Demagogues Three: Charles Foster Kane,Willie Stark, and Tucker Carlson

 APRIL 28, 2023  BY STEPHEN F. EISENMANFacebook

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Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men, Robert Rossen, director 1949. Screen shot.

Movie demagogues

The firing of Tucker Carlson by the Fox Corporation is a peculiarly American kind of denouement. A person born into wealth and influence, pushes, scrambles, and bullies to secure more of each, convinced they are his birthright. This being the United States, he quickly discovers that the best way to gain a mass following and the rewards that come with it is to embrace nativism or fascism. He does so and rises to a pinnacle of influence. But just as quickly as he rose to atmospheric heights, he falls back to earth like Icarus, punished for flying too close to the sun. That’s the fictional Charles Foster Kane and Willie Stark, and the TV personality Tucker Carlson, recently made redundant by Rupert Murdoch.

Narratives about demagogues comprise a significant sub-genre of American cinema. They include Citizen Kane (1941), All the King’s Men (1949), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Elmer Gantry (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). All were directed by progressive directors schooled in the communist or Popular Front politics of the Great Depression and supported by an industry that allowed (up to a point) social justice concerns into screenplays. These films were more formally ambitious than standard Hollywood fare, with significant use of experimental and documentary-style devices, including montage, double-exposure, agitated or hand-held camera-work, and voice-overs that provide a critical meta-narrative.

Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, director, 1941. Screen shot.

Citizen Kane, the first great exemplar of the “demagogue-genre”, is exceptional by virtue of its foundation in European modernism. It deploys filmic devices learned from German Expressionism, the Soviet avant-garde, and Surrealism. It’s protagonist, however, modeled on William Randolph Hearst (among others), is typical Hollywood fare in that his politics are muddled in order not to alienate studio heads or potential audiences.

Welles was a lifelong man of the left and crusader for civil rights, listed in Red Channels, the anti-communist pamphlets published in the early ‘50s. But his film focusses more on bildung, the psychological formation of Kane, and his eventual self-destruction, than it does on ideology. Reared by a guardian concerned about his wealth but not his emotional well-being, Kane never understood how to love or be loved. The last word he uttered was “Rosebud,” the name of the sled he owned as a seven-year-old, before he was given over to the care of his guardian. Citizen Kane is not about the anti-union or anti-communist activities of Hearst, his early approval of Hitler and Mussolini, or his bankrolling the red scare that eventually swept up Hollywood writers and directors like Welles himself in the late ‘40s early 1950s. It’s about lonliness.

The second film mentioned above, and a model for the rest that followed, was All the King’s Men, directed by Robert Rossen and starring Broderick Crawford. While it too lacks political incisiveness — for which reason it was condemned by the Los Angeles Communist Party and The Daily Worker — it was sufficiently potent in its callout of American fascism that it cost its director dearly.

The story, based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren, concerns a demagogic politician, named Willie Stark who rises from humble origins to become governor of an unnamed state in the U.S. South. (The fictional character was loosely based upon populist Louisiana governor Huey Long.) Initially driven by a desire to help the downtrodden, he becomes ever more selfish, corrupt, and power mad as he rises in office. By the end of the film, he has sacrificed everything and everyone he ever cared about, including his adopted son Tommy, for the sake of power. Facing impeachment, Willie repeatedly tells his followers: “It’s not me they are after, it’s you.” A voiceover adds: “Willie knew that if you shout long enough, loud enough, and often enough, people start to believe you.”

That narration may have been Rossen’s political undoing. It invoked Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation… in the primitive simplicity of their minds, more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”  In 1951 and again in 1953, Rossen, a Jew and former member of the Communist Party, was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of communists in the film industry. During his first appearance, he refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted. Two years later, he acceded to HUAC and studio demands and named 57 Hollywood actors, directors, and screenwriters as communists. He got his career back and later directed Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961) for which both director and actor were nominated for Academy Awards. He died in 1966 at age 57, planning a return to the socially conscious filmmaking of his youth.

American fascism

Films belonging to the demagogue genre, as we have seen, were based on biographic and historical facts. But the films left some important ones out: Fascist demagogues did not arise suddenly in the 1930s; they were part of a long, ignoble American tradition. The first American fascists were plantation owners who put their most valuable commodities — Black human beings — to work picking cotton, harvesting sugar cane, and generally building the wealth that allowed a new nation to compete in a global, capitalist market. Later, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, some fascists proudly sported white robes and hoods. They posed for snapshots at lynchings, wrote about the “Lost Cause,” applauded Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), and published books titled The Passing of the Great Race (Madison Grant, 1916) and The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (Lothrop Stoddard, 1920). These books deeply influenced Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler himself. American fascists were not mere epigones – they were the avant-garde of fascism.

By the mid 1930s, links between American, German, and Italian fascism were clear. Dozens of U.S. organizations, including The Black Legion and the German-American Bund espoused Nazi principles and trumpeted hatred for Blacks and Jews. In 1936, Father Charles Coughlin, a popular radio personality, proclaimed “I take the road of fascism.” At the peak of his influence in 1932-34, he had as many as 30 million radio listeners per week in a nation of 120 million. Just a small minority of them, as Philip Roth wrote in The Plot Against America, listened in horror.

In 1940, the isolationist and anti-Semitic “America First” Committee was formed by Charles Lindberg. The slogan was already well known. It had been used by nativists, xenophobes, and eugenicists for more than 20 years and even adorned banners carried by the KKK. It signaled

Charles Lindberg’s address at America First rally, Manhattan Center, April 24, 1941. Screen shot.

support for European fascism. At an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, Lindberg uttered a not so veiled threat to American Jews who supported U.S. entry into the war:

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration…. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”

“Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

A few months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and Japan, the America First movement began to collapse. The public saw Lindberg and his followers as unpatriotic at best and traitors at worst. Formerly sympathetic politicians now gave them the cold shoulder. But the demurral was not permanent.

Trump and Carlson

In 2016, fascism returned to the U.S. in the person of Donald Trump. He repeated the phrase “America First” like it was a mantra. It was a major theme in his first inaugural address; it became inscribed in national security documents and was trumpeted in his annual budget proposals. Nevertheless, Trump consistently supported large increases in military spending in preparation for foreign interventions. Alongside his pseudo-isolationism came nativism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and denigration of democracy. He rejected a free press, the rule of law, and an interest-free bureaucracy which he called “the deep state.” The Republican Party, of which Trump was titular head, proclaimed: “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

With the enthusiastic cooperation of Rupert Murdoch, Trump established Fox News as a quasi-official propaganda office while attacking journalists elsewhere as “enemies of the people.” Tucker Carlson became Trump’s Goebbels, his unofficial propaganda minister. The two shared both ideas and rhetorical strategies. One of these was “the Great Replacement Theory,” the idea that illegal immigration into the U.S. was abetted by Democratic politicians and their supporters for the purpose of replacing “legacy Americans”, as Carlson put it, with “more obedient voters from the third world.” It’s an idea that dates to the “racial suicide” theory deployed by racist and eugenicist opponents of Irish Catholic, Italian and Eastern European immigration in the late 19^th century. (The term “legacy Americans” comes from the white supremacist website VDARE.)

On his former platform, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the broadcaster spoke about racial replacement more than 400 hundred times, according to a NYTimes tally in 2022. Here are a few examples:

“[Democrats] can either embrace the issues the middle-class cares about, or they can import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they’ll never lose again.”

“Dramatic demographic change means many Americans don’t recognize where they grew up.”

“As with illegal immigration, the long-term agenda of refugee resettlement is to bring in future Democratic voters.”

“Illegal immigrants are the key to their power.”

Trump didn’t need coaxing from Carlson to deploy replacement and other white supremacist themes in his speeches, ads and tweets. He has used such language since his early days in the real estate business in New York City. But since 2016, the rhetoric has been supercharged as many observers have documented. He has referred to Muslims as “invaders”, decried immigration from Black, “shithole” countries, and called Mexican migrants rapists. At a rally last year, Trump pledged to “take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white” The Wikipedia page dedicated to “Racial Views of Donald Trump” extends to more than 32,000 words, including 457 endnotes; it’s not happy reading.

The address of demagogues

In All the King’s Men, as noted earlier, Willie deploys direct-address (second person speech) to rally his followers. “It’s not me they are after, it’s you.” The purpose of such rhetoric is to seize listeners’ attention and encourage them to feel a personal connection to the speaker. Willie’s specific aim is to make his followers so closely identify with him, that they will feel that an attack on him – in this case impeachment — is an attack on them. It’s what Trump did during his own impeachments and his address at on January 6 prior to the insurrection: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Direct-address is Carlson’s veritable trademark:

“They want to control what you do.”

“They care more about identity politics than they do about your life.”

“They care more about preventing a border wall than they do about raising your wages.”

“They care about Afghans far more than they care about you.”

“They Hate you.”

“They want to hurt you.”

NYTimes reporters have documented how Tucker Carlson, like “populist or authoritarian leaders” deploys the language of “they/you” to establish “emotional connections” with their followers. The “they” is frequently “the ruling class,” an ever-shifting population of Democrats, liberals, Black people, LGBTQ activists, capitalists (especially George Soros) , gun control advocates, communists, the Clintons, media executives, and Silicon Valley billionaires. Like prior generations of fascists and national socialists, Carlson co-ops the language of the left – “the ruling class” – to construe his audience as victims whom he alone can rescue.

Now Carlson is off the air, but that offers only partial solace. Unlike previous fascists and demagogues, including Coughlin, Lindberg, Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Carlson was not rejected by a cross section or Americans or elected politicians. It was not his racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQ bias, or conspiratorialism that got him booted off Fox. It was his off-camera vulgarity, disrespect for Fox executives and the Murdoch family and exposure of the Fox Corporation to expensive legal settlements.  Deprived of his large and loyal audience on cable TV (he was earlier fired by CNN and MSNBC), his best option for regaining it is politics. The question is only whether he will chart his course according to the star of Donald Trump (vice presidential candidate?) or some other demagogue, real or fictional.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015) and other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit,  Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe have just published American Fascism, Still for Rotland Press. He can be reached at: s-eisenman@northwestern.edu

Unravelling DNA’s structure: a landmark achievement whose authors were not fairly credited

The Conversation
April 28, 2023

Digital illustration of DNA (Shutterstock.com)

Seventy years ago, two male scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, proclaimed they had discovered the secret of life: the structure of DNA. Since then, history has acknowledged how Rosalind Franklin was sidelined. But new archive evidence has cast doubt on the widely accepted narrative – that Franklin collected an all-important image but didn’t appreciate the meaning of what she was looking at.

This knowledge of DNA allowed for a deeper understanding of how DNA stores information and how it is replicated. It led to technologies such as DNA fingerprinting, gene sequencing, gene editing and personalized medicines.

For most of the past 70 years the names Watson and Crick have been synonymous with DNA. But scientific discoveries are rarely the result of a few individuals. Most breakthroughs happen through collaboration. The story of DNA is no exception.

The structure of DNA discovery was actually described in a series of three papers. And the three papers were the result of direct input from seven authors: Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alec Stokes, Herbert Wilson, James Watson and Francis Crick.

Nevertheless she persisted

Franklin suffered dreadfully from the endemic sexism of the time. In Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix he frequently disparages Franklin, making negative comments about her appearance, her feminist principles and her emotions. In one passage Watson writes: “Given her belligerent moods, it would be difficult for Maurice Wilkins to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA.”

Franklin, along with her PhD student Raymond Gosling, created one of the most famous images in science. It was a photograph generated by shining x-rays through a crystal of DNA, using a technique called x-ray crystallography. The image is known as Photo 51, and it contained critical information on the physical dimensions of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin. 1955. From the personal collection of Jenifer Glynn

The story goes that the image was shown to Watson, without Franklin’s knowledge or permission. In his book Watson tells how seeing the image triggered a eureka moment, during which the helical structure of DNA became obvious to him. This narrative (which has been retold by popular articles and a stage play featuring Nicole Kidman) portrays Franklin as a victim of intellectual property theft, but implies she did not understand the implications of her data. Given Franklin was a skilled X-ray crystallographer while Watson was a relative newcomer to the field, this seems unlikely.




Photo 51: X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, taken in 1952 by Raymond Gosling \ Raymond Gosling/King's College London

While researching biographies on Watson and Crick, Matthew Cobb (professor of zoology) and Nathaniel Comfort (professor of the history of medicine) unearthed a draft news article for Time magazine from 1953, never published, which hints at a different set of events. A description of the article and other newly discovered letters was published in the journal Nature, 70 years to the day after the original DNA papers appeared in the same journal.

Things could have been different

The draft news article, written in consultation with Franklin, portrays the DNA work as being carried out through an equal collaboration between two teams. One based in King College London, which included Wilkins and Franklin. The other in the Cavendish laboratories, Cambridge, comprised of Watson and Crick. The London team collected experimental data, whilst the Cambridge duo used the information to build a structural model.

The article describes an exchange of information, including Franklin “checking the Cavendish model against her own x-rays’ data”. In this narrative Franklin is an equal member of a group of four leading scientists. Cobb and Comfort speculate that Franklin probably wasn’t happy with the way the science in the Time draft was communicated, and so it never made it to press.

Unlocking the role of DNA

Given what we now know about DNA’s central role in biology it is difficult to imagine a time when we did not credit it with carrying our genetic blueprints. However, scientists used to think proteins were responsible.

Changing this view was crucial. Without an understanding of DNA’s role in biology Watson and Crick would not have been at all interested in DNA.

Another overlooked voice is that of Florence Bell. In 1939 she was a PhD student at the University of Leeds, a position that was so unusual that when Bell presented her work at a conference, the Yorkshire Evening News ran an article with the headline “Woman scientist explains”.

She produced the first x-ray images of DNA. The images were lower resolution than those made by the King College team. However they did reveal DNA’s regular structure and provided key dimensions of the molecule. Bell’s work also gave her an inkling of DNA’s critical role in biology. In her PhD thesis she wrote, “the beginnings of life are closely associated with the interaction of proteins and nucleic acids.”

The experiment that settled the debate was performed by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase in 1952. They used bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, to show that DNA, not proteins, carried genetic information.

When Hershey died in 1997, James Watson penned a memorial article in which he wrote “the Hershey-Chase experiment … made me ever more certain that finding the three-dimensional structure of DNA was biology’s next important objective.”

Taking the credit

Unlike their male colleagues, neither Franklin, Chase nor Bell reaped the benefits of their groundbreaking science. Hershey, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins all received Nobel prizes. The male authors of the 1953 DNA paper enjoyed long careers in academia. But Chase only had a brief spell as a researcher before losing her job, for reasons that are unclear. Bell married a US serviceman and emigrated to the US. Florence Bell died in 2000, Martha Chase in 2003. Their deaths went largely unnoticed.

Franklin’s achievements were cut short by her death from ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37.

Franklin, Bell and Chase are far from the only women whose contributions to science are underappreciated. In the 1940s, Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau designed the first commercial penicillin production plant. Working in her kitchen in 1891 Agnes Pockels worked out fundamental principles of how soaps behave. And Elizabeth Fulhame introduced to science the concept of catalysis, 40 years before its “discovery” by Jons Jakob Berzelius in 1835.

Much has changed since 1953. However, women are still massively underrepresented in the higher echelons of science. Much more is still to be done.

Mark Lorch, Professor of Science Communication and Chemistry, University of Hull

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

Christian group plans to ‘ambush’ Satanic Temple Convention: report

Gideon Rubin
April 28, 2023

Image of Baphomet from the Satanic Temple website 

(https://thesatanictemple.com/)

The Satanic Temple plans to hold its 10th anniversary celebration in Boston this weekend and several Christian groups have promised to protest the “SatanCon” gathering, one of which said it plans to “ambush” the event, Newsweek reports.

The Satanic Temple doesn’t worship Satan but rather uses its status as a religious group to “reject tyrannical authority,” according to the report.

The “largest Satanic gathering in history” began Friday at Boston Marriott Copley Place.

A group of Christian activists plans to hold a “counter-response” it’s calling “Revive Boston” on the same days as SatanCon, the group’s leader, Dr. Jaymz Sideras, said in a YouTube video.

"While they think they are coming to ambush Boston, little do they know that God has planned to ambush them," Sideras said.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston plans to respond to SatanCon with "intense prayer," the report said.

"At the direction of the cardinal [Sean O'Malley], we are approaching it through a response balanced and focused on prayer," archdiocese spokesman Terrence Donilon said.

According to its website, the Temple does not believe in “the existence of Satan or the supernatural.”

“The Satanic Temple believes that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.”

The group also said it does not promote “evil.”

“The Satanic Temple holds to the basic premise that undue suffering is bad, and that which reduces suffering is good,” the group said on its website.

“We do not believe in symbolic “evil.” We acknowledge blasphemy is a legitimate expression of personal independence from counter-productive traditional norms.”

Missouri lawsuit isn’t the only defamation case against far-right site Gateway Pundit

Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent
April 29, 2023, 

Screengrab.

Soon after the 2020 election, Eric Coomer’s name started trending on Twitter, often accompanied with the hashtag #ArrestEricCoomer.

At the time, he was living in Colorado and working as director of product security for Dominion Voting Systems, the company ensnared in unfounded election fraud conspiracies following former President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.

Coomer found himself at the center of the conspiracy after a right-wing podcaster named Joseph Oltmann claimed without evidence that he’d infiltrated an antifa conference call in which a Dominion employee named Eric allegedly said: “Trump is not gonna win. I made f-ing sure of that.”

A series of Coomer’s Facebook posts making disparaging comments about Trump soon surfaced, including a satirical manifesto that he didn’t write that was signed by “antifa.”

Oltmann’s theory was picked up by other right-wing media and shared on Twitter by one of Trump’s sons. It eventually found its way to the St. Louis-based the Gateway Pundit, which published a story that also included a 2016 video of Coomer presenting the security features of Dominion’s systems.

One of Gateway Pundit’s early stories about Coomer appeared under the headline: “WAKE UP AMERICA! Bold Billionaire Offers $1 Million Bounty for Dominion’s, Eric Coomer’s Comeuppance.”

Coomer said the accusations led to death threats and harassment, driving him into hiding. So in December 2020 he filed a defamation lawsuit in Colorado against the Trump campaign, two of its lawyers and myriad right-wing media figures who helped spread the conspiracy — including the Gateway Pundit.

The far-right site founded in St. Louis by twin brothers Jim and Joe Hoft has been at the forefront of election fraud conspiracies, rising in influence alongside Trump to become what Missouri’s attorney general called “one of the most influential online voices in the country.”

But as lawsuits began piling up against purveyors of election lies in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 loss, the Gateway Pundit was not immune.

A judge in Colorado rejected a motion to dismiss Coomer’s lawsuit last year, concluding the case should proceed to trial because evidence shows defendants engaged in “the deliberate spread of dangerous and inflammatory political disinformation designed to sow distrust in democratic institutions.”

That ruling is being appealed.

The Independent reported last week about the Gateway Pundit being sued for defamation in St. Louis by a pair of Georgia election workers who say debunked stories about their involvement in voter fraud subjected them to threats of violence, many tinged with racial slurs.

A hearing in that case is scheduled for next month in St. Louis Circuit Court, though the Hofts filed a countersuit claiming that they are the ones being defamed.

In both cases, plaintiffs are not only asking for monetary damages but for Gateway Pundit to remove stories considered defamatory from its website and social media platforms.

“These lawsuits are the only remedy left for people,” said Daxton Stewart, a journalism professor specializing in media law at Texas Christian University. “They feel like it’s the only way they’re gonna get a chance to be made whole, or to at least call some attention to the suffering that they faced.”

‘Shocking patchwork quilt of baseless attacks’

The Gateway Pundit has long been known for trumpeting debunked conspiracies on a wide range of topics, from the 2018 Parkland school shooting to former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It’s helped proliferate lies about the brutal attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and made false claims about U.S. aid money sent to Ukraine.

Jim Hoft was banned from Twitter last year after repeatedly promoting falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election, though he was reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the social media company. Hoft is now a co-plaintiff in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit alleging the federal government colluded with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech.

In appealing the Colorado judge’s ruling last year that the case should go to trial, Hoft’s attorneys argued that the Gateway Pundit did not act with “actual malice” in its coverage of Oltmann’s claims.

That is the legal standard set in the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, which found public officials must establish actual malice — or reckless disregard of the truth — before recovering defamation damages.

Hoft’s attorneys also wrote in their appeal that “numerous aspects of Mr. Oltmann’s accounts were supported by available evidence.” And during an August 2021 deposition in the lawsuit, Hoft was asked if he believes Coomer influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“We believe that’s possible,” he said.

Coomer has flatly denied any of the allegations he’s faced, calling Gateway Pundit’s stories about him “a shocking patchwork quilt of baseless attacks.”

He states in his lawsuit that he has no knowledge of the alleged “Antifa Conference Call” and did not make the comments falsely attributed to him. And he “did not take actions to subvert the presidential election as defendants falsely allege.”

The dueling cases against Gateway Pundit are playing out soon after Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million for promoting phony claims that it rigged the 2020 presidential election by flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden.

And while Fox News’ deep pockets have allowed it to avoid a public apology, other smaller conservative outlets haven’t had that option.

Newsmax was dropped from Coomer’s lawsuit in April 2021 after it apologized and aired a statement that it had found no evidence that the accusations made against him by Trump’s team and supporters were true.

One America News Network settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the Georgia election workers last year, agreeing to say on air that there was “no widespread voter fraud” in Georgia in 2020 and that the plaintiffs “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and Twitter.

Major hurricanes expected to increase in 2023, researchers forecast

Siri Chilukuri, Grist
April 28, 2023

Hurricane Ian / Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)
This story was originally published by Grist. 

Researchers at the University of Arizona, whose computer model has since 2014 accurately predicted hurricane activity, are calling for a very active hurricane season in 2023, after two years of relative calm. Of nine hurricanes forecast for the period between June and November, five are expected to be “major.”

Forecasters are predicting activity similar to the 2017 hurricane season, which saw Maria, Harvey, and Irma make landfall to devastating effect. Though fewer hurricanes overall are expected to make landfall this year, the number of major hurricanes like Maria is expected to be roughly the same.

Major hurricanes refer to those classified as Category 3 and above, with wind speeds up to 150 miles per hour. The average number of major hurricanes per year is two.

A big contributor to a more active hurricane season is hotter ocean temperatures and rising sea levels, according to Xubin Zeng, a researcher at the University of Arizona who leads the forecasts each year.

“With global warming there will be more water vapor over oceans, and water vapor is a fuel for hurricanes,” said Zeng. “That means on average we expect to see more hurricane activity, not necessarily in terms of the [total] number but in terms of the major hurricanes.”

Another phenomenon impacting hurricane season is hotter-than-average ocean-surface temperatures that can create ideal conditions for a hurricane to form.

In addition, rising sea levels are impacting storm surges, when fast-moving storms push a wall of water onto the shore, which dramatically increases the chances of flooding. A 2020 study from the journal Nature projected that by 2100, 68 percent of coastal flooding will be caused by tides and storms.

Zeng noted that with a potentially active hurricane season, federal and local government agencies have an important role to play. Forecasts like Zeng’s are crucial for the emergency management agencies that provide critical services to people living in affected areas.

Additionally, Zeng noted that people who live on the coast and in the path of hurricanes should be aware of the increasing threats to their home and property as climate change progresses. With a potentially more dangerous hurricane season approaching the East and Gulf coasts, people need to prepare, said Zeng.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Fed points finger at Trump-era rollback for SVB demise

By Douglas Gillison

Reuters
April 28, 2023

(Reuters) - The Federal Reserve on Friday blamed the deregulatory zeal that occurred during the Trump era for contributing to the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, appearing to take a clear stand on an acrimonious policy divide in Washington.

Amid the turmoil that Silicon Valley Bank's implosion unleashed on the financial system last month, some Republicans and industry advocates have argued strenuously that a 2018 roll-back of post-financial-crisis safeguards was not to blame.

But the Fed's searing 100-page post mortem says bipartisan legislation in 2018 loosened post-financial crisis safeguards, undermining oversight by hindering the work of bank supervisors and encouraging the capital weakness that ultimately proved fatal to SVB.

Greg Baer, president of the Bank Policy Institute, a lobby group, said the Fed had blamed the 2018 changes when the results of its own review showed "the fundamental misjudgments made by its examination teams."

According to the Fed, SVB's management bore significant blame and bank examiners also made grave missteps. The report, however, also pointed to the Fed's vice chair for supervision at the time, without naming him, for creating what it said was a culture of weak and lax supervision that favored inaction.

Randal Quarles, who was appointed to the Fed by President Donald Trump in 2017, oversaw the Fed's bank supervision until his resignation in 2021.

Quarles did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. The Federal Reserve did not offer any further comment on criticism of its report and actions.

The report appeared only to harden long-set policy positions.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who serves on the Senate Banking Committee and has led post-crisis reforms to rein in financial sector excesses, said the report "clearly identified" 2018 legislation among the "major contributors" to SVB's demise.

Patrick McHenry, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, blasted the Fed report as a "thinly veiled attempt" to justify positions like those of Warren.

In 2018, a significant number of Senate Democrats joined all Republicans in rolling back key provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms enacted after the global financial crisis. Among other things, the new law raised the threshold at which the most intensive oversight is required to $250 billion in assets, from $50 billion, a key point cited in the report.

The reforms ultimately meant looser regulation and lower capital requirements at precisely the wrong time, according to the report.

"While higher supervisory and regulatory requirements may not have prevented the firm's failure, they would likely have bolstered the resilience of Silicon Valley Bank," the report said.

The collapse of SVB and Signature Bank last month burned a $23 billion hole in a government fund for deposit insurance, which officials are preparing to recoup in special fees expected to fall most heavily on the largest U.S. banks.

It was unclear on Friday whether the Fed report made it more likely lawmakers could ultimately undo 2018's deregulation, with a narrowly divided Congress consumed by a battle over raising the government's borrowing limit to avert a default on U.S. sovereign debt in the coming months.

According to the report, the 2018 law caused the Fed to raise the supervisory threshold for large banks, i.e. those smaller than the "global systemically important banks," to $100 billion in assets from $50 billion -- delaying stricter oversight of SVB "by at least three years."

Had SVB been subject to the capital and liquidity requirements that existed before, the report said, SVB "may have more proactively managed its liquidity and capital positions or maintained a different balance sheet composition."

(Reporting by Douglas Gillison, Hannah Lang, Chris Prentice and Lananh Nguyen; editing by Megan Davies and Leslie Adler)

GOP bill aims to protect 'God-given role' of parents in education

THAT'S NOT A LIBERTARIAN POSITION
William Oster, Colorado Newsline
April 29, 2023

(Shutterstock.com)

A committee will hold a hearing next Monday over a Republican-sponsored “parent’s bill of rights” resolution seeking to amend the Colorado state Constitution through a 2024 ballot measure that advocates warn would harm LGBTQ+ children.

House Resolution 23-1004, titled “Fundamental Rights For Parents,” would ask Colorado voters to approve a wide-ranging measure granting parents more explicit rights relating to the education and care of their children, including oversight over school records, control over medical decisions, and consent in writing for any sort of medical procedure.

The proposed amendment’s primary focus is on education, where it would require a district’s board of education to craft policy that would allow for parent participation in school and objection to specific areas of curriculum taught in classes on the basis of it violating a parents’ personal belief in sex, morality or religion.

Rep. Brandi Bradley, a Littleton Republican who is the sole sponsor for the bill, has posted messages on Facebook asking supporters to sign up to testify, arguing that parents should have more oversight in protecting children.

“It’s their God-given role,” Bradley said in one post.

The bill has been met with opposition from LGBTQ rights groups like One Colorado, which argues that the bill is seeking to control what children can learn and how they choose to identify.

“This resolution is an overstep that will restrict the rights of young people and suppress information if it does not fit within a narrow view of the world,” Gillian Ford, communication director of One Colorado, said in a statement. “Our country is facing a mental health crisis and young people, especially LGBTQ+ young people, need support and access to resources more than ever. HCR23-1004 would cause irreparable harm by amending the Colorado constitution to favor censorship and invasion of privacy over basic rights.”

The Fundamental Rights For Parents bill resembles similar legislation from GOP lawmakers in other states targeting childhood education in an attempt to limit certain rhetoric and policies in school curricula. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Parents Bill of Rights, which in addition to allowing parents to review curriculum, would allow them to inspect books and other library materials. With Democrats still in control of the U.S. Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass.

While Bradley’s measure is largely identical to bills in other states targeting education, the Fundamental Rights for Parents bill also focuses on a parent’s ability to decide on health care for children. While not explicitly targeting transgender students like other bills this session, the proposed legislation would require a parent’s written or verbal consent for the “performance of surgical procedure upon a minor child.”

Similar “parents’ rights” bills have been proposed by Republicans in the 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022 legislative sessions, with each failing to pass committee hearings.

As a legislatively referred constitutional amendment, the bill would need to pass the House and Senate, where it would then be approved by a 55% majority of voters in the 2024 general election. With the State, Civic, Military Affairs Committee known loosely by Capitol insiders as a “kill” committee, holding the hearing, the bill has virtually no chance of being approved.

The hearing and testimony for the Fundamental Rights of Parents bill is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. Monday.


Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

New Zealand fights to save its flightless national bird

Agence France-Presse
April 29, 2023, 7:19 AM ET

New Zealand's flightless birds such as the kiwi were decimated by introduced predators that accompanied the arrival of humans © Marty MELVILLE / AFP


New Zealand's treasured kiwi birds are shuffling around Wellington's verdant hills for the first time in a century, after a drive to eliminate invasive predators from the capital's surrounds.

Visitors to New Zealand a millennium ago would have encountered a bona fide "birdtopia" -- islands teeming with feathered creatures fluttering through life unaware that mammalian predators existed.

The arrival of Polynesian voyagers in the 1200s and Europeans a few hundred years later changed all that.

Rats picked off snipe-rails and petrels, mice chewed through all the seeds and berries they could find, leaving little for native birds to peck on.

Possums -- introduced for fur -- stripped trees bare. Rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, devouring meadows and paddocks alike.

Heaping disaster upon disaster, stoats were introduced to kill the rabbits but instead killed wrens, thrushes, owls and quails.

The population of native flightless birds like the kakapo and kiwi plummeted.

The Department of Conservation estimates there are only around 70,000 wild kiwi left in New Zealand.

Despite the bird being a beloved national symbol, few New Zealanders have seen one in the wild.

However, numbers are rising again thanks to more than 90 community initiatives working nationwide to protect them.

One such group is The Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust backed by millions of dollars from government grants and private donations.
Special connection

"Ever since people came to New Zealand, we have had a special connection to the kiwi," founder and project leader Paul Ward told AFP.

"They are central to Maori myth. Our sports teams, our rugby league teams, our defense force and, even when we go overseas, we are known as kiwis.

"They are tough, resilient, adaptable, all values we think of as New Zealanders, but most of us have never seen a kiwi before."

Ward estimates wild kiwi last roamed the Wellington area more than a century ago.

The bid to save them required a sustained conservation effort.

The project had to first deal with the kiwi's natural enemies prowling through the undergrowth.

Local dog owners were invited to sessions to teach their pets to steer clear of kiwi while out for walks.

The project also had to declare war on stoats.

An adult kiwi can fight off a stoat using its powerful legs and sharp claws but a chick has no chance, Ward explained.

The project laid a huge network of 4,500 traps over an area equivalent to nearly 43,000 football pitches on the hills surrounding Wellington. The traps have claimed 1,000 stoats so far.


After "blitzing stoats", as Ward puts it, the predator population was low enough for the project to release the first batch of kiwi last November.

The birds were carefully transported nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) from a captive breeding program to a Wellington school, where they were welcomed by a traditional Maori ceremony.

Ward said a hush came over the 400-strong crowd as they caught their first glimpse of a kiwi when the first bird was released.

Rare sightings

"The power of that moment was palpable," he said. "Our job is to bottle that and spread it across the hills of Wellington."

Regular check-ups show that the first wave is thriving.

"Two months after we released the birds, we were ecstatic to discover they had gained weight," Ward said.

"One had put on 400 grams -- that's a considerable weight gain even for a human over Christmas or Easter. There's plenty of food for them on these hillsides."

Ward said the goal is to release 250 birds over the next five years to establish a large wild kiwi population.

He wants their distinctive shrill cry to become part of everyday life on the outskirts of the capital.

"It's our duty to look after the animal that's gifted us its name," Ward said.

"As one of our volunteers said, 'if we can't look after the thing we're named after we deserve to be renamed idiots'."

© 2023 AFP

Anti-abortion legal strategy revives Comstock moral purity laws of late 1800s

Elisha Brown, Florida Phoenix
April 28, 2023

Protesters demonstrate in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on the morning that the court took up a major abortion case focusing on whether a Texas law that imposes strict regulations on abortion doctors and clinic buildings interferes with the constitutional right of a woman to end her pregnancy in Washington 

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

When officials in a small New Mexico city sued the governor and attorney general over their ordinance placing restrictions on abortion clinics earlier this month, they argued that a late 19th century federal anti-obscenity law superseded state law. In March, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a measure prohibiting public entities from interfering with reproductive and gender-affirming care access.

It was the latest legal challenge to abortion access to lean on the Comstock Act of 1873, federal statutes that ban the mailing of anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious” or considered morally impure, including abortifacients or abortion-related materials. The plaintiffs in the high-profile Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the key abortion pill mifepristone, cited the act in legal arguments, asking the court to find the 150-year-old law makes it illegal to send abortion pills through the mail.

But in December, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion for the U.S. Postal Service stating that federal law does “not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully. Because there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion, the mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.’’

The campaign launched by abortion opponents to revive the Comstock Act is working: Recent court rulings in the abortion pill case suggest the dormant law can be applied today

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk referenced the act earlier this month in revoking FDA approval of mifepristone, a decision immediately appealed to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Defendants rely heavily on the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) Memo that purports to establish this ‘consensus.’ But none of the cases cited in the OLC Memo support the view that the Comstock Act bars the mailing of abortion drugs only when the sender has the specific intent that the drugs be used unlawfully,” Kacsmaryk wrote. He found that the FDA’s decision to allow abortion pills to be mailed violated the act.

The conservative-leaning appellate court in Louisiana also appeared skeptical of the federal government’s argument that the Gilded Age law is irrelevant. “The plain text does not require that a user of the mails or common interstate carriage intend that an abortion actually occur. Rather, a user of those shipping channels violates the plain text merely by knowingly making use of the mail for a prohibited abortion item,” the Fifth Circuit wrote. (The U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on lower courts’ rulings last week while the appeals process plays out in court, leaving the ability to access the pill in place.)

Legal and historical experts told States Newsroom the statutes – named after the moral purist Anthony Comstock – could be the next major legal argument used by the anti-abortion movement in the courts to restrict abortion and reproductive health care. “No court has really determined what is the enforceability and scope of the Comstock Act,” said Rachel Rebouché, Temple University Beasley School of Law dean.

“We’re going to see this head right back to the Supreme Court,” Rebouché said.
Who was Anthony Comstock?

Anthony Comstock was a Connecticut native affiliated with Congregationalists, a devout sect of Christianity descended from the Puritans, according to Amy Werbel, a cultural historian and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who wrote the 2018 book Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock.

“They were true believers in the sense that if one wasn’t saved properly as they thought, they would burn in hell. And I think that’s really important to understand – that the root of all of these laws is even Christianity, the desire to save the souls of Americans through the lens of their own religious framework. And that also then will be motivated by this idea of Christian nationalism,” Werbel said.

Comstock spent his life spreading his view of moral superiority. Congregationalists believed that sex was a sin and people should only have intercourse for procreation, Werbel said. After serving in the Civil War – many Northern fundamentalists were abolitionists – Comstock and others turned to other tactics to sanctify the nation. “An abortion also wasn’t seen as a sin because it was the death of a person. It was seen as taking away the punishment for sex” because procreation was the sole purpose of intercourse, Werbel explained.

His crusade eventually influenced Congress, who named the 1873 anti-obscenity laws after him, she said. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act into law in March 1873. First-time violators faced up to five years in prison. The federal government soon hired Comstock to serve as a Post Office special agent.

“After 1873, Comstock goes all over the country,” Werbel said. “He goes to state capitals. He’s always bringing suitcases of contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, pornographic photographs. And [he] spread them out for people to look at, then they pass the legislation, express their horror.”

The act was weakened in the 20th century after a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court ruling,1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut, which found the state law banning contraception was unconstitutional and violated the right to privacy, according to legal experts. Six years later, Congress removed restrictions on contraception and birth-control information from the act, wrote Joanna L. Grossman, a Southern Methodist University law professor, and Lawrence M. Friedman, a Stanford Law School professor.

But a version of the law is still on the books – Congress never repealed it.

Culturally, the newfound interest in the late-19th century anti-obscenity codes revives a stunted view of sexual morality, said Priscilla Smith, a Yale Law School professor and director of the Information Society Project’s study of reproductive justice program. “They’re rooted in archaic views of women’s sexual expression and their subservient role in the family. They really were designed to control women’s sexual activity.”

“All of these things go together,” Werbel said. “The suppression of teaching about LGBTQ history, the suppression of access to abortifacients. All of these things go to this belief that is also woven into this particular Christian evangelical idea: God creates Adam, woman is born from man, and I’m just going flat out say it – a white man has dominion over all else in the world, including women.”
New Mexico ordinance cases cite Comstock

The New Mexico lawsuit, filed on April 17 in the Fifth Judicial District Court County of Lea, stems from the city of Eunice’s recently enacted ordinance requiring abortion clinics to comply with Comstock.

The ordinance is part of the so-called Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn campaign, started by Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, whose mission has been to ban abortion across the nation city by city. The initiative started in Texas and has spread to other states.

The New Mexico Supreme Court recently suspended similar ordinances in Hobbs and Clovis, Source NM reported. And the town of Edgewood just passed a parallel ordinance, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

“The problem that the New Mexico attorney general has really isn’t with these ordinances; it’s with these laws that were passed by Congress in 1873,” Dickson told States Newsroom. “Even if the New Mexico Supreme Court were to rule against us, that would actually be a great opportunity to take this before the Supreme Court of the United States. And I do not believe the Supreme Court of the United States would hold the same opinion as the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that the Biden administration put forth.”

Attorneys for Eunice – two local lawyers and former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of a bounty-style six-week abortion ban – argued that city ordinances and the Comstock Act take precedence over state laws, according to the complaint. “Federal law imposes criminal liability on every person who ships or receives abortion pills or abortion-related paraphernalia through the mail, an express service, a common carrier, or an interactive computer service,” they said.

They also claim distributing abortion pills is a violation under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Therefore, abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood, employees, volunteers and donors face civil and criminal penalties, the suit said.

“I think the argument is that RICO provides a civil cause of action against people who are violating civil law,” Rebouché said. “RICO is a hook to prosecuting people under civil litigation for their conspiracy to violate federal law. It’s just another way to try to breathe life into Comstock.”

Last week, New Mexico Attorney General Torrez argued that the local government ordinances exceed their authority and are unconstitutional, according to a brief filed to the state Supreme Court.

“Our brief demonstrates that the counties and cities violated the state constitution and state law when they passed their ordinances to restrict abortion care and undermine women’s reproductive rights,” Torrez said in a statement. “Further, our briefing provides analysis into House Bill 7 which reinforces our argument that local governments cannot regulate abortion clinics and reproductive healthcare.”

Eunice officials want a judgment that the act is fully enforceable, after the Dobbs decision overturned the federal right to abortion. They urged the court to ban abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia through the mail.

Arguments referencing Comstock target early abortions, according to Smith, the Yale professor. Medication abortion is approved by the FDA for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Besides abortion pills, devices called tenaculums and vacuum aspiration equipment are needed in surgical abortions. Even though 14 states ban most abortions, there are still exceptions in some states to save the life of the mother or terminate an ectopic pregnancy, for example.

“It’s ridiculous to say that abortion remains legal in many states around the country, and yet you can’t deliver equipment and medications used to perform abortions through mail carriers,” Smith said. “How else are you going to get the equipment there? That’s like saying it’s legal to take Viagra, but nobody can send it to pharmacies or doctors around the country.”

Sofia Resnick contributed to this report.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

Snowballing effects of beech leaf disease hurt helpful root fungi

Severe beech leaf disease infestation hurts trees’ relationships with helpful root mutualists, ectomycorrhizal fungi.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HOLDEN FORESTS & GARDENS

 

IMAGE: UNDER THE MICROSCOPE, THESE BEECH TREE ROOTS (FAGUS GRANDIFOLIA) ARE FULL OF ROOT TIPS COLONIZED BY A COUPLE DIFFERENT TYPES OF MYCORRHIZAL FUNGI. RESEARCHERS AT THE HOLDEN ARBORETUM COLLECTED SAMPLES LIKE THIS ONE AND COUNTED OVER 70,000 ROOT TIPS TO QUANTIFY THE EFFECTS OF BEECH LEAF DISEASE ON THIS IMPORTANT MUTUALISM BETWEEN TREE AND FUNGI. view more 

CREDIT: DAVID BURKE, HOLDEN FORESTS & GARDENS

The American beech, Fagus grandifolia, is a North American staple and the dominant species in many northeastern forests. In 2012, a new disease was first spotted, infecting trees in northeastern Ohio. The worst afflicted had dark banding on their leaves, which emerged crumpled and leathery in the spring. Not until 2018 would experts discover the nematode pest, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii, overwintering in the buds of infected trees. 

As it marches across the continent, researchers are still learning the full extent of the causes and consequences of beech leaf disease. In a new paper out this week in the Journal of Fungi, researchers at Holden Forests & Gardens in Kirtland, Ohio, found a new downstream effect of the disease: The roots of infected trees have fewer helpful fungal mutualists called ectomycorrhizal fungi. 

That’s bad news for both the trees and for the fungi species they support. “It’s a really scary story when you think about all of the benefits that the tree is normally accruing from its fungal mutualists,” says Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, researcher at Holden Forests & Gardens and lead author of the new paper. “These trees are already under stress from beech leaf disease, so losing their mutualisms puts an added strain on tree health.” 

These mutualists, the ectomycorrhizal fungi that colonize the trees’ roots from the soil, play an important role in tree health. They help the trees with nutrient and water acquisition, and recent research has even shown they can be important for resistance to pathogens in the soil.

“There hasn’t been much research that tells the full story, that looks at the whole ecology of a tree in terms of what it’s experiencing above ground and what it’s experiencing below ground,” says Bashian-Victoroff. “This is the first paper to connect the effects of beech leaf disease with mycorrhizal fungi.” 

Why would a leaf disease have effects on fungi living in a tree’s roots? Beech leaf disease affects the leaves’ ability to photosynthesize, which means they’re not pulling in as much carbon dioxide and not making as much sugar. That sugar isn’t just the primary energy source for the tree, it’s also what they provide to the ectomycorrhizal fungi in their roots in exchange for its services. Damaged leaves means less photosynthesis, less sugar, and fewer ectomycorrhizal fungi colonizing the roots.

The researchers found the new link in a plantation of research trees at the Holden Arboretum, planted in 2006 at part of a U.S. Forest Service project to develop trees resistant to a different beech ailment, beech bark disease. The trees were planted from Maine and Michigan stock selected for potential resistance to the older disease. Now, the trees are succumbing to the new pest, beech leaf disease, as it spreads through the area, with different trees showing different severity of symptoms.

The team counted over 70,000 root tips, small segments of fine roots where the mycorrhizal fungi grow and exchange nutrients with the tree. They quantified and identified fungi across 30 trees and two seasons. They found a key difference in fall, after a full growing season: Trees with the most severe beech leaf disease symptoms had over 65% less of the healthy fungi in their roots compared to those with mild symptoms. 

They also found that trees from Michigan — geographically closer to the study site and therefore a better match for growing conditions — had overall more ectomycorrhizal fungi than those from Maine, and that the fungal community composition from the two regions were notably different. 

If beech leaf disease impairs the ability of the trees to associate with their mutualists, there could be cascading effects on forest health and function, with implications not just via beech tree losses but also via the losses of fungal diversity. 

“Fungal mutualists are underappreciated and understudied, even among mycologists,” says Bashian-Victoroff. “The vast majority of research on fungi is on fungal pathogens, like the ones that disrupt agricultural systems. So focusing on fungi and what they do to help our ecosystems is extremely important.”

The study underscores the importance of understanding the complex interactions between trees and their root symbionts and emphasizes the need for continued research to develop effective strategies to combat the spread of beech leaf disease and protect these important forest ecosystems.

Citation: Bashian-Victoroff, Claudia, et al. "Beech Leaf Disease Severity Affects Ectomycorrhizal Colonization and Fungal Taxa Composition." Journal of Fungi 9.4 (2023): 497. https://doi.org/10.3390/jof904049

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JOURNAL

Journal of Fungi

DOI

10.3390/jof9040497 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Beech Leaf Disease Severity Affects Ectomycorrhizal Colonization and Fungal Taxa Composition