Possibly the most distinctive voice in Maroon 5’s halftime show was Drake’s, prerecorded and piped in, praising Xanax as a sleep aid. The most recognizable face was that of SpongeBob Squarepants, who popped up on viewers’ screens just before a cartoon comet hit Maroon 5’s set, sending it into polite spouts of patio-furniture flames. The apocalypse, the implication seemed to be, will be tepid.
How fitting that the main attractions of Maroon 5’s concert were characters not on stage, and not even in the stadium. To the extent this halftime show will be remembered at all, it’ll be for outside factors: a boycott of the NFL triggered by Colin Kaepernick’s protests against racism; Atlanta’s queasy clearing of homeless camps in preparation for the Super Bowl; Tom Brady’s sixth ring; the trauma of seeing the Bud Knight’s skull crushed by a Game of Thrones brute. “Moves Like Jagger” is the sort of prescription-grade jingle meant to jam brain circuitry, but even it couldn’t, on Sunday night, whistle away the show’s dreary context.
Maroon 5, masterful at creating hits that take an active mental effort to distinguish from one another, did not enter this gig with the burden of great expectations. But the band still might have delivered neat arena gimmicks, like a giant swiveling The Voice throne or something. Instead they did the minimum, which perhaps was one of the things that the M-shape of the stage stood for. The only storyline came in the form of the singer Adam Levine’s striptease. At the start, his proto-Facetune cheekbones glinted above a chassis of athleisure; by the end, abs flaunted clip-art tattoos. To think it was a scandal when Janet Jackson removed such a smaller fraction of her shirt.
Mild pyro, drone-lamp skywriting, a drum line dressed for a gay bar, an imported black choir: All are tropes from more spectacular halftime shows of past, and they were mostly deployed here in a subdued, budget-friendly fashion. The exception was the gospel singer whose geyser of a voice highlighted just what Levine hadn’t achieved all along. His whimpery croon generally offers the only unique flavor in Maroon 5’s stews, but here its cloying tang was barely discernible. At no point did he convey that he wanted the folks at home to pause in their analysis of Brady’s shaky first half, though many of them no doubt did so anyways, for a moment, to sing along about the girl with the broken smile.
At least Levine’s vocals were broadcast on TV. Travis Scott, the Houston rap experimenter who really has nothing to do with Maroon 5, saw long patches of his “Sicko Mode” verses squelched by censors. The profanity of his lyrics would have seemed to present a foreseeable and work-aroundable problem, but—again—this was not a show that created the impression of anyone stretching for excellence. Scott still gave a shot at interesting visuals, radiating wolfish energy as he stalked around while wearing some sort of alien tool belt. Big Boi of OutKast brought a greater jolt of electricity later on, as well as the show’s most effective Atlanta shout-out, by rapping his caffeinating 2003 hit “The Way You Move” while swaddled in a majestic fur.
What was SpongeBob doing there? Fans of the Nickelodeon meme machine have long lobbied for a halftime tribute to a beloved Squarepants scene set at a football game, and after the show creator Stephen Hillenburg’s death at age 57 this past November, the call was heeded. The Yellow One’s inclusion was … touching isn’t the right word, because the backstory to the shout-out wasn’t conveyed to viewers. Charming—sure, SpongeBob is always charming. But maybe the best term for the interlude is useful. It filled time, it changed the subject, and it assisted in Maroon 5 fulfilling what felt like a hidden agenda suited for tense times: to be forgotten.
There is no place in America for blackface and Ku Klux Klan costumes. And it’s becoming clear that there may be no place in public office for Ralph Northam.
Since a photo from Northam’s medical-school yearbook page, showing two men dressed in blackface and Klan regalia, surfaced late last week, the Virginia governor has refused to do what every major politician has called on him to do: resign. After first admitting wrongdoing and apologizing on Friday, Northam contorted his original story, walking back his admission in a Saturday press conference while conceding that he, on a different occasion, had darkened his skin for a Michael Jackson impersonation.
But if Northam left the press conference confident in his chances of remaining governor, he was in for a surprise. The chorus calling for his exit is only growing louder. For a country grappling with complex debates on race and its role in American life, the Northam scandal has led to an uncommon consensus, with representatives from both major parties applying the same harsh scrutiny to his actions.
Just hours before the Super Bowl, two days before a much-anticipated State of the Union address, and 12 days before another potential government shutdown, the scandal and its fallout dominated the Sunday-morning news shows. (The exception was CBS’s Face the Nation, which aired a prerecorded interview with President Donald Trump.)
“Hello, I’m Jake Tapper in Washington, where the state of the union is shaking our heads,” Tapper began his program. The CNN anchor said this was “the first time in American political history that a politician attempted to explain his innocence regarding one racist, blackface incident by pointing to another one that he recalled participating in.”
“Northam’s political future is clearly in peril,” Chuck Todd, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, said in his opening monologue. “Virtually the entire Democratic establishment, including Virginia’s two Democratic senators, has called for his resignation. And Northam’s press conference only accelerated those calls … It’s possible that 10 or 20 years ago a politician like Northam could have apologized his way out of this. But the political climate has clearly changed.”
[Conor Friedersdorf: Why Ralph Northam should resign]
Todd’s first guests were two Democratic members of Congress, Representative Karen Bass of California, the Congressional Black Caucus chair, and Representative Donald McEachin of Virginia, the caucus whip. Their denouncements of Northam were uncompromising, reflecting Todd’s assessment that Democrats are showing “zero tolerance,” even with one of their own. Bass said Northam has been “disingenuous” in the scandal’s fallout, and “still does not understand the seriousness of his actions.”
McEachin, meanwhile, rejected the governor’s claim that what’s depicted in the yearbook photo was “commonplace” in eastern Virginia in 1984, when the picture was taken. “But let’s assume without conceding that it was commonplace,” McEachin continued. “Slavery [at one time] was commonplace; that doesn’t make it right … Jim Crow was commonplace; that didn’t make it right. And so, too, if blackface was commonplace in 1984, that doesn’t make it right. And Ralph should have known better.”
As Todd suggested in his monologue, Democrats seem to understand that their criticisms of other politicians for racism will fall short if they are hypocritical about racist elements within their own party. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a potential Democratic candidate in 2020, told Todd that Northam could “contribute to [a] dialogue” aimed at helping Virginia heal from this scandal—but only once he resigns. “This country hasn’t dealt well with the issues of race,” Brown said. “I mean, we have a president who’s a racist.”
On State of the Union, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, another 2020 Democratic hopeful, told Tapper, “Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue be the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
Only one Democratic voice on the news programs offered a defense of Northam. Former Representative Jim Moran of Virginia told This Week’s George Stephanopoulos that Northam should not resign. “I hate to be on the other side of virtually all of my friends on this, but I do disagree with their judgment, because I think it is a rush to judgment,” Moran said. “Even if the worst case scenario is true … I think there is an issue of redemption.”
Northam appears to be counting on Americans to see things Moran’s way—to believe that he at least deserves more time to explain himself. But for most of the governor’s peers in American politics, his time has already run out.
President Donald Trump said in an interview Sunday that he prefers to have temporary Cabinet secretaries, suggesting that the current, unsettled state of the executive branch is likely to stay in place, though it puts him at odds with the U.S. Constitution.
Trump conducted the interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan as part of Super Bowl Sunday activities. Portions of the exchange aired on Face the Nation in the morning and as part of pregame coverage in the afternoon. The president covered a broad range of topics. Trump spoke at length on foreign policy, criticizing his own top intelligence officers’ conclusions about Iran and North Korea. He defended his plans to pull U.S. troops back from the Middle East, and questioned “whether we should have been [in Afghanistan] in the first place,” seeming to challenge the wisdom not only of the long occupation but also of the post-9/11 invasion.
The president also said that he would not bar his son Barron from playing football, but that he would not “steer him” toward the sport, citing its health risks. His comments echo similar remarks by former President Barack Obama in 2013, but contrast with his own previous mockery of NFL concussion rules.
[Read: Donald Trump’s double standard on free speech and the NFL]
But perhaps the most important comments Trump made were about his aides and the Cabinet. Currently, six acting officers are in Cabinet-level jobs: Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, Acting United Nations Ambassador Jonathan Cohen, and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney.
“It’s easier to make moves when they’re acting,” Trump said Sunday, echoing similar comments he made to Reuters in January. But whereas the president told the wire service that he was “in no hurry” to fill the jobs permanently, he suggested to Brennan that he prefers the temporary jobs as a matter of course.
“Some are doing a fantastic job,” he said. “I like acting because I can move so quickly. It gives me more flexibility.”
The problem is that the arrangement also conflicts with the Constitution, which says the Senate must offer “advice and consent” on nominees for top jobs. Of the six open positions, five require confirmation. Trump has nominated permanent candidates for two of the posts: William Barr, a former attorney general, in Whitaker’s place, and Wheeler as permanent administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He has reportedly chosen Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, as UN ambassador, but has not formally nominated her.
No matter how much Trump likes the flexibility, the Constitution doesn’t: It requires the president to put nominees to Senate approval in part to avoid chaotic policy making and mismanagement of government. The Constitution does allow recess appointments, and past presidents have sometimes made extensive use of them, including to install candidates the Senate opposes while calling for their confirmation.
Trump, however, isn’t bothering. He doesn’t care whether the Senate has a role, and apparently he’d rather it not, because that makes it easier for him to fire people. His position is especially brazen because, with the Senate in Republican hands, he could get nearly any nominee he wants confirmed. His preference is to flout the Constitution and keep his aides on edge.
[Read: Why would Bill Barr even want to be Trump’s attorney general?]
The president offered several obviously false statements about his Cabinet during the interview. He said he fired former Defense Secretary James Mattis, which is a lie—Mattis resigned in protest of Trump’s troop-withdrawal plans. Trump also claimed that reports that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was recruiting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to run for Senate were “fake news”—only to be reminded by Brennan that Pompeo had validated them.
The other acting Cabinet officials aside, Barr is expected to be confirmed soon in the Senate, though Democrats this week forced a postponement of the vote. Barr is expected to eventually receive a report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and will have to decide whether to release the report to the public.
Trump said the decision will be “totally up to the attorney general,” though in an interview with The Daily Caller this week he again asserted that “I had the right if I wanted to to end everything … Many people thought that’s what I should do.”
Pressed on whether he’d be okay with the report being public, Trump told Brennan, “I don’t know. It depends. I have no idea what it’s going to say.” Yet Trump also said, “You have to get rid of the Russia witch hunt.” He did not indicate how he thought that should happen—or what he expected on that front from his new attorney general.
A special Sunday event, a photographic essay celebrating a few of these magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North and South America, captured here in photos taken over the past few years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely) I invite you to have a look, it was a real hoot putting this together.
You know this scandal by now: the one with the powerful man, and the unearthed yearbook page, and the wave of outrage that follows. This time, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is cornered.
On Friday afternoon, Northam’s 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page surfaced online, and showed—right there below his name—a photo of two people: one man in blackface, standing next to a person in the standard uniform of the Ku Klux Klan, complete with a pointy white hood. The people are holding beers. They appear to be at a costume party.
Northam, a Democrat, has been called on to resign by members of both parties and several 2020 presidential candidates. Over the past 24 hours, the governor’s explanations for the photo and his own history of wearing blackface have shifted significantly. He first apologized, then said he wasn’t one of the men in the photo, then added that he once wore shoe polish to dress up as Michael Jackson, and so far is refusing to step down. After first declining to identify which man in the photo was him, he now feels sure that neither is, and that the photo appeared on his page only because of an error in yearbook production.
There’s more. In a press conference, after telling reporters about his Michael Jackson costume, Northam nearly moonwalked right there on the stage, as though to emphasize that it had all been intended in jest. His wife managed to stop him.
Whether Northam is in that photo is unclear, but it’s very difficult to believe he can’t remember who is. And in his bizarre denial, he calls to mind the most cartoonish national stereotypes of the South: Not only does Northam seem to want you to believe that Klan hoods and blackface were common and forgettable sights, but that white southerners were too dumb to know that invocations of racial violence could be anything but harmless fun. I don’t know whether Northam is lying about himself, but he’s not telling the truth about Virginia.
[Read: The Charlottesville rally wasn’t a protest. It was a pride march.]
The American South’s history is dark and violent. Harm has been inflicted upon black people on a massive scale for hundreds of years. Southerners who are uncomfortable with hearing criticism of that history often lean on an excuse favored by advocates of and apologists for white supremacy across the country: It was a different time and a specific place, and it can’t be judged by today’s standards. That’s not exactly right. It wasn’t that people didn’t understand what they were doing for all those generations. It was that they faced no consequences for their actions, and if they felt inclined to do something, they were free to do it.
I grew up and went to college in the Deep South, with parents who did the same. In my 25 years in the region, I saw one person in blackface, and no Klan hoods ever. I encountered the man in blackface at a Halloween party in the mid-2000s. He had painted himself brown to dress up as the rapper Lil Wayne. Any memory I had of my own costume is lost to history, but I’ll never forget his. I also remember the handful of times I’ve ever heard a white person say the N-word out loud in front of me. White people say or wear those things because they want to scare or shock. It works. You remember.
My dad, raised in small-town Georgia in the 1950s and ’60s, often scoffs at the kind of hand-waving Northam is doing in an attempt to keep his job. Even half a century ago, even in the rural South, his conservative parents made clear to him how he was expected to treat people, and what kind of language they wouldn’t allow. Everyone knew right from wrong, and blatant acts of racism have always been blatantly racist. This was true when my dad was a kid, and it was certainly true among grad students in the mid-1980s.
A Klan hood has always been a Klan hood: It’s meant to terrify and intimidate, to make legible the violence intended by the person wearing it. You’re supposed to remember a Klan hood. Northam, I would expect, remembers too.
Kevin McCarthy finally has the job he’s dreamed of—chief of his Republican Party in Congress—yet it’s anything but his dream job. He is the leader of the minority in a legislative body in which the minority has no juice. He is not the Speaker of the House.
So, I ask him, on a recent cold morning in the middle of the government shutdown—a confrontation in which his powerlessness gave him virtually no public role—with a fire crackling in his spacious office on the second floor of the Capitol, and a larger-than-life-size impressionistic portrait of Ronald Reagan staring down from the Williamsburg blue wall, “What’s second prize?”
McCarthy lets loose with a lengthy, unforced laugh before turning serious, “Well, it’s the old Hertz commercial,” he says. “We gotta try harder.”
Well, it’s the old Avis commercial, actually, but McCarthy’s rueful answer seems somehow appropriate, even a bit endearing, coming from a man who is often pigeonholed as a likable and ambitious if not-ready-for-primetime leader. He made a candid point; it just didn’t come out of his mouth quite right. After all, this is the man who lost his chance to succeed John Boehner as speaker in 2015 in part because of his inelegant suggestion that House Republicans had launched hearings into the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya to drive down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.
It was also McCarthy who was caught on tape in 2016 telling a group of House Republicans that Donald Trump might be on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, only to become derided (or praised) as one of Trump’s biggest boosters in Congress, (“My Kevin,” Trump calls him), and so devoted to the president that he says he talks to Trump three, four, even five times a day, and once sent him a jar of Starburst candies containing only the president’s two favorite pink and red flavors: strawberry and cherry.
[Read: House Republicans Still Can’t Get Along]
Conventional Washington wisdom may wonder whether McCarthy has the smarts and savvy to succeed as a leader in Trump’s Republican Party—much less return House Republicans to power. But underestimating him might be a risk. Few people understand better than McCarthy, who turned 54 last week, the challenge he faces, and if he thinks that people doubt his mojo, he’s not inclined to let it show. Just as he did when he led Republicans in the California State Assembly more than a decade ago, McCarthy has made sure that the sign outside his office suite reads not “Minority Leader” but the less modest , “Republican Leader,” despite his party’s humbling loss of 40 seats in last fall’s midterms.
More than 70 percent of the members in his newly-constituted Republican conference have never served in the minority, but McCarthy is not among them. He arrived in Washington 12 years ago, when his party had just lost its congressional majorities and was smarting under Nancy Pelosi’s first reign as speaker. “There was only 13 of us, the smallest class since 1914 in the Republican Party,” McCarthy remembers, “and I always felt like we could weather any storm.”
He then rose faster through the ranks of his party’s House leadership than any of his predecessors, and in 2010 was a principal architect of the GOP’s successful re-capture of the majority.
[Read: Was I Wrong About Kevin McCarthy and Benghazi?]
Just two years ago, the Democrats were in even worse shape than he is now, because they’d lost the House, the Senate and the White House. “They got passionate, they got motivated, and it forced them to change what they had done in the past, because it had failed enough,” McCarthy says.
Does the GOP now have the same opportunity? “Very much so. The question will be, will we allow it? And that’s what I’ve got to make sure we allow to happen.”
That won’t be easy, with the conservative House Freedom Caucus still skeptical of McCarthy’s ideological purity on the one hand, and many senior party strategists urging a more moderate appeal to minorities and swing voters on the other. Jack Pitney, a former House Republican policy adviser who is now a professor at Claremont McKenna College, notes that McCarthy’s predicament is especially difficult. “He is in the worst possible position for a congressional leader,” Pitney told me. “Being in the House minority, yet being in the president’s party, he’ll take all the blame for every bad thing that happens in national politics now, but being in the minority has absolutely no influence over legislation. When it comes to fundraising, he’s at a disadvantage. He has almost no power to reward or punish members.”
[Read: Will Kevin McCarthy Be Any Different Than John Boehner?]
One top California Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me. “I like Kevin, and I’m intimately familiar with his personality and his m.o. But it’s all about Kevin.”
Some of McCarthy’s allies are not so sure. The Republican pollster Frank Luntz has known him for 25 years, and occasionally served as an informal adviser. “I think Kevin has a great opportunity to redefine the Republican Party as a party of kindness and decency because that’s who he is,” Luntz says. “And I think he’s the right guy at the right time to say to skeptical voters, ‘Look, we do have principles and we do have values.’’’
McCarthy points to his swift removal of Representative Steve King from committee assignments after he made comments in support of white supremacy as evidence that he’s up to that task. But he punts when I ask him about Trump’s own long history of racially charged remarks. “I look at it like this,” he says. “Steve King sits in the House. It’s my responsibility in the House.”
A former House Republican leadership aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, sums up McCarthy’s existential dilemma: “He’s basically trying to square the circle by claiming to be a forward-looking leader, while also staying close to Trump.”
When I ask McCarthy what his relationship with Trump has gotten for California, he offers a small but instructive example. When wildfires were raging through the state last fall, McCarthy heard from emergency management officials in California that a disaster declaration was languishing on Trump’s desk. The president had threatened on Twitter to revoke federal funds for the state over what he called its mismanagement of its forests. So McCarthy immediately called the president to explain that the fires’ victims weren’t just Malibu movie stars but the middle-class residents of Paradise, where 13,000 homes had been destroyed. Trump signed the disaster declaration that same night, and later toured the fire scenes with McCarthy and California’s newly elected Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. McCarthy and Newsom have a close working relationship, and McCarthy has helped foster an open line of communication between Newsom and Trump, one that Pelosi, for example, could not have forged.
But McCarthy has already paid a steep price for cleaving to the president, effectively forcing his home-state delegation to walk the plank by voting for Trump’s tax cuts, which capped the deductibility of state and local taxes and home mortgage interest, and thus amounted to a tax increase for many voters in a high-tax state like California. In the process, McCarthy solidified his own position with House conservatives, but lost all of the seven Republican-held districts in California that Democrats had targeted as vulnerable. The state Republican delegation was cut in half, to the lowest percentage since 1883, barely 13 percent of California’s 53 House seats.
"This very well could be the year you look back as the year the Republican Party ends in California as a viable force,” says Rob Stutzman, a veteran Republican strategist who worked for former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I continue to think that might very well be the case, especially if Trump's on the ballot in 2020. We also have to look to 2022 to see what kind of redistricting maps we get. I think if Trump's not on the ballot in 2020, I wouldn't foreclose the potential to win back some of those seats."
To be fair, Stutzman says, Republicans in California would be worse off without McCarthy, who has helped raise money for the party and who tried to recruit a stronger gubernatorial candidate than John Cox, who lost by nearly 25 points to Newsom. But McCarthy’s strategy to spur statewide Republican turnout with a ballot measure to repeal recent gas tax increases and vehicle registration fees was a bust. In our interview, McCarthy ticks off a raft of reasons for the Republican defeats, from the historic pattern in any new president’s first midterm election, to fears about health care, to recent changes in California law that allow same-day voter registration and the so-called harvesting of absentee ballots, in which organizers are allowed to collect vote by mail ballots and deliver them to polling places on Election Day, making it easier for people to vote.
But McCarthy also acknowledges the shifting demographic realities that have hurt his party in places like Orange County, where once reliable Republican strongholds are now much more diverse. “We’ve got to solve the suburban area,” he says. “We have a definite problem whereas we’ve shrunk in our representation for women and minorities. We’ve got to look more like America.”
Stuart Spencer, who at 92 is the grand old man of California Republican strategists, with experience dating back to Nelson Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential primary and Ronald Reagan’s runs for governor and president, has been warning for 25 years that the GOP’s harsh anti-immigration stance would hurt it with emerging Hispanic voters. In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson promoted Proposition 187, a ballot measure to withhold public services from undocumented immigrants. It passed and helped him win re-election, but was later mostly overturned in court and started the Republican Party’s long decline in the state.
“By 2025, a majority of the state’s going to be Hispanic,” Spencer says. “If you’re a politician, you’d better look at this stuff. Ronald Reagan won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. Today, a Republican statewide would be lucky to get 18 percent. You don’t need them all. You just need in that 35 percent range, and you’re competitive.”
Former State Senator Jim Brulte, who is ending a six-year stint as chair of the California Republican Party, notes that the party’s decline in the state began well before Trump. "Republicans have to deal with issues that resonate in the non-white communities, and that doesn't mean we have to walk away from our philosophies,” he says. “I don't think we spend nearly enough time talking about school choice, for example. The worst schools in this country are in poor and minority neighborhoods and the Democrats are captives of organized labor."
There’s scant evidence so far that McCarthy is inclined to tackle such policy issues, or would have the clout to move legislation if he did. “He’s not driven by ideology,” one old friend says. “He’s driven by politics.” McCarthy comes by his own support for Trump honestly; his district in Bakersfield, an oil town just over 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is about the reddest in the state. Trump carried it with 58 percent of the vote. The son of an assistant fire chief, McCarthy grew up in a family of Catholic Democrats, but was drawn to Ronald Reagan after he started a deli with $5,000 in lottery winnings and grew frustrated at the regulations governing small businesses.
He used profits from the deli to put himself through Cal State Bakersfield, where he later also earned an M.B.A. and rose through the ranks of the California Young Republicans, later heading the national organization. He cut his teeth working for Representative Bill Thomas, the longtime chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, who was often ranked among both the smartest and meanest members of Congress. McCarthy’s own temperament could hardly be more different. After winning election to the State Assembly in 2002, he quickly made friends and, helped by term limits, was elected his party’s leader in the chamber before his freshman year was out. He enjoyed a similarly swift rise after being elected to succeed the retiring Thomas in Congress in 2006, and became one of the “Young Guns” including Paul Ryan, who helped the GOP retake Congress in 2010.
In Sacramento, McCarthy lived in a group house with other members, and it was not only a place where colleagues could gather to play pool and poker, but to be drilled by McCarthy in legislative procedure and electoral maps. And because he is a non-drinker, he says, “I learned things.” When I ask if he doesn’t drink because he worries it might be a problem for him—he had a grandmother who drank too much—he says, “We didn’t really drink growing up, so it’s just not my deal.” Then he adds, “But if you drink, amongst elected officials, I have an advantage over you. Why would I want to get so…Look, I couldn’t get into Princeton. I don’t come from a background that’s all Republican. I’ve had to scrap for everything. And so I need advantages to get where I’m at. And the advantage I have over other people is I don’t give up, and I think I’ll work harder than you. Why do I want to give an advantage to somebody of doing something stupid?”
In the short term, McCarthy says, he intends to take a personal hand in recruiting Republican candidates for 2020. He still sleeps on his district office couch in the Rayburn Building and flies home to Bakersfield most weekends to stay in touch with his constituents. It’s a long trip, with a connecting flight through Denver. It’s the price he has to pay for his position, a position that is likely to get only harder as House Democrats hold Trump’s feet to the fire over the next two years.
“Whatever he does in his life,” says Stuart Spencer, the long-time GOP strategist, “if he wants to keep his district happy, he’s going to have to be in one place. If he’s going to be a leader, he has to be in another place. So he has some major policy and philosophical decisions to make.”
There was something sadly poetic about hundreds of journalists being cut loose by some of the biggest media outlets the same week that the veteran news anchor Tom Brokaw provoked a firestorm of criticism with his comments about Latinos and immigration on last Sunday’s Meet the Press.
Brokaw made the case that the mere presence of Latinos has scared conservatives into supporting the push for a border wall. He explained that conservatives in the Donald Trump era have told him they are taking a hard stance on Latin American immigration because “I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.”
“Hispanics should work harder at assimilation,” Brokaw said. “That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. They ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all of their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities, and that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.”
[Reihan Salam: What Tom Brokaw got wrong about assimilation]
The problem, I realized, was bigger than a single journalist, advanced in years and speaking off the cuff, making unsupportable claims. It was that no one on the panel was positioned to respond to, or able to explain, from their own lived experience, what he had failed to understand. And listening to Brokaw speak, I couldn’t help but think that by laying off hundreds of journalists—many of them journalists of color—HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Yahoo, AOL, and Gannett were raising the likelihood that marginalized groups will continue to be excluded from these conversations.
What Brokaw and the conservatives he cited fail to comprehend is the degree to which people of color already go out of their way to placate white paranoia, easing fear at their own expense.
From a young age, most people of color are taught that they have to minimize their identity in some form in order to gain acceptance and appear less threatening. It’s a full-time job, with no days off.
I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Bad Boys, in which the co-stars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, arrive at the house of a potential lead in a murder case. Smith and Lawrence, who play brash Miami detectives, are immediately suspicious because the door is wide open. Smith shouts, “Don’t be alarmed, we’re Negroes,” as the pair enters the house. Lawrence tells Smith, “There’s too much bass in your voice. That scares white folks. You got to sound like them.” And then Lawrence hilariously imitates a white person’s voice.
It was a funny scene, but it was baked in the uncomfortable truth that people of color must be fluent in code-switching as a condition of their survival.
[Read: The complexity of black girlhood is at the heart of “The Hate U Give”]
The burden of duality has become even heavier for people of color because conservatives, to their credit, have successfully defined who gets to be considered American. That definition is almost always concentrated on promoting and enabling entitled whiteness—the kind that makes it perfectly acceptable to call the police on black people for sitting peacefully in Starbucks, barbecuing in the park, entering their own apartment, or engaging in the very American practice of selling lemonade to neighbors. Even when people of color do very American things, they still aren’t seen as being members of American culture.
Had Meet the Press bothered to facilitate a conversation that wasn’t centered on white fragility, it could have told viewers that the use of Spanish among Latinos in major metropolitan cities has declined substantially over the past decade, from 78 percent in 2006 to 73 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.
Pew also noted that the use of Spanish among Latinos drops significantly with each generation. Overall, 71 percent of second-generation Latino parents who have at least one immigrant parent speak Spanish to their children. But among third-generation Latino parents, that number drops to 49 percent. From 2000 to 2014, the percentage of Latinos age 5 to 17 who said they speak only English at home jumped from 73 percent to 88 percent.
[Read: The intrusion of white families into bilingual schools]
So most young Hispanics seem to have been doing exactly what Brokaw and others with his mind-set want: learning to assimilate. But there is a tinge of sadness to these numbers, as well. Many immigrants have insisted that their children learn only English, even if that means surrendering a chunk of their own cultural inheritance, because they believe that speaking Spanish will lead to their children being unfairly stereotyped and prevent their advancement.
Instead of being upset by the persistence of Hispanic enclaves, Brokaw should have been asking how the hostility directed at Latinos has created an environment in which many of them only feel safe to be their true and full self in their own communities.
It’s futile to try to capitulate to people who will never be satisfied. The irony here is that it’s not Latinos who have historically struggled to assimilate in a changing world. It’s people like Brokaw.
Because it is the 15th birthday of Facebook, and because that span seems both an extremely short and an extremely long amount of time for Facebook to have existed, I recently rewatched The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of the website that would reshape the world.
Here’s one thing that’s striking today about the movie: how efficiently this work of mythmaking, with its claustrophobic settings and taut instrumentals and don’t-go-through-that-door ironies, doubles as a work of horror. In the years that have passed since Mark Zuckerberg built the site that became TheFacebook (from his Harvard dorm room, the myth pretty much requires its contributors to add), the hacker’s ethos, move fast and break things, has steadily hacked its way into people’s lives. So much has been moved. So much has been broken. And The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and featuring Jesse Eisenberg as the shuffling, shower-shoe-wearing founder, anticipated some of the fallout. The movie’s trailer is set to a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” a song that sings of longing and belonging and perfect bodies and perfect souls, and that choice tells you a lot about the lessons espoused by this particular fable.
The Social Network is in many ways a flawed movie; it got one of the biggest things, however, right: It knew enough to ironize the Great Man breathlessness that typically defines the biopic. Its heady historical revisionism (“I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth,” Sorkin said; “I want it to be to storytelling”) finally warns, through metaphor, of the future: what it will mean for people to live lives that are conducted, at least in part, online. Sorkin’s twist on Luddism was to question not the march of technological progress, but rather the Mark of it—the historical figure who drove things forward, nearly by accident. Zuckerberg, the person, is famously a fan of ancient epics (he quoted The Aeneid, via instant message, in a New Yorker profile timed to The Social Network’s release); the journey his likeness takes through the movie, though, is the path of the antihero. This is an indictment at feature length.
That’s clearest when the movie mocks one of the ideas that, from the beginning and definitely in the nearly 10 years since The Social Network premiered, has become one of Facebook’s own dearest myths: connection. Connection as origin; connection as mission; connection as justification. “He uses the word ‘connect,’” Zadie Smith wrote in a 2010 New York Review of Books essay about the film, “as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”
The usage makes for very good marketing. “Connection,” after all, both as an aim and as a gauzy brand, is pretty much incontrovertible. (What monster would object to a goal of human connection?) And that is precisely how Facebook has treated it: as an argument that answers itself. Here is the message of a TV ad, “Here Together,” that Facebook ran in 2018—yet another pseudo-apology issued by the company, this time not for violating individual users’ privacy, but rather for transgressions of a more sweeping sort:
We came here for the friends. We got to know the friends of our friends. Then our old friends from middle school, our mom, our ex, and our boss joined forces to wish us a happy birthday. Then we discovered our uncle used to play in a band, and realized he was young once too. And we found others just like us. And just like that, felt a little less alone. But then something happened. We had to deal with spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse. That’s going to change. From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends. Because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer.
It’s sly and sort of genius, what the company did there. We. Our. But then. Facebook. Friends. We all get a little closer. “Connection,” in this epic in miniature, is merely implied, but it is implied so thoroughly—so tautologically—that Facebook and we become indistinguishable. And spam, clickbait, fake news, data misuse: These become, in the alchemy of the ad, problems not for a business to solve on behalf of its customers but instead vague challenges, devoid of agent or origin, that unfortunately—inconveniently—“we had to deal with.” (“Genocidal rhetoric” is another such problem, but that tends not to play well on TV.)
Connection is so easy to talk about. It’s so easy to celebrate, and validate, and strive for. But it is also, like so much else, a construction: a manufactured good, made by people as well as for them. Facebook, for its part, has built a series of very specific beliefs into its version of “connection,” and those beliefs are an element of the product that the company exports, every moment, from Menlo Park. Connection branding, you could call it, minimizes all that work in favor of a hazier way of humanism. Deployed as messaging and as marketing, “connection” allows Facebook, the powerful company, always to be changing the subject, from it to us—the users who are also, as it happens, its product. Facebook isn’t really doing the connecting, it demurs; you are. We are. And therefore the structural unsoundness that has been built by Facebook, into Facebook, is not strictly the problem of Facebook. It is the problem of all of us, collectively. The tragedy of the commons, except these commons come with a board of directors.
The Social Network, as horror by another means, explores the human dimensions of the tragedy. It’s interested in misalignments of interest between the good of the network and the good of the people who populate it. It cares about the costs of industrialized connection. It insists, for example, that an intimate element of Facebook’s founding mythology is Facemash, the Hot or Not–style site that Zuckerberg built in 2003, just before he built TheFacebook: The site posted pictures of Harvard women—only women—and asked users to judge which one was more attractive. The whole thing was sexist and juvenile and cruel, and it nearly got Zuckerberg kicked out of Harvard long before he chose to kick himself out. Zuckerberg, today, downplays Facemash’s significance, to Facebook’s story and his own; in the commencement speech he delivered at Harvard in 2017, he referred to the site as merely a “prank.”
Facemash lives on, however, in The Social Network—not as a joke, but rather as an omen. The site comes to life haphazardly (Zuckerberg, bitter at being rejected by a woman he’s been dating, decides to get his revenge), and that, in turn, distills the film’s defining concern: Figuratively and sometimes literally, slightly beer-drunk college sophomores are deciding for the rest of us what, and who, matters. A few people, with all their quirks and contingencies, are shaping the spaces that summon us. Physical infrastructures—bridges, skyscrapers, freeways, subway entrances—have their own biases, of course; but digital worlds pervade. And so do the assumptions that are built into them. The defining aesthetic of Facebook, its accent color of dusky indigo, was selected because Zuckerberg, save for certain shades of blue, is color-blind. Which is a small thing that hints at a much bigger one—Miranda Priestly’s insights about the trickle-down effects of cerulean, made even more acute: Here, consumers end up with the specific shade not through calculations of capitalism, but instead through an arbitrary fact of one person’s life, steadily scaled into communal truth.
Critics often wonder about the moral interplay of the art and the artist; many questions get flattened, however, when the art is also the space people live in, and the artist is also an industrialist. By virtue of his status as a digital architect, Mark Zuckerberg also defines what constitutes “abuse,” and what does not. What constitutes hate speech, and what does not. What constitutes a threat—to real people, with real lives—and what does not.
That is another element of the gospel of connection: Those who espouse it most loudly are often blithely disconnected from the people whose pliant realities they mold. Jack Dorsey, the co-creator and current CEO of Twitter, tweeted about the mental benefits of fasting just after a partial government shutdown that found masses of federal workers unable to pay for food. Howard Schultz, the billionaire founder of Starbucks, is waging a presidential campaign with a current constituency of pretty much nobody, premised almost entirely on bland assumptions that accompany the blunt facts of wealth. Companies run by men flood the market with digital assistants—always cheerful, always responsive—that are named after women. Otherwise educated people insist that algorithms can’t be racist (they can), based on the truncated logic that algorithms are written by data, not people. Connection is a beautiful thing; it can also be a dangerous thing.
Mark Zuckerberg, in that 2017 Harvard commencement speech, defined the Millennial generation like this: “We understand the great arc of human history bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers—from tribes to cities to nations—to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.” Later in the speech—an address so full of willful optimism that it made people wonder whether he was planning his own presidential run—Zuckerberg pointed to graduates in the crowd who had done exceptional work for the cause of connection. “And this is my story, too,” he said: “Connecting one community at a time, and keeping at it until one day we can connect the whole world.”
You have to ask, again: Who is the “we” in that formulation? What is “the whole world”? There are reflections of the Gilded Age in this era of digital expansion—extreme wealth, restive people, new structures being grafted onto the ones that were already there. How fitting, then, that one of the moment’s great myths is also one of its great anxieties: We. Our. But then. A small collection of people, appointed first by chance and then by themselves, attempting to decide for the rest of us what it means, finally, to connect.
Since the end of the Cold War, Beijing has viewed the United States as its chief geopolitical rival, yet official Washington has only recently awakened to this strategic competition. But as American observers start to see China’s ambitions more clearly, they have also begun to misdiagnose the challenges they pose. Political scientists are discussing “power-transition theory” and the “Thucydides Trap,” as if China were on the verge of eclipsing the United States in wealth and power, displacing it on the world stage. There are two contradictory problems with this view.
The first is that this is not how the Chinese themselves understand their rise. When Chinese President Xi Jinping calls for Chinese to realize the “China dream of national rejuvenation,” he is articulating the belief that China is simply reclaiming its natural political and cultural importance. China is not, as was once said of Imperial Germany after its unification, “seeking its place in the sun.” Rather, it is retaking its rightful place as the sun.
The second is that it’s an open question whether China will achieve rejuvenation in the face of both a seemingly stagnating economy and party factionalism. Xi is more powerful than his predecessors, but his rule is also more fragile. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long faced a crisis of legitimacy, but Xi’s transformation of China into a high-tech police state may hasten this crisis. These factors combine to make China more dangerous in the short term but also less competitive in the longer term. This means that the People’s Republic of China perceives an opportunity for “great renewal” even as it will be less powerful than was expected.
A proper diagnosis of China, then, doesn’t lead to any easy categorization: Washington will have to deal with a powerful and wealthier China that is also experiencing probable economic stagnation and internal decay. This means that the PRC sees its chance at a “great renewal” even as it will be less powerful than was expected.
Xi does not sound like the leader of a country experiencing political decay or economic stagnation. In 2012, soon after he became secretary general of the CCP and president of the People’s Republic of China, he delivered the rejuvenation speech at a historical exhibition within China’s National Museum in Beijing. The exhibit, called “Road to Rejuvenation,” highlighted China’s “century of humiliation,” from the Opium Wars to the fall of the last Qing emperor in 1911. But while the exhibit featured China’s mistreatment by foreign powers, it also conveyed another message—that China was progressing towards a rebirth.
Xi reminded his audience that the CCP had long struggled to restore China to its historic centrality in international affairs. “Ours is a great nation,” he said, that has “endured untold hardships and sufferings.” But the Communist Party, he said, had forged ahead “thus opening a completely new horizon for the great renewal of the Chinese nation.”
And China is powerful. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is developing its capabilities at a rapid speed, changing the balance of power in Asia to its advantage. The Institute for International Strategic Studies estimates that, since 2014, the People’s Liberation Navy has “launched more submarines, warships, principal amphibious vessels and auxiliaries than the total number of ships currently serving in the navies of Germany, India, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.” Its shipbuilding program is outpacing that of the U.S. China is also spending vast sums on breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence, hypersonics, and robotics, which could tilt the nature of warfare to its advantage. What the PLA has achieved since the end of the Cold War will one day be compared to what Meiji Japan achieved in the decades leading up to its victory in the Russo-Japanese war.
Moreover, China’s scale alone can be daunting for smaller countries even if its geo-economics initiatives are quite as large as they seem. For example, Xi’s signature initiative, the One Belt One Road (OBOR) is not the new geo-economic order he wants it to be. Nevertheless, for its smaller, less developed recipients, OBOR is still large in scope. What might be economically insignificant for the U.S. still has large geopolitical payoffs for China.
This is all to say that even a relatively weaker China than many imagine can change geopolitics and geo-economics. And Xi may slow down China’s growth even further. He has accelerated a political change in China that has focused the party more on “Stability Maintenance” (“WeiWen”), and less on growth.
The shift from “reform and opening” to “stability maintenance” predates Xi. It began once Deng Xiaoping’s successors Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji finished their work of reforming the economy and securing China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Their successors, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, could not withstand the attacks on “reform and opening” from the New Left—a coalition of unreconstructed Marxists and CCP conservatives—and Hu began to reverse key economic reforms. This allowed the state sector to reassert its dominance of China’s economy.
Still, the momentum of reform and opening obscured the halt in reforms. Exports grew 30 percent per year from 2001 to 2006, following its ascension to the WTO. The Chinese economy experienced an investment, real estate, and manufacturing boom. China needed more commodities to feed its construction and investment-led strategy for growth.
This boom in the early 2000s made it seem as though China was inexorably ascendant. It boasted a massive workforce, substantial capital investment, and big state-owned enterprises scouring the earth for resources and flooding Western markets with Chinese goods. What many observers missed at the time, though, was China’s accumulation of substantial debt, largely due to bad loans and unprofitable investments. This made the economy more dependent on domestic credit to finance investment and on foreign consumption to buy the goods produced by over- and misallocated investment.
China’s new economic model of debt-financed overinvestment was worsened by the financial crisis of 2008. At the time, most U.S. observers believed that China was poised to overtake the U.S. But these policy makers missed how panicked China was during this crisis: Its global export markets dried up, so it turned to domestic credit to prime the pump. China accumulated even more debt through a massive stimulus package. The experience seems to have convinced China’s leaders that time was no longer on their side, and that they had to make some quick gains. From the financial crisis onward, China’s assertiveness reflected not a confidence in its destiny, but rather, a basic insecurity. China’s muscular assertion of territorial claims grew from its economic troubles, political fractiousness, and the implementation of the wide-ranging Stability Maintenance regime.
Xi not only inherited a weakening economy, but also a fractured political elite. As the succession from Hu Jintao was unfolding in 2012, the CCP faced one of its biggest political crises. The charismatic leader of Chongqing Province, Bo Xilai, made an independent bid for CCP leadership. The party moved fast to remove him and punish his wife for corruption and murder. In the process, it exposed to public view the extraordinary levels of corruption within the CCP’s top ranks.
Xi’s answer to the dual economic and political crisis was a ferocious anti-corruption campaign meant to purge cadres in a manner unseen since Mao Tse-Tung. The organization of this campaign strengthens the WeiWen. This mass securitization of the Chinese state began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the CCP became more concerned about the effects of regime change in the Caucasus, the Middle East, Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan on its own longevity. As the legal scholar Carl Minzner argues, WeiWen has included “the rise in the bureaucratic stature of the police, [and] the emergence of social stability as a core element of cadre evaluation mechanisms.”
Xi has turned his anti-corruption campaign into an additional tool of social and political control. He went far beyond just targeting corrupt cadre and businessmen and called for the “thorough cleanup of three undesirable work styles—formalism, bureaucratism, and extravagance.” This expanded which cadre could be “disciplined,” mostly through extrajudicial means. Now party and bureaucratic functionaries have every incentive to avoid the implementation of policies, as any action can be interpreted as falling afoul of “anti-corruption” rules.
The campaign is, by its nature, political, in that it is run by and accountable only to party organs. Xi has institutionalized this new politics by strengthening the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and placing disciplinary cells throughout the party’s national and regional organs. The party then codified its mass purges with a new “National Supervision Law” appointing a commission that ranks above the Supreme People’s Court and oversees the conduct of the more than 90 million CCP members, as well as managers of state-owned enterprises, and a broad swath of institutions from hospitals to schools.
Xi has also enacted the National Security Law of 2015, to address what Xi called “the worst security environment China has ever faced.” This new law codified Xi’s extremely broad view of security, which includes everything from the seabed to the internet to space. It calls for the CCP’s “firm ideological dominance” and to continue “strengthening public opinion guidance” as well as “carrying forth the exceptional culture of Chinese nationality.” The CCP also enacted the “State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System.” The Notice establishes a comprehensive database of all Chinese citizens through AI and other high-technology tools, and is grading them based on their loyalty to the CCP. The system will affect people’s applications to schools and jobs, and their access to housing and bank loans.
The new political and institutional arrangements make it very difficult for China to return to market-based reforms. Reforms require less control over the flow of information, ideas, people, and capital. Changes to the cadre-evaluation system are key as well; if cadres are evaluated on the basis of stability maintenance over hitting high-growth targets, there are fewer incentives for market reform.
These policies are not the work of a flourishing Chinese Communist Party. Quite the opposite. The party appears to feel more besieged and under threat than at any time since Tiananmen Square. And Xi has potentially further destabilized the system by crowning himself with ten titles, including head of state, head of military, general secretary of the CCP, and leader of the new “leading groups” to oversee Internet policy, national security, military reform, and Taiwan policy. He has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and all the secret internal para-military and other agencies of internal control. This means that all successes and failures are Xi’s alone. There is no doubt that he has made powerful enemies among the elites who stand at the ready to undermine him should the opportunity arise.
Despite China’s weakening economy and growing political problems, in 2012 Xi claimed the country was entering a “new horizon for the great renewal of the Chinese nation.” Xi’s speech placed the CCP firmly within the history of China’s 5,000-year-old civilization and established its purpose as continuing the struggle for China’s great renewal after the fall of the Qing Empire. The CCP had always struggled with how to address the imperial past of China, which was usually governed by a Confucian ethical and political order. Mao, for example, had led a revolution partly against the feudalism of this past order. While Xi has not abandoned Maoist tactics, he has thrown out this interpretation of history. Instead, he has presented the CCP not as revolutionary, but instead as a part of the long, continuous history of a China that has made “indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization.” Xi is thus more willing than his predecessors to highlight China’s natural geopolitical centrality.
Xi’s signature aspiration in this regard is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which Chinese leaders like Wang Yi tout as advancing China’s “international standing as never before,” as “the Chinese nation, with an entirely new posture now stands tall and firm in the East.” The main goal of the BRI is to expand Chinese global political and economic networks and to secure a more active position in “global governance” without waiting for the West to give China more roles and responsibilities in existing institutions.
Yet the actual monies associated with BRI are far below what was expected. The BRI may help China diversity its energy sources, and offer a more fulsome expression of a long-standing Chinese desire to avoid encirclement by buying influence in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Central Asia. However, the BRI will fall short of its grandiose goal of linking Asia with Europe, as China does not have the foreign-exchange reserves to invest in so many unprofitable deals. Even so, the scale with which China in coordination with its global propaganda machinery has indeed made China more central geopolitically.
As part of his effort to sell renewal, Xi has pushed to reclaim previous Qing-dynasty holdings and expand its maritime claims to secure key supply lines. Xi has built islets, militarized the South China Sea, and kept up the pressure on Japan in the East China Sea. Even as Xi oversees the mass securitization of Chinese domestic policy and directs the CCP to spend money on its continental neighbors through BRI, China has accelerated its maritime turn. Xi announced in 2012 that China is a “great maritime power” and conditioned its success in achieving the “China dream” on becoming a more global maritime power. China’s extensive maritime forces conduct daily missions to push Chinese interests in the South and East China Seas as well as around Taiwan.
Xi and Hu’s great geopolitical legacy will be that they directed China, a continental empire, whose current maps look very similar to those of the Qing, to turn to the sea. China has an area of 3,700,000 square miles and has 14 land borders more than any other country—including with Russia, India, Vietnam and Korea, all of whom have been military enemies in the 20th century. It now effectively claims the entirety of the South and East China Seas. If China were to consolidate control over these bodies of water, it would broaden its geographical expanse from the far west borders with Tajikistan to the northeast maritime reaches of Japan southward to the approaches to Indonesia. Given its continued troubles in its west and its horrifying responses to what it characterizes as Uighur and Tibetan unrest, and its continued rivalry with other states on its land borders, China’s turn to the sea may yet prove as devastating to the world as was Imperial Germany’s decision to enter into a naval competition with England. A decaying China could hasten this process for any number of reasons, including its desire to rebuild national legitimacy.
As China’s economy slows and its politics are consolidated around a new high-tech police state, the party cannot sustain all of these ambitions. WeiWen and anti-corruption efforts will exhaust the bureaucracy as the party eats its own. And Washington can make it very difficult for a continental empire to also succeed at sea. Moreover, while Xi’s political approach may have addressed the short-term crisis, it has compounded China’s political risks in the long term. Xi has done away with Deng’s institutional reforms, which maintained some stability in the CCP governance system.
China has seen many dynasties rise and fall in its history. The last empire fell for a complex set of reasons, including imperial overstretch, drawing the ire of the West, fighting back a succession of massive internal challenges including a civil war and Muslim uprising, its failure to deal with a worsening economy, foreign-policy humiliations, and the belief that the emperors had lost the “mandate of heaven” (what, in today’s terms, we would call ideological vacuity).
As policy makers and scholars stand in awe of what China has accomplished since 1978, they must also continue to examine the internal workings of the system for signs of trouble ahead. In 1993, in a special National Interest edition entitled “The Strange Death of Soviet Communism,” the scholar Charles Fairbanks warned that many had missed the Soviet Union’s long decay because they had not focused on the Soviet Union’s loss of ideological legitimacy among the Communist Party’s elite.
China today is making up for the absence of attractive political principles or ideologies by creating a new empire of fear, and offering increasingly strident appeals to an imperialist nationalism. That is not to say that China will collapse, but Xi has changed the nation’s internal dynamics. The result is a far less predictable course for the Middle Kingdom than materialist political-science theories might predict.
Era uma segunda-feira normal de trabalho na Secretaria de Estado do Meio Ambiente de São Paulo quando Victor Costa recebeu uma demanda pouco usual. Fernanda Lemes, coordenadora do Núcleo do Plano de Manejo, pediu que ele “alterasse uns mapas”. Ele achou estranho. Não era dessa forma que esse tipo de pedido costumava vir.
Então coordenador do setor de Geoprocessamento e Cartografia da Secretaria Estadual do Meio Ambiente e, portanto, responsável por elaborar mapas para qualquer tipo de empreendimento e licenciamento ambiental, ele perguntou o porquê da alteração. “Eu pedi para formalizar por e-mail”, lembra. Mapas de zoneamento levam meses para serem elaborados. São feitos por pesquisadores, discutidos em audiências públicas e aprovados pelo conselho ambiental. “Começaram a me pressionar, falando que era urgente, pedido do secretário.”
Lemes afirmou que a demanda havia surgido em uma reunião do então secretário estadual do Meio Ambiente, Ricardo Salles, com “pessoas da Fiesp”, a Federação das Indústrias de São Paulo. Segundo ela, a justificativa foi que o zoneamento da região não estava adequado para delimitar a extensão da Área de Proteção Ambiental.
O mapa em questão era o Plano de Manejo da Várzea do Rio Tietê, que havia sido elaborado por pesquisadores da USP sete anos antes. Salles e a Fiesp queriam rever o zoneamento de duas regiões específicas às margens do rio – uma entre as cidades de São Paulo e Suzano e a outra entre Barueri e Santana de Parnaíba, todas na grande São Paulo.
Em uma reunião no dia 11 de novembro de 2016, o secretário e os representantes da Fiesp marcaram no mapa, com anotações e post-its, as alterações que queriam fazer. O setor de geoprocessamento recebeu os mapas com os desejos da indústria sinalizados.
As demandas incluíam a redução de uma zona de conservação hidrodinâmica da planície fluvial, um tipo mais restritivo que serve para preservar o curso do rio, com áreas para enchentes, por exemplo. A região passaria a ser uma zona de reordenamento socioambiental e da paisagem, mais permissiva, que permite construções. A intenção era liberar atividade de mineração na região.
Desconfiado, Victor Costa pediu que a demanda fosse formalizada por e-mail. Recebeu todo o histórico: as alterações propostas diretamente pela Fiesp (mais especificamente, pela analista ambiental dos industriais, Maria Cristina Gurgel) e o pedido para que elas fossem feitas rapidamente. “Queria te pedir para tratar este tema como prioridade. O Secretário já me cobrou várias vezes a versão final dos documentos”, pediu a assessora de Salles, Roberta Buendia, à Fernanda Lemes, que foi a responsável por encaminhar a demanda ao setor de geoprocessamento.
Victor Costa respondeu por e-mail. Disse que atenderia a demanda, mas questionou o processo. “Entendemos que os mapas se referem a uma proposta de alteração do zoneamento já aprovado pelo referido Conselho”, escreveu Costa em um e-mail com cópias para os superiores e a Fiesp. “Temos a seguinte dúvida: os mapas aqui requisitados seraão objeto de uma nova deliberação do Conselho Gestor da Unidade?”, questionou, perguntando se as alterações seriam submetidas à avaliação do órgão formado por pesquisadores, sociedade civil, população e setor privado.
Não seriam. Ricardo Salles, à pedido da Fiesp, quis encurtar o processo.
“Esse pedido veio para que eu alterasse os mapas sem mostrar. Fraudar. Não colocar nome, data. Não mudar nada na legenda. Apenas mudar as cores”, diz Victor. Depois de questionar a alteração, o funcionário conta que começou a sofrer pressão e ameaças. O setor de geoprocessamento fez as alterações possíveis e entregou o mapa dentro do prazo – uma sexta-feira, 25 de novembro. Mas a equipe se negou a trocar, por exemplo, o nome “Rio Tietê” para “canal de circunvalação”. Também marcaram todas as alterações, explicitando que haviam sido feitas a pedido da Fiesp, e incluíram os créditos de quem fez o mapa original e quem o alterou.
Nos e-mails, o departamento de Victor é pressionado para fazer as alterações – sem os créditos.
A diretoria da secretaria não gostou. O Núcleo de Planos de Manejo disse que a discussão sobre a legalidade caberia ao órgão e que não era necessário “colocar a fonte” dos dados. Ou seja: a demanda era esconder que o mapa havia sido alterado.
Indignado com a pressão e por ter sido envolvido na fraude, Victor Costa pediu demissão duas semanas depois e denunciou o que viu ao Ministério Público de São Paulo. “Era a única forma de impedir que o novo mapa fosse aprovado”, diz. Foi acusado por Ricardo Salles de fazer parte de ONGs e de ser “eco-xiita”. Um de seus ex-colegas foi perseguido em reuniões e o outro, mudado de área sem aviso prévio depois que voltou de férias.
O MP denunciou Salles, a Fiesp e outros responsáveis. O então secretário justificou, em depoimento aos promotores, que havia “erros crassos” no material e que as alterações foram discutidas em “várias reuniões” na secretaria. Disse que, para “dar celeridade ao processo” e “desburocratizar”, fazia as convocações para as reuniões por e-mail – e não apresentou provas. E disse que, em divergências, “alguém tinha que tomar a decisão. E assim foi feito”. As alterações, para ele, “foram feitas para dar segurança jurídica” e não colocar empresas, pessoas e o Estado “na ilegalidade”.
Não colou. Salles foi condenado por improbidade administrativa, com multa de dez vezes o seu salário na época, e teve seus direitos políticos suspensos por três anos.
A condenação saiu no dia 18 de dezembro de 2018. Duas semanas depois, ele assumiu o cargo de ministro do Meio Ambiente na gestão de Jair Bolsonaro.
Desburocratização, a alma do negócioPara entender a ascensão na carreira do advogado Ricardo de Aquino Salles ao mais alto escalão ambiental do país, é preciso olhar para sua carreira prévia. Mais especificamente, para seu trânsito fácil entre o setor privado e o governo, a começar pela gestão tucana de Geraldo Alckmin, onde o fundador do movimento Endireita Brasil ocupou seu primeiro cargo público.
Como político, Ricardo Salles foi um fiasco. Ele concorreu a deputado federal pelo PFL em 2006, a deputado estadual em 2010 pelo DEM, a vereador pelo PSDB em 2012 (renunciou à candidatura) e a deputado federal em 2018 pelo Novo. Perdeu todas. O máximo que conseguiu foi a posição de suplente em 2010 na Assembleia Legislativa de São Paulo. Como advogado, defendeu construtoras e uma das herdeiras de Hebe Camargo. Também foi diretor jurídico da Sociedade Rural Brasileira, associação que representa os interesses do agronegócio.
Em 2013, abandonou a advocacia e começou a trabalhar como secretário particular de Geraldo Alckmin, então governador de São Paulo. Nessa época, recebia um salário de R$ 12 mil e quase foi preso por não pagar pensão alimentícia de R$ 3 mil aos filhos. No processo, alegou que não tinha “condições financeiras” para pagar os R$ 28 mil que devia à ex-mulher pelos meses de pensão atrasada.
O período na iniciativa privada rendeu ótimos frutos a Ricardo Salles.
No começo do ano seguinte, no entanto, ele deixou o Palácio dos Bandeirantes e voltou para o setor privado – para a Vila Olímpia, no escritório da incorporadora Bueno Netto. Ele seria encarregado de cuidar do imbróglio judicial que a construtora tinha com um empreendimento chamado Parque Global, que seria um conjunto de dezenas de prédios na marginal Pinheiros, no Morumbi.
O terreno, que antes pertencia à Light, companhia elétrica de São Paulo, havia sido abandonado por contaminação por zinco e manganês. Foi preparado, comprado, autorizado pela prefeitura em 2010 e lançado em 2013 – mas a obra acabou embargada no ano seguinte pelo Ministério Público por problemas ambientais e urbanísticos. Segundo o MP, apenas parte do empreendimento havia sido autorizada pela prefeitura. O órgão também exigiu que a construtora retirasse a terra poluída do local – o que, segundo a Bueno Netto, inviabilizaria o empreendimento.
Defendida por Salles, a construtora fez uma reclamação formal contra o Ministério Público, alegando que já tinha cumprido os pré-requisitos para a obra. A justiça acabou embargando definitivamente o Parque Global, mesmo com a construtora conversando diretamente com o governo de Geraldo Alckmin.
O prejuízo chegou a R$ 500 milhões, entre gastos com publicidade, obtenção de licenças e manutenção do espaço, fora os R$ 800 milhões da compra do terreno e a obrigação de devolver o dinheiro de 300 clientes que compraram apartamentos na planta.
Dos processos milionários envolvendo antigas sociedades desfeitas para o empreendimento, a Bueno Netto foi condenada a pagar R$ 160 milhões aos antigos sócios, mas só pagou R$ 10 milhões – foi o dinheiro encontrado na justiça no processo de falência. Ainda no alvo do Ministério Público paulista, Ricardo Salles foi investigado por atuar na Bueno Netto, segundo os procuradores, cometendo fraudes para blindar o grupo que ele defendia. De acordo com o MP, mesmo atuando para um grupo privado, ele se apresentava como sendo “ligado ao governo do estado”.
O período na iniciativa privada rendeu ótimos frutos a Ricardo Salles. O ex-devedor de pensão declarou, na eleição de 2018, um patrimônio de R$ 8,8 milhões – um aumento de 4.000% desde sua primeira tentativa de eleição, em 2006.
Foto: Pedro Ladeira/Folhapress
Salles se tornou secretário estadual do Meio Ambiente pouco depois, em julho de 2016, na gestão de Alckmin. Então membro do PP, ele era próximo à ala do PSDB que apoiava a candidatura de João Doria à prefeitura de São Paulo, mas sua presença era incômoda para parte do PSDB. Quando Salles chegou ao governo como moeda de troca do PP pelo apoio a Doria, o tucano Alberto Goldman se disse “enojado”.
A adulteração nos mapas aconteceu três meses depois de sua posse como secretário. E não foi sua única acusação. Foi investigado por abrir uma chamada pública para vender 34 áreas do Instituto Florestal – sem passar pelo rito legislativo. Depois, tentou negociar a sede do Instituto Geológico para obter recursos para fusão com outros dois institutos – sem que eles concordassem, ideia interrompida pela Procuradoria Geral do Estado. Em 14 de junho de 2017, o Ministério Público Estadual acusou o secretário de advocacia administrativa – ou seja, de favorecer o interesse privado usando a administração pública. Neste caso, os interesses da Bueno Netto, a incorporadora para a qual ele havia trabalhado.
Pouco antes de deixar a secretaria, em um evento em Cajati, no Vale do Ribeira, em São Paulo, Salles se indignou com um busto de Carlos Lamarca, guerrilheiro de esquerda morto em 1971. Pediu ao prefeito que funcionários retirassem o busto. A estátua foi arrancada e levada por viatura da polícia ambiental até a capital paulista, e o pedestal, demolido. A passagem dos guerrilheiros da Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária, em 1969, era um atrativo histórico na pequena cidade.
O Ministério Público de São Paulo acusou Salles de improbidade administrativa ambiental por ordenar a remoção “à revelia do devido processo legal administrativo e apenas imbuído de patente móvel ideológico incompatível com o exercício da nobre função pública que ocupava”. Como secretário do Meio Ambiente, Salles não tinha poder para tomar a decisão, de acordo com o MP, mas achou importante remover qualquer vestígio de esquerda por onde passou. Uma posição curiosa para quem hoje diz rechaçar a “perseguição ideológica”.
No dia 28 de agosto de 2017, Salles pediu demissão. Segundo o G1, a decisão partiu do PP, descontente com o desempenho do secretário. Salles disse que saiu com a “sensação de dever cumprido” e que voltaria para o setor privado. Deixou o PP, foi para o Novo e, pouco mais de um ano depois, voltou para o setor público no alto escalão de Jair Bolsonaro.
Folheto da campanha de Ricardo Salles para deputado federal.
Com a tragédia de Brumadinho, provocada pela mineradora Vale, o ministério do Meio Ambiente assumiu uma inesperada posição central no início do governo Bolsonaro. O presidente chegou a cogitar a fusão da pasta com o ministério da Agricultura – o que, na prática, submeteria órgãos como o Ibama aos interesses agropecuários –, mas voltou atrás após uma dura reação da sociedade civil. Acabou nomeando, então, o ex-colega do PP, Ricardo Salles, agora filiado ao Novo.
Com uma campanha eleitoral em que prometia “munição de fuzil” contra o MST, chamou a atenção de Bolsonaro. “Vocês gostaram do ministro do Meio Ambiente agora, né?”, disse Bolsonaro a ruralistas logo após a escolha, em um vídeo gravado no Clube Militar de Brasília.
Assim como seu chefe e seus colegas, Salles chegou ao ministério motivado a extirpar a “ideologia” de esquerda. Disse que “perseguição ideológica não é saudável para ninguém” e que sua gestão seria responsável por “harmonizar” os interesses. Seguindo a cartilha de seu chefe – que queria no ministério alguém “sem caráter xiita” e proteger o meio ambiente sem “criar dificuldades para o nosso progresso” –, Salles disse que no Brasil há um “descontrole na aplicação da lei e da fiscalização”.
Depois de Brumadinho, o ministro classificou a atual lei ambiental como “complexa e irracional”. “Recursos humanos que deveriam estar focados nas questões de médio e alto risco estão sendo dispersos. Precisamos de legislação que funcione, licenciamento que funcione”, disse.
‘É uma legislação tão complexa e irracional que não funciona’, disse Salles.A flexibilização e a simplificação das leis ambientais é uma demanda de setores como a mineração e a agropecuária, que fazem lobby para aprovar o licenciamento para o setor. A proposta de Salles, defendida antes de Brumadinho, é que a liberação possa ser feita com uma “autodeclaração” – ou seja, o empreendedor diz que a obra está ok, e a fiscalização vem depois. Na proposta de Salles, não fica claro, por exemplo, quem define o grau de impacto ambiental de uma obra.
Se depender do histórico de defesa dos interesses corporativos e “desburocratização” – uma palavra bonita que ele usou para justificar não ter cumprido os ritos tradicionais dos processos ambientais em seu período como secretário –, não é difícil deduzir a quem o seu posicionamento vai beneficiar.
Enquanto Salles recorre da condenação, o Ministério Público paulista entrou com uma apelação pedindo que ele seja impedido de exercer o cargo de ministro. Segundo o MP, a mudança nos mapas ordenada por Salles poderia provocar “gravíssimas consequências”. Os condenados, segundo os promotores, agiram “com a clara intenção de beneficiar setores econômicos, notadamente a mineração”. Vale lembrar que a justiça paulista livrou o ex-secretário – e também a Fiesp – de uma multa milionária pelos possíveis danos ambientais decorrentes das alterações. Outro advogado entrou com uma ação para tentar impedir que Salles assumisse, mas a justiça paulista negou o pedido. “Gostando ou não da escolha, parece que ainda foi feita dentro do espaço de discricionariedade política próprio do cargo de Presidente da República”, disse o juiz na decisão.
Em entrevista à Jovem Pan, o ministro atribuiu a condenação à perseguição “ideológica”, como de praxe. O ministro disse que “esse processo e a decisão são muito mais um combate político-ideológico contra a postura que eu adotei na secretaria do que qualquer ilegalidade formal”. E que Bolsonaro reconhece isso.
Apesar das denúncias, Salles assumiu normalmente o ministério. Sua agenda foi ocupada, principalmente, por encontros com ruralistas, empresários, banqueiros e mineradoras – nenhuma reunião com ambientalistas e pesquisadores da área aconteceu em seu primeiro mês no ministério. Na quarta-feira, 23, se encontrou com representantes da Frente Parlamentar de Agropecuária e, logo depois, com Luiz Eduardo Fróes do Amaral Osório, diretor-executivo de Sustentabilidade e Relações Institucionais da Vale. Dois dias depois, a lama desceu sobre Brumadinho.
The post Como Ricardo Salles adulterou um mapa ambiental para beneficiar mineradoras appeared first on The Intercept.
The high-security federal jail known as the Metropolitan Correctional Center, near Foley Square in New York, on Jan. 21, 2017. The facility has housed some of New York’s highest-risk federal defendants. Joaquin Guzman Loera, the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, has been held there since January.
Photo: Karsten Moran/The New York Times via Redux
At the tail end of the Obama administration, I was locked up a stone’s throw away from Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán at the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ infamous Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York (MCC NY), in downtown Manhattan, where Guzmán is currently being held during his ongoing federal trial. I was there writing and waging a hunger strike when “El Chapo” first arrived. Much has been written about El Chapo’s trial, but close to nothing about his conditions of confinement, as the security around him has made access off limits to any journalist other than me.
I’m an imprisoned human rights activist and political journalist focusing on protecting institutionalized children from common tortures in America like these:
I’m currently suing the Bureau of Prisons and MCC NY for both state and federal civil rights violations, related to the conditions where El Chapo is held, and I’m exploring class-action certification. My lawsuit against MCC NY offers a new and rare glimpse into prison life in the solitary confinement cells which El Chapo has now called “home” for nearly two years. Besides simply recovering my fees and costs, however, my goals aren’t financial. Instead I’m asking the court to force MCC NY to respect human dignity, the First Amendment, federal regulations, and other human and civil rights.
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the 10-South unit at MCC where “El Chapo” is being housed. Much of that is fueled by the effects of it being a “SAMs” or “special administrative measures” unit. As such, the inmates aren’t supposed to come into any visual or other contact with other inmates.
Even magazines they receive in the mail must be pre-screened by the FBI for the supposed reason of intercepting hidden messages. Outbound communications are similarly restricted and monitored in real time.
You can read more about the SAMs program here. For the rest of the details of my pending litigation, you can read the full filing at FreeMartyG.com.
But it’s virtually impossible to prevent inmates from seeing other inmates. For my part, I was regularly paraded to the 10-South medical exam room during my 81 consecutive days in solitary confinement at MCC NY, and I shopped at the 10-South commissary. When I caught glimpses of El Chapo being moved, I noted his unassuming appearance. He was about my height and weight, and I’m 5’7”, 180 pounds (obviously, though, I weighed less during my hunger strike).
Once El Chapo arrived at MCC NY, the staff appeared to be doing everything they could to get him to roll on the rest of the Sinaloa Cartel and especially to try to get him to reveal where he’s allegedly hiding $1 billion or so in assets in Mexico. The prison transferred Spanish-speaking staff to his unit in case he ever let something slip in his native language. This also seemed to be part of a “good cop, bad cop” routine. They vacated the cell next to his in an apparent effort to reduce his conversational options. They seemed to hope that he’d get lonely and decide to speak to prison staff.
Even within the “SAMs” program though, El Chapo was subject to extra precautions. While every inmate in 10-South is also on a status called a “lieutenant hold,” which requires using a lieutenant and two lower-ranking Correctional Officers to move them anywhere, El Chapo was a “3 lieutenant hold,” meaning 3 lieutenants were necessary to move him. Finding three available lieutenants was no easy task, which meant moving El Chapo was always an all-consuming process.
The facility itself is trash, with cockroach-infested meal trays, and frigid, leaky cells. One inmate resorted to drinking from his toilet when the water was shut off. (Its sister facility across the river is now the subject of public attention, as detainees have been living without heat.)
In my lawsuit, I also describe how, as a member of the press, my First Amendment rights were violated. Among other things, MCC NY and its warden refused to let me send sealed media mail to Rolling Stone, which was profiling me and my case, as they were required to do by federal regulation. According to them, Rolling Stone didn’t qualify as a legitimate national news organization.
Here’s what I think they didn’t want Rolling Stone and its readership to see:
Drawing: Courtesy of Martin Gottesfeld
The above is my hand-drawn diagram of the cell where MCC NY houses high-profile inmates like El Chapo. I made that drawing as I was standing in that cell myself about 2 years ago, but MCC NY wouldn’t let me mail this diagram to the press.
My proximity to El Chapo might also explain why the prison wouldn’t let Rolling Stone or Wired interview me in the prison.
Some inmates, however, saw at least one benefit from the alleged drug lord’s arrival. Once he was in 10-South, the kitchen served his unit tacos for dinner.
The post Inside El Chapo’s Confinement: Cockroaches, Frigid Temperatures, Tacos, and a Three-Lieutenant Escort appeared first on The Intercept.
Sergio Herrera, a Chicago police officer, was accused in a 2010 lawsuit of teaming up with another officer to mace and beat a black man for no reason. The man was sitting in his parked car when Herrera’s colleague approached the vehicle. As the man went to retrieve his identification, the officer told him to “cuff up,” at which point Herrera entered the fray, spraying the man with mace according to the lawsuit. Both officers then allegedly proceeded to throw the man to the ground, strike him in the head with handcuffs, and dig their knees into his back. When the man asked for medical assistance, his pleas were ignored. Instead, the police took him to the station.
The lawsuit charges that the man’s ribs were fractured, and that he was left with permanent injuries as a result of the incident. The city of Chicago ended up paying the victim a settlement of $75,000, without admitting wrongdoing. Out-of-court settlements for civil rights violations are a common outcome for the department, which is plagued by lawsuits.
The trainings are part of Chicago’s efforts to reform its notoriously abusive police force, but the trainings have in many cases been overseen by the alleged abusers themselves.Now, Herrera has a new assignment: to be one of several officers who oversee the Chicago Police Department’s “implicit bias” trainings, a program intended to curb incidents of racist police violence.
Herrera’s role is part of a troubling pattern: The trainings are a key part of the city’s efforts to reform its notoriously abusive police force, but revamped trainings that debuted in 2017 have in many cases been overseen by some of the alleged abusers themselves.
Sixteen of the 17 police officers — excluding only Officer Angela McLaurin — who have provided instruction for the procedural justice training program since the start of 2017 have together garnered a total of 111 misconduct complaints, according to police documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The misconduct complaints range from false arrests to illegal searches and include use of excessive force, often against people of color in Chicago. One officer who provided training has faced seven accusations of mistreating black people since 2011. Six other officers have together been accused of abuses in at least ten civil rights lawsuits, with at least half of those cases resulting in settlements or payments to the plaintiffs.
“Over the past two years, the Chicago Police Department has aggressively marched forward on expanding the quantity and quality of in-service training available to officers,” said Sergeant Cindy Guerra of the Chicago police’s Office of the Superintendent, in a statement to The Intercept. “By incorporating national best practices, CPD’s revised training supports officers’ abilities to be successful in the performance of their duties, and ensures sustainable reform.” Guerra, who declined to speak to the outcomes of legal cases, added, “All allegations made against a Chicago Police Officer are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated.”
For activists working on policing issues in Chicago, the track records of police officers who have or are giving trainings underscore the problems with pushing for “improved training” as the solution for police violence. “The urgency around policing is valid and real, but the insistence that what we need is better training is leading to massive amounts of money to an already over-inflated arsenal and budget of CPD,” Page May, co-founder of Assata’s Daughters, a collective of black women in Chicago who identify their work as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, told The Intercept.
The trainings were instituted in the wake of a massive public relations crisis for the Chicago Police Department and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The 2014 police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald and subsequent cover-up by city officials pushed policing issues to the fore in the city, leading to protests and, eventually, a damning 2017 Department of Justice investigation. In response, the police department pledged to reform itself, in part by providing better internal trainings with an emphasis on addressing implicit bias.
The Chicago Police Department followed up with a report last April outlining its “Next Steps for Reform.” The department — which has a pattern of racist harassment, civil rights violations, and “unreasonable killings,” according to the Department of Justice — trumpeted its plan as a solution to public concerns. “The 2018 Next Steps for Reform framework is our continued promise to the communities we serve that CPD is serious about addressing the historical challenges we face,” Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at the time.
The police plan emphasized its “procedural justice” training program as a key component of its reform strategy. One of the courses in the training program will focus on implicit bias, or the pervasive and deep-seated prejudices that shape behavior, the police report says. While the department has shared little public information about the content of these trainings, a sympathetic article in the Chicago Sun-Times billed it as a “sensitivity-training course,” noting that the term “procedural justice” is a popular buzzword among police departments under scrutiny for patterns of racist violence. According to the Chicago Police Department report, all officers are mandated to complete the entire training series by the end of 2020.
“Stomping” a Black ManMany of the instructors who have taught their fellow police officers how to deal with biases, however, are trailed by a litany of civilian complaints. Eleven of the 17 officers who have provided procedural justice trainings since the start of 2017 have been accused of violating the rights of black people, and nine have been accused two times or more of mistreating black people, according to public information collected by the Citizens Police Data Project, a project of the journalism nonprofit Invisible Institute and the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. The number may be low: Many of the civilian complaints against these officers did not note the race of the complainants.
Only three of the 111 complaints of misconduct were sustained in the processes that adjudicate these complaints, but that comes amid a system that infrequently holds cops to account. Fewer than 2 percent of misconduct accusations against Chicago police officers are sustained — a “low” rate, according to the Department of Justice. Responding to a question from The Intercept about the complaints against four of the officers who have provided trainings, Guerra, the police spokesperson, said, “In reference to the four officers you mentioned, none of these officers have any sustained allegations against them.” (The Intercept requested comment on and interviews with the five officers named in this story for having participated in trainings while also having records of civilian complains or civil rights lawsuits.)
Some of these alleged acts were violent. According to one civilian complaint obtained through a FOIA request, one of the officers who has provided trainings, Officer Daniel Goetz, allegedly “stomped” a black man while he was prostrate on the ground outside a Shell gas station in October 2015. The man had attracted the police’s attention simply for urinating outdoors after he was turned away from the gas station bathroom; when the police asked the man to approach their car, he fled.
The officers who were with Goetz threatened bystanders for attempting to document the alleged injustice, according to the complaint. Witnesses approached to film the police’s actions but were allegedly “warned by the accused officer that if they video recorded anything,” the man would be punished more severely. (In Illinois, it is legal to record most police interactions with the public.) A medical report “noted bruising to [the victim’s] left side,” and that he sought medical care on two separate occasions as a result. The Independent Police Review Authority investigator noted the witnesses declined to testify and, after fellow police officers denied the accusations against Goetz, the complaint process halted, with the evidence deemed insufficient to prove or disprove the allegations. (In its statement, the Chicago police indicated that Goetz is not currently giving procedural justice trainings, though he was listed in a FOIA document as one of the individuals who had done so since the start of 2017.)
In another civilian complaint, also obtained through a FOIA request, Goetz was accused of grabbing a black man by the arm before another officer allegedly said, “I will lock your black fucking ass up.” That complaint also was not sustained after the officers who were present denied the allegations.
The civil rights lawsuits against six of the officers who have provided training are even more harrowing.The civil rights lawsuits against six of the officers who have provided training are even more harrowing, particularly those involving Wasim Said, a Chicago police officer since 2002 who has been employed in the department’s education and training division. (Like Goetz, the police indicated in their statement to The Intercept that Said was not currently giving procedural justice trainings.) In one suit from 2008, Said was accused of participating in a police raid on a home in which officers pointed their guns at the heads of an adult with a heart condition, a 6-year-old child, and a 4-month-old infant. The 6-year-old “began to vomit as a result of defendants’ actions,” the lawsuit alleges, noting that no criminal charges were ultimately filed. The case settled with $35,000 awarded to the plaintiffs.
According to a separate lawsuit filed the same year, Said and another officer responded violently to an alleged physical assault of a young girl by an adult woman. The suit charges that the officers slammed the girl’s head “extremely hard” onto the hood of a car and held her there despite pleas from her mother that she was only 10 years old. The following morning, the child received treatment at a hospital for “neck strain and head trauma,” alleges the lawsuit, which resulted in a dismissal.
Said is not alone. In 2007, Officer Reginald Weatherly was sued for his alleged participation in a group beating. “One or more of Defendant Officers repeatedly struck Plaintiff in the leg with a blackjack club, breaking his ankle and causing Plaintiff severe pain and suffering,” according to the suit. The suit, which resulted in settlement and dismissal, states that the other officers named in the suit “had the opportunity to intervene to prevent it, but failed to do so.” (In its statement to The Intercept, the Chicago Police Department indicated that Weatherly was not currently giving procedural justice trainings.)
Beyond formal charges, the social media conduct of at least one of the police trainers raises further cause for concern. An officer named Phil Visor, who also serves as an instructor of the procedural justice training, published Facebook posts that include images and rhetoric associated with Blue Lives Matter, a reactionary movement that arose in opposition to Black Lives Matter. One of his profile photos, uploaded on December 23, 2015 — when Chicago was in the grips of protests responding to the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video — shows an image of a group of officers in riot gear that reads, “Sometimes There’s Justice. Sometimes There’s Just Us.” This image, along with other profile photos depicting the “thin blue line” — the mantra that police are the only thing separating society from chaos — demonstrates an affinity with precisely the “us versus them” mentality Visor has been tasked with eradicating.
Guerra, the Chicago police spokesperson, told The Intercept: “[A]s part of our commitment to improved and expanded in-service training under the consent decree, impartial policing concepts, to include proper use of social media, will be provided for all officers, including supervisors and command staff.”
Yet the promise of improved trainings given by police — despite the fact that most of the officers who have given trainings faced formal accusations of troubling misconduct — is being used to justify the funneling of public funds into the police department. In his budget for 2018, Emanuel cited the need for “best practice training for officers and supervisors.” He called for “$103.5 million worth of new investments in police and first responders.”
Joey Mogul, a partner at the People’s Law Office who represents victims of police torture, told The Intercept that the troubling track records of these police officers show that the department cannot train its way out of a crisis of public legitimacy. “The issues we have with the CPD and several municipal police departments are not only willful and egregious violations of the law, but officers coming together to cover those things up,” Mogul said.
Mogul cited the case of Jason Van Dyke, the officer who was convicted last October of second-degree murder for killing McDonald. Notably, Van Dyke was trained at the police academy and had been awarded 22 Honorable Mentions over his career — in addition to having a long list of misconduct complaints.
“In the case of Van Dyke, what additional training did that officer need in order to not go out and shoot and kill someone like Laquan McDonald the way he did?” Mogul said. “Look at the officers who went out of their way and made false statements. They could tell from looking at the video that they were false statements. What training did those officers need to tell them you can’t lie?”
The post Officers Accused of Abuses Are Leading Chicago Police’s “Implicit Bias” Training Program appeared first on The Intercept.
NBC News published a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”
But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.
To justify its claim that Tulsi Gabbard is the Kremlin’s candidate, NBC stated: “analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted ‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”
What NBC – amazingly – concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: that same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'”
That fraud was overseen by New Research’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan. At the same time Morgan was fabricating Russian troll accounts and using them to create a fraudulent appearance that Putin was trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate, he was exploiting his social media “expertise” to claim that Russians were interfering in the Alabama Senate election. In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled.
Even worse, Morgan’s firm is behind one of the recent Senate reports on Russian social media election interference as well as the creation of “Hamilton 68,” the pseudo-data-driven dashboard constantly used by U.S. media outlets to claim that its enemies are supported by the Kremlin (that tool has so been abused that even some of its designers urged the media to stop exaggerating its meaning). During the Alabama race, Morgan – in a tweet he deleted once his fraud was exposed – cited the #Hamilton68 data that he himself manipulated with his fake Russian accounts to claim that Russia was interfering in the Alabama Senate race:
In response to this scam being revealed, Facebook closed the accounts of five Americans who were responsible for this fraud, including Morgan himself, the “prominent social media researcher” who is the CEO of New Knowledge. He also touts himself as a “State Dept. advisor, computational propaganda researcher for DARPA, Brookings Institution.”
Beyond Morgan’s Facebook suspension, the billionaire funder and LinkedIn founder who provided the money for the New Knowledge project, Reid Hoffman, apologized and claimed he had no knowledge of the fraud. The victorious Democratic Senate candidate who won the Alabama Senate race and who repeatedly cited New Knowledge’s fake Russian accounts during the election to claim he was being attacked by Russian bots, Doug Jones, insisted he had no knowledge of the scheme and has now called for a federal investigation into New Knowledge.
This is the group of “experts” on which NBC News principally relied to spread its inflammatory, sensationalistic, McCarthyite storyline that Gabbard’s candidacy is supported by the Kremlin.
While NBC cited a slew of former FBI and other security state agents to speculate about why the Kremlin would like Gabbard, its claim that “experts” have detected the “stirrings” of such support came from this discredited, disgraced firm, one that just proved it specializes in issuing fictitious accusations against enemies of the Democratic Party that they are linked to Russia. Just marvel at how heavily NBC News relies on the disgraced New Knowledge to smear Gabbard as a favorite of Moscow:
Experts who track inauthentic social media accounts, however, have already found some extolling Gabbard’s positions since she declared.
Within a few days of Gabbard announcing her presidential bid, DisInfo 2018, part of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, found that three of the top 15 URLs shared by the 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at U.S. citizens were about Gabbard.
Analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted “chatter” related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns. The chatter discussed Gabbard’s usefulness.
“A few of our analysts saw some chatter on 8chan saying she was a good ‘divider’ candidate to amplify,” said New Knowledge’s director of research Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge.
What’s particularly unethical about the NBC report is that it tries to bolster the credentials of this group by touting it as “the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election,” while concealing from its audience the fraud that this firm’s CEO just got caught perpetrating on the public on behalf of the Democratic Party.
The only other so-called “expert” cited by NBC in support of its claim that Russian accounts are supporting Gabbard is someone named “Josh Russell,” who NBC identified as “Josh Russel.” Russell, or Russel, is touted by NBC as “a researcher and ‘troll hunter’ known for identifying fake accounts.” In reality, “Russel” is someone CNN last year touted as an “Indiana dad” and “amateur troll hunter” with a full-time job unrelated to Russia (he works as programmer at a college) and whose “hobby” is tracing online Russian accounts.
So beyond the firm that just got caught in a major fraudulent scam fabricating Russian support to help the Democratic Party, that’s NBC’s only other vaunted expert for its claim that the Kremlin is promoting Gabbard: someone CNN just last year called an “amateur” who traces Russian accounts as a “hobby.” And even there, NBC could only cite Russel (sic) as saying that “he recently spotted a few clusters of suspicious accounts that retweeted the same exact text about Gabbard, mostly neutral or slightly positive headlines.”
NBC also purported to rely on its own highly sophisticated analysis by counting the number of times Gabbard was mentioned by RT, Sputnik and Russia Insider, and then noting what it seems to regard as the highly incriminating fact that “Gabbard was mentioned on the three sites about twice as often as two of the best known Democratic possibilities for 2020, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, each with 10 stories.”
But in contrast to Gabbard, who announced her intent to run for President almost a month ago, neither Biden nor Sanders has done so. Perhaps that fact, rather than – as one of the NBC reporters adolescently gushed: “The Kremlin already has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard” – is what explains the greater amount of coverage?
The Kremlin already has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard https://t.co/bCpTdWG0Bo
— Ben Popken (@bpopken) February 2, 2019
In any event, NBC News, to smear Gabbard as a Kremlin favorite, relied on a group that it heralded as “experts” without telling its audience about the major fraud which this firm just got caught perpetrating in order – on behalf of the Democratic Party – to fabricate claims of Kremlin interference in the Alabama Senate race.
That’s because the playbook used by the axis of the Democratic Party, NBC/MSNBC, neocons and the intelligence community has been, is and will continue to be a very simple one: to smear any adversary of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party – whether on the left or the right – as a stooge or asset of the Kremlin (a key target will undoubtedly be, indeed already is, Bernie Sanders).
To accomplish this McCarthyite goal, this Democratic Party coalition of neocons, intelligence operatives and NBC stars will deceive, smear and even engage in outright journalistic deception, as NBC (once again) just proved with this report.
The post NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.
When Yasmin, a native of the Syrian town of Douma, decided at age 35 to resume the education that had been interrupted when she married at 13, her family was incredulous. Their objections were both pragmatic and rooted in traditional conceptions of gender roles. As they saw it, Yasmin’s place was at home, caring for her four children. If she craved intellectual enrichment, they suggested, she should study religious doctrine in whatever spare time she could find between cooking, cleaning, and tending to her children’s needs.
She pressed on despite their objections, promising her husband that her studies would not interfere with her duties as a wife and mother. It was 2011, the same year that Syria’s uprising, which was then largely nonviolent, erupted, with opponents of Bashar al-Assad seeking political and social reforms. Yasmin, who asked The Intercept to identify her by a pseudonym, passed her ninth grade exams on the first try and obtained her high school diploma in 2012. Now, having fled Syria because her hometown was besieged and under assault by government forces, she is a second-year college student in Gaziantep, Turkey, where she also heads the local office of a religious Syrian charity.
If not for the revolution, Yasmin told me recently, she would not have had the courage to take on such a role. “Before the revolution, I wasn’t able to speak in this way, even among my family,” she said. “I didn’t have the confidence to express the ideas I had.”
Her experience is emblematic of the tangible shift many Syrian women have experienced over the last seven years, as they’ve joined the workforce in greater numbers and found themselves having unexpectedly frank conversations about the political and cultural forces that have stymied their growth. An amalgam of factors, including displacement wrought by war, has allowed these women to renegotiate their social standing and push back against patriarchal norms.
But even amid growing acknowledgment that practices like domestic violence must be spoken about in public with an eye toward ending them, interviews with nearly two dozen Syrians in Turkey last fall indicate that there is no consensus in this socially conservative and religiously observant community about what it means to be an independent, powerful Syrian woman.
“The revolution made it possible for us to talk about rights.”Speaking openly about “gender-based violence, equality, and women’s rights are all new to Syrians — not just to women — because we weren’t previously allowed to talk about any of these issues,” said Lubna al-Kanawati, the Turkey country manager for Women Now for Development, a Syrian organization that provides psycho-social support to women in Syria and Lebanon and funds projects that could help beneficiaries make money on their own. “The revolution made it possible for us to talk about rights. Especially in the liberated areas, it became possible to broach these issues. When you live in a state of constant violence and you’re being subjected to violations, it becomes easier.”
Lubna Kanawati, country manager for Women Now for Development, in her organization’s office in Gaziantep, Turkey on Sept. 19, 2018.
Photo: Maryam Saleh/The Intercept
In the #MeToo era, Syrian women are not alone in finding new language and methods to address the age-old problems of patriarchy and sexual violence. The revolution may have made it possible for Syrian women to start talking about these issues, but the war, which has ravaged Syria for seven years and displaced half the country’s population, has also given them new urgency. As the space for these conversations has expanded, some thorny issues have emerged. What role do nonnegotiable religious dictums play, as opposed to more malleable cultural norms? What will it take for someone like Yasmin to choose to go back to school without feeling pressured by her social circle to focus on being a wife and mother instead? Who gets to set the terms of the debate — Syrian women, or the foreigners who are often funding their efforts?
“When European or American donors come in to work on women’s social development, they’re asking people to liberate themselves of their [socially conservative] traditions,” said Mohamad Ziada, who works at Basamat for Development, which runs programs for women and children in Syria and Lebanon and has an office in Istanbul.
Women’s independence means different things to different people, and Ziada highlights a key tension: Foreigners encouraging women to take control of their lives are not necessarily familiar with the Syrian social context. Syrian women, naturally, have taken advantage of the funding that has come their way. In interviews, some said they have total autonomy, while others said that a certain Western type of feminism is being imposed on their communities. Ideally, Syrian women would be leading these conversations, deciding how to exercise their new freedoms, perhaps with input from Syrian men. But with so much foreign aid pouring in to tackle women’s issues, the reality is much more complicated than that.
In pre-2011 Syria, most women, even those with college degrees, did not work outside the home. Over the last two decades, the proportion of women in the workforce peaked at nearly 20 percent in 2000 and has been at a low of about 14 percent for the last few years, according to data from the World Bank. (The worldwide average has hovered around 39 percent.) Prominent examples of women in public life include Asma al-Assad, Syria’s London-raised first lady, and Bouthaina Shaaban, a political and media adviser to the Syrian dictator.
Women, especially those in the Global South, have been a primary focus of international aid since at least the 1979 passage of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. (The United States is among a small minority of countries that have not ratified the treaty.) In 1995, the United Nations World Conference on Women adopted an “agenda for women’s empowerment,” but subsequent efforts focused largely on helping women make money without opening pathways for their political participation. From India to Afghanistan to Cambodia, in place of political mobilization, journalist Rafia Zakaria writes, came a narrow form of so-called empowerment “expressed through technical programming seeking to improve education or health with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality. This depoliticized ‘empowerment’ serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help.”
By 2011, when Syrians began fleeing to neighboring countries following the Assad regime’s bloody crackdown on protesters, the global humanitarian response was ready to focus primarily on the needs of women and children. In many ways, this made sense: Men were being killed, imprisoned, or forcibly disappeared at much higher rates than women, leaving wives and mothers to shoulder the responsibility of caring for families. But the international response metastasized into an entire industry focused on women’s empowerment, which the U.N. defines as dealing with women’s sense of self-worth, their right to make their own choices, their right to access resources and opportunities, their right to be able to control their own lives, and their ability to influence social change.
In Turkey, the women’s empowerment industry is booming.In Turkey, which hosts at least 3.6 million Syrian refugees, the women’s empowerment industry is booming. Its participants include everyone from U.N.-affiliated and other Western-backed agencies, to conservative Muslim charities, to grassroots initiatives started and funded by Syrians themselves. There’s the U.N.’s “protection” sector, which deals with gender-based violence, as well as initiatives focused on economic self-sufficiency through vocational training; political strength through leadership training; and intellectual development through forums, at which social topics, like the societal role of Syrian women, and political ones, like democracy in a post-Assad state, are discussed. The meshing of economic tools with political ones is important because, as some critics have pointed out, women’s economic development programs have historically been most successful when they also take into account the protection of human rights.
Arab donors have focused on providing humanitarian aid, while Western donors have narrowed in on social issues, said Kinda al-Hawasli, an Istanbul-based researcher at the Syrian Dialogue Center, an organization that issues reports and hosts discussions about a variety of social and political topics. Some organizations, like Yasmin’s, are doing both.
These organizations are responding to needs that have evolved organically from Syria’s 2011 revolt, which, as several women told me, was against not only Assad, but everything bad in Syrian society.
“There was a radical change in the role of women: The traditional role of women has changed from being a homemaker to someone who brings money into the home,” said al-Kanawati, whose organization, Women Now, offers vocational training and has funded projects like one to install solar panels in eastern Ghouta, a region outside Damascus that was under government siege and experienced frequent power outages. “This showed society at large that this group that previously operated behind the scenes before the revolution is capable of working. This is how it became possible for us to say that a woman who works also has a role in decision-making and that she has rights of her own.”
Photo: Maryam Saleh/The Intercept
The circumstances of Syrian women in Turkey are quite different from those of their counterparts in Jordan or Lebanon, where they do not face the challenge of learning a new language. On the flipside, Turkey is the only country that has created pathways to citizenship for certain classes of Syrian refugees, giving these women more stability than they’d find elsewhere.
Women specifically stand to benefit from life in Turkey, said Zahra al-Omar, a lawyer from Aleppo who has lived in Gaziantep since early 2013. Back in Syria, she said, domestic violence was taken for granted as part of many marital relationships. Personal status laws, which are rooted in religious doctrine; the nationality law, which bars women from passing citizenship on to their children; and criminal laws all “prevent the equal enjoyment of rights by men and women,” according to a 2013 dissertation on Syria’s family laws. What’s more, there’s a commonly held view that social customs often override statutory law, leaving many of those who fall victim to spousal abuse feeling that they have few social or legal protections. In Turkey, the pressures of displacement have increased the incidences of domestic violence among Syrians, al-Omar and others told me. But Syrian women are slowly starting to push back, al-Omar said. There are laws in place to punish abusers and protect survivors, and in several instances, Syrian women told me, Turks have called the police when they suspect that abuse is taking place inside homes of their Syrian neighbors.
“For those living in cities, there exists Turkish law to protect women, so long as they have the bravery to speak up,” said al-Omar, whose blue eyes were accentuated by the blue hijab she wore to our meeting in one of Gaziantep’s lush parks. Syrian nongovernmental organizations should be raising awareness among women about their protections under Turkish law and the existence of battered women’s shelters, she said. Indeed, 73 percent of Syrian women and girls in Turkey don’t know where to go if they experience sexual violence or harassment, according to a June 2018 U.N. Women report.
But shelters, like many other social services for Syrians in Turkey, are scarce, said Nada al-Fawwal, who runs a developmental center for Syrian women and children in Istanbul called Together We Grow. Though the U.N. runs a number of “safe spaces” for women and girls throughout Turkey, civil society groups and U.N. organizations, including those with offices in Turkey, mostly provide services inside refugee camps or across the border in Syria itself, where the war has made women more susceptible to sexual violence. According to a report by the Turkey-based Syrian Dialogue Center, most groups offer only in-kind assistance, and very few work toward the intellectual and social growth of Syrian women. A recent Turkish government crackdown on NGOs has made it more difficult for Syrian organizations to operate inside Turkey.
Nada al-Fawwal stands outside Together We Grow, the developmental center she runs in Istanbul for Syrian women and children, on Sept. 14, 2018.
Photo: Maryam Saleh/The Intercept
Women Now, for example, one of few organizations that has provided gender-based violence programming for Syrian women in Turkey, used to run programs in Gaziantep, but is now at a bureaucratic standstill, awaiting approval for a Turkish partner organization to be able to continue its work inside the country.
In early 2017, Women Now partnered with the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, a Syrian relief organization, for gender-based violence trainings for nearly 60 women in Gaziantep, al-Kanawati said. “Gender-based violence” is a U.N. buzz phrase that was relatively alien to the Syrian lexicon eight years ago, and al-Kanawati, whose organization receives funding from American and Canadian donors, said Women Now is conscious of talking about it in a way that reflects their understanding of cultural norms. (The U.N. Populations Fund is working with Syrian organizations in Gaziantep to develop resources for NGOs working on gender-based violence that specifically considers Syrian cultural norms, according to an NGO staffer involved in the process.)
“When it comes to international human rights, we try to talk about them in a way that is suitable in the environment,” she said. “We talk about women’s rights in Islam because that helps people accept it.”
“We talk about women’s rights in Islam because that helps people accept it.”Though the overwhelming majority of Women Now’s staff is female, they also work with men to help spread their message, for example by asking an imam to give a Friday sermon on what Islam says about the treatment of women. But even within an Islamic framework, there are disagreements on how to frame the conversation about women’s rights.
In the Syrian community, the pursuit of justice for women is appropriate, while the pursuit of equality between men and women is less so, Ziada told me when I met with the Basamat staff at their office, where men and women interacted comfortably. Some organizations that obtain funding to work on women’s issues may encourage women to leave their spouses or to complain to the police about any conflict, large or small, he said, echoing a relatively common perception among Syrians. Police intervention in a domestic dispute, even a major one, is uncommon in Syrian society, he noted, which is why it’s important for this type of work to be adapted to social norms.
Because Basamat tries to respect these cultural norms and because its staff is ideologically similar to its beneficiaries, who come from rural Aleppo and Damascus, Ziada said, the organization gained a reputation in Lebanon, where he used to work, for being illiberal. “We got this reputation because we never worked on projects that directly equated men and women,” he said.
Yasmin, the woman who went back to school at 35 and who wears a niqab — a face-covering veil with a slit for the eyes — said that talking about helping Syrian women with terms like “women’s empowerment” is an unwelcome imposition, removed from what she views as Islamic ideals.
“We have ignorance in our society, but we need to make women more aware of their rights in a correct way,” she said. “Women are going to start thinking that freedom means to go out whenever she wants to and to dress however she wants to, whereas Islam should be the foundation from which we move forward.”
Photo: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images
I met Yasmin at the Gaziantep office of the organization she works for, which offers religious programming and humanitarian aid inside Syria, as well as to Syrians living in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. She started working for the group in Douma, teaching and organizing religious classes. When she left for Turkey in December 2016, they asked her to run their Gaziantep women’s office, which operates out of a three-story former apartment building that has been turned into offices and classrooms for religious instruction, as well as a sewing room and hair salon, where women are taught marketable skills. (Yasmin asked The Intercept not to identify her organization to avoid drawing undue attention from the Turkish government.)
The organization is more socially and religiously conservative than most, and it goes to great lengths to ensure gender segregation. As Yasmin stood up to show me around the building, she doubled back to grab the niqab that hung on the back of her office door. She had remembered that there was a man in the building.
“Our hijab and our religiosity don’t prevent us from participating in whatever we want to participate in.”We walked down the hall to a classroom, where Yasmin tapped lightly on the door. A male instructor sat at the front, and a dozen or so women occupied desks against the walls. Two tall roll-up banners stood in front of the instructor’s desk, separating him from his female students. The instructor was a sheikh, or religious leader, and one of the few men allowed to enter the building, Yasmin told me, but even he does not have direct contact with the women he teaches.
There was a time when Yasmin would not have felt comfortable working alongside a man who was not her blood relative, but her thinking has evolved over the last seven years. “I have no problem speaking to a manager or a sheikh or any other man, as long as there’s a purpose,” she told me.
“The revolution opened a lot of opportunities up for me,” she said. “For example, I wear niqab. We [as a culture] had a perception that a woman who wears niqab has to stay at home. Well, I want to go out in my niqab! I want to walk on the moon while wearing hijab.”
When she attends meetings with other NGOs in Gaziantep, Yasmin said, she is the only woman who covers her face. But staying true to her religious convictions, even amid her newfound insistence on her role as a working woman, is exactly what she aims to do.
“When I left Syria, my goals changed. I wanted to show other societies that we as Syrian women have a lot to offer,” she said. “Our hijab and our religiosity don’t prevent us from participating in whatever we want to participate in.”
Reporting for this article was supported by a media fellowship through the initiative on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence, a project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.
The post “I Want to Walk on the Moon While Wearing Hijab”: Syrian Women in Turkey Seek to Define Their Independence appeared first on The Intercept.
An American flag waves in front of the U.S. Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 13, 2019.
Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
The 2016 elections — all of them — were painful. Democrats failed to take back the House and Senate and lost the presidency to a bigoted fraudster. I don’t intend to relitigate the whole thing here, but those losses, as well as key defeats in local and state races across the country, have caused real harm to legions of everyday Americans.
Some people blame the losses on Russia — and that’s ridiculous. Others make it out like the hacking and interference had no impact at all — and that’s ridiculous too. The Democrats lost for dozens of reasons, but the hacking and interference was damn sure one of them. It was a major distraction during the campaign. My fear was that it would also be such a distraction for the Democratic Party moving forward that the party would ignore all of the substantive changes it needed to address.
Don’t get me wrong, I think election interference is a huge deal. The safety and integrity of our elections is no small thing, but since the losses of 2016, Democrats have needed to find a way to walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s good news here: I see four things happening right now that makes me cautiously optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party.
Embracing Progressive IdeasA few years ago, if you supported “Medicare for All,” you were probably either a hippie, a Bernie supporter, or both. Today, polls show that 70 percent of Americans like it, and mainstream Democrats are finally embracing it publicly. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began talking about how essential it is that the United States embrace a “Green New Deal,” on Day 1 her idea only had support from a few of her closest allies in government. In just a few weeks’ time, you’d now struggle to find a Democrat who doesn’t support it. Speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, she’s got the entire country talking about finally making the ultrarich pay their fair share of taxes. And a few years ago, I struggled to find a single mainstream Democrat talking about ending cash bail or decriminalizing weed — now those are basic talking points for presidential candidates.
I’m glad about all of this, but here’s why I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s easy as hell to talk about your bold policy choices when your party doesn’t have the power to enact them. I just want to make sure the Democrats don’t lose their nerve when it matters most.
Candidates Hiring Diverse StaffOne key reason why presidential candidates are so often tone deaf on issues of race and class is because their senior staffs are often primarily made up of white men. Democrats have completely changed this for the upcoming primaries. Julián Castro hired an amazing black woman, a highly skilled organizer named Maya Rupert, as his campaign manager. Kamala Harris announced that her campaign manager will be Juan Rodriguez, who also ran her Senate race in 2016. In Kirsten Gillibrand’s new staff, she announced six new hires — four of them are women. Of those six, two are African-American and one is Latina. This is a big deal. These early candidates are not just setting the tone for the candidates who will follow them, they are building teams that will actually be able to skillfully advise them on how to reach the entire nation.
Race Barriers Fall in SenateI have long railed against the lack of diversity of Senate Democrats’ senior staffs. It’s still a serious problem, but it’s getting so much better. When Alabama’s Doug Jones was elected, he appointed the Senate’s first African-American chief of staff, Dana Gresham. Of course it’s embarrassing we had to wait this long. Thankfully, Sen. Elizabeth Warren just hired Anne Reid as her new chief of staff; an Obama administration alum, Reid became the first black woman to serve in this role for any Senate Democrat. She wasn’t the only black woman in that role for long. Gillibrand just hired Joi Chaney to serve in the same role for her office. Yes, I am celebrating the fact that we went from zero African-American chiefs of staff for Democrats to three — because it’s trending upward.
Competitive and Healthy PrimariesThe 2016 Democratic presidential primaries were weird. A dozen serious candidates should’ve jumped in there to run, but they were either flagged off or chose not to, in order to make room for Hillary Clinton. I ultimately think that that was actually bad for Clinton. In the end, two people who nobody thought stood a chance, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, ignored the chatter and ran anyway. Sanders shocked the world and won 20 states, but a robust, competitive nationwide primary — with a normal number of candidates — would’ve been better for the winner. In 2008, Barack Obama beat out a who’s who of Democrats to win the nomination and went into the general with a ton of momentum. In some ways, that’s what Donald Trump actually did on the Republican side in 2016.
The upcoming Democratic primaries are going to be altogether different from the previous ones. Clearly, it appears that we will have a healthy number of candidates running. Already, with Warren, Harris, and Tulsi Gabbard in the race, it appears that the primary will set a record for the number of women running. Not only that, but this cross-section of candidates is already on pace to be the most ethnically diverse ever as well. These candidates look more like America. And with Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, now in the race, we have the first openly gay candidate to run for president. Whoever wins is going to have to fight in all 50 states to do so. And again, that’s going to be good for their chances at defeating Trump in 2020.
The post Four Reasons I’m Cautiously Optimistic About the Democratic Party in 2020 appeared first on The Intercept.
Há quatro anos, quando chefiava o Comando Militar do Sul, o general Hamilton Mourão fez uma palestra para oficiais da reserva convocando os presentes para o “despertar de uma luta patriótica”. Um dos slides exibidos continha a frase “mudar é preciso”. O impeachment de Dilma estava na pauta, e o general aproveitou para atacar toda a classe política. Na ocasião, Mourão alertou a tropa: “ainda temos muitos inimigos internos, mas eles se enganam achando que os militares estão desprevenidos”. E ainda lançou um desafio: “Eles que venham!” Poucos dias depois, Mourão organizou um evento em homenagem ao coronel Ustra, o principal torturador da ditadura militar.
O golpismo de Mourão foi punido pelo comandante do Exército Eduardo Villas-Boas que, pressionado pelo então ministro da Defesa Aldo Rebelo (PT) e pelo senador Aloysio Nunes (PSDB), o retirou do comando da tropa e o empurrou para um cargo meramente burocrático.
Foram essas credenciais pouco democráticas que encantaram Bolsonaro, que escolheu o general para ser seu vice-presidente. O presidente chegou a dizer em campanha: “Quero governabilidade. Tenho que ter um vice que trabalha junto comigo e não seja uma peça decorativa”. Bom, hoje o presidente pode dizer que seu vice não é decorativo, mas certamente não pode dizer que trabalha junto com ele.
Desde o fim da campanha, o Mourão golpista deu lugar ao Mourão republicano. E isso tem sido um problema sério para o presidente. Os dois têm discordado em praticamente todos os assuntos. Não é raro o vice aparecer dizendo diametralmente o oposto do presidente. E sempre com muito mais propriedade e categoria.
Quando Bolsonaro estupidamente detonou a China e deixou os chineses ressabiados, Mourão tentou segurar a onda e disse que não podíamos “nos descuidar do relacionamento com o nosso principal parceiro comercial”. Quando Bolsonaro anunciou a mudança da embaixada brasileira para Jerusalém, Mourão retrucou: “é óbvio que a questão terá que ser bem pensada. É uma decisão que não pode ser tomada de afogadilho, de orelhada”. Sobre o aquecimento global, a opinião do general também não sintonizou com os delírios dos Bolsonaro: “não resta dúvida de que ele existe. Não acho que seja uma trama marxista”. Quando Jean Wyllys anunciou a desistência em assumir o cargo na Câmara por causa das ameaças de morte, o presidente comemorou “o grande dia” no Twitter. Já Mourão declarou que a ameaça contra o deputado é um “crime contra a democracia”. Sobre o decreto que facilita a posse de armas no país com a finalidade de melhorar a segurança pública, Mourão afirmou que “não se trata de uma medida de combate à violência”, mas apenas do “cumprimento de uma promessa feita em campanha”.
Enfim, para cada absurdo do presidente, o vice oferece uma dose de sensatez.
Em menos de 30 dias de governo, o vice-presidente Mourão já assumiu a presidência por duas vezes. É curioso notar como o general fica mais à vontade no papel de presidente do que o próprio capitão. Diferentemente de Jair, Mourão domina bem todos os assuntos pertinentes ao governo, fala com desenvoltura, trata bem a imprensa e adversários políticos. O fato é que enquanto Jair Bolsonaro se comporta como um bolsominion enfurecido no WhatsApp, Mourão se comporta como um presidente da República. O ex-capitão não tem capacidade intelectual para atuar fora da bolha de ideologismo barato que Olavo de Carvalho construiu para ele. Funcionou bem durante a campanha, mas agora não mais. Isso ficou ainda mais evidente quando ele usou apenas seis dos 45 minutos que tinha para representar o país no maior fórum econômico do mundo.
Mourão, por outro lado, tem atuado com diplomacia e pragmatismo. Não se vê nem sombra daquele militar golpista que atiçava as tropas contra os políticos em 2015. Já o presidente Bolsonaro ainda se vê preso no olavismo, no papel de cachorrinho fiel de Donald Trump e no crime organizado de Rio das Pedras.
A cada dia que passa, o ex-capitão vai ficando cada vez mais minúsculo perto do general, que faz questão de deixar isso claro a todo momento. O protagonismo do vice tem deixado Bolsonaro e sua família bastante preocupados. Enquanto eles sangram e se mostram incapazes de explicar as relações com o crime organizado, Mourão vai ganhando respeito de todos os lados, construindo pontes e ganhando força política.
O vice-presidente insiste bater de frente com o olavismo que intoxica o governo Bolsonaro. O ministro das Relações Exteriores, Ernesto Araújo, um fiel olavista indicado ao cargo pelo guru, tem sido solenemente ignorado pelo general. Além de estar mantendo reuniões com embaixadores de diversos países sem a presença do chanceler, como é de praxe, Mourão debochou da sua atuação excessivamente ideológica: “Vai todo mundo virar israelense desde criancinha? Vai todo mundo virar fã dos americanos de qualquer jeito? A diplomacia são métodos e objetivos, não um fim. É preciso inserir conceitos claros, não interferir em assuntos de outros países. E ainda não está claro” — uma verdadeira lacrada no olavismo, como dizem.
Os atritos entre o filósofo e o general foram aumentando até culminar com declaração de Mourão lamentando as ameaças a Jean. Olavo se indignou com o general e correu vomitar sua megalomania delirante no YouTube. Além de descer a lenha em Mourão e acusar os militares brasileiros de serem historicamente coniventes com os comunistas, o maluco de Virgínia (EUA) aproveitou para se dizer vítima “da maior campanha de assassinato de reputação contra um cidadão privado já visto na história humana”, chamar Maria do Rosário de “vagabunda” e dizer que “há sérias suspeitas de que Jean é um dos mandantes do assassinato de Bolsonaro”.
A lisergia de Olavo não tolera a prudência, a racionalidade e o pragmatismo de Mourão. Ele acredita que estamos no meio de um guerra contra o marxismo cultural globalista, e numa guerra não se deve ter tolerância com os inimigos. O general desprezou o ataque do filósofo: “Quem se importa com as opiniões do Olavo?”A pergunta foi retórica, mas deve ser respondida: Jair Bolsonaro e o núcleo bolsonarista não só se importam como são criaturas dele.
Não se sabe exatamente quais são os interesses de Mourão ao rivalizar tão firmemente com Bolsonaro dentro do governo. Muitos já dizem que ele está preparando o terreno para assumir o poder com o apoio dos militares caso o ex-capitão se enfraqueça ainda mais politicamente. É também o que pensa um dos filhos do presidente, como relatou a Folha. Quem acompanha o Brasil nos últimos cinco anos, sabe que nenhuma possibilidade pode ser descartada. Há pouco o que se fazer para controlar o general, já que ele não pode ser demitido. A essa altura o capitão deve estar amargamente arrependido de não ter escolhido o sempre dócil e fiel Magno Malta para ser seu vice.
O vice-presidente parece ter virado um oposicionista do presidente, o que o fez ganhar simpatia de muita gente na esquerda. Nessa semana, Mourão surpreendeu ainda mais ao afirmar que “o aborto deve ser uma decisão da mulher”.
Mas vamos com calma. Até pouco tempo atrás, Mourão agitava as tropas contra “inimigos da nação” e homenageava torturador. Já durante a campanha, admitiu a possibilidade de um “autogolpe” com a ajuda das Forças Armadas em caso de “anarquia”. Defendeu uma nova Constituição sem Constituinte. Ligou os indígenas à “indolência” e os negros à “malandragem”. Chamou famílias chefiadas por mães e avós de “fábrica de criminosos”.
O general parece progressista perto de Jair Bolsonaro, mas é apenas uma questão de referência. Até um trezoitão carregado parece progressista ao lado do nosso presidente.
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