Campaign 2020 - October 23rd
Today we have:
Militia at the polls
Ayn Rand's pandemic
America the Untrustworthy
Barrett's sect
"I didn't want to come to Erie"
Fixing broken media
Lost immigrant children
A little Presidential graft
A little Presidential nepotism
A little more Presidential graft
A spat among Trumpists
ICE used torture
BIDEN 2020
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Which States Are At Greatest Risk Of Militia Activity Around The Election?
Now two research groups have mapped out where right-wing groups might be most active before, during and after Election Day, based on a variety of variables including recruitment patterns, relationships with law enforcement, and perceptions about a coming “ leftist coup .”
Swing states in the upcoming election are at “heightened risk,” the report found, and specifically state capitals and so-called “periphery” towns that offer natural meeting points in suburban and rural areas.
The organizations behind the report — The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and MilitiaWatch — concluded that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon were at the highest risk of increased militia activity around the election.
What’s Driving Armed Right-Wing Groups?
The report identified some key trends driving recent activity from militias and other fringe groups.
For one thing, militia movements have realigned from being broadly anti-federal government to aligning with a single political party and candidate: The Republican Party, and President Donald Trump.
Protests against COVID-19 restrictions, as well as counter-protests against Black Lives Matter rallies and anti-fascist activists, have also provided recruiting and networking opportunities, the report found.
The report distinguishes between three primary categories of groups: “Mainstream militia” groups like the “Oath Keepers” and those that identify as “Three Percenters” — a callback to the supposed percentage of Americans who took up arms against the British — are more likely to align with law enforcement and see the police and military as allies, the report said.
So-called “right-wing street movements” like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are more enthusiastic about brawling with their political opponents, the report noted, as their frequent battles with anti-fascist activists show. A third group, which the report calls “devolved right-wing libertarian groups” have maintained a skepticism of government authority and are “highly primed for civil conflict”: Think the Boogaloo movement and Ammon Bundy’s “ People’s Rights ” network.
There's a lot more in the OA.
America is a REALLY scary place to be these days. I sure am happy to be living somewhere that is peaceful, and the people are calm and happy - for one thing, no civilians have guns.
How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?
Liberty doesn’t mean freedom to infect other people.
A long time ago, in an America far, far away — actually just last spring — many conservatives dismissed Covid-19 as a New York problem. It’s true that in the first few months of the pandemic, the New York area, the port of entry for many infected visitors from Europe, was hit very hard. But the focus on New York also played into right-wing “American carnage” narratives about the evils of densely populated, diverse cities. Rural white states imagined themselves immune.
But New York eventually controlled its viral surge, in large part via widespread mask-wearing, and at this point the “ anarchist jurisdiction ” is one of the safest places in the country. Despite a worrying uptick in some neighborhoods, especially in religious communities that have been flouting rules on social distancing, New York City’s positivity rate — the fraction of tests showing presence of the coronavirus — is only a bit over 1 percent .
Even as New York contained its pandemic, however, the coronavirus surged out of control in other parts of the country. There was a deadly summer spike in much of the Sunbelt. And right now the virus is running wild in much of the Midwest; in particular, the most dangerous places in America may be the Dakotas.
Last weekend North Dakota, which is averaging more than 700 new coronavirus cases every day, was down to only 17 available I.C.U. beds . South Dakota now has a terrifying 35 percent positivity rate. Deaths tend to lag behind infections and hospitalizations, but more people are already dying daily in the Dakotas than in New York State, which has 10 times their combined population. And there’s every reason to fear that things will get worse as cold weather forces people indoors and Covid-19 interacts with the flu season.
But why does this keep happening? Why does America keep making the same mistakes?
Donald Trump’s disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ayn Rand — or, more generally, libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about.
If you look at what Republican politicians are saying as the pandemic rips through their states, you see a lot of science denial. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, has gone full Trump — questioning the usefulness of masks and encouraging potential super-spreader events. (The Sturgis motorcycle rally , which drew almost a half-million bikers to her state, may have played a key role in setting off the viral surge.)
But you also see a lot of libertarian rhetoric — a lot of talk about “freedom” and “personal responsibility.” Even politicians willing to say that people should cover their faces and avoid indoor gatherings refuse to use their power to impose rules to that effect, insisting that it should be a matter of individual choice.
Which is nonsense.
Many things should be matters of individual choice. The government has no business dictating your cultural tastes, your faith or what you decide to do with other consenting adults.
But refusing to wear a face covering during a pandemic, or insisting on mingling indoors with large groups, isn’t like following the church of your choice. It’s more like dumping raw sewage into a reservoir that supplies other people’s drinking water.
Remarkably, many prominent figures still don’t seem to understand (or aren’t willing to understand) why we should be practicing social distancing. It’s not primarily about protecting ourselves — if it were, it would indeed be a personal choice. Instead, it’s about not endangering others. Wearing a mask may provide some protection to the wearer, but mostly it limits the chance that you’ll infect other people.
Or to put it another way, irresponsible behavior right now is essentially a form of pollution. The only difference is in the level at which behavior needs to be changed. For the most part, controlling pollution involves regulating institutions — limiting sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants, requiring cars to have catalytic converters. Individual choices — paper versus plastic, walking instead of driving — aren’t completely irrelevant, but they have only a marginal effect.
Controlling a pandemic, on the other hand, mainly requires that individuals change their behavior — covering their faces, refraining from hanging out in bars. But the principle is the same.
Now, I know that some people are enraged by any suggestion that they should bear some inconvenience to protect the common good. Indeed, for reasons I don’t fully understand, the rage seems most intense when the inconvenience is trivial . Case in point: with around 5,000 Americans dying each week from Covid-19, Donald Trump seems obsessed with the problems he apparently has with low-flush toilets .
But this is no time for people to indulge their petty obsessions. Trump may complain that “all you hear is Covid, Covid, Covid.” The fact, however, is that the current path of the pandemic is terrifying. And we desperately need leadership from politicians who will take it seriously.
That's the cultural difference between a nation like the USA with its astronomical numbers of infections and deaths still steadily increasing, and a nation that is already substantially back to normal.
Europe Wonders if It Can Rely on U.S. Again, Whoever Wins
America’s deeply polarized politics have marked foreign policy, too, undermining Washington’s authority and reputation for reliability.
Al Drago for The New York Times
Treated with contempt by President Trump , who considers them rivals and deadbeats instead of allies, many European leaders look forward to the possibility of a Biden presidency. But they are painfully aware that four years of Mr. Trump have changed the world — and the United States — in ways that will not be easily reversed.
Even if civility can be restored, a fundamental trust has been broken, and many European diplomats and experts believe that U.S. foreign policy is no longer bipartisan, so is no longer reliable. “The shining city on the hill is not as shining as it used to be,” Reinhard Bütikofer, a prominent German member of the European Parliament, put it bluntly.
For the first time, said Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategies, “Europeans are afraid that there is no longer a foreign-policy consensus in the United States. Every new administration can mean a totally new policy, and for them this is a nightmare.”
The ideological divide will be on display on Thursday, when Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. are scheduled to hold their final presidential debate.
There will be what most consider low-hanging fruit for a Biden administration that will please Europeans. The crop includes an extension to the New Start nuclear arms control treaty with Russia and returns to the Paris climate accord, the World Health Organization and even the Iran nuclear accord. There will be feel-good meetings and statements about multilateralism, less confrontation about trade, renewed efforts to reform the World Trade Organization and a less combative atmosphere at summit meetings of the Group of 7 and NATO.
But Mr. Trump’s complaints are shared by many Americans, and given the polarization in America, President Emmanuel Macron of France has pushed Europe to step up in an altered world, where China is rising and the Trump administration is only a symptom of an American retreat from global leadership, not the cause.
The idea of European “strategic autonomy” — of a Europe less dependent on Washington and with its own strong voice in the world — has been gaining ground, even if it is more aspiration than reality.
Some, like Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, and François Heisbourg, a French security analyst, fear that a Biden presidency could short-circuit European autonomy and let Europeans continue, as Ms. Tocci said, “sticking our heads in the sand.”
A Trump re-election, of course, might accelerate the trend toward autonomy, even if few believe that Mr. Trump would be able to pull out of NATO, as one of his former national security advisers, John Bolton, suggested he might .
American foreign policy was traditionally bipartisan — the old phrase that “politics stops at the water’s edge” had merit, especially during the Cold War. But the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that foreign policy, too, was subject to deepening political polarization in the United States.
“There is an incredible decay in Europe of the sense of the United States as a leader,” accelerated and symbolized by mishandling of the coronavirus , said Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“Biden doesn’t solve their America problem,” he said. “He’s not going to be president for ever, and Democrats won’t always be in power, and people have learned that the U.S. can’t be trusted on foreign policy, because the next administration will come in and wipe it away.”
The inconsistency of U.S. foreign policy has undermined American credibility, some warned.
There is “an American decline in geopolitical weight,” said Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University. “The single fact that shapes the U.S. role in global politics is polarization, and this polarization will not disappear if Joe Biden is elected,” he said. “Americans simply don’t agree with one another on basic premises, even on how much America should be involved in global affairs and NATO.”
William J. Burns, a former senior American diplomat who now runs the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, thinks the damage is lasting, no matter who wins the election.
“One of the more insidious effects of polarization is to make foreign policy a tool of partisan politics,” he said. “It’s done enduring damage to America’s reputation in the world for being able to keep its word.”
While Europeans would see a Biden presidency “as a return to civilization,” as Mr. Heisbourg called it, a new partnership would come with demands for new obligations and commitments, especially on China.
After Mr. Trump, however, there would also be a new wariness and unwillingness to take big risks on the part of America’s allies, said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “If you know that whatever you’re doing will at most last until the next election, you look at everything in a more contingent way,” he said.
Europeans see American confrontation with China as one of the few bipartisan issues that are driving American foreign policy, and Europeans are reluctant to be made a pawn or a playing card in that rivalry, given that China is Europe’s second-largest trading partner behind the United States.
Opinion polls show that most Europeans do not want to take sides in some battle between Washington and Beijing. “We don’t see the China challenge the same way and we’re not the peer competitor,” said Rem Korteweg of the Clingendael Institute.
There's more in the OA.
It's such a shame that China and America are unable to form a mutually beneficial partnership rather than being competitors. Of course Trump prefers that they be enemies.
Actually... ... we had such a partnership... until "someone" decided that trade wars are easy to win.
Revealed: ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse
People of Praise hire lawyers to investigate historical sexual abuse allegations as former members speak of ‘emotional torment’
In the wake of the allegations, the Guardian has learned that the charismatic Christian organization , which is based in Indiana, has hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of People of Praise.
The historic sexual abuse allegations and claims of emotional trauma do not pertain specifically to Barrett, who has been a lifelong member of the charismatic group, or her family.
But some former members who spoke to the Guardian said they were deeply concerned that too little was understood about the “community” of People of Praise ahead of Barrett’s expected confirmation by the Senate next week, after which she will hold the seat formerly held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Two people familiar with the matter say that more than two dozen former members of the faith group, many of whom say they felt “triggered” by Barrett’s nomination, are participating in a support group to discuss how the faith group affected their lives.
“The basic premise of everything at the People of Praise was that the devil controlled everything outside of the community, and you were ‘walking out from under the umbrella of protection’ if you ever left,” said one former member who called herself Esther, who had to join the group as a child but then left the organization. “I was OK with it being in a tiny little corner of Indiana, because a lot of weird stuff happens in tiny little corners in this country. But it’s just unfathomable to me – I can’t even explain just how unfathomable it is – that you would have a supreme court justice who is a card-carrying member of this community.”
Barrett was not asked about her involvement in People of Praise during her confirmation hearings last week, and has never included her involvement with the group in Senate disclosure forms, but has in the past emphasized that her religious faith as a devout Catholic would not interfere with her impartiality.
People of Praise is rooted in the rise of charismatic Christian communities in the late 1960s and 1970s, which blended Pentecostal traditions like speaking in tongues and prophecy with Catholicism. It is an ecumenical group – meaning it accepts members of different Christian churches – though its members are mostly Catholic. Proponents say charismatic Christians are bound together by members’ shared personal presence of Christ, and “empowerment through the Holy Spirit”.
Its handbook emphasizes an insular view of the world, stressing obedience and devotion to other members, and communal living.
There's lots more in the OA.
Maybe it makes sense to wait and see what she does before assuming what she is going to do.
I agree. But it's such fun to read tea leaves...
‘Bold Strategy’: People Scratch Their Heads Over Trump Telling PA Rallygoers He Didn’t Want To Be There
President Donald Trump got remarkably candid on Tuesday night with his supporters in Pennsylvania, a state he desperately needs to win on Election Day, by telling them that if he had a choice, he wouldn’t have bothered to grace them with his presence.
“Four or five months ago when we started this whole thing….before the plague came in, I had it made,” Trump said during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I wasn’t coming to Erie. I mean I have to be honest, there’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to.”
Unfortunately, the President complained to his supporters, the pesky COVID-19 pandemic that’s caused his approval ratings to plummet forced him to actually reach out to them.
“And then we got hit with the plague, and I had to go back to work,” Trump said. “Hello, Erie. Can I please have your vote?”
Strangely enough, the comment met with cheers and applause from the crowd. Everyone else, however, was wondering why an incumbent presidential candidate would explicitly tell voters in a crucial swing state ( one in which he’s trailing Democratic rival Joe Biden by a little over 6 points in the polls ) that he didn’t want to be there:
There are lots of links in the OA.
Weird is an understatement. IMO, it was nuts.
It's downright painful, when he slips up... and tells the truth...
Trump exploited a broken press. Here’s how to fix it.
A conversation with media critic Jay Rosen.
President Donald Trump holds a
news conference at the White House
on August 19, 2020.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
To his credit, Biden dismissed the question, but that’s not really the point. The story the reporter was referencing, which was peddled to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, is absolute bullshit . The staff journalist who wrote the story even reportedly refused to put his name on the byline out of concerns that it was bogus and unreliable.
If any of this reminds you of Hillary Clinton’s fake email scandal in 2016 , it should. Then, as now, the goal of people like Giuliani was to get the press to cover a story not in order to convince people that it’s true, but to amplify a false narrative and divert attention — and maybe drive the public to exhaustion. It’s a strategy that Steve Bannon colorfully dubbed “flooding the zone with shit.”
I’ve written about this problem more than once ( here and here ) and yet I still struggle to come up with viable solutions. The pattern is always the same: Trump, or operators working on his behalf, flood the zone with shit and the media responds as it always does: it covers the story. Even though much of the coverage is skeptical, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent argued, the mere fact that stories are printed with the words “Biden” and “emails” means the zone-flooding approach succeeded.
In general, the press has handled the Biden story much better than it handled the Clinton story in 2016, which suggests some lessons were learned. But I still worry that the attention — even to debunk it — nonetheless gives such a story oxygen, allowing the right to muddy the waters and confuse voters.
So what, exactly, is the media supposed to do?
I reached out to Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor at NYU and one of the sharpest analysts of political journalism in the social media age, to talk about the media’s dilemma. We discussed why he thinks the prevailing model of journalism has been hacked, why the press has been either unwilling or unable to adapt, and some practical steps journalists can take to deal with the realities of this new media ecosystem.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
The model is broken
Sean Illing
You wrote recently that Trump has exposed the weaknesses in “the journalist’s code.” What does that mean?
Jay Rosen
There’s a code that tells journalists what’s newsworthy. You won’t see it written down except maybe in a journalism professor’s research. But it includes timeliness, conflict, anything totally unexpected, anything seemingly consequential, anything that involves a charismatic person whose human interest looms large in the news, and so on.
Trump has hacked the newsworthiness code by being newsworthy in the traditional sense every day, many times a day. He dominates the public conversation. He overwhelms journalists trying to process all this news. He exhausts the patience of the public. And he throws off so many false or misleading statements that he breaks the controls or checks on that as well.
If, as a journalist, you continue with the traditional newsworthiness code, you will participate in this method, which Steve Bannon accurately described. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media.” Trump governs by fighting with the news media. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Which overwhelms many codes that journalists have for how to do their work.
Sean Illing
I’m glad you brought up Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy, because that’s really what we’re talking about here. And let’s use the first presidential debate as an example. Trump did what he always does: overwhelmed the moderator and Biden with a barrage of lies and outrageous claims, and the press responded as it always does, namely by fact-checking Trump.
But I think you and I both agree that Trump’s playing a totally different game. He’s not trying to win in the marketplace of ideas. He’s dumping bullshit into the public sphere and watching the press fumble all over itself while trying to debunk a hurricane of falsehoods.
Why does this keep working over and over again?
Jay Rosen
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, has said many times that before Trump, presidents, Democratic and Republican, reacted in the same way when they were successfully fact-checked by the press. They would change the claim to make it kind-of sort-of factual, or they would take it out of the stump speech, because they didn’t want to suffer the penalty of being described as untruthful. And this was true across parties.
Trump not only doesn’t do that, but he frequently doubles and triples down on a false statement, or makes it part of his stump speech, like the claim that Biden is trying to destroy protections for preexisting conditions.
But that’s not the only thing. Attempts by the press to serve as a “check” on his lying only help Trump prove the culture-war proposition: “They’re trying to take me down because they hate you.” Glenn Kessler put out a book this year about 20,000 lies and distortions that Donald Trump has passed across that system. Well, if the fact-check is supposed to be a check on the tendencies of public figures to exaggerate or slip in falsehoods, it’s obviously not working. The press just hasn’t figured out how to build new routines on the wreckage of the old.
That’s one part of the answer. Another part of the answer is that “flood the zone” is a propaganda method. It’s crude but well-suited to an age of media abundance.
In the Russian setting, it’s called the firehose of falsehood. The most important feature is the constant production of falsehoods in every channel, every platform — mixed with a little truth. Another key feature is that you don’t care if the truth claims are contradictory. There’s no need to be consistent. You use every tool you can. You throw out multiple crappy arguments rather than make one good one.
One of the goals of this method is to overwhelm and dishearten people rather than persuade them. It’s about driving them from the public arena, getting them to give up on efforts to know the truth. The firehose of falsehood is very hard to oppose. It’s difficult to know what to do in response.
Sean Illing
Is Trump so extreme in his nihilism and bullshit artistry that the press just isn’t capable of dealing with him? And I want to be clear and say that there’s nothing new about bullshit in politics, but I do think Trump is different.
Jay Rosen
I would agree that the producers of news aren’t capable of dealing with Trump within their present rules and formulas. One of the odd things about the news system as it stands is that there’s no emergency switch. To fix this you would have to call a halt to regular journalism, suspend your routines. You would have to, for example, tear apart the Sunday shows and start again with different premises. And there’s no appetite for that.
I have tried to write about that very thing just to make it sound a little bit more possible. But it would take something like that to match the phenomena, and our journalists aren’t very good at coming up with new practices on the fly. They will assimilate critiques over a long period of time and occasionally change their behavior. People think it doesn’t happen, but it does — slowly.
A good example would be the change in the way the news media deals with mass shooting situations, where they kind of listened to the critique that if you glorify these people, you get more shooters. So there have been changes in how they handle that. They don’t use photographs of the shooters as much. They’re aware that centering the story on these people is unfair to the victims. But that took 10 years or so.
We don’t have 10 years. We don’t have 10 days at this point.
The press has an agenda. Own it.
Sean Illing
This is probably a good place to push this conversation in the direction of solutions. One thing you’ve said over and over again is that journalists have to abandon what you call “the savvy style,” and part of the problem is that reporters have this delusion that they’re merely spectators when, in fact, they’re actors in the process. By that I mean the actions they take, the things they choose to focus on, impacts the very events they claim to be just covering.
Why is this such a crucial distinction?
Jay Rosen
When you look at the American news sphere as it stands, two big things influence political journalism. One is extremely well-known: commercial pressures. We can call it ratings. We can call it clicks. We can call it the industry of attention. All these are names for the same thing, which is using news to generate an audience, and then selling that audience. And, of course, Trump assists with that. That’s why the words of Les Moonves, the former CEO of CBS, are so revealing: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
But even after we allow for that, there is still within the media system a good deal of autonomy and room for maneuver, where journalists can do what they think is important, even though they are parts of a commercial operation.
And here, I think, political journalists took a wrong turn. At some time in the ’70s and the ’80s, they began to look at politics as a game of insiders. They sought to explain to an audience that was itself sort of fascinated by politics — the political junkies, as they are sometimes called — how that game worked and who the masters of it were. This gave us political journalism as a savvy analysis of who was up, who was down, who’s winning or likely to win, the horse race, the spin, the strategy — all of that.
I call it the savvy style in political journalism. It kind of reduced the audience for politics to the junkies who wanted that and responded well to it.
Sean Illing
Why do you think the American press has been unwilling or unable to adapt?
Jay Rosen
If we asked members of the press, responsible people like, say, Dean Baquet, the editor of the New York Times, or others in positions similar to his, or those on the front lines like [the Times’s] Peter Baker, they would say they have adapted. And if you asked them, “What do you mean by that?” they would say things like, “Well, we’re a little more likely to call a lie a lie.” Dean Baquet would point to the various far-reaching, big investigations of Donald Trump that they’ve done for five years, and to his taxes especially. “See? We’ve been tough on him.”
They would say they’re more skeptical than they were at the beginning. They’re less likely to run with his latest tweets. They think they have adapted. That’s important to understand, because their metric is any departure from normal news judgment, whereas people like you and I are comparing what they continue to do to the phenomenon of Donald Trump. And that’s a different scale.
As an institution, the American press has a thin tradition of self-reflection. Part of the reason is it’s hardly an institution at all. It’s a collection of newsrooms that kind of operate in a similar way, but there’s no council that unites it. There’s no CEO of the press. If a Martian landed and said, “Take me to the media’s headquarters,” where would you take them?
After these major crashes in which the news media failed the public in very visible ways, like the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, or the 2016 election, there’s no 9/11 Commission to figure out what happened. There’s no panel that can synthesize what went wrong.
Sean Illing
I thought this latest Hunter Biden nonsense story from the Post showed that the media at least learned a few lessons from 2016 and handled this much better than the Hillary story in 2016.
Do you see progress there?
Jay Rosen
Yes, I do. There was more restraint. Of course, the fact that Rudy Giuliani was involved helped a lot. Still, I think there has been some serious reflection about document hacks with obscure actors involved, and the dangers of running with material like that. I know for a fact that some journalists participated in scenario-planning around that possibility, so maybe that had some effect.
Sean Illing
A journalism that’s equal to the scale of the Trump problem will be seen as inherently biased by a lot of people, which I’m fine with, but it seems like a real problem. The editor of the New York Times, for example, wants to serve the entire country, but how does he do that? You can sort of see this in the conservative response to Savannah Guthrie’s handling of the town hall. It’s bullshit, obviously, but half the country thought she was unfair. If you’re running a paper or a network, what’s your response to this challenge?
Jay Rosen
The key is in your phrase, “seen as inherently biased by a lot of people.” If we start with perception, there can be no answer. When the goal is to be seen as without bias you wind up with the view from nowhere, and all the dysfunction that comes with it: working the refs, “both sides do it,” a focus on the horse race because it feels non-ideological, and so on. To continue with that model because you’re afraid of being called biased is defeatist.
But you’re right: Dean Baquet wants the Times to be a paper that serves the entire country, Republicans and Democrats. What’s actually achievable, however, is a newsroom that serves everyone in the country — Democrats and Republican — who shares with Times journalists a certain baseline reality and evidentiary standard. That’s all you can get. Today this group includes a minority of Republicans. That cohort could shrink. Trump has tried to shrink it. Over time it could grow. It could disappear altogether. Margaret Sullivan, media writer for the Washington Post, uses the phrase the “reality-based press” for what I believe is the same idea.
Social media guidelines currently on the books at the New York Times say, “If our journalists are perceived as biased... that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.” This kind of thinking cannot work. If the perception of critics can shape rule-making in his newsroom, then Baquet has surrendered power to enemies of the Times, who will always perceive bias because it is basic to their interests to do so.
Sean Illing
One last thing I will say, and it’s something you’ve suggested before, which is that we need a better answer to the question, “What does it mean to succeed at election coverage?” As it stands, success is some unholy combination of clicks or ratings and predicting winners. That’s the approach to journalism that has to die, and I guess the question is then what will replace it?
Jay Rosen
I have two answers to that. One is sort of leaning into the light, and one is leaning into the dark.
I’ve been advocating for a long time for a citizens agenda approach to election coverage. It puts the electorate in the center of the story, rather than the candidates. The protagonists are the voters struggling to get their concerns addressed by the system, including the media system, but also the candidates. It begins by asking the people you’re trying to inform, “What do you want the candidates to be talking about as they compete for votes?” Another way to put the question would be, “What do you want this campaign to be about?” By asking lots of people those questions and getting a really good sense of their answers, you generate a priority list that can keep you from getting blown away by a hurricane of lies, or by the inside game of polls and tactics.
In the citizens agenda model, you “win” when you gain an accurate sense of what people want the campaign to be about, and when you successfully pressure the candidates to address those things people told you they want the campaign to be about. At the local level during this cycle, there are, here and there, public radio stations and local newspapers, that are doing it. So there is an alternative out there. It’s weak compared to the status quo. But it’s real, and it does begin in a different place and overhaul the entire contraption.
The other answer is darker because I think this is where we are going. The Republican Party has become a counter-majoritarian party. It can only win elections by making it harder to vote, and by making it harder to understand what the party is all about. The conflict with honest journalism is structural, not just a matter of broken practices or bad actors. And I believe the people who report on politics in the United States are going to have to confront that reality, whether Trump wins or loses.
If our journalists continue in the assumption that we have a normal system where there is a contest for power between roughly similar parties with different philosophies, then every day of operation they will be distorting the picture more and more. Can that go on indefinitely? I don’t know, but it seems to me that we’re headed for a crash.
Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy
Lawyers struggling to find parents deported to Central America, says ACLU, after US government removed 1,030 children in 2018
David Xol-Cholom, of Guatemala, reunited
with his son Byron after being separated
about a year and a half ago, during the
Trump administration’s wide-scale separation
of immigrant families.
Ringo HW Chiu/AP
In a court filing , the ACLU said that about two-thirds of the parents had been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind. In the rush to carry out Trump’s orders, the locations of the parents were not recorded and three years later they still cannot be found.
The zero-tolerance policy was announced in April 2018. It was later revealed that the administration had begun family separation the previous year under a secret pilot program.
In total, 1,030 children were removed from their parents by the US government under that pilot scheme, of whom 485 children have had their parents found under a scheme imposed by federal judges. The ACLU and a team of lawyers have been tasked by the courts with finding all the parents.
Under the pilot scheme, about 66% of the parents separated from their children were deported back to Central America before the court order was imposed on the Trump administration to find them. The search for the parents, who are called “unreachable” in the court document, has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.
The on-going suffering of hundreds of children and their parents lost to each other as a result of government action three years after the event has caused widespread anger and revulsion. Paola Luisi, director of the coalition of almost 250 groups, Families Belong Together, said that efforts would continue to find the parents until they had all been found.
“The Trump administration ripped 545 children away from their parents, lied about it, then lost track of them as they departed them into danger. That’s par for the course for a sadistic immigration system.”
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told NBC News : “We will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes. The tragic reality is that hundreds of parents were deported to Central America without their children, who remain here with foster families or distant relatives.”
Family separation was one of the most visceral results of the Trump administration’s ruthless assault on illegal border crossing. The goal of the zero-tolerance policy was to criminally prosecute every migrant who entered the US without authorization – irrespective of the consequences to their families including their children.
The full horror of the administration’s intentions was only disclosed earlier this month when the New York Times reported previously unpublished communications between top officials. Jeff Sessions, then US attorney general, told prosecutors in a conference call in May 2018: “We need to take away children.”
Notes of that call taken by a participant added: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
The then deputy AG, Rod Rosenstein, told prosecutors at the time that children should be pulled away from their parents no matter how young they were – even if they were infants.
Trump Is Reportedly Pressuring the Pentagon to Give Away 5G Spectrum to a Shady Company for Free
That’s a mouthful, but here’s the gist: Rivada currently has a “request for proposal” (RFP) that would bypass a competitive bidding process for the DoD’s 350 megahertz spectrum. The White House, CNN reports, has purportedly been working to fast-track that RFP.
What’s troubling about this is it appears that Trump is likely helping Rivada because he’s been encouraged to pressure the DoD into sharing its 5G network for commercial use by prominent Republicans, including Newt Gingrich. Karl Rove also reportedly told Trump to help Rivada out, according to CNN. Rove also happens to be an investor and lobbyist for Rivada. Peter Thiel—noted vampire , billionaire venture capitalist, and Trump supporter—is also an investor. In practice, this would give Rivada the power to lease that particular spectrum for commercial users, without being vetted or having to actually pay anything for it.
According to CNN, a recent auction for 70 megahertz of spectrum went for over $4.5 billion. The 350 megahertz spectrum in question here would be worth billions more. CNN’s report anonymously quotes a senior administration official as saying that, if successful, this could be “the biggest handoff of economic power to a single entity in history.”
It would appear that outside of Trump’s cronies, no one is too happy with this move. CNN claims that Pentagon leaders, FCC officials, as well as both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have purportedly expressed opposition to the plan, citing concerns that the normal bidding process is not being observed and that it’s unclear that the DoD even has the authority to lease or sell off its spectrum in the first place. The House Energy and Commerce also earlier this month launched an inquiry into the matter, noting in a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that, technically speaking, “no government agency owns spectrum, and they question the Trump Administration’s political motives for making such inquiries.” The letter also requests more information regarding whether the Trump administration about a “potential RFP” related to the same mid-band spectrum in question, and whether Rivada, Rove, or Gingrich had ever been in contact with the NTIA.
Meanwhile, Rove, Gingrich, Rivada, and the White House have denied up and down that a competitive process is being subverted, or that anything untoward is happening.
As for why Trump is doing this at all—besides the fact that his supporters have been telling him he should—CNN cites sources close to the matter as theorizing it’s to “curry favor with Rove.” Rove, while a staunch Republican, isn’t a die-hard MAGA chud, yet has significant sway when it comes to fundraising and is influential in party politics. And you know, there’s an election in a couple weeks.
It doesn’t take a genius to do the math that the entity that benefits most from this would be Rivada and its investors. Getting highly valued 5G mid-band spectrum for basically free, and then turning around and licensing that to businesses for profit would be incredibly lucrative. It is, as CNN points out, somewhat baffling that Rivada is being considered at all. In 2017, the company lost out on a contract to build out a nationwide public safety broadband network. While Rivada appealed that decision, a court ruling stated that not only did Rivada not have any experience in building or operating a nationwide wireless network, it didn’t have the financial resources to even take on the project.
This is the last thing 5G needs. False advertising , conspiracy theories , and political fear-mongering have already shrouded 5G rollout in confusion, even as tech giants and carriers wax poetic about the advances higher 5G speeds will bring. Using 5G as a political bartering chip is a terrible idea.
Hey!
What are "friends" for??
The stunning hypocrisy of the Trump family’s attacks on Hunter Biden
If there’s any family that should sit out attacking others for alleged corruption, it’s the Trumps
Manden Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to refuse to divest from his business interests upon taking office. As a result, he reportedly took in at least $73 million from foreign sources during his first two years in office, creating an unprecedented tangle of conflicts of interest with countries like the Philippines, India, and Turkey that are home to Trump-branded buildings.
Meanwhile, Trump’s adult sons — who said before his inauguration that they’d stay out of politics to avoid conflicts of interest — serve as key political surrogates for their father while running the family business, which has benefited from Trump’s presidency both directly and indirectly.
Somehow, none of this has stopped the president or his family from making his closing reelection case about corruption. Not his, mind you, but the flimsily supported idea that Joe Biden committed crimes by letting Obama administration foreign policy be influenced by his son Hunter ’s foreign business dealings.
Various aspects of these allegations have been debunked before (more on that later), but Trump’s attacks have nevertheless been echoed by his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
“The Biden family has spent decades in Washington, DC enriching themselves by selling access to Joe Biden’s taxpayer funded office. Hunter Biden is corrupt. Jim Biden is corrupt. Joe Biden is corrupt,” Trump Jr. tweeted last week, with Eric Trump making a similar attack on Tuesday.
Of course, the first rule of Trumpism seems to be to never let shame or hypocrisy get in the way of attacking your enemies, so it’s not necessarily surprising that Trump is trying to weaponize one of his weaknesses in a last-ditch effort to turn his flailing reelection campaign around. But it’s still worth devoting some attention to the projection involved in Trump posturing as some sort of anti-corruption crusader.
The thin Hunter Biden “scandal,” briefly explained
Hunter Biden is back in the news following the New York Post’s October 14 piece about unverified emails found on a hard drive of dubious provenance . The story suggests emails found on the drive indicate that while Biden was vice president, his son used his connections to get the vice president to meet with an executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter served on the board of for $50,000 a month.
It’s not clear whether the meeting ever happened (the Biden campaign says no one-on-one time ever did). But the implication, conservatives say, is that the purported meeting led to Joe Biden abusing his office by pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating a company that was paying his son.
While it’s unclear what qualifications Hunter had for that gig beyond having Biden as a last name, the accusation that his role on Burisma’s board somehow compromised the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has been long debunked .
For one, the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was widely regarded as corrupt, and his ouster in March 2016 had broad international support. As Parker Molloy recently wrote for Media Matters , “Biden’s role in carrying out that internationally supported action actually made it more likely that Burisma would face increased legal scrutiny , not less.” Secondly, while Shokin had investigated Burisma, his probe was reportedly dormant at the time Biden advocated for his ouster.
In short, there’s no there there. So it tracks that, according to reporting from the New York Times , Post staffers were unwilling to put their names on the October 14 piece. The article was ultimately co-bylined by Emma-Jo Morris, a former staffer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show who had never bylined a piece for the Post before, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, who reportedly “learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published.”
“Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings,” the Times wrote. “Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.”
As a result, Trump acolytes who have been pushing the Burisma story — including Rudy Giuliani — have already moved the goalposts from “Biden is guilty of wrongdoing” to “even if the premise of the Post story is false, the American people deserve to see the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
Trump and his acolytes have also accused Hunter Biden of selling his name and connections in China.
“He’s like a vacuum cleaner — he follows his father around collecting,” Trump said on October 16. “What a disgrace. It’s a crime family.”
But as the New York Times detailed in a story on Tuesday that, ironically, is about a previously undisclosed bank account Trump has in China, there’s no evidence Hunter did anything wrong here either:
Even if Hunter Biden were as shady as the president’s circle is alleging, the Trump family should still probably sit this one out.
From “drain the swamp” to being the swamp
Very few people would argue that there isn’t something unseemly about Hunter Biden seemingly cashing in on his family name while his father was still serving as vice president. But if there’s anybody who should refrain from making that case, it’s the Trump children.
Since Trump’s inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric have been responsible for the Trump Organization, which sprawls across more than 30 countries and about 500 business entities, and, according to Trump , generated about $9.5 billion in revenue annually before he took office. And while Trump and his family insist that they’ve honored the promise Trump made before his inauguration not to do any new foreign deals while he’s in office, the business has still provided the family multiple chances to cash in since January 2017:
As I wrote last February , shortly after the Washington Post broke news about the Secret Service spending more than $500,000 at Trump properties since he took office, the Trump family has become the swamp that Donald Trump once promised to drain:
All of this comes on top of President Trump having visited properties he still owns and profits from more than 500 times while in office, according to a count kept by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) , which found last month that Trump has racked up 3,403 conflicts of interest while in office.
Not only that, but on numerous occasions Trump has used White House events to promote his businesses, such as the following free ad for Trump National Doral Miami he cut last year during his failed push to hold the G7 there .
In addition to Ukraine, the Trumps have accused Hunter Biden of cashing in in China. But as the New York Times detailed last year, a $1.7 billion Trump Organization project in Indonesia received a $500 billion infusion from a state-owned Chinese construction company. And it’s not just Eric and Don Jr.; Ivanka Trump, despite working in the White House, continues to do business in China as well.
Donald Jr. and Eric may be two of their father’s key campaign surrogates and regularly appear on Fox News to discuss politics (making a mockery of their pre-inauguration promise to stay out of their father’s administration while running the family business), but Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner actually work in the White House. Their most recent financial disclosure indicates that politics has been lucrative for them, as they reported at least $36.2 million in income in 2019. And in 2018, Kushner received a massive cash infusion from Qatar.
As Robert Maguire, research director for CREW, told Vox, “one way to think about this is: Imagine if Hunter Biden passed his time during the Obama administration working to sustain and promote a business that not only he profited from, but Joe Biden did also. Then, on top of that, imagine that Joe Biden himself spent day after day in office openly and single-mindedly promoting that same business, in his official capacity, through glowing statements and hundreds of visits to the business, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money being spent there — along with special-interest and foreign money.”
“If all of that were true, it still wouldn’t be as corrupt as what we’ve seen over four years of the Trump administration,” Maguire added.
Desperate times call for desperate measures
With Trump trailing Biden by a robust margin in the polls and few of his attacks on his challenger landing, it seems his campaign is basically trying to recreate some of the conditions that helped propel him to an unlikely victory in October 2016 — ginning up an email scandal in hopes of tarnishing Biden as corrupt in the eyes of voters.
But one problem with this approach is that there’s even less to the Biden/Burisma “scandal” than there was to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump on some level seems to recognize this, as in recent days he’s started berating the media for not covering the Hunter Biden scandal, such as it is, instead of trying to highlight the scandal itself.
Secondly, as Republican Frank Luntz told Fox News this week, in a country being ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic in both human and economic terms, voters just don’t seem to care that much about Hunter Biden.
Nonetheless, during a Fox & Friends interview on Tuesday, Trump pleaded with Attorney General Bill Barr to appoint a special prosecutor before the election to investigate Biden. That echoed comments Trump made almost exactly a year ago when he publicly pleaded with the Ukrainian and Chinese governments to investigate the Bidens.
And in another sign of how desperate Trumpworld has become, Trump acolyte Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) went on Fox News last weekend and made baseless insinuations that child pornography was found on Hunter Biden’s computer.
Whether there’s merit to serious accusations of this sort is beside the point for Trump and his Republican enablers — what matters is creating the appearance that Biden and/or those close to him are guilty of wrongdoing. After all, if Trump really cared about corruption, he would have done what every other modern president did before taking office and divested from his business before taking office.
So we have - already have - proof of Trump's kids' illegal actions... TrumpWorld pays no attention to that. It prefers to invent crap about Hunter Biden.
Who gives a shit about truth of the law?
Apparently Foxconn's Wisconsin LCD Factory Is Fake
of the Foxconn Technology Group computer screen plant on June 28, 2018 in Mt Pleasant, Wis.
Andy Manis (Getty Images)
Last week, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) rejected electronics maker Foxconn’s tax subsidy application for failing to not only hire the number of employees it promised, but to build a Gen 10.5 LCD factory. The company had instead built a Gen 6 facility to manufacture phone screens instead of a larger factory for TV displays, and hired only 550 out of the 13,000 employees it was supposed to, 281 of whom did not qualify under the terms of the contract. But now, a report from The Verge has confirmed the Gen 6 facility is not being used to manufacture anything at all.
In an interview with The Verge, Wisconsin Secretary of the Department of Administration Joel Brennan said it’s clear “the Gen 6 that’s been discussed and built in Mount Pleasant is not similar to other Gen 6 fabs around the world.”
Basically, it’s a fake factory. The building is there, but nothing is being made.
According to a report from Wisconsin’s Division of Executive Budget and Finance, not only has Foxconn not purchased any of the necessary manufacturing equipment to make LCDs, but it’s currently using the facility as storage. If manufacturing were to happen in the building, it would only be able to accommodate the final assembly of components—LCDs and other phone parts would be shipped to the facility and then assembled there.
In an interview with The Verge, Wisconsin Secretary of the Department of Administration Joel Brennan said that this industry was new to Wisconsin, and there was “justified criticism of the [former Governor Scott] Walker administration for entering into this contract.” No outside experts were consulted, and it appears there wasn’t any thorough discussion around how a contract like this would affect the community, nor if it was particularly viable considering LCD manufacturing wasn’t something that hadn’t really been explored in Wisconsin before.
The fake factory would definitely not result in the 13,000 jobs Foxconn needed to get its subsidies. It could also explain why the company has hired such a small number of people to date. If final assembly is the only thing taking place in the facility, that wouldn’t require anywhere close to the same amount of employees as a full-fledged factory would.
To make matters worse, Foxconn allegedly hired local college students and recent graduates on visas in a futile attempt to bolster its employment numbers, according to an investigation by The Verge. Foxconn wasn’t able to hire enough people to get its subsidies, so many of those new hires were laid off once the deadline had passed. Many of them were also hired with no work to do.
It’s somewhat of an unsurprising end to a deal that never should have happened in the first place. In 2019, Foxconn had decided to not build a factory in Milwaukee, Wis., even after purchasing a 500-person office building. The company told Gizmodo at the time that factors within the global market changed its plans. But 24 hours later , after a phone call with President Trump, Foxconn execs did an about-face and decided to follow through with constructing the factory. It probably should have just walked away, considering how much of an unnecessary headache this entire saga has turned into.
Gee... the "World's Greatest Dealmaker" got taken for a ride!
Gosh...
Wow...
Frankly... is anyone surprised?
What a total con job and the great con artist got conned.
I don't suppose that Fox News gives many updates on this...
An angry Azar floats plans to oust FDA’s Hahn
Fights over vaccine standards have created an unbridgeable divide within HHS,
officials said, but White House is unlikely to approve any changes until after the election.
Infuriated by the FDA’s defiance in a showdown over the Trump administration’s standards for authorizing a coronavirus vaccine, health secretary Alex Azar has spent recent weeks openly plotting the ouster of FDA chief Stephen Hahn.
Health secretary Alex Azar has spent recent weeks
openly plotting the ouster of FDA chief Stephen Hahn
Micahel A. McCoy - Pool/Getty Images
During some of those conversations, he’s gone as far as to float potential replacements for Hahn, said one current and two former administration officials familiar with the talks, identifying HHS testing czar Brett Giroir and a pair of career civil servants – FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner Amy Abernethy and longtime regulator Janet Woodcock — as prime candidates to step in as acting commissioner should Hahn be removed.
The discussions come amid deep frustration with Hahn over his insistence that a Covid-19 vaccine meet strict safety standards — a contentious decision that rendered it impossible for President Donald Trump to fulfill his oft-expressed desire for a vaccine just before Election Day.
Earlier this month, Hahn ended a lengthy standoff over the rules under which the FDA would grant emergency authorization for a vaccine by flouting the White House and ordering their publication. The move won widespread praise from the nation’s public health community.
But it angered Azar and others who viewed it as the latest in a recent pattern of Hahn breaking with the broader administration in an effort to bolster his own reputation, current and former officials said.
White House officials are unlikely to green-light Hahn’s firing in the next two weeks despite their own reservations about him, five current and former administration officials said, over concerns about the optics of removing an FDA commissioner soon after his agency ruled out a pre-election vaccine.
Still, Hahn — who has endured a turbulent 10-month run — is viewed as a long-shot to return if Trump wins a second term. In a sign of awareness of his rocky standing, Hahn has largely avoided traveling to the White House of late, two administration officials said, preferring to call in to its coronavirus task force meetings.
In the meantime, the last few weeks have marked a new low point in an extraordinary feud between Azar’s health department and its subordinates at the FDA that has played out in the press and behind the scenes during the nation’s worst pandemic in 100 years.
That monthslong battle has disrupted efforts to combat the virus by slowing down internal decision-making and sowing confusion, according to 10 current and former administration officials and others with knowledge of the situation. It’s decimated morale and, at various times, forced the White House to intervene.
And at a time when the administration is fighting to develop the therapeutics and vaccines that can curb a disease killing 800 Americans a day, the Azar-Hahn feud has effectively severed the link between the two men at the center of that high-stakes effort.
“It’s broken,” one senior administration official said of the relationship between Azar and Hahn. “There is minimal interaction.”
In response to a series of questions, HHS and FDA spokespeople separately insisted that Azar and Hahn maintain a good relationship and speak regularly. An HHS spokesperson did not directly address whether Azar has discussed firing Hahn, and declined to say whether he still had confidence in his FDA commissioner, citing policy against conducting “personnel reviews in the press.”
On Thursday morning, after publication of this story, Azar told CBS that he has confidence in Hahn.
"Commissioner Hahn and I speak almost every day," Azar said. "We have a very close productive relationship and we're working together. As I have made very clear and the commissioner has made clear, the FDA will make the decision whether to approve therapeutics or vaccines according to their science, data, regulatory and legal standards, those calls will be made ultimately by the top career officials at the FDA and I 100 percent support that approach."
But six administration officials said the disintegration of the relationship between Azar and Hahn is the result of a series of disagreements, missteps and slights that began within weeks of Hahn’s arrival in Washington last December and steadily built to a boiling point. A radiation oncologist and longtime academic with no political experience, Hahn was thrust into the middle of a pandemic response just a month after becoming the agency’s latest leader — and the fourth in 2019 alone, after former commissioner Scott Gottlieb and acting heads Ned Sharpless and Giroir.
Hahn struggled to navigate the infighting and power plays that came with it. He clashed with HHS officials over personnel decisions, complicating plans to build out his own senior leadership team. When Azar took over management of the coronavirus response in January, Hahn was among several agency heads initially left off the Trump administration’s task force.
During those early months, Hahn spent much of the time deferring to other administration officials on how best to respond to the unfolding crisis – feeding frustration among career FDA officials and within the broader public health community over his perceived weakness as a leader.
One still-simmering dispute: whether FDA or HHS dropped the ball on enlisting the private sector to fight the outbreak.
As the coronavirus threat rose in late January, White House officials pressed Hahn to contact diagnostic manufacturers and begin coordinating the development of Covid-19 testing options, including potentially convening a roundtable discussion at which industry leaders would make public commitments. A senior FDA official also assured Azar that the FDA’s centers were pursuing planning efforts with the industry to develop coronavirus tests, said two people with knowledge of the conversation.
In a statement, FDA said that the agency had engaged the industry. "FDA staff were already conducting outreach to companies to offer assistance and understand any supply chain issues," a spokesperson told POLITICO.
But Hahn ultimately balked at convening the manufacturers themselves, two people with knowledge of the episode said, telling fellow officials that HHS had instructed him not to personally speak with companies that his agency regulated.
Azar and his allies have since furiously denied Hahn’s version of events, insisting that the FDA had a clear mandate and instructions to do what it took to aid the response, and that pinning the blame for a lack of testing resources on Azar would be "Kafkaesque," the health secretary told Wall Street Journal reporters in April.
“There is not a shred of truth to this,” an HHS spokesperson said. “Secretary Azar encouraged FDA to reach out to industry from the earliest days of the response.”
Officials at both FDA and HHS now concede that minor miscommunications at the start of 2020 — likely amplified by Hahn’s recent arrival in Washington and Azar’s own challenges dealing with internal department dissension and ramping up the coronavirus response — may have laid the groundwork for the delays and finger-pointing that followed for months.
But as critics zeroed in on the administration’s slow testing ramp-up as a key failure in allowing the virus to escape containment, those testing delays became a sticking point for Azar, who has complained that the FDA could have been more proactive in responding to Covid-19 – and that he should not have to micromanage the agencies under his department’s umbrella.
The public backlash set the stage for a series of disputes between Azar and Hahn that would drag through the spring and summer, souring relations between the two men and touching off what some administration officials saw as a series of leaks designed to shift blame away from the FDA – including on testing and, later, the botched rollout of convalescent plasma.
Stung by reports blaming his January declaration of a public health emergency for triggering FDA regulatory requirements that had hindered Covid-19 testing, Azar sought to revoke those requirements – which gave the agency the power to review the safety and accuracy of certain tests developed by commercial, university and public health labs.
The attempt met fierce resistance from Hahn and baffled officials within the FDA, who had only recently come under fire from HHS officials for allowing a flood of largely unregulated — and sometimes faulty — antibody tests onto the market.
The issue touched off what one former official termed “the war of the memos,” as HHS and FDA traded missives in a back-and-forth that ultimately pulled in the White House counsel’s office and prompted screaming matches between Azar and Hahn.
By the time Azar officially eliminated the FDA’s regulatory authority over the lab-developed tests – overriding the agency’s objections – there remained little trust between HHS officials and their counterparts at the FDA.
Azar, who has feuded with other health agency leaders including Medicare chief Seema Verma, increasingly suspected that FDA officials were serving as the source of damaging stories about the department and its coronavirus response. He grew irritated over a perception that Hahn often dealt directly with the White House – bypassing his immediate superiors at HHS.
FDA officials in turn lamented that they could not rely on Azar to reliably defend the agency, either internally or in the face of public criticism.
That left Hahn with little guidance in navigating a set of White House-level controversies. The FDA worked closely with White House officials in March and April to boost the availability of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that had scant evidence for its effectiveness in fighting Covid-19, but had become one of Trump’s personal favorites.
The agency also rewrote its rules to expand access to an Ohio-based company’s mask sterilization technology amid a public pressure campaign from Trump and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
Those decisions prompted widespread backlash among public health experts and inside the FDA itself, with staff worried that Hahn was sacrificing the agency’s long-held independence in the face of political pressure.
Hahn’s standing within his agency reached a nadir in August, when Hahn — alongside Trump and Azar — overstated the benefits of convalescent plasma as a Covid-19 treatment, enraging the scientific community and sparking calls for his resignation.
“The circumstances of your statements in recent days has led to a crisis in confidence,” Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote in a blistering open letter shortly afterward. “Not only has your credibility been diminished but so has that of the FDA, its 15,000-plus staff members, and, most importantly, your ability to oversee the health interests of the American people.”
Hahn’s allies now describe the backlash to that press conference as an inflection point – one that prompted a concerted effort by the commissioner to re-establish the FDA as an independent agency and ally himself firmly with its career officials.
To Azar and other detractors in HHS and the White House, it marks the moment that Hahn went completely off the rails.
By the next day, Hahn had issued a lengthy apology, tweeting that “the criticism is entirely justified,” angering fellow political appointees who thought the FDA commissioner was magnifying the mistake and drawing attention away from a significant accomplishment by the president.
With just months until the election and Trump pressing for a vaccine, Hahn began publicly — and repeatedly — vowing to withstand political pressure and refusing to rush vaccines or other treatments. Inside the FDA, he increasingly deferred to career civil servants like Peter Marks, a senior regulator who’s taken a hard line with the pharma industry, said three people who have been included in discussions around vaccine development.
In a move that raised eyebrows throughout the administration, Hahn also began courting influential industry figures like Topol, a vocal critic of Trump and his administration’s Covid-19 response who has since become one of the FDA commissioner’s most ardent defenders. The two have since spoken several times, Topol said in an interview.
“I went from way negative to way positive,” he said, calling Hahn a “friend” who has had to withstand tremendous pressure from Trump and Azar. “He’s gotten wiser and has figured out how, even with all the adversity, he can figure out a way to do things right.”
As Hahn and Azar privately battled, seven former FDA commissioners — including Gottlieb, Trump’s first FDA commissioner — publicly blasted the Trump administration for what they framed as political efforts to rein in the agency. In a Sept. 29 Washington Post op-ed , the former commissioners criticized the White House and Azar for a series of recent decisions, including revoking the FDA’s sole authority to establish rules for food and drug safety. FDA scientists "should make decisions based on data, unfettered by political pressure or the intrusions of ideology or vested interests," Hahn's predecessors wrote.
Hahn’s two-week fight for the FDA’s stricter vaccine safety standards — capped by his unilateral decision to publish the guidelines without White House permission — served as perhaps the most emphatic step in the current commissioner’s rehabilitation tour.
Yet among those inside the administration, it’s a battle that officials say sunk his standing — and that even Hahn’s allies concede he’s unlikely to recover from.
“Hahn tried to satisfy the White House, now he’s trying to salvage his reputation,” said one person familiar with the current situation. “He should’ve kept his head down and done neither.”
Could someone please tell this idiot that there's a pandemic happening, and that America surely deserves better than to have its senior health officials squabbling among themselves.
We are one step closer to being a Banana Republic.
US Ice officers 'used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders'
Cameroonians say officers choked, beat and threatened to kill them, as lawyers tell of pre-election removal drive
Many of the Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign, fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending.
According to multiple accounts, detainees were threatened, choked, beaten, pepper-sprayed and threatened with more violence to make them sign. Several were put in handcuffs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, and their fingerprints were taken forcibly in place of a signature on documents called stipulated orders of removal, by which the asylum seekers waive their rights to further immigration hearings and accept deportation.
Lawyers and human rights advocates said there had been a significant acceleration of deportations in recent weeks, a trend they see as linked to the looming elections and the possibility that Ice could soon be under new management.
“The abuse we are witnessing, especially right now against black immigrants, isn’t new, but it is escalating,” said Christina Fialho, executive director of an advocacy group, Freedom for Immigrants (FFI). “In late September, early October of this year, we began to receive calls on our hotline from Cameroonian and Congolese immigrants detained in Ice prisons across the country. And they were being subjected to threats of deportation, often accompanied by physical abuse.”
“The reality is that Ice operates in the shadows. They thrive in secrecy,” Fialho added. “We know that the US government is deporting key witnesses in an effort to silence survivors and absolve Ice of legal liability.”
A plane carrying 60 Cameroonian and 28 Congolese asylum seekers was quietly flown out of Fort Worth Alliance airport in Texas on 13 October to deliver them to their home countries. The charter plane did not release a flight plan, but it was tracked by immigration rights group Witness at the Border, which said it stopped in Senegal, Cameroon , the Democratic Republic of Congo and then Kenya before flying back to Texas.
The Cameroonian deportees were from the country’s English-speaking minority, which has been the target of widespread abuses, including extrajudicial killings , by government security forces seeking to crush a separatist movement. The Trump administration cut the country’s trade privileges at the beginning of this year because of the persistent abuses.
Most of the deportees on the flight had testified that they had suffered detention without charge and torture at the hands of the Cameroonian military, and had relatives who had been killed. They were detained for questioning on arrival in Douala, but some were freed after their families paid bribes, and have since gone into hiding.
As for the others, the lawyer Evaristus Nkongchu said: “We have no knowledge of what happened to those that were deported. We know they arrived, but we haven’t heard what happened after they arrived at the airport.”
The Cameroonian embassy in Washington did not reply to several requests for comment.
Detainees and their lawyers have been told there will be another deportation flight in the coming days, possibly as early as Friday.
‘I kept telling him, “I can’t breathe”’
Cameroonians are routinely denied asylum or parole in the US immigration court system, which is run by the justice department.
Victims, family members, lawyers and human rights activists have described a range of coercive measures used by Ice on Cameroonian detainees at the Adams county correctional centre in Mississippi to make them sign their own deportation orders.
A complaint filed by FFI and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) cites eight cases of forced signatures or fingerprints on stipulated orders of removal.
One of those involved, identified by the initials BJ, said that on 27 September, Ice officers “pepper-sprayed me in the eyes and [one officer] strangled me almost to the point of death. I kept telling him, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I almost died.”
“As a result of the physical violence, they were able to forcibly obtain my fingerprint on the document,” BJ said.
Another detainee, known as DF, said that he was ordered to sign his deportation order by an Ice agent on 28 September.
“I refused to sign. He pressed my neck into the floor. I said, ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’ I lost my blood circulation. Then they took me inside with my hands at my back where there were no cameras,” DF said. According to his account, he was then taken to a punitive wing of the Adams county centre, known as Zulu, and subjected to further assault.
“They put me on my knees where they were torturing me and they said they were going to kill me. They took my arm and twisted it. They were putting their feet on my neck. While in Zulu, they did get my fingerprint on my deportation document and took my picture,” he said. DF was one of the detainees on the 13 October flight to Douala. It is unclear what has happened to him since.
A third detainee, CA, said he was forced to the ground, sat on, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed. “I was crying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ because they were forcefully on top of me pressing their body weight on top of me. My eyes were so hot ... I was dragged across the ground,” he said. “The officers told me to open my eyes. I couldn’t. My legs and hands were handcuffed. They forcefully opened my palm. Some of my fingers were broken. They forced my fingerprint on to the paper.”
CA was taken off the 13 October flight, but still faces deportation.
A brief reprieve
Two Cameroonians were taken off the 13 October deportation flight at the last moment after the intervention of human rights advocates through the office for civil rights and civil liberties in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but they have been told by Ice agents it will not save them from deportation.
Patrick, a detainee who has been told he is on the deportation list, said he has not been able to sleep knowing that Ice agents could come for him at any time, and that for him, deportation could well be a death sentence.
“I live in worry because I don’t know what awaits me. I don’t even know what the next day is going to look like, and will I be taken back home,” Patrick (a pseudonym) told the Guardian in a call from a detention centre. He did not want his name used because of the risk to his surviving family members.
His lawyer, Ruth Hargrove, said: “He actually has a very strong case for asylum, but the problem is he may die before he gets his hearing, because he was supposed to be on that plane that went out last week, and his Ice officer just guaranteed that he will be on the next flight.”
An Ice spokeswoman, Sarah Loicano, confirmed that a formal complaint over use of force against the Cameroonian detainees had been submitted to the DHS inspector general.
Loicano added: “That said, in general, sensationalist unsubstantiated allegations, particularly those made anonymously and without any fact-checkable specifics, is irresponsible, and should be treated with the greatest of scepticism.”
“Ice is firmly committed to the safety and welfare of all those in its custody. Ice provides safe, humane, and appropriate conditions of confinement for individuals detained in its custody,” she said.
For those who have already been deported, any reforms to Ice would be too late, and they are currently in no position to give evidence about their treatment in the US.
The Texas-based sister of one of the deportees who escaped into hiding after the 13 October flight to Douala, told the Guardian: “My brother ran away to America thinking that you will be safe here in another culture. But they sent him back and right now he has no life. He’s hiding in the bush. What can you do in the bush?”
American law enforcement doesn't restrict its brutality against Black Americans.
American law enforcement is also brutal with foreign Blacks.
Well... of course!! I mean it's not like we've ever heard of ICE mistreating prisoners... Or of police brutality towards Blacks...