FAIR

Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty on 34 counts of “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex” (AP, 5/31/24). Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement (5/30/24) that Trump was found “guilty of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal damaging information from American voters during the 2016 presidential election,” and that his prosecutors “proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Trump illegally falsified 34 New York business records.”

Trump’s shot at retaking the White House is far from finished (Guardian, 5/30/24), and he may very well evade jail (NBC, 5/30/24), but the right-wing press is howling anyway.

“If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again,” the Wall Street Journal (5/30/24) warned, as “Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/30/24) painted Bragg’s case against Trump as “a bizarre turducken, with alleged crimes stuffed inside other crimes.” It suggested the DA was motivated less by executing the law than by kneecapping Trump’s bid for the White House. The whole affair, the paper said, leads us to more division:

What if Mr. Trump loses the election and then is vindicated on appeal? If Democrats think that too many Republicans today complain about stolen elections, imagine how many more might next year.

The conviction sets a precedent of using legal cases, no matter how sketchy, to try to knock out political opponents, including former presidents. Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor. If Democrats felt like cheering Thursday when the guilty verdict was read, they should think again. Mr. Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics, and no one can say how it will end.

The New York Post (5/31/24) ran the front-page headline “Injustice,” while its editorial board (5/31/24) argued that Democrats’ happiness at the conviction “itself is ample reason for the court of public opinion to vote [President Joe Biden] out come Election Day.”

The Washington Post (5/31/24) reported on the meltdown at Fox News:

“This is a very sad day for all of us, irrespective of party, irrespective of affiliation,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the network’s 5 p.m. show. “We have seen the criminal justice weaponized to bring down a candidate for president and a former president.”

On her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham called it “a disgraceful day for the United States, a day that America may never recover from,” while 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity called it “a conviction without a crime.”

Talkshow host Charlie Kirk (Alaska Must Read, 5/30/24) warned that “there will be an unprecedented push to say that Trump CANNOT be allowed to win, that we CANNOT elect a convicted felon.”

What comes up over and over again in coverage of both the Manhattan hush-money case―as well as two federal cases against Trump, and one election-related case in Atlanta―is that the prosecution and conviction of a former president is without precedent (Fox News, 5/30/24; New York Times, 5/30/24; NPR, 5/30/24). The theory goes that these prosecutions are so divisive, in such a politically volatile moment, that they should force us to weigh the pursuit of justice against political stability.

Yet, for journalists who looked at the Manhattan courtroom, Trump sat there like many  other New York politicians and political influencers whose criminality brought them down. Trump, who was born in Queens and made his name in Manhattan, is a businessman shaped by the New York City real estate industry and the political machines around it. That’s an exciting place to be. But it’s also a very corrupt one (WHEC, 8/13/21).

In this context, Trump’s conviction is less a partisan witch hunt or a crossing-the-Rubicon moment for US history, and more another New York politician getting caught up in a scandal that is all too typical of the city and state that made him.

New York, of course, is hardly unique in having a tradition of officials getting caught with their hands in the till. But those who follow New York politics can cite a long line of prominent politicians brought down by corruption  investigations.

Sheldon Silver, the lower Manhattan Democrat who for 20 years ruled the state assembly with an iron fist, died in federal custody due to corruption charges (Guardian, 1/24/22).

The Washington Post (5/12/16) could have run this exact same headline about two different New York senate majority leaders over a four-year period.

On the Republican side, former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos was convicted, along with his son, for “pressuring companies that relied heavily on government contracts to give his son nominal but lucrative jobs” (Washington Post, 5/12/16). Joe Bruno, Skelos’ Republican predecessor, was also found guilty on corruption charges, though he was acquitted in a retrial (New York Times, 5/16/14).

A Democratic senate majority leader, Democrat Malcolm Smith, was given “seven years in prison after being convicted of trying to bribe his way onto the Republican ballot in the 2013 race for New York City mayor” (Politico, 7/1/15). Smith was followed by Pedro Espada Jr., who was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison for embezzling from federally funded healthcare clinics (New York Times, 6/14/12).

While former Gov. Eliot Spitzer never saw a courtroom, a federal investigation into a prostitution ring revealed him as a client and ended his political career (NPR, 3/12/08).

The current New York City mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, is under federal investigation for possible illegal connections to Turkey (CBS, 5/21/24). His buildings department commissioner, Republican Eric Ulrich, has been charged with running “a years-long scheme doling out political favors in exchange for more than $150,000 in bribes” (New York Post, 9/13/23).

Prosecution of corruption isn’t confined to the public sector; the former federal prosecutor for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, made a name for himself by going after white-collar criminals (New Yorker, 3/13/17). And let’s not forget the many union leaders nabbed for corruption over the years (New York Post, 7/26/00; New York Times, 5/20/09,  8/5/09; CNN, 8/5/23).

Obviously, in the US consciousness, the president stands above all over elected leaders, including Supreme Court justices and congressional leaders, as well as the top honchos at the state level. The president leads the military, represents the nation on the world stage, and stands (theoretically) as a unifying figure for the American people. But this mythology of a sort of king-like figure not only warps the notion of small-r republican governance, but removes the president from the rest of sordid politics in an extremely dishonest way.

For those who have studied Trump’s career, despite rising to the White House and photo shoots all over the world, he is, in essence, a product of New York City. His business empire, political dealings and image in the tabloid press were created and shaped by New York’s dirty political culture.

The conviction will be the stuff of partisan rabble in the media for days and weeks. But in reality, he’s just another member of the city’s political and business class who got caught committing banal crimes. Media would be better off framing his conviction in the context of how routine it was, given the venue, rather than offering it as a novel soul-searching moment for the nation.

The Lever (5/23/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public, investors, how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. It’s knowable information, and people have a right to know it, right? The same way restaurants here in New York City have to tell potential customers how they did on their last health inspection; you can eat there or not, but at least you’re making an informed decision.

But no! This past January, the US Chamber of Commerce and a bunch of other industry groups challenged those laws, because, they said, making companies disclose the impact of their actions—in this case, their emissions—would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That, they said, makes the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.

Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this bizarre notion that regulation should be illegal, essentially, because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. But it’s not just a legal matter; public information, our right to know, is also on the line here, so we should know what’s going on.

Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow. We hear from her this week on CounterSpin.

The New York Times (4/8/24) cited “experts” who called Nicaragua charging Germany with facilitating genocide “a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.”

When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.

The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application: that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.

Many in corporate media took a more jaundiced view. The Financial Times (4/8/24) led by telling readers, “The authoritarian government of Nicaragua accused Germany of ‘facilitating genocide’ in Gaza at the opening of a politically charged case.” The second paragraph in a New York Times article (4/8/24) cited “experts” who saw it “as a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.” The Guardian (4/9/24) qualified its comment piece by remarking that “Nicaragua is hardly a poster child when it comes to respect for human rights.”

Double standards are evident here. If the US government were to do what it has failed to do so far, and condemn Israel’s genocidal violence, Western corporate media would not remind readers of US crimes against humanity, such as the Abu Ghraib tortures, extraordinary renditions, or the hundreds imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo. It’s hard to imagine Washington would be accused of “hypocrisy” (Guardian, 4/9/24) for calling out Israel’s crimes. Any condemnation of Israel by the US or one of its Western allies would be taken at face value—in clear contrast to the media’s treatment of such action by an official enemy country like Nicaragua.

For El País (4/11/24), facilitating mass slaughter in Gaza is “Germany…at its finest,” because it it is “driven by its sense of responsibility stemming from a tragic history.”

Of establishment media, Spain’s El País (4/11/24) was perhaps the most vitriolic in its portrayal of Nicaragua. Its piece on the court case was headlined “The Worst Version of Nicaragua Against the Best Version of Germany.”

“The third international court case on the Gaza war pits a regime accused of crimes against humanity against a strong and legitimate democracy,” the piece explained. “It may be a noble cause, but its champion couldn’t be worse.”

The article, which relayed none of the evidence offered by either side, commented rather oddly that Germany was “at its finest” arguing the case, and that its “defense against Nicaragua’s charges is solid and its legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable”—a comment presumably intended to contrast its legitimacy with “the Nicaraguan dictatorship.”

In addition to its article cited above, the New York Times (4/8/24) had a report more focused on the case itself. However, it was CNN (4/9/24) and Al Jazeera (4/8/24) that stood out as covering the case on its own merits rather than being distracted by animosity toward Nicaragua.

The negative presentation in much of the media was repeated when, later in April, they headlined that Nicaragua’s request had been “rejected” by the ICJ (e.g., AP, 4/30/24; NPR, 4/30/24), with the New York Times (4/30/24) again remembering to insert a derogatory comment about Nicaragua’s action being “hypocritical.” These followup reports largely overlooked the impact the case had on Germany’s ability to further arm Israel during its continued assault on Gaza.

The New York Times (3/2/23) ran a headline equating the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the German Nazi Party, based on the claim that “the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did.”

Corporate media had been gifted their criticisms of Nicaragua by a report published at the end of February by the UN Human Rights Council. A “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (the “GHREN”) had produced its second report on the country. Its first, last year, had accused Nicaragua’s government of crimes against humanity, leading to this eyebrow-raising New York Times headline (3/2/23): “Nicaragua’s ‘Nazis’: Stunned Investigators Cite Hitler’s Germany.”

The GHREN’s leader, German lawyer Jan-Michael Simon, had indeed likened the current Sandinista government to the Nazis. Times reporter Frances Robles quoted Simon:

“The weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did,” Jan-Michael Simon, who led the team of UN-appointed criminal justice experts, said in an interview.

“People massively stripped of their nationality and being expelled out of the country: This is exactly what the Nazis did too,” he added.

It’s quite an accusation, given that the Nazis established over 44,000 incarceration camps of various types and killed some 17 million people. Robles gave few numbers regarding the crimes Nicaragua is accused of, but did mention 40 extrajudicial killings in 2018 attributed to state and allied actors, and noted that the Ortega government had in 2023 “stripped the citizenship from 300 Nicaraguans who a judge called ‘traitors to the homeland.’”

Robles also quoted Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a member of the Nicaraguan oligarchic family who are among the Sandinista government’s fiercest opponents; Chamorro claimed there was evidence of “more than 350 people who were assassinated.” Even if true, this would seem to be a serious stretch from “exactly what the Nazis did.”

Like most Western reporters, Robles—who also wrote the recent ICJ piece for the Times—gave no attention to the criticisms of the GHREN’s work by human rights specialists, who argued that the GHREN did not examine all the evidence made available to it and interviewed only opposition sources. For example, former UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas castigated its first report in his book The Human Rights Industry, calling it a “political pamphlet” intended to destabilize Nicaragua’s government.

Even if one takes the GHREN account at face value, the Gaza genocide is at least 100 times worse in terms of numbers of fatalities, quite apart from other horrendous elements, such as deliberate starvation, indiscriminate bombing, destruction of hospitals and much more. It’s unclear why the accusations against Nicaragua should delegitimize the case against Germany.

In 1986, the New York Times (6/28/86) reported that the ICJ found the US guilty of ”training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces,” and of “direct attacks on Nicaraguan oil installations, ports and shipping.”

Many media reports did mention Nicaragua’s long history of support for Palestine—which undermines the accusation of cynicism underlying the case—but few noted the Latin American country’s history of success at the Hague. As Carlos Argüello, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the Netherlands who took the lead at the ICJ, pointed out, Nicaragua has more experience at the Hague than most countries, including Germany. This began with its pioneer case against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports.

One notable exception to that historical erasure came from Robles at the Times (4/8/24), who did refer to the 1984 case. But the point was clearly not to remind readers of US crimes, or to demonstrate that Nicaragua is an actor to be taken seriously in the realm of international law. The two academics she quoted both served to portray the current case as merely “cynical.”

The first, Mateo Jarquín, Robles quoted as saying that the Sandinista government has “a long track record…of using global bodies like the ICJ to carve out space for itself internationally—to build legitimacy and resist diplomatic isolation.” Robles didn’t disclose Jarquín’s second surname, Chamorro. Like her source in the earlier article, he is a member of the family that includes several government opponents.

Robles also quoted Manuel Orozco, a former Nicaraguan working at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, whose major funders include the US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute, notorious for their role in promoting regime change, including in Nicaragua. Orozco told Robles that “Nicaragua lacks the moral and political authority to speak or advocate for human rights, much less on matters of genocide.”

AP (4/30/24) missed the significance of the ICJ holding that, “at present, the circumstances are not such as to require” an order forbidding Germany to ship weapons to Israel—namely, that Germany maintained that it already halted shipments of such weapons (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24).

On April 30, the ICJ declined to grant Nicaragua its requested provisional measures against Germany, including requiring the cessation of arms deliveries to Israel. Headlining this outcome, the Associated Press (4/30/24) said the court was “effectively siding with Germany.” The outlet did, however, continue by explaining that the court had “declined to throw out the case altogether, as Germany had requested,” and will hear arguments from both sides, with a resolution not likely to come for years.

That was better than NPR‘s report (4/30/24), which only mentioned that the court was proceeding with the case in its final paragraph.

But German lawyer and professor Stefan Talmon (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24), clarified that the court’s ruling “severely limits Germany’s ability to transfer arms to Israel.”

“The court’s order was widely interpreted as a victory for Germany,” Talmon commented. “A closer examination of the order, however, points to the opposite.” He concluded that although the ICJ did not generally ban the provision of arms to Israel, it did impose significant restrictions on it by emphasizing Germany’s obligation to “avoid the risk that such arms might be used to violate the [Genocide and Geneva] Conventions.”

And Talmon pointed out that the court appeared to make its decision that an order to halt war weapons shipments was unnecessary based on Germany’s claim that it had already stopped doing so.

“By expressly emphasizing that, ‘at present’, circumstances did not require the indication of provisional measures, the Court made it clear that it could indicate such measures in the future,” Talmon wrote.

Establishment media, seemingly distracted by the “hypocrisy” of Nicaragua challenging a country whose “legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable,” mostly failed to notice that its legal efforts were therefore at least partially successful: It forced Germany to back down from its unstinting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and alerted German politicians to the fact that they are at risk of being held accountable under international law if they transfer any further war weapons.

“Do you condemn Hamas?” This question is a familiar response from corporate journalists and pro-Israel advocates whenever anyone urges the Israeli military to stop its offensive in Gaza (Declassified UK, 11/4/23; Forward, 11/10/23; Jewish Journal, 11/29/23). If you denounce Israel’s response to the attacks without condemning Hamas, the insinuation goes, you are defending the militant group and the killing of Israeli civilians.

If you don’t start off by condemning Hamas’ attack, the British pundit Piers Morgan (Twitter, 11/23/23) said, “why should anyone listen to you when you condemn Israel for its response?”

The International Criminal Court surely condemned Hamas when an ICC prosecutor,  Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for Hamas’ three principal leaders along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister (Reuters, 5/21/24). That hasn’t helped the ICC in the press. By condemning both Hamas and Israel leaders for illegal acts of violence, the ICC is delegitimizing Israel, editorialists say.

The New York Post (5/20/24) was outraged by “the ICC’s morally perverse bid to seem ‘fair’ by also seeking warrants for some leaders of Hamas.”

“Lumping them together is a slander for the history books. Imagine some international body prosecuting Tojo and Roosevelt, or Hitler and Churchill, amid World War II,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/20/24) said. It added that “Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians.”

For the record, the UN has estimated that Gaza needs 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid a day—so nearly four times as many as Israel has allowed in. Israeli soldiers have reportedly helped protesters block aid trucks (Guardian, 5/21/24), while the IDF has relentlessly targeted medical facilities (Al Jazeera, 12/18/23). And Israeli “forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023,” according to Human Rights Watch (5/14/24).

The New York Post editorial board (5/20/24) engages in the same logic, saying Hamas leaders are “cold-blooded savages—who target innocent civilians for murder, rape and kidnapping,” while Israel is pure at heart: “law-abiding, democratic victims, who merely seek to eradicate the terror gang.”

Back on Planet Earth, Israel has targeted hospitals, journalists, schools and aid workers. The United Nations has declared a famine is underway (AP, 5/6/24), and its data show the death toll for Palestinians since October 7 is nearly 30 times larger than for Israelis, a testament to the conflict’s imbalance of might and ferocity. The UN estimates nearly 8,000 Gazan children have been killed (NPR, 5/15/24).

For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (5/21/24), the “decision to seek the arrest of three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu” was part of a strategy to destroy Israel, “as it places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.”

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (5/21/24), who is loved by the right-wing fanatics at the New York Post (4/28/17, 8/27/19, 12/29/19, 2/11/21) for his backward views on social issues and his desire to rob his critics of free speech rights, said that by going after both Israeli and Hamas leaders, the court was part of an “overall strategy” to bring about Israel’s downfall through alienation, as the equivalency “places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.” In other words, it treats Israel as being morally equivalent to a group that has killed less than 1% as many children.

The Washington Post‘s opinion page (5/21/24) featured multiple sides in response to the news, including human rights scholar Noura Erakat, who said, if anything, Khan was too easy on Israel. But the Post’s roundtable also featured former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Avi Mayer, a pro-Israel public relations professional who left that paper amid turmoil (Forward, 12/15/23). He said comparing Israel to its “cruel and implacable foe against which it is defending itself will be met with wall-to-wall resistance and steely determination.”

The Post also featured Bush II and Trump administration hawk John Bolton, who ignored the accusations against Hamas altogether, saying the “ICC has finally and irreversibly begun digging its own grave”—not just because of the charge against Israel, but because the court is “untethered to any constitutional structure, unchecked by distinct legislative or executive authorities, and utterly unable to enforce its decisions.”

The Post could have found much more nuanced voices to critique Khan. Mayer is hardly a scholar looking at the situation with cold eyes; he’s a dedicated promoter of Israeli policy who only briefly worked as a newspaper editor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 3/21/23). Bolton’s entire persona revolves around opposing the notion of international justice (Politico, 9/23/18; Washington Post, 10/10/18); the ICC could have opened a cat shelter and he would have found a way to argue that this harmed US interests. Meanwhile, one of the legal advisors who had recommended seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders was a former Israeli diplomat and Holocaust survivor (Forward, 5/23/24).

Across the pond, the editorial board of the Telegraph (5/21/24), the main print voice of British conservatism, said that the “moral equivalence” of Hamas and Israeli leaders was “absurd.” The London Times (5/21/24) simply said the ICC’s action wouldn’t help the situation in Gaza.

These views reflect the official line of the White House (CNN, 5/20/24), 10 Downing Street (Politico, 5/21/24) and Netanyahu (Reuters, 5/20/24).

Chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, a British lawyer, compared Israeli actions to the British government saying “let’s drop a 2,000-pound bomb on the Falls Road” in response to IRA attacks (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).

You just can’t win, can you? Had the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants only for Israeli leaders, we can only imagine that these same outlets would condemn it as a one-sided interpretation of the war. In other words, there is simply no scenario in which criticism or scrutiny of Israel can take place.

For those who have actually studied conflict and human rights, it is just not surprising that an international body would recognize war crimes by both the military of a recognized government and an armed faction dubbed a “terrorist” group. A United Nations panel found that while the separatist Tamil Tigers committed atrocities in the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war, the final government offensive caused the “deaths of as many as 40,000 civilians, most of them victims of indiscriminate shelling by Sri Lankan forces” (Washington Post, 4/21/11).

A 2020 Human Rights Watch report noted that Syrian and Russian government forces in the Syrian Civil War used “indiscriminate attacks and prohibited weapons,” while opposition groups carried out “serious abuses, leading arbitrary arrest campaigns in areas they control and launching indiscriminate ground attacks on populated residential areas.”

The news that the ICC was indicting members of a militant anti-government group along with leaders of the government that group opposes falls into that same unsurprising category.

In fact, Khan told the London Times (5/25/24) that he believed Israel had a right to defend itself and seek the return of the October 7 hostages, but not to enact collective punishment on the Palestinians. And “he did not understand, given his warnings to comply with international law over the past months, why anyone was surprised” at his announcement (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).

Some editorial boards have been calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza (LA Times, 11/16/23; Boston Globe, 2/23/24). But there is still a loud, booming editorial voice that is in line with official thinking in Washington: There is no red line for Israel. Anything goes. No matter what atrocity it commits, editorialists will ignore it and proclaim Israel the victim.

The New York Times has become notorious for its role in laundering right-wing transphobia for its largely liberal audience (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/22, 5/11/23, 5/19/23). A recent article (5/20/24) about local school politics serves as yet another example of how the paper’s anti-trans agenda most likely flies under the radar of most readers—making its propaganda that much more effective.

The headline read, “NYC Parents Rebuked for Questioning Transgender Student-Athlete Rules.” The subhead explained further:

Over a dozen Democratic elected officials criticized a parent group that asked for a review of rules that let students play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

It’s a framing clearly intended to portray the parents as reasonable—they just want to ask questions and review some rules!—and the city officials as censorious. After all, who rebukes people for just wanting to have a conversation?

The New York Times (5/20/24) framed a story about a transphobic resolution as “parents” being attacked for merely “questioning.”

The article, by education reporter Troy Closson, began by describing “a group of elected parent leaders”–representing District 2, one of six Manhattan school districts–who “asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.”

“Elected,” so they must be representative, and simply “asked…to review,” so there’s presumably nothing anyone should get upset about. At least, as far as Times readers would be able to tell.

And what was the response? Closson tells readers:

The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.”

Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily.

In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children.

New York City’s Democrats sure sound extreme! Closson did finally give readers at least a glimpse of the other side’s perspective:

The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution.

Toward the end of the piece, Closson acknowledged that, according to another council member, the council “received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution.”

The Times gave no further context about the resolution or the people behind it that could possibly make the officials’ reactions make sense.

Instead, to help readers understand how out of the mainstream those Democratic officials are, Closson wrote, “But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines.” He offered a poll of “registered voters statewide” that found about two-thirds support barring trans athletes from competing with others who share their gender identity, with Republican respondents 30 percentage points more supportive than Democrats.

Of course, New York state is far more conservative than New York City (5–4 Democrat to Republican statewide, versus about 7–1 in the city), so it’s not a very useful barometer of NYC public opinion.

But perhaps more importantly, is it really the opinions of ill-informed voters that should matter here? Or is it the safety and well-being of the city’s public school students?

Like most Times articles about trans politics that FAIR has analyzed (FAIR.org, 5/6/21, 6/23/22, 5/11/23), Closson’s piece marginalized the voices of those most impacted. The piece quoted no students; it quoted one trans person—an “educator who runs a local after-school program”—who opposed the resolution. The rest were officials and parent council members.

The New York Times didn’t mention that the rules the resolution called for “reviewing” in fact are required under state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression (CNN, 5/11/24).

Reading about the incident in outlets focused on education news, you get a very different understanding of the situation—including what the resolution could do. And there’s much more backstory to these “concerned parents” than the Times lets on.

First of all, as ACLU lawyer (and trans parent in District 2) Chase Strangio pointed out at the meeting, New York City school guidelines on trans youth athletes already align with state law.

Indeed, when a Republican county executive tried to ban trans athletes from competing on women’s teams in nearby Nassau County, the state attorney general sent him a cease-and-desist letter for contravening New York’s law against gender identity discrimination. A state judge (CNN, 5/11/24) struck down the executive order shortly before the Times article on the school council resolution, suggesting that any sort of “review” of the city’s school anti-discrimination policy would likewise serve no purpose—other than scoring cheap political points by targeting a vulnerable student population.

That would be nothing new for some of the supposedly representative and reasonable leaders involved. For the real story here, you need a little bit of context about those leaders.

Community education councils in New York City, unlike school boards in many places, have no authority to change school policies; their resolutions are nonbinding and their role is advisory only. In part because of this—and because prior to 2021, council positions were filled by PTAs, not by popular vote—awareness of and participation in the elections are both extremely low, making them easy targets for small but organized activist groups. (In the 2021 elections, only 2% of eligible voters participated.)

PLACE co-founder Maud Maron (The City, 4/28/23) called New York City schools an “oppressor woke environment where DOE employees make them pledge allegiance to their LGBTQI+ religion.”

In New York, just such a group took advantage of that low-hanging fruit: PLACE NYC. Founded in 2019 to oppose city efforts to address some of the worst school segregation rates in the country by reforming screened admissions and gifted programs, PLACE-endorsed candidates won a whopping 40% of council seats in the 2023 elections (The City, 4/28/23).

PLACE does not advertise a particular stance on LGBTQ issues, but its leadership overlaps with other “parent rights” groups that take anti-trans positions, including the far-right Moms for Liberty.

The anti-trans resolution in New York City’s District 2 passed by 8 votes to 3. Of these eight concerned council members, seven were endorsed by PLACE in the 2023 elections, including three who are in leadership roles at the organization.

Leonard Silverman, president of the council, was quoted by the Times; it didn’t mention that he is also a founder of PLACE. PLACE treasurer Craig Slutkin was another “yes” vote.

Another founder (and former president) of PLACE, Maud Maron, sponsored the anti-trans resolution. Maron is a well-known local activist, a proud member of the Moms for Liberty who, in an unsuccessful long-shot bid for Congress last year, advocated for a trans youth athlete ban. Maron and fellow council and PLACE member Charles Love spoke at a recent Moms for Liberty panel (Chalkbeat, 1/18/24).

A city councilmember characterized PLACE leaders’ private texts as “demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies” (The74, 12/14/23).

Back in December, education news site The74 (12/14/23) reported on a leaked WhatsApp chat among Maron, fellow council and PLACE member Danyela Egorov and other parent leaders. In it, Maron declared that “there is no such thing as trans kids.” When a parent expressed concern about how many LGBTQ kids were in her child’s school, Maron responded, “The social contagion is undeniable.” She also falsely claimed of gender-affirming hormone therapy: “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination.”

Three months later, Maron called an anonymous high school student who penned a pro-Palestinian op-ed in their school paper a “coward,” and accused them of “Jew hatred” in the New York Post (2/24/24). After numerous parent and official complaints about her conduct, the NYC Department of Education (The74, 4/18/24) investigated and issued an order last month to Maron to

cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety.

This very relevant context was reported just a few weeks before Closson’s Times article.

PLACE and its controversial members and history are well known among local education activists and reporters. So Closson, who specifically covers the Times‘ “K–12 schools in New York City” beat, would appear to be either remarkably uninformed about his beat or intentionally obscuring the background to his story.

Chalkbeat‘s report (4/23/24) put the focus on “protections for trans students,” not on “questioning” parents.

Meanwhile, Chalkbeat (4/23/24), which covers education news in a handful of large US cities, covered the council meeting with the headline “An Attempt to Roll Back Protections for Trans Students in Sports Angers NYC Students and Families.”

Unlike Closson, reporter Liz Rosenberg quoted a number of people directly impacted by the resolution: a local trans teen, a local seventh grader who had started a Gay/Straight Alliance, and a parent who had moved to New York from Florida to protect her young trans child from the anti-trans laws there.

Rosenberg explained Maron’s history, including the cease-and-desist letter she had received only a week before the meeting. She quoted experts who described the documented negative impacts on trans kids when exclusionary or restrictive anti-trans laws are enacted, including a sharp rise in K–12 hate crimes against LGBTQ students.

Over at The74 (3/22/24), Marianna McMurdock also provided the back story on Maron. She noted, as Closson did not, that “dozens of community members spoke out against the gender resolution with only one expressing support.” According to McMurdock, the messages received by the council about the resolution were even more lopsided than Closson reported: 173–2.

Where Closson wrote that it was “unclear…whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city,” but that “some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams,” even non-local outlet Politico (3/20/24) noted directly that there was no evidence that any cisgender girls in the district had been harmed by the city schools’ policy.

In other words, it’s not terribly difficult to provide the kind of context that helps readers understand what’s “true and important” about this story. But on trans issues, the New York Times has proven itself time and again less interested in what’s true and important than in acting as a trojan horse for organized right-wing transphobia.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

Janine Jackson interviewed historian Ellen Schrecker about the attack on academic freedom for the May 24, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Intercept (5/16/24)

Janine Jackson: Any accounting of the impact of Israel’s Gaza assault on scholarship, on learning, has to start with the reduction to rubble of all 12 universities in Gaza, with the incalculable loss that entails, and the reported killing of at least 90 professors. But as the Intercept’s Natasha Lennard writes:

Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with US universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either.

We are now learning of how many academics and teachers around the country are seeing their jobs targeted as part of a purge, aggressively encouraged by funders and—mostly, but not only—Republican politicians.

It’s being called a new McCarthyism. But our guest, an expert on McCarthyism, suggests we understand other elements at play that make today different from, say, anti-Vietnam college protests in the 1960s, including the fact that today’s political repression aims not just at teachers themselves, but at what gets studied and taught.

Historian Ellen Schrecker is author of numerous books, including The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and she’s editor, with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, out now from Beacon Press. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ellen Schrecker.

Ellen Schrecker: Thank you for having me on your program.

JJ: There are a number of differences between student (in particular) protests today, and that of the 1960s. For one thing, today’s student protesters remember previous student protesters, and their impact on history. And I would say, also, the availability today of more person-to-person information sources, avenues outside of “all the news that’s fit to print.” But you note that the playing field of the university, as a site, as a place for voicing dissent, is itself importantly different. Tell us about that.

ES: Yes, that’s really the key issue now. Every time there is an attempt to repress free speech and academic freedom, I’m always asked, how does this compare to McCarthyism? And I’m a trained historian, so I sort of put in a lot of nuance, and I’ll say, “Oh, it depends….” But I don’t do that anymore, because it’s worse than McCarthyism. Much worse.

And that is really because the university of 2024 is a very different place than the academic community in the late 1960s. In the 1960s, American universities were expanding. They had a great reputation. People loved them. State governments and the federal government were throwing money at the universities.

And that’s no longer the case. And what we’re seeing is a very much weaker system of American higher education than had existed during what was called the Golden Age of American higher education, in the late 1950s and 1960s.

So I’d like to talk about what has changed between that period and now, and why what’s happening today is so much worse.

When we look at McCarthyism itself—and up until recently, it was probably the longest-lasting and most widespread episode of political repression in the modern American university—what we saw was an attack on individual faculty members. It was part of a broader purge of left-wing scholars, movie stars, government officials. It was running throughout large sectors of American society, not specifically targeting the universities, but they probably accounted for a quarter or fifth, maybe, of the victims of McCarthyism, in the sense that these were the people who were losing their jobs as a result of the inquisition.

To my knowledge, there were about a hundred people, more or less—probably more, because people kept this stuff secret, so they could keep their jobs—who were fired. And they were fired specifically because they had had some kind of connection with the American Communist movement earlier in the 1930s and ’40s, and did not want to cooperate with the ongoing anti-Communist inquisition that we now call McCarthyism. (Although we should have called it Hooverism, if we really understood how it operated.)

But anyhow, what’s interesting, and what’s very different, of course, from today, is that these people were being fired for their external political activities, or former political activities, and were never questioned about their teaching or scholarship. That was simply not of interest. It was their political work, or former political work.

Vox (6/17/23)

That’s not the case today. What is happening today is that there is a huge movement attacking all of American higher education. It’s been ongoing now for 40 years. It started as a response to the ’60s, to the student movement of the ’60s, to the originally nonviolent civil disobedience. These students were protesting, very much like students today, against what they saw as a dreadful moral calamity, a dreadful American participation in the Vietnam War. Certainly that was the main thing, but also, they were very involved with the movement for racial justice.

And as they tried to get some kind of action to end the war—which they actually did do, but it wasn’t obvious at the time—and trying to open up American society to racial equality, they became frustrated and noticed that their own institutions, universities, had been collaborating in some way with these injustices that they were seeking to rectify.

And so that’s why you get this sort of campus-focused movement on the part of students, because, after all, this was the only institution they could affect. They may not have been particularly realistic; in retrospect, maybe they should have emphasized electoral politics a lot more than they did, but that’s rewriting history. What we need to learn from history is the fact that as a result of the student unrest of the ’60s—which was essentially nonviolent on the part of the students, and only became particularly violent when universities and political bodies sought to repress it, just like today, of course—what we’re seeing on campuses is police violence; the kids have been remarkably restrained, much more so than in the ’60s, actually. They’re just sitting on the ground in their tents.

They’re not bothering anybody, except, of course: if you look at this from the perspective of 40 years of repression against higher education, that is in large part, not entirely by any means, but in large part the product of a very self-conscious conspiracy, and I don’t use the word “conspiracy” a lot, on the part of a group of very wealthy businessmen and intellectuals who were seeking, as early as the 1960s, to roll back the political reforms of the ’60s, and impose a more right-wing, neoliberal political culture on the United States, that contained, as one of its main focuses, an attack on higher education.

Because these wealthy conservatives felt that the kind of dispassionate and educated, evidence-based scholarship that was coming out of universities was attacking them, and they wanted to destroy the reputation of higher education. And they did so very self-consciously, by undermining the institutions of higher learning, by circulating propaganda about how universities have been taken over by left-wing professors, by—the word that they use today is “woke”—the forces of “woke” left-wing radicals, by weak-kneed administrators who are capitulating to these powerful forces.

Well, that wasn’t the case at all. What happened was universities themselves changed in response, not just to this attack, but also in response to a very strong economic pullback on the part of the state legislatures and the federal government that had been funding them so well up until the end of the ’60s.

So what we’re seeing is universities that then, for the past 40 years, have been responding to a very different financial economic situation, an economic climate that was punishing them, and they had to respond, administrators did, not by taking a more positive approach to what’s going on, and trying to sell what American higher education was doing for the country, for individuals, they thought to placate these forces of reaction.

But they also responded by seeking other sources of income, when state funding shrank, and that’s key. And what did they do? They raised tuition, slowly at first, but then quite significantly. So we now have, of course, the student debt problem, which I think it’s up to $1.8 trillion of student debt. And we have people being very upset about how much higher education costs, when in so many other countries, it seems to be free.

They also look for other sources of income: donors. The leaders of higher education began to curry favor with these very wealthy billionaires, many of whom were funding this attack on higher education. So we’re seeing that, and we’re also seeing universities themselves following a corporate agenda, on the assumption that this is what they can do to get favor with the new donors.

Ellen Schrecker: “Universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.”

But also because they have imbibed the neoliberalism that came about beginning in the 1970s, and continuing through til today, whereby the public good sort of disappears from the agenda and it’s intensely individualistic. Even a higher education now is something that’s good for individual people, and its role as a benefit to the rest of society has long since disappeared, which is really a total travesty.

Anyhow, as a result, universities have also ignored their faculty members, and this is why they have put up, I think, such a pathetically weak and collaborationist response to the current repression.

The final point here is that the way that the universities have been weakened is by ignoring their faculty members, but also by destroying the faculty:  Over the past 40 years or so, very gradually, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members has declined to the extent that 75% of all instruction is now being offered by faculty members who have no academic freedom.

These are what we call contingent workers. They are part-time or contract temporary workers who have no academic freedom, no economic security. They can be fired at any time for any purpose or no purpose at all. And they are not in a position to fight back, and their administrations do not support them when they’re attacked from the outside.

They’re very good teachers. They’re equally qualified with the tenured and tenure-track faculty members, but have terrible salaries. They often are hired to teach one course for one semester for $3,000 or so, that’s the average pay, and can be fired at any time.

And I think we have to realize that this is a structural problem that needs to be addressed before we can really fight back and preserve the jobs of people who are now particularly threatened, especially after October 7, by another group, a very powerful political group of supporters of Israel.

JJ: The fact that, of the many professors who’ve been fired, only one of them, as far as we know right now, had tenure—it is the adjuncts, it is the people who are basically at-will workers who are easier to just be cut off by these universities. So part of it is, it is this structural thing where you undermine the very idea that as a professor you would have some kind of job security, you would have some kind of protection.

ES: Exactly. Yes.

JJ: Let me just say, we have seen a number of professors putting themselves, sometimes physically, between students and police. We have seen professors standing up for, not only their own rights to speak, but their students’ rights to protest. And I would just say, because we’ve talked about this before, that faculty/student support and coalition-building, that’s part of a tradition too.

ES: Exactly. And what we’re seeing, for the first time, really, since the 1960s, is faculties beginning to organize themselves in support of causes that many of us support. And that should be protected by the universities and has not been, because the administrations over the past 40 years have been seeking to curry favor with these right-wing billionaire donors, and have been living in a kind of right-wing bubble.

They don’t know students, they don’t care about students. What they care about is getting money, getting support, growing their institutions, growing them in a way that will appear on the US News & World Report status ranking, without really paying attention to the kind of education they’re giving their students.

And it’s been shown, there’s evidence that the predominance of these temporary and low-paid contingent workers are unable to give their students the kind of education they deserve. And that’s a very significant problem. But, together, what we’re seeing is a real beginning, however, of a new awareness that we’re all in this together.

I would argue that the most powerful way to fight against this probably is through unionization, through organizing unions that can get contracts that include language supporting academic freedom. That’s very important. That seems to be the only way that these gig, part-time and temporary professors can gain a measure of economic security, so that they can speak out and keep their jobs.

I mean, this is really destroying free speech within American society, because universities have traditionally been, and certainly at the moment still are, spaces where there is more support for intellectual freedom than anywhere else in American society.

So it’s very important that faculty members begin to fight back, begin to form coalitions, can begin to argue for a serious pushback against these forces that, as we know, have been passing laws, certainly since 2020, in red states and in some blue, to sanction free speech and ideas that the right-wing Republicans do not think are appropriate. And this is a terrible threat to our whole democratic system.

Beacon Press, 2024

JJ: The book talks about how we can’t just rhetorically defend academic freedom and free speech; we have to act, and the book is part of that. So I would just ask you, finally, this new book, The Right to Learn, I want to say, it’s not a tome; it’s immensely readable. I just would ask you, what do you and other contributors hope that this book will do in the world? How do you look for it to be used?

ES: OK, we wrote this book more than two years ago, and I remember feeling it recently: “Oh my God, it’s out of date. How can it be used?” Well, it’s more relevant now than it was then. The situation has really worsened enormously since October 7.

What we were hoping to do is give people some intellectual ammunition, the facts about what’s going on on American campuses, and how people have been distorting history, have been distorting constitutional measures, have been distorting the function of academic freedom, and how people can fight back, give people information that they need, so that then they can go out and become active on their campuses, recruit colleagues, recruit students, start teach-ins, start doing whatever they can to create a buzz on their campuses, which certainly is happening.

But we’ve got to mobilize. We’ve got to organize. People have to have the information, and that’s what we felt was a necessary precursor for mounting a serious campaign to take back power on our campuses, to bring the faculty back into action as it has never been before. And we’re really asking for something very revolutionary, I guess.

What we’d like to see is a much more democratic university, that isn’t under the sway of these reactionary politicians and businessmen. And it’s going to be hard to do. It’s going to require a lot of action, but we want that action to be well-informed, and we hope that this book will be useful, be a weapon. It’s not going to save the world, obviously, but it’s our contribution to this campaign.

JJ: Thank you so much for that. We’ve been speaking with Ellen Schrecker, author of books, including The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University. That’s available from the New Press. The new book we’re talking about is called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom That’s out now from Beacon Press. Thank you so much, Ellen Schrecker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thank you so much, Janine, for having me.

CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain,
including difficulties meeting basic needs.”

A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.

Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”

And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a  frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).

So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”

Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).

Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24).

This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely.

When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”

We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon.

Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Ian Vandewalker about small donors for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: If you ask people to boil down what “democracy” means, many will say, “One person, one vote.” If powerful people, rich people, get more voice, it’s not democracy. Even as practices and policies have moved us materially further from that reality, that’s still the selling point. Even the reason the US can invade other places is they “don’t believe in democracy like we do.”

Now we see more and more people saying, “Well, democracy shouldn’t actually mean everyone gets equal voice (but we would like to keep using the label).” You can forgive a person for being a bit confused. And since courts have declared that money is speech, you can forgive a person for being more confused. That’s the landscape in which the latest fillip seems to be that people who give small amounts of money to political campaigns somehow have outsized voice?

Here to help us make sense of that is Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ian Vandewalker.

Ian Vandewalker: Thank you. Good to be here.

Brennan Center (5/8/24)

JJ: I will say, when I first saw the headline of your report, “Do Small Donors Cause Political Dysfunction?,” I thought, “Huh? Who would say that?” It turns out it’s a number of folks, including author and New York Times writer Thomas Edsall, who wrote, “For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties.” And then David Byler at the Washington Post wrote, “Small-Dollar Donors Didn’t Save Democracy. They Made It Worse.” So this is not like a subreddit, obscure line of thought. Before I ask you to engage it, putting the best face on it, what is the argument here?

IV: The argument is this contrarian line that you think small donors are democratizing, because anybody can be one. But if you look at who gets a lot of small money, it tends to be people who engage in disruptive antics, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz—people who try to attract a lot of attention with extremist or polarizing rhetoric. And so the argument is, what small donors are really doing is encouraging these people who are showboating, and not engaged in serious moderation or governance.

New York Times (8/30/23)

JJ: So the idea, though, is it that these small donors aren’t real, that they’re kind of orchestrated? That these folks are trying to get folks to just give $12 to make some kind of point? And it’s not that actually it’s people who can only give $12?

IV: Right, I mean, I think there’s something here in that the media ecosystem that we live in, both the mainstream media and social media clickbait, does gravitate towards outrage and controversy and people screaming at each other. We all get these fundraising emails with all caps: “The world’s going to come crashing down if you don’t send me $12.”

So I think there are incentives in the media system that say to certain people, “I can engage a national small-donor fundraising base by saying crazy things.” That exists. Now, one of the critiques is that most small donors don’t actually respond to that. Small donors tend to give to competitive races where they think they can help their party win control of a chamber of Congress or the White House.

JJ: So first of all, I like how you go right to the media ecosystem. I think a lot of folks go, “Well, there’s a political system and there’s a media system, and they’re different.” You’re already saying, “No, these things are intimately integrated.”

IV: Yes, campaign fundraising doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And, look, the internet has been a huge beneficial force for fundraising and allows people to connect across the nation to things that they believe in. But one of the other effects of that has been this clickbait world of, say the most outrageous thing in order to get the clicks and get the small-dollar fundraising.

There’s a question whether these candidates that engage in this kind of extremist rhetoric, are they doing it for the small-dollar fundraising, or would they be doing it anyway, given who votes in their district?—I think is a question we should also look into.

JJ: There is a reality, there is a foot we can keep on base. And so what do you say in this piece about, when you actually investigate, are small donors causing political dysfunction? What did you find?

Ian Vandewalker: “Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors…has increased even faster.”

IV: So first of all, there’s lots of reasons for polarization, people moving farther to the right and left and other kinds of dysfunction. They have to do with gerrymandering and the media ecosystem and the parties making strategic choices about how they’re going to engage their voter bases, and things that have nothing to do with campaign finance.

As I said, small donors, they give to people they’ve heard of, so one way to get heard of is to say crazy things, but it’s certainly not the only way. Some candidates are trying to find policy solutions to the problems that face us. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned yet is big donors. Even though the amount of small money in the system has dramatically increased, the money from the biggest donors, people who give millions, 10 millions, has increased even faster. So that’s actually the biggest part of the campaign finance system, is the big money, and those people give to extremists as well.

So it’s hard to say, when you look at all those facts together, that small donors are causing dysfunction or polarization, even though there are these notorious examples of extremists who raise lots of small money.

JJ: It just sounds weird to say that people who can give less, people who don’t have a million dollars, their throwing in their money wherever they throw it is throwing off the system. It makes you ask, “Well, what’s the system?” Is the system that only people who can afford to give tens of thousands of dollars should be included? It just sounds weird.

IV: Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the things, the sort of thought experiments I like to do with these arguments is, well, replace small donor with voter, right? If small donors give a lot of money to a candidate because they believe in that candidate, OK, that’s just like voters voting for a candidate because they believe in that candidate. And it’s hard to say that that’s, as you say, a problem with the system itself.

JJ: Obviously, every election year is important, but hoo boy, 2024. Thoughts for reporters who are going to be engaging this?

IV: Yeah, I think for reporters it’s important to get away from the high profile anecdotes. It’s easy to say, “Oh, Marjorie Taylor Green raised a bunch of small money,” but there’s data out there that can show you, what are small donors actually doing across the entire system. And that’s a very different story.

And as for reforms, the Brennan Center supports a small-donor public financing system that matches small donations. So it amplifies those amounts from regular people, to make them competitive with the big donors. And that changes the way the candidates fundraise, and makes them fundraise by essentially asking people in their communities for votes. And so it amplifies those regular people’s voices, and engages a kind of connection between elected representative and constituent that’s good for representative democracy, because politicians are listening to the voters in another way.

JJ: All right, then, and we’ll have another conversation about the role of money in politics generally, and why do you have to have money to participate? That’s a whole bigger conversation.

IV: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot to say about the uniquely American way of running politics with private dollars and the biggest donors calling the tune.

JJ: All right, then. Well, for now, we’ve been speaking with Ian Vandewalker. He’s senior counsel of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Ian Vandewalker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IV: Thank you. Good to be here.

After pro-Israel billionaires and millionaires met with Eric Adams, one attendee summarized “items ‘discussed today,’ including donating to Adams, using group members’ ‘leverage’ to help persuade Columbia’s president to let New York police back on campus, and paying for ‘investigative efforts’ to assist the city.” (Washington Post, 5/16/24)

An exposé by the Washington Post (5/16/24) showed the degree to which wealthy pro-Israel businesspeople coordinated with each other to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to take drastic action against college campus protests against the genocide of Palestinians.

It’s a remarkable piece of reporting, by Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton, that points to a pervasive problem in American politics: that the wealthy enjoy outsized influence with the political class, while the rest of us drift in the wind. 

The story is based on transcripts of a WhatsApp groupchat called “Israel Current Events,” whose participants included “billionaires and business titans.” One message by a billionaire’s staffer “told the others the goal of the group was to ‘change the narrative’ in favor of Israel,” the Post reported. A person identified only as “a staffer” told the group, “While Israel worked to ‘win the physical war,’ the chat group’s members would ‘help win the war’ of US public opinion by funding an information campaign against Hamas.”

The article reported that the chats revealed collaboration with Adams:

“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member [Joseph] Sitt, founder of the retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s OK if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”

The piece revealed that groupchat members, aware that “Columbia had to grant Adams permission before he could send city police to the campus,” strategized about how to apply the group’s “leverage” to Columbia president Minouche Shafik, including contacting the university’s board of trustees.

The New York Post (5/17/24)—which regularly accuses George Soros of being the puppet master behind all progressive causes—attacked the Washington Post: “Intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”

Needless to say, City Hall wasn’t too happy about the piece. One of the mayor’s deputies, Fabien Levy, quickly responded on Twitter (5/16/24) that “the insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all-too-familiar antisemitic trope.” 

His multi-post thread concluded: 

@WashingtonPost & others can make editorial decisions to disagree with the decisions by universities to ask the NYPD to clear unlawful encampments on campuses, but saying Jews “wielded their money and power in an effort to shape American views” is offensive on so many levels.

The Washington Post, of course, did not report that “Jews” had “wielded their money and power”—but that “some prominent individuals” had, distinguished not by religion or ethnicity, but by their politics.

The mayor himself called the story “antisemitic in its core” (Good Day New York, 5/20/24) and doubled down on this point when speaking to reporters (New York Post, 5/21/24). The Anti-Defamation League (Twitter, 5/20/24) said that the Washington Post should be 

ashamed of publishing an article that unabashedly (and almost entirely on anonymous sources) plays into antisemitic tropes by inferring a secret cabal of Jews is using wealth & power to influence governments, the media, the business world & academia.

The Adams administration’s effort to redirect scrutiny away from the latest credible charge of coziness with wealthy donors found a friendly audience in right-wing media. Fox News (5/17/24) gave Levy’s claims headline status, and the New York Post editorial board (5/17/24) said that the Adams administration “smells a whiff of antisemitism in the WaPo report,” because “intimating that a mainly Jewish bunch of wealthy power-players were quietly pulling a politician’s strings is a classic trope of Jew-hate.”

Yes, that’s the same New York Post that obsessively ties every political cause to the left of Emperor Palpatine to the Jewish philanthropist George Soros (e.g., 8/1/22, 1/22/23, 1/25/23, 7/24/23, 12/9/23, 4/26/24, 4/26/24). It is also interesting to note that two Rupert Murdoch outlets, thought to be Republican stalwarts, are once again acting as in-kind public relations agents for a Democratic mayor, a testament to Adams’ right-wing agenda—the New York Post endorsed him (5/20/21) and continues to cheerlead for him (1/27/24) as he approaches the end of his first term. For the Murdoch empire, politics (including shielding Israel) sometimes comes before party. 

ABC (4/24/24) reported that at Passover Seders celebrated in campus antiwar encampments, “some set aside an empty seat at the Seder table for hostages abducted from Israel on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise terror attack. Others put an olive on the Seder plate to recognize solidarity with Palestinians.”

The accusation that the student protest movement against the genocide of Palestinians is “antisemitic” has become more and more tired. Many Jews are mobilizing in these protests (ABC, 4/24/24). As a result, many Jewish protesters face state violence (Al Jazeera, 5/3/24) and censorship (FAIR.org, 12/15/23) for speaking out against the Israeli military. Yet the Adams administration, Fox and the New York Post continue to hurl the insult, this time at the Washington Post, signaling that they have no more honest way to defend the behavior exposed by the Post.

It would be just as ridiculous to claim that Jeff Sharlet’s reporting (Washington Post, 8/16/19) on the influence of Christian lobbying in Washington is anti-Christian, or investigations into the millions of dollars Saudi Arabia spends in the US to sanitize its image (Guardian, 12/22/22) are anti-Muslim. Federal investigators are probing Adams’ financial relationship with Turkey (Politico, 12/22/23; New York Times, 5/20/24), and there’s been no serious discourse that the scrutiny is somehow anti-Muslim. Is reporting on the growing influence of the Indian BJP and the Indian nationalist government in Washington (Intercept, 3/16/20; Jacobin, 3/4/23) anti-Hindu?

When we talk about the Israel lobby, we don’t even necessarily mean Jewish advocates; that lobby consists heavily of right-wing evangelical Christians (Jerusalem Post, 1/27/24). Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who announced he wouldn’t hire Harvard grads who signed a letter critical of Israel (New York Post, 10/16/23), is Presbyterian. The arms industry supports Israel as well, strictly from the profit potential of protracted violence in the Middle East (Reuters, 10/16/23).

Establishment attacks on outlets that expose corruption are evidence of good journalism (FAIR.org, 6/17/21, 1/12/24,  2/2/24). Such attacks are meant to stifle the press, and keep them from being a check on power. In this case, they are meant to shut down dissent against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 

False charges of antisemitism have been an effective tool for the right in the past (FAIR.org, 8/26/20). The good news is that this may be starting to change.

Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about election transparency for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Voting Booth (5/9/24) has investigated Trump loyalists’ election denial strategies.

Janine Jackson: The Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump has proven surprisingly tenacious, perhaps, in part, because it is so big and vague, and perhaps, in part, due to a corporate press corps that are constitutionally incapable of saying sometimes there are not two sides with the truth in the middle. 

Based on the tenacity and the utility of that lie, Trumpists are continuing the work of undermining US electoral processes in the run up to the 2024 race. Besides saying, “Trump! Am I right?” is there more we might do to break through the disinformation and gird ourselves for similar future efforts? 

Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency and other electoral issues for VotingBooth.media. He joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.

Steven Rosenfeld: Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.

JJ: I want to ask you about the Election Education channel that you’ve written about, but first, just some context. Even if you don’t think anyone’s going to go back and say Trump actually won, there is a possibility of creating enough chaos, confusion and controversy around elections that people can say, “Well, I don’t know what went on, so I’ll believe who I want to believe.” Trumpists don’t have to convince you of the Big Lie if they sow enough doubt. That’s kind of the playing field we’re on.

SR: Well, that is true. If you think about what happened since 2020, there were 60-something lawsuits, election challenges filed after election day by Trump and his allies in the Republican party and other nonprofits that are aligned with Republicans. Courts, unlike state legislatures and political campaigns, actually have rules of evidence. You’re not allowed to lie in court. If you go into court and you present lies and you can’t back things up with evidence or facts that can be duplicated by somebody else, you’ll lose your law license, and that’s what’s happened with Rudy Giuliani and a whole bunch of others. 

But winning in the court of legal opinion is not the same as winning in the court of public opinion. So what’s happened since 2020 is these legislators in states like Arizona and other places have created these audits and these investigations where the goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month, especially on the television channels and the online platforms that are favored by the Trump supporters and right wingers, and just plant those seeds of doubt. 

Steven Rosenfeld: “The goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month…and just plant those seeds of doubt.”

They have people on these channels and they talk about technical things that no one could understand, but people would just nod and go “Okay, okay,” and so what you ended up getting was you can win in court but lose in the court of public opinion. So these folks have basically been winning the propaganda war, and they’ve been doing it just as you said, by planting seeds of doubt and basically saying political tribal loyalties, “How could that possibly happen?” All this kind of stuff. And that’s brought us to today.

JJ: It’s a particular example, it’s not a sole example, but it is a kind of epicenter of this kind of thing: You looked at the Election Education channel on Telegram. Tell us a little about what that is and what they are up to that is currently and potentially meaningful.

SR: When I was on the floor of the Arizona recount, which was in an old basketball arena in Phoenix, this was run by the Cyber Ninjas, and the state senate in that state said we’re going to take possession of all the ballots in Maricopa County, which is, I forget, second or third largest jurisdiction in the country. So, 1.2 million ballots. They had a lot of volunteers come in who were basically patriotic citizens who thought, “My God, something went wrong. I gotta do something to help figure out what happened.” 

So a lot of these folks are emblematic of the grassroots wing of the “election integrity movement” or the pro-Trump part of the Republican party. They call themselves an election integrity movement. They went to other platforms like Parler and Telegram, and they stayed in touch there. 

Now, this is not the same as the people who have really tried to become professional agitators, the people like Mike Lindell and others who’ve gone around the country speaking at Republican Party county meetings and have basically turned their livelihoods into holding forth with all these conspiracies that were based on things they claimed were happening and couldn’t be proven and “invisible hidden hands” and “the world’s out to get us” kind of stuff. And I’m not making any of this up. I won’t get into the details. The point is the details are really hard to follow, but people just nod and go along. 

But below that, to answer your question, is on these pro-Trump, right of center social media platforms, you have these channels. They’re sort of pages where people share information and they talk and they communicate and they have a community there. And I would periodically go and see what these folks are saying. And I found this one channel on Telegram, which is one of the platforms, and it’s called the Election Education channel, and it’s run by a woman who is based in Washington state, and she is different than the folks who are in Trump’s immediate orbit. Because the folks in Trump’s immediate orbit will say—there’ll be a lot of cliches: “It was stolen.” “It was electronically hacked.” “Oh, they’re fabricating voters.” “Oh, they’re making up voter lists.” “Oh, they’re stealing ballots.” 

These folks instead, at this Election Education channel, they decided to try to learn about the way elections work. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of subsystems and steps with a lot of bureaucratic and technical procedures that really follow the start to the finish of elections. So the whole voter registration system has its own rules and its own data, and then the whole ballot counting system, the vote counting system, is another set of computers and analytics and records and data. So they’ve discovered this and what they’ve tried to do is they’ve tried to teach themselves about it because they don’t trust talking to election officials and election officials most often don’t really want to talk to them or they lose patience.

So what’s happened is these folks, especially on this Election Education channel, I found more than a hundred really pretty well done graphics. It’s not like a bumper sticker, but they’re charts that can be read in five or ten seconds, and they have identified all these little steps and technicalities of running elections, and everywhere possible, they’ve tried to figure out, “How can this be used against us?” 

So they’re emblematic of the phrase or cliche that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, because they’re starting with something that’s factual and they just spin off the deep end. And they come from this mindset, “Well, anything that can be done against us will be done against us. And if anything is possible, it means it probably is happening somewhere. And even if people are trying to operate in good faith, like poll workers, they don’t know what’s happening invisibly inside their machines.” And they just go on and on this way. 

And this is really different from the people surrounding Trump at the end of 2020 because they’re not just targeting the candidate, they’re targeting the system. When things get close in the fall, if they are close, it’s going to be a zillion targets.

JJ: So they’ve identified, they’ve broken down the different steps in the election process, and they’re saying, every step of the way, there can be subterfuge.

The Atlanta Voice (5/7/24) on new restrictive voter registration laws in Georgia: “The victory is sweet especially for some that believe the 2020 Presidential election was ‘stolen’.”

SR: Let’s just put this in the context of what you’re hearing about right now. So in early May, the governor of Georgia signed a bill that allows mass election challenges or challenges of voter registrations. And this had been in law before, and literally less than 10 people in 2020 tried to challenge the voter registrations of over a hundred thousand voters who obviously predominantly lived in the democratic epicenters, the blue cities, lower income communities, college campuses and things like that. 

So the governor signed a bill allowing this to actually be expanded six months from now towards the ’24 presidential election in November. What you have in these narratives as a backdrop to what you read on the Trump social media channels is, “The Democrats are fabricating voters. The voter lists are actually not up to date, and that’s on purpose, because what they’re doing is they’re finding people who are not voting and they’re filling out ballots in their names, and they’re doing this electronically, and they’re doing this with mailed out ballots, and they’re doing it on Election Day so that when they find out that people haven’t come in, they can just push through five or ten thousand votes as needed, and this is how they’re going to screw us.”

And that level of paranoia—I could tell you practically why that is very unlikely, because there are too many other checks and balances in the actual data and records to get away with something like that where it wouldn’t be caught very early and immediately and quarantined and found and fixed and corrected. But the point, what I’m saying is, this is the rhetoric and the crazy-making around just this one little step at the start of the process. 

So what people in the mainstream media and in election defense circles have not acknowledged is this same level of focus and what I would call craziness or paranoia, they’ve got scripts or scenarios every step of the way through the final certification, which comes weeks after Election Day. They don’t trust the machines, or they don’t trust the testing. They don’t trust how ballots might be delivered from a voting site to a counting center. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.

They don’t know what they don’t know. So what do I mean by that? They do not know, or they never say, what security measures might be in place to quarantine problems. They don’t know what other data or records occur upstream might be used to double check and say, “Wait a second, this isn’t right. It doesn’t match.” They don’t know, and they never say, what is the scale of proposed impacts here, are we talking about ten or a hundred or a thousand votes? 

So it becomes this crazy-making, spinning kind of mindset that will never be satisfied. And even if you respond to one thing, there’s always going to be something else. It’s always going to be a “What about this?” and “What about that?”

JJ: Well, I want to say a few things—that you’ve actually said, but just to lift them up—for one thing, to show that it’s a rhetorical kind of thing, these folks are not saying, “If you did this, then I would believe that the process was clean.” They’re not offering solutions, they’re not offering things that might be done to be introduced in the process, and then we would accept the results. They are emphatically not doing that. 

And then let me just tack onto that, you have written, actually, voting systems are not black boxes; there is data, there is ballot-centered evidence that can be verified. So it’s two things; it’s both, there are things that we can use to check and to make these processes transparent, and also, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want agreed-upon, evidentiary-based things that we can all see and say, “All right, this actually went according to rules.”

SR: That’s exactly right. For example, the attorney general’s race in Arizona, after the official result was in, there was a several hundred-vote margin, which means it went to an official recount. It turned out that in one county they didn’t count 500 votes, 500 ballots. And people knew what to look for to basically make sure that the number of voters equals the number of ballots. Very early on they would’ve seen there was an inventory problem, there was a mismatch. But instead it took nine weeks, nearly. It was late December before that recount was over. And in that nine week period, you can just imagine the volume of partisan propaganda that occurred. 

So what’s happening is these folks, they’re learning about how elections work, they don’t know, or they didn’t know then, where to look to basically solve the most basic questions. Does the number of ballots equal the number of voters? And then you can drill down. You can make sure that the votes on each ballot, if they’re not totally sloppy, match what’s in the final spreadsheet. And if you want to argue about the sloppy ballots, you can find them very quickly. That’s what lawyers argue over in recounts, “Do I have a vote? Is it for my candidate or the other candidate or neither of us?” And they don’t do any of that.

JJ: Well, finally, I know that you have heard, “Let’s just not talk about these people. That only elevates them, that only spotlights them.” And I guess I see what people are saying? But at the same time, Trump won in 2016, he became the freaking president based on all manner of nonsense and straight up lying. And so I don’t know what we get from ignoring that, but we should certainly come at it smarter. 

And so I want to ask you, what would you be asking from reporters? And I want to say, especially at the local level—you know, we can get big chin-scratching ideas pieces in the national media, but local reporting on the election is going to be really meaningful. “What happened here? What actually happened?” 

What role do you see for reporters who aren’t, like you, specifically dedicated to issues of electoral processes and transparency, but they’re going to be the ones that we look to for reporting claims of fraud or claims of poll worker bias and so on in November. What would you like to put in reporters’ minds, maybe?

The Detroit Free Press (11/5/20) debunked a widely-shared Trumpist claim that late-arriving ballots were smuggled into a Detroit counting center.

SR: Well, I can tell you very simply, most local reporters, and this is also true of the people who come to observe elections, they don’t know what they’re seeing. They’re standing behind a stanchion or at a distance and they don’t really know what people are looking at as they’re shuffling ballot return envelopes or ballots, or looking at a computer screen to check signatures or something else. 

What I would hope is that people who actually know the way things work could do some proactive education to tell journalists who are going to be covering the swing counties and the swing states to literally help them understand what they are seeing as the process inches forward. It’s not hard to do if you know what to look for. 

There aren’t that many key decision points, and at least at that point, at the very worst, if the counting takes days or weeks, and the editors are saying, “I need a story by five o’clock, what are you going to do? What do you got?” At least then, you will actually be covering what’s real instead of covering the made-up crazy things, like “The ballots are being smuggled in the next room.” At least it could come back to what’s real, as opposed to what’s made up. And I think that’s the best we can hope for, is to try to nip the disinformation rumors in the bud. And that’s where they’ll start, in these swing counties, in these swing states, with these local reporters and local influences.

JJ: Alright, then we’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. You can find his piece, “Trump Loyalists Preview Strategies to Upend 2024 Election,” online at VotingBooth.media. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SR: Well, thank you so much for having me.