices now and in the future. And there is a growing call to expand the court to recapture public trust and counteract what it has become: an institution with a reactionary majority created by unethical and even outright corrupt means. That too is a larger conversation. A word of caution before AI becomes standard in health careCan Trump hide from abortion?

But for now, there is a clear path to holding Clarence Thomas accountable. His actions are unquestionably inappropriate, and the Justice Department has the grounds and the legal authority to investigate and determine whether they are inarguably illegal. It should use that power as it was intended.

And if Thomas is guilty, DOJ should throw the book at him.


 Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way. Previously, he served as the organization’s executive director and led campaigns focused on transforming public safety, racial equity, voting rights and empowering young elected officials. Myrick garnered national attention as the youngest-ever mayor in New York State history.   

Who Else Has Harlan Crow Given Money To?

Crow and his wife have poured millions into shaping state and federal politics over the past three decades.

BY SHIRIN ALI

APRIL 23, 2023
 

Photo illustration by Slate. 

Photos by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images, and Tom Williams/Pool/Getty Images.

Real estate mogul Harlan Crow has been in the national spotlight lately over his penchant for giving extravagant (undisclosed!) gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: private jet trips, mega yacht excursions and a $19,000 bible, to name just a few. He also spent $133,363 to buy several properties from Thomas—including the home the justice’s mother still lives in. Crow, and groups linked with him, often have cases before the court, and Thomas has ruled in their favor. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote, this sure seems like a case of “classic quid pro quo (or perhaps quid pro Crow) corruption.”

Though most of us probably didn’t even know Crow existed until recently, the 73-year-old Texan has been pouring his wealth into influencing American politics since the 1990s. Transparency group OpenSecrets identified $14.7 million that Crow and his wife Kathy have contributed to state and federal candidates, committees and parties over the past three decades.

In an interview with the Dallas Morning News, Crow said he considers himself a “center-right Republican” that believes in bipartisanship and a good debate—though Republicans have received the majority of his money. (On the other side of the aisle, he’s donated to conservative Democrats, like the group that ended up killing the Build Back Better Act).

The New Republic reported that, between 2019 to 2021, Crow donated over $130,000 to No Labels—a third party group that claims to promote a more moderate alternative to the two major political parties, but who critics say basically just exists to get Donald Trump elected in 2024 by taking votes away from President Joe Biden.

Crow appears not to be especially keen on Donald Trump, though—he donated $100,000 to the Our Principles PAC back in 2016, a group created specifically to prevent Trump from being elected.

The National Republican Congressional Committee also reported receiving over $1.4 million from the Crows since 1990, and Crow donated another $500,000 to Liberty Central, a conservative activist group founded by Ginni Thomas—yes, we’re talking about Justice Thomas’ wife. He’s also given generously to Senate Judiciary Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn and Marsha Blackburn. (That’s the same committee that would be responsible for holding hearings about Thomas and Crow’s dealings).

So, Is Clarence Thomas at Real Risk Here? Absolutely.

Crow has also dabbled in local politics, particularly in the state of Utah. He has donated over $35,000 to both Republican and Democratic candidates and committees there since 1994. Almost half of Crow’s Utah-specific donations went to Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who got around $8,000 from Crow in his first reelection campaign in 2016 and another $8,700 in his 2022 race against Evan McMullin. Crow also gave Sen. Mitt Romney’s campaign a boost in 2012, when he donated $2.3 million to super PACs that supported the senator’s presidential bid.

But politics isn’t the only area Crow is interested in, as the billionaire appears to have an…eclectic mix of hobbies. He recently spent $25 million on a pet project in his hometown of Dallas—a 228-foot bell tower called Campanile. Crow considers it a gift to the city and hopes it will bring an Old World-style ambiance to Dallas. Alongside architecture, Crow also invests in artwork and even has two paintings by Adolf Hilter…along with a signed copy of Mein Kampf and Nazi medallions. (Crow defended his controversial collection in 2014, saying it was not a celebration of repressive regimes but an effort “to preserve that as a part of our history.”)

He also created a “garden of evil” in his backyard, complete with statues of fallen communist leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro and Karl Marx.

Many of the GOP lawmakers that have benefitted from Crow’s wealth have been quick to defend his, um, questionable taste. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose 2018 re-election campaign got $75,000 in outside political spending from Crow, claimed he simply hadn’t seen the billionaire’s Hitler paintings himself and therefore couldn’t confirm if they did in fact exist. “I have no idea,” Cruz told Insider. “His library is an extensive museum.”