'Tallahassee Mussolini': Steve Schmidt says 'unfit' Ron DeSantis has even worse morals than Trump

Matthew Chapman
May 31, 2023, 

Ron Desantis (Photo via Shutterstock)

Former GOP strategist turned Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt ripped into Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in a new episode of his political podcast, "The Warning."

"There he is," said Schmidt, showing an image of DeSantis during his interview with Fox News in which he claimed he would "smash" leftism in the United States as president. "Governor Ron DeSantis. The Mussolini of Tallahassee, using a U.S. Navy war vessel as a visual prop just days after his disastrous launch, which spawned the fantastic hashtag, "#DeSaster."

"Who is it that he wants to smash?" said Schmidt. "Is he going to arrest Bernie Sanders? Is he going to send AOC to a rehabilitation and re-education camp?"

This moment, for Schmidt, encapsulated how DeSantis is unfit for office — and how his presidential campaign, hyped by numerous GOP donors looking for an alternative to Trump, will crash and burn.

"Ron DeSantis' campaign is going to be epic," said Schmidt. "As in, an epic debacle for the ages. He will raise more money against lower vote results than any presidential candidate in American history. He's going to make Texas Senator Phil Gramm look like Bill Clinton, when it comes to politics, by the time this is done."

"Let me just say this about Ron DeSantis, and his wanting to smash and break and hurt," he continued. "The job of the American president is to temporarily lead the American people, and to make the Union more perfect. Ron DeSantis doesn't understand that. He's as unfit at a moral level, at a character level, as any person has ever been, including Donald Trump, running for this office."

"He will fail," said Schmidt.

NOTHING QUITE LIKE A STEVE SCHMIDT RANT  

EIGHT MINUTES LONG!!!

EXCLUSIVE: Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House

By Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins, 

CNN  Wed May 31, 2023

CNN —

Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.

The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

Notable legal clouds that continue to hang over Donald Trump in 2023

CNN has not listened to the recording, but multiple sources described it. One source said the relevant portion on the Iran document is about two minutes long, and another source said the discussion is a small part of a much longer meeting.


Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an “important” piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump, who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and “automatically” declassify documents.

Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident.

The July 2021 meeting was held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin. The attendees, sources said, did not have security clearances that would allow them access to classified information. Meadows didn’t attend the meeting, sources said.

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.

Investigators have questioned Milley about the episode in recent months, making him one of the highest-ranking national security officials from Trump’s administration to meet with the special counsel’s team. Milley’s spokesman Dave Butler declined to comment to CNN.

Out of the spotlight, Mark Meadows wields quiet political power amid Trump legal woes

The revelation that the former president and commander-in-chief has been captured on tape discussing a classified document could raise his legal exposure as he continues his third bid for the White House. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

A Trump campaign spokesman said “leaks” are meant to “inflame tensions” around Trump.

“The DOJ’s continued interference in the presidential election is shameful and this meritless investigation should cease wasting the American taxpayer’s money on Democrat political objectives,” the spokesman added.

When asked at a CNN town hall this month if he showed classified documents he kept after the presidency to anyone, Trump answered: “Not really. I would have the right to. By the way, they were declassified after.”

A lawyer for Meadows declined to comment. A lawyer for Martin declined to comment.

Smith’s investigation has shown signs of nearing its end, though it hasn’t yet resulted in any criminal charges. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment for this story.

In this February 2020 photo, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley chats with President Donald Trump after he delivered the State of the Union address at the Capitol in Washington, DC.Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images/File

Trump was outraged at New Yorker story on Milley and Iran

The recording that’s now in the hands of prosecutors shows they are not only looking at Trump’s actions regarding classified documents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but also at what happened at Bedminster a year earlier.

The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.

'You're blowing this': New book reveals Melania Trump criticized her husband's handling of Covid

Glasser reported that in the months following the election, Milley repeatedly argued against striking Iran and was concerned Trump “might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified.” Milley and others talked Trump out of taking such a drastic action, according to the New Yorker story.

On the recording and in response to the story, Trump brings up the document, which he says came from Milley. Trump told those in the room that if he could show it to people, it would undermine what Milley was saying, the sources said. One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him.

Several sources say the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around, though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document. There’s also laughter in the room that’s captured on the recording.

The US military has contingency plans and courses of action that apply to countries and situations around the globe.

The meeting took place well before Trump’s team shipped 15 boxes of presidential records and classified documents back to the National Archives and Records Administration in January 2022 after months of back-and-forth between his team and the records agency.

The Justice Department later obtained additional documents with classified markings from Trump, seizing more than 100 during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August. Trump’s legal team hired people to search other Trump properties, including Bedminster, late last year.

Investigators from the special counsel’s office also have asked in their document handling and obstruction investigation about other scenarios in which Trump may have shown national security documents, such as maps, to others, sources say. They’ve also asked several witnesses to share details about Trump’s anger toward Milley.

During the summer of 2021, sources say multiple people were making recordings of Trump as he held conversations with journalists and biographers.
Trump’s different explanations on the declassified documents

Trump and his attorneys have given several different, often conflicting, explanations for why Trump didn’t intentionally retain classified materials in violation of federal law. 

Initially, Trump allies argued he had a “standing declassification order” so that documents removed from the Oval Office were immediately declassified.  A few weeks later, Trump told Fox News that he could declassify things “just by thinking about it.”

Earlier this year, Trump’s legal team told Congress that classified material was inadvertently packed up at the end of the administration. Most recently, Trump told CNN at a town hall that materials were “automatically declassified” when he took them.

However, there’s no indication Trump followed the legally mandated declassification process, and his attorneys have avoided saying so far in court whether Trump declassified records he kept.

This story has been updated with a response from former President Trump’s campaign.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Sara Murray contributed to this report.

Alaska governor's 'pro-family' adviser resigns after pro-Hitler and pro-rape comments resurface

Matthew Chapman
May 31, 2023

APM Reports, YouTube screen grab

A key policy adviser for Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) has resigned after the release of a series of inflammatory statements he made on a podcast praising Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and defending the right of husbands to rape their wives, among a number of other things, reported Alaska Public Media this week.

Jeremy Cubas had been serving as Dunleavy's counsel on "pro-family" policies after previously serving as the governor's staff photographer, and, according to the report, his main job in his new role had been setting up a "pro-family" website for the state.

"Cubas aired those and other extreme views on the podcast he co-hosts, Contra Gentiles, whose Latin title translates to 'against the non-believers,'" reported Nathaniel Herz and Curtis Gilbert. "The program, which has been published for the past three years, was available for anyone to hear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube when Dunleavy, in April, promoted Cubas to a $110,000-a-year job as his policy adviser on 'pro-family' issues."

Among many other things, Cubas claimed that anti-Semitism is fictional, that Hitler only targeted Jews because they were "homeless people just taking over the country," and he really just "wanted the races in their respective areas to remain pure, so Europe remains Europe." He also called civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a "loser," and said people should just "get violent on" transgender activists to stop them.

Cubas also had a lot to say in defense of rape, particularly spousal rape, which he claims is not possible because "When you signed the contract, you have already consented. You’re consenting until the end of time, until you’re dead." He added that rape in general is "pretty low on the totem pole of grave immoral actions," especially if the victim is impregnated, and that "divorce is worse than rape."

Speaking to APM, Dunleavy's spokesman Jeff Turner reportedly condemned Cubas' controversial statements.

“Gov. Dunleavy sincerely believes that the differences between people are what makes all of us stronger,” said Turner. “The governor represents all Alaskans, regardless of their faith, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or gender. Derogatory statements about individuals and groups within our society do not in any way reflect the values of Gov. Dunleavy or his administration and will not be tolerated.”

McCarthy suggests new commission could look at Social Security and Medicare cuts

Sarah K. Burris

May 31, 2023,

Kevin McCarthy (Photo by Stefani Reynolds for AFP)

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced Wednesday he was launching a commission tasked with looking at budget cuts – and he suggested Social Security and Medicare could come under his scalpel.

His pledge came just months after vowing such cuts to mandatory spending programs were off the table.

In February, President Joe Biden spoke before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans the GOP wanted to cut the programs they had paid into their whole lives. "Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years," he said.

"That means those programs will go away if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them. Other Republicans say if we don’t cut Social Security and Medicare, they’ll let America default on its debt for the first time in our history."

His comments got a chorus of boos from the audience of Republicans. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) shook his head.

As he repeated the claim at his State of the Union address, Biden incensed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) so much she leaped her feet yelling “liar!", while Republicans committed on television to never making such cuts.

McCarthy even told CBS's Face the Nation he was taking Social Security and Medicare “off the table” in debt ceiling negotiations.

And then, on Wednesday, the speaker announced he's starting a commission to look at how to make cuts.

Appearing on the Fox network, McCarthy explained, "And now we're cutting, and you know what? It's gonna make some people uncomfortable by doing that, but I'm not going to give up on the American people."

"I'm going to announce a commission coming forward from the speaker — from bipartisan, both sides of the aisle," he added. "...The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending; it's Medicare; it's Social Security, interest on the debt."

McCarthy told Fox host Harris Faulkner that only 11 percent of the budget could be negotiated during the debt ceiling talks because Biden had "walled off" parts of it – including the part that included discretionary spending programs.

Now, he said, "We have to look at the entire budget."

See a clip of the interview below 

Chris Hedges: The Democratic Party’s Revenge on Matt Taibbi

Extensive government blacklists, revealed by the Twitter Files, are used to censor left-wing and right-wing critics. This censorship apparatus has been turned on the reporter who exposed them.

Redacted – by Mr. Fish.

By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost

May 29, 2023

On Dec. 24, 2022, Matt Taibbi was in a room at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco poring through reports sent to Twitter from an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF).

The FITF is an F.B.I.-led interagency task force that forwards “moderation requests” from numerous government agencies, including Homeland Security, the C.I.A., the Pentagon and the State Department, to social media outlets. Taibbi was given access to the internal traffic by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk.

It revealed how the F.B.I. and other government agencies routinely suppressed news and commentary. He published a Twitter thread that night, Christmas Eve, with the headline “Twitter and Other Government Agencies.”

“There would be a list of YouTube videos,” Taibbi said when I reached him by phone.

“There would be a notation that would say ‘We assess that these are all created by the Internet Research Agency in Russia. We assess that they are promoting anti-Ukraine attitudes.’ I would see that all those videos were no longer on YouTube. You can make your own deduction from that, but that was the pattern. They would send Excel spreadsheets full of account names and either all or most of them would be gone.”

The content that was suppressed included right-wing and left-wing reports critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, which has been folded into the Democratic Party.

Threads from the Yellow Vests movement, activists from the Occupy movement, Global Revolution Live, negative stories about President Joe Biden, reports on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year while his father was vice-president, positive stories about Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses and details of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of the plethora of accounts that were flagged and disappeared.

I was a victim of this censorship. The six-year archive of my show On Contact, broadcast on RT America, was erased from YouTube, although not one show was about Russia and none violated YouTube’s content guidelines. Episodes were later reposted on The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel.

The show gave a voice to those targeted by the FITF — anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, prison reform advocates, Black Lives Matter and Palestinian activists, anti-fracking activists and independent intellectuals, journalists and authors including David Harvey, Noam Chomsky, Sami Al-Arian, Glen Ford, Amira Hass, Mumia Abu Jamal, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Medea Benjamin, Nils Melzer, Pankaj Mishra, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Cornel West.

The F.B.I., before the release of Taibbi’s Twitter thread on Dec. 24, had denounced the Twitter Files as the work of “conspiracy theorists” who fed the public “misinformation” and whose “sole purpose” was “discrediting the agency.”

“They must think us unambitious, if our ‘sole aim’ is to discredit the F.B.I.,” Taibbi responded. “After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the Twitter Files. Why stop with one?”

Taibbi was acutely aware these Christmas Eve revelations, which for the first time revealed the role of the C.I.A., would further enrage the intelligence agencies.

“My understanding is that the FITF has a staff of at least 80,” Taibbi said.

“It consists primarily of the F.B.I., but it also includes people from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The FITF was the conduit for content moderation requests that went to the tech platforms. They had something called an industry meeting which was, at first monthly and then weekly, leading into the 2020 election. It included companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Wikimedia, a series of others, about two dozen of them.

They would have a general briefing on trends. Individually, each of the companies were receiving notices. Some of them were receiving weekly notices from the FITF. Twitter was. We know that because there were very specific instructions about how it was done. Requests that came from the states went through the DHS. Requests that came from the federal government went through the F.B.I. They went through a program called Teleporter. That’s how we got those documents.”

Congressional Testimony


IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS agent visited his house in New Jersey.

Taibbi discovered that the IRS opened a case against him on the day he published his Christmas Eve Twitter thread from a letter House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel inquiring about Taibbi’s case.

It was a Saturday. It was Christmas Eve. Taibbi did not owe taxes. The case was four years old. All this suggests that the IRS case was politically motivated and the F.B.I. was monitoring Taibbi.

“There’s probably little doubt that they were at least closely following all the Twitter Files reporters, but probably they were monitoring in other ways too,” Taibbi deduced.

“One of reasons I agreed to testify before the weaponization of government committee — and I got a lot of grief from old lefty friends who were upset that I was appearing before a Republican-led committee — was that the other mainstream news reporters weren’t picking up a lot of these stories that I thought really needed some attention. I needed other reporters to do some work on this. My thinking was, if I testified in Washington, it might get some more attention, not just nationally but maybe globally.”

Taibbi ran into a buzzsaw of orchestrated character assassination. The Democratic members of the committee rarely let Taibbi speak. They delivered vicious and insulting diatribes. Here is a clip of Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with Sam Seder and other hosts at The Majority Report, attacking Taibbi.

“I expected there to be hostility in the questioning, but what happened in that hearing was amazing, even to be involved with as a spectator,” he said.

“Rather than engage with the material of the Twitter Files reporting on any level, even negatively, it was pure character-assassination. The ranking member called us a direct threat to people who oppose us. We were ‘so-called journalists.’ We were the lapdogs and scribes of Elon Musk. We didn’t believe in Russian interference. We didn’t respect authority. I had a tin-foil hat I was told to take off by one member. It was one member after the other creating clips of video that were replayed on MSNBC and CNN later that night. That was how people got the news about that hearing.”

“We grew up in an atmosphere where the Democrats were always the champions of free speech, more so than the Republicans,” Taibbi told me. “Through the ’70s, ’80s,’90s and even the early 2000s. Suddenly, on this issue, it was wall-to-wall hostility. There wasn’t a Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders type who stands out from the crowd. There are no dissenters in the ranks of this party anymore.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz questioning Matt Taibbi during the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, March 9. (C-Span)

“The old school ACLU-like liberals, they’re just gone now,” he said. “There’s this new movement that doesn’t believe in countering bad speech with better speech. They believe in closing it off and shutting it down. That’s what the Twitter Files were about. That’s why there was so much hostility.”

Taibbi was informed there were problems with his 2018 tax return. The IRS said it had sent him letters about the issue, but Taibbi had not received any letters and the IRS refused to produce copies. He also had electronic confirmation from the IRS that his 2018 tax return had been received.

It was only when Congressman Jordan wrote to the IRS asking for clarification that Taibbi became aware of the files the IRS had amassed on him. These included information taken from search engines and commercial investigative software such as Anyhoo, Consumer Affairs and LexisNexis.

They had his voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, whether he had a concealed weapons permit, his telephone numbers, articles he had written and articles written about him.

“Why would an IRS agent need to know anything about my professional history or about controversies that I’ve been involved with or things that I had written about?” he asked. “That seems pretty dubious.”

“They’re not worried about the optics, about doing something like sending an IRS agent to the home of a journalist who has a big platform and a reputation for not being afraid to say something about it,” he said. “They’re not worried about how this looks. It is concerning for a number of reasons. It reminds you of things you would see in a third world country.”

Taibbi was interviewed by MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan. Hassan, or his researchers, had combed through Taibbi’s reports and found a couple of very minor errors, including a confused timeline and a misplaced acronym. Hassan argued that the errors were evidence that Taibbi intentionally lied to Congress.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconded the accusation. The ranking committee member, Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi a letter accusing him of lying to Congress. Plaskett threatened Taibbi with a five-year prison sentence.

Steps to Destroying a Reporter

Matt Taibbi appearing before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, March 9. (C-Span)

There are three steps to destroying a reporter who can’t be bought off or intimidated. The first is a campaign by the powerful, whose lies and crimes have been exposed, along with their obsequious courtiers in the press, to discredit the reporting. The second is a sustained campaign of character assassination.

The third is persecution carried out once the reporter’s credibility has been weakened, his or her ability to publish or broadcast is degraded and public support has eroded.

This is what happened to Julian Assange. Before Assange, it happened to Don Hollenbeck, I.F. Stone, Gary Webb, Ray Bonner and many others. It is what is happening to Taibbi whose revelations of widespread censorship — by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Homeland Security and other intelligence and government agencies — have enraged the ruling class.

I don’t know if they will win. Let us hope not. But the deafening silence by nearly all press outlets to what they are doing to Taibbi, as is true for Assange, is ominous and self-defeating.

It sends a signal to those who attempt to report about the inner workings of power that no matter how well known you are or how high a profile you have, you too will be targeted.

The concerted attacks on Taibbi are an example of how the walls are steadily closing in to impose an iron conformity, one more piece of our emergent corporate totalitarianism.

“Nobody wants to deal with a full-throated negative media campaign that you volunteer for when you do this kind of work,” he said. “It never goes away. That’s kind of a drag. We’ve seen it happen with you, with Glenn Greenwald after the Snowden business and it happened with him again during Russiagate. It’s not fun. People don’t want to go through it. It’s a disincentive to do counter-narrative work.”

“It’s funny, Chris, I thought a lot during this process about your book Death of The Liberal Class,” Taibbi said.

“There have been so many different instances where the basic story we’re looking at with a lot of the Twitter Files reports was a breakdown in the system of checks and balances. Civil society organizations, the media, private industry and the government, they’re all supposed to have different interests. They have a check on each other.

“But what we’re seeing is, underneath the surface, they’re engaged in anti-competitive behavior … It’s basically media, these internet censors, the enforcement agencies and NGOs, all acting in concert against the population as opposed to checking each other. You were predicting this. When these institutions break down, when they don’t work anymore, this is what happens.

“It’s a pretty quick step to consolidation of authority. That’s the scary part. Once upon a time, if you were in media, even a small offense in this direction would’ve attracted solidarity amongst the ranks. Now there’s nothing.”

He decried the role major media organizations played in hunting down Jack Teixeira, a National Guard technology support staffer who posted classified documents online.

[Related: Craig Murray: Snowden & Teixeira]

“Instead of reporting on the contents of big intelligence leaks, The Washington Post and The New York Times worked with Bellingcat to deliver this suspect to the authorities,” he said. “This is a new role for the media. It is a big shift in how the press thinks of itself. It doesn’t see itself as something separate from government or law enforcement. It sees itself as on the same side.”

“There were probably a lot of people who were frightened by the spectacle of the rise of Donald Trump,” Taibbi said.

“They were told over and over again that this was a Christian nationalist neofascist movement. There are elements of that. There’s real truth to that. But in response to it they became exactly the thing they were telling everybody they were fighting against. By the time people wake up it might be a little bit too late, which is unfortunate.”

A discredited ruling class, which has disemboweled the nation for its corporate masters and whose primary mission is the perpetuation of permanent war, has no intention of carrying out reform. It will not permit an exchange of ideas or allow its critics a platform. It knows it is hated. It fears the rise of the neofascists its dysfunction and corruption have spawned.

It seeks to perpetuate itself only through fear — fear of what will replace it. That is all it has to offer a demoralized citizenry. Constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to privacy are noisome impediments to its tenuous grip on power. These constitutional rights have been effectively abolished.

What the Twitter Files revealed is massive government blacklists and the craven acquiescence of media platforms to marginalize and ban individuals and groups on these blacklists. Taibbi, not surprisingly, is being targeted by the totalitarian machinery he exposed.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Report: FBI Reopens Assange Investigation

An Australian newspaper reported Thursday the F.B.I. sought to question Julian Assange’s former ghostwriter in London as the U.S. continues a probe that resulted in an indictment three years ago of the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher.

FBI Headquarters in Washington. (Sammy Six/Flickr)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

May 31, 2023

Three years after indicting him on espionage and computer intrusion charges, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears to be still seeking more evidence against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

The Sydney Morning Herald has reported in its Thursday edition that the F.B.I. last week sought an interview in London with Andrew O’Hagan, who worked as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography in 2011.

The London Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism command sent the letter to O’Hagan, which said: “The FBI would like to discuss your experiences with Assange/WikiLeaks …”

O’Hagan told the Herald: “I would not give a witness statement against a fellow journalist being pursued for telling the truth. I would happily go to jail before agreeing in any way to support the American security establishment in this cynical effort.”

The news comes amid growing optimism among Assange supporters that a deal may be in the works to free Assange from London’s Belmarsh prison, where he has been kept since 2019 awaiting the outcome of a U.S. extradition request.

Assange’s Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, told the Herald:

“It appears they are continuing to try to investigate, which I find unusual given the amount of time that has passed since the investigation began.

I would think it is of some concern because we have been working to try to secure an arrangement that would see Julian come home. It would be very unusual if the FBI was trying to gather evidence that could help clear his name.”

Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, told the newspaper: “It shows they understand how weak the charges against Julian are and are trying to strengthen them.”

Optimism about a diplomatic solution to Assange’s plight rose in May when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made his clearest statements yet on the case. He said for the first time that he had spoken directly to U.S. authorities about Assange; that he wanted the prosecution to end and that he was concerned for his health.

Optimism grew further when five days later, Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Australia, agreed to meet a group of six, pro-Assange, Australian MPs, from three different parties, plus an independent. It is highly unlikely Kennedy would have invited them to the U.S. embassy for lunch to discuss Assange’s case without approval from at least the State Department, if not the White House.

A few days after that, Albanese said Assange would have to play his part in any deal to be freed. That was widely interpreted to mean that Assange would have to agree to some sort of plea deal, perhaps serve a short sentence in Australia and then walk free.

Kenny appeared on CN Live! on Monday night to discuss possible end-game scenarios, including a so-called Alford plea, in which Assange would eventually be released by asserting his innocence while also formally pleading guilty to lesser charges.

U.S. constitutional lawyer Bruce Afran also joined the program and suggested the Assange team could make proposed plea deals, including agreeing to a new, misdemeanor charge of mishandling government documents.

News of the F.B.I. continuing its probe has thrown those hopes of a deal into disarray.



Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

G7 Should Be Shut Down

This is an undemocratic body that uses its historical power to impose its narrow interests on a world that is in the grip of a range of more pressing dilemmas. writes Vijay Prashad.

Leon Golub. U.S., “Vietnam II,” 1973.

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

May 27, 2023

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held. Not doing so would have been an act of immense discourtesy.

Despite many calls for an apology from the U.S. for dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian population in 1945, U.S. President Joe Biden has demurred. Instead, he wrote in the Peace Memorial guest book: “May the stories of this museum remind us all of our obligations to build a future of peace.”

Apologies, amplified by the tensions of our time, take on interesting sociological and political roles. An apology would suggest that the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong and that the U.S. did not end their war against Japan by taking the moral high ground.

An apology would also contradict the U.S. decision, backed fully by other Western powers over 70 years later, to maintain a military presence along the Asian coastline of the Pacific Ocean (a presence built on the back of the 1945 atomic bombings) and to use that military force to threaten China with weapons of mass destruction amassed in bases and ships close to China’s territorial waters.

It is impossible to imagine a “future of peace” if the U.S. continues to maintain its aggressive military structure that runs from Japan to Australia, with the express intent of disciplining China.

Tadasu Takamine, Japan, Still frame from: “God Bless America,” 2002.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given the errand to warn China about its “economic coercion” as he unveiled the G7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion to track Chinese commercial activities.

“The platform will address the growing and pernicious use of coercive economic measures to interfere in the sovereign affairs of other states,” Sunak said.

This bizarre language displayed neither self-awareness of the West’s long history of brutal colonialism nor an acknowledgement of neocolonial structures — including the permanent state of indebtedness enforced by the International Monetary Fund — that are coercive by definition.

Nonetheless, Sunak, Biden and the others preened with self-righteous certainty that their moral standing remains intact and that they hold the right to attack China for its trade agreements.

These leaders suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for the IMF — on behalf of the G7 states — to demand “conditionalities” from debt-ridden countries while forbidding China from negotiating when it lends money.

Kent Monkman, Canada, “The Scream,” 2017.

Interestingly, the final statement from the G7 did not mention China by name, but merely echoed the concern about “economic coercion.” The phrase “all countries” and not China, specifically, signals a lack of unity within the group.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for instance, used her speech at the G7 to put the U.S. on notice for its use of industrial subsidies: “We need to provide a clear, predictable business environment to our clean tech industries. The starting point is transparency among the G7 on how we support manufacturing.”

One complaint from Western governments and think tanks alike has been that Chinese development loans contain “no Paris Club” clauses.


The Paris Club is a body of official bilateral creditors that was set up in 1956 to provide financing to poor countries who have been vetted by IMF processes, stipulating that they must pledge to conduct a range of political and economic reforms in order to secure any funds.

In recent years, the amount of loans given through the Paris Club has declined, although the body’s influence and the esteem its strict rules garner remain. Many Chinese loans — particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative — refuse to adopt Paris Club clauses, since, as Professor Huang Meibo and Niu Dongfang argue, it would sneak IMF-Paris Club conditionalities into loan agreements.


“All countries,” they write, “should respect the right of other countries to make their own choices, instead of taking the rules of the Paris Club as universal norms that must be observed by all.” The allegation of “economic coercion” does not hold if the evidence points to Chinese lenders refusing to impose Paris Club clauses.

Francesco Clemente, Italy, “Sixteen Amulets for the Road (XII),” 2012–2013.

G7 leaders stand before the cameras pretending to be world representatives whose views are the views of all of humanity. Remarkably, G7 countries only contain 10 percent of the world’s population while their combined Gross Domestic Product is merely 27 per cent of global GDP.

These are demographically and increasingly economically marginalised states that want to use their authority, partly derived from their military power, to control the world order.

Such a small section of the human population should not be allowed to speak for all of us, since their experiences and interests are neither universal nor can they be trusted to set aside their own parochial goals in favour of humanity’s needs.

Elisabeth Tomalin, U.K., “Head,” ca. 1920.

Indeed, the agenda of the G7 was plainly laid out at its origin, first as the Library Group in March 1973 and then at the first G7 summit in France in November 1975.

The Library Group was created by U.S. Treasury Secretary George Schultz, who brought together finance ministers from France (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), West Germany (Helmut Schmidt), and the U.K. (Anthony Barber) to hold private consultations among the Atlantic allies.

At the Château de Rambouillet in 1975, the G7 met in the context of the “oil weapon” wielded by the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973 and the passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the United Nations in 1974.

Schmidt, who was appointed German chancellor a year after the Library Group’s formation, reflected on these developments: “It is desirable to explicitly state, for public opinion, that the present world recession is not a particularly favourable occasion to work out a new economic order along the lines of certain U.N. documents.”

Schmidt wanted to end “international dirigisme” and states’ ability to exercise their economic sovereignty.

The NIEO had to be stopped in its tracks, Schmidt said, because to leave decisions about the world economy “to officials somewhere in Africa or some Asian capital is not a good idea.”

Rather than allow African and Asian leaders a say in important global matters, U.K. Prime Minister Harold Wilson suggested that it would be better for serious decisions to be made by “the sort of people sitting around this table.”

Louise Rösler, Germany, “Street,” 1951.

The private attitudes displayed by Schmidt and Wilson continue to this day, despite dramatic changes in the world order.

In the first decade of the 2000s, the U.S. — which had begun to see itself as an unrivalled world power — overreached militarily in its War on Terror and economically with its unregulated banking system.

The war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crunch (2007) threatened the vitality of the U.S.-managed world order. During the darkest days of the credit crisis, G8 states, which then included Russia, asked surplus-holding countries of the Global South (particularly, China, India and Indonesia) to come to their aid.

In January 2008, at a meeting in New Delhi, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told business leaders,

“At the G8 summit, eight countries meet for two and a half days and on the third day invite five developing nations — Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa — for discussions over lunch. This is [an] injustice to [the] 2.5 billion inhabitants of these nations. Why this third-grade treatment to them? I want that the next G8 summit be converted into a G13 summit.”

There was talk during this period of weakness in the West, that the G7 would be shut down and that the G20, which held its first summit in 2008 in Washington, D.C., would become its successor.

Sarkozy’s statements in Delhi made headlines, but not policy. In a more private — and truthful — assessment in October 2010, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard told U.S. Ambassador to France Craig R. Stapleton, “We need a vehicle where we can find solutions for these challenges [the growth of China and India] together — so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able to deal with them.”

The “monsters” are now at the gate, and the U.S. has assembled its available economic, diplomatic, and military arsenals, including the G7, to suffocate them.

The G7 is an undemocratic body that uses its historical power to impose its narrow interests on a world that is in the grip of a range of more pressing dilemmas. It is time to shut down the G7, or at least prevent it from enforcing its will on the international order.

Fabienne Verdier, France, “Branches et Bourgeons, Étude Végétal” — “Branches and Buds, Nature Study,” 2010.

In his radio address on August 9, 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman said:

“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

In reality, Hiroshima was not a “military base.” It was what U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson called a “virgin target,” a place that had escaped the U.S. firebombing of Japan so that it could be a worthwhile testing ground for the atomic bomb.

In his diary, Stimson recorded a conversation with Truman in June about the reasoning behind targeting this city.

When he told Truman that he was “a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength,” the president “laughed and said he understood.”

Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was one of 350,000 people living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombings. She died 10 years later from cancers associated with radiation exposure from the bomb.

The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was moved by her story and wrote a poem against war and confrontation. Hikmet’s words should be a warning even now to Biden against laughing at the possibility of renewed military conflict against China:

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead.

I’m only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I’m seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead.

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

THIRD WORLD U$A

‘Nowhere to go’: Low-income tenants lack options as old mobile home parks razed

ANITA SNOW Associated Press
May 27, 2023


PHOENIX — Alondra Ruiz Vazquez and her husband were comfortable in Periwinkle Mobile Home Park for a decade, feeling lucky to own their mobile home and pay about $450 a month for their lot in a city with spiraling rents.

But now they and dozens of other families have until May 28 to leave the Phoenix park, which nearby Grand Canyon University purchased seven years ago to build student housing. Two other mobile home communities are also being cleared this spring for new developments in a city where no new parks have been built in more than 30 years.

Alondra Ruiz Vazquez walks outside her home at the Periwinkle Mobile Home Park on April 11 in Phoenix. Residents of the park are facing an eviction deadline of May 28 due to a private university's plan to redevelop the land for student housing. Matt York, Associated Press

“I'm here, well, because I have nowhere to go,” said Isabel Ramos, who lives at Periwinkle with her 11-year-old daughter. “I don't know what's going to happen.”

The razing of older mobile home parks across the United States worries advocates who say bulldozing them permanently eliminates some of the already limited housing for the poorest of the poor. Residents may have to double up with relatives or live in their cars amid spiking evictions and homelessness, they warn.

“Mobile homes are a much bigger part of our affordable housing stock than people know,” said Mark Stapp, who directs Arizona State University's master's degree program in real estate development. “Once it’s gone, a lot of people will have no place to go.”

A recent survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed a U.S.-wide shortage of 7.3 million affordable rental homes for extremely low-income renters, defined in Arizona as a a three-member household making $28,850 or less.

Industry groups estimate that more than 20 million people live in some 43,000 mobile home parks across the United States.

“We are in the deepest affordable housing crisis we’ve ever experienced,” said Joanna Carr, acting head of the Arizona Housing Coalition. “Housing for many people is getting completely out of reach. It’s very dire.”

Ken Anderson, president of the Manufactured Housing Industry of Arizona, said trying to bring an old park up to modern standards can be cost-prohibitive for owners, requiring replacement of electrical and sewage infrastructure for newer homes.

At least six such communities have been torn down in Arizona in the last 18 months, he said, adding that Grand Canyon University “bent over backwards” to help residents more than other park owners.

“A lot of these parks are 70 years old,” said Anderson, noting an uptick in demolitions of older communities for redevelopment. “It’s going to be a big problem down the line.”

Efforts under way to revitalize old mobile homes have limits. Despite their name, most aren't truly mobile, and moving them can be very costly. The oldest homes are often too decrepit to move at al

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced $225 million in grants to governments, tribes and nonprofits to preserve mobile homes, but the money can only be used to replace, not repair dwellings built before 1976, which are common at older parks.

Vermont earlier this year announced a mobile home improvement program to be funded by $4 million in federal money. It aims to help park owners prepare vacant or abandoned lots for new mobile homes, and help mobile homeowners install new foundations and make their dwellings more habitable.

In Riverdale, Utah, the last of about 50 families at Lesley's Mobile Home Park must leave by the end of May for construction of new apartments and townhouses.

“The state laws don't protect us," said Jason Williams, who sold his mobile home for half what he asked for and will now live in a motorhome.

Cities often don't like older parks because unlike other housing they don't generate property taxes for municipal services. Rundown parks can also be eyesores, depressing the worth of nearby properties even as the value of the land the mobile homes sit on has increased exponentially.

In Phoenix, Grand Canyon University said in a statement it “waited as long as it could” to build new student housing after buying Periwinkle in 2016.

Many park residents are Spanish-speaking immigrants earning minimum wage as landscapers or restaurant workers. There are also retirees living on Social Security.

The Phoenix City Council this spring decided to let the eviction proceed, but set aside $2.5 million in federal funds to help mobile home park residents facing eviction in the future.

CEO Mike Trailor of the nonprofit Trellis, who once headed the Arizona Department of Housing, said the organization is working with the university to help Periwinkle families find apartments and arrange to move mobile homes that can be moved.

Still, Phoenix activist Salvador Reza said most families face uncertain futures.

“Some of them might move in with another family, with an uncle or aunt," said Reza. "Some might go out into the streets and become part of the homeless.”

A new law in Arizona recently increased state funds for owners forced to move their mobile homes because of redevelopment to $12,500 for a single-section dwelling and $20,000 for a multi-section.

Those who must abandon their home because of precarious condition can now get $5,000 for a single-section home and up to $8,000 for a multi-section.

Periwinkle resident Graciela Beltran said it’s not enough.

“They want my house?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Give me a house that is equal to mine. I am not asking for anything more.”

Former OpenAI Employee Recounts Traumatic Experience Witnessing Disturbing Content During ChatGPT Training

By Komal Banchhor
May 27, 2023
    
Cover Image Source: Pexels | Photo by Sanket Mishra

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our daily lives, powering various applications and services. Behind the scenes, there are countless hours spent on training and fine-tuning AI models to ensure they perform effectively and safely.

However, recent reports shed light on the traumatic experiences faced by AI specialists involved in training ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI. The employees, contracted by OpenAI through an AI annotation company called Sama, worked on a process known as "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback," and they have now come forward to share their distressing encounters

.

Image Source: Pexels | Photo by Hatice Baran

As mentioned by The U.S. Sun, Richard Mathenge, one of the AI specialists, spoke to the news publication Slate about his experience training ChatGPT. Mathenge revealed that he dedicated nine hours a day, five days a week, to training the model and that the nature of the tasks assigned to him and his team was deeply troubling.

They were exposed to explicit and disturbing text repeatedly to label it as inappropriate content. While this process helps ensure that language models are safe for public use, it took a toll on the mental well-being of the trainers.

The explicit texts reportedly included passages related to heinous crimes like child sexual abuse and bestiality. Mathenge expressed concern for his team, noticing signs of emotional distress and disinterest in their work. He shared that his team members were not ready to engage with such explicit and distressing content, indicating the detrimental impact it had on their psychological well-being.

Image Source: Pexels | Photo by Matheus Bertelli

Mophat Okinyi, another member of Mathenge's team, revealed that he continues to suffer from medical issues resulting from the training experience. Okinyi experiences panic attacks, insomnia, anxiety, and depression, and he believes that these conditions directly stem from the traumatizing tasks he had to undertake. He even attributes the disintegration of his family and his wife leaving him to the toll that this job took on his mental health.

The AI specialists involved in training ChatGPT feel that the support they received during the process was inadequate. They believe that more comprehensive wellness programs and individual counseling should have been provided to address the emotional challenges they faced.

OpenAI, in response to the concerns raised, stated that they had previously understood that wellness programs and counseling had been offered, workers had the option to opt out of distressing work, exposure to explicit content had limits, and sensitive information was handled by specially trained workers. However, the employees argue that the support fell short of their needs.

Image Source: Pexels | Photo by Laurence Dutton

Mathenge explained that a counselor did report to duty at one point but he was "not professional" or even qualified to deal with the situation. The counselor reportedly asked, what Mathenge called, "basic questions" like "What's your name" and "How do you find your work," questions that did not in any way help the employees deal with the unique challenges they faced at work.

It is important to recognize the immense contributions made by these AI specialists in training ChatGPT and in the success achieved by the model. Despite the traumatic experiences they endured, they take pride in their work. However, it is crucial for organizations like OpenAI and AI annotation companies such as Sama to prioritize the well-being of their human trainers. Steps must be taken to ensure that comprehensive support systems are in place to address the emotional toll of training AI models, including adequate counseling, mental health resources, and limitations on exposure to explicit and distressing content.

UK army officers forced electric shock treatment on gay soldiers

Ellen Milligan - Bloomberg News (TNS)

LONDON — Gay British soldiers were subjected to electric shock treatment in an effort to “cure” them of their homosexuality, according to a damning investigation into historic homophobia in the U.K. armed forces.

Military personnel were still being referred to doctors for conversion therapy as recently as the 1990s, according to anonymous testimony in a government-commissioned review seen by Bloomberg and slated for publication next month. The study contains more than a thousand anonymous submissions detailing the use of electrodes, blackmail and sexual assault against gay personnel between 1967 and 2000.

“I was sent to see a psychiatrist at a hospital where they put these electrodes in my head and showed me pictures of men and gave me nice feelings and they then showed me pictures of women and gave me electric shocks,” one unnamed victim of the policy said. “I had some type of bruising/burn marks where they put the electrodes.”

The Ministry of Defence declined to comment on specific allegations included in the report, which they said had been submitted to ministers. “We are proud of our LGBT+ veterans and grateful for their service in defense of our nation,” a government spokesperson said.

The shocking revelations cast light on the damage inflicted on thousands of gay, lesbian and trans personnel over more than three decades by a ban on them serving in the military, despite homosexuality being legal since 1967. The report piles moral pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to publicly apologize for the historic policy, and to compensate those affected by it for loss of earnings, distress caused, and denial of their pension rights.

Another veteran, who served in the Royal Air Force, testified that they were sent to a psychiatric ward to be interrogated about their sexuality while seated on a commode. Electrodes were attached to their head and used to take a reading of their brain while medical staff drank lager. They were told they had a “shadow” on their brain, which explained their sexuality.

Referrals of young male personnel for what was referred to as “the cure” were still taking place as recently as the mid-1990s, according to testimony from a civilian doctor who served at various military bases from 1993 to 2004. The medic recounted how a sergeant accompanied one of the men, who explained he’d told his superiors he was gay and had been told to book medical treatment. The doctor refused to provide such treatment and sent him on his way, but never knew what became of the young recruit.

‘Traumatized’

The review was commissioned last year during Boris Johnson’s premiership, with a remit to take testimony from those affected by the blanket ban on gay people in the armed forces that ran until January 2000.

Terence Etherton, the cross-bench member of the House of Lords who led the probe, said in the report that military personnel were told if they consented to taking drugs and undergoing electro-compulsive treatment to convert them, they may be permitted to remain in the military.

It left many “severely traumatized” as a result, he said.

Though the government has promised to introduce a law banning conversion therapy, it’s yet to publish a draft bill. An Equality Hub spokesperson for the government said it remains “committed to protecting people at risk from conversion practices.”

Uncomfortable past

The report into homophobia in the military follows a trend in recent years of the U.K. unpicking its often uncomfortable history spanning recent years and past centuries. The legacy includes slavery and colonialism as well as misogyny and racism and touches on some of the nation’s most famous institutions.

In March, the owner of the Guardian newspaper issued an apology for the role played by the newspaper’s founders in transatlantic slavery and announced a decadelong program of restorative justice. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement sparked calls to remove the presence of statues of figures from the Britain’s imperial past, resulting in the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol being pulled down, triggering a row over the country’s colonial legacy.

Also in March, an investigation found that London’s Metropolitan Police is a breeding ground for racism, sexism and homophobia, while this year the country’s biggest business lobby group, the Confederation of British Industry has been engulfed in a scandal that includes allegations of rape and sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have voiced concerns about racism in the royal family, while the Koh-i-Noor diamond that’s featured in previous coronations but is now widely seen as a symbol of the U.K.’s colonial past was excluded from King Charles III’s coronation earlier this month.

Blackmail, assault

It’s an issue that divides politicians even within Sunak’s own Cabinet. Home Secretary Suella Braverman last week criticized those who favor “decolonizing the curriculum, demanding reparations, denigrating our heroes, tearing down statues,” in a speech widely seen as a pitch to be the next Conservative Party leader.

The latest report includes a core recommendation that Sunak should make a public apology in Parliament for the historic ban on gay and trans military personnel.

Some of the testimony details the after-effects on veterans of their treatment by the military. One woman who joined the navy at 17 in 1991 said she was discharged in 1997 after disclosing she was gay. It led to alcohol-dependency and gravely affected her mental health.

Another female veteran said she was assaulted by two senior male colleagues, and was placed into a psychiatric ward and later dismissed after she complained. Another said that when her superior tried to assault her, he told her he would have her kicked out of the Army because he knew she was gay.

Interview techniques

Other veterans said they were followed by military detectives, even while off-duty. One recounted how in 1995, on a visit to their hometown to see friends at a local gay pub, military police officers showed up, seemingly looking for gay soldiers. Another veteran described being interviewed by the Special Investigation Branch for eight hours and wasn’t allowed to access the toilet or get water until she admitted she was gay.

The accounts “paint a vivid picture of overt homophobia at all levels of the armed forces...and of the bullying that inevitability reflected it,” according to Etherton.

A spokesperson for the government said it will “carefully consider the findings and respond in due course.” They didn’t say whether the prime minister would accept the recommendation to apologize.

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