It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, December 07, 2020
Railway unions extend support to farmers’ call for Bharat Bandh
The railway unions on Monday announced that their members will hold rallies and demonstrations on Tuesday in a show of solidarity with the farmers.
INDIA Updated: Dec 07, 2020
HT Correspondent Hindustan Times, New Delhi
A long queue of tractors and trolleys of protesting farmers parked in the middle of the highway near Singhu (Delhi-Haryana) border in Sonipat district of Haryana on Monday. (Ravi Kumar/HT PHOTO)
Farmers demanding the repeal of three farms laws received a shot in the arm on Monday with two of the biggest unions of the national transporter-- The All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF) and the National Federation of Indian Railwaymen (NFIR) – extending their support for Bharat Bandh on Tuesday.
The railway unions on Monday announced that their members will hold rallies and demonstrations on Tuesday in a show of solidarity with the farmers who have called the bandh.
All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF) general secretary Shiva Gopal Mishra met the agitating farmers at Delhi’s Singhu border and assured them that members of the railway union are with them in their fight against the new agriculture laws.
“We have written to our affiliates all over the Indian Railways to extend support to the farmers in their struggle to achieve their genuine demands, on December 8, 2020 during Bharat Bandh’. I have already advised AIRF affiliates to organise agitation programmes, dharna, demonstrations and rallies during lunch hour against anti-farmer policies of the Government of India. I hope that the government will give cognizance to the genuine demands of the farmers and redress the same at the earliest,” he said in a statement.
M Raghavaiah, general secretary, NFIR in a statement appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to accept the demands of the farmers and said that the railway families are with the “annadatas” in their struggle against the anti-farm laws which are “detrimental to the farmer community of the nation”.
“The NFIR general secretary advised all its affiliate unions throughout the Indian Railways to conduct dharnas, rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with the farmers’ struggle and against anti-farmer decisions of the central government,” the statement said.
The two unions comprising nearly 13 lakh current railway employees and around 20 lakh retired employees, are the latest to show solidarity with agitating farmers.
Support for farmers have also poured in from the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Hind Mazdoor Sabha (HMS) and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).
The All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) has also extended its support.
“Earlier it was decided that the transport fraternity from Northern India will participate in the Bharat Bandh announced by farmers, but now it has been resolved in the meeting that transport associations and unions in other parts of the country will join the Bharat Bandh of farmers and voluntarily suspend their operations on December 8, 2020,” the AIMTC said in a statement.
Bandh(Devanagari: बंध) (literally: shutting down) is a form of protest used by political activists in South Asian countries such as India and Nepal. It is similar to a general strike. During a bandh, a political party or a community declare a general strike.[1] For example, a Bharat bandh is a call for a bandh across India, and a bandh can also be called for an individual state or municipality.
Although the official reason provided to Canada for Jaishankar's (pictured) unavailability is a scheduling clash, local media reports suggest the external affairs minister's absence from the summit is a deliberate snub by India to express its displeasure over remarks by the Canadian prime minister . — AFP/File
Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will not attend a Canada-hosted virtual summit of foreign ministers to discuss common global strategy for the coronavirus pandemic in a show of displeasure over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent comments on the ongoing Indian farmers’ protests, multiple Indian media outlets reported on Monday.
Although the official reason provided to Canada for Jaishankar's unavailability is a scheduling clash, local media reports suggest the external affairs minister's absence from the summit is a deliberate snub by India to express its displeasure over remarks by the Canadian prime minister.
Trudeau, speaking to the Indian community last week in Canada, said that he was concerned about the farmers, most of them from the Sikh-dominated state of Indian Punjab, camped out on the outskirts of Delhi in a protest against farm reforms.
"I would be remiss if I didn’t start by recognising the news coming out of India about the protests by farmers. The situation is concerning, and we are all very worried about family and friends. I know that’s the reality for many of you," he had said.
That prompted a rebuke from India's foreign ministry, which termed these remarks as "unwarranted [interference], especially when pertaining to internal affairs of a democratic country".
This was later followed up by a formal protest with Canada’s ambassador to India where he was told the comments were an interference in its domestic affairs and would seriously hurt bilateral ties.
India and Canada have warm ties, but in recent years there has been concern in India that some Sikh leaders in Canada have ties to separatist groups hostile to India.
Canada is home to an influential Sikh community and Indian leaders say there are some fringe groups there that are still sympathetic to the cause of an independent Sikh state called Khalistan, carved out of India.
The Indian foreign ministry said comments made by Trudeau and other leaders had emboldened radical groups and they were a risk to its diplomatic staff based in Canada.
“We expect the Canadian government to ensure the fullest security of Indian diplomatic personnel and its political leaders to refrain from pronouncements that legitimise extremist activism,” it said.
Politicians from Australia, UK attend roundtable on whether India is becoming a fascist state
“I think people are realising that Hindutva is not Hinduism, it is fascism.” AMRITA SINGH07 December 2020
On 26 November, India's Constitution Day, diasporic advocacy groups organised a roundtable on the question, "Is India becoming a fascist state?" The event was attended by politicians, researchers and activists from Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
On 1 December, the Indian foreign ministry reacted sharply to comments by the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, calling the ongoing farmers’ protest in India a “concerning situation” and supporting their right to peaceful protest. The ministry said “such comments are unwarranted, especially when pertaining to the internal affairs of a democratic country.” On the same day, Janet Rice, an Australian senator, addressed the country’s parliament and called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a “fascist organisation.” Five days earlier, on India’s Constitution Day, she attended a roundtable discussion on the question, “Is India becoming a fascist state?”
The roundtable was jointly organised by Amnesty International and Australia- and United States-based diasporic advocacy groups: Humanism Project, Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council. David Shoebridge, a member of the New South Wales parliament—Australia has eight state-level parliaments—from the Australian Greens party, moderated the discussion. Shoebridge kicked off the session by asking if “values that are said to resonate with that liberal, democratic tradition of democracy and freedom of expression” were being upheld in India. “As friends of India, these are questions, I think, that we need to ask,” he said.
The roundtable was held over two panel discussions, the first one titled, “View from Academia and Civil Society,” had researchers and activists as speakers, and the second one on the “Role of the International Community,” included politicians from the United Kingdom and United States. The panellists discussed the activities of the Sangh Parivar—the RSS and its affiliates—and the Bharatiya Janata Party government helmed by Narendra Modi, as well as the challenges to dissent and free speech in India.
Suchitra Vijayan, the executive editor of the Polis Project—a US-based research and media organisation—provided context about the Sangh Parivar in the first panel. “The Sangh Parivar is modelled after the Italian fascists and the German Nazis,” she said. “It is wrong to assume that fascist tactics are only used in dictatorships, in totalitarian regimes,” Vijayan said. She cited the writing of Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works, which lays out various strategies used in fascist politics.
“These strategies include petitioning to a mythic past, reinvention of history, use of propaganda, creating a culture of anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas,” Vijayan said, citing Stanley. “This is followed by constant repetition of the Hindu victimhood, obscuring law and order, and dismantling public welfare and unity. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics create a state of unreality in which conspiracy theories, fake news replaced reasonable debate.” She added, “In India, politicians employ these strategies regularly.” Based in the US, Vijayan said she was speaking “as a concerned Indian citizen who is watching her home being destroyed from afar.”
All panellists referred to the treatment meted out to marginalised communities since Modi came to power in 2014. “I feel the Modi government is intensifying efforts to portray religious minorities as enemies, as it moves rapidly towards an exclusivist Hindu Rashtra,” Raju Rajagopalan, a panellist and co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights—a US-based organisation that works on religious freedom—said. Anjali Arondekar, a co-director of the University of California’s Centre for South Asian Studies, highlighted that Dalit, Bahujan, Muslims and transgender communities are persecuted by the Hindu Right.
She began her address by stating, “For many scholars, such as myself, the question posed here, ‘Is India a fascist state,’ seems at this point to be a largely rhetorical question.” Arondekar, who is Bahujan and queer, also cautioned against blaming Modi and RSS for everything, emphasising that there was “continuity” in the actions of the Indian state. “I am a lower-caste person,” she said. “Talk to any lower-caste, Muslim person. These are not new stories.” Arondekar added, “When I was growing up, we referred to the Congress as the opposite of progress.”
Pieter Friedrich, an activist and author who was a part of the panel, spoke about the inroads that the RSS has made in other countries. Friedrich focused on the role of the Overseas Friends of BJP and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh—respectively, a foreign advocacy group with links to the BJP, and the RSS’s international wing. “Since Modi’s re-election, the OFBJP and the HSS have continued to promote and assist in the whitewashing of the pogrom-tainted Modi,” he said. He also brought up the fact that the Australian High Commissioner to India, Barry O’Farrell, met Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS’s chief, at the Sangh’s headquarters in Nagpur, in November this year. “That’s certainly an issue that moves the bar in the wrong direction,” Friedrich said.
According to Crikey, an Australia-based media outlet, the spokesperson for the country’s department of foreign affairs and trade said that the high commissioner “meets with a wide variety of social and political groupings as part of his role.” On 1 December, Rice spoke about the meeting between O’Farrell and Bhagwat in the country’s parliament. She said that the meeting was a “disgrace” and that Farrell should resign. During her speech, Rice identified the RSS as “a fascist organisation” and one that “rides roughshod over people’s human rights.” She added, “I’m keen to continue this discussion here in this parliament in the new year, because I believe that issues related to the erosion of human rights and democracy are things that needs to be drawn to people’s attention and for us to discuss here in this national parliament.”
The second panel of the roundtable discussed the matter of commenting on another country’s internal matters. Shaffaq Mohammed, a British politician who has served as a member of the European Parliament, noted that people who want to question the Modi government are told, “You are having a go at India,” or that these are “internal matters.” “Human rights, civil liberties need to be at the forefront,” Mohammed said. “We have to say—yes, we will applaud the good things that happen in India. But when there are issues, if you are a genuine friend of India, then you’ve got to challenge, you’ve got to question.” Mohammed added, “It is really important to say that the BJP and the RSS are not India.”
In January 2020, Mohammed had moved a resolution in the EU parliament against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. He was born in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and moved to the UK when he was four years old, but in India, the mediacoverage of Mohammed’s resolution focused on his Pakistani heritage. On 29 January, the EU parliament deferred the vote on the resolution till March, which never took place in the wake of the pandemic. But Mohammed emphasised the importance of addressing these issues at a global level. “The EU has a human-rights sub-committee, members from that were very much concerned around not just the CAA-NRC, but also what happened in August previously with the lockdown in Kashmir,” he said. Shoebridge, too, tabled a motion against the CAA in the New South Wales parliament in August this year.
Marie Newman, a Democrat who has been elected to the US House of Representatives this year, sent a video message noting the global rise in nationalism. “This tide that has turned in the US, it will affect other nations’ pastures around nationalism,” she added, referring to the recent presidential elections in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.
It became clear from the roundtable that international mobilisation around the developments in India witnessed a sharp surge following the enactment of the CAA. The Humanism Project was among several advocacy and activist groups located abroad that were born out of the anti-CAA movement. Representatives of such groups from across the world told me about how they were organising to tackle Hindutva within India and abroad. Amrit Wilson, a founding member of the South Asia Solidarity group in the United Kingdom, told me, “This scale of churn has not been seen before.”
Ritumbra Manuvie, an Indian citizen based in the Netherlands, told me that she worked with a human-rights advocacy group called The London Story foundation, registered in The Hague and formed in the wake of the anti-CAA protests. Manuvie said that the foundation prepares reports to send to bodies such as EU parliamentary committees using “data from different organisations based in India who cannot do it themselves.”
Though the Humanism Project has previously collaborated with the Australian Greens about developments in India, Miraj Khan, a member of the project, was quick to dismiss any political affiliation. “We don’t have a political background,” she told me. “We don’t have an agenda … We are not benefitted financially.” Khan added that most of the Humanism Project’s members are not career activists, and that they have day jobs and volunteer on the side.
Speaking about why the Humanism Project was formed, Khan said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. The only way a government can be held accountable is through free press, freedom of speech and expression. And all of that is being hampered.” Deepak Joshi, another member, said western governments also need to be held to account. “Many of them see India as a big market and don’t want to be on the wrong side of the Indian government,” he said. When asked about the response of other Australian parties to their advocacy, Joshi said, “We have been talking to them as well. We expect them to take our cause to various levels.”
The South Asian Solidarity group was formed in the 1980s, and has been campaigning about the dangers of Hindutva since Modi came to power, Wilson told me. She said that there is a “big lobby of the Hindutva groups” in the UK. “Modi wants a global community of Hindus who will support Hindutva,” she said, before adding, “I think people are realising that Hindutva is not Hinduism, it is fascism.”
AMRITA SINGH is an editorial fellow at The Caravan.
Watch: Protests in support of Indian farmers erupt in Canada, UK, Australia
People from across the globe have expressed solidarity with protesting Indian farmers.
On Sunday, police also warned crowds gathered outside the India High Commission that they would be fined for breaking coronavirus restrictions.
Sikh Federation UK posted pictures online of big crowds in the capital as they protested against farming reforms in India.
Waste audit names Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle as top plastic polluters
Children play in a large collection of plastic waste at Mahim Beach in Mumbai, India. The study released Monday cited hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic waste, mostly in Southern Hemisphere nations. File Photo by Divyakant Solanki/EPA-EFE
Dec. 7 (UPI) -- A report published Monday by an international coalition of environmental activists identifies a number of companies that it says are the world's biggest plastic polluters -- and at the top of the list are the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and Nestle.
The 57-page report, titled "Demanding Corporate Accountability for Plastic Pollution," was produced by the Philippines-based group Break Free From Plastic, which analyzed data generated by waste pickers who audited nearly 350,000 pieces of plastic in 55 countries.
The audit was conducted mainly in countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
The analysis says waste pickers found about 14,000 pieces from Coca-Cola in 51 countries, 5,200 pieces from PepsiCo in 43 nations and 8,600 pieces from Nestle in 37.
Other companies noted by the report include Unilever, Mondelez International, Mars, Procter & Gamble and Philip Morris International.
"It's not surprising to see the same big brands on the podium as the world's top plastic polluters for three years in a row," Abigail Aguilar, plastics campaign regional coordinator of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said in a statement.
"These companies claim to be addressing the plastic crisis yet they continue to invest in false solutions while teaming up with oil companies to produce even more plastic. To stop this mess and combat climate change, multinationals like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle must end their addiction to single-use plastic packaging and move away from fossil fuels."
The companies are signatories to the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program.
The pact calls for the "elimination of problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging through redesign, innovation" and new delivery and reuse models.
All three companies told The Guardian Monday they are working to address packaging waste.
"Globally, we have a commitment to get every bottle back by 2030, so that none of it ends up as litter or in the oceans, and the plastic can be recycled into new bottles," a Coca-Cola spokesperson said. "Bottles with 100% recycled plastic are now available in 18 markets around the world, and this is continually growing."
PepsiCo said it's moving to cut pollution through "partnership, innovation and investments" and said part of that is a goal to reduce virgin plastic in the beverage business by 35% by 2025.
Nestle said it's making "meaningful progress" in sustainable packaging, but acknowledged the need for more efforts.
"We are intensifying our actions to make 100% of our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025 and to reduce our use of virgin plastics by one-third in the same period," a spokesperson said.
Coca-Cola, Pepsi, & Nestlé Named World’s Top Plastic Polluters — For 3rd Year In A Row
Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé are the world’s top plastic polluters for the third consecutive year. This news comes from Break Free From Plastic’s report that was released this week during a virtual press conference.
Break Free From Plastic’s brand audit, which is an annual citizen action initiative involving the counting and documentation of brands on plastic waste found in communities worldwide, collected 346,494 pieces of plastic from 55 countries. This year, the brand audit took a closer look at the essential work of informal waste pickers — especially in the Global South — and the impact that low-value single-use plastic has on their livelihoods.
Abigail Aguilar, the Plastics Campaign Regional Coordinator at Greenpeace Southeast Asia, noted that it wasn’t surprising that big brands are the world’s top plastic polluters. “It’s not surprising to see the same big brands on the podium as the world’s top plastic polluters for three years in a row. These companies claim to be addressing the plastic crisis yet they continue to invest in false solutions while teaming up with oil companies to produce even more plastic. To stop this mess and combat climate change, multinationals like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé must end their addiction to single-use plastic packaging and move away from fossil fuels,” she said.
The aim of BFFP is to challenge the industry narrative about who is responsible for the plastic crisis and how to solve it. Brand audits collectively help us to redirect the focus back onto the companies that create the problem — those who make the plastics — while empowering us to demand these companies to stop making unnecessary throwaway single-use plastics. Here’s looking at you, Coke, Pepsi, and Nestlé.
You may remember that back in 2015, the chairman of Nestlé stated that he didn’t believe water was a human right when using it to fill up swimming pools, wash cars, or water a golf course. Although it takes Nestle around 1.39 liters of water just to make one liter of bottled water, the company is known for its stance on water and the idea of water being a human right as being “extreme,” simply because water is overused.
“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there,” said Former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.
I’m bringing that bit up due to the hypocrisy of the company that is one of the world’s top three plastic polluters — plastics that are made with water that is then being used to pollute the ocean. And adding into that mix, all three of these companies sell bottled water (the other two sell sodas as well).
Waste pickers and BFFP movements are demanding that these companies shift toward refill and reuse systems — replacing packaging that isn’t recyclable and that provides no economic benefit. Waste picker and National Coordinator of South African Waste Picker Association Simon Mbata said it best: “Whatever cannot be recycled, must not be produced.” Top 2020 Global Polluters
Although many of these companies have clever marketing strategies centered around “lofty ‘sustainability goals'” it should be noted that these same companies are on the list of Top Global Polluters not just once, but year after year. This shows that many of these companies who are going “carbon neutral by such and such year,” or are doing (insert activity here) to be more “sustainable,” are not actually becoming sustainable.
The report shows that these corporations that pollute the most places globally with the greatest amount of plastic waste. The results below are ranked according to the number of countries where brand audits reported finding these companies. The 10 Worst Polluters are: Coca-Cola in 51 countries with 13,834 plastics. PepsiCo in 43 countries with 5,155 plastics. Nestlé in 37 countries with 8,633 plastics. Unilever in 37 countries with 5,558 plastics. Mondelēz International in 34 countries with 1,171 plastics. Mars in 32 countries with 678 plastics. P&G in 29 countries with 3,535 plastics. Phillip Morris International in 28 countries with 2,593 plastics. Colgate Palmolive in 24 countries with 5,991 plastics. Perfetti in 24 countries with 465 plastics. More From The Report
Image from BFFP Brand Audit Report
According to the figure above, most of the waste surveyed was not recyclable in many countries, including Brazil, Chile, Ghana, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Africa. Only Chile and the Philippines had more recyclable waste than non-recyclable waste. The figure below, from the report, demonstrates the values of the recyclables, ranging from bottles, gallon jugs, plastic bags, and plastic cups and plates. Image from BFFP Brand Audit Report
Waste Pickers Share Their Thoughts
In a special section of the report where waste pickers could share their thoughts with these companies, a question and answer series is documented. Here are a few of those questions and answers taken directly from the report:
Companies say they have created small sachets for the urban poor. If you could meet one of these corporate CEOs, what would you say to them?
“This statement is of total disrespect, underestimating the intelligence of waste pickers. In our daily lives, we see thousands of packages go through the conveyor belt with no commercial value and that leave us distressed and afflicted, to know that the thought of large corporations is to treat waste pickers with indifference and not recognizing the works done by the category.” — Valquiria Candido da Silva Waste picker from Brazil
How do company decisions about plastic packaging directly impact the livelihoods of waste pickers?
“In my own experience, I work at a material recovery facility with waste pickers in VaalPark South Africa, and the majority of the plastic that we come across is not recyclable. This no value plastic impacts the livelihoods of waste pickers because it eats into the profits and surpluses of our projects. The reality is that companies who produce this type of plastic are not creating jobs for waste pickers, but are quickly destroying the planet. The only way that these companies can create jobs for waste pickers, is if they create recyclable materials that can go back into the economy. Whatever cannot be recycled, must not be produced. My hope is to see waste pickers in South Africa working in better environments and being an integral part of the waste management system.” — Simon Mbata, waste picker and National Coordinator of the South African Waste Picker Association (SAWPA) More Thoughts From An Expert, Lakshmi Narayan:
“Around 15 million waste pickers retrieve paper, metal, glass, and plastics from municipal solid waste, and move it up the value chain through scrap traders to reprocessors. They form the base of a pyramid responsible for over 50% of global recycling that employs millions. Despite internalizing costs and subsidizing corporations whose waste materials they recycle, they are fragmented, marginalized, and often displaced by corporate investment in pilots that incentivizes superficial behavior change, encourages expensive, capital intensive, centralized technologies, or research small-scale efforts in obscure, expensive, inefficient recycling.
“FMCG manufacturers unhesitatingly claim sachets ensure the poor have access to their wonder products in bite-size, that littering and pollution are due in equal measure to weak municipal solid waste management systems and the ‘indisciplined’, illiterate poor, and that continued production of plastics ensures waste pickers access to a steady income. In fact, waste pickers neither want single-use plastics for recycling, nor the expensive commodities they package.” — Lakshmi Narayan, waste picker specialist.
BALTIMORE — The Better Business Bureau is seeing an increase in reports about scam websites claiming to sell face masks online but not delivering.
Angie Barnett with the Better Business serving Greater Maryland said there was a spike in scams in the spring as the pandemic spread throughout the country. Now, there's another wave of reports as state and local governments implement mask mandates and Americans prepare for guests over the holidays. “We had a business here in Maryland that actually ordered PPE (personal protective equipment) online, thought it was a legitimate retailer, and lost thousands and thousands of dollars a small business couldn’t afford to lose,” said Barnett.
It’s not just businesses and consumers sending money to the wrong people, the FBI has received reports from state governments attempting to procure ventilators or PPE and wired money to fraudulent sellers. By the time they realized it, the money had been transferred outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement and was unrecoverable.
“We always say, and holidays are so important, slow down to investigate. Do your research as you’re looking because it’s so easy to get misdirected to a fake website,” said Barnett.
Only buy from sellers you know and trust. Be sure the online store has working contact information, and evaluate claims of any medical product before buying.
Angelica Gomez wishes she did more research after handing over $175 for N95 masks through the online seller EM General.
“My husband, his genes aren't great. He has high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and he had quintuple bypass when he was 38 years old,” Gomez said. “I have two sons with asthma and I have another son who already has diabetes.”
Gomez waited for the masks to arrive, but they never did. When she reached out to the company by phone and email, no one responded.
“They’re creating false hope because it’s not real to begin with,” Gomez said.
Earlier this year, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California charged a Michigan man with wire fraud for allegedly scamming customers into paying for N95 masks that they never received. Rodney Stevenson II controlled EM General and purported to sell an available inventory of “Anti-Viral N95” respirator masks, according to the criminal complaint.
The Department of Justice continues to go after criminals attempting to exploit the pandemic. If you are the victim of a scam involving COVID-19, you can report it to the National Center for Disaster Fraud through their hotline at 1-866-720-5721 or online complaint form. Copyright 2020 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
DEC. 6, 2020 White Evangelicals Made a Deal With the Devil. Now What? By Sarah Jones
The savior. Photo: AFP via Getty Images
In the end, white Christian America stood by its man. The exit polls present an imperfect but definitive picture. At least three-quarters of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in November, a figure largely unchanged from 2016. Evangelicals didn’t win Trump another four years in power, but not for lack of effort. While most of America tired of the president’s impieties, the born-again found in themselves a higher tolerance for sin.
And the sins are legion, lest we forget. He tear-gassed protesters so he could walk to a D.C. church and hold a Bible upside-down in front of it without interference. He lied and cheated, and smeared women who accused him of sexual assault. He separated migrant children from their parents and staffed his administration with white nationalists. Over a quarter of a million Americans died of the coronavirus, while he railed against doctors and scientists trying to save lives. Not even a plague turned Evangelicals from their earthly lord. For Trump, the consequences are political and legal. For Evangelicals, the fallout has a more spiritual quality. What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?
Evangelicals had more to lose than Republicans, for reasons I learned in church as a child. You can’t evangelize anyone if your testimony is poor. If you disobey your parents, or wear a skirt that falls above your knees, how can anyone believe you’re saved? Another Sunday school lesson, conveniently forgotten? Be sure that your sin will find you out. Evangelicals bought power, and the bill is coming due. The price is their Christian witness, the credibility of their redemption by God. Evangelicalism won’t disappear after Trump, but its alliance with an unpopular and brutal president could alienate all but the most zealous.
To be Evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear. The world was so dangerous, and our status in it so fragile. The fossil record was a lie, and scientists knew it. You could not watch the Teletubbies because Jerry Falwell thought the purple one was gay. No Disney, either, and not because Walt had been a fascist; Disneyworld allowed a gay-pride day, and in one scene of The Lion King, you could see the stars spell out “sex.” You were lucky to even be alive, to have escaped the abortion mill. The predominantly white Evangelical world in which I was raised had created its own shadow universe, a buffer between it and the hostile world. Our parents could put us in Christian schools or homeschool us; if they did risk public school, we could take shelter with groups like YoungLife and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which would tell us to make the most of this chance to save souls. We had alternatives for everything; our own pop music, our own kids’ shows, our own versions of biology and U.S. history, and an ecosystem of colleges and universities to train us up in the way we should go: toward the Republican Party, and away from the left, with no equivocation.
Whatever the cause, whatever the rumor, the fear was always the same. It was about power, and what would happen if we lost it. Certain facts, like the whiteness of our congregations and the maleness of our pulpits and the shortcomings of our leaders, were not worth mentioning. You were fighting for God, and God was not racist or sexist; He was only true. The unsaved hated this, it made them angry, and that was proof you were doing the right thing. If “owning the libs” has a discernible origin point, it’s here, in the white Evangelical church.
While I was in college and Trump was still a reality-show star, Evangelicals faced a crisis in the pews. Young people were leaving the church, and they weren’t coming back. The first signs arrived in 2007, in the last hopeful months before the Great Recession. A pair of Christian researchers released a study with troubling implications for the future of the church. Young people aged 16 to 29 were skeptical of Christianity and of Evangelicalism in particular, concluded Dave Kinnaman of the Barna Group and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project. “Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political,” they wrote. Among the unchurched, attitudes were even more negative. A mere 3 percent said they had positive views of Evangelicalism, a precipitous decline from previous generations.
I interviewed Lyons about his research while I was a student journalist at Cedarville University, a conservative Baptist school in Ohio. By the time I graduated, I’d become one of his statistics, an atheist with a minor in Bible. Trump was not even a glimmer in Steve Bannon’s eye, but the Evangelical tradition had already asked me to tolerate many sins. There was George W. Bush and his catastrophic invasion of Iraq; welfare policies that starved the poor; the dehumanization of immigrants, of LGBT people, of women who do not wish to stay pregnant, and my own, non-negotiable submission to men. At some point I realized that I had traveled some distance in my mind, and I could not go back the way I came. I was over it, I was through.
The years after my personal exodus brought with them more proof that the church was in trouble. Partisanship did not entirely explain why. Membership declined fastest in mainline congregations, even though they tend to be more liberal than the independent churches of my youth. Social media has expanded the philosophical marketplace; all Christian traditions face competition from new ideologies for the hearts and minds of the young. But conservative denominations are suffering, too. The Southern Baptist Convention said this June it had experienced its 13th consecutive year of membership decline. By age 22, two-thirds of adults who attend Protestant services as teenagers have dropped out of church for at least a year, LifeWay Research found last year, and a quarter cited political disagreements as the reason. An alliance with a president the young largely hated might not lure new generations to the fold.
Years of attrition have taken a toll on white Evangelicals, said Robert Jones, the author of The End of White Christian America and the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. “If you go back a couple of election cycles ago, into Barack Obama’s first election, they were 21 percent of the population, and today they are 15 percent of the population,” he told me. The share of Black Evangelicals has remained relatively stable, he added, while the numbers of Latino Evangelicals has grown. And while these groups ostensibly share a religious label, politically they are far apart.
“If I take the religious landscape, and I sort religious groups by their support for one candidate or the other, what inevitably happens is that there are no two groups further away from each other in that sorting than white Evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants,” Jones said, adding that Latino Evangelicals are “a little more divided.” (Indeed, Trump won significant support from this group in 2020.)
People pray together during the “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry as they await the arrival of President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 in Miami, Florida. Photo: Getty Images
But white Evangelicals are still outliers overall: They’re more conservative than other Protestants, more conservative than Catholics, more conservative, in fact, than any other demographic in the country. The implicit claim of the Moral Majority — that it embodied mainstream opinion — always lacked evidence, but it’s become even less true over time. By the time Trump applied Richard Nixon’s label of a “silent majority” to his own coalition, it barely made sense at all. A bloc that can only take the White House through the Electoral College, and not the popular vote, only to lose it outright four years later, has no claim to majority status. They are a remnant within a remnant, a nation within a nation.
There are still dissenters. Last year, the outgoing editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, called for Trump’s removal from office. Galli wrote the typical approach for his magazine was to “stay above the fray,” and “allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible,” he wrote. But Trump had abused the power of his office and revealed a “grossly deficient moral character.” Galli has since converted to Catholicism, a decision he explained to Religion News Services as being more personal than political.
Others stay. But they can experience a painful friction between their spiritual convictions and political independence. My parents, both pro-life Evangelicals, have now voted against Trump twice. I spoke to another by Skype, not long before the election.
I know Marlena Proper Graves from my days at that Baptist university, when I was an upstart college feminist, and she was a resident director and the spouse of a professor. Now the author of two books on faith and a doctoral candidate at Bowling Green State University, Graves worries about the influence of Trump, and Trump’s party, on her beloved church. The word “Evangelical,” she noted, had always referred to a constellation of beliefs. “You have a relationship with God, God cares about you, God cares about all people, and Christ is central,” she said, ticking them off. “But now it seems to be something of a culture.” That culture is an exclusionary one. “I’ve been disinvited from events because of my views and activism for immigrants, because it’s controversial,” she said.
When Proper was young, she told me, she listened to Christian radio all the time, just like I did. Preachers and commentators like James Dobson, a famed radio personality and the founder of Focus on the Family, would opine on the issues of the day, on morality, and virtue. “All these people would talk about character,” she said. “How you can’t vote for Bill Clinton in particular because of Monica Lewinsky, because he had affairs.” Then came Trump. “People said, first, that they didn’t think he would win. Then it was all about abortion and judges. I felt like I was being punked,” she remembered. But many Evangelicals are in on the joke. Faced with popular rejection and the humiliation of Trump, they declare themselves persecuted, and identify numerous enemies. The mission remains the same: Purify the nation, and pacify the barbarians.
Beyond the usual celebrity-preacher scandals, the faith’s place in the broader Christian right required it to make moral compromises it never tolerated among the rank-and-file members of the flock. Our definition of morality narrowed the further up the pyramid you climbed. For the politicians we backed, it shrank to a pinprick point: Ronald Reagan was divorced. What mattered instead to the Moral Majority was his opposition to abortion, his hippie-bashing, his ability to trade in euphemisms about “states’ rights.” Two Bush presidents later, thrice-married Trump gave Evangelicals the conservative Supreme Court of their dreams.
As hypocritical as white Evangelical support for Trump may look from the outside, the president actually understood his base quite well. Eight years of a Black, liberal president threatened their hegemony. So had the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist and the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, told me that Trump managed to tap into two key Evangelical tendencies. “Those two things were the racial grievances of the white base of the Republican Party, and how televangelism had changed Evangelicalism from the 1970s onward,” she said.
Galli, the former Christianity Today editor, believes Trump also appealed to an entrenched Evangelical sense of marginalization. By the time same-sex marriage was legalized, public opinion on LGBT rights had already liberalized; the gap between white Evangelicals, and everyone else, on matters of sexuality is now wider than it’s ever been. “Here comes Donald Trump, saying it’s okay to be Christian, it’s okay to have your values, it’s okay to practice your values in the public square. And he does this in a very authoritative manner,” Galli explained. Trump didn’t know his Scripture, but he knew there was a war on, and that was enough. The nation’s culture warriors had found their general.
Evangelicals, Galli added, “are deeply suspicious of human authority,” but only to a point. What they may fear, really, is authority they don’t control. “Paradoxically,” he continued, “they are a group that’s attracted to authoritarian leaders, whether that person be a pastor of a megachurch or a dictator.” Those tendencies existed before Trump. With the help of the far-right press, social media, and alternative institutions, they will survive Trump, too.
“I think that the thing that we have to keep our eye on is the ways in which the infrastructure that they built gives them an advantage beyond what their numbers would tell you,” Posner said. Conservative Evangelicals already know that they’re no longer the Moral Majority, and they’ve found a way to make it work for them. “They’ll recognize, for example, that they may be in the minority on LGBTQ rights, but in their view, that’s all the more reason that they should be protected by either the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or the First Amendment, in having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.”
That infrastructure still churns out new acolytes, who embrace the worst elements of the tradition we all used to share. The same movement that produced me also spawned Madison Cawthorn, a Republican elected to Congress last month. He was born the year the Southern Baptist Convention first apologized for slavery, and he will be the youngest member of Congress when he takes office in January. He’ll also be one of furthest-right Republicans in office, with a personal life that once again tests the bounds of Evangelical toleration for sin. Women from his Christian homeschooling community in North Carolina and women who studied with him at the conservative Patrick Henry College have accused him repeatedly of sexual harassment and misconduct. A racist website linked to his campaign criticized a local journalist for leaving academia to “work for nonwhite males” like Senator Cory Booker, “who aims to ruin white males.” After he won, he celebrated with a tweet. “Cry more, lib,” he wrote.
There’s time for Cawthorn to self-immolate on a pyre of his own sins before he’s old enough to run for president. But there will be other Cawthorns, other white Evangelical candidates who will try to master Trumpism-without-Trump. They might not need an army to win, either. The GOP already knows it doesn’t have to be popular to stay in power. They need a radical remnant, and a lot of dirty tricks. Republicans can get what they want by suppressing the vote, or by undermining our confidence in elections. They can protect themselves through the subtle tyranny of inequality, which empowers the wealthy while alienating the most under-represented among us. A party out of step with most voters must either reform, or it must cheat. This, too, is something the modern GOP has in common with the Christian right. Democracy is the enemy. People can’t be trusted with their own souls. Leave them to their own devices, and they make the wrong choices, take the easy way out, threaten everything holy. They need a savior, whether they like it or not.
