THE NEW McCARTHYISM

Pat Sajak blasts ‘far-left propaganda’ that has ‘infected’ colleges: letter

Mark Alesia, Investigative Reporter
January 11, 2024 

TV personality Pat Sajak attends "The Wheel of Fortune: 35 Years as America's Game" hosted by The Paley Center For Media at The Paley Center for Media on November 15, 2017, in New York City. (Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage via Getty Images)


Pat Sajak guides the realm of letter-turning and phrase-guessing as host of the enduring game show Wheel of Fortune, maintaining an amiable, everyman persona for more than four decades.

But when the subject turns to politics, Sajak becomes something quite different — a sharp-elbowed culture warrior who serves as chairman of the Board for Hillsdale College, a small private institution in Michigan beloved by Christian conservatives.

“If you care about liberty and if you believe America’s brightest young people deserve an alternative to the PC-policed schools that dominate the American university landscape, I encourage you to support Hillsdale College,” Sajak said in a January fundraising letter obtained by Raw Story.

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He says Hillsdale offers education “free of the far-Left propaganda that has infected so many of America’s college campuses.”

Hillsdale immerses students in classic Western thought in what it sees as high-minded support of “America’s founding principles of liberty and limited government.”

Despite the school’s lofty ideals, the New York Times reported recently how Hillsdale was caught up in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.



Pat Sajak's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Shutterstock / Walter Cicchetti

And the school apparently doesn’t hesitate to rile its donors with red meat conservative bugaboos.

Sajak’s fundraising letter included a “National Opinion Survey on the threat of Critical Race Theory in American Education.”

“Do you think critical race theory has a divisive effect in our schools, increasing race consciousness and racial division in the name of ‘anti-racism’?” is the first question.

Hillsdale did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

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The “survey” generally reads like an advertisement for Hillsdale, including mentions of the school’s free online courses and magazine.

Sajak, 77, has been on Hillsdale’s Board of Trustees since 2002 and became chairman in 2019. He is a longtime friend of Hillsdale President Larry Arnn. Former Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are also noted friends of Arnn.

Pence delivered Hillsdale’s graduation speech as a sitting vice president. Thomas has also been a graduation speaker for the school.

This year’s speaker is Sajak, who, in a presidential election year, will have plenty to discuss — if the game show host makes his speech political.


“Pat Sajak gave a wonderful convocation speech some years ago,” Arnn said when Sajak was announced as the speaker last September. “He has done long and excellent service for our college, and he has a serious understanding of and commitment to it. I expect his remarks will be worthy of the occasion.”

Donald Trump's controversial slavery comments reveal his secret weapon: report

David McAfee
January 10, 2024

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. President Donald Trump greets U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley during an event celebrating Women's History Month on March 29, 2017. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are both GOP presidential contenders who made similarly controversial Civil War comments, but only one is paying for it, and that's because Trump has the advantage, a new report says.

Haley left slavery out of her answer when asked what caused the Civil War, and Trump suggested the Civil War should have been "negotiated," ignoring that doing so would have continued the establishment of slavery in America. These issues were essentially the same, according to a writer for The Atlantic.

"Though he mocked Haley’s answer as 'three paragraphs of bullsh-t,' a refusal to acknowledge slavery’s role in the war is at the core of Trump’s gaffe too: A negotiated settlement was unlikely, because the southern states were determined to continue enslaving Black people, and any negotiation that allowed that to continue would have been barbaric," the article states. "As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in The Atlantic in 2011, arguing that the Civil War was 'tragic' misses the point of its triumph in ending slavery."

According to the report, the response from the public shows how Haley and Trump are treated differently.

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"But the reception of the two remarks has been distinctly different. Haley has centered her campaign on her competence and her no-nonsense affect, and the botched pander undermined both of those," according to the report. "She encountered a sudden surge of negative publicity and spent the next few days walking back and explaining her answer. Trump’s commentary, by contrast, elicited the same kind of shrug that so many things he says do. He’s made no effort at damage control and moved on entirely."

The report states that part of the reason for the different reactions is that Trump "produces so many outrageous comments that it’s hard to keep attention on any one of them for very long."

The report continues:

"Trump also benefits from being a very well-known quantity: No one expects him to know anything about history, and people know he approaches everything as a deal."

And that, it appears, is Trump's secret weapon against Haley.

"It’s that the lower expectations attached to him mean almost no misstep hurts him. Trump and Haley are effectively running in entirely different elections, yet only one of them can win," the article states.

Ben Carson says slavery is 'nothing to be ashamed of' while campaigning for Trump

David Edwards
January 11, 2024 

Ban Carson speaks to CBS News (screen grab)

Former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson suggested slavery was "nothing to be ashamed of" while campaigning for Donald Trump.

While stumping for Trump in Iowa Thursday, Carson downplayed the importance of slavery in U.S. history.

"And interestingly enough, you look back to the beginnings of this country and our founders, a lot of people are trying to denigrate them now, saying that they were horrible people, maybe because some of them had slaves, and that America is a horrible place because we had slavery," Carson argued. "People who say stuff like that obviously don't have a good grasp on world history, because every society has had to deal with slavery, and there are more slaves in the world today than there have ever been at any point in time."

Carson pointed out that the U.S. fought a civil war over the institution of slavery.

"And if there's anything unique about the United States, if there's anything unique about the United States and slavery, it's that we had so many people who were vehemently opposed to it that we fought a bloody civil war to get rid of the evil institution," he said.

"And that's what we should teach our children," he added. "Our history is nothing to be ashamed of."

"There's good, there's bad, and there's ugly, as there is in every society inhabited by human beings, which is why we need a savior."

Carson has a history of referring to enslaved people as immigrants.

"Hundreds of years before that, other immigrants came here in the bottom of slave ships," he wrote in his book in 2000. "They worked even harder for longer hours for even less. They too had a dream. That one day their great-grandchildren could pursue the dream of freedom and happiness in this land.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Otters, beavers and other semiaquatic mammals keep clean underwater, thanks to their fur

The Conversation
January 11, 2024 

An Otter (Photo by USFWS Pacific Southwest Region/Flickr)

Underwater surfaces can get grimy as they accumulate dirt, algae and bacteria, a process scientists call “fouling.” But furry mammals like beavers and otters that spend most of their lives wet manage to avoid getting their fur slimy. These anti-fouling abilities come, in part, from one of fur’s unique properties — that each hair can bend and flex as an animal moves.

Fouling on boats and machinery can be a big problem, and scientists are searching for ways to prevent it.

I’m a mechanical engineer who studies fluid dynamics, or how liquids behave. My team recently published a study showing that fur that was allowed to move back and forth in a flow of dirty water accumulated less than half the amount of dirt as fur that was held stiff from both ends.



While lots of animals have fur that seems to clean itself, semiaquatic mammals have the most grime-resistant, or “anti-fouling,” fur.

Our recent study compared fur fibers from beavers, otters, springbok, coyotes and more using a flow of water containing titanium dioxide, a common additive in cosmetics. Titanium dioxide readily attaches to surfaces like skin. Our team pumped the dirty water over individual fibers in a closed loop for 24 hours, then cleaned the fibers to measure how much titanium dioxide they’d accumulated.

My colleagues and I then used mathematical techniques to combine all of fur’s properties into a single number that predicts its anti-fouling behavior. We considered each fur strand’s ability to bend, how fluid flows over it and other unique features of each species.

We found that the ability to flex was critical for keeping the animal’s fur clean.
Why it matters

Fouling can damage the affected surface. When fur fouls, the arrangement of individual strands across the animal’s pelt is disrupted, and the animal might struggle to stay warm or dry.

Industrial repellent methods used to protect the bottom of ships and the insides of pipes often employ harmful chemicals and consume energy and materials, unlike naturally evolved solutions.

Figuring out how fur stays clean naturally could lead to more environmentally friendly solutions for repelling fouling in the water supply, in marine environments and even in the medical field. Solutions could include surfaces with parts that can flex and move or that have little hairs on a surface.

Research into fur also reveals more about how these mammals have evolved to survive across a variety of environments.

What still isn’t known

Animal fur and the fouling process are both complex, so we still don’t fully understand how all the intricate properties of fur, from texture and length to cross-sectional shape and environmental conditions, contribute to cleanliness.


Since hairs in fur are packed densely, they brush against each other and don’t always move individually. Hailshadow/iStock via Getty Images Plus

The strands of hair in fur don’t always move individually. On an animal, the hairs are packed tightly, and they likely clean each other by rubbing as their host moves. We can’t yet tell if rubbing and moving affect the host animal’s cleanliness.
What’s next

My colleagues and I have just scratched the surface of the mystery of furry mammal cleanliness, and there’s plenty more we can test. Future work could expose fur to biological foulers like bacteria and algae, or look at the role patches of fur play in cleanliness.

The only known mammal that does succumb to fouling is the sloth – algae grows on their fur.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Andrew Dickerson, Assistant Professor of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee

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

Alaska's wildlife is declining. Agencies blame predators. The truth is more complex.

Lois Parshley, Grist
January 11, 2024 

A bear hunts for salmon in Katmai National Park. National Park Service


This story was originally published by Grist. 


As spring arrived in southwestern Alaska, a handful of people from the state Department of Fish and Game rose early and climbed into small airplanes. Pilots flew through alpine valleys, where ribs of electric green growth emerged from a blanket of snow. Their shadows crisscrossed the lowland tundra, where thousands of caribou had gathered to calve. Seen through the windscreen, the vast plains can look endless; Wood-Tikchik State Park’s 1.6 million acres comprise almost a fifth of all state park land in the United States.

As the crew flew, it watched for the humped shape of brown bears lumbering across the hummocks. When someone spotted one, skinny from its hibernation, the crew called in the location to waiting helicopters carrying shooters armed with 12-gauge shotguns.

Over the course of 17 days, the team killed 94 brown bears — including several year-old cubs, who stuck close to their mothers, and 11 newer cubs that were still nursing — five black bears and five wolves. That was nearly four times the number of animals the agency planned to cull. Fish and Game says this reduced the area’s bear population by 74 percent, though no baseline studies to determine their numbers were conducted in the area.

The goal was to help the dwindling number of Mulchatna caribou by reducing the number of predators around their calving grounds. The herd’s population has plummeted, from 200,000 in 1997 to around 12,000 today. But the killings set off a political and scientific storm, with many biologists and advocates saying the operation called into question the core of the agency’s approach to managing wildlife, and may have even violated the state constitution.

The Board of Game, which has regulatory authority over wildlife, insisted that intensive control of predators in Wood-Tikchik was the best way to support the struggling herd. But the caribou, which provide essential food and cultural resources for many Alaska Native communities, are facing multiple threats: A slew of climate-related impacts have hampered their grazing, wildfires have burned the forage they rely on, warmer winters may have increased disease, and thawing permafrost has disrupted their migrations.
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With conditions rapidly changing as the planet warms, wildlife managers nationwide are facing similar biodiversity crises. Rather than do the difficult work of mitigating rising temperatures, state agencies across the country are finding it easier to blame these declines on predation.

“We don’t want to talk about how the tundra is changing, because that’s something we can’t fix,” says Christi Heun, a former research biologist at Alaska Fish and Game.

In Wyoming, where a deadly winter decimated pronghorn and mule deer, the state spent a record $4.2 million killing coyotes and other predators and is considering expanding bear and mountain lion hunts. Wildlife officials in Washington are contemplating killing sea lions and seals to save faltering salmon populations from extinction. In Minnesota, hunters are inaccurately blaming wolves for low deer numbers and calling for authorities to reduce their population. Culls like these are appealing because they are tangible actions — even when evidence suggests the true threat is much more complex. “You’re putting a Band-Aid on the wrong elbow,” says Heun, who now works for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife.


As the climate crisis intensifies, she and others say, wildlife management strategies need to shift too. “All we can do is just kind of cross our fingers and mitigate the best we can,” she adds. For people whose job is to control natural systems, “that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

***

In January 2022, a flurry of snow fell as the Alaska Board of Game gathered in Wasilla, far from where the Mulchatna caribou pawed through drifts, steam rising from their shaggy backs. Its seven members are appointed by the governor. Though they make important decisions like when hunting seasons open, how long they last, and how many animals hunters can take, they are not required to have a background in biology or natural resources. They also do not have to possess any expertise in the matters they decide. Board members, who did not respond to requests for comment, tend to reflect the politics of the administration in office; currently, under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, they are sport hunters, trappers, and guides.



That day, the agenda included a proposal to expand a wolf control program from Wood-Tikchik onto the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge — though that would require federal approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the government ultimately rejected the proposal.



A wolf carries a piece of prey while walking through a national park in Alaska. National Park Service

The conversation began with two Fish and Game biologists summarizing their research for the board on the herd. Nick Demma explained that, like most ungulates, on average half of Mulchatna’s calves survive. In a study he conducted, many died within two weeks of birth; he mentioned as an aside that their primary predators are brown bears. “But I want to stress that this basic cause of death and mortality rate information is of little use,” he quickly added. Predator and prey dynamics are complex: The calves may have died anyway from injury or disease, and their removal may reduce competition for food and resources, improving the herd’s overall health.

When Demma tried to analyze the existing wolf control program, he found he didn’t have the data he needed to see if removing the canines helped calves survive. In fact, from 2010 to 2021, when Fish and Game was actively shooting wolves, fewer caribou survived. So the researchers turned their attention to other challenges the herd might be facing.

His colleague, Renae Sattler, explained that preliminary data from a three-year study suggested there could be a problem with forage quality or quantity, especially in the summer. This could lower pregnancy rates or increase disease and calf mortality. In the 1990s, the herd had swelled as part of a natural boom-and-bust cycle, leading to overgrazing. The slow-growing lichen the animals rely on takes 20 to 50 years to recover. Compounding that, climate change is altering the tundra ecosystem the animals rely upon. She also found that today, 37 percent of the sampled animals had, or were recently exposed to, brucellosis, which can cause abortions, stillbirths, and injuries. Biologists consider such high levels of disease an outbreak and cause for concern.


Sattler also noted that half of the animals that died in the study’s first year were killed by hunters taking them out of season — meaning the predators killing the most adult caribou were people. For all these reasons, the biologists suggested that the Board of Game reconsider the wolf control program.

Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang, who oversees the agency, immediately questioned their conclusions, and their recommendation. Killing predators, he said during the meeting, “seems like one of the only things that’s within our direct control.” In other words, it was better than doing nothing.

Demma seemed taken aback, and chose his words carefully. “I guess what we are kind of trying to present there is just the information,” he told the board. “It’s — you know — wolves aren’t an important factor right now.” The meeting broke for lunch. When it resumed, the board unanimously voted to continue the wolf program through 2028, and, even more surprisingly, to add brown and black bears over a larger area. The public and Fish and Game biologists didn’t have the typical opportunity to comment on this expansion of predator control.


When he heard what happened, “I just was stunned. I was shocked,” says Joel Bennett, a lawyer and a former member of the Board of Game for 13 years. A hunter himself, Bennett served on the board under four governors and recalls his colleagues having a greater diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Their votes were always split, even on less contentious issues. The unanimous vote “in itself indicates it’s a stacked deck,” he says. That’s a problem, because “the system only works fairly if there is true representation.”

In August, Bennett and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the agency approved the operation without the necessary “reasoned decision-making,” and without regard for the state’s due process requirements. Bennett also was troubled that the state has tried to keep information about the cull private, including where the bears were killed. He suspects that, to have slain so many animals in just 17 days, the flights might have veered beyond the targeted area. He also wonders if any animals were left wounded. “Why are they hiding so many of the details?” he asked. A public records request reveals that although the board expected the removal of fewer than 20 bears, almost five times that many were culled without any additional consideration.

Alaska’s wildlife is officially a public resource. Provisions in the state constitution mandate game managers provide for “sustained yields,” including for big game animals like bears. That sometimes clashes with the Dunleavy administration’s focus on predator control. In 2020, for example, the board authorized a no-limit wolf trapping season on the Alexander Archipelago, a patchwork of remote islands in southeast Alaska. It resulted in the deaths of all but five of the genetically distinct canines. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued, a case Bennett is now arguing before the state Supreme Court. “That was a gross violation of ‘sustained yield’ in anyone’s definition,” he says, adding that even today, there is no limit on trapping wolves there.


Once, shooting bison from moving trains and leaving them to rot was widely accepted. Attitudes have evolved, as have understandings about predators’ importance — recent research suggests their stabilizing presence may play a crucial role in mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Other studies show predators may help prey adapt more quickly to shifting conditions. But Bennett worries that, just as Alaska’s wildlife faces new pressures in a warming world, management priorities are reverting to earlier stances on how to treat animals. “I’ve certainly done my time in the so-called ‘wolf wars,’” Bennett says, “but we’re entering a new era here with other predators.”

***

Even as legal challenges to the board’s decisions move forward, scientific debate over the effectiveness of predator control has flourished. Part of the problem is that game management decisions are rarely studied in the way scientists would design an experiment. “You’ve got a wild system, with free-ranging animals, and weather, and other factors that are constantly changing,” says Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. “It’s just not amenable to the classic research design.” Even getting baseline data can take years, and remote areas like Wood-Tikchik, which is accessible only by air or boat, are challenging and expensive places to work.


The sun sets over the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. Getty Images via Grist

Paragi has for more than a decade monitored the state’s intensive wildlife management programs and believes predator control can be effective. Looking at data collected since 2003, he notes that when Alaska culled wolves in four areas in a bid to bolster moose, caribou, and deer populations, their numbers increased. They also remained low in those areas where wolves were left alone. (His examination of this data has not yet been published or subject to peer review.) Elsewhere in the state, removing 96 percent of black bears in 2003 and 2004, reducing hunting, and killing wolves boosted the number of moose. Heavy snowfall during the next two winters killed many of the calves, and most of the bears returned within six years, but Paragi still considers the efforts a success. By 2009, the moose population had almost doubled.

He’s also not convinced that Demma and Sattler were right when they told board members that predation doesn’t appear to be the most pressing issue for the Mulchatna caribou. He says record salmon runs have likely brought more bears near the park and the calving grounds, and warmer temperatures have fostered the growth of vegetation that provides places to hide as they stalk caribou. As to the suggestion that the herd is suffering from inadequate food supplies, he notes that their birth rate has been high since 2009. That’s often a strong indicator of good nutrition.

But Sattler says, “It isn’t that cut-and-dried.” A female caribou’s body condition, she explains, exists on a spectrum and affects her survival, the size and strength of any calves, and how long she can nurse or how quickly she gets pregnant again. “The impact of nutrition is wide-reaching and complex, and it isn’t captured in pregnancy rates alone.” Understanding how nutrition, brucellosis, and other factors are impacting the herd is complicated, she says.

There are a lot of interacting factors at play on the tundra — and among those trying to determine how best to help the herd. “Part of the frustration on all sides of this is that people have different value systems related to managing wild systems,” Paragi says. To him, last spring’s bear kill wasn’t truly a question of science. “We can present the data, but what you do with the data is ultimately a political decision,” he says.

Sterling Miller, a retired Fish and Game research biologist and former president of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, acknowledges that crafting regulations is left to the politically appointed Board of Game. But Miller says the agency tends to dismiss criticism of its predator control, when there are valid scientific questions about its effectiveness. In 2022, Miller and his colleagues published an analysis, using Fish and Game harvest data, showing that 40 years of killing predators in an area of south-central Alaska didn’t result in more harvests of moose. “Fish and Game has never pointed out any factual or analytical errors in the analyses that I’ve been involved with,” he says. “Instead, they try to undercut our work by saying it’s based on values.”

Miller also was involved in what remains one of the agency’s best examples of predator relocations. In 1979, he and another biologist moved 47 brown bears out of a region in south-central Alaska, which resulted in a “significant” increase in the survival of moose calves the next fall. But Miller says Fish and Game often misquotes that work. In reality, due to a lack of funding, Miller didn’t study the young animals long enough to see if they actually reached adulthood. Similarly, Fish and Game conducted an aerial survey this fall of the Mulchatna herd, finding more calves survived after the bear cullings. But Miller and other biologists say that’s not the best metric to measure the operation’s success: These calves may still perish during their first winter.

The Alaskan government is the only one in the world whose goal is to reduce the number of brown bears, Miller says, despite the absence of baseline studies on how many bears are in this part of the state. It irks him that the state continues to use his research as justification for allowing predator measures like bear baiting. In most parts of Alaska, Miller says, “the liberalization of bear hunting regulations has just been so extreme.”

While last year’s bear killings were particularly egregious, similar cullings have gone largely unnoticed. State data shows over 1,000 wolves and 3,500 brown and black bears have been killed since 2008 alone. In 2016, for example, the federal government shared radio tag information with the state, which used it to kill wolves when they left the safety of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve — destroying so many packs that it ended a 20-year study on predator-prey relationships. “There weren’t enough survivors to maintain a self-sustaining population,” recounted an investigation by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The nearby caribou herd still failed to recover.

Multiple employees for Fish and Game, who didn’t want to be named amid fear of repercussions, told Grist that the agency was ignoring basic scientific principles, and that political appointees to the Board were not equipped to judge the effectiveness of these programs.

Even these criticisms of the agency’s science have been subject to politics: This summer, a committee of the American Society of Mammalogists drafted a resolution speaking out about Alaska’s predator control — only for it to be leaked to Fish and Game, which put up enough fuss that it was dropped. Link Olson, the curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, was one of many who supported the group taking a position on the issue. Olson says that even as someone who “actively collect[s] mammal specimens for science,” he is deeply concerned with Alaska’s approach to managing predators.

A month later, 34 retired wildlife managers and biologists wrote an open letter criticizing the bear cull and calling the agency’s management goals for the Mulchatna herd “unrealistic.” Meanwhile, neither Demma nor Sattler, the biologists who cautioned the board, are still studying the herd; Demma now works in a different area of the agency, and Sattler has left the state and taken a new job, for what she says are a variety of reasons.

***

Every fall, millions of people follow a live-streamed view of the biggest bears in Katmai National Park, which sits southeast of Wood-Tikchik. The animals jockey for fish before their hibernation, in an annual bulking up that the National Park Service has turned into a playful competition, giving the bears nicknames like “Chunk,” and, for a particularly large behemoth, 747.

Though marked on maps, animals like 747 don’t know where the comparative safety of the national park ends and where state management begins. This can mean the difference between life and death, as Alaskan and federal agencies have taken very different approaches to predator control: The National Park Service generally prohibits it. This has sparked a years-long federalism battle. Back in 2015, for example, the Board of Game passed a rule allowing brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, leading the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban it in 2016. The state sued, and in 2020 the Trump administration proposed forcing national wildlife refuges to adopt Alaska’s hunting regulations. Similarly, the National Park Service challenged whether it had to allow practices like using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating bears in their dens in national park preserves. In 2022, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal agencies have ultimate authority over state laws in refuges; last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

How these agencies interact with local communities is markedly different, too. Both Alaska Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have regional advisory groups where residents can weigh in on game regulations, but Alissa Nadine Rogers, a resident of the Yukon- Kuskokwim Delta who sits on each, says that, unlike the federal government, it feels like “the state of Alaska does not recognize subsistence users as a priority.” On paper, the state prioritizes subsistence use, but under its constitution, Alaska can’t distinguish between residents, whereas the federal government can put the needs of local and traditional users first. This has frequently led to separate and overlapping state and federal regulations on public lands in Alaska.

Many people in the region rely on wildlife for a substantial part of their diet. Since the area isn’t connected by roads, groceries must be barged or flown in, making them expensive — a gallon of milk can cost almost $20. In addition to being an important food source, caribou are a traditional part of her Yupik culture, Rogers explains, used for tools and regalia. It’s a real burden for local communities to be told they can’t hunt caribou, which has driven poaching. As state and federal regulations have increased restrictions on hunting, she says residents have difficulty obtaining enough protein to sustain themselves through the winter. “If people don’t understand how it is to live out here, what true perspective do they have?” she asks. “Subsistence users are the ones who bear the burden when it comes to management. And a lot of the time, folks aren’t feeling that their voices are being heard or adequately represented.”

Yet Rogers says state and federal systems can provide an important balance to each other, and she approves of Fish and Game’s predator control efforts. As the former director of natural resources for the Orutsararmiut Native Council, she helped the council write a resolution, later passed by the statewide Alaska Federation of Natives, supporting last spring’s bear and wolf cull. She thinks officials should focus more on climate change but believes culling remains a useful tool. “It gives a vital chance for the [caribou] population and immediately supports growth and recovery,” Rogers says. She also asked Fish and Game to institute a five-year moratorium on all hunting of the herd. “If we go any lower, then we’re pretty much gonna be facing extinction.”

Who gets to make choices about the state’s fish and wildlife resources is a point of increasing tension this year, as a lawsuit unfolds between the state and federal government over who should manage salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River, to the west of the Togiak refuge. All five of its salmon returns have faltered for over a decade — making game like caribou even more critical for local communities. (In sharp contrast, to the east of the river, Bristol Bay has seen record recent returns, showing how variable climate impacts can be.) The Alaska Native Federation and the federal government say fishing should be limited to subsistence users, while the state has opened fishing to all state residents.

To ensure Alaska Native communities have a voice in such critical decisions, the Federation called for tribally designated seats on the Board of Game this fall. “We need to have a balanced Board of Game that represents all Alaskans,” says former Governor Tony Knowles. He, too, recommends passing a law to designate seats on the board for different types of wildlife stakeholders, including Alaska Native and rural residents, conservationists, biologists, recreational users, and others. Knowles also proposes an inquiry into Fish and Game’s bear killings, including recommendations on how to better involve the public in these decisions. “We deserve to know how this all happened so it won’t happen again.”

It’s clear to many that business as usual isn’t working. “I have no idea how the state comes up with their management strategy,” says Brice Eningowuk, the tribal administrator for the council of the Traditional Village of Togiak, an Alaska Native village on the outskirts of the Togiak refuge. He says Fish and Game didn’t tell his community about the bear cull, and he expressed skepticism that primarily killing bears would work. “Bears will eat caribou, but that’s not their primary food source,” he says.

Part of the solution is setting more realistic wildlife goals, according to Pat Walsh, whose career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist involved supervising the caribou program in the Togiak refuge. Recently retired, he says the current goal for the Mulchatna herd size was set 15 years ago, when the population was at 30,000, and is no longer realistic. Reducing that goal could allow targeted subsistence use — which might help ease some of the poaching. Though Fish and Game has killed wolves around the Mulchatna herd for 12 years, he points out the caribou population has steadily dropped. “We recommended the board reassess the ecological situation,” he says, and develop goals “based on the current conditions, not something that occurred in the past.”

Today’s landscape already looks quite different. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the global average, faster than any other state. When Rogers was in high school, she tested the permafrost near her house as an experiment. As a freshman, she only had to jam the spade in the ground before she hit ice. By the time she was a senior, it thawed to a depth of 23 inches — and in one location, to 4 feet. Summers have been cold and wet, and winters have brought crippling ice storms, rather than snow. Berry seasons have failed, and the normally firm and springy tundra has “disintegrated into mush,” Rogers says.

Feeling the very ground change beneath her feet highlights how little sway she has over these shifts. “How are you gonna yell at the clouds? ‘Hey, quit raining. Hey, you, quit snowing’?” Rogers asked. “There’s no way you can change something that is completely out of your control. We can only adapt.”

Yet despite how quickly these ecosystems are shifting, the Department of Fish and Game has no climate scientists. In the meantime, the agency is authorized to continue killing bears on the Mulchatna calving grounds every year until 2028. (The board plans to hear an annual report on the state’s intensive management later this month.) As Walsh summarizes wryly, “It’s difficult to address habitat problems. It’s difficult to address disease problems. It’s easy to say, ’Well, let’s go shoot.’”

Management decisions can feel stark in the face of nature’s complexity. The tundra is quite literally made from relationships. The lichen the caribou feed on is a symbiotic partnership between two organisms. Fungus provides its intricately branching structure, absorbing water and minerals from the air, while algae produces its energy, bringing together sunlight and soil, inseparable from the habitat they form. These connections sustain the life that blooms and eats and dies under a curving sweep of sky. It’s a system, in the truest and most obvious sense — one that includes the humans deciding what a population can recover from, and what a society can tolerate.

As another season of snow settles in, the caribou cross the landscape in great, meandering lines. There are thousands of years of migrations behind them and an uncertain future ahead. Like so much in nature, it’s hard to draw a clear threshold. “Everything is going to change,” Rogers says.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

AOC, Sanders Sign On to Court Filing Supporting Lawsuit Against Willow Project

The Willow Project, dubbed a “carbon bomb,” is being challenged by climate advocates in court.

By Sharon Zhang , 

TRUTHOUT

January 9, 2024

A part of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System runs through boreal forest past Alaska Range mountains on May 5, 2023, near Delta Junction, Alaska.

MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES

A group of Democrats in the House and the Senate is throwing its weight behind climate and Indigenous groups’ lawsuit seeking to stop a massive project in Alaska approved by the Biden administration last year that would bring fossil fuel development to pristine land in Alaska’s North Slope, deemed a “carbon bomb” by climate advocates.

Led by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California), the lawmakers filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals calling on judges to overturn a district court’s November decision to allow the project to proceed, saying that the project “violates the nation’s laws” as well as congressional intent. A total of 16 lawmakers joined the brief, including prominent members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

In the brief, lawmakers argued that the project would not serve the interests of all Americans and thus violates protections for federal land, and that federal regulators are ignoring climate considerations set forth by their own administration by advancing the project.

“Due to national security and environmental considerations, modern-day United States policy embodies a pressing need to reduce national reliance on non-renewable energy sources — policy that is undermined by the Willow Project,” the lawmakers wrote.

They went on to say that Willow is not consistent with the intent behind climate regulations and laws; specifically, for the latter, the lower court had misinterpreted the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act (NPRPA) and sidelined the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), they said.

“Another Massive Climate Disappointment”: Biden Slammed for Oil Project Approval
The Willow project, as proposed by ConocoPhillips, has been dubbed a “carbon bomb” by climate advocates.
By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUTMarch 13, 2023

While the district judge had cited a provision in NPRPA that directs regulators to “conduct an expeditious program” of oil and gas leasing in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the lawmakers say that the judge ignored other environmental protection provisions in the law, including a mandate to “mitigate … adverse effects” on the region’s resources to “assure the maximum protection” of certain protected areas.

“Congress historically afforded special consideration to the Naval Petroleum Reserve-Alaska — highlighting it as a resource not only due to its oil potential, but for its abundant natural diversity,” the brief reads. “The environmental protection provisions in the NPRPA are important, intentional inclusions of Congress.”

The lower court judge was “Fatally deterministic in deference to the perceived ‘expeditious’ objectives of the NPRPA” in her decision, the brief goes on, to the point where she swept aside proper environmental analyses required by NEPA in order to allow the project to move forward. “It bears stating plainly: any congressional intent relevant to the ‘expeditious’ clause in NPRPA does not supersede the congressional intent of the nation’s bedrock environmental statutes and considerations,” the lawmakers wrote.

ConocoPhillips’s Willow Project is slated to be constructed in a majority-Native American area in Alaska, in a reserve that currently holds the title of being the U.S.’s single largest piece of pristine land. Climate advocates call the project a “carbon bomb” for its predicted impact of releasing nearly 260 million metric tons of carbon emissions, or a third of yearly emissions from U.S. coal plants, further worsening the climate crisis.

The case is a combination of lawsuits brought by Earthjustice on behalf of a coalition of climate groups and a suit brought by Trustees for Alaska, representing the Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic and other groups. The lawsuits were filed after the Biden administration gave the Willow Project, long opposed by Indigenous and climate groups, the greenlight last March despite his promise not to back new drilling on federal lands on the campaign trail.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

SHARON ZHANG is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Busted: Secret recording shows NRA treasurer plotting to conceal Wayne LaPierre's expenses

Mike Spies, The TraceProPublica
January 11, 2024 

Wayne LaPierre, Jr. former executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

 Photo by Gage Skidmore.

This story was originally published by ProPublicain partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.

At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.

Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.

During the meeting, which took place in the Alexandria, Virginia, office of PR firm Ackerman McQueen, executives agreed that Ackerman would issue a Platinum American Express card to Tyler Schropp, the new head of the NRA’s nascent advancement division, which was responsible for bringing in high-dollar contributions from wealthy donors. Ackerman would then cover the card’s charges and bill them back to the NRA under nondescript invoices.

“It’s really the limo services and the hotels that I worry about,” William Winkler, Ackerman’s chief financial officer, said. “He’s going to need it for the hotels especially.”

The use of the Ackerman American Express card, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ expert witness on nonprofits, skirted internal controls that existed to ensure proper disclosure and regulatory compliance and to prevent “fraud and abuse” at the nonprofit. As a result, outside of a tiny group of NRA insiders, everyone was in the dark about years of charges by Schropp — who is still the head of the nonprofit’s advancement division — for luxury accommodations, including regular sojourns to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. The NRA, in response, said the report was “rife with inadmissible factual narratives, impermissible interpretations and inferences, and improper factual and legal conclusions.”

James’ investigation into the NRA began in 2019, after The Trace, in partnership with The New Yorker, and later with ProPublica, reported on internal accounting documents that indicated a culture of self-dealing at the gun-rights group. In 2020, James sued the NRA and LaPierre, who presided over the organization for three decades, over claims of using nonprofit resources for personal enrichment, luxury travel and bloated contracts for insiders, allegations that the parties deny. The attorney general is seeking financial restitution from the defendants and was until last week petitioning for LaPierre’s removal, which was preempted on Friday when LaPierre announced he would resign at the end of January.

The attorney general’s office was unaware of the audio until it was contacted by The Trace and ProPublica and did not respond to a request for comment.

Ackerman McQueen and Winkler declined to comment. None of the other individuals mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment. The gun-rights group’s attorney, William A. Brewer III, said in an email: “The tape has not been authenticated by the NRA but, if real, we are shocked by its content. The suggested contents would confirm what the NRA has said all along: there were certain ‘insiders’ and vendors who took advantage of the Association. If true, it is an example of a shadowy business arrangement — one that was not brought to the attention of the NRA board.”

In the recording, Woody Phillips, who was the NRA’s top financial official from 1993 to 2018 and is also a defendant in James’ suit, did not say why the unusual credit card arrangement was necessary. But at one point, he indicated that LaPierre — whose public persona was that of a populist firebrand — had concerns about the optics of using NRA funds for travel on a private jet.

“We just have to be careful because Wayne wants to get through this whole year saying he hasn’t used private aircraft,” Phillips said. In that year’s tax filings, he explained, nonprofits, for the first time, would be required to disclose whether they paid for chartered flights for any of the numerous executives and officials listed in the documents. LaPierre, Phillips explained, “just doesn’t want to be seen getting off the plane — anywhere.”

In the opening statement by Phillips’ attorney on Jan. 9, he said that the NRA’s political activities caused “real and serious” security concerns. To that end, his client always “acted in good faith,” he said, and the questionable arrangements Phillips helped devise were not due to “a desire for secrecy” or “to keep information from the NRA and its board. But for confidentiality.”

LaPierre’s attorney spoke of his client’s unflagging devotion to the NRA and dedication to his job. “Was his thinking always right?” he asked. “No. Is perfection a standard for leading a not-for-profit? No.”

James’ complaint states that LaPierre “spent millions of dollars of the NRA’s charitable assets for private plane trips for himself and his family.” In a 2021 deposition, LaPierre said that “NRA security has a policy against me flying commercial because of threats,” and that the requirement had been in place for a decade or more.

In 2009, the NRA did indeed check the box on its tax filing indicating it had used “first-class or chartered travel.” The NRA’s explanation, which the Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofits to provide, was that “charter travel was used on occasions involving multiple events when reduced airline schedules precluded other options.” The description became the NRA’s standard template going forward. Other nonprofits, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disclose the names of executives who use the luxury service.

At the meeting, according to a source who asked not to be named for fear of professional retribution, Phillips, the NRA’s sole representative in attendance, was joined by Melanie Montgomery, an executive vice president at Ackerman McQueen, and Hillary Farrell, then the company’s chief operating officer. Winkler, from Ackerman, attended via videoconference.

The recording shows how the NRA used Ackerman, which devised the nonprofit’s most prominent messaging campaigns, as an extension of itself. The decadeslong relationship ended in acrimony and lawsuits. After evidence of the NRA’s self-dealing became public in 2019, the NRA and Ackerman accused each other of financial misconduct, with the gun-rights group claiming that the firm filed fraudulent invoices. In 2022, the two entities reached a settlement in which the NRA paid Ackerman $12 million.

In the recording of the 2009 meeting, Winkler said he was told that Phillips wanted to route Schropp’s pricey expenses through Ackerman McQueen, filing them as a “travel job,” which was billed to clients with an invoice that was devoid of detail.

“Well that’s easy,” Winkler announced. “As far as I’m concerned, we can give Tyler an Ackerman Amex. And do it that way.”

“Oh well that’s the way to do it then,” Montgomery replied.

“Yeah,” Phillips agreed. “That’s the easiest way to do it, and for the most part, it’s going to be stuff that Gayle books because it’s stuff with Wayne.” (Gayle Stanford was a consultant who handled LaPierre’s travel.)

“That aspect of it’s very easy,” Winkler said.

Phillips later said of Schropp, “Most of what he’ll do, he’ll do like he does here, where it’ll just be he’ll fill out an expense report for us, he’ll have cards for that too.”

Montgomery responded: “Woody just asked him, ‘Can you do some, you know, that goes through the NRA system, then just your high, well, the stuff you do with Wayne, do through Ackerman.’”

Before Schropp took over the NRA’s advancement division in 2009, he was a vice president at Ackerman, where he worked directly with LaPierre, who recruited him to the NRA. “We were great, great friends and spent a lot of time together,” Schropp later said in a deposition. “And I think we had a mutual respect for each other.”

At the meeting, there was some confusion about whether Schropp already had an Ackerman American Express card. Winkler settled the matter by calling a colleague.

“Does Tyler Schropp have an Amex?” Winkler asked. “Get him one.” He added that it should be a “Platinum.”

Schropp would use the card extensively in the years to come. The lawsuit alleges, “He routinely stayed in suites costing over $1,500 a night.” In addition to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton, he was partial to the Beverly Hills Hotel and the St. Regis.

In a 2021 deposition, Schropp said that he had the card for “donor privacy reasons, and Wayne LaPierre privacy and security reasons.” Phillips has not addressed the matter in unsealed testimony, while LaPierre, for his part, said in a 2019 deposition, “I was aware that — from our treasurer’s office that the advancement expenses, some of them, were — were under Ackerman McQueen,” a practice that was stopped a decade later, when, he said, the NRA “self-corrected under New York state law.”

At another point during the 2009 meeting, Phillips brought up Tony Makris, an Ackerman executive who worked closely with LaPierre as an adviser. The two were good friends. Makris had served as the actor Charlton Heston’s personal and political adviser while Heston was president of the NRA in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

“In the case of Tony, now that he’s married, does anyone know what he’s doing about the Beverly Hills Hotel?” asked Phillips, who was looking for ways to save cash. “Because that would cut out a lot of this cost if he’s not doing that. I think without it being a special occasion, we’d have a hard time paying for that.”

Makris was responsible for recruiting conservative celebrities, like Tom Selleck, into the NRA’s fold.

Phillips then mentioned Rick Tedrick, the NRA’s managing director of finance, a job he still holds.

“And I know Rick’s going to be watching that,” Phillips continued, “not that he’d say anything or do anything.”

Winkler chimed in: “What you guys need to do is give me the guidance with Tony. Because you know what will happen. It will go full circle, right back to Wayne.”

U.K. unveils plans for 'biggest nuclear power expansion in 70 years'

Agence France-Presse
January 11, 2024

French company EDF is currently building a new reactor at Hinkley Point (Handout)

The U.K. government on Thursday announced plans for what it said was the country's "biggest expansion of nuclear power for 70 years" to bolster its energy independence and meet carbon emission targets.

The Civil Nuclear Roadmap includes exploring the construction of a major new power station, £300 million ($382 million) of investment to produce an advanced uranium fuel and "smarter regulation".

Taken together, the measures would quadruple UK nuclear power by 2050 to 24 gigawatts, enough to provide a quarter of the UK's electricity needs.

"Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain -- it's green, cheaper in the long-term and will ensure the U.K.'s energy security," said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

"This is the right long-term decision and is the next step in our commitment to nuclear power, which puts us on course to achieve net zero by 2050 in a measured and sustainable way," he added.

The government says it is committed to the 2050 net zero target but has come under fire after announcing last summer it will issue "hundreds" of new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea.

It is also grappling with a cost-of-living crisis partly caused by the spike in oil and gas prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Energy minister Claire Coutinho said the plans would mean the UK would "never again be held to ransom over energy by tyrants like Vladimir Putin".

The government said the proposals represented "the biggest expansion of nuclear power for 70 years", adding it would "reduce electricity bills, support thousands of jobs and improve U.K. energy security".

- Construction -

The most eye-catching proposal is the possible construction of another power station as big as Sizewell in east England, construction on which is due to begin this year, and Hinkley in west England, which is currently under construction.

Both power stations will be capable of powering six million homes each.

The U.K. currently has nine operational nuclear reactors on five sites but many are nearing the end of their operating lives.


Six reactors on three sites have been shut down since 2021 and will be dismantled.

However, operator EDF announced in March that it was extending the life of two British power plants -- Heysham 1 and Hartlepool.

The U.K. intends to build up to eight new reactors by 2050.

The government said on Sunday it will invest up to £300 million into producing the HALEU fuel required for new high-tech reactors, and which currently is only commercially produced in Russia.

"The U.K. will lead the way from its North West production hub to provide the world with this form of uranium fuel, with the first plant aiming to be operational early in the next decade," said the government.

Regulators will also be allowed to assess projects while designs are finalized in a loosening of rules aimed at speeding along construction plans.

 

Why I Believe What I Believe About the Chinese Revolution

The Second Newsletter (2024)

by Vijay Prashad / January 11th, 2024

Liu Hongjie (China), Skyline, 2021.

Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.

**

The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.

We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than perhaps any period since 1991. The war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are illustrative of the dangers before us. In the interim, I worry about the US trying to draw Iran into the conflict, with Israel threatening to escalate tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and then draw Tehran into making a step that would allow the US to bomb Iran. The New Cold War against China will take these conflicts to another level. Taiwan is already the lever. I hope that sober minds will prevail.

All socialist projects, as you well know, are formed in the process of the class struggle and through the development of the productive forces. Not the least China. You recall Bill Hinton’s book The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China, 1978–1989, published in 1990. I was with Bill in Concord, Massachusetts a year or so before he died in 2004 and had several discussions with him about China. No one in the US knew China as well as Bill, his entire family (including his sister Joan and her husband Sid Engst, who modernised dairy farming in China), and, of course, their friends Isabel Crook, Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, and, later, the translator Joan Pinkham, the daughter of Harry Dexter White.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was great trepidation about China. When I visited the country decades earlier, I was confounded by the poverty in rural areas. But at the same time, I was taken by the dignity of a people inspired by the great history of the struggles that created the Chinese Revolution of 1949 who knew that they were building a socialist project. Bill held fast to Maoism, clear about the contradictions of the socialist project, as he wrote in Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution.

Inequality had risen to high levels during the Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) years. In Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), I wrote about the Chinese Revolution with some of that pessimism, despite understanding the difficulties of building socialism in a poor country (the only place, after Russia, to try and do so since revolutions failed in the West). A few years after that, I read Ezra Vogel’s terrific assessment of Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which placed Deng’s decisions in 1978 in the context of the entire revolutionary process. That book gave me a better understanding of the Deng reforms. One of the key lessons I took away was that Deng had to confront the stagnation of the economy, allowing the market to advance the productive forces. Without that, it was clear that China – a poor, backward country – would slip into a socialism of despair. It had to pioneer a new approach. Of course, the Deng reforms turned toward market forces and opened the door to a very dangerous situation. Bill’s pessimism was a response to that reality.

Sheyang Farmers Painting Institute (Jiangsu, China), part of the ‘farmers painting’ project, 2017.

By the late 1990s, discussions began – including in the journals of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – to tackle rising rates of inequality and poverty through mass action. At the fifth plenum of the 16th CPC congress in October 2005, the party announced a ‘great historic mission’ to ‘construc[t] a new socialist countryside’, using the new phrase the ‘three rurals’ to refer to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. This mission sought to improve rural infrastructure through state investment, provide free and compulsory education, and develop cooperative medical services while retreating from the market reforms in the medical sector, the latter of which became a nationwide policy across China from 2009. It interested me that the campaign was run with a mass character and not bureaucratically, with thousands of CPC cadre involved in carrying out this mission. This was a forerunner of the poverty eradication campaign that would come a decade later.

As this mission unfolded, I was very interested in the fact that places with ‘red resources’ were highlighted for action (such as Hailufeng in Guangdong Province, which was the heart of China’s first rural Soviet). It is telling that scholars in the West did not focus on these new shifts, fixated as they were on the country’s Pacific coastline rather than studying the conditions in China’s rural interior. Among the few exceptions are sincere people such as Professor Elizabeth Perry and Professor Minzi Su (the author of China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the ‘New Socialist Countryside’, 2009), who are ignored by most commentators on China.

This push for a new socialist countryside enlivened the CPC and a tacit movement to counter pure free-market forces, which created the dynamic that led to Xi Jinping’s election as party leader in late 2012. Xi’s concern for the country’s rural areas comes from spending part of his youth in China’s underdeveloped northwest and from his time as the party secretary of the Ningde Prefecture in the late 1980s, which was then one of the poorest regions in Fujian Province. A widely acknowledged element of Xi’s leadership during this period is that he helped decrease poverty in that area and improve social indicators, making youth less prone to migrate to cities.

Did China’s growth need to come at the expense of nature? In 2005, while in Huzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi laid out the ‘Two Mountains’ theory, which suggested that economic and ecological development must go hand in hand. This is evidenced by the fact that, from 2013 to 2020, particulate pollution in China decreased by 39.6%, increasing average life expectancy by two years. In 2023, Xi announced a new ecological strategy to build a ‘beautiful China’, which includes an environmental plan for rural areas.

I was struck by some of your claims, in particular that ‘forcible return to the countryside is now state policy’, which I think bears special reflection due to it being part of the broader ‘new socialist countryside’ policy. It is true that President Xi has been talking about the need for rural revitalisation since 2017, and it is also true that various provinces (for instance, Guangdong) have action plans for college graduates to go to the countryside and participate in making the rural as attractive as the urban. However, this is not done by force, but by innovative programmes.

Zhang Hailong (China), Horses and Herdsmen Series 3, 2022.

At the frontlines of these programmes are youth, many of whom were among the three million cadres who went to villages as part of the policy to abolish extreme poverty (it is worth noting that 1,800 cadres died while carrying out this task). Xi is very sensitive, as Mao Zedong was, to the importance of party members experiencing the reality in rural China, given China’s vast rural landscape, and was himself sent to China’s rural northwest during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on this experience, Xi wrote in 2002: ‘At the age of 15, I came to Liangjiahe village perplexed and lost. At the age of 22, I left with a clear life goal and was filled with confidence’. There is something of this attitude in China’s policy. Is it bad for party members, many of whom might have jobs in the state apparatus, to spend time in the countryside? Not if you want them to better understand China’s reality.

I have been to China many times over the past ten years and have travelled extensively in both rural and urban areas. The dual circulation strategy that Xi has pursued (driven by this ‘new socialist countryside’ policy) is of interest, and I have been working with a range of scholars to build up a detailed, empirical understanding of the Chinese project from within and through their own categories. That is the basis of the work we have been doing, some of it published in Wenhua Zongheng and some of it in the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study on the eradication of extreme poverty in China. Is it propaganda? I hope not. I hope that we are getting closer and closer to being able to offer a theoretical assessment of the Chinese Revolution as it proceeds forward. Is the revolution perfect? Not at all. But it requires understanding rather than clichés, which abound in the West when it comes to China.

Abdurkerim Nasirdin (China), Young Painter, 1995.

Take, for instance, the allegations of the oppression of Chinese Muslims (25 million or 1.8% of the total population). I remember being in Central Asia in the 2000s when al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a serious impact on the region, including through the offices of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU formulated a policy to take over the entire Xinjiang region, which is why some Uygurs moved to the leadership of Juma Namangani.

The Turkistan Islamic Party, led by people close to al-Qaeda (such as Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s shura), was born out of those sorts of contacts. Bombings of public places became commonplace, including in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani, who in 2010 took over leadership from Abdul Haq (the engineer of the 2008 bombings in Beijing during the Olympics), was responsible for the Kashgar attacks in 2008 and 2011 and the Hotan attack in 2011. In 2013, this group moved to Syria, where I met a few of them on the Turkish-Syrian border. They are now based in Idlib and are a key part of the al-Qaeda formation there. This is their characteristic feature: not mere Turkic nationalism, but Islamic fundamentalism of the al-Qaeda variety.

At the time, several approaches could have been taken to the insurgency. The one that the US and its allies in the region favoured was to use violence, including by attacking areas suspected of being run by these insurgents and arresting them en masse, with some of them ending up in US-run black sites. Many of the members of this group, including Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor, were killed by US drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Interestingly, China did not follow this approach. Some years ago, I interviewed former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who had turned away from violence and the ideology of al-Qaeda. Their group, the controversial Quilliam Foundation (based in London), was led by people such as Noman Benotman who followed the approach of the Egyptian ‘repentance’ and the Algerian ‘reconciliation’ projects. These programmes essentially tried to adopt both cognitive and behavioural approaches to deradicalisation (changing the ideology and stopping the violence, respectively). The former Libyan jihadis were eager to bring this approach to play both in Libya (which failed) and in the West (where many of them resettled), rather than the alternative of targeted violence and mass arrests. They were rebuffed (except in Germany, where the Hayat Programme was established in 2012). The problem with the violent approach that the West opted for instead was that it demonised all Muslims rather than merely trying to deradicalise those drawn into a toxic politics.

In the case of China, rather than waging a frontal war against the radical groups in Xinjiang and then the society in which they lived and demonising all Muslims, the government sought to conduct forms of deradicalisation. It is useful to recall the meeting between the Chinese Islamic Association and the CPC in Beijing in 2019 that built on the Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam and sought to make Islam compatible with socialism. This is an interesting project, although it suffers from a lack of clarity. Making Islam Chinese is one part of the project; the other is to make the practice of Islam consonant with the socialist project. The latter is a sensible sociological approach for the modern world: to make religion – in a broader sense – compatible with modern values, and, in the case of China, with ‘core socialist values’ (such as combating gender discrimination).

Liu Xiaodong (China), Belief, 2012.

The former is harder to understand, and I have not truly grasped it. When it comes to the idea that religion must be aligned with modern values, especially socialist values, I am fully on board. How should this happen? Does one, say, ban certain practices (such as headscarves in France), or should one begin a process of debate and discussion with the leaders of religious communities (who are often the most conservative)? What does one do when confronted by an insurgency that has its roots outside the country, such as in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and even Syria, rather than inside the country, such as the contradictions in Xinjiang? These are all pressing dilemmas, but the ludicrous statements about genocide and so on pushed by US State Department and its cronies – including by dodgy people who work for dodgier ‘think tanks’ near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia – cannot be allowed to define our discussion within the left. We need a greater understanding of the matters at hand so as not to fall into the Biden-Netanyahu line of questioning, which boils down to the ‘do you condemn Hamas’ sort of debate.

Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li (China), Mother on the Construction Site, 1984.

In your email, you write that ‘there is no question that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people, especially city-dwellers, have improved dramatically over the last decades’. In fact, all the data – and my own travels – shows that this is not only the case ‘especially’ for city-dwellers but across the country and increasingly in the areas of the far west and far north. International Labour Organisation data, for instance, shows that China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7%, far and away above that of other countries in the Global South, and certainly higher than in India (1.3%) and the US (0.3%) In just eight years, from 2013 to 2021, the disposable per capita income of China’s 498 million rural residents increased by more than 72.6% while that of the 914 million residents of urban areas increased by 53.5%. Meanwhile, the gap of disposable income between rural and urban areas declined by 5% during this period, and the growth rate of disposable income of rural residents has outpaced that of urban residents for twelve consecutive years (2009–2021).

Between 2012 and 2020, targeted poverty alleviation lifted 98.99 million people in rural areas out of extreme poverty and enabled every single family suffering from extreme poverty to receive assistance. As part of this innovative process, the CPC combined the training and development of grassroots cadres with digital technology, thus enhancing modern governance capabilities at the local level and enabling party members and cadres to serve the people more accurately and efficiently.

For comparison, using the Gini index, which does not cover public services (ignoring items like subsidised rentals for rural homes), income inequality in India is 24% higher than in China.

Those who look at the data on inequality in China often focus on China’s billionaires. That was clear in your email, which noted that China ‘is awash with state-subsidised millionaires and even billionaires. Indeed, a mounting class of super-bourgeoise, many of whom “invest abroad”’. Certainly, the reform era produced the social conditions for some people to get rich. However, that number is in decline: in 2023, of the 2,640 billionaires in the world, about 562 were in China, down from 607 in the previous year, and the last few CPC congresses have made it a priority to reverse the engine of this billionaire-production process. Of the 2,296 delegates to the 20th National Congress, only 18 were private sector executives, most of whom are from small and medium-sized enterprises, down from 34 who participated in 18th National Congress in 2012.

As you might know, in 2021 Xi called for a policy of ‘common prosperity’ (a term first used by the CPC in 1953), which alarmed many of these billionaires. They have since sought to run for the hills (‘invest abroad’, as you say). However, China has very strong capital controls, allowing only $50,000 to be remitted overseas. A range of illegal operations have opened up in the past few years to assist the rich in exiting their cash, including through the more porous region of Hong Kong. But the state has been cracking down on this, as it has cracked down on corruption. In August 2023, the police arrested the leaders of an immigration firm in Shanghai that facilitated illegal foreign exchange transfers. The pressure on Jack Ma (fintech company Ant Group), Hui Ka Yan (property developer Evergrande), and Bao Fan (investment bank Renaissance Holdings) is indicative of the CPC’s current position regarding billionaires.

You write that while living standards have improved in China, ‘socialism is not on the agenda in that country’. If not for the socialist agenda pursued by the CPC, how has China been able to abolish extreme poverty and bring down inequality rates, especially in times of rising global inequality when the social democratic agenda in the capitalist Global North and in large parts of the Global South has failed to come anywhere close to these achievements? It helps that large banks in China are under the control of the state so that large-scale capital can be managed efficiently to solve social problems, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. The class struggle continues in China, of course, and that class struggle impacts the CPC (with its extraordinary membership of 98 million).

Wang Zihua (China), When the Wind Blows Through the Summer, 2022.

I have tried not only to provide some facts to guide our discussion but also to thread them into the theory of socialism that I believe is most attractive. According to that theory, socialism is not an event but a process, and this process – rooted in the class struggle – goes in zigs and zags, a back-and-forth tension that is often accentuated by the urgent need to increase the productive forces in poor countries. It is important to accompany such processes rather than taking an omniscient standpoint.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.