The media is being duped by Republicans on the "lab leak" theory
New reporting underscores how little evidence there is for the GOP-preferred story about COVID-19's origins

By AMANDA MARCOTTE
PUBLISHED JUNE 16, 2021 

Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn and the Chinese flag (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Last month, seemingly spurred on by this column from a controversial former science reporter for The New York Times, it became suddenly fashionable in some journalistic circles to scold the mainstream press for dismissing or ignoring something called the "lab leak theory" regarding the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. To be sure, the possibility that the coronavirus was released in a lab accident in Wuhan, China, has never been fully discounted by the scientific establishment but long treated as less likely than that it emerged from a purely natural origin. Still, led by Matt Yglesias from his (sigh) Substack blog, a narrative started to form in May that the mainstream media was deliberately ignoring a scientifically valid hypothesis because of a, heaven help us, bias against conservatives. Otherwise reputable opinion writers like Jonathan Chait of New York, eager to demonstrate that they are Not Biased© and Care About Hearing All Sides©, took up the mantle, scolding the mainstream press for supposedly dismissing the "lab leak hypothesis" out of hand, simply because Donald Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., were fond of it.

The scolding worked.

As Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review wrote earlier this month, "we've seen a gusher of opinion essays in the same vein, indicting the mainstream press and prominent experts for characterizing a plausible hypothesis as a conspiracy theory for essentially political reasons." This, in turn, resulted in a slew "of news articles asserting that the lab-leak theory has 'gone mainstream,' and is getting a 'second look.'" Here at Salon, we addressed the sudden surge of interest in this theory by highlighting the basic reality: Scientists do not think it's likely, plus there is no new evidence that would suggest that it's become any more likely than it was before the pearl-clutching about "bias" began. Soon, however, President Joe Biden gave in to the pressure and ordered an intelligence investigation into the theory.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

The problem with all this moralizing about "bias," however, is that the original reason that the media wasn't doing more to hype the "lab leak" hypothesis had little to do with politics and everything to do with science. As science educator Rebecca Watson explained in a video responding to the controversy last week, "There is currently no evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab. None." And, as Justin Ling of Foreign Policy argued Tuesday, "Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory," and, in fact, the hype around the idea is literally "just speculation."

Indeed, the finger-waggers had it backwards. The media isn't biased against the right but biased in favor of the right.

If it weren't for conservative pressure, there would probably be no substantive media interest the "lab leak" hypothesis. Typically, news outlets are loathed to publish speculation that emerges from fringe conspiracy theory boards that have offered little in the way of real evidence for their claims. But when the conspiracy theorists are politically motivated right-wingers, they tend to get more of a media hearing than say, Bigfoot enthusiasts.

Wednesday morning, the "why won't the media do more to indulge this evidence-free right-wing speculation" crowd got egg on their face with a new report from the Washington Post that wreaked havoc on claims that the "lab leak hypothesis" failed to get a fair hearing. On the contrary, there has been "an ongoing, sometimes politicized and so far fruitless effort inside the U.S. government to determine whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be the result of engineering or a lab leak."

The report documents an extensive hunt for evidence of the "lab leak" theory throughout the federal government. Much of it driven by Donald Trump's desire to blame someone else, ideally China, to divert attention from his own failures. But more responsible actors in the federal government, including prominent health officials like Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci also gave the "lab leak" hypothesis a good deal of time and attention. But while the White House was heavily pressuring every bureaucrat in sight to give them something, anything, they could use to push this "lab leak" hypothesis, the evidence simply wasn't there.

The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain.

The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who, as Lindsay Beyerstein of Alternet explains, feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault."

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Attention journalists: The way to avoid political bias in media is to, well, avoid political bias. Which means avoiding giving life to poorly evidenced ideas, simply because they're being hyped by the right. What happened instead is that the press gave into right-wing bullying. In doing so, the press ignored the usual journalistic standards for weighing facts and evidence. Now it's likely most Americans have heard more about lab leaks than they have about the far more plausible theory that the coronavirus pandemic emerged from nature.

To make it all worse, the hyping of the "lab leak" hypothesis meant politely ignoring the fact that Trump, Cotton, and Pompeo were winking at an even less plausible conspiracy theory that holds that China deliberately manufactured the coronavirus as a bioweapon. People who have heard this bioweapon conspiracy theory and see headlines or cable news chryons touting the "lab leak" theory will assume that's what is being discussed, and assume that it's now been proved. And once that kind of misinformation is out there, it's pretty hard to claw it back.

A lot of critics who accused the media of ignoring the "lab leak" hypothesis claim to be interested in putting facts before political bias. They worry that mainstream journalists are disregarding good information simply because the sources are conservative or even because they have a history of lying. (As if credibility isn't an important consideration in sourcing information!)

But what this debacle shows is that the mainstream media has the opposite problem. They all too often give in to Republican bullying and allow themselves to be used as conduits for right-wing disinformation campaigns. Yes, prioritizing truth over politics often leads to news stories that have a "liberal" feel to them. That's because the American right is wholly committed to lying and disinformation. But journalism should put reality before the tender feelings of lying right-wingers. Especially when it comes to scientific disputes where we all supposedly agree it would be better if politics were kept out of it.

AMANDA MARCOTTE
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.
MORE FROM AMANDA MARCOTTE • FOLLOW AMANDAMARCOTTE

How conspiracy theorists are using a CDC database to spread misinformation and fear
Jackson Proskow 

A U.S. early-warning system for detecting vaccine side effects is being weaponized by the global anti-vaccination movement.

Getty Images Doctors and leaders in Winkler say they are dealing with a high percentage of people who believe COVID-19 is a hoax.

The Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System (VAERS), run by the Centers for Disease Control, has become the launching pad for conspiracy theories that claim COVID-19 vaccines have caused “thousands” of deaths and serious illnesses

“COVID19 VACCINES DEATH TOLL CLIMBING!!!” screams the headline on one viral Facebook video, that claims the CDC database shows a list of “all the people who have died from vaccines.”

There’s just one problem: anyone can make a claim of severe reaction, or death, and have their report included in the CDC’s publicly accessible VAERS database. No one checks if those claims are true.

Read more: 50% of U.S. adults have received both COVID-19 vaccine doses, CDC says

The agency has inadvertently given the anti-vax community a powerful tool for spreading misinformation about the vaccines it’s encouraging the world to use.

As of June 7, VAERS logged 5,208 unconfirmed reports of death among alleged vaccine recipients — that’s the number often touted by vaccine skeptics. If true, that would amount to 0.0017 per cent of total COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the United States.

Yet the CDC says that a careful review of those deaths “has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines,” with the exception of a small handful of plausible instances of rare blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which, in very rare cases, can lead to death.

“They are incredibly safe vaccines, especially the ones that are being used in the U.S. and Canada,” says Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.

Anti-vaccine groups are using the numbers in a different way.

They claim the sheer volume of VAERS reports tells the story of a huge safety cover-up. They often mix in individual, unverified reports with the seemingly overwhelming, and equally unverified statistics.

Video: COVID-19 myths: Doctors say false reports linking vaccines to infertility

A prominent anti-vaxx advocacy group called “America’s Frontline Doctors,” has promoted a now-deleted VAERS report that claimed a two-year-old child, who would not have been eligible for vaccination, died from the vaccine — a claim echoed in several Facebook posts that have been flagged as misinformation. The group did not respond to Global News’ request for comment.

Many other reported deaths in VAERS are just as questionable.

Two of the supposed vaccine fatalities list gunshot wounds as a cause of death.

Report #1116353 explains that a 77-year-old woman in Minnesota died one month after receiving her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. It does not list a cause of death.

Report #0917790 references a 90-year-old Arkansas woman who died two weeks after receiving a first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The report notes that she tested positive for COVID-19 and explicitly states, "there is no evidence that the vaccination caused patient's death. It simply didn't have time to save her life."

There are countless other reports of people who died at some point after vaccination, through circumstances that are not conclusively linked to the vaccine.

The FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for the vaccines is likely part of the reason for the surge in reports. The EUA requires that doctors report through VAERS any death that occurs after COVID-19 vaccination “regardless of whether the health care provider believes the vaccine was the cause.”

Read more: Influencers say they got offered thousands to spread fake news on Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine

The reports of vaccine side effects are similarly murky.

One lists a 39-year-old Alaska woman whose post-vaccination symptoms allegedly included “Jesus visiting her,” along with contracting a “sexually transmitted disease.”

In recent weeks, anti-vaccine advocates have begun to point to hundreds of VAERS reports of myocarditis, and pericarditis, a rare heart inflammation among male vaccine recipients under age 30. The CDC notes there are 623 relevant VAERS reports, but only 268 have been verified. That’s enough to warrant further investigation, which is now underway as the system was designed. There is still no conclusive determination of a link to vaccines.

“We vaccinated a lot of people,” says Dr. Tara Kirk Sell, a health misinformation expert at the Johns Hopkins School for Health Security. “We have to figure out what all of these issues are and if the rates of things are happening at more than the background rate.”

VAERS was designed to be transparent by collecting as many reports as possible to identify trends and possible problems with vaccines.

The CDC has largely relied on the honour system to keep things honest, warning that “knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law punishable by fine and imprisonment.” Readers of VAERS reports are met with a disclaimer that “the reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.”

That hasn’t stopped anti-vaccine advocates from claiming everything recorded in VAERS is real.

“Whenever you have transparency, you have the opportunity for that information to be used and twisted in ways that you didn’t intend,” Sell says. “We have a whole spinning narrative of misinformation that’s based on tiny kernels of truth.”

Video: Health officials urge Canadians to break the pandemic misinformation chain

In fact, the CDC’s statistics have become the runaway favourite among vaccine skeptics worldwide.

Canadian anti-vaccination groups like Vaccine Choice Canada and Take Action Canada regularly make use of VAERS data on social media, sometimes mixing it in with various conspiracy theories about lockdowns, masks and the pandemic.

One Facebook video by Take Action Canada titled “Are you familiar with the VAERS Stats?” rattles off a list of seemingly alarming statistics about alleged vaccine reactions and deaths, with no mention that they’re based on unverified claims. A spokesperson for the group acknowledged to Global News that VAERS reports are not fully accurate, before making unproven claims that those inaccuracies also include under-reporting.

Canadian statistics are far less alarming than what VAERS documents in the U.S.

In Canada, so-called adverse events are reported to doctors and pharmacists, who determine whether to relay the reports to provincial and territorial public health departments. That data is then shared with the Public Health Agency of Canada.

As of June 4, Health Canada was tracking a total of 104 deaths reported after administration of a COVID-19 vaccine through the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization (CAEFI) system.

The agency classifies 40 of those deaths as likely not linked to vaccines, 43 are still under investigation, 15 do not include sufficient information, and six cases involve deaths from rare blood clots linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

As of June 5 in Ontario, four deaths had been investigated for possible vaccine links. Only one, relating to rare instances of blood clots, had a definitive link.

Read more: Fighting COVID-19 has meant tackling conspiracy theories, even within families

The CDC did not respond to a list of questions from Global News about the future of VAERS, including whether it was aware of its misuse, or would institute better reporting controls.

Health experts have long applauded the system as a helpful tool that can catch rare vaccine reactions, and they believe its openness and transparency are important.

Still, some wonder if it’s time to update VAERS for the era of misinformation.

“After this pandemic, there should be a review of the value of the sources of that information,” Dr. Omer says. “I think there may be some value in doing some quality control.”

Mark Ruffalo, Margaret Atwood, David Suzuki & More Join First Nations Activists Calling For The Protection Of BC’s Old Growth Forest

© Stand.earth/YouTube Mark Ruffalo

"Avengers" star Mark Ruffalo, acclaimed environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki and The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood are among those joining their voices to those of British Columbia's First Nations communities to prevent the province's old growth forests from being cut down for lumber.

In a new video released on June 17 by the environmental advocacy group Stand.earth, the celebs implore BC Premier John Horgan to halt logging of old growth forests.

"As you're watching this," begins Ruffalo, "some of the last old growth trees in rainforests across British Columbia are falling," continues Suzuki.

RELATED: Mark Ruffalo Urges ‘Inclusion And Justice’ In Emotional Golden Globes Acceptance Speech

"Some of them are over a thousand years old," adds Atwood.

"Less than one per cent of forests in British Columbia still have big, old growth trees," says Suzuki.

According to Dr. Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, these old growth trees are "essential in our fight against climate change."

The video is demanding that logging of old growth forests end immediately.

"The world is watching," the video's participants declare in unison at the video's conclusion.

RELATED: David Suzuki Turns 85 And Canadians Are Celebrating

Viewers are encouraged to sign a petition urging the BC government to ban logging for the most at-risk old growth forests.

Pro-Trump trucker gets off scot free after driving his tanker in George Floyd rally

Ray Hartmann

RAW STORY
June 18, 2021



The man who made national news last May for driving his tanker into a massive George-Floyd protest in Minneapolis -- just six days after Floyd's murder-- "will see the two criminal charges against him dropped if he remains law-abiding for the next year," according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Bogdan Vechirko, 36, of Otsego, MN, was allowed to enter what is called a " continuance without prosecution" agreement with Hennepin County prosecutors before a district judge Friday. Here's how the Star-Tribune reported the development:

"Vechirko appeared via an online court session that lasted about 20 minutes. The arrangement is not a plea bargain and he didn't speak beyond saying, "yes sir" to Koch's questions about the process. Vechirko wore a suitcoat and dress shirt as he sat behind attorney Kevin DeVore.

"Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman didn't charge Vechirko in the incident until last October, months after it transpired. In charging Vechirko with threats of violence, a felony, and criminal vehicular operation, a gross misdemeanor, the prosecutor said he had admitted to investigators that he was "kind of in a hurry," and that the investigation found he sought to "scare" protesters out of his path.

"The incident was especially unsettling because it came amid days and nights of upheaval in the Twin Cities following Floyd's murder by former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Like Floyd's killing, the incident on the bridge was captured on surveillance cameras.

"Vechirko was seen driving his big rig onto the bridge as hundreds of pedestrians protested the death of Floyd. Vechirko said at the time he was returning from a fuel delivery in south Minneapolis and didn't intend to drive into the protest or aim to hurt anyone.

"But the criminal complaint said investigators reviewed cellphone videos showing that Vechirko should have known something was occurring on the bridge because of the large crowd and vehicles stopped on I-35W northbound on the road leading to the bridge.
Report Advertisement

"The agreement approved Friday requires Vechirko to remain law-abiding for a year, pay restitution and attend three sentencing circles. He's already attended two. Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Daniel Allard said Vechirko would be required to pay restitution, but he was unable to provide an amount to the court Friday.

While Vechirko didn't address the court during the brief hearing, one victim was allowed to provide a statement.

Bennett Hartz of Minneapolis, a protester on the bridge that day, talked about the ongoing trauma he experiences from the event, saying he still has nightmares and jumps out of his skin when he hears fireworks or a car backfire. Hartz called it a "miracle" that no one was killed that day.


"Koch acknowledged that, saying, 'I don't think anybody looking at that would have taken any bet that no one would be seriously injured.'

"The criminal complaint said "at least" one protester suffered abrasions as she jumped to get out of the truck's path.

"None of the protesters who attacked and injured Vechirko was charged. Vechirko suffered cuts to his face, and his wife told the Star Tribune that his cellphone, wallet and other items in the truck's cab were stolen."

The incident was reported at RawStory last July as part of a story describing how Trump supporters were getting away with attacking and killing BLM protesters. Here's a passage about Vechirko:

"On May 31, Vechirko drove a tanker truck through protesters on a highway in Minneapolis. Video shows thousands fleeing in panic as Vechirko barrels an 18-wheeler toward them. Newscasters gasped that he went "pretty fast into that crowd." He stops feet short of hitting a person. Another video shows him stopping twice and driving toward the crowd despite bikes and other objects being thrown beneath his truck and protesters clambering on the truck to stop him. Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said, "It was one of the most dangerous things I've ever seen."

 Protesters said, "It was a miracle no one was hurt."Vechirko is also a Trump donor. He's given more than $300

Report Advertisementto the "Trump Make America Great Again Committee" and the Republican National Committee since 2018. Vechirko, who has a criminal history that includes arrest for domestic assault, is among 19 documented vehicle attacks against protesters in three weeks. The attacks are reminiscent of the neo-Nazi who murdered anti-racist activist Heather Heyer with a car as she protested right-wing extremists in Charlottesville in 2017, and deadly vehicle attacksby religious extremists inspired by the Islamic State. Despite the grave danger he created, Vechirko was released without charges. The Democratic governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, claims Vechirko appeared confused and was frustrated because the highway was closed. The state has not indicated what is confusing about intentionally driving an 18-wheeler at high speed towards thousands of people, or why being frustrated at traffic mitigates an assault that could have resulted in mass casualties. There is a petition with nearly 50,000 signaturesdemanding Vechirko be charged."

‘We thought it was a joke’: International opposition to Norwegian whale testing project

Crystal Goomansingh

 The Associated Press FILE: A Minke whale, between three to four metres long, is now swimming near Teddington Lock. Picture date: Monday May 10, 2021.

Norwegian and American researchers are working to capture young minke whales in northern Norway.

The waters near Lofoten are the site of a large, multi-year, first-of-its-kind acoustic testing project.

"We will work until the end of June, trying to catch whales to measure their hearing threshold," said Petter Kvadsheim with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

Read more: Minke whale death toll rising off East Coast

Global News reached Kvadsheim by telephone for an interview about the project, but because of a poor connection the researcher provided a few comments about the project by email.

Kvadsheim and another researcher involved with the auditory experiments, Dorian Houser, say to determine if man-made noise is negatively effecting the whales, they must first determine exactly what sounds the whales can hear and their frequencies.

VIDEO U.S.-Norwegian whale study triggers wave of backlash

The capture and testing methods, however, have attracted the attention of scientists and veterinarians around the globe.


Video: Dead whale falls onto pavement as crew attempts to place it in dumpster

"The whales are going to be chased and herded into this fenced-off area. Then they will be kept for hours within a salmon cage, basically put between two rafts. Electrodes will be put under the skin to monitor their reaction to loud noises," said Astrid Fuchs, policy lead for the German office of Whale and Dolphin Conservation.

The group launched a petition to try to raise awareness about the project and collected signatures from more than 50 experts, calling on the Norwegian government to put an end to the research.

"When we first heard about this couple of months ago, we thought it was a joke, to be honest, because it's a very, very unusual setup, to put it mildly," Fuchs told Global News.

Read more: Humpback whale swallows up diver, then spits him out alive

There are many peer-reviewed scientific papers documenting the harmful effects of man-made noises such as those caused by navy sonar testing on whales and other marine wildlife.

"I've been studying whales since 1982. I just find the solution will not be in the biology, the solution will be in the engineering, you know, quiet technology, just like we did with aeroplanes," said Lindy Weilgart, adjunct research associate at Dalhousie University and ocean policy consultant for OceanCare.

Weilgart is one the Canadians who signed the 'statement of concern' from the scientific community.

"I mean, really, we know noise is a problem. We know it even affects ecosystem services," Weilgart said.

"How about we decrease the noise? How about that?"

Video: Global National: Jun 13

Those involved with the research said they were aware of the letter from "animal rights activists and so-called scientists."

Kvadsheim added, "Many more established researchers in the science community is supportive of the research and think that it is an important project, including the agencies regulating ocean noise."

The project has multiple funding partners including the National Marine Mammal Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy.

Read more: More endangered right whales spotted in Canadian waters, some fishing areas closed

According to numbers provided to Global News by the U.S. Navy, it is contributing USD$186,000 to the project for the base year, with an option to commit USD$586,000 for fiscal years 2023-2025.

The researchers are looking to capture and test 12 juvenile minke whales.

"Basically, the question is do they actually want to protect whales and dolphins, which they claim? But as I said before, there is a lot of research on how negatively such noise affects the animals. So we know that already," said Fuchs.

The president of the Canadian Marine Environment Protection Society, Roy Mulder, fears the research will end badly for the whales.

"This is this is the first time that this has ever been done. They've never done a capture of a large whale to do acoustic testing on. And the stress levels on these particular minke whales and their disposition of minke whales doesn't lend itself to this sort of study. They're largely fairly skittish creatures," said Mulder.

Mulder, Fuchs and Weilgart all categorized this research as a step backwards, saying much of the research that happens today is observed in whales in the wild, unlike this project, which involves the whales being herded, captured and restricted during testing.

"This is an experiment and it just disturbs me that they have to do it this way. There's got to be a better way," said Mulder.

Access to the testing site has been restricted.

Norwegian government officials tell Global News access will be granted to media at some point in the future, but that those involved are concerned too many people around in boats would cause stress f

Opinion: The right is panicking over critical race theory

Opinion by Nicole Hemmer 

The moral panic around critical race theory, an academic legal framework for analyzing structural racism, reached a new level on Glenn Beck's radio show on Monday. Beck, who specializes in dreaming up bogeymen intent on destroying the United States, warned his audience that critical race theory was coming for everything that defines American culture. "Baseball: unwatchable because of critical race," he said, before teasing an upcoming segment on its attacks on another American institution: "Wait until you hear the critical race theory on apple pie that has just come out — it's

 unbelievable."

© Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images People attend a rally against critical race theory being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government Center in Leesburg, Virginia on Saturday, June 12.

Much of the hysteria on the right about critical race theory is unbelievable, but quite a few people believe it all the same. "Critical Race Theory" has become the song of the summer for right-wing media and politicians, the one they're playing on repeat, returning to it when they've got nothing else on tap. And while there's nothing particularly novel about this particular moral panic, it is serving a useful political purpose: arguing about critical race theory shifts the conversation away from the continued consequences of structural racism.


That conversation opens up challenging issues about equity, affirmative action, reparations, and government intervention to dismantle racist systems — all of which face significant opposition from the right — and can only hurt a Republican Party that has grown dependent on the politics of White racial grievance.

We know that because right-wing media have attempted to use critical race theory as a cudgel before. That previous effort, which occurred in 2012 and was ginned up largely by the website Breitbart News, fell flat because it was not tied to a larger debate about racism. Instead, it was part of an effort to damage President Barack Obama during his reelection campaign by tying him to the founder of critical race theory, Derrick Bell.

Critical race theory, though in practice it took many forms, emphasized the centrality of structural racism and the way institutions like the law, while seeming race-neutral, actually upheld and recreated racist practices, policies, and outcomes. That cut against the optimistic narratives about the triumph of 1960s civil rights legislation and national progress, and so tended to be controversial.

Conservative media outlets had argued for years that Obama had been insufficiently vetted before becoming president and regularly suggested that he had a closet full of anti-White skeletons. Having mostly abandoned the attacks on his citizenship after the release of his long-form birth certificate in 2011, they moved on to his school transcripts and his ties to incendiary figures. They had used up their attacks on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers (a member of the Weather Underground in the 1970s) during the 2008 campaign, so in 2012, they were looking for someone new.

Enter Derrick Bell. In 1991, when Obama was in his final year of law school at Harvard University, Bell organized a protest after the university denied tenure to Regina Austin, a Black professor (at the time, Harvard Law School had only three Black professors and five women professors, and Obama was serving as the Law Review's first Black president). Obama not only supported the protest, but there was also video showing he had — gasp! — hugged Bell.

For some, this video served as evidence of Obama's covert radicalism. It bounced around sites like Fox News and the Daily Signal, and Breitbart flogged the story for months, trying to gain traction. But it ultimately petered out, and the phrase "critical race theory" returned to the relative obscurity of academia and activist philosophizing.

Why didn't the moral panic take hold then? The Bell story broke in early March, a few weeks after Trayvon Martin's murder but a week or two before it had become a national story. The Black Lives Matter movement would not become widely known until 2013, and the 2012 election would be more focused on the Republican "war on women" than a national debate about racism. There was no urgent need on the right to distract from conversations about race.

That changed in the years that followed. But the right-wing backlash against Black Lives Matter did not take the form of opposition to critical race theory, in part because it had little overt connection to education. Nor, at first, did the anger over the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, which placed slavery and its aftermath at the center of the story of the United States. It took the mass protests of 2020 over the murder of George Floyd, and the efforts of conservative activists and right-wing media, to spark a real moral panic over critical race theory.

One key figure here was Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist who carried out a campaign against diversity training in 2020. Rufo, a regular on Fox News, framed diversity training as an extension of critical race theory, a case he made repeatedly on Tucker Carlson's show. And because it was on Fox News, President Donald Trump was watching — and tweeting — about it. The one-two punch of propaganda and the president made attacks on critical race theory a national story, and a right-wing moral panic.

Like any good moral panic, it has spread through both repetition and innovation. Fox News has mentioned "critical race theory" more than 1,300 times since March, according to a study from Media Matters for America. That has turned the words into a kind of catchphrase, a signal to conservative audiences of the New Bad Thing penetrating every part of American life. But it also draws on old, familiar political fights: Battles in the 1990s over the content of history curricula and White angst over everything from "reverse racism" to "Black identity extremism."

And like any good moral panic, its creation was deliberate. As Rufo bragged on Twitter, he and his allies had turned "critical race theory" into a slogan, one that they had inserted "into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category." Given how the phrase now saturates not only right-wing media but state legislation, it's fair to say they have succeeded.

All of this is why it is important to expose that none of this hysteria is not really about critical race theory itself, but about derailing the debate about racial inequality and police brutality that seized the nation with particular force a year ago. The footage of George Floyd's murder was so brutal, the injustice and immorality so clear, that there was no effective political argument against it.

Unable to win the debate about the continuing consequences of racist policies and actions, right-wing activists are now working to sidestep it. Preventing them from doing so is the best way to honor — and continue — last year's protests.

#UBI

New York to give monthly cash payment to homeless young adults

Edward Helmore 

New York City is set to launch a pilot program aimed at combatting homelessness among young adults by giving them monthly cash payments.

The scheme, developed by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and financially supported by the city, will give $1,250 a month to 40 participants aged 18-25 for up to two years, with the aim of helping recipients find stable housing .

© Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Bill de Blasio, the outgoing mayor, said the program ‘ reinforces our commitment to ending youth homelessness once and for all’.

“Direct cash transfers are supported by a solid international evidence base, and they recognize people’s agency,” Chapin Hall’s Matthew Morton said in a statement.

He added: “Providing direct financial assistance with supports to young people has the potential to empower them to make investments in their own success while helping to counter racial inequities stemming from legacies of injustice.”

The program targets young people “with lived experience of homelessness, especially Black, Indigenous, Latinx and LGBTQ [people]”.

Separately, New York’s outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio said the program, chaired by first lady Chirlane McCray, said “will help uplift young people and reinforces our commitment to ending youth homelessness once and for all”.

A Chapin Hall statement said that “contrary to common beliefs, studies have shown that cash transfers to people experiencing adversity do not result in money poorly spent, increased substance use, or reduced motivation to work”.

In 2018, Chapin Hall found that one in 10 young adults aged 18 to 25 in the US have slept on the streets, in shelters, run away, been kicked out of home, or couch-surfed in the previous year.

The previous study, Missed Opportunities: Youth Homelessness in America, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, also found that at least one in 30 adolescents aged 13-17 experienced some form of homelessness unaccompanied by a parent or guardian over the same period.

It also found that homelessness was no less prevalent in rural areas than in urban locations, and that certain groups, including black and Hispanic, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, as well as those who do not complete high school or are young parents, were at greater risk.

“Every day of housing instability and the associated stress represents a missed opportunity to support healthy development and transitions to productive adulthood,” Chapin Hall researchers concluded.

EU envoy: Ethiopian leadership vowed to 'wipe out' Tigrayans

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopia’s leaders in closed-door talks with a European Union special envoy earlier this year said “they are going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years,” the envoy said this week, warning that such an aim “looks for us like ethnic cleansing.”

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The remarks by Pekka Haavisto, Finland's foreign minister, describing his talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and other ministers in February are some of the most critical yet of the Ethiopian government's conduct of the conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. They came in a question-and-answer session Tuesday with a European Parliament committee.

Ethiopia’s foreign ministry dismissed Haavisto’s comments as “ludicrous” and a “hallucination of sorts or a lapse in memory of some kind.”

Haavisto’s special adviser, Otto Turtonen, told The Associated Press that the envoy “has no further comment on this matter.”

For months, Haavisto has served as the EU's special envoy on Ethiopia. In February he said he had “two intensive days in substantive meetings” with Abiy — the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2019 — and other “key ministers” about the growing humanitarian crisis in Tigray, where thousands of civilians have been killed and famine has begun in a region of some 6 million people. Ethiopian and allied forces from neighboring Eritrea have been accused of atrocities while pursuing fighters supporting Tigray's former leaders.

It is not clear from Haavisto’s remarks this week which Ethiopian officials made the comments about wiping out ethnic Tigrayans.

“When I met the Ethiopian leadership in February they really used this kind of language, that they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, they are going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years and so forth," the envoy said.

“If you wipe out your national minority, well, what is it?" Haavisto added. "You cannot destroy all the people, you cannot destroy all the population in Tigray. And I think that’s very obvious, that we have to react, because it looks for us like ethnic cleansing. It is a very, very serious act if this is true."

In comments shortly after those February meetings, Haavisto had warned that the crisis in Tigray appeared to be spiraling out of control.

The United Nations human rights office has said all sides in the conflict have been accused of abuses, but witnesses have largely blamed Ethiopian and Eritrean forces for forced starvation, mass expulsions, gang rapes and more.

Haavisto's remarks emerged as Ethiopia prepares to vote in a national election on Monday, the first major test at the polls for Abiy as he seeks to centralize power under his Prosperity Party.

Abiy was awarded the Nobel a year after he took office and introduced dramatic political reforms while sidelining Tigray leaders who had dominated Ethiopia’s government for years in a coalition with other ethnic-based parties. Months of growing tensions between Abiy’s government and Tigray’s ruling party followed, and the prime minister in November accused Tigray forces of attacking a military base.

The EU and the United States have been outspoken about Tigray, with the U.S. last month announcing it has started restricting visas for government and military officials of Ethiopia and Eritrea who are seen as undermining efforts to resolve the fighting.

The U.S. earlier this year asserted that ethnic cleansing is occurring in western Tigray. The term refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.

“It is critical that leaders within the EU are raising the alarm bell,” Human Rights Watch researcher Laetitia Bader told the AP. “There is now ample evidence of widespread atrocities having been committed against civilians in Tigray. ... But so far the international response is nowhere near matching the magnitude of the crisis.”

She called on the EU to take “further concrete steps, bilaterally and in international fora, to prevent further atrocities and human suffering.”

Cara Anna, The Associated Press

Biden claims America doesn't meddle in foreign elections. Don't make me laugh.

Lev Golinkin 

“How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it?”

©

 Provided by NBC News

President Joe Biden made this stunning remark after his Wednesday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden meant it as a rhetorical question, but it landed with a thud. The United States does interfere in foreign elections. We’ve done it for decades. Denying this basic historical reality does us no favors with the rest of the world; indeed, it hampers our ability to continue to champion democracy and human rights.

In 1953, the CIA run by Allen Dulles orchestrated a coup in Iran, overthrowing democratically elected Prime Minster Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of the more pliant Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iranians didn’t forget it; in 1979, the Iranian Revolution swept in religious fanatics riding a wave of hatred toward the shah and, by extension, toward America. In Chile in 1973 we overthrew another democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, paving the way for the brutal — yet U.S.-friendly — Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet enjoyed an excellent relationship with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger while his regime tortured and disappeared tens of thousands of Chileans.

© Reuters file Former U.S Minister of Foreign Affairs Henry Kissinger, left, and General Augusto Pinochet, center, stand with two unidentified men in this undated file photo. (Reuters file)

Whatever election-interfering trick you can think of, we’ve done it. We’ve trained and unleashed death squads in Latin America. We funded splinter groups in Guayana, spread false reports accusing an Indonesian communist party of treason to aid the tyrant Suharto, quarterbacked the overthrow and murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and delivered cartoon-sized bundles of cash to ensure our candidates won elections in Italy. Scholars disagree on the total scale of America’s interference in the modern (post-World War II) era, but we’ve interfered in at least several dozen elections over the past seven or eight decades.

Nor has Russia escaped it. While we’ve spent the past five years obsessed with Russia’s meddling in America, we’ve conveniently forgotten America’s meddling in Russia.

It wasn’t subtle. On July 15, 1996, the cover of Time featured the drawing of a smirking Boris Yeltsin — who’d been re-elected president of Russia — waving an American flag. “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win” proclaimed the headline. Yeltsin had plenty to smirk about; he’d just pulled off a seedy, oligarch-backed victory bankrolled and orchestrated in part by Washington.

By 1996, Yeltsin had gone from being a symbol of democracy to the face of the brutal economic austerity measures that left Russians reeling. He was about to get trounced when President Bill Clinton stepped in. The White House leveraged the International Monetary Fund to pump $10 billion into Yeltsin’s stagnant economy while a trio of D.C.’s crack election wizards were dispatched to drag his bloated campaign across the finish line. The election was rife with fraud — even the U.S. deputy of secretary of state admitted it was most likely corrupt.

Seven years later, Hollywood celebrated Washington’s coup with a lighthearted comedy called “Spinning Boris,” starring Liev Schreiber and Jeff Goldblum. “Electing a Russian President the American Way” was the tagline. Russians didn’t find it funny, especially since Yeltsin’s rapid privatization push sent millions of Russian men to early graves due to unemployment, poor health care, addiction and other social ills. In the process, an entire generation was poisoned to the notion of democracy. This led to a climate of cynicism that was masterfully exploited by Putin.

Often, Americans don’t even register our government’s interference at all. Take Ukraine, where a pro-Western uprising in the winter of 2013–14 led to the ouster of Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych. During the protests, a steady stream of American bigwigs, from Sen. John McCain to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, joined the crowds, assuring them of U.S. support. “We’re with you!” McCain boomed to the masses. Nuland handed out snacks to the protesters.

It’s safe to say many Americans wouldn’t even consider this meddling. But simply imagine the apoplexy if say, China or Russia had government officials join a Black Lives Matter protest, or an anti-coronavirus restrictions protest — or the Capitol riot.

And there’s good reason for that. No one likes meddling, and over the years, America’s interference has had disastrous results. Pretending otherwise makes us look like we’re dissembling or, worse yet, utterly disconnected from reality. It impairs our ability to promote democracy because no nation can credibly address the topic while blatantly whitewashing its past. Above all, it callously dismisses the fates of the millions who’ve been maimed, starved, bombed and murdered as a result.

It’s hard to admit this. Every country has a story it tells itself about itself, a story that shapes how it sees the world. Some countries say they’re strong, some say heroic, some say divine or tragic or misunderstood. America, more than any other place, tells itself that it’s good — innately and universally. If we start questioning that, we rattle our very psyche.

I know this well. When I was 10, my family was admitted to the U.S. as political refugees fleeing Soviet antisemitism. I fell in love with this country the moment I landed on its shores. I loved the freedom, I loved the suburbs, I loved holidays full of eating and fireworks, I loved the ample personal space, and I loved, deeply loved, Ronald Reagan — the American president who fought for my freedom. Like for many other Soviet Jews, Reagan embodied America for me. Reagan was good.

That story fell apart when I was studying at Boston College, a Jesuit school with deep ties to Latin America. There I learned about the massacre at El Mozote, where a U.S.-trained battalion from a Reagan-supported government exterminated over 800 Salvadoran villagers, including children. Soon enough I realized that while for me, the American flag symbolized hope, for those Salvadorans, the American flag meant death.

I’m a product of American foreign policy; the problem is, so are the dead people of El Mozote … and Iran, and Indonesia, and a whole lot of other places. Biden should acknowledge them and acknowledge our history. It’s what a good country should do.

CLEAN, GREEN, GLOW IN THE DARK

Indigenous youth and women offered a free nuclear industry training program

BRUCE COUNTY – The Province of Ontario announced $500,000 in funding on June 11 to help offer a free program to Indigenous youth and women to be trained in skilled trades careers in the province’s clean nuclear energy sector.

This one-year program, led by the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries and the First Nations Power Authority, will focus on opening doors for underrepresented groups to enter in-demand careers in skilled trades such as boilermaker, carpenter, electrician, and welder, a media release from the Ontario government said.

“We know that women and Indigenous communities have been especially hard hit by job losses during this pandemic,” said Monte McNaughton, minister of energy, northern development and mines.

“This great project gives participants the skills they need for good jobs in the clean nuclear energy sector as more tradesmen and women retire. Their success will have a positive impact on the local economy, and provide meaningful jobs that support them and their families.”

Participants will train in Bruce County, Grey County, and Durham Region, with a virtual training option. Childcare support, travel, and accommodation subsidies of up to $3,000 will be available during the training period.

Job placements will then be in Bruce, Grey, and Huron counties.

“As Ontario continues to recover from the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring economic well-being for First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples is an ongoing priority,” said Greg Rickford, minister of Indigenous affairs.

“This investment in training for Indigenous youth and women aligns with our government’s efforts to partner with Indigenous leaders and communities to break down socio-economic barriers and advance long-term prosperity for Indigenous people.”

The project, part of Ontario’s Skills Development Fund, is designed to help grow the number of skilled workers required to extend the operating lives of 10 nuclear generating units at the Bruce and Darlington power plants, and support smaller employers who supply nuclear equipment and tools to those sites.

At the end of the training, participants may be hired for jobs in the industry.

“Demand is high for talented tradespeople to train and work in Huron and Bruce counties and our thriving clean nuclear energy sector,” said Huron-Bruce MPP Lisa Thompson.

“I’m really looking forward to welcoming trainees from across the province to the riding and to the positive impacts this program will generate for them, their families, and Ontario’s economy. This valuable program will prove that good quality, high-skilled jobs have a home in small-town Ontario."

Interested candidates can apply for the program by contacting by email at Terrilynn.woods@ocni.ca.

Cory Bilyea, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Wingham Advance Times

This Juneteenth, If We Want Black Liberation, We Need Global Solidarity Now

Cherrell Brown 
REFINERY29


In 1964, after Malcolm X returned from the Palestinian territory of Gaza, he delivered a speech at a rally sponsored by the Organization for African-American Unity in Harlem. “I, for one, would like to impress, especially upon those who call themselves leaders, the importance in realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people all over the world,” he said. That call for global solidarity between oppressed people is just as important today as it was then—especially as we celebrate Black freedom day, Juneteenth.


I had an opportunity to heed this call to solidarity in 2015. Months after the 2014 Ferguson uprising rocketed anti-Black State violence to headlines across the world, and months after Israel had mounted an aggressive and violent two-month offense in Gaza, a delegation of organizers, artists and academics set out to Palestine to learn about the Israeli occupation and build connections across our struggles. I was a part of the historic delegation coordinated by the Dream Defenders, a Florida youth organization that formed in 2013 in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin. Palestinian activist Ahmad Abuznaid, one of the coordinators of the delegation, said of the trip: “As a Palestinian who has learned a great deal about struggle, movement, militancy and liberation from African Americans in the U.S., I dreamt of the day where I could bring that power back to my people in Palestine. This trip is a part of that process.”

This certainly wasn’t the first time there was a meeting between Black and Palestinian activists or a show of Black-Palestinian solidarity. James Baldwin wrote about the plight of Palestinians in The Nation in 1979. Weeks before Baldwin’s article was published, representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met with Yasser Arafat in Lebanon during a fact-finding mission to the Middle East, to bring back recommendations and to discuss with then-President Carter the necessity of recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Organization and ending Israel’s use of U.S. weapons. (The delegation also planned to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but Begin refused to meet with the delegation of Black activists.)

After his trip to Gaza, Malcolm X said, “Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the ‘religious’ claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago?” Our delegation intended to build upon that history.

It’s been seven years, but I can still paint the open-air prison from memory: checkpoints in East Jerusalem were constructed to herd Palestinians between work and home, and the constant presence of uniformed Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers carrying automatic assault rifles. My arrival to Tel Aviv started mildly enough. It was a beautiful coastal city that one could quickly tell had a vibrant recreational life. On the hour shuttle ride to Jerusalem, I saw a billboard for GAP and another one boasting Tel Aviv as a vacation destination and haven for same-sex couples. This was the Israel of progress, modernity, diversity, and acceptance. We would later learn that Israel’s heavy promotion of its position as the only state in the Middle East that has legalized same-sex marriage was a veiled attempt at concealing the violence Israel enacts on Palestinians, what activists call “pink-washing.”

Closer to the Israeli settlements near Ramallah, we saw what were once beautiful olive groves, uprooted and destroyed by Israel to make way for new settlements. One Palestinian shared that the act of destroying groves wasn’t just about expanding settlements but killing an integral part of how many families made their livelihood. The olive groves provided a source of income for many Palestinian families and an ancestral inheritance now disrupted by colonial violence. Israeli settlers have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees since 1967. “It is how Israel exerts power over us, by taking our land and destroying our food systems,” one of the guides offered. One group member drew parallels between the barren fields and the theft and intentional sabotage of indigenous food systems in America.

Israel’s military strength was evident to us in Palestine. The IDF littered the landscape at almost every turn. In the streets of Hebron, we were met with soldiers demanding to check everyone’s documents. It was clear that our Palestinian comrades were the targets. We watched as young IDF soldiers, draped in automatic assault rifles, denied our Palestinian friends passage to certain streets. Those of us with American passports were not restricted, but the movement of Palestinians, people indigenous to the land, was heavily policed. Even Ibrahim mosque, an important place of worship for Muslims, was heavily guarded—callously ironic, given the last display of violence at Ibrahimi was in 1994, when Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29 people.

As we traversed through Palestine and around Israeli settlements, we’d come to more checkpoints that seemed constructed to herd livestock—not people. Each time, our Palestinian comrades were made to walk through and show their documents; an internally colonized people, both terrorized and heavily policed at home. I left Palestine knowing our struggle didn’t just have similarities; they sprung from the same source.

In 2021, the Israeli occupation has been front and center after protests against evictions of Palestinians in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah escalated into a full-scale Israeli military offensive, killing at least 248 Palestinian people, including 66 children. The IDF met Palestinian protestors with tear gas and riot gear, echoing what many saw in the U.S. during the 2020 uprisings in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many more: a state that intentionally antagonizes grieving people and justifies their violence as a defense against those they’ve harmed.

It’s not a mere coincidence that the violence being enacted on Black and brown communities in America and those in Palestine is linked; it’s by design. One day during a visit to Ramallah, Yasmine*, a Palestinian artist-activist, and I were talking about the tweets that Palestinians sent to Ferguson protestors on how to best deal with the tear gas police were spraying. These days, it’s a favorite story often brought up in conversations of Black-Palestinian solidarity. Yasmine leaned over and gestured towards a few IDF soldiers lined up across the street from us and said, “They teach a lot of this stuff to your police. The tear gas, the flashing sirens—all of it.” According to Amnesty International, law enforcement officials from nearly a dozen American metropolises have traveled to Israel for training from the IDF.

While anti-Black police violence has been an issue well before the exchange program between U.S. police departments and the IDF, we must fully understand the origins of this relationship as well as the dangers of the global effort towards para-militarized police and their shared mission of exploitation of oppressed people, resource extraction, and rebellion repression.

During World War I, Britain gained control of Palestine. Zionist leaders saw an opportunity to petition London to support the creation of a Zionist state, and Britain saw an opportunity to control the Suez Canal in neighboring Egypt. The strategic agreement was called the Balfour Declaration. The U.S. became a nuclear superpower after World War II and its policy of support for the creation of a Jewish state would grow to become Israel’s biggest ally. U.S. powers were both interested in the oil reserves in the region and in stamping out the anti-imperial sentiments sweeping the Arab peninsula. For the U.S., Israel was strategic gold, providing a military outpost to advance American interests in the region. In return, Israel has received billions in U.S. aid, much of which is spent purchasing military equipment from U.S. defense companies. America’s unequivocal support of, and investment in, Israel has paid off tenfold.

The relationship was successful in thwarting Soviet influence over the Arab diaspora in the Middle East during the Cold War. Support for Israel has only become more immovable with each U.S. Presidency. Pro-Israel interest groups donate to political campaigns, with a whopping $30 million given across both parties in 2020 alone. The special U.S.-Israeli relationship has cemented over time through waves of military aid, defense contracts, Pro-Israel lobbyists, police exchange programs, and political campaign contributions, creating a loop between State and private interests. Together the two allies have co-constructed an imperial stronghold, with the IDF serving as another proxy for a U.S. military base, able to quell any uprisings that might threaten white, Western hegemony in the region.

Halfway across the globe, American interests have their hands in another long-standing fight. Last month, in response to protests against oppressive tax reforms and the killing of human rights activists, the Colombian state deployed its military into the predominantly Afro-Colombian community of Cali. The death toll of Afro-Colombian protestors is steadily climbing. We don’t have to walk far back to find the United States’ involvement.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana negotiated a deal for military and financial aid to help combat Colombian drug cartels and left-wing insurgency groups. Though the supposed original intent of the agreement, dubbed ‘Plan Colombia,’ was focused on social programs, a whopping 78% of aid went to the military and police. The shifting focus to the army and the police in this plan was supported by someone who is no stranger to “tough-on-crime” policies. In a speech before Congress, then-Senator Joe Biden stated:
“What did we do? We gave the Colombian National Police aid, $750 million in aid… if I stood on this floor five years ago and said the Colombian police are going to crack the Medellin and Cali Cartel, no one would have said that is possible. No one. Guess what. They cracked the Medellin Cartel. They cracked the Cali Cartel. They put them in jail. They are extraditing the police. Why? Because we trained their police….”

‘Plan Colombia’ was an extension of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ started by Richard Nixon—at least, that’s how it was sold to the American people. The agreement that bolstered military aid to U.S.-backed Colombia under the premise of drug crackdowns was crafted while Colombia was fighting the left-wing insurgency group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). FARC was a Marxist rebel group founded in 1964 by the Colombian Communist Party. The U.S. interests in the region date that far back, as both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower moved to secure their geostrategic positions in the region and contain the spread of communism. Like every president, they wanted a pro-American Colombia government to advance American interests in Southern America with U.S. investment in the region’s oil and the Panama canal. FARC disarmed itself in 2017, but the vestiges of their resistance remain today as protestors fight back against military occupation and police presence funded by the U.S.

Since the invention of the War on Drugs, every U.S. President has worked to reaffirm the connection between drug cartels and the need for military aid and intervention in Colombia.

The War on Drugs at home was extended to, or arguably an extension of, the fight for American imperialism abroad. As it’s made enemy combatants of leftist insurgencies overseas, so has it of Black people here at home. Today, nearly 77 percent of people incarcerated in America’s federal prisons for drug offenses are Black and/or Latinx. Colombia remains America’s third-biggest trading partner in Latin America.

Another major movement that rose up in the past year was the #EndSARS protest movement that sparked in Nigeria in October of 2020, nearly 60 years after Nigeria gained independence from Britain. Just as Black protestors in America rose up against our police state, #EndSARS was not only Nigeria’s battle cry to disband the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police force that terrorized their communities, it was also a cry against neoliberalism and colonization. To understand how, we have to understand Nigeria’s history pre-Independence.

One of Britain’s first acts after establishing the colony was to create a paramilitary police force to protect British occupiers living in certain quarters of the country while also making way for unfettered exploitation of Nigerian resources. Police and military were a central part of funding proposals in the Nigeria Police Act of 1943, and additional state-hired guns proliferated the streets—recruited and trained by the British Empire to crush potential uprisings.

The presence of armed forces continued well after Nigeria’s independence, and in the early 2000s, U.S. AFRICOM was established by the U.S. in partnership with other western powers. Like the America’s partnership with Israel, the pretext of AFRICOM was counterterrorism and protection against domestic threats, but the real aim was and still is, protecting Western investments in Nigeria. AFRICOM now operates in over 50 African countries and continues to provide military weaponry to the powerful and elite who, in exchange, make way for the theft of resources by both state and private interests, including what would become SARS.

So what, then, is our mandate? Solidarity between oppressed peoples across the globe isn’t about a perfect homology. These aren’t just parallels, but imbricating pieces of a global struggle. The Black Panther Party understood this and offered an anti-imperial framework that situated Black people as an internal colony in America, in solidarity with other colonized people worldwide.

Though the Black internationalism tradition has experienced a renaissance, with organizations like the Movement for Black Lives and Black Youth Project 100 embracing Palestinian liberation as a core politic, the demand to “Free Palestine” is not popularized across the Black political spectrum. For those who consider themselves in solidarity with oppressed people around the world, it should be.

Yet Black Evangelicals have a long-standing relationship with Israel and Zionism based on a manipulation of faith texts that suggests that Jewish people must return to Israel in order to trigger the Rapture—wherein Jesus will return to Earth to bring Christians to heaven and everyone else will suffer in hell—a belief that’s been characterized as anti-Semitic. Global powers are brokering international alliances in service of colonization and capitalism; land theft and unmitigated riches, while their people suffer and rage. The oppressors’ playbook has become clear: colonize the land, exploit their resources, call it a fight against communism to save democracy, call it counterterrorism, call it a War on Drugs, call it tough-on-crime—and for Evangelicals, call it religious duty.

Whatever the suggested pretext, however it gets packaged and sold to the American people, it is but a part of a trajectory of neocolonialism, a marriage between capitalism and imperialism, and people across the globe suffer. From Palestine to Cali, to Nigeria and abroad, an insurgency spirit is cropping up alongside the rise of right-wing regimes backed by the U.S. government.

This Juneteenth, it is not enough to invoke the past-work of our elders; solidarity is something each generation of freedom fighters must opt into by deeply studying these histories, popularizing education about struggles beyond our borders, and heeding calls to picket and boycott from our comrades abroad. Black people in America must see their struggle as a part of a broader global decolonial struggle. As Malcolm said: “As long as we think… that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your connection to the Congo.”

* Yasmine’s name has been changed for her protection

ABOLISH PRISONS ! PETER KROPOTKIN

When We Say ‘Abolish,’ We Mean More Than Just Police

Kandist Mallet

REFINERY29


If there’s a word that has signified the culture of resistance over the past year, it would be “abolish.” Despite always being present in U.S. history, especially during slavery, the abolition movement was popularized in 2020 after the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. Acts of abolition—the collective efforts to abolish systems of subjugation—are rooted in both the need to destroy the oppressive structures in this society as well as the need to create alternative ways of living, beyond the extractive, exploitative mode of interaction that dominates our society. Often when we think of abolition, we just think of abolishing the police or the prison system. And while those are definitely components of abolition, they are not all that needs to be abolished.

By looking at the injustices in our world, and how they perpetuate and are perpetuated by anti-Blackness, we can see how this current system of governance doesn’t serve Black people. Black people are continuing to be killed by police, are disproportionately forced into incarceration, and are economically disadvantaged. For the past year, there have been abolitionist efforts through mutual aid support, kicking cops out of schools, migrant defense support, prison uprisings, rent strikes, and people refusing to work low paying jobs. These abolition efforts were ignited by an even more direct act of abolition in the wake of Floyd’s murder: the burning of a Minneapolis police precinct.

To understand where these abolitionist actions are leading the movement, R29Unbothered speaks to five people who are active in abolition efforts about the state of these movements and why we need abolition now.

For years, Chicago has had an active defund movement and Bettina J has spent the past year training people who were activated by last year’s uprisings to implement the DefundCPD (Chicago Police Department) campaign. One of the core demands of the campaign is to cut the Chicago police budget by 75%. “Defunding is the first step to abolition,” Fullamusu Bangura, another Chicago based abolitionist, says. “But we run the risk of replicating the same structures if we just stop there.” Through her work with the social justice-centered education program Chicago Freedom School, Bangura has supported Chicago students in their efforts to remove “school resource officers” and other police-adjacent entities from their schools. Individual school councils across the city began voting out SROs, undermining the citywide campaign efforts. Despite not getting a citywide ban on SROs in schools, Bangura still sees it as a win for the schools that did decide to remove SROs.

New Afrikan Liberation Collective co-founder Shaka Shakur focuses on prison abolition behind the walls of Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, Virginia. Shakur says that solidarity between those who are imprisoned and those on the outside is central to prison abolition. “This allows us to network across the world and allows us to network within our individual community, with our families and so forth.” Shakur says the last year has given him hope because he “sees the movement growing,” especially in Virginia. Shakur and others have helped form the Virginia Prisoner Abolitionist Collective which engages local communities to better support abolition efforts as well as those who are locally imprisoned.

“We are part and parcel of a unified front within the Prison Lives Matter National Coordinating Committee,” the Twitter bio for the VA Prisoner Abolitionist Collective reads. “We seek to use this network to build a statewide infrastructure and regional organizing committee aimed at establishing inside-out coordination between captives [and] outside.”

Shakur sees Virginia recent ban on the death penalty as a good sign towards the larger prison abolition movement but says the conversation still, “has to be pushed and has to be put in the proper context where it doesn’t just become like trying to reform the system itself and go for a kinder, gentler form of prison.”

In the wake of these national uprisings, another abolitionist tactic people are using to address community needs and solve social problems is mutual aid. Like abolition, mutual aid has become a buzzword, but its practice predates colonialism and capitalism. Throughout the years, Black and non-Black indigenous people have been practicing mutual aid as a way to care and support one another but also to build and maintain a community autonomous from the forces of control that sought their domination.

In Los Angeles, Edxi Betts shares the foundations of mutual aid. “It is foundationally anarchistic, it’s foundationally anti-authoritarian,” Edxi says. “I’ve been taking part in mutual aid for quite a few years in the form of different food programs, rent strikes for housing, and cop watch. There’s quite a long list of things you can do for people and it’s more service based.” Mutual aid can play a crucial role when we discuss abolition and what building a world outside these oppressive structures can look like. “It’s a practice that meets our needs and differs from charity because it isn’t top down,” Edxi says. “That money prolongs the hierarchical power dynamic. It does nothing to flatten it.”

In the United Kingdom, Kwabena Asare has been doing mutual aid work focused on supporting migrants and refugees detained by the UK’s Home Office (similar to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security). “We have had demonstrations at Napier Barracks in Kent, we’ve been able to keep people in touch despite the punitive relocations. Some in the network have gained rescue boats to save lives who may have otherwise drowned in the channel—all this in opposition and despite state resources,” Kwabena says. “In creating networks of support that are independent of the state, we reduce its power and legitimacy over our lives. There is beauty in this collective endeavor.”

The pandemic illustrated in high definition the failures of capitalism, and mutual aid projects have played a crucial role in various abolition movements. Some of these efforts have looked like distributing food, masks and sanitation products to those in the community that have needed it and offering crisis support as an alternative to calling the police. Mutual aid has been and continues to be a key part of taking an active role in creating the world we want to see. Through direct action, mutual aid shows others there’s another way of co-existing.

Though police abolition has gotten some shine over the year, there are other parts of abolition that the movement has neglected. When it comes to the death of trans women, Edxi is pushing for the end of gender policing to be included in larger discussions on abolition. “I wish there was more education around policing, not only towards the policing of Black people’s bodies, but the policing of gender, gender roles and norms. I’ve always tried to bridge that,” Edxi says. “There are certain laws that have criminalized Black people and that same ‘law and order’ has also criminalized and vilified trans people.”

With the popularization of abolition terminology, there’s a fear that abolition efforts can be co-opted. “I definitely see folks trying to co-opt abolition by watering it down to something more palatable for the masses. Abolition is not settling for reform and I think that’s the biggest misconception I’ve seen,” Bangura says. Co-optation has always been a danger for movements once they have gained the interests of the masses. And while “abolish” is being used in other reformist efforts, like the movement to “abolish the filibuster,” it’s important to distinguish that fight from the efforts of those who are working to abolish the whole structural system that the filibuster and senate work within.

Co-optation efforts shouldn’t distract us from the goals at hand. Our need for abolition remains just as necessary now as it was for our enslaved ancestors. Economically, it is vital for Black people to abolish capitalism because of its inherently exploitative nature. Black people are by far the most indebted within the capitalist system through predatory payday loans and student, health care, and credit card debt. Through creating a society that is based on mutual aid, we would have stronger Black communities that aren’t constantly threatened by gentrification and evictions.

While Black capitalism may be touted by the Black wealthy class as a means towards liberation, it is through collectivity that we will be free, not by exploiting each other for individual families’ gain. “We do not need control over these systems,” Bettina J says. “What we need is more people involved and imagining and most importantly building what needs to come next.”

As more people become interested in abolition, it’s key that we understand that part of those efforts must be to abolish our own internalized desire to police and dominate others.

Thinking about what needs to happen next,,Kwabena emphasizes the need for a new kind of international solidarity. Specifically, he says, we must “actively make links beyond and across borders, not limiting ourselves to policing and prisons but abolishing all of the violences of imperial armies and global economic structures which impoverish peoples and impose poverty worldwide.”