SERÁ QUE ALGUÉM no Facebook tem a intenção, ou mesmo a capacidade, de controlar o Facebook? É essa a questão de fundo da investigação conduzida pelo New Tork Times na semana passada sobre o gigante das mídias sociais. Está cada vez mais claro que o crescimento e a sobrevivência da empresa dependem de sua cumplicidade, não apenas na prática de um intercâmbio invasivo de dados como o revelado pelo escândalo da Cambridge Analytica, mas também na abordagem ineficiente e casuística sobre a promoção de violência na plataforma – que não conseguiu, por exemplo, detectar uma campanha coordenada pelas forças armadas de Myanmar para promover o genocídio da população Rohingya no país. Esses problemas parecem imunes às tentativas de reforma promovidas pela companhia. Suas lideranças, então, optaram pela defesa agressiva: fazem lobby no Legislativo e procuram tranquilizar o público negando e minimizando sua responsabilidade.
Os problemas do Facebook são uma perversão da utópica promessa da tecnologia, ou um resultado lógico da estrutura da internet e de seus produtos? O que o escritor, tecnólogo e artista James Bridle sugere em seu novo livro é a segunda opção. Em “New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future” [“A Nova Idade das Trevas: Tecnologia e o Fim do Futuro”, ainda sem tradução no Brasil], ele argumenta que o principal objetivo da internet – a combinação de computação de alta velocidade e redes globais – é exatamente o responsável pela ascensão da captura invasiva de dados, das “fake news” e da vigilância de massa. Em outras palavras, a internet não foi corrompida por influências nefastas. Na verdade, mais do que nunca, ela está operando de acordo com seus princípios e imperativos centrais. E, ao fazê-lo, está, ao mesmo tempo, prejudicando a compreensão que temos do mundo ao nosso redor e tornando esse mundo mais perigoso.
O novo livro defende que a tecnologia está prejudicando a compreensão que temos do mundo ao nosso redor e tornando esse mundo mais perigoso.Um exemplo aparentemente banal demonstra em pequena escala a hipótese de Bridle. Graças à internet, eu consigo acessar a previsão do tempo em qualquer lugar, a qualquer momento. Essa previsão pode até estar errada, e acabar me deixando preso no meio de um temporal, mas eu gosto da sensação de sair de casa de posse da melhor informação disponível. O pior que pode acontecer é eu me molhar um pouco.
Bridle demonstra que estou errado de formas bem profundas. A previsão do tempo, como todos os tipos de computação preditiva, essencialmente presume que o futuro será como o passado. Ela sintetiza pontos de dados passados em projeções futuras. Com a rápida aceleração das mudanças climáticas globais, no entanto, esse tipo de previsão computacional se tornará cada vez menos precisa a longo prazo. O futuro é cada vez menos semelhante ao passado.
Além disso, o próprio ato de realizar a previsão computacional contribui para essa menor precisão: na escala atual, trata-se de uma empreitada com grande consumo de energia, que exige muita emissão de carbono. É por isso que Bridle escreve que “a computação é ao mesmo tempo vítima e causadora das mudanças climáticas”. A cada vez que recarrego uma previsão, estou contribuindo para reduzir sua precisão e contribuir para as mudanças climáticas, que já estão provocando padrões imprevisíveis de tempo e causando destruição em todo o mundo. Então, a curto prazo, eu talvez evite a chuva. A longo prazo, boa parte da minha cidade vai estar submersa.
É assim que a internet, como a conhecemos, vai nos levar ao que Bridle chama de “Nova Idade das Trevas”. Ela incorpora suposições sobre como o mundo é ou deveria ser, mas torna invisíveis suas próprias contribuições a um futuro mais volátil. À medida que o futuro começar a divergir do passado que lhe serviu de modelo, nós talvez acabemos sabendo ainda menos sobre o mundo.
Foto: Divulgação/Verso Books
Uma das razões para isso, segundo Bridle, é que a arquitetura que levou à internet nunca teve a intenção de produzir conhecimento desinteressado. A computação meteorológica, por exemplo, foi desenvolvida por uma aliança anglo-americana militar e de negócios, com o propósito específico de dar às potências ocidentais a supremacia estratégica aérea e nuclear durante a Guerra Fria (os arquitetos dessa empreitada no meio do século 20 posteriormente vieram a integrar o núcleo da Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [Agência de Projetos de Pesquisa Avançada de Defesa], a entidade do governo dos EUA que foi precursora da internet como a conhecemos hoje). É ingênuo achar que a extensão dessas tecnologias ao público em geral possa ser separada dos imperativos sob os quais foram desenvolvidas, a saber, a hegemonia do capital ocidental e a potencialização dos lucros de suas empresas. Na verdade, nosso uso dessas tecnologias contribui para um mundo em que esses imperativos estejam cada vez mais entranhados.
Cada capítulo de “New Dark Age” apresenta uma perspectiva distinta que revela como esses imperativos passaram a permear profundamente as nossas relações sociais, e como tornaram inacessível o conhecimento real. O capítulo sobre “Clima” discute como a nossa sociedade integrada e de alta tecnologia não apenas acelera as mudanças climáticas, mas também destrói no processo fontes analógicas de conhecimento (bancos de sementes, restos arqueológicos armazenados no permafrost, solo típico do Ártico). Em “Complexidade”, ele argumenta que a tecnologia computacional nas altas finanças distorce a informação econômica a aprofunda a desigualdade. “Conspiração” mostra como a organização algorítmica da internet canaliza para grupos marginais fragmentados os sentimentos de desconfiança e impotência das pessoas comuns, e “Concorrência” se concentra no YouTube, que no esforço de potencializar o tempo dos espectadores diante da tela (e o resultado financeiro do Google), encoraja a produção e a reprodução automática de vídeos infantis ultraviolentos e altamente perturbadores, gerados por computador. (Bridle postou uma versão desse capítulo no Medium no ano passado, mostrando como um pai que deixa sua criança pequena diante de um inócuo vídeo da Peppa Pig pode, ao voltar, encontrá-la vendo a Peppa ser torturada.)
No cerne de muitos desses problemas está o que Bridle chama de pensamento computacional. O pensamento computacional considera que informações perfeitas sobre o passado podem e devem ser coletadas e sintetizadas para informar as decisões sobre o futuro. Em um capítulo chamado “Cumplicidade”, Bridle alega que essa forma de pensar informa também a vigilância em massa pelo governo: a conhecida política das agências governamentais de inteligência, de “coletar tudo”, não tem um histórico demonstrável de aumento da segurança pública ou redução da violência. (Esse fato inclusive levou um comitê presidencial nos EUA a declarar que a vigilância em massa “não é essencial à prevenção de ataques”, em 2013.) O problema, propõe Bridle, é que a prática é “essencialmente retroativa e retributiva”. Ela presume que a simples exposição é um fim em si mesma, e que os problemas vão se revelar, ou mesmo se resolver por conta própria quando trazidos à tona.
Esse conceito, porém, não se limita a governos sombrios: jornalistas também fazem uso dessas práticas. O primeiro exemplo de Bridle a esse respeito foram as revelações de Edward Snowden sobre a Agência de Segurança Nacional, em 2013 (e que catalisaram inclusive a fundação deste website). A despeito da indignação inicial com a exposição da exata mecânica de vigilância de massa usada pelos EUA e por seus aliados, as reformas foram ínfimas, se tanto, e a opinião pública logo se voltou para outras questões. O problema, argumenta Bridle, é a expectativa de que a simples exposição conduza à compreensão e à ação. É assim que o próprio jornalismo adota a mesma lógica obsessiva e paranoica da computação e da vigilância. Ele deixa de lado uma verdadeira compreensão do presente e do futuro enquanto molda obsessivamente uma perfeita imagem do passado. “Nós fomos convencidos de que jogar luz sobre um assunto é a mesma coisa que pensar a respeito dele, e, portanto, ter poder de agir sobre ele”, alerta Bridle.
“Fomos convencidos de que jogar luz sobre um assunto é a mesma coisa que pensar a respeito dele, e, portanto, ter poder de agir sobre ele”, alerta Bridle.A proposta de “New Dark Age” para lidar com esse problema é menos uma linha de ação, e mais uma nova forma de pensar. “O que precisamos não é de tecnologia nova”, escreve Bridle na página inicial, “mas de novas metáforas”. Na contramão do pensamento computacional, que se considera, equivocadamente, capaz de contemplar e compreender todos os fatos sobre o mundo, Bridle propõe o “pensamento enevoado”, uma prática que reconhece o que é incognoscível e busca “novas formas de ver sob outra perspectiva”. Ele na verdade espera que a “Nova Idade das Trevas” do título do livro seja vista como oportunidade, não como queixa. Ao abraçar essa oportunidade, ele argumenta, precisaremos deixar de lado a pretensão de um conhecimento absoluto para aderir ao ceticismo responsável, informado pelo reconhecimento de que a rede onde vivemos e trabalhamos está ativamente prejudicando nossa compreensão do mundo real, e, com isso, reforçando a injustiça.
James Bridle.
Foto: Divulgação/Verso Books
“Nada aqui é um argumento contra a tecnologia”, insiste Bridle. “ao fazer isso eu estaria argumentando contra nós mesmos”. A tecnologia é ao mesmo tempo uma ferramenta para reconstruir o mundo, e uma metáfora para compreendê-lo. Deve-se reconhecer que ele provavelmente está certo ao dizer que precisamos aprender a esperar coisas diferentes das nossas relações com a tecnologia. Não podemos esperar que a tecnologia forneça informações perfeitas ou consenso social. Deveríamos estar a postos para agir com base em informação provisória de fontes confiáveis, em vez de esperar que a tecnologia sintetize e verifique cada mínimo fato. Se esperarmos, será tarde demais.
No entanto, é bobagem acatar esses conselhos sem confrontar diretamente o que a internet se tornou. Embora Bridle esteja certo ao apontar a impossibilidade de separar nossas vidas da internet contemporânea, ele algumas vezes parece sucumbir tanto a uma espécie de fatalismo, quanto a um otimismo ingênuo. O fatalismo é sua suposição de que estamos presos à internet que temos. O otimismo é a sugestão de que ao simplesmente pensar de forma diferente sobre a internet, possamos subverter seus objetivos socialmente destrutivos.
A infraestrutura da internet é um capital, uma série de investimentos feitos por governos e empresas. E eles esperam o retorno desse investimento.O problema é que a internet como a conhecemos não é apenas, nem principalmente, algo virtual. Ela é viabilizada por uma rede mundial de cabos que atravessam oceanos, arranha-céus brutalistas que pontuam horizontes, e imensos data centers que consomem o mesmo volume de energia de cidades inteiras. Essa infraestrutura é um capital, uma série de investimentos feitos por governos e empresas. E eles esperam o retorno desse investimento.
Bridle, juntamente com a escritora Ingrid Burrington, prestou a todos nós um grande serviço ao enfatizar a natureza tangível da infraestrutura que constitui a internet. “New Dark Age” também aponta os enormes interesses materiais que motivam esse investimento continuado. “O Império praticamente desistiu de conquistar território, para continuar sua operação no nível da infraestrutura e manter seu poder na forma da rede”, escreve Bridle. Infelizmente, ele não conduz essa compreensão ao que seria sua conclusão lógica. O poder não pode ser tomado simplesmente pelo pensamento, ele só pode ser tomado pela ação. Se a infraestrutura da internet é operada pelos vestígios de um império envolvido na exploração da maior parte da humanidade, como podemos esperar que a internet vá funcionar para essa mesma humanidade?
Propostas de socializar a internet ou exigir controle público dos dados podem parecer irreais, mas pelo menos confrontam essa questão. É decepcionante que um livro que tem uma visão tão clara sobre os cenários aparentemente apocalípticos que se descortinam diante da civilização humana não lide com isso de forma direta. Talvez seja mais fácil imaginar o fim do mundo que o fim da internet. Elaborações futuras sobre o trabalho de Bridle, porém, precisarão se haver com a questão que ele se recusa a abordar: se a única forma de salvar a internet e o planeta seria a efetiva tomada da infraestrutura, incluindo todos os data centers e quadros de distribuição, das mãos dos poderes instaurados, para que ela possa finalmente servir a propósitos igualitários e socialmente responsáveis. Ou, caso isso não seja possível, se o mais interessante para a humanidade não seria a completa destruição da internet.
Tradução: Deborah Leão
The post É mais fácil imaginar o fim do mundo do que o fim da internet? appeared first on The Intercept.
The new House committee being created to confront the climate crisis is being stripped of authority in order to accommodate the parochial concerns of senior Democrats in the caucus, protecting their pieces of turf.
On Friday, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed rumors that she would be appointing Rep. Kathy Castor, D- Fla., to chair a revived select House committee on climate change, as more information on the select committee begins to trickle out on Capitol Hill. Pelosi named the panel the “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.”
Paradoxically, though, the committee created to confront what Pelosi in her statement deemed an “existential threat” will likely not have the power to even issue subpoenas for records or to compel testimony.
Those powers will remain solely among the powerful committees that have been dominant on the Hill for generations. “The problem is institutional—it’s a turf war. There’s only one reason the select committee didn’t get [more powers] and that is the jurisdictional concerns of Frank Pallone. Mr. Pallone has made it clear that he thinks this infringes on his committee’s jurisdiction. That’s a very unfortunate way of looking at Congress,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an early signatory and booster of Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution to create a Select Committee on a Green New Deal.
Khanna also recently accused Pallone publicly of refusing to back separate legislation brought by Khanna based on his support for the Green New Deal resolution. “We heard that Rep. Pallone’s staff told the Senate staff that he will ‘not move a Khanna bill,’” Heather Purcell, a spokesperson for Khanna, said over email.
Despite Pallone’s worries, supporters of Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution had never pushed for the Select Committee on a Green New Deal to be able to bring legislation directly to the floor, or to circumvent standing committees like Energy and Commerce. Anything the select committee produced would need to be routed through those standing committees, as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation—produced out of the select committee’s previous iteration—was in 2009. “We wanted it to be able to draft legislation, and standing committees could take and do whatever they wanted with it,” said Sunrise Movement Political Director Evan Weber. Per the most recent draft of Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution, “The select committee shall not have legislative jurisdiction and shall have no authority to take legislative action on any bill or resolution.”
Pallone, D-N.J., the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, did not reply to a request for comment in time for publication. In November, he told reporters that “we got a lot of people on the committees that are real champions, so I don’t think it’s necessary.”
Without subpoena power—a measure publicly opposed by current Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md.—the select committee will in fact be weaker than its previous iteration, created in 2007, which did the groundwork to produce Waxman-Markey.
“The very industry that has lied about how big a problem climate change is shouldn’t be on a committee tasked with coming up with the solutions to climate change,” said Khanna, who has suggested Ocasio-Cortez herself chair it. “The committee should have subpoena power, and the ability to haul fossil fuel executives in front of it. I guarantee fossil fuel executives aren’t going to want to appear.”
Full details on the committee haven’t been made public yet and more are expected to come this week, but statements from those close to the negotiations suggest it will omit several of the proposals brought in a resolution by Ocasio-Cortez with the backing of 45 current and incoming members of Congress and the Sunrise Movement.
Assuming the committee wouldn’t be stripped of its ability to draft legislation, the issue now is what its mandate will be. Likely owing to the little information currently available, Pelosi’s statement announcing the committee was vaguely worded. “Together, we must protect public health by reducing air pollution, create jobs by making America preeminent in green technologies, defend our national security by preventing climate-driven instability and uphold our sacred moral responsibility to leave a healthy, sustainable future for generations to come,” Pelosi said.
Green New Deal advocates are concerned that its mandate will be too diffuse and wide-ranging to produce anything actionable. “What we’re concerned about here is whether it will have a mandate, and what that mandate will be,” Weber said. “We want its mandate to be: make a Green New Deal plan, and draft Green New Deal legislation.”
Castor stated previously that while Green New Deal measures would be a piece of what the committee will consider, “that’s not going to be our sole focus.”
“As a young person whose literal future is on the line if we don’t do something about the climate crisis, it’s inexcusable to hear our politicians refusing to have a conversation about the greatest existential threat of our lifetime over party politics,” said Varshini Prakash, cofounder and spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement. “Why do young people have to be the grown ups in the room? We’re not here to fight about turf or any of that. We’re here to fight about the clear, equitable and just solutions that have been laid out by literally thousands of scientists to do something that will determine whether we get to live our our future in relative peace or in chaos, conflict, and uncertainty.”
Climate scientists and economists have said that a wartime-level, economy-wide mobilization will be needed to bring greenhouse gas emissions down in time to avert catastrophic levels of atmospheric warming, which the National Climate Assessment forecasts could create hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage to the U.S. economy in the coming decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report found we have just 12 years to begin rapidly stripping fossil fuels from the global economy, beginning in industrialized, high-emitting nations like the United States.
In an interview with E&E News, Castor suggested that banning politicians who take donations from the fossil fuel industry—as Green New Deal supporters have demanded—could represent a First Amendment violation, though she quickly walked back those comments in a follow-up interview with HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman. Facing blowback, Castor then last week signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, which commits signatories to refusing donations from PACs linked to the fossil fuel industry, and from industry employees in amounts greater than $200.
There still haven’t been any signal that select committee members will have to take the same pledge, leaving the door open to fossil fuel industry influence. “If the committee is what it appears to be from the conversation that’s going around right now, it would be more toothless and ineffective than the committee that was formed a decade ago,” said Prakash, who added that the new details emerging are upsetting but not surprising. “In that time we’ve seen hundreds of billions of dollars in damages from floods and wildfires. It’s utterly inexcusable for the Democratic Party and for the select committee to not be taking this crisis more seriously than it is.”
Advocates are waiting until full details on the committee are announced to go public with any official next steps, but will continue to push for more elements of Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution, including subpoena power, to be included up until that point. They also look forward to making the Green New Deal and climate change more generally a defining issue of the fast-approaching 2020 Democratic primary season.
“The Green New Deal will be a litmus test going forward for anyone who is looking to run for president,” Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, told me. “We applaud Sens. Booker, Sanders and Merkley for already supporting it, and are still holding out hope that other potential 2020 contenders like Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand will join the call.”
The post Climate Crisis is “Existential Threat,” House Democrats Say — but Protecting Turf Comes First appeared first on The Intercept.
The Trump administration opened 2018 with a renewed attack on immigrants. The arrest by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir and the targeting of No More Deaths volunteers in Arizona were early salvos in a campaign of harassment and intimidation that reached its apex with the family separation crisis.
Illustration: Nicole Rifkin
By Alice Speri
Photo: Saul Young/News Sentinel
By Ryan Devereaux, Alice Speri
Photo: Federal Courthouse, Pecos, Tex.
By Debbie Nathan
Still: Debbie Nathan
By Debbie Nathan
Still: Verónica G. Cárdenas
By Debbie Nathan
Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
By Natasha Lennard
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez
By Ryan Katz
Map: Immigrant Defense Project
By Ryan Devereaux
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
By Nick Pinto
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By Ryan Devereaux, Alice Speri, Cora Currier
Photo: Michelle Siu
By Ryan Devereaux
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By Ryan Devereaux
Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
By Maryam Saleh
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas
By Melissa del Bosque
Photo: Courtesy of Kurt Cappelli
By Daniel Medina
Photo: Reade Levinson/Reuters
By Jose Olivares
The post Closing Liberty’s Sea-Washed, Sunset Gates: The Intercept’s 2018 Immigration Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.
Jesse Horne still struggles to talk about the day he was kicked out of the anti-Dakota Access pipeline movement. It had been an intense week. Searching for direction and ideological fulfillment ever since Iowa’s stand against the pipeline wound down, the 20-year-old had reconnected with some of the state’s more radical pipeline opponents, and the group was now taking on drone warfare. After a protest outside a drone base in Des Moines in which Horne and several others were arrested, two of his fellow activists, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, sat him down and told him to stay away.
“They were asking me if I was an infiltrator,” Horne told The Intercept. “My response was absolutely not.”
There was a lot Horne says he didn’t know at the time — for one, that Reznicek and Montoya had recently been involved in a series of acts of pipeline sabotage. Between March and May 2017, above-ground valves along the Dakota Access pipeline in Iowa and South Dakota were pierced with welding torches, creating new costs for the pipeline company, Energy Transfer, and sending its security personnel into a frenzy. A few weeks after their conversation with Horne, the two women would claim responsibility for the sabotage.
Another thing Horne says he didn’t know: that someone he considered a “brother in the cause” was indeed an infiltrator. For months, a man calling himself Joel Edwards had posed as a pipeline opponent, attending protests, befriending water protectors, and paying for hotel rooms, supplies, and booze. He told some people he had a job with a hotel that allowed him to travel, others that he was a freelance journalist reporting on the pipeline resistance. But five former contractors for TigerSwan, the secretive security firm hired by Energy Transfer to guard the pipeline, confirmed to The Intercept that Joel was an undercover intelligence operative. His real name was Joel Edward McCollough, and he had been sent to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck. Horne, who struggled with addiction, appeared to be a perfect target.
Jesse Horne in Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 5, 2018.
Photo: Rachel Mummey for The Intercept
McCollough passed along what he learned to his superiors at TigerSwan, who attempted to use the information to thwart protest activity and identify people or plots that represented threats to the pipeline. Traces of his surveillance turned up in TigerSwan’s daily situation reports, which were written for Energy Transfer and at times passed to law enforcement. The former TigerSwan contractors interviewed by The Intercept, who declined to be named because it would threaten their continued work in the industry, had either worked with McCollough directly or knew of him through internal communications.
Like other contractors working for TigerSwan, McCollough had developed the skills he deployed in the Dakota Access pipeline fight during the U.S. war in Iraq, where he served as a Marine Corps interrogator and counterintelligence specialist. TigerSwan was founded by James Reese, a former commander of the elite special operations unit Delta Force, and the company got its start as part of a boom of mercenary security firms in the early years of the war on terror. McCollough was participating in something akin to a massive experiment in U.S. military-trained operatives applying lessons learned fighting insurgencies abroad to thousands of pipeline opponents engaged in protest against a Fortune 500 energy giant at home.
Behind the operation was Energy Transfer, whose pipeline empire has been key to propelling the U.S. oil and gas boom at a moment when the devastating impacts of climate change demand a rapid halt in fossil fuel production. Were the environmental movement able to convince policymakers to take climate science seriously, Energy Transfer would be out of business.
Instead, the business of building oil and gas pipelines is booming. Construction projects approved across at least two dozen states continue to face fierce resistance — including Energy Transfer-owned projects in Louisiana and Pennsylvania — ensuring that the pipeline security business will keep booming too. Although TigerSwan has failed to win many of the new contracts it once aspired to, few clear incentives exist to deter others from reproducing the mercenary firm’s tactics.
Through interviews with more than a dozen water protectors who were approached or befriended by Joel, The Intercept has tracked the TigerSwan operative’s path from Iowa to North Dakota to Illinois as he attempted to infiltrate an array of DAPL-opposed organizations, including Bold Iowa, Mississippi Stand, and Food and Water Watch, between September 2016 and April 2017. McCollough declined to comment for this story. Neither TigerSwan nor Energy Transfer responded to multiple requests for comment.
Photo: Courtesy of Gloria Araya
It’s unclear how much of a difference the intelligence Joel collected made in the pipeline company’s efforts to shut down opposition, but what is apparent is that a creeping distrust infected the NoDAPL movement as the months wore on and rumors of infiltration proliferated.
Horne had accepted rides from Joel, crashed in his hotel room, and the two kept in touch. A small set of water protectors became convinced that, knowingly or unknowingly, Horne was supplying information to Joel.
“It was a really painful experience,” Horne said. “It fell apart in front of me really quickly.”
More than anything, Horne remains bewildered. “I just can’t think of anything that would be so sensitive that would have led to this,” he said. “I’m wondering what he gained from interacting with me at all.”
1TigerSwan
It was early September 2016 and video footage of private security dogs attacking Indigenous pipeline opponents in North Dakota had spread across social media. What began as a small anti-pipeline resistance composed almost entirely of the Oceti Sakowin people exploded into a massive, multinational social movement.
Over the next few months, thousands of people traveled to the rural Midwest to protest the 1,172-mile pipeline, which would carry oil extracted from North Dakota’s Bakken fracking region through South Dakota and Iowa to a storage facility and transport hub in Illinois. Those who flooded in carried wide-ranging agendas, identities, and levels of experience — from longtime Indigenous and environmental activists to hippies fresh off the festival circuit to veterans and former law enforcement officers who felt called to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to protect the Missouri River from the threat of an oil spill. In many ways, the space was primed for infiltration: It was next to impossible to control who showed up.
“I need you guys to start looking at the activists in your area and see if there are individuals who are vulnerable,” Joel McCollough later wrote to a small group of TigerSwan personnel. “They’re broke, always talking about needing gas money or whatever. Maybe they’re disillusioned, depressed a little. Life is fucking them over,” the email continued. “We can buy them a bus ticket to any camp they want if they’re willing to provide intel.”
“We win no matter what. If they agree to inform for pay, we get intel. If they tell our pitchman to go fuck himself/herself, the activist will start wondering who did take the money and it’ll cause conflict within the activist groups and it won’t cost us anything.”
The Oceti Sakowin camp near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Dec. 3, 2016, where people gathered to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Photo: David Goldman/AP
The message was provided to The Intercept by a former TigerSwan contractor. It was sent in May 2017, months after Joel had embedded himself in the anti-pipeline movement. None of the water protectors The Intercept interviewed were aware of instances in which Joel or anyone else had offered explicit bribes for information.
Neither was a former TigerSwan operative who worked on the Dakota Access pipeline contract. Reading the email, though, he shrugged. “It wouldn’t be unreasonable to do something like that. It wouldn’t surprise me or concern me,” he said. “If someone can take a quarter-million in $100 bills and give it to a guy in Ramadi, Iraq, to do something, and that person is working for the government, then why is it a problem to give somebody $200?”
TigerSwan came in after the dog attack to oversee the half-dozen or so companies working security on the pipeline. The firm didn’t get a private security license in North Dakota, an omission over which the state security board would later sue. In the subsequent legal battle, which remains ongoing, TigerSwan has claimed that it simply provided “management and IT consulting.” But two former TigerSwan operatives disputed that characterization. As one of them put it, “TigerSwan had personnel on the front lines doing the exact same things the security guards were.”
The other security companies had varying degrees of autonomy from TigerSwan. Personnel moved between companies, and at times it was unclear who was working for whom. “We had the implants, then we had the mobile teams who took information and followed people around wherever,” one former TigerSwan operative said. Others monitored social media accounts remotely.
For the former TigerSwan contractor who reviewed Joel’s email, the infiltration wasn’t such a big deal. It was the other things that bothered him more, like when a handful of security operatives armed themselves with baseball bats to fend off protesters, or bought paintball guns to shoot down the camera drones that water protectors used to document the protest. He said the weapons weren’t ultimately used, but it was stupid nonetheless. Stupid like when TigerSwan operatives would use the water protectors’ radio signals to exhaust and confuse them — ordering everyone to a location where they’d find nothing happening, or blasting the theme song for the professional wrestler John Cena over the system. “We had a few rogue guys at the highest level at times acting like jackasses, doing stupid stuff, not being professional.”
Travelers arrive at the Oceti Sakowin camp near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Dec. 4, 2016.
Photo: David Goldman/AP
Another former contractor confirmed activity on the part of the company that seemed to serve no purpose other than to intimidate and stir paranoia. “It was the whispers on the radio at night; it was the lights; it was the helicopter flights at night for no fucking reason. There were strange vehicles that would come up into the camp,” the former operative said. “That wasn’t really the intelligence operation; that was something else.”
The mission was supposed to “have a relaxed defensive posture — to be a good witness and protect the workers if needed, that was our role,” said one of the former contractors. “Some people couldn’t handle how simple and mundane and boring that was.”
“There’s been nothing like this,” he said of the DAPL contract. “People dreamed about making $500 a day stateside just keeping people safe. It was the beginning of something big with all these pipelines getting approved: Keystone, Bayou Bridge, DAPL.”
What he’s certain of is that the glimmer of opportunity he saw at the beginning of the pipeline fight was extinguished when The Intercept published more than 100 TigerSwan situation reports leaked by a former operative, revealing the security firm’s extensive surveillance efforts, coordination with law enforcement, and comparisons of water protectors to jihadi fighters.
“This was the beginning for all of us, not just TigerSwan,” the former contractor reflected. “High-dollar ex-special ops types doing great things in America to keep people safe. They can have a mercenary stigma all they want, 98 percent of those guys I would let babysit my kids.”
He remembers thinking at one time, “If they watch their p’s and q’s, they will be the standard. They’ll be the company that everybody’s gonna use.” The former contractor laughed. “That didn’t happen.”
2Iowa
When Kima Selene met Joel, he didn’t raise suspicion. She noticed his big white boxer before she noticed him. “I really got to know him because he had this awesome dog,” she said. With a joke about how Sully liked Selene more than he liked Joel, a friendly familiarity developed.
Selene had been studying business, sculpture, and aromatherapy in Ohio when a friend told her that she was driving to Standing Rock. Selene went along on a whim. She spent about a month in North Dakota, then responded to a call put out by a group in Iowa called Mississippi Stand looking for water protectors to help block construction of the pipeline across the Mississippi River.
Joel and his dog, Sully, on Oct. 22, 2016.
Photo: Courtesy of Angel Martinez
Mississippi Stand was the Iowa anti-DAPL group most willing to risk arrest. It was linked to the Catholic Worker, a decentralized organization born during the Great Depression whose highest-profile actions have involved disabling military infrastructure, with the saboteurs staying on site to claim responsibility.
Starting in mid-September, according to Mississippi Stand leader Alex Cohen, Joel seemed to show up to every action held in Iowa. Joel had a big beard and loved Tito’s vodka. He looked “like he could have just popped off a sofa from watching a football game. He had this nice dog, and everyone loves dogs,” said Ed Fallon, the leader of another local anti-pipeline group, Bold Iowa.
Joel never participated in protests that could get him arrested, but Cohen didn’t think much of it. Because of Mississippi Stand’s no-drugs, no-alcohol policy, however, “No one really trusted him,” said Cohen, not because they thought he was an informant, but because of his drinking. When the group’s camp was evicted, they became a convoy — traveling to different construction sites and locking down to infrastructure. They didn’t invite Joel to join them.
But he kept showing up anyway. “He would always message me just wanting to know about anything coming up,” Cohen said. Then, in November, Joel got in touch with an offer. “He called and said, I found a unique way I can help,” Cohen remembers. “I want to find you guys a hotel room once a week so you can shower and do whatever.”
Joel had identified a vulnerability among Mississippi Stand members that would allow him to insert himself into some of their intimate conversations. “We were doing a direct-action campaign. We were all camping, none of us were showering for weeks on end, none of us had the comforts of a bed,” said Joseph Waters, another Mississippi Stand activist. “It was like, yeah, of course we would love to stay in a hotel. We would love to take showers.”
Selene remembers the time she took Joel up on his offer. It was mid-November, and she and another protester had just been released after spending two nights in jail. The group celebrated that night in Joel’s hotel room, where Sully the dog greeted them. “He gave me $50 and told me to go to the liquor store and pick out any alcohol I wanted,” Selene said.
Photo: Kelsey Kremer/The Register via USA Today Network
Their Facebook post ran the next day, stating, “We believe that the only thing that is going to kill this snake is warriors showing up on DAPL easement and refusing to leave until construction is shut down in all four states permanently.”
Sure enough, a day later, the post showed up in an internal situation report that TigerSwan submitted to Energy Transfer. The security firm described the post as “significant because this directly ties MS with the Red Warrior Camp and opens up the possibility of the two groups working together in the future.”
Looking back, Mississippi Stand activists struggled to come up with examples of actions that Joel could have swayed or much of significance he could have learned. But perhaps, mused some participants, it wasn’t the intelligence gathered that made the difference. Waters estimated that the biggest damage Joel might have done was to add alcohol to the mix. “People who show up who want to save the earth, a lot of times they are alcoholics and a lot of times they are recovering,” he said. Joel’s biggest harm might have been in “taking advantage of people most vulnerable to succumb to demons.”
Photo: Rachel Mummey for The Intercept
Jesse Horne, a web developer from Macon, Georgia, considered himself an atheist and an anarchist, though he’d never been actively involved in a social movement. The contract tech firm he worked for had placed him in a job at DuPont Pioneer’s research and development headquarters just outside Des Moines, one of the world’s largest developers of genetically modified crops. Horne said that soon after he arrived, he began looking for ways to be involved in local activism and stumbled onto the NoDAPL group Bold Iowa.
Bold Iowa was part of the nationwide Bold Alliance, which got its start in Nebraska fighting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline via alliances between farmers, Indigenous people, and concerned neighbors. Led by Ed Fallon, a former Iowa state representative, Bold Iowa members occasionally participated in actions that got them arrested, but overall, they were less hardcore than Mississippi Stand.
At the first action Horne attended, around 150 protesters blocked workers’ access to the Des Moines River construction site; Horne and 18 others were arrested. “After that whole experience was done, I couldn’t focus on my job anymore,” he recalls. “I wanted to have an action every day because it was like I am actually doing something.”
When Bold Iowa members began to discuss opening a camp, Horne decided that he would quit his job. “It was irresponsible, but I also knew that I had to do it,” he said.
Although Horne said he was never involved in any action to sabotage property, he sympathized with the impulse. “I was completely OK with the idea of someone disabling the hardware that constructed the pipeline,” he said. “It seemed to be more efficient than holding a sign in front of a random building in the heart of downtown Des Moines for an hour.”
It was a point of debate — and at times, contention — among many of the water protector groups, because crossing the line into physically disabling machinery had more serious political and legal consequences, allowing the oil and gas industry and politicians to frame the movement as supportive of “eco-terrorism.”
Heather Pearson, another Bold Iowa activist, recalls that Horne tended to push to take actions to another level. During a protest at a construction site, he ran up a pile of dirt and was tackled to the ground and arrested, something that, according to Pearson, was not part of the plan. His impulsiveness and enthusiasm made him easy to imagine as a provocateur.
Horne doesn’t remember exactly when he first met Joel, only that he was around a lot at the Bold Iowa actions. After the group’s camp closed down, Horne got a ride with Joel 10 hours to North Dakota to visit Standing Rock. A TigerSwan situation report at the time noted, “Jesse Horne traveling to ND this weekend.”
“You can’t fight a 2,000-man force without knowing what they’re thinking. You can’t win without knowing what your enemy is thinking.”According to one former TigerSwan contractor, a large web board in Iowa displayed the names and pictures of some 60 people the security firm claimed to be tracking, along with their connections to other pipeline opponents. One of the targets was Horne, the contractor said.
“Jesse was not with us,” he said. “He was someone Joel worked to exploit regularly.”
Another former operative explained to The Intercept why infiltration made sense for the company. “When you get a bunch of Delta guys together, they want to do a great job,” he said. “They know the value of intel, so if there’s no law preventing you from getting a few people to act like hippies and go in there and find out what they can, they would be negligent not to do it.”
“You can’t fight a 2,000-man force without knowing what they’re thinking. You can’t win without knowing what your enemy is thinking — they’re the bad guys that we need to protect these workers from,” the former contractor said.
But although some TigerSwan operatives had identified the protesters as the enemy, others were seeing bad actors among their own ranks. According to three former TigerSwan operatives, the security companies were squabbling too. It’s not clear exactly what complaint fueled it, but bubbling discord developed the way it often does — into a leak of information.
In March 2017, Pearson received a strange Facebook message from an account named “Burt Maklin,” a reference to the FBI agent alter ego of a “Parks and Recreation” character. “Heather you don’t know me (and this is a fake FB obviously), but [I] know who the Iowa mole was from the pipeline. I do not want you to do anything for me, I do not want information from you.” Maklin sent a link to a columnist’s bio on the news website Military 1. It was J.E. McCollough: Joel.
“Thank you. I recognize him,” Pearson replied.
“Good luck. Stay safe,” Maklin wrote.
Pearson began quietly warning members of the movement.
Months later, after The Intercept published TigerSwan’s situation reports and Pearson read the note about Horne traveling to North Dakota, she reached out to Cohen. She was convinced that Horne, having spent so much time with Joel, and given his proclivity to push things to another level, was an infiltrator. They should disassociate from him immediately. It was decided that, even if Horne wasn’t intentionally providing information, his struggle with addiction was reason enough to ask him to leave.
3North Dakota
Tala Ali met Joel in the depths of winter at the Prairie Knights Casino in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. She had been staying at the Oceti Sakowin resistance camp since the day of the dog attack, returning home to Cincinnati occasionally to check in on her life.
Ali is Palestinian-American and was taught from a young age that Native Americans were going through a parallel oppression to that of her own people. “Especially being here of Palestinian blood, not having the right of return and feeling really impotent,” she remembers thinking, “how can I not be involved with this?”
December was a strange time. Donald Trump was the president-elect, and it was all but assured that the pipeline would get the approvals it needed to resume construction once he was sworn in. After a blizzard ravaged the camp, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe urged everyone to go home for their own safety. It was less clear than ever where things were going.
And it was cold as hell. At times, everything was so frozen in the camps that it was impossible to find water for drinking or washing up. The casino, just 10 minutes away, was an important resource for water protectors. Ali would go a few times a week to charge her phone and warm up or grab a bite to eat. On rare occasions, she would get a hotel room for a night.
This was one of those bitterly cold nights. Ali arrived at the casino with a friend from Cincinnati, Jen Mendoza, and headed to what was known as “the pit,” where there were tables and a bar in the midst of the flashing slot machines. Joel sauntered over. “You’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re dirty — at that point, you’re putty in his hands,” Ali recalled feeling at the time. “There’s this huge smile, and come sit at my table, and can I talk to you, and how are you?”
After their first encounter with Joel, Mendoza and Ali became aware that he was a fixture at the bar. Occasionally, he would also make appearances at the resistance encampment. Terrill Goodman, a member of the Navajo Nation from Monument Valley, Utah, remembers seeing Joel at the Oceti Sakowin camp’s sacred fire. He offered Goodman a pack of cigarettes once, which he accepted.
“Everyone was suspicious of everyone. It was infuriating and debilitating for the movement.”Ali developed a friendly relationship with Joel. He talked with her about his time serving in Iraq, dropping Arabic words he thought she might know. The two debated politics. Mendoza, though, was not a fan. “I’ll be honest — most men creep me out, but he was a particular breed of creep,” she said.
One time, when Mendoza needed to pay her phone bill and couldn’t get the casino Wi-Fi to connect, Joel stepped in. “He was just brazenly like, ‘I’ll take care of that for you,’” she recalled. The way he threw money around weirded her out, but she accepted, thinking, “Yeah, pay my phone bill, dude that creeps me out and I’m definitely never gonna see again.”
Eventually, Mendoza confronted Joel about where all his money came from, and his answer was vague. He had received some kind of military settlement, she said.
Joel, center left, at the Prairie Knights Casino with Daniel Younan, far left, Jen Mendoza, center right, and Tala Ali, far right.
Photo: Courtesy of Tala Ali
Mendoza wasn’t naïve. Anyone who had spent time at Standing Rock was aware of the threat of infiltration — it was discussed constantly. Many of those who first came to camp had links to the American Indian Movement, which was infiltrated extensively by the FBI in the wake of AIM’s 1973 standoff with the federal government at Wounded Knee.
One of the most high-profile AIM infiltrators was Douglass Durham, who presented himself at Wounded Knee as a journalist for a regional publication. He grew to become AIM’s director of security and worked with the organization’s legal team. Later, he admitted that the FBI had paid him $1,000 per month to inform on the group’s activities.
By that December at Standing Rock, “Literally everyone was suspicious of everyone,” Mendoza said. “It was infuriating and debilitating for the movement — it really was. I hate to admit that, because it’s almost an admission of defeat that their tactics are so good that it worked, but no one trusted anyone — family members, people that grew up together, people that had been together since day one.”
In the story Joel told 20-year-old Daniel Younan, a friend of Mendoza’s and Ali’s, he was a reporter working on a story about Standing Rock, and his publication was paying for his hotel room and other expenses.
“His room is empty. It’s just him and his dog, and he pulls out his laptop.”One day, Joel invited Younan to smoke weed outside of the casino. Once Younan was stoned, Joel asked if he’d like to join some friends in his room for drinks. Younan accepted the invitation. But when they got there, “His room is empty,” Younan said. “It’s just him and his dog, and he pulls out his laptop.”
Journalists and documentarians were everywhere at the time. “Every time you’d go into the food hall, everyone would be sitting there interviewing each other or writing,” Younan said. Some were working for established publications like Al Jazeera, but others were working on zines or blogs, something Younan viewed as a positive thing. But this felt different. “I should have stood up and walked out,” Younan acknowledges now, but because Joel had given him free weed, he felt “this weird obligation.”
Many of Joel’s questions revolved around the controversial Red Warrior Camp. Joel wanted to know whether Younan “had ever been to their headquarters and if there were any drugs or guns there.” Younan said no. He found the questions about drugs particularly bizarre considering they had just smoked weed together. McCollough declined to comment on Younan’s recollection, although Ali remembered Younan describing Joel offering him weed and alcohol around the time of the incident.
Joel repeated the reporter act with Mendoza and Ali, and that’s when their relationship with him soured. Stories had emerged of women being sexually assaulted at Standing Rock, and Joel said he was working on a news story to expose the sex offenders and people with criminal records who were staying in camp. He asked Ali and Mendoza to share the names of women who’d been sexually assaulted.
Ali was uncomfortable. She described to him how camp medics, a security team, and a women’s council dealt with reports on a case-by-case basis. Joel argued that this wasn’t sufficient and an exposé was necessary.
Mendoza was even more irate. “It was like, first of all, you’re a slimeball dude,” she said. “You are not some ally of women. Secondly, no, what permission do you have to gain this access to these women’s stories?”
Although Ali and Mendoza continued to run into Joel up until the camps were evicted by police, they distanced themselves.
4Illinois
Joshua Smith hardly knew Joel when Joel texted him with a proposition. “Hey, man, I got some footage you might like. I took my drone down to Patoka,” Joel wrote, referring to the endpoint of the pipeline in Illinois.
“Law enforcement will freak out on whoever posts it,” he continued. “You know anyone who would want to do that? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, I just would love for it to be out there for the movement.”
Smith had been laid off from construction work when the protests in Iowa kicked off. He had a side gig as a wedding photographer, so when a friend began visiting the protest sites, Smith tagged along to take photos. Eventually he was going every day so he wouldn’t miss a good shot. Inevitably he ran into Joel, but it wasn’t until April, months after the protests had died down, that Joel struck up a conversation on Facebook after Smith posted a meme illustrating the difference between equity and equality. The two discussed philosophies of human rights in the comments, and Joel texted Smith about the drone footage the same day.
Joshua Smith became involved with the anti-Dakota Access pipeline movement as a photographer documenting the protests in Iowa.
Photo: Rachel Mummey for The Intercept
Smith attempted to instruct Joel on how to post the video on Facebook anonymously, but Joel demurred. “Man … tell you what, I’ll drive to you tomorrow and just give it to you. Do with it as you will.” He added, “I’ve had bad run-ins with law enforcement before. I don’t need anything more. and I know DAPL will have their dogs out.”
Smith agreed to meet. “I liked the guy,” he said. “It’s hard to run into people that have good conversation.”
In the footage Joel showed him, the drone pans over a field of white tanks, apparently filled with oil awaiting transport. “I didn’t think it was all that compelling or even that anyone was going to care,” Smith said. “It could be any tank farm anywhere in the United States.” Still, he hesitated to agree to post it. It was footage of so-called critical infrastructure, and Smith wasn’t sure that he’d be any more protected from legal consequences than Joel.
Joel let it go and the two talked for a few hours. They were both military veterans and shared an easy rapport. They made plans to go to a climate march in Chicago later that month. Finally, when it was time to leave, Joel left the footage behind, telling Smith that he could post it or not post it.
As the climate march got closer, Smith mentioned to Joel that he’d need a place to crash if he were to come. “Of course!” Joel replied. “Only if you post the Patoka video, though, hahah!”
It was obviously a joke, but at the end of the day, Smith didn’t think the footage was such a big deal. Before he left to meet Joel at the march, he posted it on Facebook.
Photo: Heather Ainsworth for The Intercept
Preparations for the climate march had just kicked off when Ashley Williams, a volunteer with Food and Water Watch, received a strange message on Facebook from a guy named “Bobby Long.”
“Ashley, if you are currently working with a Joel or JE McCollough, I would recommend breaking contact with them as they work for DAPL,” the message said, adding, “(obviously my profile is fake).”
The message was weird. Wracking her brain, she couldn’t place the name Joel. But the possibility of an infiltrator wasn’t new to Williams. “I think it’s just part of this line of work to anticipate that there’s someone waiting in the wings quietly as a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” she said. “You also think, Is this just my paranoia?”
Jenya Polozova, another Food and Water Watch volunteer, received a similar message. So did the organization’s Midwest region director, Jessica Fujan. According to Fujan, the person behind the sock puppet account said he knew about Joel because he too worked for TigerSwan. The three women agreed to keep an eye out.
Ten days later, Williams spotted him at a screening at Loyola University: a large man sitting in the back of the room — obviously a Marine, she thought. She and Polozova had organized the screening — of a Viceland series that included episodes on the Dakota Access pipeline — not as part of Food and Water Watch, but as politically active students of the university.
She’d met Joel before, she realized, at a climate march kickoff event, where she was stationed at an information table. Joel had hovered for a while, talking to Williams about the march and the frac sand mining community where she grew up.
“He came to almost every single event we put on,” Fujan said, whether the event was in downtown Chicago or deep in the suburbs. He even showed up twice to the same social media training, in two different locations.
Polozova became more conscious of how she talked about her environmental advocacy work. “I would run what I was going to say through my head and think, Is this something that could be used against this campaign?” she said. “I wasn’t getting paid. It was something a bunch of college kids are passionate about. It felt kind of predatory.”
Photo: Courtesy of Gloria Araya
Evidence of Joel’s presence at various Food and Water Watch events appears throughout the situation reports that TigerSwan submitted to Energy Transfer. A report in early April included a detailed description of the climate march kickoff event, while another featured images of Williams and Polozova and a description of the women’s upcoming Loyola screening.
The purpose of the situation reports offers a clue to McCollough’s interest in Food and Water Watch. According to a former TigerSwan contractor who worked on DAPL, “There was pressure from the highest levels to make sure that those reports didn’t make it look like there was no reason to have security. If you put at the bottom or the top of your report that there is little to no threat, you’re basically saying that you don’t need us.”
The reports were apparently meant to communicate to Energy Transfer both that there was a serious threat and that TigerSwan was making a dent in addressing it. That April, both those premises were in question. Overall, anti-DAPL activity had died down significantly since the previous fall. As promised, Trump issued an order within days of his inauguration to expedite approval of the pipeline, and construction was nearly complete. The North Dakota resistance camps had been evicted by police, and Mississippi Stand was no longer active.
Some passages also hinted at the possibility of future vandalism, including at the Illinois Patoka terminal.There was one thing, though, that kept the contract going. Starting in mid-March, saboteurs had snaked down the pipeline, piercing valves with some type of welding torch. The damage to Energy Transfer’s property was not a good look for the security firm, but it was also the thing keeping so many operatives working. In its reports, TigerSwan described its efforts to find the culprits. Some passages also hinted at the possibility of future vandalism, including at the Illinois Patoka terminal — something that never materialized.
On the day of the climate march, Joel’s tank farm footage was described in a TigerSwan situation report. “Drone footage from the Patoka storage facility was recently published on an activist photographer’s webpage,” the document said, referring to Smith.
Joel showed up to the march with three people carrying nice cameras, whom he described to Fujan as veterans. They spent the day with the organizers and joined them at a restaurant afterward. “He asked about what’s next and talked about us working together,” Fujan recalled. It was time to end this, she felt.
She pulled Joel aside. “I explained that we had heard that he was affiliated with TigerSwan, and I didn’t want him to come around anymore,” she said.
“He just kind of laughed it off awkwardly and was like, ‘You’re kidding, that’s crazy.’ I told him that I knew his real name and … it was creepy that he didn’t use his real name,” said Fujan. She turned away to settle the bill, and Joel faded out of the Chicago activist scene.
About a month later, Joel sent Fujan one last Facebook message. “It sucks not being able to work with ya’ll. I have zero desire to be judged and viewed with suspicion by your people. That said, I really like you. You’re an incredibly fresh, vibrant, beautiful soul. If you ever need my help on a personal basis, hit me up! If I had worked with ya’ll longer I would have wanted to expand your outreach to veterans.”
Photo: Nam Y. Huh/AP
Smith was there that day at the climate march with Joel — in fact, he was one of the veterans with nice cameras whom Fujan was uneasy about. He had no idea that Joel was expelled from the Chicago activist scene that weekend.
He remembers an exhilarating day. “Oh my god — I was stoked. I get to sit here with the actual organizers, spend all day with them — I don’t have that kind of access,” Smith said. These were the types of contacts that would allow him to take pictures that mattered.
Joel explained to Smith that the hotel he worked for would cover the cost of their room, all their meals, even parking. “We spent a lot of time in the hotel room having a good time. We had time to sit down and have good conversations,” Smith said. They discussed the movement and exchanged war stories.
“He drank a lot. To describe it as excessive is an understatement,” Smith said. “There was a hard edge to him, but any combat veteran’s got a hard edge, and that’s the way it is.”
One of the things Joel wanted to talk about most was Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek. The reports of pipeline valves being pierced had surfaced soon after the women went quiet on social media, and Joel was worried that the duo could be behind it. Smith had wondered too.
Reznicek had a reputation for being what Smith called “committed.” She was willing to do lockdowns. She had conducted an anti-DAPL hunger strike. But Montoya’s tactics seemed more measured.
Joel “was very, very concerned that Ruby had gotten in over her head,” Smith said. “He wouldn’t leave it alone. It was, ‘Who do you know that I can talk to that would know where Ruby is?’”
Smith wrote it off. “I thought he had an infatuation with her,” Smith said. “Ruby has that effect on people. She’s really personable; she’s easy to like.”
Joel kept at it even after parting ways with Smith, texting again two days after the march when another report emerged of a valve being sabotaged.
By then, Smith was tired of the conversation. Whatever Montoya was up to, Smith wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s possible,” he told Joel in a text, “but from my vantage point I don’t know them well enough.”
In the months that followed, as The Intercept published a series of articles based on TigerSwan’s situation reports, rumors started circulating about the identities of the infiltrators who had gathered the intelligence. Seeing reference after reference to Food and Water Watch’s planning meetings, Fujan became more convinced than ever that the sock puppet Facebook account was telling the truth about Joel, and she was pissed.
In June 2017, she sent a letter to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. “Given your role in ‘protecting the public interest of the state and its people,’” she wrote, “we believe that you should launch an investigation into TigerSwan’s activities in the state.” According to Fujan, Madigan declined. Madigan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Jessica Fujan chants through a bullhorn at the Chicago climate march on April 29, 2017.
Photo: Nam Y. Huh/AP
“When you do this work, you see that the power of the oil and gas industry and monied industries like this is unconquerable,” Fujan said. “They could sue our organization out of existence. They could sue me personally into dire financial straits, and it’s unreasonable to me that we should be incurring that kind of risk for truth-telling.”
5Joel
From left, Angel Martinez, Joel McCollough, and Joshua Smith on Dec. 6, 2016.
Photo: Courtesy of Angel Martinez
Reflecting on his friendship with Joel Edwards, Smith said he could imagine an alternate reality in which he was in Joel McCollough’s place. After he left the military, he considered going into mercenary work. “I thought about putting in applications with Blackwater, Triple Canopy. The money is just insane,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, I thought, that’s not me anymore.”
In fact, Joel McCollough isn’t all that different from Joel Edwards. As he told many water protectors, McCollough is a former Marine and served in Iraq. It’s also true that he’s a writer. In 2015, he published a book of poetry, called “Aftermath.” One of his most vivid poems describes a gruesome aspect of his military service.
I should have killed him,
Finished it with a knee on his throat,
or a bullet.
Instead I crouched over him
As he lay quietly gurgling in the sand
And went through his pockets
Looking for maps and rosters.
McCollough described his work in prose too. His essays and analysis have been published on veterans’ sites like SOFREP, Ranger Up, Military 1, and Time magazine’s Battleland. “As a Marine Corps counterintelligence specialist and interrogator in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, I had the opportunity to not just fight the enemy, but become intimately familiar with him,” McCollough wrote for Time in 2013. “After conducting more than 400 interrogations as well as working with Iraqi informants, I’ve had the opportunity to see the enemy as he is, a human being with a range of motivations, loyalties and ideologies. I discovered the enemy isn’t crazy, or immoral, or twisted, though his reasoning may be alien to the Western understanding of sanity and morality.”
According to one of his pieces, intelligence McCollough collected in Iraq led to the rescue of seven U.S. prisoners of war. His military records confirm that he was awarded a Purple Heart.
More than anything, McCollough’s writing reveals an understanding of the world that is indelibly shaped by combat.
As McCollough wrote, “There is a sign that has hung in hundreds of infantry headquarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. It says, ‘Complacency Kills.’ Every patrol that would go out would see that sign and be reminded — as if the blood of their brothers wasn’t reminder enough — to be vigilant.”
“I feel bad for the guy,” Smith said. “That is a private military organization operating domestically with no constitutional concerns. The federal government created Joel.”
When Smith got a warning about Joel, he didn’t take it too seriously. He texted Joel.
“I’ve heard it before. Whatever. I’m sure you’ve heard you’re a suspect, too,” Joel responded. He was right. Mississippi Stand organizers had told Smith that at first, they suspected that he might be an infiltrator. “Because of my military background and because I was holding myself aloof,” he said. Smith conceded Joel’s point, saying that he just wanted to give him the heads-up.
“All I’ve done is help people, paid for plane and bus tickets, let them shower in my room, given people rides to Standing Rock and back,” Joel replied. He texted a week later, pointing to others who had been fingered as possible infiltrators on social media. “It’s fucking absurd. I don’t want to get wrapped up in it.”
He proposed a theory. “In fact, this would be beyond devious, but has anyone checked out who the Intercept is working for? All these leaks from TigerSwan have just fueled people’s accusations against each other. They haven’t done the movement any good at all. That would be one hell of a psyop action by TigerSwan, but you and I both know they could do it.”
Smith and Joel communicated again briefly when Montoya and Reznicek publicly took responsibility for the pipeline sabotage in July 2017 — a decision the two women said they came to after The Intercept contacted them for comment on allegations about their involvement included in TigerSwan documents. (As one former TigerSwan operative put it, “We’d been trying to track them for a long time. They eluded us. Those girls were successful.”)
After that, Smith’s communication with Joel tapered off, but his old friend’s name resurfaced in October of last year in a Facebook post by Bold Iowa’s Heather Pearson. “To the 23 people who are still mutual friends with Joel Edwards, it has been confirmed by many sources that he is a paid infiltrator,” she wrote. Some commenters shrugged off the warning for lack of evidence, including Smith. Joel’s Facebook page came down not long after that.
The post How an Undercover Oil Industry Mercenary Tricked Pipeline Opponents Into Believing He Was One of Them appeared first on The Intercept.
Stanley McChrystal has a history of speaking plainly about American presidents and their leadership. His military career ended in 2010 after a Rolling Stone profile quoted him and his aides as criticizing Obama-administration officials, mocking the civilian leaders and painting them as indecisive. McChrystal quickly offered his resignation, which President Barack Obama accepted.
But while the retired four-star Army general’s complaints about the Obama administration centered on its military strategy, his concerns about the current White House, which he articulated in an ABC News interview on Sunday, are rooted in President Donald Trump’s character. McChrystal has criticized the president before, but his remarks on Sunday were timely, given the departure of James Mattis, the defense secretary who previously served as a Marine Corps general, and Trump’s recent war of words with another former military leader.
McChrystal, whom Obama had selected to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in the interview that he would not work for Trump. “I think it’s important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it,” McChrystal explained.
“Do you think he’s a liar?” asked Martha Raddatz, the co-host of ABC’s This Week.
McChrystal raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and responded, “I don’t think he tells the truth.” When Raddatz asked whether McChrystal considers the president “immoral,” the former general replied, “I think he is.”
[Read: Do presidential visits to combat zones offer leaders any insights, or boost morale for troops?]
McChrystal’s comments came about 10 days after Trump’s announcement via Twitter that he’s planning to withdraw 2,200 U.S. troops from Syria. The abrupt decision prompted Mattis’s resignation with a public letter, in which the former general cited differences between himself and the president over “treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors.” In the interview, McChrystal told Raddatz he hopes Mattis’s exit has caused the American public to “take a pause.”
“If we have someone who is as selfless and committed as Jim Mattis resigning his position, walking away from all the responsibility he feels for every service member in our forces, and he does so in a public way like that, we ought to stop and say, ‘Okay, why did he do it?’” McChrystal said. “We ought to ask what kind of commander in chief he had that Jim Mattis, ‘the good Marine,’ felt he had to walk away.”
McChrystal also echoed recent criticism of Trump’s holiday visit to troops serving in Iraq. During the stop, his first trip to a combat zone since he assumed office in early 2017, Trump made a campaign-style speech in which he talked up his plans for expanding the border wall and disparaged his political opponents, claiming that “Democrats don’t want to let us have strong borders.”
“When leaders visit soldiers … there’s a sacred interaction that occurs,” McChrystal said. “You don’t use that as a time to tout your politics or your personal opinions. You use that as a time to reassure them that what they’re doing is appreciated.” He also chided service members who brought Trump paraphernalia to the event—including “Make America Great Again” hats and a Trump 2020 patch—saying that they at least “violated the spirit” of military rules against political activity while serving on active duty.
[Read: Everything’s political to Trump, even killing Osama bin Laden]
McChrystal is not the only ex-military leader to recently rebuke Trump. William McRaven, the retired admiral who oversaw special operations—including the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed—criticized the president for attacking the media and pulling the security clearance of a former CIA chief who spoke out against him. In an interview last month, Trump dismissed McRaven as a “Hillary Clinton fan” and questioned why it took nearly a decade to find bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. McChrystal sprang to McRaven’s defense the next day, calling the president “simply wrong” and “uninformed.”
Trump didn’t immediately counterattack after McChrystal’s criticism. But as the interview was airing on ABC, the president did tweet about an Associated Press poll that found he has higher approval ratings among troops and veterans than he does among citizens who have not served in the military. Overall, 56 percent of veterans said they approve of Trump’s job as president, compared with 42 percent of nonveterans.
Given how the president loves to spar, it’s possible a volley is still on the way. He has fodder to dismiss McChrystal as just another spiteful Democrat: In the fateful profile that cut the general’s career short, Rolling Stone reported that he voted for Obama in 2008.
After leaving to pursue an education, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain wrote in November, some Native Americans find themselves stuck between a longing to help their community and the lack of viable employment back home. “All too often,” he observed, “success for reservation Indians means leaving your heart in your homeland.”
I would like to add to Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s article. I too am a Blackfoot living and working on the reservation. As I was growing up, my grandparents had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity in their one-room home where they raised their six children. My father’s generation began the quest for the promises of higher education by leaving for school. I remember quite well my grandfather telling me, “It’s a white man’s world, and it runs on education. If you don’t get an education, you’ll live like this. Do you want to live like this?” The chorus of “No, Papa” rang from all of us children sitting in his car. His point was: Go get your education, see the world, expand your mind, then come home.
After attending Cornell University as an undergraduate, then for medical school, I returned as a physician. I have met many highly educated Native people who have chosen to return home to stay and be an agent of change. We need the educated artists and writers of our people to stay and be the nidus of a collective of writers and artists that will take root and blossom in future generations. If you want a certain standard of living now that the reservation doesn’t have then yes, leave. But if you want to fight the good fight and be that agent of change here and now, I invite you to return home and stay.
Ernest J. Gray, M.D.
East Glacier Park, Mont.
Dr. Gray,
I want to thank you for your response to my article; it is a rare moment when two people from the same indigenous community are able to dialogue, if only briefly, in a way that allows other Americans access and insight to our world.
Thank you also for the service you have done for the people on our reservation; Native doctors are rare, and we are lucky to have one of our own working at the hospital. My sisters speak highly of you, and are deeply appreciative of the help you have given during their pregnancies and with their children as they’ve grown.
Your grandfather’s words are as true today as they were then: We have no choice, for now, but to live in an American world. I heard these same things when I was growing up, and believe that every Indian who gets an education should find some way to help other Indians, particularly those from one’s own tribe. It was a struggle for me to justify leaving our community to pursue my writing, with so much need there in so many areas of life. However, I believe in the power of art to change lives—though not the way we usually talk about change—and to make people more honest and beautiful. In order to put myself in the best position to make the best art I can, I had to leave home. It was the hardest decision of my adult life. If I can write one thing true enough to show our part of Indian country, in all its complexity and beauty and difficulty, though, then I will have done something worth doing. And it will not have been only for myself. I still intend to more directly help people on our reservation; I just don’t know how or when that will be.
Sterling HWM
P.S. My mother recently reminded me of the time last winter when she had pneumonia and you came to check on her during a snowstorm. It goes without saying that our family is grateful.
An “ice tsunami” killed a herd of musk oxen in February 2011 and kept their bodies perfectly entombed for seven years.
Ten thousand years ago, the people who lived in Europe had dark skin and blue eyes.
Facebook sent huge volumes of data about you and your friends to millions of apps from 2007 to 2014, and you have no way to control—or even know—how that information gets used. . A fishing cat is a water-loving cat species that lives in swamps, quacks like a duck, and dives from riverbanks to snag unsuspecting fish. Astrology is experiencing a resurgence among Millennials, fueled by meme culture, stress, and a desire for subjectivity in an increasingly quantified world. In the beginning of 2018, Amazon had 342 fulfillment centers, Prime hubs, and sortation centers in the United States, up from 18 in 2007. Ivy League universities took nude photos of incoming freshman students for decades. Some fundamentalist Christian groups think the spread of implantable technology is a key sign of the impending apocalypse. The shopping mall put a cap on consumerism as much as it promoted it. Bees stop buzzing during total solar eclipses. The scientist who advised the production team of Interstellar made so much progress on his research in the process that it led him to publish multiple scientific papers. High fibrinogen content can help a blood clot stay in a shape like putty—even if it gets violently coughed up. Many butterflies in the nymphalid group can hear with their wings. Some scientists think the reason you want to squeeze or nibble on a particularly cute baby is to snap your brain out of the euphoria that cuteness can summon, making you able to tend to the baby’s needs. In the fourth quarter of last year, 25 percent of all new office space leased or built in the United States was taken by Amazon. The first scooter was invented in 1990 by a guy who really wanted a bratwurst. The streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile. In August, Oxford University’s Said Business School came up with a clever way for homeless people to receive cashless donations: Donors could scan the barcodes on homeless people’s lanyards to send them money. Don’t worry if you forget all the facts you read in this article by tomorrow—that’s normal. Many doctors have difficulty accessing the health records of patients treated previously at another facility; fewer than half of hospitals integrate electronic patient data from outside their system. The original indigenous American dogs are completely gone, and their closest living relative isn’t even a dog—it’s a contagious global cancer. Donald Trump can’t really send a message directly to your phone. In fact, the president’s ability to address the nation directly in a time of crisis, available since the 1960s, has never been used. In 1995, a man in Germany realized his pet crayfish was cloning itself. Clones of that crayfish have now spread all over the world. Four hundred years after Galileo discovered Jupiter’s largest moons, astronomers are still discovering some tiny ones. The fastest someone has ever hiked all 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail is 41 days, seven hours, and 39 minutes. That averages out to roughly two marathons a day. The lifespan of a meme has shrunk from several months in 2012 to just a few days in 2018. Elon Musk’s $20 million SEC fine might make his ill-advised “funding secured” tweets the most expensive ever. Thousands of horseshoe crabs are bled every year to create a miraculous medical product that keeps humans alive. Single-celled microorganisms can survive in lab conditions that simulate the icy environment of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Only 10 major hurricanes have ever made landfall along the Southeast Atlantic coast, if you don’t count Florida. Animals that live in cities are sometimes found to outperform their rural counterparts on intelligence tests. Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is shrinking. The paleontology consultant for Jurassic Park had a Tyrannosaurus rex eat a doppelgänger of another researcher with whom he had an academic beef. Some people think tennis balls are green while others think they’re yellow, and the disagreement has a lot to do with how our brains perceive color. Conservatives tend to find life more meaningful than liberals do. It’s easier for spacecraft to leave the solar system than to reach the sun. Thanks, physics. Despite giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was worth $20 billion when he died, 48 percent more than when he signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 and promised to give away at least half his wealth. China consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—with the average resident eating 140 pounds a year. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may be covered in 50-foot-tall blades of ice. You can reconstruct a pretty decent record of historical whaling intensity by measuring the stress hormones in the earwax of a few dozen whales. Doing a good deed—or even imagining doing a good deed—can boost an athlete’s endurance by reinforcing his or her sense of agency in the world. A science adviser on Stargate: Atlantis imagined a fictional astronomical phenomenon called a binary pulsar system for the show. Years later, such a system was found in real life. The lowercase g in Google’s original logo is really, really weird. Sixty percent of gun deaths in 2017 were suicides. From 1984 to 2015, the area of forest in the American West that burned in wildfires was double what it would have been without climate change. An astrologer came up with the phrase “super blue blood moon” to describe a celestial event that’s much less scary than it sounds. The Cambridge Analytica scandal caused 42 percent of Facebook users to change their behavior on the platform, according to a survey conducted by The Atlantic. Ten percent of those people deleted or deactivated their accounts. In the absence of federal regulation or good research about how skin-care products work, communities of citizen scientists have started compiling pretty decent resources. The figure-eight trajectory flown by the Apollo moon missions was the very same path followed by fictional astronauts in a classic silent film from 1929, Woman in the Moon. After one year in America, just 8 percent of immigrants are obese, but among those who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, the obesity rate is 19 percent. There’s a spider that makes milk. Goats love to feast on weeds, and you can rent dozens of them to landscape your lawn. Some people have a bony growth on the back of their heel, called a pump bump, that makes it hard to wear pumps and other kinds of dressy shoes. Astronomers can still detect ripples in the Milky Way caused by a close encounter with another galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago. China built its rocket-launch facilities deep inland to protect them during the Cold War, but decades later it actually makes launching rockets into space more dangerous. The folks who make Piaggio scooters hope you might buy an R2D2-like cargo robot to haul a case of Aperol home from the market. Shifting the pitch of an audio recording can make it sound like an entirely different word. Kids under the age of 8 spend 65 percent of their online time on YouTube. A reservoir of liquid water may lurk just a mile beneath the ice-covered surface of Mars’s south pole. When people overdose in public bathrooms, many service workers become the unwitting first line of medical responders. Some people think that quantum computing will bring about the end of free will. Mouse urine is a major cause of asthma for poor kids in Baltimore. The House of Representatives’ longest-serving member, Alaska’s Don Young, was first elected to his seat after his opponent died. In September, Hurricane Florence dropped about 18 trillion gallons of rain over the Carolinas—enough water to completely refill the Chesapeake Bay. Europe suffered its worst carbon dioxide shortage in decades (think of the beer and the crumpets!) because of a closed ammonia fertilizer plant. Yes, these two things are related. Americans spent $240 billion on jewelry, watches, books, luggage, and communication equipment such as telephones in 2017, twice as much as they spent in 2002, even though the population grew just 13 percent during that time. People get more colds in winter because chilly temperatures make it easier for microbes to reproduce inside your nose.The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series delves into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. (Read our previous entries here.)
“My father has an anger disorder. He has rage bottled up inside of him. It goes off like a bomb. Once it goes off, everything is destroyed.” So begins a confession of sorts from Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an introverted, pent-up writer living on his father’s farm, trying vainly to write. It’s a confession he makes to the poised, handsome Ben (Steven Yeun), an enigmatic businessman who’s dating Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the girl Jong-su has a lingering crush on. And it’s quickly followed by a much stranger revelation from Ben, one that’s at the center (literally and figuratively) of Burning, Lee Chang-dong’s woozy, beguiling mystery thriller.
In talking about his now-imprisoned father’s nasty temper, Jong-su recalls the day his mother abandoned the family, fleeing her abusive husband. “I burned all her clothes,” Jong-su says, laughing. “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses,” Ben replies, looking absentmindedly into the horizon. “It’s a crime, so to speak.” The two of them are sitting on a porch, stoned, and Hae-mi, the joint object of their affection, is sleeping in the house behind them. Jong-su’s memory suggests a lifetime of buried anger and deep-seated issues planted by his parents’ relationship, things the viewer might have guessed already. Ben’s admission is far, far more inscrutable.
But then, that’s the dynamic between the pair. Jong-su is a simmering cauldron of resentment, class envy, and sexual frustration; Ben is a blank canvas, a suave charmer who seems like a catch one moment and a creep the next. What he tells Jong-su is borderline nonsensical: He scouts out abandoned greenhouses in rural areas such as this one, sprays some kerosene, and lights a match, delighting in the wanton destruction. “You can make it disappear as if it never existed,” he tells a disbelieving Jong-su. “It’s like they’re all waiting for me to burn them down.”
An adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, Burning is a narrative about the male ego’s many forms, and Ben’s destructive impulses suggest that he takes a childlike thrill in the freedom he possesses. But the way he describes his hobby—carefully selecting a greenhouse and burning it every couple of months—sounds almost like a metaphor for the work of a serial killer, hunting and stalking his prey. Jong-su eventually convinces himself that’s exactly what Ben was talking about after Hae-mi disappears. But the only real evidence the viewer has is this conversation; it is, without question, the most arresting exchange of dialogue in a movie this year.
Lee and his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, shoot the sequence like a fading dream; as the two chat, the sun dims in the sky, and the entire scene is bathed in blue twilight. Yeun plays Ben as so calm and collected that his story feels extremely mundane, like he’s talking about the weather or what to have for breakfast tomorrow. It only makes the confession seem that much stranger. In talking about his father, Jong-su was baring his soul; in offering this reply, Ben seems to be exposing the lack of one. “As I watch them burn to the ground, I feel great joy,” he says, with a hint of a smile.
Maybe Ben really does just like to burn greenhouses (though Jong-su finds no evidence of such). But even then, there’s something deeply unsettling about a wealthy, charismatic man engaging in needless destruction just to feel alive. Though Jong-su is no saint, he is at least an artist trying to engage in the act of creativity, whereas Ben is seemingly thrilled by nothing at all. But his blunt nihilism does reflect the blank heartlessness that, in Jong-su’s eyes, comes with being rich and powerful. It gives the entire conversation the feel of a fantasy, as though Ben is suddenly animated with an evil that only Jong-su can perceive. Their cryptic exchange is enough to lead the latter half of Lee’s film down a violent and corrosive path. But it’s just as easy to imagine that Ben’s confession never happened at all.
Previously: A Star Is Born
Next up: Widows
Imagine a place on the internet where a post that begins with “I’m not a feminist” is met with comments quoting Virginia Woolf and asking serious, clarifying questions. A place where a conversation about gun-control legislation unfurls into a thread of analogies, statistics, and self-reflection; where a discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of immigration is carried out in a series of building logical arguments. A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered.
This vision seems like the stuff of technology fantasy; spend five minutes on the platforms that host most of the web’s political arguments, and you’re likely to find name-calling, bigotry, sarcasm, and stubborn assumption. It’s a rare thing to stumble on an online dispute about politics that hasn’t devolved into a furious and chaotic shouting match, where no one can make out what is being said for the noise.
[Read: Is Reddit the world’s best advice column?]
But civil discourse does exist, at least in a small pocket of the internet. Reddit’s Change My View forum, founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, then a teenage musician in Scotland, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other. Its mission statement says that the subreddit is “built around the idea that in order to resolve our differences, we must first understand them.” Turnbull says that he created Change My View because of what he saw as a lack of places to turn to if you wanted to discuss an issue with people who took the opposite perspective. There was social media, but the goal on those platforms was largely not to listen and engage in search of insight. He wanted the forum to be conversational—a way of learning about an issue that wasn’t limited to self-directed research. Because of the unique oasis that Change My View represents from the troll-stalked depths of the rest of the internet, a number of academic studies have used its data to analyze how persuasion and civility work online. It has also spawned a blog and a podcast.
What might be more startling than the forum’s general tone of calm, reasonable disagreement is the fact that so many of its contributors seem to change their minds, even on flash-point subjects such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and gun control. (There are also lighthearted posts: A recent debate took on the intractable question of whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich.) While most users’ opinions aren’t turned 180 degrees, shifts in thinking and perspective occur regularly; “deltas” are awarded to commenters who manage to convince, persuade, or teach in some way. The forum’s rules system states that rudeness and hostility are banned, as are comments that don’t “contribute meaningfully” or challenge the original post’s view in some way, whether that means asking a question, offering an emotional appeal, or providing evidence for a claim. The result is that Change My View is the opposite of an echo chamber, where users reinforce the ideas that the group already holds and police anyone who tries to dissent. Instead, dissent is the point.
[Read: Reddit’s case for anonymity on the internet]
Change My View’s success largely rests on its strict rules and the dedicated team of moderators who enforce them. Elizabeth Weeks, one of the forum’s moderators and a 32-year-old attorney who works in Seattle, said that she was surprised at first by how much users wanted and depended on the rules. Weeks first heard about Change My View in 2013, when she was in law school, and thought that the forum presented an interesting premise, as well as a good place to practice formulating arguments. She enjoyed her conversations there because the rules “set up guardrails, so you could expect to have a quality experience each time.” The rules are one of the main things that users like about the forum, both because they mean that anyone who is behaving in a disruptive way is removed and because they set expectations about the environment that mean that users can operate under an assumption of good faith. Change My View’s rules system works because it is consistent, intuitive, and transparent. The moderation is predictable, and users modify their behavior accordingly.
[Read: Donald Glover fans have taken over a pro-Trump Reddit page]
Larger platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have struggled with swiftly and fairly moderating posts, with the result that users have little sense of which posts will be deleted for violating the platform’s terms of service and which won’t. That kind of confusion isn’t conducive to the patient and painstaking process of untangling a stranger’s presumptions and prejudices. If Twitter and Facebook are vast wildernesses, overgrown in some places and manicured in others, Change My View is more like a carefully tended garden. Weeks says that Turnbull’s leadership is a big part of why Change My View has been so successful. “Heads of companies often don’t understand the consequences of what they have built,” she says. “But he thinks about that quite a lot. Kal leads by example.”
Change My View’s most important lesson is one that applies beyond its moderated walls, one that anyone who has tried to engage in a productive political argument likely already knows. If you want to convince, meet people where they are rather than where you want them to be. “People respond better if you don’t start out guns blazing, accusing them of being dumb or nefarious,” Weeks says. “The most important thing you can do is listen to people,” says another moderator, Brett Johnson, a project manager in Houston who is 36. “If people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.”
Some of the arguments on Change My View make use of a strategy called moral reframing, a concept studied by the Stanford sociologist Robb Willer that relies on a person’s ability to empathize and understand the point of view of someone who holds different values. Moral reframing means appealing to the morality of the person you are trying to convince rather than your own. Most people have a hard time doing this without being coached, even though it can be an effective means of shifting deeply held beliefs. This “moral empathy gap” is why it is difficult for those with differing political views to understand each other.
Willer says that two factors contribute to the moral empathy gap: information and inclination. Increasingly, Americans don’t have access to or don’t seek enough information to fully understand the opposite side’s positions. Their news sources may represent only one slice of the political spectrum, or they live and work in communities that are overwhelmingly red or blue. The second factor is inclination. How motivated are we to try to bridge the divides between us? What really widens the moral empathy gap is not attitudinal polarization—that is, how the public generally feels about policy—but affective polarization, which measures how much political groups dislike one another. While both types of polarization are getting worse, and have been for some time, affective polarization is getting worse faster, Willer says.
This is why places such as Change My View are so important; the forum is proof that some people are still willing to engage in good faith with “the other side.” Willer says he thought Change My View was an interesting thing to study because it showed that normal people could reach their political counterparts if they wanted to. “It’s not just political strategists … a motivated or clever or empathic person can change somebody else’s mind on something. It’s a reassuring thought,” he says.
Turnbull, Change My View’s founder, says that one of his goals with the forum is to encourage people to change the way they look at admitting that they’ve encountered a perspective or a fact that they didn’t know about before, one that has the potential to alter their opinion about an issue. “People feel that changing their view is somehow losing … that it’s this embarrassing thing,” he says. “We are trying to change that perspective.” To an impressive extent, he has succeeded. Johnson says that this attitude is what initially intrigued him about Change My View when he came across it three years ago. “I found it to be a unique place,” he says. “Most places on the internet, most places in the world, they reward you for being right. But this was a community that celebrates being wrong.”
As a moderator, Weeks worries about the role the forum plays in giving a platform to problematic ideologies. Change My View’s rules don’t ban any specific topic—users may post on just about anything as long as they are willing to truly engage with challenges (that means no soapboxing or propaganda). She says that she came across a number of posts in the forum that disturbed her in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, a series of murders near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara committed by a college student named Elliot Rodger, who said that he wanted to “punish” women for not being attracted to him. For his misogynistic crimes, Rodger was eventually held up as a “hero” in some of the internet’s darkest corners.
“If we assume that these people want their views changed, then it’s probably a good thing that these conversations are being had, because hopefully they will change their views,” Weeks says. “But at the same time, the more people see those views being surfaced, they become normal. Are we contributing to an atmosphere where really terrible views that previously would have had no place to go are given a little bit of sunlight?” Those extreme views can and do find expression elsewhere on the internet, and in spaces where there is no one to counter or challenge them, but it’s a question that Weeks says she and the other moderators continue to wrestle with.
Change My View’s model has other limitations. Its users represent a self-selected pool of people who have already declared themselves interested in open-mindedness as a principle. Some of them view the conversations they have there as a game; these users tend to be law students practicing for the bar exam, or former high-school debate stars who think of argument as a sport. Amy Bruckman, a professor and an associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, worked on a study of Change My View in 2017. “It’s not clear to me that many people on Change My View really change their views,” she says. “But I think our data suggests that everyone walks away with a broadened perspective, and that’s absolutely of value.”
Johnson believes that the forum offers something else that is increasingly hard to find in the polarized political landscape of 2018: the chance to forge compromise. “Even if we come away and our minds haven’t changed, we understand why the opposition feels the way that they do,” he says. “Most of the time we agree about more than we disagree about, and if we were willing to come to the table and have a conversation, we would discover that most of the time, we are after the same ultimate goal. We just disagree on the best path to get there.”
Nothing in the presidency of Donald Trump combines tragedy and farce so perfectly as his decision to withdraw the 2,000 American troops in Syria.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted on the morning of December 19. The claim was false on its face. The Islamic State has lost most of its territory, but it retains thousands of fighters in the desert where the Euphrates River crosses from Syria to Iraq. Those fighters could be more dangerous as insurgents and terrorists than as the territorial army of a self-proclaimed caliphate.
Trump’s announcement was so ill-considered and rushed that it blindsided his most important advisers, prompting the resignations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGurk, special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition. Diplomats and aid workers involved in rebuilding liberated Syrian towns were given 24 hours to evacuate the country. U.S. Special Forces now have to abandon the training of the American-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a job that General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently said was only 20 percent finished. For American troops dedicated to the ethic of leaving no friend behind on the battlefield, Trump’s order has to be particularly bitter.
The Syrian Democratic Forces were the only local army capable of beating the Islamic State, and in pushing ISIS out of its strongholds—including the caliphate’s capital, Raqqa—the Syrian Kurds paid a heavy price. America will now leave them to their fate. Turkey considers the People’s Protection Force, or YPG, to be terrorists indistinguishable from the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey, and nothing now prevents the Turkish army from a murderous attack on the Syrian Kurds. In a phone call four days before Trump’s decision, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president, played him perfectly, flattering Trump by telling him that, with ISIS defeated, Turkey could take it from here—so why would America stick around for the Kurds? “You know what?” Trump reportedly said. “It’s yours. I’m leaving.” It’s yours—do what you want with it. Now that he’s rid himself of every U.S. official willing to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, Trump can turn for policy advice to foreign dictators.
[Read: The Kurds are betrayed again by Washington]
The American troops in Syria were never easy to explain. Since a final victory over the Islamic State isn’t possible, what was our goal? Not to end the Syrian civil war—that has never been a serious American aim, since it would require a military and diplomatic commitment that American voters and their elected leaders have no interest in making. The most that Americans have tried to achieve in Syria is to mitigate the worst—to deter Bashar al-Assad from gassing his own people, to stabilize areas occupied by the Syrian Democratic Forces, to counteract Russian and Iranian influence, to keep the Islamic State on the run, to prevent Turkey from slaughtering the Kurds. Those goals suggested an American presence, however small, without end.
Trump looked out across this unsatisfying landscape and saw another way, one more in tune with his own psychic needs, and perhaps with the real desires of most Americans: Declare victory and get out. Claim credit for both the win and the withdrawal. When our enemies return and our friends are wiped out—for not even Trump can believe that this is unlikely—find someone else to blame.
There’s a history behind Trump’s sudden decision. In the face of a war that offers no prospect of complete victory, or any victory, the temptation to betray an ally and call it success has seduced far more serious presidents than Trump. The historical pattern is instructive, and so is the fact that, this time, there’s a difference.
By 1969, the Vietnam War was lost. Instead of telling the American people this hard truth, the new president, Richard Nixon, and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, spent four more years in pursuit of what Nixon called “peace with honor.” He wanted to find a way out of Vietnam that wouldn’t hurt his reelection chances or his broader foreign policy. He wanted to be able to say that 58,000 Americans did not die in vain.
At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger were well aware that peace with honor wasn’t possible—an American withdrawal would mean the end of South Vietnam.
[Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz: Trump delivers a victory to Iran]
Kissinger’s solution was a deal that would leave the Saigon government in place long enough for the world to blame the South Vietnamese for their own inevitable downfall. “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence,” Kissinger told Nixon in August 1972, during peace talks with the North Vietnamese. “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together for a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.” Kissinger called this scheme “a decent interval.”
On January 23, 1973, after 12 years of Americans fighting and dying in Vietnam, Nixon announced the end of the war in a nationally televised speech that was full of lies. He said that the peace to be signed in Paris “has the full support of President Thieu and the government of the Republic of Vietnam”—our South Vietnamese ally. In fact, Thieu had to be coerced and deceived into accepting the deal with threats and false promises. Nixon told the country, “Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.” The people of Indochina enjoyed barely a day of peace before the fighting resumed, as both North and South Vietnam predictably broke the cease-fire. By keeping North Vietnamese troops in the South and Nguyen Van Thieu in power, the Paris Peace Accords guaranteed that the war would go on, without the Americans.
The cynicism of the decent interval—the deception and self-deception—ensured that the denouement in Vietnam would be cataclysmic. In April 1975, the Ford administration was unprepared to evacuate those Vietnamese partners of America whose lives were directly threatened by a communist takeover. But Kissinger was right: When the end came, not many Americans gave a damn. Congressional Democrats, who viewed any appropriations for Vietnam as wasteful efforts to prolong the war, refused to authorize money to save desperate people. The public, wanting to be rid of the nightmarish memory of the war, paid little attention. Only the heroic actions of individual Americans in South Vietnam, often working against official orders, rescued thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children. Far more were left behind. (This story is the subject of a powerful new book, Honorable Exit, by Thurston Clarke.)
[Daniel Shapiro: Trump leaves Israel in the lurch]
Barack Obama, born the year the American war in Vietnam began, became the next president faced with the elusive search for peace with honor. He opposed the war in Iraq as an Illinois state senator, and he was vindicated when the occupation produced a lethal insurgency, a civil war, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and a terrorist group called al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In 2008, Obama campaigned on a promise to withdraw American troops. At the beginning of his presidency, he announced that the combat mission in Iraq would end on August 31, 2010. And when that day arrived, he declared success:
Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest—it’s in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people—a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now it’s time to turn the page.
It would have been beyond any president’s capacity for bitter candor to say instead: “Iraq has no functioning government. The political class is incapable of compromise. Our chosen partner, Prime Minister Maliki, is thoroughly corrupt and sectarian. After seven years of this war, ordinary Iraqis still live without reliable services or security. We will leave behind a power vacuum that will be filled by Shiite pawns of Iran and Sunni extremists. At some point, Iraqi cities that our troops fought to clear will probably fall again to our enemies. Iraqis being hunted down for their association with us are on their own. We haven’t come close to meeting our responsibilities. But we’re tired, we have our own problems, and so this artificial date I set 18 months ago will have to do as an ending.”
In both Vietnam and Iraq, ending the war wasn’t the wrong policy. The wrong lay in Nixon’s cynically prolonging a lost war for four years, and in Obama’s failure to anticipate the return of chaos in Iraq. The wrong was to pretend that those wars were something other than historic disasters that could never be made right, and to shift our blame to others. If peace with honor is impossible, better to be honest about that fact than to allow an illusion to drift into a catastrophe.
Syria is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. Those 2,000 American troops weren’t an expression of imperial arrogance or blind doctrine. Obama sent them in 2014 with great reluctance, despite his long-standing fear of being drawn into a complex, multisided quagmire. The precipitating event was the threatened genocide of Iraqi Yazidis by murderers from the Islamic State, who killed and enslaved enough to make the threat credible. The Yazidis who survived as refugees—many of whom were later able to return to their homes—owe their lives at least in part to Obama’s intervention. Anyone who opposed it would have been answerable for a great crime against humanity, just as those who supported it are answerable for the thousands of civilians killed by American bombs in the push to free Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State. None of us gets off.
There were reasonable arguments for staying out of Syria, including the lack of any congressional or public debate. It would have been much better for Congress to have authorized the use of force—but the Republican majority washed its hands of the matter. In our hyper-partisan time, foreign policy itself would be just about impossible if it depended on Congress. Nor did congressional authorizations in Vietnam and Iraq ensure either a wise policy or public support.
In four years, four Americans have been killed in Operation Inherent Resolve. The lightness of American casualties has partly contributed to heavy civilian deaths—at least 1,400 in Raqqa—because keeping fewer boots on the ground means greater reliance on air power, which is less discriminating. On the whole, though, U.S. support for the Syrian Democratic Forces—made up of Arabs as well as Kurds—has gained a significant, if slow and painful, return on a small investment. For the first time, there’s a decent fighting force in Syria, a margin of hope between Assad’s barrel bombs and the Islamic State’s bloodlust. Any theory of international relations that looks with indifference on its elimination, and prefers a three-way fight among Erdogan, Assad, and ISIS, shouldn’t be called realist.
This time, an American withdrawal will not have been preceded by years of sunk blood and treasure—just by the president’s lust for bragging rights and his indifference to any cause greater than some chimerical “win.” Trump’s version of peace with honor—like so much about his presidency—is notable for its blatant stupidity, its needless cruelty. Everyone, even the Trump mouthpieces on Fox News, knows that the Islamic State isn’t “defeated.” The betrayal of our Kurdish and Arab allies is entirely gratuitous. They will pay the price; we will soon forget. There will be no peace for them and no honor for us.
As New Year’s Day approaches, I’ve been looking back and pondering the almost constant expressions of outrage that characterized another year. “The same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable,” the former Slate editor Julia Turner declared. “The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect … It’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch.”
In America’s digital culture, outrage is packaged to almost every niche in the citizenry. People feel a “duty” to be outraged by the offenses being trotted out, Choire Sicha argued in the same Slate story. “Maybe you were guided by fury. Maybe even as you cried out your emotion was moving on,” he observed. “Maybe you were exhausted and ironic. Maybe you were playing to the cheap seats, broadcasting a simulacrum of a human response because you, without realizing it, have become a strange magazine of one, a media brand of yourself.”
And then things turned:
You are speaking, first, into the echo chamber of your friends. But not everyone is in your silo. And so then some stranger is mad at you; then some friend is noticeably silent. You are blocked or you are yelled at. Spiraling conversations come from realms unexpected and unwanted. You are embarrassed, or you are angrier, defensive or passive-aggressive, or laughing at them all. It is a rush of emotion that stretches long but is only an instant. Then, with a slithery zip, the moment is sealed shut. That cycle is replicating itself now all around you …
All those words describe 2018.
Yet they were all written in 2014, when Slate published a year-end package that it called “The Year of Outrage.” It included an interactive calendar noting what Americans had been outraged about every day of that year.
[Charles Duhigg: The real roots of American rage]
Remember when NBC was under fire for broadcasting a comedian’s light mockery of Pearl Harbor survivors? And when a costume that the recording artist Macklemore performed in struck some as anti-Semitic? And when Jennifer Lawrence made a rape joke? And Ira Glass’s dig at Shakespeare? And a Washington Post contributor’s remark on marriage and gender violence? And Raven-Symoné’s comment about her racial identity?
Yeah, me neither.
As I perused the Slate calendar, I started to suspect that most of the items of outrage are forgotten even by many of the people who expressed outrage at the time. Yet four years on, outrage is still regularly pegged to matters as trivial as an aquarium’s tweet about an overweight otter, to cite a recent example.
“All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?” Jamelle Bouie asked in 2014. “It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular.”
He went on to characterize the costs and benefits of that mode:
By raging against something … you can voice your anger at the status quo, which, in the past year especially, seems to have frozen in place. And with a simple retweet, you can signify just what camp you’re in. In a sense, for the social-media left, cultural outrage is a substitute for politics.
You may not be able to move the Democratic Party toward a more populist agenda or stop the Republican takeover of state governments across the country or protect abortion rights or even make media more inclusive. But you can punish social transgressions and in doing so, affirm the values that are missing from so much of the digital and analog worlds. The problem, unfortunately, is that this doesn’t give you a material win. It doesn’t ameliorate any actual injustice. And it might, in the end, harm efforts to make change. If outrage stands in for activism, if we’re focused on the moral temperature of Internet individuals, then we’re distracted from the collective action—and collective institution building—that makes real reform possible.
There are other costs, too. Some of the “guilty” are over-punished for some social transgressions; even many innocents live in fear of online mobs.
And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous. For example, I’ve argued for many years that more outrage is warranted in response to U.S. drone strikes that kill innocent civilians. Circa 2009, one could convey the horrors that affected certain villages in Yemen or Pakistan by talking about the awfulness of “feeling unsafe in one’s home,” or “the erasure of a marginalized community.”
Now language like that signifies very little. Its power has been sapped by all the people who say they’re unsafe when they mean they’re uncomfortable, and by those who talk as if verbal criticism can literally erase its targets.
On the populist right, too, there are commentators aplenty who treat outrage as though it is an inexhaustible resource—“What kind of man,” a pandering Laura Ingraham once asked, “orders a cheeseburger without ketchup, but Dijon mustard?”—depleting it of its power instead of reserving it for the definitionally anomalous moments when it is both warranted and useful. Their counterfeiting does real harm.
In that same Slate package, Amanda Hess offered a characteristically astute defense of some digital outrage, describing its value to some people:
Social media allows people who have been boxed out of journalistic, academic, and political spaces to speak out about their lived experiences (#ICantBreathe) and call on the elites to address their own unexamined entitlements … Disrupting the rigid structures of language and standards of argumentation enforced by the elites is part of the point. As New Inquiry editor Ayesha Siddiqi said of social media in an interview with the Guardian this month: “Work that’s meant to liberate all people cannot be presented in a language available to very few.” The structures of racism, sexism, and homophobia are too powerful and ubiquitous to topple in a single blow, so online activists grab hold of millions of little examples and start chipping away.
Done right, chipping away can and does improve the world.
But she also warned about pitfalls of this mode: “This new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions, and thinkers who don’t play by the rules will themselves be made the target,” she wrote. “A new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness.”
[Read: Bari Weiss and the left-wing infatuation with taking offense]
So how to find the sweet spot? How is someone who wants to deploy outrage constructively, ethically, and effectively to proceed in the year ahead?
One answer is to study recent history and stay cognizant of its lessons. While “The Year of Outrage” was worth reading back when it was published, the package is even more valuable to today’s thoughtful reader. This is partly because the rise of Donald Trump (has any other president ever expressed outrage so promiscuously?), fueled partly by populist-right outrage and a backlash to political correctness, illustrates a consequence of outrage culture as it was described in 2014 that few anticipated.
But more than that, Slate’s daily chronicle of mostly forgotten outrages affords a chance to look back and reflect on a few specific instances when good was achieved—and lots more where nothing was gained at some cost.
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