Brazil protests show low street support for impeachment push
 

MARCELO SILVA DE SOUSA
Sun, September 12, 2021, 4:42 PM·3 min read

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Turnout at protests across Brazil against President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday was far smaller than rallies the president called earlier this week, underscoring that pressure from the streets remains insufficient to drive efforts seeking his impeachment.

Many of those protesting dressed all in white, as instructed by political groups that organized the demonstrations in at least 19 states. There was a notable absence of leftist political parties, which diminished turnout.

“Bolsonaro is in the middle of a political crisis, but public opinion has so far not exerted pressure on lawmakers from the center for impeachment,” said Leonardo Avritzer, professor of political science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “Impeachment can come if lawmakers understand that they begin to run risks of not being elected in 2022 by continuing to support the Brazilian president.”

Sunday’s protest targeted the government for allegedly mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and surging inflation, particularly for mainstays like food and electricity. But, for some, the demonstration acquired fresh urgency after Sept. 7 rallies at which Bolsonaro stepped up his attacks on the Supreme Court and threatened to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

Centrist lawmakers told The Associated Press this week that turnout at Sunday's demonstrations would be decisive in determining whether to push for impeachment.

“Enough of the orders of this psychopath (Bolsonaro). We want vaccines in the arm and food on our plates,” said Alessandra Amorim, an accountant who joined a rally in Sao Paulo. “It looks like we are defeated, that we don’t have strength. We want vaccines in our arms and food on our plates. Enough of Bolsonaro.”

The president’s approval ratings have steadily declined throughout the year, but he remains far more popular than prior presidents who were impeached — most recently Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party in 2016.

Unlike in 2016, people aren’t broadly united behind an alternative or project, said Leandro Consentino, a professor of political science at Insper, a university in Sao Paulo. In addition, he said many political leaders want to resolve the political crisis with the 2022 elections, when Bolsonaro is expected to seek another term.

As Tuesday’s pro-Bolsonario demonstrations showed, the president is still able to energize his followers. He got a rousing reception from demonstrators in Sao Paulo and the capital, Brasilia, as he lit into the Supreme Court. He declared he will no longer abide by rulings from Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who will assume the presidency of the nation’s electoral tribunal next year. He also said only God can remove him from the presidency.

Many called his comments “undemocratic,” including Supreme Court Chief Justice Luiz Fux, who said that disobeying judicial rulings or encouraging others to do so would constitute an impeachable crime. Bolsonaro later backtracked in a statement claiming his comments were made in the “heat of the moment” and he hadn’t meant to attack other government branches.

Over 130 impeachment requests have been filed since the start of Bolsonaro’s administration, but the lower house’s speaker, Arthur Lira, and his predecessor have declined to open proceedings.

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers Party, one of the parties with greatest capacity to mobilize street protests, didn't participate in Sunday's demonstrations. Party president Gleisi Hoffman said it wasn’t invited to join the events, although it supported the cause.

But the party may not want impeachment given that da Silva holds a significant lead in early polls for the 2022 presidential contest, said Consentino, the political science professor.

“Lula is in a comfortable setting to go to an election with Bolsonaro,” Consentino said. “Defeating him would be the best scenario for the Workers Party to return triumphant to the presidency.”

Brazil Bolsonaro Protest People gather at Paulista Avenue during a protest against President Jair Bolsonaro, demanding his resignation for mishandling the pandemic, corruption over vaccine contracts and a faltering economy, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, Sep. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Marcelo Chello)

Country Music Embraced Jingoism After 9/11.

It’s Finally Moving On

Songs like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” and “Have You Forgotten?” defined post-9/11 country music. But “it’s a different type of patriotism now,” says one radio programmer

By JOSEPH HUDAK

Toby Keith performs at the 2002 Academy of Country Music Awards.
Kevin Winter/GettyImages


Even during a pandemic, September is the high season for Darryl Worley. From Labor Day weekend into early October, the country singer spends most of his Saturdays onstage reminding country fans about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And this year, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, he’s been particularly busy. That’s because he’s the singer of “Have You Forgotten?” — the only Number One country song to ever mention Osama Bin Laden by name.

“We’ve got like six or seven dates in a row, just one after another from this 9/11 anniversary. We’re so thrilled,” Worley tells Rolling Stone of his touring itinerary. “It’s good work and it’s good that we’re remembering… History says if you forget it, you repeat what you did. We certainly don’t want to do that.”

There’s no chance of that with “Have You Forgotten?” Released two years after 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, the song hit you over the head with its hyper-literal lyrics. “Have you forgotten how it felt that day/to see your homeland under fire/and her people blown away?” goes the first chorus. The verses ask you to remember how “those towers fell,” with people trapped inside “going through a living hell.”

“We wanted a fifth-grader to be able to hear this song and know exactly what it was talking about,” says Worley, who co-wrote “Have You Forgotten?” with fellow Tennessee songwriter Wynn Varble. Upon its release in 2003, it spent seven weeks atop the Billboard country songs chart, reinforcing what, by that point, radio programmers, label heads and Nashville stars already knew: in the days, weeks, and years following 9/11, the public was hungry for patriotic country music.

Twenty years later, country fans, radio stations, and some of the artists who sang them hold onto the patriotic and sometimes jingoistic songs that sprang up after 9/11, even as the idea of patriotism itself has changed.

“It’s a different type of patriotism now,” Mark Razz, program director of Philadelphia country station 92.5 WXTU, says. “It’s more of a, ‘Hey, we know we have our differences, be we’re still one nation.’ We have to figure out a way to bridge the divide.”

Andie Summers, a DJ at Philadelphia’s WXTU, was on the air during the attacks. She remembers the station’s playlist changing overnight, replaced at first with conversation, news updates, and a lot of listener phone calls. When they did play songs, it was often Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Lee Greenwood’s 1984 flag-waver “God Bless the U.S.A.”

“We didn’t play much music for the next few days,” Summers says. “When we finally started again, the only upbeat songs we were playing were patriotic ones, very pro-America. Everything else was somber, reflective or comforting.”

RJ Curtis, executive director of Country Radio Broadcasters, was program director at KZLA, a now defunct Los Angeles country station, in 2001. He recalls a similar pivot toward patriotic material.

“It was a local decision on our part, but who really drove it was the listeners. They just could not get enough. They wanted more patriotic music. And if you’re a good program director, you listen to what your fans want and give them more of it,” Curtis says.

“If you put ‘U.S.A.’ or ‘America’ in a song, you had a pretty good chance of getting attention.”

Record labels were listening, too. From 2001 through at least the midpoint of the decade, there was a glut of broadly patriotic or specifically 9/11-inspired songs delivered to radio. Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” Aaron Tippin’s “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly,” Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America,” Charlie Daniels’ “This Ain’t No Rag It’s a Flag,” Randy Travis’ “America Will Always Stand,” and Hank Williams Jr.’s “America Will Survive” — a rework of his 1982 hit “A Country Boy Can Survive” — all dropped in 2001.

In 2002, Toby Keith released his notoriously jingoistic anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” — “’cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/it’s the American way,” it threatened — with the more tempered ballad “American Soldier” following in 2003, just a few months after Worley’s “Have You Forgotten.”

“If you put ‘U.S.A.’ or ‘America’ in a song,” Curtis says of that era, “you had a pretty good chance of getting attention.”

Few hit the mark quite like “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” a somber everyman ballad that succeeded in part because of Jackson’s admitted ignorance. Jackson wrote the song by himself, and it’s his voice that professes to not be a “political man” nor quite grasp the differences between Iraq and Iran. While it resonated across genres — it was a country Number One and broke into the Top 30 on Billboard’s Hot 100 — “Where Were You” was explicitly a song for those who, like Jackson and his listeners, lived far from New York or D.C. and were struggling to make sense of what happened there. The lyrics leaned heavily into Christian teachings of faith, hope, and love.

Joe Galante, former chairman of Sony Music Nashville, oversaw Jackson’s Arista Nashville label when the singer debuted “Where Were You” at the CMAs.

“It exploded instantly,” Galante says, recalling the clamor for a recording of the song. “It was, ‘When can we play that? How do we get a copy?’ People were recording it off air. So we took the live performance from the CMAs and fed it to the radio stations. That song gave you hope, belief in your fellow human man, and he was telling you to just love one another and you’ll get through this.”

But not every post-9/11 country song preached such compassion. Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” Williams’ “America Will Survive,” and Daniels’ “This Ain’t No Rag It’s a Flag” burned with aggression. Williams lobbied for bringing back a “tooth-for-a-tooth and an eye-for-an-eye” in his lyrics, while Daniels sang, “We’re coming with a gun, and we know you’re gonna run…We’re gonna hunt you down like a mad dog hound/make you pay for the lives you stole.”

Galante says the anger was understandable. “The reality is we all felt various emotions. I don’t know anybody who was going, ‘Hey, let’s just lay back and sit here and take this.'” He singles out three songs that satisfied the diversity of emotions at the time: the love and comfort of Jackson’s “Where Were You,” the hope and optimism of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America,” and the fury and rage of Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”

“If you take those three songs, and listen to the vocals, there were three different tones from the singers and each of them were valid. Each of them emphasizes the point and we felt all those emotions. They were all part of it,” he says.

It wasn’t only country music’s male stars who were releasing patriotic songs. During the very same awards show that Jackson premiered “Where Were You,” the then-Dixie Chicks performed “Travelin’ Soldier,” their tender dissertation on the sacrifices made by military families. “People forget about this for some reason, or don’t want to admit the Chicks had a recording career,” Curtis says, “but it was the same night on the same show.” (Two years later, the Chicks would be blackballed by the industry after singer Natalie Maines criticized President George W. Bush for rushing into the Iraq War.)

As country radio preps for 9/11’s 20th anniversary, WXTU’s Razz says unity will be the underlying theme. He’s programming songs like Kane Brown’s “Worldwide Beautiful,” Tim McGraw and Tyler Hubbard’s “Undivided,” and, of course, “Where Were You.”

“We came through a tumultuous election and people want to be more united. They’re looking for that,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying to portray here. I want to be careful of playing war theme songs, because especially with current events, people are confused and raw. It was a different time 20 years ago.”

Darryl Worley performs “Have You Forgotten?” at the CMT Awards in 2003.
Rusty Russell/GettyImages

Two decades later, some post-9/11 songs are still heard regularly on country radio. But Curtis says the majority surface only a few times a year and are played from “a nostalgic standpoint.” In other words, the overt jingoism is now dated.

“They’re not something that will be put in rotation beyond 9/11,” he says. “‘Where Were You’ is the one that will stand up, but I’m not sure ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’ or even ‘Have You Forgotten?’ are going to.”

Worley, who recently partnered with a veteran-owned distillery to create a line of “Have You Forgotten”-branded whiskeys to support veteran charities, begs to differ. He says his song has been having a resurgence since the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“With the whole Afghanistan debacle, it’s almost like this song has been re-released. It may be more relevant right now than it ever has been,” he says. “I’m not certain that we as a people are not more vulnerable now than we ever have been in the history of our nation.”

Worley’s song is nearly 20 years old itself, but over the last few weeks Jason Aldean and Brantley Gilbert have both released obliquely patriotic new songs, a sign that a fresh crop of pro-America country material may be coming. Both singers dedicated their tracks — Aldean’s “Have a Beer on Me,” Gilbert’s “Gone But Not Forgotten” — to the 13 service members killed in Afghanistan last month. “Coming from a Military family, it’s been tough to find the words to express how I feel for what’s happened in Afghanistan,” Aldean wrote in an Instagram post that set “Drink One on Me” to images of soldiers in Afghanistan. “It’s heartbreaking and unforgivable. We appreciate your service and thank you all for your sacrifice.”

Rallying around the flag will always remain a pillar of country music, but it’s hard to not see the foundation cracking a little. Says RJ Curtis, “The format is still patriotic, but with all of the divisiveness and politicization, I’m not sure it’s as strong as it was.”

‘Never Forget’ Is Breaking America

Laura Jedeed
Sat, September 11, 2021, 

U.S. Soldiers Provide Security Around Kandahar Airfield - Credit: Getty Images

I fell in love with a shambling corpse, the day the towers fell.

I was fourteen years old, in small-town Colorado. We clustered around a television that showed, again and again, a commercial jet flying into the World Trade Center. The broadcast footage, a mere 45 minutes old, was already a relic of the long-distant past. Moments earlier, the world had watched the second tower fall. Thousands were dead. The myth of America Invicta lay bludgeoned to death on live TV.

As I watched the old world end on national television, my initial feelings of vulnerability and helplessness gave way to bloodletting rage like nothing I have felt before or since. By the time Yasser Arafat offered what felt like forced condolences in the hours after the attack, I knew with knife-edge clarity that we had to wipe him and every other terrorist off the face of this earth. We had to go to war to protect America: a place that never felt so fragile or so precious to me as it did in that instant. We would stand united.

Or would we? Before the day was over, a classmate of mine expressed the same desire to wipe out America’s enemies. But he did not call those enemies terrorists. He called them Arabs.

That’s not right, I retorted, more confused than angry. I’m Arabic. We aren’t all like that. My father came here from Syria because he loved this country. How could anyone think I wasn’t part of America on the same day I’d realized how much I loved it?

I did not yet know, as Oscar Wilde wrote, that each man kills the thing he loves. All I knew was that I wanted to defend and export freedom. I wanted to serve my country. And, buried half-conscious beneath my patriotism, I wanted to prove that it was my country. That my classmate was wrong and that I belonged here.

Four years later, I turned 18 and signed my enlistment papers.

THE UNIFORM FELT GOOD on me.

I enlisted in 2005, back when America was so desperate for soldiers to fight in their two-front war that they handed out $20,000 sign-on bonuses to people who qualified for jobs like “Signals Intelligence Operator.” I shipped off to basic training, and then to Monterey, California for 15 months of intensive language school. The army immediately assigned me Arabic, of course; the last name made that inevitable though I did not speak a single word.

After barely squeaking through my language evaluations, I volunteered for Airborne school to escape my initial assignment to a desk in Georgia. I spent the next three weeks jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, then skipped Thanksgiving leave to make the cutoff to join my new unit in Afghanistan. It would be the first of two deployments with the 82nd Airborne Division, one in 2008, the other in 2009-2010.

Cognitive dissonance began almost immediately. During my first deployment, I was sure the problem was my unit. By the end of the second, I knew it was far worse than that. We brought something we called freedom and democracy to Afghanistan at the barrel of a gun. We demanded the Afghans accept our vision of who they should be without bothering to learn a thing about them. Little wonder the corrupt government we installed lasted exactly as long as our presence did.

Military intelligence is a strangely intimate profession. I listened, every day, to the communications of our enemies — not just about their plans to kill us but about their lives as well. It became clear to me, at some point, that these were not radical Islamists hell-bent on America’s destruction. They were, by and large, young men who wanted to be left alone. Men who would never have fought us if we were not killing hundreds of thousands of their people and telling them what to do.

After twenty long years, the war is over. We lost. 67 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans now believe the Afghanistan war was not worth fighting.

Ask them whether we should have invaded Afghanistan in the first place, however, and the answer often changes. Voices grow grim and quiet. Of course we had to go. We had no choice. We remember what it felt like, after all, when the towers fell. We were told to never forget.

But why are pain and anger the things we most remember?

IN THE SUMMER OF 2005, a group of human rights activists, academics, and philanthropists tried to get America to remember something else.

The International Freedom Center (IFC) was originally planned for the World Trade Center memorial site. Its objective was to not merely commemorate the tragedy, but actively resist the ideas that led to the attack. The center’s museum would present the 9/11 attacks as another volley in the eternal war between tyranny and liberty. Its lecture hall would host lively debate and promote free expression. “[The IFC] will not exist to precisely define ‘freedom’ or to tell people what to think,” IFC President Richard J. Toefel wrote, “but to get them to think — and to act in the service of freedom as they see it.”

On June 7th, 2005, World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board member Debra Burlingame wrote a scathing editorial denouncing the concept as borderline treasonous. The memorial, she believed, ought to focus exclusively on visceral horror, human loss, and noble sacrifices of 9/11. “Instead of exhibits and symposiums about Internationalism and Global Policy,” Burlingame argued, “we should hear the story of the courageous young firefighter whose body, cut in half, was found with his legs entwined around the body of a woman.”

What self-respecting pro-war pundit could possibly resist such raw and bloody meat? “A Blame America Monument is not what we need or deserve,” wrote Michelle Malkin, a political commentator now best known for her vocal and consistent support of white nationalism. “It is reminder [sic] to the American people that the intellectuals are their enemies,” journalist and philosophy PhD Robert Tracinski wrote, presumably with a straight face. Roger L. Simon, now an editor-at-large for the far-right Epoch Times, sarcastically suggested that IFC member George Soros rename the museum “A Memorial to the Victims of the American Gulag in Guantanamo.”

Toefel believed both types of memorial could exist at the site where the Twin Towers once stood, but Burlingame had it right: the two narratives are incompatible. One centers worship of sacrifice and remembrance of pain, the other channels that pain into an effort to better understand the world. One leads to revenge, the other seeks to overcome violence through unity and connection. The vicious fight over the World Trade Center memorial was a desperate, bloody battle to shape the collective memory of September 11th and — by extension — America’s future.

Burlingame won. One by one, New York congresspeople condemned the IFC: John Sweeney, Peter King, Vito Fossella, and then-Senator Hillary Clinton. True to form, Chuck Schumer feebly called for compromise, as Democrats so often did in the wake of 9/11. The IFC found itself entirely without allies.

On September 28th, 2005, New York governor George Pataki banned the IFC from the World Trade Center memorial.

Burlingame got precisely the kind of memorial she wanted: one that reflected her own deep trauma at losing her brother, the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Any attempt to govern her personal grief would be unconscionable. So too, though, is projecting it onto an entire nation. We built a monument to the anger stage of grief in the heart of America’s largest city and swore a blood pact to never forget, never process, never reach acceptance.

“FIRST OF ALL I AM offering my con— condolences. Condolences of the Palestinian people.”

I am watching Yasser Arafat again, twenty years and two deployments later.

“To the American president, President Bush. To his government. To the American people, for this terrible time.” Arafat looks down, shakes his head ever so slightly. “We are completely shocked. Completely shocked. Unbelievable.”

I was correct, two decades ago, about the insincerity. This is not a video of a man consumed by grief. It is a man consumed by fear.

His trembling lips. His shaking voice. How could we not hear it? He was afraid, and he was right to be afraid. He knew that even as he spoke, Palestinians celebrated in the streets: regular people who only knew their enemy was hurt. They could not see the consequences of such actions, but Arafat could. Leader of his people, father of his children. Arafat begged us not to hurt them on national TV.

We could have understood. The footage of New York City’s streets that day bore an eerie resemblance to the streets of Palestine in the past months of conflict there. Suddenly, the horrors of total warfare were not vaguely sad abstractions happening to far-away strangers, but horrors beyond imagining happening to ourselves.

We experienced, for the first time, the heartbreak and terror millions feel at the hands of American missiles when we use them as pawns in our endless proxy wars.

In that moment, we could have chosen to see why so many hated us so much. We could have looked at our own fury and understood the kind of anger that might lead someone to crash a plane into a skyscraper. We could have dared to feel the pain of it — the tragedy, the waste — and vowed: never again. Not here. Not anywhere.

But we didn’t.

By the time the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan, 88 percent of us wanted war. The remaining 12 percent were either ignored or, worse, attacked as traitors. When the Taliban offered to give up Osama Bin Laden to a third party nation if shown evidence of his involvement, we scornfully dismissed this gesture towards due process as an impediment to catharsis. “There’s no need to negotiate,” President Bush declared in an October 14th press conference. “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty. Turn him over.”

Two months later, the last Taliban stronghold fell and Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan. Too quick. Not enough blood. Two years later, we found another enemy to destroy.

Two decades later, we remain awash in blood and anger. A destabilized Middle East, three-quarters of a million people dead. Militarized police. Mass surveillance deployed casually against civilians. A Department of Homeland Security bloated with cash and scornful of oversight. A militarized border patrol authorized to conduct unconstitutional searches and seizures on the two-thirds of Americans who live within 100 miles of an international border.

And that “kill every Arab” sentiment I heard 20 years ago today? It’s all grown up. It’s not school children calling for genocide anymore. It’s a president who rode a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor to the White House. It’s his followers who, seeing their champion defeated, wait patiently for their next chance at remaking America in the image of their hate.

“NEVER FORGET IS AN INSANE way to live.

Land of the free, monitored and brutalized. Home of the brave, willing to hurt anyone and everyone in our war against our own terror. I wanted to prove that I belong here. But who could wish to belong to the thing we have become?

At no point have we lived up to the promise of our own self-conception. Our history is marred by genocide, slavery and the failures of Reconstruction. But never have we so explicitly turned our backs on the thing we always imagined we could be: the shining city on the hill, a beacon of freedom, home to huddled masses yearning to be free. We buried that America the day the towers fell.

I do not know if we can fix this. I hope so. This is still my country. I still love the thing we could have been.

We can never undo the harm of these last twenty years, both to the world and to ourselves. But we could, perhaps, learn from our mistakes. We could remember that, when the towers fell, our first thought was not of vengeance or of war but of the people we love. The way that compassion spread to those we had never met and manifested itself in the need to help. The way untrained volunteers rushed into the wreckage to rescue those trapped beneath the rubble. The way people lined up to give blood to the Red Cross and opened their wallets to those in need. Disagreements that seemed insurmountable on September 10th shrank into nothing. We remembered, suddenly, that human life is precious, and beautiful, and fragile.

It is time to bury our rage and fear in an unmarked grave. Turn our faces towards the future and finally reach the acceptance stage of our national grief. Try to move towards something better. A country worth belonging to.

We have to forget.

Twenty years is long enough.

How the War on Terror Gave Us Trump

Spencer Ackerman
Sat, September 11, 2021, 

LONG READ

The following is an excerpt from Spencer Ackerman’s new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” out now.

Every Republican national leader since 9/11 had backed the harshest possible prosecution of the War on Terror. Even Mitt Romney pledged to double Guantanamo. Those relatively few prominent Republicans who did object to the war, like senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, did so on the respectable grounds that it was costing America freedom and wealth. They were openly disdained by the ascendant McCains of the party. Rand Paul’s father, Ron, sought the presidency on an antiwar platform, but he was even more marginal, despite an enthusiastic following on the far right.

Handling the party’s nativists was a more delicate proposition for GOP leaders. Romney and McCain, uncomfortable fits in nativist circles, compensated by advocating “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants or releasing “complete the danged fence” ads, to say nothing of proposing that the nativist Sarah Palin should be a heartbeat from the presidency. No Republican since 9/11 had been able to combine nativism with antipathy to the futility of the War on Terror and seize control of the party. It occurred to few to try. Then, in June 2015, Donald Trump descended his escalator at Trump Tower.

In his infamous announcement speech, the one claiming Mexicans were rapists and criminals invading a supine America, Trump demonstrated just how effortlessly 9/11 politics amplified nativism. His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself. That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness: “We don’t win anymore.” Trump was able to safely voice the reality of the war by articulating what about it most offended right-wing exceptionalists: humiliation.

It was a heretical sentiment to hear from someone seeking the GOP nomination. Every major Republican figure had spent the past 15 years explaining away the failures of the war or insisting that it was a noble endeavor. Trump called it dumb. His America was suffering unacceptable civilizational insults. “We have nothing” to show for the war, he said, and certainly not the spoils of war that Trump believed were due America. “Islamic terrorism” had seized “the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should have taken.” The war was a glitch in the matrix of American exceptionalism, and Trump offered a reboot.

But except for the Afghanistan war, which he considered particularly stupid, Trump was no abolitionist. “I want to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, and we need it now more than ever,” he stated. He threatened to sink Iranian boat swarms, even as Iran was aligned with the United States against ISIS in Iraq, engaged in the ground combat Obama desperately sought to avoid. Then there was ISIS, at home as well as abroad. Trump pointed specifically to ISIS’s spoils: the 2,300 Humvees they drove out of Mosul. “The enemy took them,” he complained, pledging that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump.” His latest position on Iraq was that it was dumb to get in, dumb to get out, and now the United States had to win, whatever that ultimately meant.

Trump’s incoherence was less important than what it revealed: a disgust at waging the war on its familiar terms, along with an enthusiasm for voicing its civilizational subtext. The same weakness that made the War on Terror a no-win situation had also yielded the current wave of Central American migration. Trump promised to crash the wave against a giant wall on the southern border for which he would make Mexico pay. The socialist writer and critic Daniel Denvir observed that Trump’s pledge to extort Mexico’s wealth for the wall was effectively a demand for imperial tribute. The analysis applies equally to his claim on Iraq’s oil.

Trump would tolerate no more nonsense about a “war of ideas.” Brutality would be defeated by greater brutality. The euphemism of the War on Terror had been an attempt to conceal such disreputable behavior, but Trump brought it unapologetically into the open. He lied that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City had cheered the fall of the Twin Towers. As vengeance, Trump would “bomb the shit out of ISIS” and stop fighting “a politically correct war,” by which he meant one that distinguished between guerrillas and civilians. “You have to take out their families,” he told Fox. Torture “absolutely” works, Trump asserted, showing faith in the CIA’s 15-year-old narrative. He pledged to bring back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and stock Guantanamo Bay full of “bad dudes.” ISIS’s assault on Paris meant there was “no choice” but to close mosques within the United States. Before 2015 had ended, Trump delivered his ultimate response to ISIS: calling for a ban on all Muslim immigration. “We can’t take a chance,” he said, denying that ISIS fighters were meaningfully distinct from the Muslim civilians they raped, terrorized, and turned into refugees. It was Cheney’s one-percent doctrine applied civilizationally. Stephen Miller was so excited by these promises that the following month he joined Trump’s campaign. His old boss, Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump, helmed the candidate’s foreign policy and national security working group.


Trump’s instinct for violence extended from his rallies, where he offered to post bail for anyone arrested for beating up protesters, to Moscow, where he praised Vladimir Putin as a strong leader. The path blazed by the white supremacist Steve King was still too far for most Cold War–forged Republicans. Trump ambled down it. “[Putin’s] running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” he said in December 2015. Even Bill O’Reilly was discomfited, and when he asked Trump about Putin’s assassinating his enemies, Trump responded, “What, do you think our country’s so innocent?” After all, he continued, Russia fights “Islamic terrorism all over the world, that’s a good thing.” Where others, liberal and conservative alike, flinched at or denied the brutality that built America, Trump was proud of it. It made America great.

There were legions who had been waiting for such a champion. At a March 2016 Trump rally at the Kentucky International Convention Center, a 25-year-old man in Trump’s signature Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat physically pushed out protester Kashiya Nwanguma, whom he called “leftist scum.” The man, Matthew Heimbach, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor but was proud of his actions, which he justified by claiming that Nwanguma was a member of Black Lives Matter. “White Americans,” he wrote, “are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down.” Heimbach was a neo-Nazi, leader of the fascist Traditionalist Worker Party. A more bourgeois but no less fascist Trump supporter was Richard Spencer, who through the “altright” united white nationalists and internet-addicted provocateurs. The alt-right was a bridge between Trump support and open fascism, possessed of just enough deniability. “This is a movement of consciousness and identity for European people in the 21st century,” Spencer explained to NPR. The Southern Poverty Law Center later concluded that through Trump, “the radical right suddenly felt a connection to mainstream politics and a realistic hope of gaining political power, which drew more adherents — and a wider variety of adherents — to the movement.”

Fifteen years of brutality as background noise made it easy for many to misinterpret Trump’s position on the War on Terror. Journalists listened to his invective against it and called him antiwar, as if he had not been promising to “bomb the shit” out of millions of people. “Donald the Dove,” Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, “in most cases . . . would rather do the art of the deal than shock and awe.” Such attitudes revealed what elites chose to believe about Trump and what they opted to consider merely an act for the rubes. What they overlooked by focusing on Trump’s criticisms of the ground wars was that he wanted to expand the War on Terror to frontiers it had yet to reach. Most important, they heard Trump describe the enemy as Radical Islamic Terror. For 15 years, nativists, stoked by Fox News, had considered such a definition a prerequisite for winning the war. Elites had never understood why the right was so spun up about the phrase. Trump knew that “Radical Islamic Terror” extracted the precious nativist metal from the husk of the Forever War.

None of this was tolerable to the Security State and its allies. Sean MacFarland, a David Petraeus-favored officer during the Iraq occupation who now commanded the war against ISIS, rejected indiscriminate bombing as “what the Russians have been accused of doing in parts of northwest Syria.” Dozens of Republican-aligned security luminaries signed open letters refusing to serve in a Trump administration, birthing the Never Trump Beltway movement. But the architects, contractors, and validators of the War on Terror were placed in awkward positions. One of the letters decried Trump’s “expansive” embrace of torture, since their own embrace of “enhanced interrogation” foreclosed on a more categorical rejection. Former NSA and CIA Director Mike Hayden, who had lied so extensively about torture that the Senate compiled his falsehoods into a separate annex of the torture report, who secretly constructed a surveillance dragnet around the United States while imploring Congress to set the balance between liberty and security, characterized Trump as “unwilling or unable to separate truth from falsehood.” Nor was there any self-reflection from signatories like Iraq occupation chief Bob Blackwill, who took over as Bush’s personal envoy after Paul Bremer, and who had asserted against “the professional pessimists within parts of the U.S. intelligence community” that “2005 will be a good year in Iraq for President Bush.” None of them seemed to understand that they had created the context for Trump. He was about to show them.

Trump relished his critics’ revulsion. He presented it to his crowds as validation: the people who had gotten America into an unwinnable war hated him. Why listen to them? After a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, Trump lamented, “When will our leaders get tough and smart?” He thanked the Never Trump signatories for stepping forward, “so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” There was no credentialism capable of stopping Trump, not even from the military. His uniformed detractors weren’t truly reflective of the military, as they had been “reduced to rubble” by Obama. He insisted he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS that the generals would either love or, in disliking it, reveal their incompetence. It was a dominance politics rarely played against the military. To make it work, Trump, a Vietnam draft dodger, had to show he was unintimidated by attacking even the most venerated. McCain, who could not abide Trump, was no genuine war hero because, as Trump boasted, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Because the Security State couldn’t win the War on Terror it was waging, Trump had a permanent cudgel against it. Why accept the expertise of the architects of a quagmire? He championed the explanation that these so-called intelligence experts, political generals, amoral attorneys, and other liberals had misunderstood that this was a war of survival against Radical Islamic Terror. All of them had condescended to the nativist right since 9/11, and they had marched America into humiliation. Wrapped in a redemptive flag, the nativists were not afraid to challenge the authority of the military. The Cheneyites hadn’t been, either, though neither side tended to see the continuity.

Trump and his nativist followers, the coalition known as MAGA, did not quite offer a Dolchstosslegende. They didn’t claim the Security State had deliberately lost the War on Terror, but rather that it had flinched at confronting a civilizational assault. The offer Trump made to the Security State was an alibi. He would “unleash” the military, which meant, as John Rambo had said, that the military had not been allowed to win. It was easier for the MAGA crowd to accept that than to accept that their American exceptionalism had marched America into ruin.

The sense of civilizational besiegement that the Forever War inspired was central to MAGA. With Breitbart providing a voice, and social media providing networking and amplification, the alt-right was able to rebrand white nationalism and even outright neo-Nazism. Its members spoke in terms of civilizational “replacement,” by which they meant the loss of a racial caste hierarchy with whites at the top, a status conferring though never guaranteeing substantial material benefits. (Demagogues and bosses had long divided the working class by blaming any unfulfilled white expectation of material comfort on nonwhites.) Fluent in online sarcasm and provocation, members of the alt-right half joked that they were “meme war veterans,” by which they meant propagandists out to radicalize conservatives, and not merely the “101st Fighting Keyboardists” whom progressives had mocked as chickenhawks when they typed their vituperative defenses of the Iraq war. In the style of fascists everywhere, the alt-right reveled in its transgressions and its apocalyptic fantasies of crushing its opponents. Such transgressions extended into classical anti-Semitism, previously taboo among conservatives, such as using “(((globalists)))” as a term for Jews to evade internet-platform censorship. Nonwhites had a place in the movement, provided they espoused the superiority of “Western civilization.”

The alt-right understood what could fuel their appeal to so-called “normies.” In July 2016 the troll site 4Chan began a petition to call Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization “due to its actions in Ferguson, Baltimore, and even at a Bernie Sanders rally.” It garnered over 120,000 signatures in a week. BLM cofounder Patrisse Khan-Cullors wrote, “The accusation of being a terrorist is devastating, and I allow myself space to cry quietly as I lie in bed on a Sunday morning listening to a red-face, hysterical Rudolph Giuliani spit lies about us.”

For his entire career, manipulating reality had redounded to Trump’s benefit. Two generations earlier he had aggressively courted New York reporters to ensure frequent publicity. He planted anonymous quotes, sometimes using the fake name John Barron. When he told his crowds that the lying news media used anonymity to cover for what he called fake sources, he spoke from experience. He pledged to Alex Jones, who had matriculated from calling 9/11 an inside job to becoming an all-purpose right-wing conspiracy broadcaster, “I will never let you down.” He surrounded himself with criminals like his fixer, Michael Cohen, who would threaten reporters when necessary. Trump specialized in areas that often function as cash laundries: real estate, casinos, licensing. He covered repeated business failures with debt while portraying himself in entertainment and news media as the embodiment of capitalist brilliance and sexual potency. His campaign rallies played “Real American,” the theme music of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. His defining features — gilded apartments, ridiculous hair, media thirst, transparent lies — occasioned contempt from the sophisticated. As did Trump’s unsubtle bigotry; they preferred theirs structural instead of flagrant. Trump, like a good con man, harnessed that contempt. It drew him closer to his constituency.

From “REIGN OF TERROR: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump” by Spencer Ackerman, with permission from Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Spencer Ackerman

OPINION: Thousands of people who were released from prison due to the pandemic are now thriving with their families.

But if Biden doesn't act now, they will be cruelly sent back.

Michael E. Novogratz
Sat, September 11, 2021,


Nearly 4,000 people who were released from prison due to the CARES Act could be sent back soon.


The Biden administration has said it would be an 'extraordinary intervention' to stop their return to prison.


These people are home with their families and rebuilding their lives - Biden has the power to keep them out of prison.


Michael Novogratz is founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital and founder and co-chair for Galaxy Gives.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the authors.


An inmate at a maximum security prison in Alabama. 

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Jeanne Rae Green was given home confinement in July 2020 because of the CARES Act, seven years into a 12-year sentence on drug charges. Now, a year later, Jeanne Rae is living with her cousin in Texas, working as an essential worker at a food mart, and has begun to rebuild her life. She has rebuilt her relationships with her children, siblings, and family and has become an active mother and grandmother in her children and grandchildren's lives - potentially stopping generational harm in its tracks.

4,000 people who, like Jeanne, have been freed from incarceration are currently home with their families and with the people they love, making meaningful contributions to their communities, and are about to be sent back to prison because of a lack of political will to do the thing that is urgent, that is right, and that is just.

In July, The New York Times reported that the Biden administration is leaning towards forcing people released from incarceration under the CARES Act to return to federal prison when the COVID emergency is over. Last week, the White House stated that the Biden administration is considering granting commutations to those under home confinement who have federal drug charges and have less than four years left in their sentences. If enacted, that decision would only affect about 2,000 out of the 4,000 people currently under home confinement. To those that don't fit the criteria, the administration will force them back to federal prison.

For these individuals, the decision could be devastating to the progress they've made since emerging from behind bars. Sending Jeanne back to prison and hampering her progress would have the opposite effect of what our justice system purports to achieve.

And Jeanne Rae Green's story is not an exception; her success mirrors what our country has seen throughout this process.

President Biden has the authority to grant commutations to these individuals like Jeanne so that they can move forward with their lives, but the administration has argued that doing so would be an extraordinary intervention in our nation's criminal justice system and would come with both political and public safety risks.

The truth is our justice system is in need of extraordinary interventions. And, in this case, the risks are well worth the rewards.
It's a low-risk decision

Risk assessment is a big part of my career. I spent decades as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street, including as a partner at Goldman Sachs. I was one of the first and largest investors in Bitcoin. As a Wall Streeter, I have insights on how to accurately assess risk.

I am also a stakeholder when it comes to the criminal justice system. My wife is a crime survivor, and for the past five years I have been making criminal justice the focus of my philanthropic efforts, visiting prisons around the country and hiring formerly incarcerated people in leadership positions in my companies.

Based on my experience, I believe that commuting the sentences of these 4,000 individuals is an excellent investment for the president.

The 4,000 Americans in question already went through a detailed vetting process in order to gain their release. In 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act which authorized the Federal Bureau of Prisons to release very low-risk prisoners to home confinement to alleviate the overcrowding in federal prisons and to reduce the dangers of COVID transmission.

As a result, nearly 24,000 federal prisoners served their sentences at home during the pandemic. Of these 24,000 people, 99.37% of them abided fully by the terms of their home confinement. And only three people were arrested for new crimes - a far lower arrest rate than the general population.

The continuity of keeping these Americans home to serve out their sentence is as much about maintaining law and order as it is about redemption and second chances. When our criminal justice system works well it brings people back to the community in a better position to succeed than when they went in. And I share a majority of my fellow Americans' belief in second chances, that people can change and that we are not defined by our worst moments.

An "extraordinary intervention" to the criminal justice system is a priority for American voters, and it is important to the president himself. On the campaign trail, President Biden often spoke about the need to change our criminal justice system and committed to enact change. At one point in the campaign, he even said we could cut our prison population by "more than" 50%, by investing in alternatives to prison.

As we start to emerge from the pandemic and come together as a nation, the president needs to keep the promise he made to voters that he would deliver alternatives to incarceration - here are 4,000 people he can begin with.

MANFRED MANN EARTH BAND 1974 'MESSING' UP THE EARTH

IT WAS BOOMERS THAT ANNOUNCED EARTH DAY

AND KEPT IT GOING FOR GEN Z, SORRY WE DIDN'T

FIX THE PROBLEM

SPACE WARS

Defense Department seeks nuclear propulsion for small spacecraft


A NASA nuclear thermal propulsion concept spacecraft.


Jon Fingas
·Weekend Editor
Sun, September 12, 2021

The US Defense Department's ambitions beyond Earth just grew a little clearer. SpaceNews has learned the department recently put out a call for privately-made nuclear propulsion systems that could power small- and mid-sized spacecraft. The DoD wants to launch missions venturing beyond Earth orbit, and existing electric and solar spacecraft are neither suitable for that job nor suitable to smaller vehicles, the department's Defense Innovation Unit said.

The nuclear propulsion system will ideally offer "high delta-V" (above 33ft/s) while scaling down to less than 2,000kg in dry mass (4,409lbs on Earth). On top of providing electricity for the payload, the technology will hopefully keep the spacecraft warm when in shadow and minimize radiation both on the ground and to other components. Responses are expected by September 23rd, with contracts handed out as quickly as 60 to 90 days afterward.

Officials acknowledged they were making the request as a matter of expediency. NASA and other agencies are already developing or backing nuclear spacecraft, but those won't be ready for a long while. The DoD is hoping for a prototype within three to five years — this technology would serve as a stopgap that puts nuclear propulsion into service relatively quickly for near-term projects.

While the request didn't provide clues as to what spacecraft were in the works, the focus on smaller spacecraft suggests it could involve probes, satellites or other vehicles with modest goals. You won't see this power human trips to Mars. All the same, it's clear the DoD is frustrated by the limitations of existing spacecraft engines and wants a fast track to more powerful designs.

WORKERS CAPITAL AT WORK FOR BANKERSTERS
New U.S. Hedge Fund Taps Japan Pension Cash to Bet on Stocks



Takashi Nakamichi
Sun, September 12, 2021,

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. investment advisory firm GSB Capital LLC has started a hedge fund focusing on Japanese stocks, using seed money provided by a corporate pension fund in the Asian nation.

The GSB Japan Equity Long Short Fund targets mid- and large-cap Japanese shares, buying equity of companies with attractive fundamentals while shorting those with a poor outlook, a statement showed Monday. It aims to raise a maximum of $650 million, the firm said, without naming the seed-capital provider.

Pressured by rock-bottom interest rates, Japanese corporate retirement funds are becoming more eager to take risks for returns on their roughly $1 trillion of assets under management. Yet while they have raised exposure to alternative investments in recent years, it’s unusual for such pensions to offer initial capital to a hedge fund.

Geoffrey Bennett, GSB Capital’s chief executive officer and portfolio manager who has focused on Japanese markets for about three decades, will oversee the new fund from San Francisco. “Japan has long been an overlooked stock market and as result is a rich source of alpha opportunities,” he said in the release.

GSB set up the vehicle with help from Gordian Capital Singapore Pte, an asset management firm that provides infrastructure services for funds and asset managers. Gordian Capital Japan arranged the seed investment from the pension fund.

UK

My union will no longer rely on Labour – fighting for our members must come first

Workers face challenges that Westminster won’t solve. So, as the new head of Unite, I will campaign for jobs, pay and conditions

 Sharon Graham is the general secretary of Unite

Workers shouldn’t wait for Labour victory, says Unite’s Sharon Graham

Unite members protest over NHS wages at the Royal London hospital, August 2021. 

Photograph: Guy Smallman/Getty Images

Sun 12 Sep 2021 

It was early morning at a factory on Humberside. My campaign team were handing out leaflets as workers made their way in to work. One worker told the team: “I voted for the best candidate for the workers. And don’t ask me who, that’s between me and the ballot box – but she’s good.”

When I heard the story I knew I could win the election for Unite’s general secretary. The factory wasn’t one that had nominated me to stand in the election. We didn’t have supporters inside trying to deliver our vote. It was totally new ground for us. And there was only one woman on the ballot paper.

Many observers called the election wrongly. They failed to see that our campaign was a crusade for change, not yet another vote for Buggins’ turn; they underestimated how much this reflected the mood among union members. And we had a volunteer army that refused to be beaten, battling for every vote. In the end our victory was decisive.


Post pandemic, I believe we need to face new challenges with new responses. We need to get back to what it says on the trade union tin: fight for jobs, pay and conditions. We can’t keep hoping for the election of a Labour government to solve our members’ problems. Putting all our eggs in the Westminster basket will not deliver. When did the parliamentary Labour party win a collective bargaining agreement at a workplace? Fighting for our members must come first. We cannot have the political tail wagging Unite’s industrial dog any longer.

So for me it’s about going back to the workplace. A powerful union capable of winning disputes and workplace battles is the only way workers will be protected through the pandemic and beyond. The union grows by winning. Its current structures were built to serve local bargaining. We need to build an organisation that can deal with the multinational and hi-tech employers of the 21st century.

For example, on home working, should Unite have separate negotiations with each of the big banks or should we create a collective effort, for all our banking reps to come together and work towards one agreement? Then that could be presented to each of the bank chief executives at the same time. Why can’t the huge profits of the banks these days, and the stellar salaries of their chiefs, be reflected in decent wages, pensions and working conditions for their workers?

After my election we had a host of media interview requests. Some were fulfilled, but it was far more important for me to organise meetings with all shop stewards, across the UK and Ireland, who were in dispute with their employer. During one of the first meetings more than 80 reps signed up on Zoom to discuss action plans in 18 separate disputes. That is what I mean by fighting for jobs, pay and conditions.

I am not underestimating the challenges that lie ahead. Only one in four UK workers is a member of a union, even fewer in the private sector. This needs to change. Which brings me to Unite’s strategy of “leverage”.

Leverage can be defined as union strategies designed to give us an advantage in negotiations with hostile employers, which involve tactics well beyond the traditional “all-out” strike. However, if you read some of the recent press scare stories you might think that leverage means Unite members harassing employers’ families, including their children. Not true.

In the 15 leverage campaigns I have led, the only family members investigated were adults who had significant holdings or interests in the business. Suddenly there are crocodile tears being shed by aghast employers: the very same employers who wouldn’t give a second thought to the families who have been blighted by their “fire and rehire” strategies, where workers are sacked unless they agree to slashed wages, pensions and conditions.

Leverage uses “brain” as well as “brawn”. It takes union strategies into the forensic investigation of a business to see what its real standing is. Action follows, and this has been hugely successful.

Last year BA was poised to sack thousands in its fire and rehire programme. It threatened to sack workers in Britain, and rehire them on inferior contracts while its parent company, IAG, was ready to spend a billion euros buying a new airline. We campaigned for cross-party MPs to join our BABetrayal campaign to tell BA it was putting its lucrative Heathrow landing slots in jeopardy. We called the IAG bosses to explain all this and more. BA returned to the negotiating table.

We want companies to do well so that our members can share in the benefits. So Unite will have no issues with what we might call “good bosses”. On the other hand, Unite will be relentless in defending workers from “bad bosses”.

My job is to wake up every morning and deliver for union members. That is why I stood for election as Unite’s general secretary and that is precisely what I intend to do.


Sharon Graham is the general secretary of Unite

The Major Problem With EVs No One Is Talking About

By Irina Slav - Sep 07, 2021


When GM earlier this year started recalling Bolts, it issued a warning to owners of the EV: don’t charge your car battery to 100 percent. Normally, this would be easy enough to do. But what if your charger got hacked?

Last year, researchers from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas successfully hacked the most popular charging system used in North America. The hack limited the charging rate, then blocked charging, and then overcharged the battery. The reason for the hack: “This was an initiative designed to identify potential threats in common charging hardware as we prepare for widespread adoption of electric vehicles in the coming decade,” according to lead researcher Austin Dodson.

Mission accomplished.

Earlier this month, UK cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners said that it had found cyber vulnerabilities in six home EV chargers and a large public charging network. Some of the vulnerabilities were no small potatoes.

Among the findings of Pen Test Partners was a vulnerability that could potentially make possible the hacking of millions of EV chargers simultaneously and another that exposed user and charger data for the hacker to use.

Perhaps the most dangerous vulnerability that the cybersecurity experts uncovered, however, was the possibility for a hacker to take control over millions of chargers.

“As one could potentially switch all chargers on and off synchronously, there is potential to cause stability problems for the power grid, owing to the large swings in power demand as reserve capacity struggles to maintain grid frequency,” the firm said.

EVs have been touted as the future of transportation. Governments in Europe and North America are allocating billions in financing that focuses precisely on public charging networks. Yet, there is little talk about the cybersecurity implications of having a huge network of hundreds of chargers that can be hacked.

Public chargers are the riskiest, it seems. While one could hack a home charger, they would only gain access to that device and possibly the home network of that household. If they hack a public charger, they could gain access to the whole network, explains Baksheesh Singh Ghuman, Senior Director of Product and GTM Strategy at Finite State, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in connected devices.

Gaining access to data is one risk associated with the vulnerabilities of EV chargers. Another is even more straightforward: electricity theft. If a hacker breaches a public charger, they could siphon electricity off it and make someone else pay, says Singh Ghuman.

Attacks on home chargers can be serious, too, despite their much more limited focus. Since both EVs and EV chargers are connected devices, hacking the charger could grant the attacker access to things like passwords and other credentials.

And that’s not even the worst that can happen.

“Threat actors can also gain control of the electric vehicles themselves, which includes control over steering, brakes, acceleration, and other functions which could result in an accident,” Singh Ghuman told Oilprice. “They would have the ability to listen in on phone conversations held within the car and steal personal data from the vehicle’s connected network too.”

Everything is hackable, cybersecurity experts have warned repeatedly, from a corporate computer system to a pacemaker. And cybercriminals are often ahead of their opponents in the game of cat and mouse, forcing governments and cybersecurity service providers to often catch up.

Luckily, in the wake of the latest massive hack attacks in the U.S., action is being taken. A recent executive order by President Biden will oblige manufacturers of hackable equipment to start implementing more stringent cybersecurity standards, Singh Ghuman says. It is important to act preemptively and remove as many vulnerabilities as possible as early as possible.

A lot of hopes are being pinned on electric vehicles as a crucial element of the low-carbon economy of the future. Automakers are spending billions on their shift to EVs, and one could only hope some of that money is being spent on guaranteeing the cybersecurity of the vehicles. It should be, given how much is at stake. And with carmakers already aware of the challenges they face in promoting their EV models as the better cars, they need to be exceptionally wary of the possibility that the hackability of an EV could very well become a monumental issue alongside range anxiety.

Chargers are even more important. If a hacker can make several hundred chargers switch on and off when the hacker tells them to, that becomes a problem for the grid. And if a larger-scale attack can be launched, the situation would become a lot more serious.

There are already concerns about the addition of millions of EVs to city grids that were not built for this sort of electricity demand. Investments in the upgrade of grids so it can take the additional demand are seen at between $1,630 and $5,380 per EV, according to Boston Consulting Group. And that’s for EV penetration rates of 10-20 percent. The more EVs are added, the more money will need to be spent to keep the grid stable.

The EV revolution is becoming a challenging endeavor in more aspects than one. The cybersecurity theme needs to be at the center of the EV discourse. The threats might be potential for now but let’s remember: everything can be hacked.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com