OPINION   

GUEST ESSAY

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft


The New York Times Opinion section 
By Joe Fassler
April 10, 2023
Mr. Fassler is a journalist covering food and environmental issues.

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to improve our collective climate morale and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice, from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use has surged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)

You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change; they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges, to some extent, on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale, a term coined by the Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. One Twitter user wrote, “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws.”

As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)

There’s a lesson here: Hugely disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.

Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsize impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.

There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’ newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.

Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.

Joe Fassler is a journalist covering food and environmental issues. He is the author of “Light the Dark” and the forthcoming novel “The Sky Was Ours.”

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

I Worked at the F.D.A. The Abortion Pill Decision Is Dangerous.

April 10, 2023


By Joshua M. Sharfstein
Dr. Sharfstein is a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. He was principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 2009 to 2011.

A federal judge in Texas has taken a shocking and irresponsible action: invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a medication used safely by hundreds of thousands of women each year to help terminate pregnancies as part of a two-pill regimen. For what appears to be the first time, a court has invalidated an agency drug approval — an approval that was based on extensive review of scientific evidence, earned the unanimous support of outside experts and retains, after two decades, the full backing of major professional medical organizations.

The decision is so stunning that it is reasonable to ask whether courts should have any role in reviewing the F.D.A.’s scientific decision-making at all. In fact, judges do have an important job: protecting the ability of the agency to use science and expert judgment to support the health of the American people. The Texas decision is a perversion of this role and, by undermining the F.D.A., represents a threat to the safety of millions of Americans.

There’s a name for the day of the week when the F.D.A. finds itself in court: Monday. Also, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Sometimes the weekends, too. The agency’s large stable of dedicated attorneys defends its actions on a multitude of issues. These include routine administrative matters such as whether the agency moved too fast or too slow on a generic drug approval or whether the agency has missed regulatory deadlines.

More consequential cases challenge whether the agency has the authority under statutes or the Constitution to address serious threats. For example, the Supreme Court struck down the agency’s initial attempt to regulate the marketing of tobacco products, leading Congress to later pass legislation permitting the agency to move forward. To the chagrin of many public health advocates, an expanding constitutional doctrine of corporate speech has led courts to limit the actions that the F.D.A. can take to protect the public.

And then there are those cases that seek to overturn actual regulatory decisions, which may be brought by advocacy groups, regulated companies or other affected parties. In determining whether the agency has been “arbitrary and capricious,” the standard of review, courts have long respected the judgments of the F.D.A.’s experts, especially those that are in line with expert advice and the consensus of leading medical organizations. This respect has led courts in rare instances to intervene when inappropriate political interference has disrupted the agency’s normal processes.

Example A is Plan B. In 2009, a federal judge ordered the F.D.A. to make emergency contraception available over the counter to 17-year-olds. The decision came after investigations found that the leadership of the F.D.A. during the Bush administration deviated from normal procedures when it overruled the decisions of multiple staff scientists, the views of leading medical associations and the vote of advisory committees, all of which were supportive of making the product available without a prescription to people of all ages.

By 2011, the agency’s scientists had again determined that it was appropriate to permit emergency contraception to be sold over the counter without age restrictions. This time, the F.D.A. commissioner appointed by President Barack Obama supported the scientists’ position, publicly explaining that it was based on scientific findings, expert advice, and data from well-designed studies. Yet the secretary of health and human services overruled the agency and blocked approval for all ages on the basis of her own review of the evidence, a decision endorsed by the president himself.

Again, the matter headed to court. The judge found that the secretary’s decision was “obviously political” and cited expert testimony stating that the F.D.A.’s scientific decisions shouldn’t “bend to political winds.” The court ordered the F.D.A. to make emergency contraception available over the counter without age restrictions.

Political attempts to interfere in the F.D.A.’s decision-making are rare, but dangerous. During the Trump administration, concerns over political interference at the F.D.A. flared up during the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House reportedly pressured the agency to support ineffective treatments and authorize vaccines before key data on safety had been gathered. Overruling agency scientists could have led to a court battle, with the judiciary needing to step in to preserve the agency’s authority and the trust of the public.

Now, growing ideological polarization, reflected in the Texas decision’s embrace of extreme language about abortion and health, poses new risks to the F.D.A.’s integrity. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires the F.D.A. to approve medications on the basis of “substantial evidence.” Trust in the agency’s work rests on the idea that decisions that affect a nation are based on facts, not ideology or influence.

Courts should protect this principle. If a future administration attempts to evade these requirements, such as by withdrawing medications that have been appropriately studied and approved, courts should strike it down. Such a threat of legal action may have kept the Bush administration from reconsidering the approval of mifepristone back in the early 2000s. Courts should also step in, as they have done in the past, as states like Wyoming try to outlaw approved drugs.

The scientific and regulatory excellence of the F.D.A. is a point of national pride. Because of its independent, thorough and expert reviews of data, the agency remains the international gold standard for approving medications. Confidence that the F.D.A. can do its work is essential for clinicians and patients, who routinely depend on the agency’s decision-making on matters of life and death. It is also necessary for companies and their investors to develop important new therapies for devastating conditions. If judges can interfere with legitimate and well-supported F.D.A. action, there is no reason to believe that the consequences will be limited to abortion medications.

Courts can protect the work of the F.D.A. or they can destroy it. In issuing an order to keep mifepristone on the market in certain states, a federal judge in Washington State is supporting the many millions of Americans who depend on the F.D.A.’s scientific decisions. The Supreme Court will soon have to decide which side it is on.

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2023, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Abortion Pill Decision Is Dangerous. 

More on abortion pill ruling

Opinion | Dana M. Johnson
A New Battle in the War on Abortion Pills
March 5, 2023

Opinion | Mary Ziegler
If You Want to Know What Republicans Think About How Americans Feel, Ask Walgreens
March 17, 2023

Where Restrictions on Abortion Pills Could Matter Most in the U.S.

Grappling with life in post-Roe America

“My life would not have been my own. I would be a prisoner subject to a body’s whims — and not my body’s whims, but the whims of a teenage boy.”
Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.” Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”
Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters. Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”
David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.” Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

Mara Gay, a member of the editorial board, in “The Republican War on Sex.” Read the essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.” Read the guest essay.

The New Company Towns

Monopolistic hospital systems now dominate the economies of many cities—and shape public policy far beyond the scope of medicine.

by Brian Alexander

WASHINGTON MONTHLY

April 4, 2023

Large hospital systems like Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland have evolved into quasi–government actors practically colonizing large swaths of urban landscapes while, at the same time, often battling to avoid public scrutiny.

 (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

On the morning I wrote this essay, I received a text message. It contained a scan of a letter written by the president of Community Hospitals and Wellness Centers, a hospital in the rural town of Bryan, Ohio. CHWC featured in my book, The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town. Much of the tension in the book centered on whether CHWC would be able to survive as an independent community hospital in an era of stampeding consolidation

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Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care by Guian A. McKee University of Pennsylvania Press, 392 pp.

For the past 20 years, CHWC, fearing the loss of local control, cuts to services, and higher costs, had been trying to stave off being gobbled up by a big health system. Could it succeed forever? In the letter, the CHWC president gave the hospital’s employees the answer to that question: No. The hospital was exploring a “relationship” with just such a system, rumored to be Parkview Health, based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Guian A. McKee, an associate professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia, provides many important services in his new book, Hospital City, Health Care Nation. The most important is delivering an exquisite accumulation of detail that explains not only how the swallowing-up of small hospitals like CHWC has become inevitable, but also why it matters.

McKee’s focus is urban cities—specifically Baltimore, Maryland, home of Johns Hopkins Hospital—not rural towns like Bryan. But in both Baltimore and Bryan, as in many other American communities large and small, hospitals have become leading, if not the leading, employers. Many have also evolved into quasi–government actors practically colonizing large swaths of urban landscapes while, at the same time, often battling to avoid public scrutiny. So the fate of the hospital can dramatically affect the fate of the town or the urban neighborhood.

Johns Hopkins is based in the neighborhood of East Baltimore, which, during America’s great deindustrialization, became majority Black and majority working class and poor. In the post-World War II era, the hospital quickly became both an economic engine and a remodeler of the neighborhood. It became a health care provider and a source of low- and middle-wage jobs for neighborhood residents. As McKee shows us, Hopkins was a prime mover in local urban renewal projects, motivated to help itself, mainly, even as it said, and perhaps believed, that it was trying to help the neighborhood. Over time, it turned East Baltimore into a hospital city.

This facet of McKee’s book is often missed in discussions of hospitals and health care. Hopkins took on the roles of government, something not unique to Baltimore or Hopkins. Toledo, Ohio, has relied in part on ProMedica, a regional health care system, for urban redevelopment. In Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the largest landowner. The Cleveland Clinic has played the same role in Cleveland.

Behemoth health systems have usurped even more obvious government functions, too. In Fort Wayne, for example, Parkview operates a private police department with little public oversight, a trend among big health systems, and, by maintaining “nonprofit” status, it doesn’t pay property taxes.

This transformation from a mission to fix people’s sick and broken bodies to ruling a hospital city sits at the center of McKee’s book, and he’s a terrific guide through the maze. In place of manufacturing, health care has become the number one segment of the U.S. economy, at about 18 percent of GDP, representing roughly $4 trillion. There are many hospital cities and towns. Their economies depend on the high cost of medical care.

This is the result, in part, of consolidation. Big systems want to get bigger because Medicaid and Medicare, which account for about two-thirds of the revenue in a small hospital like CHWC, pay much less for many services than private insurance pays. So hospitals crave a “payer mix” that’s heavier on private payers. By grabbing market power, the systems can muscle those private insurance companies into paying more than they would if there was more competition between hospitals. Blue Cross, for example, could tell one pricey hospital system to shove off if there was another good, less expensive, hospital nearby. Naturally, this is also why insurance companies want to get bigger, too. The bigger they are, the more power they have to stand up to the hospitals. And so it goes. This combination of quasi-government power, economic importance, and often opaque governance and operation makes reining in those costs so politically fraught that they’ve become nearly untouchable.

“This was the true larger issue at the core of the hospital cost problem,” McKee writes.

In a country that during the 1970s rejected national employment policy and that since World War II had failed to develop a viable program for the revitalization of racially—and economically marginalized—cities, major health care-sector institutions such as Johns Hopkins Hospital had become a de facto jobs program.

In this metaphor, hospital costs (or insurance premiums and co-pays that are then paid to hospitals) are really taxes. And, to continue the metaphor, Americans are the most highly taxed people on the planet.

Yet American health care is a dismal failure. Despite some of the world’s best doctors, technology, and drugs, Americans pay much more for medical care than citizens of any of our peer countries. In 2021, the U.S. spent $12,318 per capita on health care compared to our next biggest spending peer, Germany, which spent $7,383. Canada spent just under $6,000. But we die younger and live sicker lives. Life expectancy among white men in the U.S. fell a full year between 2020 and 2021, from 74.8 to 73.7. Yet we go bankrupt over medical bills.

For a century, any attempt to change this absurd situation has devolved into a miasma of confusion and conflict. McKee performs the incredible feat of explaining why this has happened, step by step, policy by policy, missed opportunity by missed opportunity. (At one point, possible health care reforms drown when Fanne Foxe, stripper and paramour of the Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills, jumps into the Washington, D.C., tidal basin.)

McKee’s detailed survey sometimes makes Hospital City a wonky read. We get Baltimore politics, negotiations between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, labor union positions, and many, many payment schemes. But this is the way it happened, and why it happened, and I found myself underlining, marking, and exclaiming as one era’s policy was forced to grapple with the policies of previous eras, as politicians, labor, hospitals, community activists, and business interests all fought to protect turf and benefits.

McKee’s attention to racial discrimination is especially welcome. The largely African American district of East Baltimore was home to Johns Hopkins, but according to McKee, residents did not benefit as much as might be expected from the hospital’s medical expertise, still suffering from a dearth of basic primary care.


After World War II, Johns Hopkins became an economic engine and a remodeler of Black working-class East Baltimore. The hospital supported urban renewal, both to help itself and, it claimed, the neighborhood. Over time, it turned East Baltimore into a hospital city.

Today hospital CEOs talk about “social determinants of health.” This is, at least, a recognition that direct medical care accounts for only about 15 percent of Americans’ health. Income, education, trauma, employment, diet and food access, and family environment all have much more influence. But hospitals live in a larger social, economic, and policy environment that does not reward them for addressing needs that would ideally be the responsibility of government. As McKee explains,


In pursuing this relatively narrow, health-care-based strategy for increasing its community engagement, Hopkins had medicalized its engagement with the neighborhood’s social problems. Such medicalization formed part of a much larger pattern in the postwar United States. Health care spending far outstripped funds allocated to poverty interventions or community development, and in neighborhoods such as East Baltimore, few nonmedical options remained for addressing those issues.

The fact that health is woven into American society itself and that America’s lousy health outcomes are rooted in its vast inequality are much tougher truths to recognize. There’s no profit in resolving the problem, and American medicine runs on profit. The corporatization of hospitals is now so far along that hospitals have subsidiaries. McKee highlights the point at which Johns Hopkins created a for-profit business to “allow … joint ventures with other providers and industrial firms.” Hospitals have gone into the hotel, apartment, insurance, and even golf course businesses. They’ve bought nursing homes and founded for-profit pharmaceutical companies. And as McKee illustrates, they’ve been encouraged to do all this by misguided, if well-intentioned, policies.

Some of these policies were birthed out of America’s religious faith in “markets.” Presidents as diverse as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all insisted on basing health care policies on markets. All of them wanted Americans to become wise consumers in such markets, naively assuming that Americans could behave in the black box of medical markets the way they buy cars.

They can’t. Markets have failed, over and over again. And now, there is no market anyway. Rather, we are quickly creating hospital oligopolies with oligopoly pricing power. And it’s not just hospitals, as the $70 billion merger between CVS and Aetna showed. As McKee’s title suggests, we have become a “health care nation.” About 340,000 people work for UnitedHealth Group, and that’s just one company. A scheme like “Medicare for All” would displace an awful lot of well-paid employees. So there’s not much political will to close the cash register. Recall what happened last year when Congress added money for new ships the Navy did not want as a way to keep shipbuilders busy. If, under a plan like Medicare for All, hospitals were forced to give up higher reimbursements from private insurers, resulting in layoffs, we could expect similar opposition from politicians and the hospital cities they represent. We’ve become such hostages to our health care system that killing the monster would destroy the village.


Brian Alexander is a journalist and author. His two most recent books are Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town and The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town.

More by Brian Alexander

Right-Wing Extremism Is Even More Common Than You Think

A scholar who studies white nationalism shares his data and insights on America in the age of January 6 and the Trump indictment.

by David Masciotra

WASHINGTON MONTHLY

April 10, 2023

Courtesy of Anthony DiMaggio

Right-wing extremists threaten the lives of racial minorities and LGBTQ Americans, Democratic officials, and democracy itself. Donald Trump’s encouragement of hate groups, the “Big Lie,” and the insurrection of January 6, along with attempts to downplay the insurrection from Republican officials, have only emboldened fanatics. But one scholar’s intriguing research shows that far-right extremism goes beyond the small cadre of extremists who captured the spotlight at the U.S. Capitol. In fact, the research shows, white nationalist beliefs have set in among ordinary citizens who make up the rank and file of the Republican Party, people who aren’t associated with QAnon or the Proud Boys but nevertheless share some of their core principles.

Anthony DiMaggio is one of the leading scholars studying the far right. A political scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, he is the author of several works on extremists, including Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here and a forthcoming examination of “fake news” and conspiracy theories in the United States. He joined colleagues at Lehigh to form a research team under the sponsorship of Lehigh’s Marcon Institute that scrutinizes right-wing extremism.

I interviewed DiMaggio in March about his team’s discoveries and how they should influence our understanding of American politics.

DM: How do you define right-wing extremism?

AD: Our research at the Marcon Institute is looking at various dimensions of right-wing extremism. These include susceptibility to the men’s rights movement and its heteronormative values, white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism. We look at heteronormative ideology as support for violence and the belief that “real” men use violence to get respect. Our research examines how people idealize the belief in the United States as a white nation. By authoritarianism, we mean support for violence to achieve political goals and a preference for leaders who suppress dissent and indulge in violent rhetoric and actions. With Christian nationalism, we’re looking at people who explicitly want the state to support and adopt a Christian identity and policies.

DM: What are your research methods?

AD: We’re using standard social science methods, drawing on Marcon’s national polling data and questions that we designed. We use “regression analysis” to look at how acceptance of various dimensions of right-wing extremism is correlated with how Americans look at political issues, including support for Trump and policies like the wall, immigration from Mexico, as well as opinions of January 6, attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, and opinions of abortion, among other topics.

DM: Since January 6th, most analysis of the insurrection has focused on Trump, his enablers in Congress, and groups like the Proud Boys. What did your team find about the prevalence of right-wing extremism and hostility toward democracy among the general electorate?

AD: Our polling data and analysis are important because they demonstrate that the effort to focus on a small number of right-wing activist groups and political officials is inadequate to examine how the nation understands January 6-style violence and attempts to subvert elections. We find that susceptibility to various forms of right-wing extremism, including heteronormative biases, white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism, is significantly correlated with positive perceptions of the J-6 participants, of Trump himself, and of efforts to excuse Trump for what happened on J-6. Much of the national discourse on J6 is incredibly limited. We believe that J6 represented a pivotal moment in modern history. It was not only about right-wing activists coming together hoping that Trump would be the president to impose an authoritarian, white nationalist, heteronormative Christian nationalist socio-political order. It’s also about a sizable segment of the population that agrees with these goals. That should concern anyone who believes in secular democracy, equal rights, and the rule of law.

DM: It has become folklore that the MAGA movement emerges from financial insecurity, and your team’s research busts this myth. What have you found regarding the correlation, or lack thereof, between economic insecurity and support for authoritarian politics?

AD: The Trump-financial insecurity thesis has been significantly oversold. It’s pretty clear, looking at national surveys, including ours, that right-wing political values related to immigration, abortion, hostility toward religious minorities (including Muslims), and other sociocultural attitudes are stronger predictors of support for Trump compared to various metrics of financial insecurity. This isn’t to say that economic concerns are irrelevant. One thing I’ve found in my research is that white Americans who hold a second job or work overtime and who share negative views toward immigration and welfare recipients are more likely to support Trump. A plausible interpretation of this data is that much of the Trump base is angry about working harder to make ends meet in an era of rising inequality and that they are looking for scapegoats (the poor and immigrants). Generally speaking, though, Trump’s base is not more likely than the rest of the public to indicate that they are financially insecure. It is primarily comprised of middle to upper-class voters who feel aggrieved about the demographic shift of their country away from a white majority. Our poll finds that about two-thirds of Trump voters (63 percent) identify as middle, middle-upper, or upper class in background, and nearly six in ten (58 percent) say their finances are “somewhat” or “very good” compared to 60 percent of all poll respondents.

DM: Almost half of voters supported Trump. Are they all racists or extremists?

AD: Considering the evidence, it’s difficult to argue that racism—particularly the mainstreaming of white nationalist sentiment—is not central to the politics of the American right today. We know from polling during Trump’s term that more than a third of Americans and a majority of Republicans agreed with the sentiment that “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage.” Our poll’s white nationalism index looks at all types of questions, including some related to the Great Replacement theory—the fears that white voters are being “replaced” by immigrants—and that changing national demographics pose a threat to white Christian Americans and “their culture and values.” We also examine opinions about Confederate monuments as an important part of “our nation’s cultural history and heritage,” demands that the U.S. “prioritize and preserve its white European heritage,” and resentment that America’s “strength” is “diluted” by immigrants “who come from diverse ethnicities and cultures.”

Very few Americans self-identify as racists and extremists. Our survey finds that less than 1 percent of Americans identify as fascists, only 4 percent identify with neo-Nazis, and about one in 10 identify as white nationalists. Related to the last finding, our index reveals that white nationalism is much more common than people admit. Depending on the question examined, nearly half of Republicans signal support for the Great Replacement theory and for prioritizing a white national identity, and three-quarters think the effort to remove Confederate monuments from public places represents an attack on our nation’s cultural history and heritage. So, a sizable number of Republicans—about half to three-quarters—are susceptible to various white nationalist impulses. This doesn’t mean all Republicans are racist or extremist, but our findings suggest it’s a large and very significant number.

The mainstreaming of white nationalism matters to politics. Our research finds that people who identify with white nationalist sentiments are significantly more likely to say they will vote for Trump in 2024, to say they’re sympathetic to the J6 participants and their concerns, to believe that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election, to be hostile toward Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and to support the travel ban against Muslim-majority countries. It’s an even stronger predictor of people’s beliefs than is identification with the Republican Party. In an era when parties largely drive how people look at politics, white nationalism is an even stronger predictor of how people think.

DM: Kathleen Belew, the Northwestern University historian, has written extensively about the far right’s rise in the 1970s and 80s, tracing much of it to revanchist sentiments about Vietnam. Do 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq somehow affect who is vulnerable to a right-wing appeal?

AD: The far right is a mixed bag when it comes to wars driving anti-interventionist attitudes. From what I’ve gathered looking at national surveys of Trump supporters, Trump’s base is not any more likely to be anti-militarist when it comes to military spending and foreign wars. So, there’s little to indicate that wars in the Middle East are driving the extremist segment of Trump’s base (or his base in general) into anti-war politics. Other segments of the far right also embrace the anti-intervention position, including paleoconservatives and libertarians. We saw this recently, with various activists coming together with the progressive left to attend the “Rage Against the War Machine” event. Overall, though, I’d say the evidence that foreign wars are driving most right-wing Americans—particularly those in Trump’s base—to oppose war is pretty thin.

DM: Is there an overlap with the radical left in terms of conspiratorial thinking and antisemitism? The recent anti-Ukraine aid rally was an orgy of left and right speakers. There are also obvious connections with antisemitism and QAnon.

AD: While my team’s survey work doesn’t address this question, I’ve spent a lot of time studying modern conspiracy theories. It’s fair to say that conspiracies affect all parts of the political spectrum. I know numerous people, for example, who identify as left and accept conspiracy theories related to 9/11 “truth,” who think the Democratic primary elections in 2016 and 2020 were “stolen” from Bernie Sanders, and who fall into conspiracies about COVID-19, including the claim that it was developed by China as a bioweapon. What I’ve found, though, is that conspiracy theories are more common on the American right due to the Republican Party’s mainstreaming of them. Whether it’s the birther and “death panel” conspiracies under Barack Obama, or QAnon, “big lie” election propaganda, and COVID-19 misinformation today, we see Republican officials and right-wing media indulge in these conspiracies, and the rank and file are more likely to fall into them than other Americans. Of course, on the antisemitism point, this is also linked to the Republican Party with the rise of QAnon—a movement that Trump has openly identified with—which recycles old Nazi-era “blood libel” propaganda. In the past, the claim was that the Jews were cannibalistic killers who drank the blood of children. QAnon has swapped out “Jews” for “Democrats,” but the antisemitism remains, with about half of QAnon supporters accepting the conspiracy that there’s a secret Jewish plot to rule the world.

DM: What should Americans who oppose the fascistic march of the Republican Party take from your team’s research in terms of stopping it?

AD: Our research documents how people accept extremist ideology without seeing themselves as extremists. The large majority of Republicans in our survey (72 percent) self-identify as conservatives, not as fascists or white nationalists. Yet, extremism is rising, with about half to three-quarters of Republicans identifying with white nationalist values. We believe that the most effective ways to push back against the mainstreaming of white nationalism and other forms of extremism are, first, to speak out to family, friends, and colleagues and to openly take stands against bigotry and prejudice in its many forms. Second, we think this can be most effectively done by people forming social movements and working together for a better future. Whether it’s the Black Lives Matter protest, #MeToo activism, or other action, it’s vital that people collectively work to undermine racism, sexism, and extremism when they’re being rapidly mainstreamed and taking over the politics of one of the two major political parties.

Related
About that DHS report…
ABOUT THAT DHS REPORT…. The right’s response to a DHS report on radical, potentially violent, right-wing extremists has been quite intense, for reasons that have not stood up well to scrutiny. But the more details emerge, the more it seems Republicans who were outraged by the report didn’t think this…April 16, 2009

David Masciotra is the author of several books, including I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters and a forthcoming examination of the politics of exurbia and suburbia. He has also written for The New Republic, The Progressive, and many other publications. He lives in Indiana.

More by David Masciotra

India Decides Fighting Tuberculosis Is More Important Than Johnson & Johnson’s Profits

The country shot down a patent extension on a critical TB drug.

BY RYAN COOPER
AMERICAN PROSPECT
APRIL 10, 2023

MAHESH KUMAR A./AP PHOTO
A doctor examines a man suffering from tuberculosis during a visit at the government TB hospital in Hyderabad, India, March 13, 2018.

Across most of the rich world, tuberculosis is a minor health problem, with estimated cases of about 8,000 per year in the United States, and about 300 in Denmark. That, of course, is thanks to public-health and sanitation measures, plus the development and rollout of antibiotics that effectively kill the tuberculosis bacteria, many decades ago.

However, in many middle-income and poor countries tuberculosis remains a major problem. The World Health Organization estimates that about a quarter of all people alive have a latent TB infection (though only a minority develop an active case). In 2021, it killed about 1.6 million people—the second-deadliest disease in the world, behind only COVID-19. Worse, several countries have developed a large number of drug-resistant TB cases, because the bacteria has evolved to counter previous antibiotics.

So it’s great news that the Indian government has shot down an attempt from Johnson & Johnson to extend the patent on the best treatment for drug-resistant TB, which is called bedaquiline. This will enable the production of a generic version of the drug at a greatly reduced cost. It’s not only a benefit for poorer nations with a heavy TB burden, but a lesson the rest of the world can take.

More from Ryan Cooper

The decision is the result of a challenge filed with the Indian Patent Office by two activists, Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisle, who are TB survivors from India and South Africa, respectively, with the backing of Médecins Sans Frontières. They argued that Johnson & Johnson’s patent extension argument was spurious, since they didn’t make any real changes to the drug. They just fiddled slightly with the formulation, without a real effect on its mechanism of action.

As legal analysts Renu Bala Rampal and Soujanya Sikha explain in detail, the patent office agreed with the challengers’ arguments. It concluded that Janssen Pharmaceutical (the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that developed the drug) was engaged in patent evergreening—that is, trying to get a longer legal monopoly on the drug through technical trickery. This is a common practice around the world, the U.S. very much included.

That’s great news for India, where over 40 percent of the population is TB-positive, and which has the largest number of drug-resistant TB infections in the world. A generic bedaquiline will reportedly cost something like $8 per month per patient in poor countries, as compared to $46 today. While it can cause serious side effects, they are typically less severe than those caused by other last-ditch treatments (Venkatesan lost her hearing from such treatment), and bedaquiline doesn’t have to be taken as long either.

Tuberculosis cases are concentrated in poor neighborhoods, and this will make the finicky business of tracking down new cases and directing people to appropriate treatment much easier for India, which is still quite poor. “Small differences in getting a lower price go a huge way in decision-making at a country level,” said David Branigan, TB project officer at Treatment Action Group, which advocates for the elimination of TB, HIV, and hepatitis C. “Also, it goes a long way to … free up funds for other areas of the TB response that are underfunded.”

“Small differences in getting a lower price go a huge way in decision-making at a country level.”

This is also great news for rich countries. If huge numbers of TB cases are allowed to fester indefinitely, then sooner or later the bacteria will evolve resistance to bedaquiline along with all other drugs, and from there possibly spread to Europe or America where it will be much more difficult to treat. Cutting down TB cases as far as possible where they still proliferate would greatly reduce this risk. Eliminating the disease entirely, which would be difficult but probably not impossible, would be even better.

The case against Johnson & Johnson gets even stronger when we realize that most of the drug development costs for bedaquiline were shouldered by governments, principally the United States. A study estimated that government investment in basic research and clinical trials, plus tax breaks and deductions, amounted to a sum between 1.6 and 5.1 times that spent by Janssen, depending on the accounting assumptions used. So not only did the company get the normal legal period of monopoly profits from the drug—much of it coming from some of the poorest people on Earth—they didn’t even front most of the cash and work to develop it in the first place. Time to share!

Moreover, this high-profile triumph over patent evergreening should give governments around the world the momentum needed to deny the pharmaceutical industry monopoly patent extension for the most trivial of changes. That includes most prominently the U.S., where many of the innovations take place.

But it’s not all good news. India has some of the largest generic pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world, which ought to put it in ideal position to export around the world. But Johnson & Johnson already got their patent evergreening scheme to work elsewhere. “That patent was already accepted in 15 other high-TB countries,” said Branigan. That’s a big obstacle to getting generic bedaquiline where it needs to go.

The last couple of years have been a brutal lesson in the importance of public health. All possible pressure, from outside groups to the U.S government (which should expect more for its investment), should be brought to bear to get Johnson & Johnson to give up its patent at least for these 15 countries. Given how poor they are, it’s not even that much money at stake.

Pakistanis living abroad sent $2.5 billion home in March

By MUNIR AHMED

April 10, 2023

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistanis living abroad have sent $2.5 billion home in March, responding to the cash-strapped government’s appeal for more hard currency remittances, the country’s central bank said Monday.

The sum represents a 27.4% increase compared to February and is the highest in seven past months, according to a tweet by the State Bank of Pakistan. The announcement offered some hope for improving Pakistan’s ailing economy, officials said. The remittances came mainly from Pakistanis living in the United States, Britain and the Middle East.

Pakistan is grappling with one of its worst economic crises, exacerbated by last summer’s devastating floods that killed 1,739 people, destroyed 2 million homes and caused $30 billion in damages.

The impoverished country also has been hit by a wave of violence, which last week prompted top political and military leaders to order new operations against the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that is separate but allied with the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistani Taliban have stepped up attacks on security forces since unilaterally ending a cease-fire with the government last November.

In an overnight attack, the militant group shot and killed two police officers in Quetta, the capital of southwestern Baluchistan province, police said Monday. One of the assailants was also killed when police returned fire. The provincial chief minister, Abdul Qudoos Bizenjo, condemned the attack. In a statement, the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Pakistan is in the final phase of talks with the International Monetary Fund to secure a crucial instalment of $1.1 billion loan from a $6 billion bailout package. The tranche has been on hold since December over Pakistan’s failure to meet the terms of a previous deal, signed in 2019 by then-Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Economists fear a failure to get the IMF loan would spark a surge in inflation. About 21% of Pakistan’s 220 million people live in poverty.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif has blamed Khan, now opposition leader, for much of the economic demise, saying the former cricket star turned Islamist politician violated the terms of the 2019 agreement with the IMF.

Sharif has also asked his finance minister, Ishaq Dar, to sit out a trip to Washington on Monday for the annual meeting of the Word Bank and the IMF because of the country’s dire economic crisis. Dar will instead join the gathering virtually.

Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April 2022 and has campaigned demanding Sharif schedule early elections. In a speech to lawmakers Monday, Dar accused Khan of intentionally deepening the crisis to harm the country.

“We will put Pakistan back on the path of progress,” Dar said in Parliament, claiming that Pakistan managed to avoid default “by the grace of God” and “because of the timely measures” taken by Sharif’s administration.

Foreign exchange reserves, which last month fell to below $3 billion, have also witnessed an improvement and now stand at $9 billion, Dar said.

___

Associated Press writer Riaz Khan in Quetta, Pakistan, contributed to this story.

First of April …the start of Syrian calendar for ancient civilizations


2 April، 2023

Damascus, SANA- The First of April is the Syrian New Year’s Day as the Syrian calendar is considered one of the ancient one that is still celebrated up till now.

This year marks the beginning of the year 6773 of the ancient agriculture calendar where the ancient Syrian year (Nisanu) in the Canaanite and Aramaic languages began on the first of April.

Eyad Younes , a doctor in archeology and ancient languages at the University of Damascus, said that the Calendar continued to exist in successive Syrian civilizations, including kingdoms of Ugarit, Ebla, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus, and it was later transferred with the Arabs to Andalusia.

He added that the celebrations of the arrival of spring began in the day of the vernal equinox and continued until the first day of April, the Syrian New Year’s Day, and is associated with the celebration at the end of raining season and the start of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits, as the celebration were accompanied with religious rituals, in which offerings were made.

Younes noted that the Syrian calendar related to Ishtar, First Mother Goddess, Goddess of life, and the Morning and Evening Star at the same time, where the ancient texts described it as “in her mouth lies the secret of life’

ِThis day was called Akitu” in Sumerian, and “Akiti Sununum, according to Younes.

He noted that the antiquities which were discovered in Syria and Iraq refer that the first festival for Akitu in history began on the form of agricultural harvest day which was celebrated twice a year, the first one is in April month, and the second in October.

Younes concluded that the ancient Syrian festivals are cultural and social values, and the celebration in Syrian New Year Day, Akitu, is considered an important event in an indication to a new awareness of the Syrian people to rediscover those unknown stages of their history.

Haybah Sleman/Shaza Qreima

Demonstration in Boston in condemnation of occupation attack on al-Aqsa Mosque

10 April، 2023

New York, SANA- Hundreds of members of Arab and Palestinian community and American activists participated in a demonstration in Massachusetts state, Boston city, in condemnation of the Israeli aggression on al-Aqsa Mosque.

“The participants condemned the attacks launched by the occupation forces and settler gangs on the Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and their repeated storming into the al-Aqsa yards,” Wafa News Agency stated.

They stressed their support for the Palestinian people’s struggle until restoring all their legitimate national rights.

The participants also called on US administration to stop financial and military support for the occupation authorities and to lift the international cover so that they will be held accountable for their crimes against the Palestinians.

Rafah al-Allouni/ Ruaa al-Jazaeri

If the Law Is Legitimate, Clarence Thomas Must Stand Trial

The Supreme Court justice repeatedly broke the law for two decades. But do the laws even apply to the leaders on our judicial branch?

BY MAX MORAN
AMERICAN PROSPECT
APRIL 10, 2023


CLIFF OWEN/AP PHOTO

ProPublica reported last week that for two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow.

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Americans are taught in high school civics classes that our laws are legitimate because they apply to everyone equally. This has never been true. But if we even want to pretend that we believe in this ideal, then Congress must immediately investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.


Recent reporting indicates that Thomas has broken the law, knowingly and repeatedly, for two decades. If an investigation corroborates this reporting, then Thomas must immediately be impeached and removed from the bench.

If Congress instead greets these allegations with a perfunctory shrug, then this country can no longer claim to even theoretically believe in equal justice under law. Congressional inaction would set a precedent that the Supreme Court appointees need not abide by the laws they interpret. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Richard Nixon said 46 years ago. Congress would be extending that pathology to the Supreme Court if they do nothing.

On Thursday, ProPublica reported that for two decades, Thomas has secretly taken luxury global vacations at the expense of conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, a patron of right-wing political influence groups including the Club for Growth, American Enterprise Institute, and Hoover Institution. Thomas also accepted expensive gifts from Crow, such as a $19,000 Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass, and regularly vacationed at Crow’s retreat in the Adirondacks. There, Thomas held court, so to speak, with conservative luminaries like Leonard Leo, the architect of the right-wing Federalist Society and dark-money financier of other conservative projects.

Thomas’s failure to disclose these gifts directly violates the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. He claims that this all falls under an exception for “personal hospitality” from friends, a reading so tortured it would make the statute pointless. That exception doesn’t apply if the “personal hospitality” involves official government business. How can regular meetings with the leading legal minds of the conservative movement, whose organizations regularly appear before the Court or file amicus briefs in major cases, not be considered “official business”? Thomas once swore in a federal judge in Crow’s personal library, almost certainly taking Crow’s private jet to and from D.C. in the process. Thomas is asking the public to ignore what their lying eyes are showing them.

This is not even the first time he has been caught in this exact scandal. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that Thomas was receiving these same gifts from Crow, down to the Douglass Bible detail, without disclosing them. According to ProPublica, he simply went right back to accepting these gifts without disclosure. Thomas’s fix for the ethical violation, then, was to try to make it harder to track.

There is no reasonable ambiguity about this. If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.

Nor is this even Thomas’s only disclosure scandal. In 2011, Thomas was forced to amend 20 years’ worth of disclosure forms after Common Cause “questioned the omission of his wife’s place of employment.” He lied, under penalty of perjury, for decades when asked if his spouse had an income. Congress and then-President Obama did absolutely nothing in response.

If the ProPublica reporting is accurate, Thomas has knowingly and brazenly violated federal ethics law for decades.

No one should have ever believed that Thomas observed an ethical code in the first place. During his confirmation hearings, legal scholar Anita Hill famously testified to Thomas’s serial sexual harassment. She was vilified and slandered for it, which then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden allowed to stand before cutting the hearings short and denying three other women who had prepared to testify to Thomas’s behavior the chance to speak.

Since then, Thomas has made it as plain as humanly possible that he is a purely partisan tool. Over decades of Supreme Court proceedings, he has barely asked any questions. He is there to rule in favor of the maximally conservative position, and he has no interest in maintaining any illusion otherwise. See, for example, his spiteful concurrence in last year’s Dobbs ruling, where he makes clear that he’d like to invalidate other privacy-derived rights, such as same-sex marriage and contraceptive access. Being relentlessly partisan on the Court isn’t illegal. Consistently violating the law is.

Speaking of which, the January 6th Committee revealed that Thomas’s wife Ginni repeatedly urged Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. Later, Justice Thomas refused to recuse himself from hearing Donald Trump’s petition to prevent the House of Representatives from gaining access to January 6th–relevant documents. The Court ultimately ruled against Trump. Thomas was the lone dissenter.

Thomas’s latest scandal is not even that unusual for this right-wing Court. Shortly after destroying Americans’ rights to control their own bodies last year, Justice Samuel Alito enjoyed an ostensibly academic trip to Rome on the dime of the Religious Liberty Initiative at Notre Dame University, which files frequent amicus briefs before the Court.

The difference here is that Thomas may have somehow managed to knowingly break one of the vanishingly few ethics laws for Supreme Court justices that do exist. These allegations demand an investigation and trial.

The conservative movement will, of course, immediately mobilize not only to prevent Thomas from facing any accountability, but to destroy anyone who even attempts to do otherwise. Conservatives have developed a full victim complex on Ginni Thomas’s behalf, and Republicans responded to the arraignment of former President Donald Trump by calling to starve the agencies that investigated him of funds. Defund policing for me, but not for thee.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) is leading that particular charge. Jordan will almost certainly not do the right thing and draft articles of impeachment. Democratic representatives should fight the noble fight to draft their own articles—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rightly called for impeachment within hours of the ProPublica story’s publication—but the Republican Party hates equality under the law too much for anyone to have much faith in the success of that project.

That means Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) now has an extraordinary responsibility. He must immediately begin a thorough investigation to determine if ProPublica’s reporting is accurate. Thomas should testify as part of that investigation.

Figuring out the facts will not be difficult. According to the story, Crow literally hung a kitschy painting in his Adirondacks resort of Thomas smoking cigars with the masterminds of the conservative legal movement. One of ProPublica’s photos of the Thomases vacationing with the Crows came from a public Instagram account.

The difficult part will be getting Congress to treat this investigation with the urgency it deserves, and perhaps more important, ending the perverse way leading liberal scholars think about the Court of their dreams.

For decades, ostensible liberals, often anticipating potential future business before the Court, have treated conservative jurists like Thomas as walking gods on Earth, simply because of their job title. Originalism, the Federalist Society’s go-to tool to shoot down any government intervention, has been mythologized as some high-minded theory, even though it’s not consistently applied, and has now given way to the “major questions doctrine,” which suggests that even textual basis for a policy is not enough if it’s not specific. (Does Thomas actually think it was Congress’s original intent for judges to take multimillion-dollar gifts from political activists who appear before their court, so long as they called them “personal hospitality” when anyone asked questions?)

The unspoken assumption is that, by definition, Supreme Court justices cannot be unethical, partisan cynics. It is an absurd, self-serving mythos propagated by legal elites who have earned the American people’s abhorrence.

Thomas’s ethical quagmire exposes the Supreme Court’s self-mythology for the lie that it is. “Public trust in SC is already bad. A big circus would destroy it completely,” one Democratic congressperson apparently texted a Democratic strategist. Then let it be destroyed.

If the highest justices in the country regularly violate the laws they interpret, then they do not deserve to be arbiters of legality. Failing to act on something this clear means Democrats accept that regular people have no guaranteed rights, and those with power and prestige can do no wrong. Refusing to create “a big circus” might maintain congressional Democrats’ personal delusions of bipartisan comity, which has never been reciprocated. The cost of this self-serving fantasy, though, would be any fleeting claim that the United States government has legitimacy in the first place.

Anyone who does not endorse vigorous, unflinching congressional action believes one or both of the following: that powerful conservatives have an absolute right to do whatever the hell they want, and that keeping a pleasant atmosphere between Democrats and Republicans at D.C. cocktail hours matters more than the consent of the public to their being ruled. It’s as simple as that.

We Need to Talk… About AIPAC—and Develop a Strategy to Defeat the Lobby Too

Summer Lee’s victory in PA is a road map for how progressive Democrats can unite to elect candidates whose values will be consistent at home and abroad.

By Alexandra Rojas and Waleed Shahid
APRIL 10, 2023
THE NATION

Representative Summer Lee at the House Oversight and Accountability Committee organizing meeting on January 31, 2023. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

As we head into another cycle of competitive Democratic primaries, conference calls among Democratic Party strategists and progressive organizations keep ending on the same question: “So, what is our AIPAC strategy?” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee endorsed over 100 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden, while weaponizing its super PAC, United Democracy Project, to spend millions of dollars on misleading attack ads, often accusing Democrats like Summer Lee, Jessica Cisneros, Nina Turner, Andy Levin, Donna Edwards, and others of insufficient loyalty to the Democratic Party. (Oddly, in all of these ads the words “Israel” and “Palestine” are never mentioned.) The specter of AIPAC’s unlimited spending now looms large over our democracy.

Some Democratic operatives are suggesting that prospective candidates just get “AIPAC’s target off their back” by conceding to the anti-Palestinian spending network (made up of not just AIPAC but also Democratic Majority for Israel, Pro-Israel America, NORPAC, and others) through vague or overly conciliatory positions regarding the billions in largely unrestricted military aid that American taxpayers provide the Israeli military. This view was summarized in one conference call last year in which a consultant suggested to a progressive candidate: “Why don’t you just tweet something about how you support Israel if you want to avoid $5 million in attack ads?” Missing from these short-term, tactical discussions about appeasing AIPAC are ideological, moral, and strategic questions regarding the Democratic Party’s position on a military occupation that leading Israeli and international human rights organizations like B’tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch all call apartheid.

Anxiety about AIPAC’s millions is certainly warranted, because when it spends, it spends big. AIPAC spent in just nine races last cycle and defeated nearly every Democrat it opposed—with the exception of working-class, progressive Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Sri Thanedar of Michigan, a self-funded multimillionaire. The importance of Lee’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a recent and concrete example of how a strong candidate with a well-run, community-driven campaign and large progressive coalition can overcome AIPAC’s multimillion-dollar machine.

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Lee’s victory is a road map for how progressive Democrats can unite to build infrastructure to elect candidates whose values will be consistent both at home and abroad. The AIPAC network is spending millions of dollars precisely because it is losing the generational and partisan battle to progressive Democrats. Instead of capitulating, progressives should continue building off Lee’s victory by coordinating our own network of anti-occupation donors, operatives, and local community members on the ground—precisely mirroring the ideologically driven electoral infrastructure that the AIPAC network has already built.

At least 88 Palestinians and 16 Israelis have been killed since January, making 2023 the deadliest year in the region in over two decades. A major factor leading to this surge of violence is the Israeli government’s embrace of a much more public racist, anti-Palestinian stance over this past year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has welcomed the support of the ultranationalist, far-right Religious Zionist Party, whose leader, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—a settler himself—said in response to recent settler violence Palestinians, “I think the village of Hawara needs to be erased. I think that the State of Israel needs to do it.”

The Israeli government recently announced a plan for the biggest settlement expansion ever—a direct violation of both international law and stated United States policy, all but ending any realistic possibility of a two-state solution. On top of that, Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption and fraud, is attempting to mount an overhaul of the Israeli judicial system that would give him and his political allies even more unchecked control and power in a “democracy” that has always excluded Palestinians. Yet the Biden administration has shown no sign of even considering making the $3.8 billion in annual military funding Israel receives from the US conditional in order to put pressure on the Israeli government to de-escalate and end their illegal annexation of Palestinian land.


The AIPAC network’s multimillion-dollar spending operation to punish Democrats who stray even one step away from unconditional support for the Israeli occupation makes sense considering how politically untenable such stances would be otherwise. A Gallup poll released this month found that for the first time a majority of Democrats now sympathize with Palestinians more than with Israelis. And as of 2019, 56 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Democrats said the United States should not “give unconditional financial and military assistance to Israel if the Israeli government continues to violate American policy on settlement expansion or West Bank annexation.”

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However, because of the massive political and financial power of the anti-Palestinian lobby, only 14 percent of Democrats in the House of Representatives have signed legislation to condition aid to Israel on ending the expansion of settlements. If the AIPAC network can spend unlimited money to ensure that US politicians don’t represent the generational shift in the Democratic Party and the evolving views of the American people, it will have nothing to worry about.

After Bronx public school principal Jamaal Bowman unseated Eliot Engel—the anti-Palestinian lobby’s favorite Democrat, and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—the lobby tripled down on an electoral strategy. In the last cycle, for the first time in history, AIPAC launched its very own super PAC and—alongside the AIPAC-affiliated Democratic Majority for Israel—spent over $41 million attacking Democrats who violated its purity test on unconditional aid and support for the Israeli government.

AIPAC’s aggressive entry into Democratic primaries signals the increasingly partisan track that the anti-Palestinian lobby is taking, mirroring Israel’s rightward shift and the Democratic disavowal of groups like the NRA and more recently, Big Oil. While today there is only one NRA-backed Democrat in the House, just 12 years ago Democratic candidates in the House represented nearly 20 percent of NRA-financed candidates (a drop from 39 percent in 1992).

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In the last cycle, AIPAC backed over 100 insurrectionist-aligned Republicans, opposed Democrats in general elections and primaries, spent zero dollars against Republican candidates—and were largely funded by pro-Trump Republican donors Robert Kraft, Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer. Given the generational shift taking place in the Democratic Party—led by Justice Democrats like Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, and many others—it is clear that the extreme anti-Palestinian sentiment championed by AIPAC will increasingly fall along party lines, which is exactly what AIPAC’s multimillion-dollar spending seeks to avoid.

Just as with Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or criminal justice reform, we must organize to align the preferences of Democratic legislators with the voters who elected them. It is through Congress, after all, that we have the power to ensure that American taxpayers are not funding the violation of human rights and subsidizing the endless occupation of the Palestinian people. AIPAC and its largely Republican donors know that Democrats who speak out about the occupation also make the party more progressive on a range of other issues. A progressive movement, and a Democratic Party that sells out Palestinians for an easy reelection, is not a movement that can be counted on to fight back for any community when they need us most. Our end goal is not winning for the sake of winning. It’s winning to bring about fundamental change.

Alexandra RojasTWITTERAlexandra Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Summer Lee.


Waleed ShahidTWITTERWaleed Shahid is the communications director of Justice Democrats, and a member of The Nation‘s editorial board.