Maersk: Shipping capacity down as much as 20% due to Red Sea attacks

dpa
2024/05/06

A container ship of the Maersk shipping company is handled at Eurogate Container Terminal. Marcus Brandt/dpa

Due to the difficult security situation in the Red Sea, Danish shipping giant Maersk is expecting an industry-wide loss in freight capacity on routes from eastern Asia to Europe of 15% to 20% in the second quarter.

Maersk released the estimates on Monday, citing attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on merchant shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthi militants have said the attacks are intended to support the Palestinian militant group Hamas by making it more difficult for cargo ships to reach Israel.

The attacks have forced several major commercial shipping firms, including Maersk, to indefinitely cancel voyages through the critical Red Sea shipping corridor that connects to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

That has forced shipping firms to route cargo around the southern tip of Africa, a far longer route that adds both time and additional expense to voyages.

According to Maersk, the situation in the Red Sea is causing ship congestion, delays and capacity bottlenecks. To counteract this, Maersk has increased the speed of its ships and leased more than 125,000 additional containers, according to Monday's announcement.

The added costs are passed onto customers, the company said.

Maersk is the world's second-largest container shipping company behind MSC.

dpa

Far-right parties wage disinfo war ahead of EU vote

Agence France-Presse
May 6, 2024 

Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen (JULIEN DE ROSA AFP)

Far-right populist parties are way ahead of their traditional rivals in the race for voter attention on social media, where disinformation is stirring fear and rage around key issues in June's European elections, experts say.

Platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram and others have been used by populist parties to spread misleading or false claims on hot topics such as the war in Ukraine, migration and regulations intended to protect the environment, as AFP's fact-checkers have found.

"Populist parties are masters of a new type of propaganda. Disinformation is at the core of (their) communication strategies," said consultant Johannes Hillje, who advises parties and politicians in Berlin and Brussels.

And the right-leaning parties have a lead in the quest for views and likes.

According to research by Politico magazine in March, the far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the European parliament -- which includes France's National Rally (RN), AfD in Germany and PVV in the Netherlands -- has 1.3 million followers on TikTok.

The centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the largest and oldest parliamentary grouping, has a paltry 167,000.

- 'Scapegoating immigrants' -

A key issue for online misinformation is migration.

With the economy an overriding concern, "opportunistic politicians... are scapegoating immigrants for society's ills," said Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, deputy director of Washington-based think tank Migration Policy Institute.

"Dis/misinformation about migrants and migration has long been used to foment fear and mobilise voters in Europe," she said.

In March, for example, a false claim on X that immigration cost France 40 billion euros per year was repeated by the lead FN candidate, Jordan Bardella. Economists involved in the research cited as the source for the figure told AFP this was a "misleading interpretation".

Another battleground for the right is the EU's Green Deal measures to stem climate change. In April, a number of AfD politicians shared false claims that France had banned the construction and operation of wind power turbines. In fact, a court had merely issued a ruling regarding the noise levels of such turbines.

Social media is "handy for... organized right-wing populist political parties to impose their lies, conspiracies and frames", said Ayhan Kaya, chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Many election issues are complicated, making them easy targets for disinformation. People wanted simple black and white answers "to the complexities of today's globalised world", he told AFP.

Far-right politicians such as the AfD's top candidate Maximilian Krah have become veritable TikTok stars, garnering millions of likes for their videos.

In March, however, Krah was forced to deny allegations he accepted money to spread pro-Russian positions on a Moscow-financed news website. Since then, German prosecutors have launched an investigation against him for suspicious links to Russia and China.

The average number of views for AfD's TikTok videos in 2022 and 2023 was 435,394, way ahead of Germany's conservative CDU/CSU parties with an average of 90,583 views, said Hillje.

The gap was also substantial on YouTube, he said.


- 'Major threat' -

Already last October, the EU's Agency for Cybersecurity called for vigilance ahead of the June 6-9 vote for the European Parliament, saying "information manipulation campaigns are considered to be a major threat to election processes".

In a bid for votes, Bulgarian far-right party leader Kostadin Kostadinov in March falsely claimed on Facebook that an EU report listed his country as having the third most asylum applications from illegal migrants.

In Romania, the lead candidate for the SOS party, Diana Sosoaca, has veered into deep conspiracy, repeatedly spreading material related to the widely rejected chemtrails theory, that condensation trails in the sky from aircraft are actually from biological agents.

In Hungary, "one of the major sources of disinformation is the government itself," according to EU DisinfoLab.

Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban was scolded by Brussels last year for a series of misleading claims on Facebook, including that Brussels wanted to establish migrant ghettos in Hungary.

Populist parties are "animating their electoral successes" by painting the migration issue as an existential one, said Banulescu-Bogdan.

They "benefit from multiple crises by exploiting the fear of people," said Hillje. "The main problem is that disinformation spreads faster and wider than information," he said.

France warns that forcing civilians from Rafah may be a war crime

2024/05/06

Palestinians inspect damaged houses after Israeli warplanes bombed a home for the Al-Shaer family, leading to widespread destruction in the Al-Salam neighbourhood, east of the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.

 Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa

The French Foreign Ministry has emphasized its "firm opposition" to Israeli plans to launch a military ground offensive against the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"France also recalls that the forced displacement of a civilian population constitutes a war crime under international law," the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The French government demanded that the Palestinian militant group Hamas immediately release all hostages, and that parties to the conflict agree to a permanent ceasefire that protects the needs of the civilian population.

French President Emmanuel Macron had already made a similar statement on Sunday.

Israel's military began evacuating Rafah on Monday and demanded that the inhabitants of the eastern part of the city to move to the al-Mawasi camp on the Mediterranean.

WAR IS RAPE
'Taboo': French women speak out on rapes by U.S. soldiers during WWII

Agence France-Presse
May 6, 2024 


Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944.

But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out.

Nearly a million U.S., British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany's grip on Europe.

Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the "liberators" arrive, as was everybody around her.

But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two U.S. soldiers -- often called GIs -- arrived at the family's farm.

"They were drunk and they wanted a woman," Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote "so nothing is forgotten".

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. "They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each."

Aimee's voice broke as she read from the letter. "Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day," she said.

"My mother sacrificed herself to protect me," she said. "While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead."

The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.

In truth, hundreds or even thousands of rapes between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a handful to research what she called "a taboo" of World War II.

"Many women decided to remain silent," she said. "There was the shame, as often with rape."

She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.

- 'Easy to get' -


Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women that were "easy to get" to add to their motivation to fight.

The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans.

"Here's What We're Fighting For," read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: "The French are nuts about the Yanks."


The incentive of sex "was to motivate American soldiers", Roberts said.

"Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans," she added.

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers "as if it was yesterday" how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI.


"The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house," 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.

Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby U.S. garrison to alert them.

"I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that he was American," she said.


Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret "that poisoned her whole life" until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.

"Lying on her hospital bed she told me, 'I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,'" Plassard told AFP.

Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: "Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel," she said.


French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel "OK Joe!", including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts.

"Those sentenced to death were almost all black," said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.

- 'Shameful secret' -


Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged publicly in French villages.

"Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army," said Baron.

"Once a black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal," he said.

This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation of white Americans by "scapegoating many African-American soldiers".

Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.

Racial stereotypes on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary.

"If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he never stayed near the rape scene. The next morning, he was gone," Roberts said.

After her book "What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France" appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her.

"People were angry at my book because they didn't want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI," she said. "Even if it means we have to keep on lying."

AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the subject.

Frauenkultur.co.ukfrauenkultur.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Against-Our-Will.pdf

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape - Frauenkultur

... Against. Our Will. Men, Women and Rape. SUSAN BROWNMILLER. Fawcett Columbine • New York. Page 5. Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If ...

Unravelling life’s origin: five key breakthroughs from the past five years

The Conversation
May 6, 2024 

Origin of the Earth (MisFluffy/Shutterstock)

There is still so much we don’t understand about the origin of life on Earth.

The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ingredients of a living cell. Water, energy, and a few essential elements are the prerequisites for cells to emerge. However, the exact details of how this happens remain a mystery.

Recent research has focused on trying to recreate in the lab the chemical reactions that constitute life as we know it, in conditions plausible for early Earth (around 4 billion years ago). Experiments have grown in complexity, thanks to technological progress and a better understanding of what early Earth conditions were like.

However, far from bringing scientists together and settling the debate, the rise of experimental work has led to many contradictory theories. Some scientists think that life emerged in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where the conditions provided the necessary energy. Others argue that hot springs on land would have provided a better setting because they are more likely to hold organic molecules from meteorites. These are just two possibilities which are being investigated.

Here are five of the most remarkable discoveries over the last five years.

Reactions in early cells

What energy source drove the chemical reactions at the origin of life? This is the mystery that a research team in Germany has sought to unravel. The team delved into the feasibility of 402 reactions known to create some of the essential components of life, such as nucleotides (a building block of DNA and RNA). They did this using some of the most common elements that could have been found on the early Earth.

These reactions, present in modern cells, are also believed to be the core metabolism of LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, a single-cell, bacterium-like organism.

For each reaction, they calculated the changes in free energy, which determines if a reaction can go forward without other external sources of energy. What is fascinating is that many of these reactions were independent of external influences like adenosine triphosphate, a universal source of energy in living cells.

The synthesis of life’s fundamental building blocks didn’t need an external energy boost: it was self-sustaining.

Volcanic glass

Life relies on molecules to store and convey information. Scientists think that RNA (ribonucleic acid) strands were precursors to DNA in fulfilling this role, since their structure is more simple.

The emergence of RNA on our planet has long confused researchers. However, some progress has been made recently. In 2022, a team of collaborators in the US generated stable RNA strands in the lab. They did it by passing nucleotides through volcanic glass. The strands they made were long enough to store and transfer information.

Volcanic glass was present on the early Earth, thanks to frequent meteorite impacts coupled with a high volcanic activity. The nucleotides used in the study are also believed to have been present at that time in Earth’s history. Volcanic rocks could have facilitated the chemical reactions that assembled nucleotides into RNA chains.

Hydrothermal vents

Carbon fixation is a process in which CO₂ gains electrons. It is necessary to build the molecules that form the basis of life.

An electron donor is necessary to drive this reaction. On the early Earth, H₂ could have been the electron donor. In 2020, a team of collaborators showed that this reaction could spontaneously occur and be fueled by environmental conditions similar to deep-sea alkaline hydrothermal vents in the early ocean. They did this using microfluidic technology, devices that manipulate tiny volumes of liquids to perform experiments by simulating alkaline vents.


This pathway is strikingly similar to how many modern bacterial and archaeal cells (single-cell organisms without a nucleas) operate.

The Krebs Cycle

In modern cells, carbon fixation is followed by a cascade of chemical reactions that assemble or break down molecules, in intricate metabolic networks that are driven by enzymes.

But scientists are still debating how metabolic reactions unfolded before the emergence and evolution of those enzymes. In 2019, a team from the University of Strasbourg in France made a breakthrough. They showed that ferrous iron, a type of iron that was abundant in early Earth’s crust and ocean, could drive nine out of 11 steps of the Krebs Cycle. The Krebs Cycle is a biological pathway present in many living cells.

Here, ferrous iron acted as the electron donor for carbon fixation, which drove the cascade of reactions. The reactions produced all five of the universal metabolic precursors – five molecules that are fundamental across various metabolic pathways in all living organisms.

Building blocks of ancient cell membranes

Understanding the formation of life’s building blocks and their intricate reactions is a big step forward in comprehending the emergence of life.

However, whether they unfolded in hot springs on land or in the deep sea, these reactions would not have gone far without a cell membrane. Cell membranes play an active role in the biochemistry of a primitive cell and its connection with the environment.

Modern cell membranes are mostly composed of compounds called phospholipids, which contain a hydrophilic head and two hydrophobic tails. They are structured in bilayers, with the hydrophilic heads pointing outward and the hydrophobic tails pointing inward.

Research has shown that some components of phospholipids, such as the fatty acids that constitute the tails, can self-assemble into those bilayer membranes in a range of environmental conditions. But were these fatty acids present on the early Earth? Recent research from Newcastle University, UK gives an interesting answer. Researchers recreated the spontaneous formation of these molecules by combining H₂-rich fluids, likely present in ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents, with CO₂-rich water resembling the early ocean.

This breakthrough aligns with the hypothesis that stable fatty acid membranes could have originated in alkaline hydrothermal vents, potentially progressing into living cells. The authors speculated that similar chemical reactions might unfold in the subsurface oceans of icy moons, which are thought to have hydrothermal vents similar to terrestrial ones.

Each of these discoveries adds a new piece to the puzzle of the origin of life. Regardless of which ones are proved correct, contrasting theories are fuelling the search for answers. As Charles Darwin wrote:

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often long endure: but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.


Seán Jordan, Associate professor, Dublin City University and Louise Gillet de Chalonge, PhD Student in Astrobiology, Dublin City University

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

Crime is not on the rise — so why do so many Americans think it is?

Claire Bond Potter, 

Alternet
May 6, 2024

Donald Trump at a rally in Virginia last month. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

As we approach the 2024 election, crime is all over the media. Sure, it’s the media’s job to report crime. But if you are a devoted listener of 1010-WINS radio (which covers New York, New Jersey and Long Island), you will notice that other than weather and traffic, crime and policing are key aspects of the broadcast. Out of the top six news headlines on the WINS site today, five were violent crimes and the sixth was the ongoing student protest at Columbia. And if there aren’t enough crimes in the New York metropolitan area (oh, for the days of “Headless Body in Topless Bar”), reporters detail unusual and often grisly crimes that have happened hundreds or thousands of miles away. In the past week, the station has reported a gun battle in Louisiana that left three police wounded and one suspect dead; a fugitive former Oregon police officer accused of murder and kidnapping taking his own life; a robbery and carjacking in suburban West Haven, Connecticut.

Given that crime is a staple element of tabloid news, coverage of local tragedies, rather than seeming to occur at a distance, brings the specter of mayhem into communities that experience little or no crime. As Gideon Taffe of Media Matters reported in January 2023, Fox produced “a misleading narrative” about the United States being in the grip of a crime wave in 2022, devoted 11 percent of its reporting to the topic in advance of the midterm election. But that crime wave was “largely created by its own relentless coverage,” Taffe writes. “By focusing on racist stereotypes, smearing progressive prosecutors and pushing conspiracy theories, Fox made crime one of the biggest perceived ailments in the country and pushed far-right policy prescriptions ahead of the election.”

The only sane policy responses, Fox hosts proclaimed, were those embraced by the Party of Trump. And these “draconian solutions” meant a return to policies forcibly ended in the courts as civil rights violations:

Fox personalities began arguing for a return to “Broken Windows” policing, which involves aggressive enforcement and harsher sentences for lower level crimes. In reality, there is no evidence that this strategy works as a deterrent to reduce crime, and other heavy-handed policing tactics based on the broken windows theory have been found to significantly discriminate against Black Americans and other minority groups.

But as Taffe also pointed out, crime in the United States has dramatically decreased — 73 percent, to be precise — over the last thirty years. 2023 saw the biggest national drop in murder rates ever recorded (6 percent) and murders in cities dropped 12 percent. Yes, there are periodic crime spikes. (There was one during the pandemic). But overall, the trend is towards less crime.

The Atlantic’s crime reporter, Jeff Asher, pointed out that less crime doesn’t mean no crime. Yet “declining murder does not mean there were not thousands upon thousands of these tragedies this year,” he wrote on his Substack:

Nor does it mean that there was an acceptable level of gun violence, even in places seeing rapid declines. It simply means that the overall trend was extraordinarily positive and should be recognized as such.
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966 and Baltimore and St Louis are on pace for the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. Other cities that saw huge increases in murder between 2020 and 2022, like Milwaukee, New Orleans and Houston, are seeing sizable declines in 2023. There are still cities like Memphis and Washington, DC, that are seeing increasing murders in 2023, but those cities are especially notable because they are the outliers this year, not the norm.

Yet Americans don’t seem to believe that their world is safer than ever.

In February 2024, the Pew Research Center took the American electorate’s temperature. This nonpartisan, nonprofit research group identified 20 issues that will be priorities when voters decide between President Joe Biden and Unindicted Co-conspirator Number One in November. (Israel-Palestine didn’t even make the list, although perhaps it might now, amidst the campus demonstrations that are in the news around the country.) A whopping 73 percent saw the economy as the top priority for any president, outstripping the next item (defending against terrorism) by a good 10 points.

“Reducing crime” was in the seven spot, at 58 percent, which may seem like OK news on the surface. But in fact, concern about personal safety, up 11 points in a little more than three years, is trending in the opposite direction of actual crimes. While the big shift has been among Republicans and “Republican leaners” — from 38 percent to 68 percent since Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021 — 47 percent of Democrats also think crime should be a priority.

Here’s the puzzle: analysis of crime statistics — also by Pew — argue that there are fewer crimes committed in the United States today than there have been in any year since the early 1990s. Then you may recall, politicians “solved” the crime problem, not through full employment, education or welfare, but with harsh sentences, incarcerating a whole generation of mostly Black men for decades. Things peaked at about 2 million people incarcerated and pending trial in 2010 and has since fallen by about 400,000 souls.

So the fact that public opinion is so out of synch with crime statistics puts Democrats in a tricky position for November: they must defend policies that are working, but that large numbers of Americans, including Democrats, believe are failing. But trying to counter the narrative on the right is difficult, because these policies are counterintuitive to what Americans have believed for generations. For example, if the prison population is dropping, and the United States is becoming safer, that might mean that crime rates and incarceration rates are independent variables in determining overall rates of crime. Or it might mean that incarceration causes crime. Some policymakers did believe that prison transformed petty criminals into hardened, violent felons — hence the creation of a separate prison system for juvenile offenders beginning at the turn of the 20th century in Illinois and Colorado.

Here’s what I would do if I were the Democrats.

Instead of allowing Republicans to take over the narrative, I would look for the programs that work and that have contributed to reducing crime. I would create a series of advertisements featuring police officers talking about why community policing methods work; mothers talking about how “second chance” diversion programs turned their kids around; programs that support students in graduating from high school and going on to college; men and women who finished technical training, or high school and college degrees, while incarcerated started afresh; and formerly incarcerated men working as violence interrupters.

These are just a few of programs that produce thousands of success stories—and reductions in crime. That story is happening now, and American voters need to know it.

The Met Gala’s Opulence Is Always Gross. This Year, It’s Obscene.

WHILE ROME BURNS…

Dead civilians, poverty, and chaos take a back seat at the annual event seemingly designed to make us all loathe the rich and privileged.


Kali Holloway

OPINION
Updated May 06, 2024

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Once again, the first Monday in May is fast approaching, the moment we annually find ourselves beset by the Met Gala.

It’s going to be the gala to end all galas, so expect an endless procession of fashion hot-takes, celebrity spectacle, drunken after-party video leaks and breathless Rihanna anticipation, all wrapped up in a lexicological bow of co-opted slang Black gays stopped using two years ago, HUNTY!

Over the past few days, no fewer than 10 articles fretting about Met Gala co-chair Zendaya’s as-yet unfinished dress have been posted, the most distressed of which notes that “this news has sent ripples through the fashion community, leaving everyone wondering why and how this could happen.”

Even in an era filled with the horrors of late-stage capitalism run amok—bipartisan support for genocide; rolling back of reproductive, civil, and voting rights; a threadbare social safety net; decades of wage stagnation; tax cuts for the the rich; the crushing of unions and labor rights; expansion of the militarized police surveillance state; creeping techno-authoritarianism; untested, unregulated, and unchecked A.I.; entrenched racial inequality and injustice; right-wing and white supremacist extremist violence; and Boeing jet parts falling from the sky like so many dead whistleblowers—that kind of frivolous urgency promises that this year’s event nonetheless will stand out as a vainglorious display of self-congratulatory decadence and tone-deaf extravagance. (Sidenote: the other co-chairs are J. Lo, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth—which, huh?)


But let us get back on topic. The theme of this year’s gala is “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” also the name of the exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute fashion archive, which funds itself each year with proceeds from the gala.

Zendaya during the Met Gala in 2019.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

The titular sleeping beauties, Vogue has noted, are not princesses from “Brothers Grimm or Disney,” but instead some 250 pieces from the museum’s permanent collection that can never be worn again because they are so very old and fragile. (Low-key shout out to President Joe Biden.) Those items will be “displayed via video animation, light projection, AI, CGI, and other forms of sensory stimulation.”

The gala dress code, “The Garden of Time,” is based on J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story. It is a tale of aristocrats, living ensconced in a walled-off estate, who each day must stave off an ever-advancing “immense rabble” of plebes.

Completely unrelated, entry to this year’s (invite-only, as always) gala is $75,000 per ticket—up $25,000 over last year’s price—a cost celebrities needn’t pay themselves because various brands cover it for them. Tables, by the way, start somewhere around $350,000. Anna Wintour hates you.

And of course, it all takes place at the Met Museum of Art, an institution filled with items straight-up boosted or otherwise coercively extracted from countries we condescendingly regard as somehow lesser—while we marvel at their priceless cultural artifacts in Manhattan. But alas, it is too late to change the theme to “Irony.”


“I suppose we should, though only fleetingly, all sit back and take in the Marie Antoinette of it all.”

All this begs so many questions.

Will Kylie Jenner’s big reveal be that she is, indeed, pregnant, not with Timothée Chalamet’s baby—but with a baby that is Timothée Chalamet? (Poor Things realness? Baybée? Am I doing this right?)

Timothée Chalamet attends the Met Gala in 2021.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images

In a space where people can finally get a break from so much incessant chatter over dead children in Gaza, will there be a moment of silence to mourn the campus buildings being so cruelly occupied and vandalized? Will Megyn Kelly, fresh off complaining about the unattractiveness of students protesting genocide, finally be given the masturbation material she so openly craves?

Should we expect New York City Mayor Eric Adams to make a repeat appearance and, if so, will he again be wearing an item bedazzled with some bullshit platitude about gun violence while he floods every cranny of the city with cops playing random shoot ‘em up games? Also, can we get somebody to make sure Olayemi Olurin is always somewhere in his sightline?

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Tracey Collins at the Met Gala in 2022.
Chris Polk/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images

Was the cockroach who showed up last year invited back, and will she at least stick to the theme this time? What time can we expect the countdown for the annual Derulo Fall to begin? And is it true, as Page Six reports, that Queen Wintour will use the Gala to coronate as “America’s New Royalty” Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchezzzzzzzzzzzz…

Oh, sorry. Not sure how long I fogged out there.

Now, as much as this might seem like one long grouse-fest, even I think the Met Gala offers some moments for fun to interrupt the endless doom-scroll that is our times. I hope Ayo Edibiri turns up, in all the ways that term applies. Rooting for everybody Black. Hope Pedro Pascal, Lil Nas X, and Taika Waititi—as individual people, I mean—get as weird as they wanna be.

The headlines, for the night, will crowd out the somber images for just a few hours—offering instead thoughts on who ate and left no crumbs and who is just… crummy. I suppose we should, though only fleetingly, all sit back and take in the Marie Antoinette of it all.

All tea, no shade.



Kali Holloway
@kalihollowayftw

Trump allies rake in lucrative contracts with right-wing non-profit they founded: report

Travis Gettys
May 6, 2024 

Mark Meadows (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

The nonprofit Conservative Partnership Institute has enjoyed a substantial boost in fundraising after becoming a nerve center for the MAGA movement, but recent tax filings show much of that money has been funneled to corporations led by the group's leaders or their relatives.

The filings show the institute's three highest-paid contractors were each connected to insiders, including its president Edward Corrigan and his brother Patrick Corrigan, chief operating officer Wesley Denton and senior legal fellow Cleta Mitchell, which could be in violation of its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service, reported the New York Times.

“There’s no checks and balances,” said Michael West, a lawyer at the New York Council of Nonprofits. "The potential for overpayment here is epic.”

The nonprofit has become a landing spot for Trump's former allies and staffers, including Mitchell, who assisted the former president in his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss, as well as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former senior adviser Stephen Miller.

The institute is funded by Republican political campaigns and conservative businesspeople.

“I’ve known them a long time,” said major donor Robert Bruce, a retired Texas aviation entrepreneur who has given "several hundred thousand" dollars. “They’re good people.”

Former Senator Jim DeMint founded the institute in 2017, after he was ousted as president of the conservative Heritage Institute, and its fundraising jumped — from $7 million in 2020 to $45 million in 2021 — after Democrats returned to power.

The newly flush organization bought a 2,200-acre retreat in Maryland and commercial properties near the U.S. Capitol, and the institute's leaders founded a series of companies in Delaware that soon contracted with the nonprofit.

“You have an obligation to behave in the interest of that organization,” said Linda Sugin, a professor of nonprofit law at Fordham University. “The problem is, when you’re on both sides of the transaction, then we’re skeptical that you’re going to put the organization’s interests before your own.”

The institute could have reduced its risks by soliciting outside bids to see whether insiders were charging market rates for their service or asked them to recuse themselves from decisions on hiring their own companies, Sugin said, and Corrigan and other leaders did not respond to requests for comment from the Times on whether those steps were taken.

The Conservative Partnership Institute could face financial penalties from regulators or lose its tax-exempt status if it is found to have improperly benefitted insiders, the Times reported.

Who believes the most "taboo" conspiracy theories? It might not be who you think

White men with graduate degrees, a new study finds, are highly likely to hold especially noxious beliefs

By PAUL ROSENBERG

SALON

Contributing Writer
PUBLISHED MAY 5, 2024

LONG READ

Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr. (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Like Henry Ford before him, Elon Musk has emerged as America’s top conspiracy spreader. But he’s hardly alone. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the conspiracy-theory candidate for president, and as Paul Krugman observed last summer, was attracting “support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley”:

Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter Spaces event.

Krugman didn't focus on conspiracy theory as such but on something closely related: distrust of experts and skepticism about widely accepted facts. He described this tendency as the “brain rotting drug” of reflexive contrarianism, quoting economist Adam Ozimek.

That wasn’t exactly scientific, but a new paper entitled “The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs” by Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, is. Its most eye-catching finding is the discovery of “a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who display a penchant for conspiracy beliefs” that are “distinctively taboo.”

Specifically, Roscigno writes, “approximately a quarter of those who hold a graduate degree agree or strongly agree” that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland “are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government,” which is “around twice the rate of those without graduate degrees.” Results are similar for the proposition that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust “has been exaggerated on purpose.”

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RFK Jr. and Aaron Rodgers: How con artists exploit male insecurity for political gain

These findings are striking for many reasons. Most obviously, they go against the common belief — long supported by research — that conspiracist beliefs are more common among lower-income and less-educated individuals. They also challenge the formulation popularized by Joseph Uscinski that "conspiracy theories are for losers," and should be understood as “alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers” that “tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

Roscigno’s findings don’t refute previous formulations so much as reframe them by adding greater nuance. For example, he finds that conspiracy beliefs are more common both among the less educated and less affluent, on the one hand, and the more educated and more affluent on the other. Secondly, he identifies the subjective group experience of threat as a key element, rather than objective “loser” status.

Even more important, his paper reveals how much more we have to learn about conspiracy theories from a rigorous social science approach. Conspiracy theory is much more mainstream, varied and ubiquitous than previously assumed, and there’s much more to be learned from studying it as an integral part of the sociological landscape. Like the recently published paper I previously covered here, this model breaks with dualistic approaches that in some sense mirror what we find troubling about conspiracism — that is, painting the world in black-and-white rather than in many shades of gray. I recently spoke with Roscigno by Zoom about his findings and where they might lead. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Your paper has a dramatic finding regarding "a cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men” who tend to embrace conspiracy beliefs that are "distinctly taboo." But that's just the tip of the iceberg, because there's a whole host of questions that raises, including the role of sociology in this research, not just psychology. What led you to do the research behind this paper — what kind of questions, concerns or interests were driving you?

One of the things that motivated me was precisely the observation that sociologists hadn't really been part of the conversation. I've been interested in this topic for a while. I grew up spending a lot of time online, seeing a lot of conspiratorial stuff, having a lot of conversations with my friends about that kind of stuff. In the past couple of years, it seems like a lot of it has hit the mainstream. I remember when QAnon stuff first started fermenting online. I remember seeing posts where people were analyzing and trying to break down these “Q drops,” and sending them to my brother, like “What's what's going on here? This is something totally new.”

When I got to grad school, I thought, well, there's got to be some sociologists doing work on this. I definitely found a cluster of cultural sociologists starting to do some really interesting stuff that inspired me a lot. I also found the work of people like Joseph Uscinski and others in political science who had been doing some work and some theorization that I thought could be pulled into building a sociological approach to this.

What did you think you might learn in doing this study?

The basic question was just which groups of people tend to hold which conspiratorial beliefs. Maybe it seems like an overly basic question, but I was really struggling to find anybody in the literature that had engaged it. There's a lot of talk about who believes conspiracies in general, but there's less attention to how different groups might be sympathetic to different claims. And I had observed in my time online that some conspiracy spaces are older or younger, in some there's more white people or more women, and I wanted to know what the variation was. That was the starting point, and then building a more sociological approach to the topic, looking at inequality and demographic variation, and then moving on to other questions.

So what did you find that confirmed that basic sociological intuition that there were significant differences, and what did you find that surprised you?

The belief "that school shootings like Sandy Hook and Parkland are false-flag attacks ... and that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis has been exaggerated on purpose — these two particular claims are disproportionately held by white graduate-degree-holding men."

The one pattern I really highlight is, as you said, that there's this cluster of graduate-degree-holding white men who are more favorable towards almost all the beliefs that are listed. But there are some that they are much more favorable toward, where there's a larger gap between them and those without graduate degrees. I describe these as "taboo claims." Specifically, that school shootings like those at Sandy Hook and Parkland are false-flag attacks perpetrated by the government, and the other one is that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II has been exaggerated on purpose. These two particular claims are very disproportionately held by white graduate-degree-holding men.

In addition, if you look a little bit deeper into some of the other survey research and even my own data, you can also see a concentration of medical-themed conspiracy beliefs among African-Americans, and among the less educated. Those were the two points of variation that I have been able to highlight. I suspect there are many more. But here the goal of the paper was just to demonstrate that variation exists. It wasn't to capture all of it.

That second variation is unsurprising, given that African Americans have been very ill-treated by the medical establishment. If you told most white people about the Tuskegee experiment 20 or 30 years ago, they'd think that was a conspiracy theory. But the finding about this group of more educated white men was more surprising. What have you speculated the reasons might be?

The most convincing explanation I found is that essentially this is about access dynamics. The typical theoretical focus when it comes to conspiracy beliefs tends to be toward attitudes or dispositions. I think the role of attitudes is relevant here, and I think these attitudes are fueled by a perception of threat among graduate-degree-holding white men. Maybe they see social changes that are going on, they hear how the tone of certain conversations is changing, they see how the job market is changing. So there's a perception of threat. That's where you get the attitudes.

Now the other side is the access. There's a couple of things that could be going on, but it's hard to believe that Sandy Hook was perpetrated by the government unless you've heard that claim made in some level of detail, not just seeing reporting about Alex Jones but hearing somebody really make that claim. It's even hard if you don't know what a false-flag attack is. So I suspect that graduate-degree-holding white men, particularly via online channels, are are more likely to encounter this information, more likely to run into it. We also know from scholarship on rumor that certain rumors tend to be concentrated in certain demographic networks. There's a rumor that will primarily be spread within white networks or Black networks, and that's what's going on here.

I think it's also important to take survey results about something as deep as beliefs with a grain of salt. A question I get a lot when I present this research is, “Oh, they don't really believe that, do they?” That's not really a question that a survey can necessarily answer. At the very least, we know they are checking off a survey box way more often. So if we read it with that interpretation, we can maybe say that this is kind of a transgressive act. They’re saying, “I know that I'm supposed to be checking off the other box, but I'm going to check off this one.” To me, it's demonstrating a kind of transgressive expertise, a special access to what Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge.”

So that sets off two things for me. One is the question of how you would go about digging deeper into that, testing if that's true. Related to that, it seems that survey research could be improved to ask people whether they have communicated these beliefs to others, are they deeply held beliefs that help them make sense of other things, questions like that. Have you given any thought to that?

"A question I get a lot when I present this research is, 'Oh, they don't really believe that, do they?' That's not a question that a survey can necessarily answer."

Some of those things can be ascertained through survey research. I like the idea of asking, "Have you ever spoken to somebody about this?" or "Is this something you hold privately?" But I'm wary that survey research will give us all the answers we need. If you really want to figure out if somebody really believes something, I think you have to talk to them. You have to learn about how they live their life. You have to learn about their social relationships. It’s just like if we were studying religious beliefs. I think you have to engage at a deeper level to figure out whether that is true belief.

There's a lot of room for improvement on surveys, though. One of the biggest rooms for improvement in surveys is on the issue of prompt selection. It seems that this pattern that I noticed didn't get noticed before because nobody was asking these taboo questions on the surveys. Mostly they ask questions about COVID, and maybe a few other things. But if the prompts substantively change the findings of the survey, and nobody seems to be giving much conscious consideration about which prompts are included, there's definitely room for improvement.

You also found similar, though less dramatic, gaps between the highly educated and less educated for four other unpopular beliefs. So there's seemingly a general predisposition to conspiracy beliefs there. What other factors do you think might be involved?

I've gone back and forth, but I think there’s something I've decided on. There's this question of whether it's that they prefer unpopular [beliefs], or is it a question of, like, these things are taboo? They know these things are transgressive, they know these things violate a deep social norm. I'm pretty sure it's the taboo.

But this can be pretty easily tested. There are beliefs that are very unpopular but are not particularly taboo. If you ran a survey that included something like belief in a flat earth, if I'm right we wouldn't expect white grad-degree men to be high on that. When I say “taboo,” I basically mean that if you said something like this in public you would face some kind of social sanction. If I told my co-workers that I thought the earth was flat, they might laugh at me. If I told my co-workers that I thought the Holocaust was exaggerated, it would be a very different story.

Do you have some thoughts on what research you might be able to do to make more sense of this?

One thing that could be done is looking at a really wide variety of prompts and seeing what kinds of patterns are going on. In this one, I'm working with 15 claims and trying to draw a common thread. If you worked with a much larger set of prompts — I know some of those data sets exist — I think it would let you articulate that a little bit more clearly.
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But that's only one way to approach the issue of typology. You could start at the point of "there's a group of people that tends to hold these beliefs," and try to describe those particular claims. You could also start by looking at the claims and trying to find narrative threads between them. You could also define the claims by the relation to some authority, which is kind of what I'm doing with the taboo stuff. So I'm not quite sure how to address that yet.

You also found roughly equivalent subsets of respondents who held both of those claims [about school shootings and the Holocaust] and who disagreed with both, providing a convenient comparison. They differed in terms of extremism and social media use. So what can you say about those differences and how they interrelated?

I already mentioned the question of access. I think social media use gets at that access question. Those who agree report higher levels of social media use by every platform, particularly by anonymous image boards like 4chan and 8chan. So at the very least, if we think about people stumbling into these beliefs kind of accidentally, if you're on 4chan more often you're a lot more likely to run into one of these. In addition, there's some interesting work being done on information-seeking strategies online, and some sociologists have pointed out that people with different social positions have different strategies that may lead to different results. So a possibility relative to social media is that white men with graduate degrees, when they're doing research, the steps they’re taking may be different from some other groups, so they're more likely to end up at a certain point.

Relative to political extremism, that's a bit more complicated. There's definitely some exciting research that's going on about radical political beliefs and their relationship to conspiracy beliefs. Something I want to point out is that the white grad-degree men who agree are way more on the political edges, which maybe is to be expected. They're identifying as extremely liberal or extremely conservative way more often. We get this U-shape. These two taboo claims, at least according to this measure, are not right-wing phenomena. There is a big cluster of people that identify as very liberal and agree with these things as well. I suspect this measure isn't picking up on everything it could be. In the time that I've spent in politically radical spaces online and within the conspiracy milieu, the way people identify politically — there's a lot of variety to it, and “liberal” and “conservative” descriptors may not resonate with a lot of these people. But at the very least we know that people on the political fringes tend to be more charitable towards these claims.

"White grad-degree men who agree [with 'taboo' claims] are way more on the political edges, which maybe is to be expected. They identify as extremely liberal or extremely conservative way more often. We get this U-shape."

Over time, erosion of social trust seems to be related to a rise in conspiratorial beliefs. It would make sense, just in terms of people who feel skeptical of the existing system, for that to show up more, regardless of whether they are left-wing or right-wing. Do you have any thoughts about that?

This is something else I think that sociologists have to bring to the table: What's with the structural context of these situations? There's some evidence that countries with higher levels of social inequality, higher levels of corruption, tend to demonstrate or report higher rates of these beliefs. We know that it's tied to structural conditions. The collapse of institutional trust is a huge piece of this. If you look at graphs of trust in the federal government over time, or trust in the press over time, they're really at historic lows.

That has to play some role. Because when we talk about conspiracy beliefs, in the simple definition we’re talking about claims of elites doing something in private, but we’re also talking about something that counters the official narrative. So in a situation where historically few people trust the producers of the official narratives — in part the government, in part the press — we would expect people to be more doubtful of those things.

But when we talk about social trust, I don't necessarily think belief in conspiracies means a low level of social trust in general. I think it means a low level of trust in particular institutions. But in order to believe a conspiracy you have to hear it. It's probably from somebody you know, and you have to trust them when they tell you that. There's a rumor scholar, Gary Fine, who says that when trust in institutions is questioned, trust in informal networks is revealed. So there is a social trust that exists. It's much more decentralized. It's not in a particular institution and it’s social trust, rather than institutional.

One thing your paper suggested to me was looking at how beliefs in conspiracy theories co-vary, meaning what beliefs go together or tend to negate each other, and how that might change across status lines. I was specifically interested in those white male graduate-degree holders. Are there any beliefs that they accept less than other people? Do you have enough data to look at that yet?

I think enough data exists that we can probably answer that, but I don't know for sure. In this particular data set, there are none that they were less likely to believe in. For very mainstream beliefs — the idea that “one percent” of economic elites control the government and economy, the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered — these are beliefs held by 50% of the general population and also held by about 50% of white men with graduate degrees. In this data there wasn't a single belief that these white male graduate-degree holders were less interested in. That was stunning to me. I was actually very surprised by that..

But it's possible. We have these two types that I'm describing, the medical ones and the kind of taboo ones. It's possible there may be some medical ones that white men with graduate degrees are less likely to agree with. But it is hard to say, because this data clearly suggests that graduate degree holders are more into all of these claims.

We spoke earlier about “prompt selection” and things that perhaps aren't being asked about. Do you have anything specific in mind?

There's a lot of things that aren't being asked, definitely more than are being asked. At least in this paper, my starting point is the simple definition of the conspiracy belief which is, again, basically that a group of elites are plotting something in private. If that's our conceptualization, then the universe of possible things to ask about is massive.

For instance, if that's our conceptualization, why don't we ever ask about institutionally verified conspiracies? For instance, Watergate fits that definition just fine, COINTELPRO fits that definition just fine, Tuskegee fits that definition just fine. To me there seems to be a mismatch, an unacknowledged element to the definition, which is that it has to counter some official narratives. But even if we include that second part in conceptualization, there’s still tons and tons of stuff.

"Why don't we ever ask about institutionally verified conspiracies? For instance, Watergate fits that definition just fine, COINTELPRO fits that definition just fine, the Tuskegee experiment fits that definition just fine."

I read a very interesting paper this past week. This came out as a content analysis of TikTok, but it’s specifically about the conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift is secretly gay, and she's closeted and dropping all these hints in her tracks. Maybe people will say that isn't a politically consequential conspiracy theory, but it’s within the realm of conspiracy claims by any definition.

I've even heard that and I don't follow Taylor Swift news at all. It's clearly out there.

Yeah, if I had to guess, if you polled the demographics it would disproportionately be women. So that makes me think, OK, a lot of studies emphasize that men are more into this stuff. Does that have something to do with the prompts that are selected for the surveys? How does that come into play?

I bring up the Taylor Swift example to demonstrate that the realm of things under this blanket is, like, so large that trying to generalize any kind of research findings to the entire world of claims about elites doing sneaky stuff ends up being very difficult. I suspect there are claims that graduate-degree holders are more into that we haven't quite figured out yet. I suspect there are claims that women are more into that we haven't really figured out. I'd like to see a lot more, a) alignment between the conceptualization and operationalization and b) experimentation within that. We have a big world of things that fit this conceptual framework.

We’ve talked a bit about “collective identity” as a useful concept and you've said “it applies to all varieties of conspiracy cultures." Could you expand on that?

To be totally sociological, collective identity is useful in understanding all kinds of cultures more generally. Within conspiracy cultures, there's a couple things going on. If we talk about rumors, if I tell you some finding before it's published, it feels like you're in the know, it feels like you have a piece of secret information. It's exciting, it feels good. It also creates a bond between people that I think can be part of identity. So that's one level.

There's also the level that gets to the question of institutional distrust. There's a general sense in this country that, you know, people like us — whatever “us” means — are being screwed over by elites in some faraway place. We can't really see what's happening over there, we're not in the rooms where these decisions are made. I think there's a very general sense of that. And who “people like us” ends up being defined by is, I think, very important, because different people are going to understand it in different ways. There’s a general sense that there's opaque power that's screwing us. We don't really know where it is, or what's happening. You hear that kind of sentiment a lot in this milieu.

There's also collective identity more overtly. If I make the claim that white people are being replaced in this country — which to me is one of the more consequential conspiracy claims — I'm invoking a very specific identity, saying, “Hey, we collectively are under threat and need to do something about it!” So some conspiracy claims, even in the claim themselves, name the in-group or name the out-group. It will say who the “we” are, who the mysterious “they” is. Identity plays a key role there as well.

What stands out for you as the next steps? What questions need answering that follow from what you've done so far?

"A lot of people in the conspiracy milieu feel like they're being studied from afar by people that aren't talking to them at all. I think that absolutely adds to the resentment. If you were an expert in Amish culture, you'd probably want to spend time talking to Amish people."

To me, a lot of the most interesting questions are about how, when and why these beliefs matter, which I do think are better suited to qualitative methods. There's been very little in the way of qualitative inquiry into conspiracy cultures, with the big exception of Jaron Harambam, whose work has been very inspiring to me. Back to this matter of collective identity, something he points out that I find intriguing is that there are all kinds of conflicts over identity, even within the conspiracy milieu. There are people who understand themselves as aiming to get new converts to the movement, and other people who understand themselves as basically having given up and clocked out. There's all kinds of variation within the community.

Also, part of my reasoning for wanting to do qualitative research is that I feel like a lot of people in the conspiracy milieu feel like they're being studied from afar by people that aren't talking to them at all. I think that absolutely adds to the resentment.

I saw a tweet recently from somebody who is loosely in these circles that basically said, “How come none of these conspiracy theory experts are even talking to us?” If you are an expert in Amish culture, you'd probably want to spend a lot of time talking to Amish people. If I were studying the student movements that are going on right now, I'd probably be down at the encampments hanging out. It's not like believers in conspiracies are a small or fringe minority group that's super-hard to access. Some of these claims are totally mainstream, and even for the more taboo ones that you might envision would be hard to do qualitative research into, they're concentrated among graduate-degree holders. So in some sense those of us in academia are exceptionally well positioned to engage these communities at a closer level. So I definitely would like to do qualitative research in the coming years.

Finally, what's the most important question I haven’t asked? And what's the answer?

I can tell you a question that I get whenever I present my research to my undergraduates, but I'm not going to answer it. I give this whole presentation and at the end they’re like, “What are the ones that you believe in?” That's not my role as a sociologist. [Laughs.] So that’s my favorite question.

Former White House hopeful Sanders seeks reelection at 82

Agence France-Presse
May 6, 2024T

Bernie Sanders (Photo by Mandel Ngan for AFP)

Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the longest-serving independent senator in American history, said Monday he will seek a fourth term in an announcement touting his record over 16 years and taking aim at US military funding for Israel.

The 82-year-old son of Jewish immigrants -- who describes himself as a "democratic socialist" and votes with the Democrats -- framed November's election as "the most important" in generations.

The announcement cements Sanders, who is in a safe seat in Vermont, as the most high-profile Senate progressive as President Joe Biden vies for reelection against Republican Donald Trump while navigating a growing protest movement sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.

Sanders has been a reliable Biden ally on most of the president's domestic agenda.

But he has become a thorn in the administration's side over the mounting death toll in Israel's response to the October 7 Hamas attacks. That assault seven months ago resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

"Israel had the absolute right to defend itself against this terrorist attack, but it did not and does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, which is exactly what it is doing," Sanders said in his announcement.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday that at least 34,735 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory, including at least 52 deaths in the past 24 hours.

A wave of pro-Palestinian protests on US university campuses has been the latest front in a fierce worldwide debate as anger over civilian deaths has triggered complaints that demonstrations have sometimes veered into hate against Jews.

Sanders, who suffered a heart attack during his 2020 presidential campaign, is the second-oldest senator, behind 90-year-old Republican Chuck Grassley.

He is almost certain to be reelected by his liberal northeastern state, meaning he would be 89 at the end of an upcoming term.

A fringe figure for much of his career, Sanders saw his political stock rise as he campaigned twice to represent the Democrats in presidential elections on a platform of universal health care, fairer housing and low-priced universities.

His run in the 2016 primary arguably fatally damaged his rival Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose the election to Trump.

And his 2020 bid was cut short as the centrist Democratic establishment pulled together in a coordinated effort to support Biden.

© Agence France-Presse