Culture

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    [post_content] => Chappelle knew that claiming he had been 'canceled' would be the equivalent of dangling red meat in front of the Joe Rogan set.

Last week, Dave Chappelle posted a video to Instagram in which he addressed “the transgender community.” Many of its members, as well as members of several other communities, were upset by “The Closer,” Chappelle’s new Netflix special; and it’s not hard to understand why. In his one-hour monologue, Chappelle compares the genitalia of trans women to plant-derived meat. He proclaims that, like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, he’s “Team TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). He states that “gender is a fact.” He calls women “bitches,” drops the n-word with abandon and pitches a movie called “Space Jews” about powerful aliens who try to conquer the earth. Those are not even the most offensive parts of his act.

The show was met with a yawn from critics. In his review for The New York Times, Jason Zinoman wrote that the “fallout from ‘The Closer’ is in some ways the most interesting thing about the special.” The fallout to which he was referring included a walkout by Netflix employees, one of whom was fired for allegedly leaking internal documents to the press. It also resulted in an online feud between Chappelle and an unlikely adversary: Australian lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby.

How this situation came about has less to do with Gadsby or Chappelle and more to do with Netflix’s increasingly untenable objective to balance its reputation for unfettered creative freedom with building an inclusive workplace. In response to the widespread criticism coming from within his company, Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos wrote a long, defensive memo to employees in which he stressed that the streaming platform is committed to airing diverse perspectives: “We are working hard to ensure marginalized communities aren’t defined by a single story. So we have Sex Education, Orange is the New Black, Control Z, Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle all on Netflix.” So there was Gadsby, trotted out as a token for all Netflix employees to see.

Chappelle responded by offering trans people—all of them, everywhere—the opportunity to meet with him and air their grievances, but only under certain conditions, which he laid out in a video clip that is posted to his Instagram account. They couldn’t come unless they had watched “The Closer” in its entirety. Chappelle would determine where and when this meeting would take place. And finally, he said, all prospective attendees “must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”

You could almost hear Chappelle’s 2.4 million Instagram followers nervously laughing while asking themselves: Who? 

Hannah Gadsby, an Australian from a conservative small town in Tasmania, rose to international prominence in 2018 with “Nanette,” a Netflix special that contained atypical standup fare: In it, she described being badly beaten by a homophobic man. She spoke about suffering from mental illness and revealed that because standup comedy demanded constant self-deprecation it was killing her soul. She does an extended set on art history to take down its role in amplifying and perpetuating misogyny—or, as she puts it, “to needle the patriarchy.”

Gadsby’s audience has virtually no overlap with Chappelle’s. He is a straight, Black, American man with a storied reputation for scalding political satire that focuses primarily on race and racism. And yet, his name and Gadsby's are now linked in an angry controversy.

Once Sarandos’s email was leaked to the press, Gadsby was irate, not so much at Chappelle but at Netflix. She took the unusual step of firing back at her distribution partner, describing the company as an “amoral algorithm cult” in a public letter she posted on Instagram. “Hey Ted Sarandos!” she began, “Just a quick note to let you know that I would prefer if you didn’t drag my name into your mess. Now I have to deal with even more of the hate and anger that Dave Chappelle’s fans like to unleash on me every time Dave gets 20 million dollars to process his emotionally stunted partial world view.”

That could have been the end of Gadsby’s involvement in this narrative. But Chappelle is a guy who never will miss an opportunity to capitalize on controversy. He knew better than anyone that invoking Gadsby in his response would both signal solidarity with Sarandos—"He’s the only one who didn’t cancel me yet,” he said his Instagram video—with the added benefit of dangling more red meat in front of the alpha-male Joe Rogan set. And once again, he was right: Shortly after the video was posted, Gadsby and Chappelle appeared in dozens of headlines together, including a New York Times obituary for another, unrelated, comedian. Right-wing troll Ben Shapiro tweeted, “Admitting that Hannah Gadsby is unfunny shouldn't just be a precondition for meeting with Dave Chappelle. It should be a precondition for being considered a sentient human.” Chappelle supporters posted attacks to Gadsby’s Instagram account, flooding the comments with insults from Chappelle supporters, just as she predicted.

I decided to watch “The Closer” last week in its entirety, followed by “Nanette.” Neither special could be considered a laugh riot. Many of the jokes in “The Closer” reflect Chappelle’s frustration and bewilderment at society’s having evolved to accommodate diversity in gender and sexuality faster than it has ever risen to deal with racism. It’s an interesting point, but also problematic because the construction of Chappelle’s us-versus-them jokes rest on the fallacy that the Black and LGBTQ communities are mutually exclusive. In reality, as Netflix employee Terra Field pointed out in in a viral Twitter thread, Black trans people are the ones who bear the brunt of the real-world consequences of Chappelle’s jokes: 27 of the 43 trans people who are known to have been murdered in 2021 were Black, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

What I found most fascinating about watching these two specials back-to-back was that both Gadsby and Chappelle tell almost the exact same “joke”—I use this term loosely—about anti-trans violence, though from opposite points of view. In “Nanette,” Gadsby describes taking a beating from a straight man who thought she was hitting on his girlfriend. This story was intentionally unfunny. In “The Closer,” Chappelle brags about beating up a butch lesbian after she took a swing at him because she thought that Chappelle was hitting on her girlfriend. This story was unintentionally unfunny.

While watching “The Closer,” I got the sense that not only did Chappelle anticipate the firestorm over its content, but, lacking any relevant new material, he structured the special—ending with a tragic story of a trans comedian friend who died by suicide—precisely so he would be able to cast himself as a victim of “cancel culture” after it was released. “If this is what being canceled is like, I love it!” he said at a sold-out show at LA’s Hollywood Bowl on October 7, as he received a standing ovation.

In the special, Chappelle once again comes to the defense of people like Kevin Hart, one of the highest grossing movie stars of all time, because he lost his job hosting the Oscars four years ago due to the latter’s homophobic tweets. He defends the Grammy-nominated rapper DaBaby, who made jokes about AIDS at a music festival last summer and was subsequently dropped from Lollapalooza. Now Chappelle believes himself to be among the Canceled because, in the wake of the Netflix-Gadsby furor, he was disinvited to film festivals. Film festivals! Has there ever been a more bougie complaint? The man is a multi-millionaire, widely acknowledged even by his critics as a brilliant comedian, who fills stadiums all over the country.

Dave Chappelle has not been canceled. Awash in fame and money, he has simply lost his edge. In “The Closer,” Chappelle states that this is going to be his last comedy special for a very long time. For this, everyone—including Ted Sarandos—can be grateful.

 
    [post_title] => 'If this is what being canceled is like, I love it!': Dave Chappelle plays the culture war game
    [post_excerpt] => The comedian deliberately manufactured a controversy by gratuitously name-checking Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who has no overlap with his fan base, in order to amplify his latest Netflix special. 
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‘If this is what being canceled is like, I love it!’: Dave Chappelle plays the culture war game

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => No one is forbidding anyone from using the term 'woman' or 'mother.'

On October 15 Rosie DiManno, a Canadian journalist, wrote a contentious column for the Toronto Star, in which she claimed that women were being “erased” because British health care providers were introducing gender-inclusive language to accommodate nonbinary people and transgender men. The practice of referring to a menstruating or pregnant person instead of a menstruating or pregnant woman was, DiManno asserted, tantamount to “blotting women out” and bore a “whiff of misogyny.” DiManno’s grievance mongering, with her anger directed at transgender people, follows a pattern we have come to expect from TERFs—the acronym stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”—and their enablers. Almost invariably, they invoke problems that do not exist as a means of preempting the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people.

Whether the imaginary problem du jour is “men in dresses” invading public bathrooms or, as in DiManno’s op-ed, the supposed erasure of language that captures quintessentially female experiences, this tactic embodies reactionary politics of grievance and scapegoating. The subtext is that transgender women are “really” men, transgender men are “really” women, and nonbinary people don’t exist. DiManno’s views are widely known to Canadian newspaper readers, and rarely elicit a response, but this particular column received international attention because Margaret Atwood promoted it approvingly on Twitter. This is indeed disappointing. Even more disappointing is that Atwood refused to listen to those who alerted her to the trans-antagonistic nature of DiManno’s commentary. Instead, she doubled down.

Before exploring these developments and the key issue of inclusive language in more detail, let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, no one is forbidding anyone from using the term “woman” or “mother.” Secondly, I’m not here to “cancel” an 81-year-old literary icon, even if I had the power to do so. I taught The Handmaid’s Tale in 2018 for an arts and humanities theme course on apocalypse and dystopia in the University of South Florida’s Honors College; and, while I am not planning a return to the classroom, I would teach that book again. Atwood’s novel is an immensely important exploration of what can happen when religious extremism runs amok, with the harm disproportionately falling on women and queer people (“gender traitors” in the terminology of Gilead), and for that reason it is painfully relevant in our time.

As a trans woman, I have no trouble discussing access to abortion care as a woman’s issue, although it doesn’t fit exclusively under that rubric because it also affects trans men and some nonbinary individuals, which makes it also an LGBTQ issue. Nor is access to abortion an issue that affects all women. Cisgender women who are unable to conceive, have had hysterectomies, have gone through menopause, or who have certain intersex conditions, are not personally affected by abortion access issues, but no one would get defensive about applying the word “woman” to people in most of those categories.

I would like to pause here to point out that I unabashedly typed “woman” or “women” five times in the above paragraph, because in each case that was the most fitting term. In addition, in my recent commentary on Brittney Poolaw’s horrific manslaughter conviction in Oklahoma for suffering a miscarriage, I used the word “women” 10 times; by contrast, I used the inclusive phrase “anyone who can get pregnant” just once.

To the second point above— i.e., the issue of “cancel culture”— it should go without saying that criticizing the views of a public figure is not censorship. A highly visible public figure should expect that the expression of their opinion on political concerns will elicit a variety of responses and should be prepared for criticism. Even if one is not a public figure, the right to free speech is not the same as an exemption from consequences for expressing hateful or bigoted views.

In addition to the degree of offense, power dynamics should be taken into consideration. This should be axiomatic for feminists. And yet, when it comes to these issues and “cancel culture,” anti-trans self-described feminists are suddenly unable to understand that women (see what I did there?) like Atwood, gazillionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and DiManno are not vulnerable people who have to worry about financial insecurity or access to healthcare. They all have white and cis privilege, and they have far more power than the average woman. Trans people, by contrast, are disproportionately poor, highly vulnerable to “cancellation” via scapegoating, likely to face barriers to healthcare access, and, especially in the case of Black trans women, disproportionately subjected to violence up to and including murder.

There is one issue DiManno raised on which I agree with her and, by extension, Atwood: the anatomy of the female reproductive system has historically been erased due to patriarchy and puritanism. Encouraging girls and, indeed, all of us to have a better understanding of the vulva, the clitoris, the cervix, the uterus, and so forth is something our society needs. Jennifer Gunter’s 2019 bestseller The Vagina Bible was a much needed intervention, and I am very glad it exists. At the same time, there is something very odd about women who identify with feminism, a movement that has sought to decouple a woman’s value from reproduction and childrearing, to suddenly wish to define women precisely in those terms so long as it means not having to accommodate “those people.”

Regarding inclusive language, I disagree with DiManno and Atwood’s claim that using it as a means of accommodating some people who can get pregnant undermines the goal of increasing literacy about female anatomy and reproduction. DiManno completely misrepresented the facts to make her case, by referring to an article in The Lancet about UK hospitals using gender-neutral language to accommodate transgender men and nonbinary people. As Stacy Lee Kong points out, rather than prescribe that language across the board, “What did happen is Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust announced in February that it would be adding new trans-friendly terms including ‘birthing people’ and ‘chestfeeding’ to its existing vocabulary as a way to become more inclusive. The hospital was careful to note that it would only be using gender-neutral language in its internal communications and meetings, and that staff would use patients’ correct pronouns while caring for them.”

Intentionally or not, there is a great deal of dishonesty among the handwringing “why can’t we say woman anymore” crowd. That Atwood would throw in her lot with them is more disappointing than surprising to those who have been paying attention, since, as Kong also highlighted in her commentary on the current dustup, Atwood has previously reveled in being a self-described “bad feminist.”

The evolution of language, which is often pushed along by activists and advocates for marginalized communities, is understandably something that can make people uncomfortable. And indeed, activists sometimes go to excesses, though trans rights activists have so little power that the issue is mostly a red herring. Meanwhile, discomfort is sometimes necessary in order to learn and grow. And there is simply no excuse for distorting, exaggerating, and lying about what is really happening when healthcare systems, which often discriminate against trans people, begin to move toward understanding and accommodation. That thoroughly reactionary response is antithetical to the spirit of feminism as I understand it. Atwood seems uninterested in addressing her critics in a serious way, but if she should happen to read this column, I would ask her to look at the actual facts rather than the distorted version found in DiManno’s column, to sit for a while with her discomfort, and to consider leaving the politics of fear, scapegoating, and scarcity to the reactionary Right.
    [post_title] => Margaret Atwood's opposition to gender-inclusive language is disappointing, but not surprising
    [post_excerpt] => Self described feminists who oppose the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people are ddisregarding the facts in favor of a position predicated on fears and biases.
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Margaret Atwood’s opposition to gender-inclusive language is disappointing, but not surprising

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => The crux of the problem with deplatforming: when it’s good, it’s excellent; and when it’s bad, it’s dangerous.

“Deplatforming works” has, in recent months, become a popular slogan on social media. When a widely reviled public figure is booted from a social media platform or a television channel, Twitter users repeat the phrase as a truism. And, indeed, there is evidence to support the claim that taking away someone’s digital megaphone can effectively silence them, or significantly reduce their influence.

After Twitter and Facebook permanently banned Donald Trump in January, for example, there was a noticeable and quantifiable drop in online disinformation. In 2016 Twitter took the then-unprecedented step of banning Milo Yiannopoulos, a notorious provocateur and grifter who disseminated hate speech and disinformation. Yiannopoulos tried vainly to mount a comeback, but never recovered from the loss of his bully pulpit. It appears his 15 minutes of fame are well over.

Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder, was booted from multiple platforms in 2018 for violating rules against hate speech, among other things. Jones disseminated disgusting conspiracy theories like the claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax perpetrated to curtail gun rights, thus re-victimizing the parents of children who had been shot and killed at the Connecticut elementary school. His rants spawned fresh conspiracies about other mass shootings, like the one at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which he said was staged by “crisis actors.” Jones boasted that banning him from mainstream platforms would only make him stronger. “The more I’m persecuted, the stronger I get,” he said. But three years later, his name has almost disappeared from the news cycle.

Experts on online hate speech, misinformation, and extremism agree that kicking extremist haters off platforms like Facebook and YouTube significantly limits their reach.

According to one recent study, “far right content creators” who were kicked off YouTube found they were unable to maintain their large audience on BitChute, an alternative video platform that caters to extremists. Another study found that a far-right user who is deplatformed simultaneously by several mainstream social media platforms rapidly loses followers and influence. In other words, toxic influencers who are forced off mainstream social media do have the option of migrating to secret platforms that specialize in hosting extremists, but if they are not on YouTube they will be starved of new targets to radicalize and recruit.

The removal of a Yiannopoulos or a Jones from the quasi-public sphere  can be a huge relief to the people they target. However, I am not convinced that censorship is an effective tactic for social change. Nor do I believe that it is in our best interests to entrust social media corporations with the power to moderate our discourse.

The negative effects of deplatforming have not been studied as thoroughly as the positive effects—which is not surprising, given that the phenomenon is only a few years old. But there are a few clear possibilities, like the creation of cult-like followings driven by a sense of persecution, information vacuums, and the proliferation of “underground” organizing—such as the organized harassment campaigns that are organized by “incel” (involuntarily celibate) communities on sites like 4Chan and then taken to more central platforms like Twitter.

Substack, the subscription newsletter platform, now hosts several “deplatformed” people who are thriving, like “gender critical” activist and TV writer Glen Linehan (who was kicked off Twitter for harassing transgender people), or Bari Weiss, the self-proclaimed “silenced” journalist who claimed in her public resignation letter from The New York Times that her colleagues had created a work environment that was hostile to her. Substack allows the author to set the terms for their newsletter by deciding on the subscription price, and whether they’d like the company to assign them an editor. The company has also been clear about its views on content moderation, with which I largely agree: free speech is encouraged, with minimal content moderation. My concern is that newsletters facilitate the creation of a cult following, while giving writers with a persecution complex a place to join forces in a self-congratulatory, circular way.

Of course, even Substack has its limits: I doubt that the platform would be happy to host Alex Jones or Donald Trump.

Deplatforming can also have a damaging impact on fragile democracies.

In early June Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari issued a threat, via his Twitter account, that he would punish secessionists in the Biafra region. Twitter decided the threat violated its policies and removed the tweet. In response, the Nigerian government blocked access to the social media company indefinitely and said those who circumvented the ban would be subject to prosecution—a situation that is, as of this writing, ongoing—although the government says it will restore access “in a few days.” Nigerian businesses are suffering from the ban, while those who do find a way to tweet risk arrest. This is a salutary example that illustrates how a social media company’s ostensibly righteous decision to censor world leaders can backfire.

The first time I heard the term “deplatforming,” it was used to describe student-led boycotts of guest speakers invited to campus. The mediator in these situations is the university administration, which responds to the demands of enrolled, tuition-paying students—who should have the ultimate say in who comes to speak at their university. But social media platforms are large multinational corporations. As I argue in my recent book, making corporations the gatekeepers for acceptable expression is deeply problematic.

In cases when the social media platform acts as an intermediary between external forces and an individual, the resulting scenario can resemble mob rule.

Chris Boutté, who runs a YouTube channel about mental health issues called “The Rewired Soul,” experienced the mob rule scenario firsthand. Boutté references pop culture in his videos about mental health and addiction, in which he talks about his own experience, often using illustrative examples from the world of YouTube influencers. He attracted angry detractors who believed he was causing harm by speculating about the mental health of popular YouTube stars. In an effort to silence Boutté, his critics attacked him in their own videos, which ultimately resulted in his receiving death threats.

“Everything I did was from a good place,” he told me during a recent conversation. “In their mind, I was so dangerous that I should not be able to speak. So that’s where my concerns with deplatforming come in, when you get a mob mentality [combined with] misinformation.” He added: “I’m not a big fan of the court of public opinion.” Boutté says that his angry critics’ efforts to get him deplatformed included “dislike bomb” campaigns, whereby users mass-dislike videos in an effort to trick the YouTube algorithm. According to Boutté, the tactic worked: His channel is no longer financially viable.

Mobs who take matters into their own hands, manipulating recommendation algorithms to get someone removed from a platform, have been around for a long time. In recent years, however, they have become more sophisticated; meanwhile, the public’s understanding of how platforms work has increased.

According to one recent Vice report there is a cottage industry of professional scammers who exploit Instagram’s policies to get individuals banned by making fraudulent claims against them. Want to get someone kicked off Instagram? Pay a professional to report them (falsely) for using a fake identity on their profile. Anyone can be targeted by these tactics. Repressive governments, for example, target the Facebook accounts of journalists, democracy activists and marginalized communities worldwide.

So here is the crux of the problem with deplatforming: when it’s good, it’s excellent; and when it’s bad, it’s dangerous. Deftly removing noxious propagandists is good.  Empowering ordinary people to silence a common “enemy” by manipulating an algorithm is not good. Silencing marginalized activists fighting repressive governments is very, very bad.

Finally: Is censorship really a meaningful strategy for social change? Surely the most effective means of routing hate speech is to tackle its root causes rather than hacking at its symptoms. The study of online misinformation and extremism are currently hot topics, the darlings of funders in the digital space, with millions of dollars doled out to academic institutions. Certainly, online hate speech is an important area of study, but the intense focus on this one issue can come at the expense of other urgent social issues—like online privacy, the declining right to free expression worldwide, and the ongoing struggles against repressive governments.

I suggest that deplatforming should be viewed and wielded with extreme caution, rather than presented as a means of fixing the internet—or, more importantly, our societies.
    [post_title] => The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists
    [post_excerpt] => The negative effects of deplatforming have not been studied as thoroughly as the positive effects—which is not surprising, given that the phenomenon is only a few years old. But there are several case studies that illustrate the risks of kicking extremists off mainstream platforms.
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The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists

by Jillian C. York

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    [post_content] => Some assert that the now-disgraced Silicon Valley wunderkind has been singled out for prosecution because she's a woman.

All eyes were on Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the once high-flying Silicon Valley startup Theranos, when her much-anticipated criminal trial kicked off on September 8 in San Jose—the same day, coincidentally, that Fashion Week began in New York. Maybe that’s why it felt like the scene outside the California courthouse was itself a runway, as a throng of paparazzi cameras snapped the slim, tall, blonde Holmes arriving to face a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy charges. 

Watching the choreographed spectacle of Holmes’s grand entrance, it occurred to me that she might as well have danced her way into the proceedings to the beat of M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.” That’s exactly what she did at a 2015 company party, memorable footage of which wound up in HBO’s Holmes documentary, “The Inventor.” Grooving to the music with a distinct white woman’s overbite, Holmes was brazen and undaunted, celebrating an infinitesimally minor victory—the FDA’s approval of a rarely used herpes test—right as the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou published the first of a two-year investigative series that ultimately brought down the company. But there was Holmes, shimmying across the stage to shift the narrative, which is exactly what she is doing now. 

Gone are the black Issey Miyake turtlenecks and the low, messy bun of Holmes’s Theranos days. Bizarrely, the only people who look like the former version of Elizabeth Holmes are the fangirls called  “Holmies,” who wear her signature all-black outfits and distressed blonde buns; one reporter spotted a gaggle of them who had queued up at 6 a.m. to snag a spot in the courtroom. Gone are the bodyguards who lent the onetime youngest self-made female billionaire on earth her wunderkind mystique. Now Holmes, 37, is an American everywoman, favoring sheath dresses, sensible pumps, smart suits and a loose hairstyle, with blonde waves framing her face in a style reminiscent of a Midwestern bank VP. Once she had intimidating security guards who carried her bags for her; now she holds a $175 leather diaper bag that is described as “the perfect mama-cessory” on the website of its label, Freshly Picked. 

Holmes hasn’t testified yet, though she’s widely expected to take the stand later in the trial. But her new look speaks volumes about her team’s defense strategy: she will be channeling a new identity, Working Mom, after choosing to have a baby weeks before she was to go on trial on charges that could result in a 20 year prison sentence. 

Holmes has always been an optimist: “I’m too pretty to go to jail,” she once told a Theranos employee, according to ABC’s The Dropout podcast. In many respects, “Can’t Touch This” has been the motto of her life. And, really, why wouldn’t Holmes believe herself to be untouchable? Historically, she’s only ascended higher and higher on the power of her own unblinking self-confidence. 

Even in Silicon Valley, Holmes’s story is legendary: She dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos with the support of one of her professors, Channing Robertson, the dean of the School of Engineering. Her vision, inspired by a lifelong fear of needles, was to build a machine that could conduct hundreds of diagnostic tests on a drop of blood taken from a finger. The problem, as Stanford medical school professor Dr. Phyllis Gardner told her: this was scientifically impossible. Marker molecules are often present in far lower concentrations in our blood, requiring more than a single drop to get an accurate reading. 

One need not hold a PhD in microbiology to understand this scientific concept, but that didn’t stop Holmes from convincing pinwheel-eyed investors that she’d somehow make it work—and they handed her $700 million to do it. The powerful men—all of them men—who took seats on Theranos’s board included two former secretaries of state, two former secretaries of defense and two former senators. By 2014, Theranos had attained a valuation of $9 billion and the turtlenecked Holmes was being heralded as the second coming of Steve Jobs. 

Besides Holmes, the only board member who worked at Theranos—the only non-white person on the board—was Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a former software executive who made millions before the first dot-com bubble burst. Holmes and Balwani met on a Stanford-sponsored trip to China when she was 18 and he was 37. Several years later, Balwani invested $13 million of his own money in Theranos, and in 2009 he became the company’s president and COO. What board members, investors and employees didn’t know was that he and Holmes were involved in a romantic relationship that they kept secret from everyone. 

The romance fell apart in 2016, as the company began unraveling; now Balwani is playing a new role in Holmes’s life: fall guy. The two were originally to be tried together, but Holmes’s lawyers successfully argued to separate their cases, stating that she “cannot be near him without suffering physical distress.” So, in addition to presenting Holmes as a sympathetic new mother, her defense team is planning to cast Balwani as an abuser, claiming that he psychologically manipulated their client to the extent that she didn’t have any agency.  

For his part, Balwani has vehemently denied all allegations of abuse. Like his ex-girlfriend, however, he is not exactly a reliable narrator. The real question for the jury is whether partner abuse could reasonably cause someone to lie to investors, retailers and the press about the efficacy of blood-testing technology. To me, it’s a bridge too far, although Holmes has certainly sold many bridges. This is a woman who managed to find a handsome, wealthy husband eight years her junior—San Diego hotel heir Billy Evans—after she was indicted for fraud. 

Holmes has lied about things both big and small, sublime and ridiculous. She claimed that Theranos’s devices were being used by the military on the battlefield, which was a blatant falsehood. She said that the devices could run hundreds of tests, when in reality they could never do more than a dozen. She said that the product was endorsed by pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, which was not the case. In 2014 she said revenue was projected to be $100 million when it was in fact $100,000. She lied about her relationship with Balwani, where she lived and whether or not she was in the office. She even lied about the pedigree of her dog, claiming that her Siberian husky was a wolf. 

But the most bizarre misrepresentation is Holmes’s own voice, which she deepened, seemingly in a bid to get (male) investors to take her more seriously. In the boardroom, Holmes wanted to be seen as a man. But now that she’s in the courtroom, backed into a corner, she wants to play the woman card. When she takes the stand, I won’t be surprised to hear her raise her voice a few octaves. 

Tech executive Ellen Pao asserted in a recent New York Times op-ed that the trial is a “wake up call for sexism in tech,” noting that as a rare woman in a world populated by men, Holmes is the first founder to face any real consequences for Silicon Valley hype. She argued that men like Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann should have to account for their exaggerations, too. And they should. But Holmes lied about medical technology. She endangered peoples’ lives with false test results, which is substantially worse. At least Kalanick and Neumann built products that worked. Patients who had their blood tests analyzed by Theranos were led to believe they had cancer and vitamin deficiencies, or that they were miscarrying a pregnancy. Imagine calling an Uber to go to JFK airport, getting picked up by a pedicab and winding up in Times Square. Imagine renting an office in a WeWork and arriving to find an illegal basement apartment in Queens that had been flooded by Hurricane Ida. That’s Theranos. 

Holmes may be a new mom wearing smart suits and carrying an accessible diaper bag. She may or may not have been abused by her former domestic partner. But none of that changes the fact that the core of her business—the core of her entire being—was, and continues to be, bullshit. 
    [post_title] => Elizabeth Holmes's legal strategy: part Svengali, part 'can't touch this'
    [post_excerpt] => Once listed by Forbes as the world's youngest self-made billionaire, Holmes claimed Theranos could produce accurate test results from a finger prick of blood. Now she is on trial for fraud and faces 20 years in prison.
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Elizabeth Holmes’s legal strategy: part Svengali, part ‘can’t touch this’

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_date] => 2021-09-23 18:34:50
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    [post_content] => But can radical inclusion be accomplished without silencing white feminist allies?

I was a first-year student at a prestigious U.S. women's college, back in 1989, when the college's alumnae association invited me to speak at a large event about my experience in coming to America. It wasn't very long into my first semester, and I'd just arrived from Karachi. I was 17 years old.

Karachi had been wracked by ethnic violence for more than a year, with student groups clashing all across the city and the entire province of Sindh.  That was a very frightening time, with the media reporting daily death tolls and the military enforcing 24-hour curfews. It is still fresh in my mind.

There were two other speakers at the event, both women: one was a youth organizer and peace activist in her troubled Black urban community; the other had survived a slave camp in Southeast Asia and had been subsequently adopted by an American family. The audience, however, was composed almost exclusively of white American women, many of them rich, older, well-traveled, and educated. Yet for all their worldliness, they seemed unaware that they had propped us up on a stage as though we were exhibits on display.

The three of us stood and told our stories in turn, while the women in the audience looked sad and sympathetic. I don't remember much of what I said: I do remember being in tears as I said I wanted to study and to live in peace, but that my city didn't provide much opportunity for that. Afterward, we joined the audience for dinner. We three speakers were overwhelmed by all the attention from the alums, who came up to us to tell us how "brave" we were. But while I stayed in touch with the other speakers, never again did I hear from any of the alums or from the association.

That I had been asked to perform my story of misery and woe for an audience of white women was a realization that came only years later. Those women meant well and obviously cared about our stories, but they used my life and the lives of my fellow speakers to make themselves feel better about their comfortable American existence. Not only were they more fortunate than a girl from troubled Pakistan, a former child slave from war-torn Southeast Asia, or a Black girl from a rough urban neighborhood, but they were also providing them with a platform to amplify their stories.

Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption reminded me of this uncomfortable experience, now more than 30 years old. Indeed, the author describes an experience that felt remarkably familiar to the one I describe above: in her case, Zakaria believed she had been invited to a 2012 feminist event in the American Midwest as a speaker—only to be told, upon her arrival, to sit at a stall in a “global bazaar” and sell Pakistani trinkets.

It was a cathartic read, which helped me place my experience at the alumnae association against a backdrop of a white feminist agenda that is oftentimes self-serving, and which leaves behind women of other ethnicities, countries, experiences, faiths, and societies. Beyond just leaving us behind, this type of feminist activism uses us in order to leave us behind: by demonstrating the inferiority of our lives, white feminists continue to play the role of “expert” in the gender development establishment.

Zakaria deftly deconstructs the modern conundrums facing mainstream (white) feminism, with insightful examples, such as the lack of inclusivity at the 2017 Women's March; while the organizers were Black and Brown, the vast majority of attendees were white middle-class women. More broadly, she points to issues of intersectionality and how class and color affect women who struggle to make it out of poverty, but who cannot access essential tools like legal assistance. She also examines the pitfalls of addressing issues like so-called honor killings and female genital cutting/mutilation through a culturally limited white feminist lens.

In the first instance, she draws a parallel between honor killings and “crimes of passion”: while the crimes are similar, she points out, only one serves as an indictment of an entire culture and religion— i.e., Islam, eastern, “foreign.” About female genital cutting, she points out there is no attempt to understand the nuances and complexities of the issue or to distinguish between a ceremonial “nick” and an outright excision of the genitals. Zakaria does not defend honor killings or advocate for FGM. She challenges the idea that there is an innate moral superiority to Western culture, which presents itself as exclusively on the “right” side of these issues.

Zakaria, an attorney and author who lives in Indiana, intersperses these chapters with her own experiences as a young Pakistani-Muslim woman. Born in Pakistan, she consented to an arranged marriage with a Pakistani man in the U.S. when she was 17. It was an unhappy and violent union that she escaped at age 25, fleeing with her toddler to a women’s shelter. She went on to law school and a job with a Black-owned law firm, and to helping immigrant women make their way through the American justice system. With this life story she establishes herself as the opposite of a white feminist, but one who possesses, as the result of her lived experience, a deep understanding of the phenomenon.

Against White Feminism turns middle-class white feminism inside out, like a garment, so that we can view the weaknesses of the seams and the sloppiness of the stitching. It's eye-opening for anyone who identifies as a feminist but has not thought about how strongly its prevailing principles, tenets, and history are rooted in systemic racism and capitalism.

The book is probably strongest, however, in its analysis of how the U.S. justified its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by claiming they were partly motivated to save women from Taliban oppression. American feminists threw their weight behind the war effort, and the ostensible goal of saving oppressed brown women from oppressive brown men. In doing so, they lent their voices to the American military industrial complex, which visited untold suffering upon Afghan women with bombings, drone attacks, massive displacement, and the destruction and displacement of their families.

Certainly, the situation of some Afghan women—i.e., those in urban areas—improved immeasurably after the coalition forces routed the Taliban. Over the past 20 years, a whole generation of women attended university and built careers. But with the Taliban now back in power and female journalists, teachers, artists, and activists having fled or gone into hiding, the long war seems futile. With reports in The New Yorker and from the Brookings Institution showing that the U.S. presence made rural Afghan women’s lives a hell, white feminists are now forced to confront the limitations of their support for the 20 year Afghan project and the putative gains in women’s empowerment that it touted.

A debacle like the invasion and withdrawal from Afghanistan does not happen without important historical context. Zakaria looks at the British suffragist movement of the early twentieth century, pointing out that the women who fought for the right to vote ignored the suffering caused by their country’s colonialism and imperialism in places like India. Zakaria also examines how contemporary white feminists engaged in “development” work abroad design aid programs that ignore activists on the ground who would provide crucial cultural and sociological moorings to any program for lasting, deep-rooted change.

The result of this failure to include local activists: campaigns and interventions that are myopic and deeply racist, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program that gave sewing machines and chickens to poor women in the Global South. These programs endow women with the white feminist’s fantasy of what a simple livelihood in undeveloped countries looks like, instead of envisioning creative solutions that enable women to access complicated and complex power, as well as agency and respect in their communities.

For the most part Zakaria makes her arguments lucidly; at other times, however, they are a stretch. For example, she dismisses Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom's attempt to introduce feminist foreign policy as empty promises from a disingenuous white feminist.  The truth is more nuanced than that: Wallstrom tried very hard to stop Sweden from selling arms to Saudi Arabia because of its poor record on women’s rights, but her government, influenced by powerful arms traders in the Swedish military-industrial complex, overrode her efforts. Zakaria glosses over these facts, perhaps trying too hard to find case studies that conform to her arguments.

In another section of the book, Zakaria refers to a letter signed by Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2002. However, the source for this claim is a 2015 article that Zakaria wrote for Aeon, in which she made the same claim. The original article on the Aeon website does not have a source, and there is no trace of the open letter anywhere on the internet. This, I suspect, is a consequence of sloppiness rather than malice, but it does not serve the book well in its call for a higher kind of feminist ethics.

Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming, however, is Zakaria’s failure to offer a proper definition of the term “white feminism” until close to the end of the book; she should have laid it out at the beginning, since her entire argument is a response to white feminism. Zakaria describes it as a system that excludes the needs, voices, and expertise of brown and Black women, "a set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery." But there is a danger in using “white feminism” as a shorthand for the entire system Zakaria is calling out. Pitting brown and Black feminists, a minority in America (the book is written very much for an American audience, which is an unavoidable shortcoming), against the "white" feminist majority is momentarily empowering, but, in the long term, dispiriting and exhausting. It can leave everyone feeling like there's no point in trying to come together because the gap created by past divisions is too vast to bridge.

Zakaria’s indignant refusal to make excuses for white feminists is satisfying, but it leaves very little room for allies among white women. It also leaves little room for brown and Black women who want to work in solidarity with white women, or for those who want to access the networks and power structures that white feminists have benefited from for decades. Instead, Zakaria advocates a further splintering of the feminist movement into "Black feminisms, Muslim feminisms, queer feminisms." Will this breakdown into feminist specializations lead to a more effective global feminism— one that accomplishes the goals of women’s equality? Zakaria does not say.

It's important to point out the injustices and weaknesses of the dominant feminist movement vis-a-vis women of color. It’s certainly not the job of non-white women to provide the roadmap to reconciliation, and there is nothing in Against White Feminism to make white feminists feel more comfortable—rightly so. But the balkanization of feminism is hardly a movement from which women of the world, brown and Black, can achieve true gains. Power-sharing between all women, white, brown, and Black, under the current system, seems impossible if we are to take Zakaria’s perspective to heart. Surely we can envision a system where no woman has to step down in order for everyone to step up, together.
    [post_title] => Rafia Zakaria's 'Against White Feminism' is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist
    [post_excerpt] => 'Against White Feminism,' by Rafia Zakaria, successfully challenges the idea that western culture holds an innately superior attitude to women.
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Rafia Zakaria’s ‘Against White Feminism’ is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist

by Bina Shah

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    [post_date] => 2021-09-22 03:32:26
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-09-22 03:32:26
    [post_content] => Her message to the world: please don't forget the refugee children.

A little girl is walking alone from Syria to England. She is 11 feet and 6 inches tall.

Little Amal (Arabic for “hope”) is actually a giant puppet. She represents the thousands of refugee children who have been displaced from their home countries. This nine-year-old Syrian girl is now journeying from Turkey, across Europe, and to the U.K., as part of an 8,000 kilometer (5,000 mile)  travelling festival titled The Walk.

At the end of July, Amal began her journey as a “refugee” in Gaziantep, Turkey, home to half a million Syrians. People holding lanterns aloft surrounded her, lighting up the night. As she moved through the streets, Amal reached out to balconies where children stood watching, and gently touched their hands as they smiled down at her. Orbs of light sparkled overhead, and a choir welcomed her with song. Many of the people participating in the street theater were themselves refugees.

Amal is now halfway through this theatrical journey created by Good Chance, a theater company founded in the Calais refugee camps in 2015, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company. Communities in Turkey, Greece, and Italy, where she’s continued her journey, have found different ways to welcome her — sometimes with love, and sometimes with hostility. But how close is Amal’s experience to that of real refugee children?

Setting off in Turkey

The rest of Amal’s journey through Turkey was likewise filled with celebration and theatrical wonder.

In Adana, a flock of model birds accompanied her across the Taşköprü stone bridge, held up proudly on long sticks by both children and adults in the local community. She played with the children of Tarsus, who crowded in together for a chance to touch her hands. In the Kaleiçi Bazaar in Denizli, portraits of refugees who had journeyed through Turkey were projected onto walls as she appeared.

“I think the most common reaction is wonderment, followed by curiosity. People have been receiving her very warmly in many places,” says Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk and Good Chance.

“One of the most astonishing things for me as artistic director on this project, was the true generosity and creativity that this evoked from people,” he says. “This project is only possible because of a network of thousands of people that have devoted time, energy, and their creativity to create these welcoming events along the way.”


Turkey is a poignant place for this journey to begin. It hosts the biggest population of refugees in the world. The “best interests of the child” principle, part of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, is enshrined into law here, which means that all unaccompanied young refugees must, in theory, be given suitable accommodation and a guardian. But according to the Asylum Information Database (AIDA), many children are in fact abandoned by the state which doesn’t offer the protections they are promised. AIDA has also pointed out the state sometimes appoints inappropriate guardians, such as people without the right qualifications, or who aren’t a relative, leaving refugee children with no other choice but to beg in the street.

Were Amal settling in Turkey, accessing education could also be a real problem. Approximately 400,000 Syrian children residing in the country are not receiving an education, according to Human Rights Watch and Turkey’s Ministry of Education,

Amal, however, is not settling in Turkey. On her last day in the country, she stood on the shores of Çesme as the sun set, ready to take a boat to Greece. In these waters, many refugees like her have lost their lives. Zuabi commented on the potency of that moment, as Amal looked into the horizon, almost motionless.

Hostility in Greece

Little Amal’s journey in Greece was, at times, quite tumultuous. It began with music, with a whole community arriving to meet her off the boat in Chios and welcome her with song. But in other towns, she faced fury.

“In a city called Larissa in Greece, she became a symbol of the refugee problem, she was shouted at and even violently attacked,” says Zuabi. Protesters threw stones at Amal. And in Meteora, people voted to ban Amal from walking through their village, because they did not want a Muslim child walking through a Greek Orthodox space. More violence was threatened against Amal in other towns and villages along her route.

“From that moment, her appearances in Greece created a strong sense of solidarity. I think the reaction she induces is specific to the context of the country we are in, and even more specific to the city and the population we meet,” Zuabi says. “One thing I know for sure is that nobody stays indifferent.” 


In spite of the threats against Amal, people still came together to welcome her in Athens. While some events had to be cancelled, Amal took to a rooftop in Athens to meet locals. From this vantage point, Zuabi says, he could see people wiping tears from their eyes. On the Walk With Amal Instagram account people responded to the video of the violence with an outpouring of love and solidarity—more than double the number of comments than their other popular videos. There were messages like, “I'm so proud that I walked with you Amal, hand in hand with my children!” and “We want to welcome you, celebrate you and keep you safe.” 

In Ioannina, Amal walked between the Katsikas refugee camp and the city centre. In the camp, Zuabi says there was a sense of pride; people felt celebrated. As she walked on, the local community presented lightboxes filled with messages of hope: “You are our rainbow” and “Step by step,” they said. 

When unaccompanied minors arrive in Greece, they are detained in reception centres until they’ve been processed and a place in a shelter found for them, but backlogs mean they can be left waiting for months. Their accommodation is often unsuitable, and spaces are limited. Human Rights Watch has witnessed young people living amongst the general population of Greece’s Moria Camp, because the areas designated for children are beyond capacity. Some children have to fend for themselves, sometimes sleeping in the open despite the fact that, under Greek law, unaccompanied children should be placed in safe accommodations and placed under guardianship.

Irida Pandiri is responsible for shelters for unaccompanied minors through her work with the Association for the Social Support of Youth (ARSIS), a Greek NGO that assists young people in difficulty or danger. She says the larger reception centres in which people are detained are simply not appropriate for children, in part because they cannot leave the facilities to go to school. Meanwhile, the guardianship promised to these young people is not provided. 

“Guardianship, it is almost a joke in Greece,” she says. “When they are in the detention facilities, there are no guardians.” This, for ARSIS, is a crucial issue. Education is also a major problem, with Greek schools often reluctant to register refugee children; even in cases where registration is possible, Covid restrictions often prevent them from leaving the camp to attend.

In order to make it to these reception centres, young refugees must come face-to-face with authorities hoping to send them back to Turkey. Their “welcome” to Greece is full of violence: their belongings are confiscated and they are frequently turned away, in clear violation of their human rights. Many such experiences have been documented by organizations like the Border Violence Monitoring Network and Refugee Rights Europe.

Just as the response to Amal’s reception in Greece was mixed, so has ARSIS found its ability to do its work challenged by uneven support in various communities.

“In the years since 2017-2018, in the areas where we are trying to establish shelters, unfortunately, the communities weren’t so welcoming,” Pandiri says.

But ARSIS continues to support young refugees as best it can. The organization has eight centres for unaccompanied children across Greece, and they operate safe zones in some of the larger camps. Other NGOs also offer child protection services, legal advice, and recreational activities.

As Amal took her final steps in Greece toward Piraeus Port, she was guided by more singing and live music. The protests in Greece were loud, but the welcome was louder.

Walking through Italy

Little Amal is now walking through Italy. She arrived in Bari, where an Italian nonna, or grandmother, arrived to give her guidance. This nonna, a puppet just a few inches shy of Amal’s height, pulled her for a hug and imparted upon her some words of wisdom.

[caption id="attachment_3195" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Little Amal greeted by an Italian nonna, or grandmother, in Bari, Italy.[/caption]

Italy has welcomed Amal warmly, but this experience might be far from the reality for actual young refugees. Andrea Costa is president of Baobab Experience, an organization supporting displaced people who have arrived in Italy. The organization is also a humanitarian partner of The Walk.

“Italy—and I’m very sad to say this, because I love my country—is changing,” Costa said. Although it has traditionally welcomed foreigners, negative media coverage of migration and the rise of far-right politicians have led to a changed country, he said, adding: “It's pretty difficult for unaccompanied minors to make their way in Italy.”

In Italy, solidarity with refugees has now been criminalized in a number of ways. In June 2019, Italy banned NGOs from carrying out search and rescue operations. In the area of Ventimiglia, several people have been charged for giving food to refugees, after a municipal decree outlawed the practice.

“Before, people felt ashamed to be racist,” said Costa. But now, people who want to help refugees must do so surreptitiously. 

Like Turkey and Greece, Italy has policies and procedures in place that are designed to protect unaccompanied children. They are given a permit to remain until they are 18 years old. They can’t be pushed back to other countries, they must be accommodated, and they cannot be detained. 

But in practice, these rights aren’t always respected. As the coronavirus pandemic swept through Italy, the government used private ships to quarantine incoming refugees. According to a report from the Italian Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI), some children were held on these ships for 10-15 days (although some people report this is far longer) before their ages were assessed. Human Rights Watch reported that children were being illegally pushed back from Italy to Greece, another abuse of rights. These are young people who have most likely already faced tremendous trauma.

Costa describes Italy as a transit country for refugees. While many young people choose to move through the country rather than claim asylum, they are at risk.

“We have an extremely high number of unaccompanied minors who don't want to stay in Italy, but want to go directly to France, to Germany, to Holland, to Belgium, because they know that even for minors, just like for all the other migrants, it's much better organized in other European countries,” Costa said.

According to Human Rights Watch, many young refugees cite a lack of access to education and poor reception upon arrival in Italy as influencing them to move onto other countries instead.

Baobab Experience is an organization composed of volunteers who care for young people at risk of falling into the hands of smugglers or human traffickers while they’re in Italy. They make sure these refugees have somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and are clothed. Recently, they joined a network of organizations helping to create safe passages so that, if those young people do choose to cross borders, trusted organizations can help on the other side, including in finding travel tickets at the best prices, rather than turning to smugglers.

But there is another problem for unaccompanied minors in Italy—a cruel gift on their 18th birthday. As they make the difficult transition into adulthood, far from their home country and family, they are no longer guaranteed accommodation. Many of them lack the skills to make their way safely in the world, with no access to language or professional skills.

“There are a lot of young people that really lose important years of their lives,” Costa says. This is why Baobab Experience provides English and Italian courses for young people.

Despite all this, Costa remains optimistic about the future of refugees in Italy. He’s seen a change in younger Italians, who seem to be more understanding about their plight. Perhaps a new, more welcoming Italy is on the horizon.

Meanwhile, Amal is continuing her journey through Italy, before she crosses into France. She’s just finished exploring the ancient landmarks of Rome; in Vatican City Pope Francis met with Amal, along with the children accompanying her on this leg of the journey. 


Amal’s welcome across Turkey, Greece, and Italy varied from country to country and village to village. Like the refugees whose experiences she’s enacting, Amal’s journey has only begun. Her last stop is the U.K., where the government is currently pushing through legislation called the borders and nationalities bill, which would deny asylum or aid to any refugee who enters the country through an unofficial port of entry—for example, by crossing the channel in a small boat. Under the provisions of the bill, Afghan refugees forced to escape from the Taliban could be jailed in the U.K. because they reached the country by routes that the U.K. government has decided are “illegal”—although, according to international law, there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. What kind of welcome can Amal expect when she arrives in October?

In spite of the government proposals, many British communities promise a warm welcome to Amal and to refugee children. Camden Town has planned a birthday party for Amal, while several choirs will sing for her in the port town of Folkestone on the day she arrives in the U.K.. Anti-refugee sentiment has become more pronounced since Brexit, but many people have also become more vocal about their support for refugees. In the face of racism, changing government policy, and dehumanizing tabloid headlines, compassionate communities are needed more than ever.
    [post_title] => This is Little Amal, the puppet refugee girl on a European odyssey
    [post_excerpt] => Ferried from country to country by volunteer puppeteers, Little Amal has been greeted by choirs and dancers. In Vatican City, she was greeted by Pope Francis. 
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This is Little Amal, the puppet refugee girl on a European odyssey

by Katie Dancey-Downs

WP_Post Object
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    [post_date] => 2021-09-14 21:51:25
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    [post_content] => Packed with far-right radicals during the Trump presidency, the Supreme Court is well-positioned to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In several articles written over the past few years, I have warned readers that a United States Supreme Court illegitimately packed with far right-wing Christian justices might overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion by locating a right to privacy in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. Quite a few pundits have long since dismissed this possibility, suggesting not only that Roe was settled law, but also, cynically, that the Republican Party needs Roe v. Wade as an ongoing campaign issue to play to its white Christian base and would thus never allow it to be overturned. But these pundits are, for the most part, not informed by intimate lived experience of the Christian right, so they underestimated the power of its zealotry.

In one sense only, they might nevertheless be proven correct. If the Supreme Court’s majority of conservative justices decides not to explicitly overturn Roe—because they want to avoid the fallout that would come from officially taking away a constitutional right, while still de facto ending that right—they will only be able to do so because the five most radical justices have already rendered the case a dead letter. “The Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade,” wrote constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel on September 2, a day after the court allowed Texas’s brutal Senate Bill 8 (SB8) to go into effect. The so-called “Texas Heartbeat Law” is deceptively named, given that electric activity is detectable in a fetus before an actual heart has formed. The scientifically inaccurate, rhetorically charged language of “unborn child” is also used throughout the legislation’s text.

Texas’s SB8 bans abortion after six weeks, which is only two weeks after it’s even theoretically possible for most women and trans men to know that they’re pregnant. In an even more twisted move, the law incentivizes abortion bounty hunting, empowering private citizens to receive at least $10,000 by suing not only abortion providers, but also anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” By crafting the law to provide for private enforcement without creating a mechanism for state enforcement, the legislators behind Texas’s law hope to insulate the state from legal action that might prevent the unconstitutional legislation from going into effect. Thanks to the right-wing partisan makeup of both the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the post-Trump Supreme Court, the tactic worked.

When Texas passed SB8, a coalition of women’s health clinics and funders promptly sued, pointing to its immediate harm; the law would effectively halt safe and legal abortions in Texas. A district court scheduled a preliminary injunction hearing that could have stopped the law from going into effect while litigation proceeded, but the defendants immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit, where a three-judge panel featuring two Trump-appointed judges halted that process. The Supreme Court then failed to rule on the Fifth Circuit’s decision, allowing the law to go into effect at midnight on September 1. On September 10, the same Fifth Circuit panel ruled that state officials are immune from legal action against SB8 because “S.B. 8 emphatically precludes enforcement by any state, local, or agency officials.” Legal maneuvering will continue, including a suit to block the law brought by the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice; in the meantime, Texas’s essentially theocratic law will remain in effect.

Andrew Seidel, who is Director of Strategic Response at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, told The Conversationalist matter-of-factly that “in a normal world, with an apolitical judiciary,” the “one weird trick” employed by Texas Republicans to ensure SB8 went into effect would not have worked. “Normally, when a constitutional right is so clearly and obviously threatened, the judiciary preserves the status quo before that threat can be realized,” he said. This is what the district court was in the process of doing before it was overruled. “Courts don’t typically allow monumental shifts in constitutional rights to occur without a full hearing first.” The Fifth Circuit thus violated longstanding norms with its decision.

“The court is basically saying if you want to challenge this law, someone needs to sue to collect the bounty,” summarized Seidel. In his opinion, this is “absurd, because 90 percent of abortions in Texas have stopped.” Because no abortion provider will risk a lawsuit, said Seidel, the “right to bodily autonomy has been gutted” in Texas. The legislation, he added, amounts to de facto “mob rule over the womb.” There are, undoubtedly, authoritarian Christian zealots who are eager to sue, backed by the deep pockets and organizational prowess of the far right. Already in July, in anticipation of SB8 going into effect, the extremist anti-choice organization Texas Right to Life created a “prolife whistleblower” website through which users could snitch anonymously on abortion providers or those who “aided and abetted” any Texan seeking abortion care.

Tech-savvy teenagers led a recent campaign, organized primarily on TikTok, to inundate the site with false and nonsensical reports in the hope of overwhelming those behind it, preventing them from using the information to do harm. Seemingly as a result of all the buzz, the internet hosting service GoDaddy declared the site in violation of its terms of service. Since a new service willing to host the site has not yet been found, the site’s URL currently redirects to the Texas Right to Life homepage.

But what of the Supreme Court’s role in allowing SB8 to stand, effectively giving the green light to abortion vigilantism? Without hearing any arguments on the case, the high court allowed SB8 to go into effect by denying, in a single paragraph, an emergency request from the Texas plaintiffs to stop it. This non-transparent action is an example of the court using what is often referred to as “the shadow docket.” Imani Gandy, Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire News, explained that the term is one “court watchers use to refer to the sort of docket behind the docket.” Unlike the regular docket, which Gandy describes as “a public-facing schedule of the court’s business,” the shadow docket refers to the court’s use of emergency procedures allowing it to take action in a case without the presentation of arguments from the parties.

The shadow docket, explained Gandy, is “a break from normal procedure,” in that its justices hand down decisions quickly and with little explanation. By contrast, normal procedure takes about a year from the submission of documents through presentation of oral arguments before the high court, to the rendering of a decision that involves the release of detailed, signed opinions. In this case, Gandy said, “What Texas did is essentially nullify Roe in the span of two weeks,” a fact that she calls “remarkable.” In her view, the Supreme Court behaved very strangely in allowing SB8 to take effect while the lower courts are still litigating its legality. “What the court should have done,” Gandy said, “is looked at this blatantly unconstitutional six-week ban and said we’re going to enjoin enforcement of this law by anybody until we can figure out what’s going on with this new private enforcement mechanism that Texas has cooked up.”

Gandy called this “unacceptable judicial procedure” because of the non-transparent way in which “it allowed the Supreme Court to do what we had been afraid the Supreme Court was going to do, but without showing its work,” which Gandy objects to as “underhanded dealing outside the view of the public.” The high court did not explain “why it believes that this six-week ban may be constitutional, or at least constitutional enough to go into effect in Texas while the constitutionality of the law is being litigated,” she said. Instead, the court simply unleashed right-wing Christian culture warriors to harass vulnerable Texans in a devastating way, in addition to giving a tacit greenlight to other Republican-controlled states to pass similar bans.

The Supreme Court might still officially overturn Roe. In Gandy’s view, the court’s action in the Texas case “signals that Roe is very much up for grabs” in a Mississippi abortion ban case the court has also agreed to hear. But whether the court overturns this major precedent or not, the federally protected right to abortion care is effectively dead. Same-sex marriage and access to contraception will probably also take their turns on the judicial chopping block.

Asked what citizens can do to fight back against this brazenly partisan judicial activism and overreach, Seidel did not equivocate. “Whatever chaos reigns over the next few months, we are coming to a point where Roe v. Wade is dead and buried. The DOJ can get involved, Congress can pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, and those things should happen, but this court is still going to get a final say on all of it.” The only solution that might have a lasting impact, Seidel said, was to expand the federal courts. “Trump, McConnell, and the Federalist Society packed the courts. They’re gone for a generation. That is the underlying problem that we need to solve.”

If we fail to restore fairness, America almost certainly faces a future of minority authoritarian rule. As Max Fisher recently laid out in The New York Times, the state of women’s rights in a country tends to be a good indicator of how democratic or authoritarian it is. Where women’s rights are expanding, an overall process of democratization is generally taking place. And where women’s rights are contracting, so are democratic norms and freedoms. Only three countries have curtailed abortion rights since 2000. Two of them are Nicaragua and Poland. The other is the United States of America.
    [post_title] => 'Mob rule over the womb': the Texas abortion law is a huge win for the Christian right
    [post_excerpt] => Rolling back the right to abortion was never just a slogan for the Christian Right. It was always the end game, and remains so.
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‘Mob rule over the womb’: the Texas abortion law is a huge win for the Christian right

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_date] => 2021-09-10 00:52:15
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    [post_content] => The meme that was created to inspire Black women is now too often used to oppress them.

In her groundbreaking 1990 monograph Black Feminist Thought, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that certain controlling images of the American Black woman—e.g., Mammy, Matriarch, Welfare Recipient, Jezebel, Unwed Mother—continue to pervade American culture and are still being used as tools of oppression. Social and government institutions in the United States continue to use these images, which work to perpetuate the erasure and oppression of Black women in a multitude of ways, limiting our rights and discrediting our experiences. Recent examples include: the faux right-wing uproar over Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s WAP music video; and the previous U.S. president’s demonstrably false claim that the majority of welfare recipients were Black. These incidents crystallize the pervasiveness of the Welfare queen and Jezebel tropes in American public discourse.

In 2013 Satoshi Kanazawa, an American evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, set off an international firestorm with a blog post for Psychology Today, in which he asserted that Black women were objectively less attractive than white women. The magazine deleted the article and ended its relationship with Kanazawa, while the LSE censured him with a ban on publishing articles that were not peer reviewed. But the impact of Kanazawa’s post, excerpts of which were reprinted in other publications, continued to echo. Partly in response to the incident, CaShawn Thompson, a Washington, D.C.-based teacher, activist, and social media influencer, created the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic—to celebrate the value and accomplishments of Black women. “Each one of us,” Thompson said, “needed something that was all the awesomeness that we are.”

#BlackGirlsMagic has since become an American cultural phenomenon. It followed a remarkable trajectory, from a Twitter hashtag to a rallying cry and an aphorism. Today it is cited when referring to accomplishments ranging from the incredible gymnastic feats of Simone Biles to surviving another day in a workplace that is hostile to Black women. Celebrities like ballerina Misty Copeland, Barack Obama, Solange Knowles, and Michelle Obama often use the phrase when referring to the outsize accomplishments of Black women.

More recently, however, the slogan has become something less positive. In its current usage, it often acts to perpetuate the very archetypes—Mammy, Matriarch, Emasculator—that Patricia Hill Collins identified more than 30 years ago. Black Girl Magic now too often provides cover for the continued dehumanization of Black women. It also functions as a means of deflecting attention from the fact that to succeed and be recognized, Black women must still work infinitely harder than their white counterparts.

When Stacy Abrams’s voter registration drive delivered Georgia to the Democrats in the 2020 election, social media users and major media outlets referred to her accomplishment as Black Girl Magic. Similarly, the phrase was used to describe gymnast Simone Biles’s paradigm-shattering athleticism. When Serena Williams won the 2017 Australian Open while pregnant, Black Girl Magic was there. Even in my academic circle of Black women, we use Black Girl Magic to celebrate our publications and invited talks. But even as we celebrate our accomplishments, we fail to grapple adequately with the fact that racist, unjust institutions withhold recognition from all but the superhuman amongst us—and even then, that recognition often comes with insults.

To be sure, there have been waves of support for Biles, Osaka, Abrams, and Williams as they publicly battled racism, misogyny, and the stigma of mental health concerns. Their actions have sparked national conversations, particularly Biles and Osaka’s for their stance on athletic performance and mental health. But the personal cost of being open about their struggles has been high.

In a recent feature about Simon Biles in The Houston Chronicle, for example, the gymnast says she regrets that the artistry in her dance routines often goes unnoticed because the focus is on her strength and athleticism. Also interviewed for the article is Lauren Anderson, a former principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, who expresses her admiration for Biles’s sense of rhythm and movement. But while the body of the article does include several references to Biles’s artistry, the headline describes her athleticism as “beastly.”

Serena Williams, widely recognized as one of the greatest female tennis players in history, has for years had to defend herself against the demeaning accusation that she looks “too masculine.” She has, for example, been called the “n” word multiple times while competing, and she has been dehumanized and belittled in sports news cartoons. In an interview, Serena discussed the toll such comments took her. She said: “It was hard for me. People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms, or because I'm strong.”

In Georgia, a conservative political group called Heritage Action is suing Stacy Abrams for the $100 million loss of the Major-League Baseball All-Star game, which relocated from Atlanta because she called for a boycott to protest state voter repression. Abrams’s feat of Black Girl Magic was made necessary by the blatant repression of minority voters in Georgia, which cost her a historic victory in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race.

Black Girl Magic marks the discursive transition of Black women from social problems to social saviors. Denigrated since the Reagan years as welfare queens and hoochie mamas, they are also widely identified as an essential element of American infrastructure. And just like all America’s infrastructure, Black women are taken for granted until there is a disaster. Time and time again, they save this country from itself—as Stacey Abrams is often credited with protecting democracy in Georgia. With the voting rights bill currently stalled in Congress, her approach to voting rights protections is one of the few options left to activists who are forced to compensate for the federal government’s incompetence.

Black athletes are celebrated when they bring praise and athletic glory to the United States, but when they show themselves as humans who need self-care, they become pariahs. Serena Williams and Simone Biles are widely praised for their unparalleled athletic strength. But when they seek to defend themselves from harm and own their labor, they face howls of outrage and charges of mediocrity. When Naomi Osaka quit the French Open because she refused to participate in the pre-match press conferences that exacerbate her anxiety and depression, the powerful blowback—from tournament officials and fellow athletes—prompted her to withdraw from competition. The fact that Osaka is one of the highest ranked tennis players and one of the highest-paid female athletes in the world was irrelevant to her detractors. Her refusal to labor for them on the court or in the press room was an affront. Her mental health be damned.

When Biles, whose status as the greatest gymnast of all time is undisputed, cited mental health issues for her decision to withdraw from the team finals at the Tokyo Olympics, right-wing male commentators targeted her with vicious personal attacks. Aaron Reitz, Deputy Attorney General of Texas, tweeted that Biles, who is a native of his state, was a “selfish, childish, national embarrassment.” This is how white men perceive Black women and their labor: Their bodies, their minds, and their work are not their own.

The men tweeting their anger at Biles for wearing the decal of a goat’s head (symbolizing the acronym GOAT for “greatest of all time”) on her leotard show that, to them, it is an affront for a Black woman to be not only ambitious, but also to know her power and do with it as she pleases. Simone Biles owes us nothing. And yet, she postponed her retirement because she was the last of Larry Nassar’s victims still on the team, and she believed her testimony would lend weight to the accusations against the since- convicted sports medicine physician who abused female gymnasts for decades. While mental health is an important and overdue discussion in athletics more broadly, we must realize that Black women’s ownership of their labor is an equally important issue.

Once a paradigm to help Black women reclaim their power, Black Girl Magic has become the newest controlling image for Black women. When hard work is described as “magic,” our education, training, preparation, and labor are demeaned. Our femininity is questioned. Or, worse, refusing to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of capitalist productivity is perceived not as our right to exercise personal choice, but as an affront.

Since the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, institutions and businesses from Apple to McKinsey, the global management consulting firm, have championed and turned to diversity and inclusion initiative. Yet across social media, Black women have lamented the labor of participating in such diversity clinics, explaining to their white coworkers how to be “anti-racist,” or publicly displaying and discussing the trauma of their oppression—allegedly for their own benefit. These requests are predicated on a flaw in ally logic: Teach us how not to be racist toward you, or it is your fault we are racist. Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s recent interview with Robin DiAngelo about critiques, including Balck critiques, of her work speaks to the general feelings of Black women about the labor diversity requires. The Twitter responses depict the greater issues of the monetization of anti-racist work Black people have been doing, for free, for decades.

I often wonder how we as Black women can reclaim what the aphorism originally meant to us. Biles and Naomi Osaka have given us public permission to say “no” as a complete sentence. To say “no” to the corporate diversity committee. To say “no” to leading the White Fragility reading group. Black women: Do and refuse to do what you choose. Imagine if every Black woman took a day to herself at the same time. Atlas shrugged.

Those who say they are allies need to understand that one of the best ways to value Black women is to do the work. If people were listening to and learning from Black women, the demands on our time and labor would decrease. The onus on saving democracy in the United States, of winning an Olympic gold medal, and of grappling with racism in academic departments should not rest solely on the shoulders of Black women. We, as a country, must hold institutions—Olympic, government, educational, and media—responsible for how they portray Black women and for the demands they project onto us. To be an ally to Black women is to recognize the numerous burdens we carry and to tackle them with us—or, even better, to use your privilege to confront the structures that continue to do harm. “Listen to Black women” echoes across social media, yet it must be more than just a meaningless slogan.

Fannie Barrier Williams, the Black suffragist and educator who lived from 1855-1944, wrote in an essay for The Voice of the Negro (1905) that, “As meanly as [the Black woman] is thought of, hindered as she is in all directions, she is always doing something of merit and credit that is not expected of her.” More than a century later, Black women continue to surpass expectations. But as Biles, Williams, and Osaka have shown us, we must do an accounting of the incredible costs of these feats. Our accomplishments seem like magic because of the obstacles we must overcome to realize them. Now we are tired. We are disregarded. We are taken for granted. Yes, the tide is clearly changing. Let us hope that Black Girl Magic becomes our term not only for the accomplishments of Black women, but also the term for their decision to embrace radical self-care and claim ownership of their humanity.
    [post_title] => Black women shouldn't have to assert their right to self care
    [post_excerpt] => Once an inspiring hashtag that spawned a movement, #blackgirlmagic now too often perpetuates stereotypes that diminish Black women
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Black women shouldn’t have to assert their right to self care

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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    [post_content] => The CEO of Afghanistan's largest media outlets talks about whether and how they will be able to continue operating freely. 

Saad Mohseni had a lot to worry about when the Taliban rolled into Kabul on August 15. Mohseni is CEO of the Moby Group, which owns and operates Afghanistan’s biggest news and entertainment networks, TOLO News and TOLO TV. The company’s 400 employees would have to adapt one way or another to the nation’s new, ultraconservative rulers.

Mohseni was born in London—his father was an Afghan diplomat and his mother a broadcaster for the BBC. In 1982, his father was on a diplomatic posting in Tokyo when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Rather than return to Afghanistan, the family settled in Australia.

The former investment banker and dual Afghan-Australian citizen launched an FM radio station in Afghanistan in 2003,  TOLO TV in 2004, and TOLO News as a separate channel in 2010. The operations have thrived in what Mohseni says was the freest media environment in Asia and the Middle East.

CPJ talked to Mohseni on August 27 by video from Dubai about how and whether that freedom can continue. So far, the Taliban are at least tolerating the station. Taliban fighters confiscated government-issued weapons from guards at TOLO News, but allowed them to keep privately purchased firearms, according to a tweet from the station. And a representative of the Taliban appeared on air interviewed by a female TOLO newscaster. She has since fled the country, according to news reports. CPJ contacted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you approach the launch of TOLO News?

What we attempted to do from the get go was to always have our viewers in mind. It was very important to us not to be didactic and condescending and to be as honest as possible with viewers. You have to be focused in terms of reporting on facts. It’s totally unvarnished and totally uncensored. And it has to be balanced and non-emotional. News takes a long time, but once you have people’s trust, people stick with you through thick and thin as they have with us now.

How was it financed initially?

We started the radio station [in 2003 with seed money from USAID] and the reaction was extraordinary. Some people reacted very badly and some people were very positive, but most people were listening to it, which was the most important thing. Then we thought of a TV station and again USAID helped with that. Essentially the business has been viable from day one except for the [two] grants and it’s been able to sustain itself for almost 20 years. It’s one of Afghanistan’s great success stories. It’s the freest media in the entire region. It’s dangerous, especially for media operators—but it’s free. Last night, we were interviewing people in the Panjshir Valley who are opposing the Taliban regime; then we interviewed the Taliban; then we had a woman who was condemning the Taliban in our studio; and then we had another woman on satellite supporting the Taliban. We are continuing to do our work like we always have. The question is whether we can continue in this new environment.

Has anything changed with the Taliban victory?

We’re scared, I’ll be honest with you, we are nervous. Everyone is having sleepless nights, but what the viewer is experiencing is not that different. We have suffered because of the 70 or 80 people we’ve lost [who fled]. They’ve left and gone on to greener pastures. Not that we have begrudged their decision, as a matter of fact, we have helped them leave the country. But they have left a huge vacuum. So we have had to hire like crazy, or move people up within the organization. [Previously] a person who joins wouldn’t be in front of a camera for a long, long time. But now we’re hiring on Wednesday and you see that person in front of a camera on Thursday.  The sad thing is to lose this much capacity, to see a generation of people who we’ve invested in, who could have done so much for the country, being forced to leave. This brain drain will take us another two decades to build that sort of capacity, sadly.

The only things we have pulled are some of the music shows and some of the more provocative soap operas. We made that decision on day one realizing that there wasn’t much upside but there was a lot to lose. I believe that our viewership for the news programs have more than doubled because people are concerned and they need to know.

The one thing we cannot take away from people is hope, and I think media plays such an important role in providing people with hope. We are thinking that the Taliban will limit women’s education in the provinces so we can turn our morning session and early afternoon segments into an education segment in particular for our women.

TOLO News has been attacked over the years, with journalists threatened and staff possibly killed by the Taliban. How is the staff dealing with that?

It’s not easy. I think they are torn emotionally because the ones who are left behind feel left behind, their colleagues have left for France, for Europe, and for the U.S. [In the previous] government we had allies. We had some faith in the judiciary, we knew that many of the judges basically respected the rule of law, our freedom as a media outlet under the constitution, and Afghan media laws, which are relatively progressive. And then the presence of the international community was a massive safety net, where they always stressed the importance of civil society and so forth. Right now, we have no safety nets. None. [On August 25] our reporters were attacked by the Taliban, literally a kilometer away from where our offices are, at the center of the city of Kabul. We complained to the media commission, they promised to pursue it, but that’s all that we could do.  We did report on it, and it was in our news. We spoke to the international media about it, we’re not fearful of that, but it just shows that we are completely and totally exposed right now.

Will you keep sending out women reporters and putting them on air?

That to us is a red line. People ask what sorts of things would force you to abandon your operations in Afghanistan. One of the things would be to walk away from that particular responsibility, the inclusion of women, minority rights, human rights, if we’re forced to censor our news and not be the truth tellers we’ve been for the last two decades. We’ve lost many of our female employees, but we’ve just hired a whole bunch. So hopefully, we’ll see more women on the screen.

One of the Taliban leaders spoke to a mutual friend and was telling him “I can’t believe how much Kabul has changed since 2001.” And our friend pointed out to him that it’s not just the city and the buildings that have changed, the country has changed. I think if the Taliban are smart they will be cognizant of these changes and adopt a more inclusive approach. They have their constituencies but you have to remember that the most positive poll number I’ve seen is that their dogma appeals to 15 percent of the population. They ought to go and engage the other 85 percent and become a political movement that appeals to all segments of our society. There’s an opportunity for them as well. They have a good place to start from but they have to adopt an appeal to other constituencies. My fear is that they will snap and go back to what they feel comfortable with, which is to be dogmatic and to become dictatorial, and have this black-and-white approach to things.

What contingencies are you planning for?

Two things. Firstly, if Afghanistan is isolated the economy will suffer like we have not seen since the 1990s. It will shrink dramatically. And perhaps if the Taliban feel really threatened they could intimidate advertisers. I think we may have to look into, at least, a period of more donor-assisted operations than advertising revenues.

What we would need to do is create a parallel structure [in London] that would complement the Afghan structure. Because in Afghanistan we still have no restrictions, but if the day comes that we have to close Afghanistan we [could] just push a button and switch directly to London. What the Taliban can do is shut down our terrestrial transmissions but we will still be available on satellite and on these illegal cable operations. There are hundreds of these cable companies. Also we are available online, we have an app that allows for people to stream on different networks.

Is there a possible more optimistic scenario for your future operations in the country?

It’s too early, but it’s our job to push for that. Half my time now is talking to all the political players in Afghanistan, including some of the hardcore Taliban sympathizers who have a good deal of influence with them. We’re not just spectators. This is our country. We have an obligation to lobby, to advocate for a more open, moderate Afghanistan because it’s the only way the international community will work with the Taliban. I think for the Taliban, they have to realize this, but I think it’s going to have to be communicated in a way that is not very condescending, in which they are engaged by professional diplomats, they are courted.

We’re talking about people who fought for the last 25 to 30 years, some even more than that. That’s why these TV shows are so important — so they can see for themselves what a vibrant country Afghanistan has become since the 1990s. I hope that it resonates with them. I think we have nothing to lose by engaging with them. Because worst case scenario is that [the international community] sticks to the sanctions. [Sanctions] are mistaken because the people who are going to suffer the most are the [millions of] Afghans who continue to live in the country.

Would you like to add anything else?

The fear is real, the nerves are real, I feel a lot of fear, and my staff are saying they don’t even want to go out because there are no guarantees they are not going to get beaten up. Women who technically can come to work are concerned that even in a car on their way to work, some checkpoint guy is going to say, “Why are you going to work?” Because they’ve issued this directive about female employees of the government, but some illiterate guy from [the provinces] who is stopping cars, he doesn’t know the difference between a government employee and a private sector employee. He may get violent because he thinks she’s breaking the law. These are things that we have to worry about on a day-to-day basis.

This interview was originally published on the Committee to Protect Journalists' website.
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‘The fear is real’: the CEO of Afghanistan’s biggest media outlet on the challenges of broadcasting under Taliban rule

by Steven Butler

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    [post_content] => Collaboration between white evangelicals and the Proud Boys is another worrying development.

In late July, a close friend of mine received a series of bizarre text messages from her parents, who urged her to stockpile food as quickly as possible. Over the next couple of weeks, they said, food would become scarce as Democrats cut off the supply and shut down the internet, as they attempted to prevent the reinstatement of Donald Trump as president. This was supposed to happen on Friday, August 13. In early August, with the Delta variant of COVID-19 surging and state governments reimposing pandemic restrictions that had only recently been lifted, my friend decided to call her parents and make one last ditch effort to convince them to get vaccinated. Her parents would have none of it. The vaccine was deadly, they insisted; she had survived only because she was protected by their prayers. They also urged her again to stock up on food and prepare for the events that would lead up to August 13.

My friends’ parents were Catholic when she was born. Soon after that they converted to evangelical Protestantism and embraced the prosperity gospel—the belief that God will give Christians health and wealth if they show sufficient faith—that is now associated with many of Trump’s most loyal Christian backers. She grew up attending church and youth group, and, although there was a time after she became an adult that her parents were not regular church attenders, they now attend weekly. Much of their disinformation seems to have come from YouTube, but, as two recent studies show, their status as white, churchgoing evangelical Protestants is not incidental to their vaccine refusal or to their embrace of the GOP’s “Big Lie” about a supposedly “stolen” election.

The first study’s conclusions are written up in a report released in late July by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Interfaith Youth Core, “Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus.” While the report presents an overly rosy picture of white evangelical Protestants by stressing that the intervention of certain religious leaders had reduced their rates of vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal, the raw PRRI data speak clearly enough. White evangelicals remain the religious demographic with the highest rate of vaccine refusal, at 24 percent. The data also show a clear correlation between vaccine refusal and affiliation with the Republican Party, QAnon conspiracy beliefs, and far-right so-called “news” outlets that purvey disinformation.

Meanwhile, using YouGov data, analysts at The Economist provided another piece of the puzzle by testing the hypothesis “that Americans who have no religious affiliation find themselves attracted to other causes, such as the Q craze.” What they found instead is that “Americans who attend church the least are also the least likely to have a favorable view of QAnon.” Conversely, “adults who attended church at least once a month were eight percentage points more likely than we predicted to rate QAnon favourably.” The Economist singled out white evangelicals as the most conspiratorial demographic. While white evangelicals do still have a net unfavorable view of QAnon, they are more likely than members of any other religious demographic to have a positive view of the groundless conspiracy. In addition, 31 percent of white evangelicals believe “that the American government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip Americans, versus 18% among everyone else.” And about two-thirds of them believe the lie that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election”—a rate that is 34 percent higher than the general population.

These studies provide crucial context for understanding the turbulent events that have wracked the United States this summer. To be sure, the August 13 date—promulgated by American fascists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who claims that God freed him from his crack cocaine addiction—came and went without another January 6. But the summer has been marred by anti-vaccine and anti-mask rallies; threats of civil war; culture warring against the teaching of critical race theory; new rounds of violence instigated by far-right groups in and around Portland, Oregon; and, especially with back-to-school season, angry conspiracists attempting to dominate and disrupt local school board meetings with their vocal opposition to mask mandates meant to protect children who are too young to be vaccinated against COVID.

There are reports that some of these extremists, some of whom have been charged with criminal conduct, do not even have children attending school in the districts in question (if they have children at all). Indeed, some of the same people have been documented at school board meetings not merely in different districts, but even in different states, making it highly likely that astroturfing is in play. Canadian observers have also noted that their anti-maskers sometimes travel the length of the country to participate in multiple protests; the notoriously homophobic and anti-mask Polish-Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski has also been known to stir up trouble in the United States, including in Portland, my adopted hometown.

In the meantime, Florida passed a law banning school districts from mandating masks, with Republican politicians vowing to punish districts that refused to comply. Thankfully, a court overturned Florida’s deadly anti-social law, but Governor Ron DeSantis nevertheless followed through on the threat of punishment by withholding funding from two school districts that passed mask mandates, despite the fact that Florida’s current COVID outbreak is the worst in the United States. The states of Tennessee, Iowa, Utah, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, all of which are governed by Republicans, have also banned school districts from passing mask mandates. In response, the Biden Administration has opened a civil rights investigation over the apparent discrimination against students with disabilities.

At every turn, Christian symbols and rhetoric have been used by the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-democratic American extremists to support their actions, which amount to a continuation of January 6—a slow-motion insurrection. In June, for example, DeSantis told audience members at the Christofascist Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference that it was necessary “to put on the full armor of God” in order to defeat those to his political left. By using that language, DeSantis conflated Democrats, liberals, and progressives with literally demonic forces.

Charismatic evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht takes a similar approach with his “Let Us Worship” tour, which brings coronavirus germs and “spiritual warfare” to numerous cities across the United States—frequently without securing the necessary permits for his largely maskless, crowded outdoor concerts—as a protest against the reasonable expectation that churches should comply with legal public health measures. On August 8, Feucht brought his circus to Portland, Oregon, bragging on Twitter about his “security team” consisting of far right-wing street brawlers. This in itself—the increasingly open collaboration between the Proud Boys and their ilk, on the one hand, and explicitly Christian leaders on the other—is a highly concerning development. Similar dynamics have been on display in anti-vax and anti-mask rallies in California. At an August 14 rally that took place in Los Angeles, for example, one speaker openly called for violence in front of signs and banners that included slogans like “Freedom in Jesus” and “Jesus is King.” Other speakers proclaimed that “true conservatism” means “instilling Christian values back into our government,” and, quoting the New Testament book of Romans, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” One sign at the rally read “The blood of Christ is my vaccine.”

As with the January 6 insurrection itself, it concerns me that too few elite journalists and pundits are taking the Christian element of American fascism seriously (to say nothing of the fact that far too few of them are willing to call fascism by its name). There is no way to effectively counter a threat to democracy without understanding the nature of the threat, and to look the other way and pretend that Christianity is always and inherently benign in fact enables the Christofascists by reinforcing Christian normativity and hegemony.

True, the quasi-eschatological predictions for August 13 did not come to pass, despite all the extremist chatter about that date. Nevertheless, it’s been a summer of vocal and violent extremism in North America, much of it theocratic in nature. State-level voter suppression efforts might lead to entrenched minority authoritarian rule by white Christian extremists in the United States in any case, but the left’s counter-messaging should include the robust embrace of pluralism and secular society as the keys to a healthy democracy.
    [post_title] => 'The most conspiratorial demographic': white evangelicals and the QAnon connection
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‘The most conspiratorial demographic’: white evangelicals and the QAnon connection

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => 'Gold is not a human right. Housing is.'

Between 2012 and 2021, Berlin’s median rent rose by over 70 percent. The cost of housing did not skyrocket because the city suddenly became a better place to live, but because investors looking for a secure place to park their money discovered the German capital. Over the past 30 years, in major cities around the world, corporations have been buying up huge swaths of domestic properties as profitable investments. As a result, habitable and affordable housing has become exponentially more difficult for ordinary people to find and keep.

In “Push,” a 2019 documentary that investigates why and how cities have become prohibitively expensive, Leilani Farha, the former U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing, says that “unbridled capitalism” has made cities unlivable for all but the rich, with affordable housing now a luxury rather than a necessity. “That’s what differentiates housing as a commodity from gold as a commodity,” Farha says: “Gold is not a human right. Housing is.”

In the film, Farha meets a number of people whose rent has increased so dramatically, essentially overnight, that they have little hope of remaining in their homes. A new management company bought a building in Harlem and raised some residents’ rent by $900 per month, making it impossible for an African-American man to stay in his home of many years unless he could suddenly find a $100,000/year job (around 58 percent of Harlem residents make $60,000 per year or less). Something similar happened to an apartment complex in Uppsala, Sweden, making it extremely difficult for older middle-class residents to stay in their homes without dramatically increasing their incomes—a nearly impossible feat for those unwilling to abandon their communities.


Housing is generally considered affordable when it costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. In the United States, nearly 11 million renters spent more than half their income on housing in 2018. That same year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that there are no U.S. counties in which a person working full time for the minimum wage could afford to rent a standard two-bedroom apartment. Some people spend so much of their income on housing that they have little left over for food.

The fact that large companies and investors now see housing as a reliable investment vehicle, rather than an essential element of social infrastructure—a phenomenon known as the “financialization of housing”—has transformed houses across the globe into shelters for money, not people. Thousands of dwellings sit vacant in major metropolises, enhancing the portfolios of the wealthy, while tens of thousands of human beings sleep on the streets.

In Berlin, housing activists are pursuing a radical solution: they want to expropriate domestic properties from Germany’s largest landlords and repurpose them as social housing. If housing is a public good, they say, then the public should control it. Among Berliners, 85 percent of whom are renters, this effort has become increasingly popular, with 56 percent saying they either support (47 percent) a proposal to expropriate the properties of large landlords or are undecided (9 percent).

A common argument against expropriation is that governments should be using their limited resources to build more affordable housing. But that solution has been on offer for decades and has yet to halt, or even significantly slow, the broader crisis. Labor and building material costs are prohibitive in many places. Building and land use regulations also pose significant barriers, especially in metro areas. It remains difficult to find both suitable places to build and communities receptive to large-scale public housing projects. Simply building more units is a flawed and partial solution, especially in the absence of significant and consistent funding.

But the Berlin campaign targets enormous, publicly traded companies that own more than 3,000 apartments, like Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, Germany’s two largest corporate residential landlords. The two companies recently negotiated an €18 billion merger that set a record for Europe’s largest real estate deal, with a combined market valuation of around €47 billion, or $56 billion. They now collectively own around 550,000 apartments throughout Germany.

Article 14 of the German constitution permits expropriation only for the common good and only in exchange for fair compensation. If Berlin’s housing activists succeed, the government won’t simply seize private units; it will transfer them to the public and compensate the owners, albeit at a rate that some shareholders might not consider sufficient (companies have the right to sue if they believe the compensation is inadequate).

According to a 2020 report prepared by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin is home to around two million apartments, about 15 percent of which are owned by financial investors and publicly traded housing companies. Globally, residential real estate accounts for $163 trillion of assets, a portion of which are held by investors and housing companies in Germany. Deutsche Wohnen reported a profit of €1.54 billion (about $1.83 billion) in fiscal year 2020. Organizers in Berlin say the company has profited handsomely from buying up properties and driving up rents, neglecting routine maintenance and dragging its feet on essential repairs until major renovations are needed, then fixing up the apartments in order to justify massive rent hikes.

Berliners are not the only ones trying to take back their city from corporate profiteers. In 2020, the city of Barcelona warned 14 companies that if they failed to rent the 194 vacant apartments they collectively held within one month, the municipality would take possession and convert the units into public housing. Since 2016 Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, has made it legal for municipalities to seize apartments left vacant for over two years and rent them to low-income tenants for four to 10 years before returning them to the owners. Catalans also approved a 2019 measure allowing cities to buy such apartments outright at half the market rate (owners would not have the option of refusing to sell). The law allows the city of Barcelona to take possession only in cases where the owners hold multiple units, while forcible purchase is allowed only when units are left vacant for at least two years.

Expropriation is unlikely to catch on any time soon in the United States, where the rights of property holders are treated as sacrosanct. During the pandemic, tenant organizers in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities pressured the government to cancel rent and mortgage payments for as long as the coronavirus was disrupting the economy, without forcing people to pay it back later. California, New York, and a few other states offered tenants modest relief in the form of temporary eviction moratoriums, in a compromise that fell far short of organizers’ demands.

Those measures in no way matched the actions proposed or taken in Berlin or Barcelona. Nevertheless Alan Beard, managing director of Interlink Capital Strategies, a financial advisory firm, penned an op-ed for The Hill entitled, “How to protect against future U.S. government expropriation,” in which he railed against governments in the U.S. for having “effectively expropriated most of the American economy” by forcing businesses to close for safety reasons and making it harder to evict people during the pandemic.

In many U.S. cities, organizers are fighting for greater control over buildings the public already owns. Last year, Philadelphia organizers obtained limited concessions from the city by setting up encampments, taking over vacant properties in North Philadelphia and on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and demanding that the city transfer the properties to the people living in them. The city eventually agreed to put 50 vacant homes into a community land trust and allow 50 unhoused mothers with children to stay in 15 vacant city-owned houses—a drop in the bucket, given that thousands of Philadelphians still need permanent housing.

In an ideal world, said Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All, a New York State-based coalition of housing advocates, “public housing that is democratically run and controlled by its residents” would be the norm everywhere. But in the United States, where there is little trust in government or appetite for funding public services, that can feel like a distant dream. “In order for public housing to be great, we also need to rebuild faith in government as a thing that could compassionately care for all of us,” she said, “not the thing that is killing us and making us sick by defunding our homes.”

Tara Raghuveer, who directs KC Tenants, a tenants’ rights organization in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Homes Guarantee campaign at People's Action, believes one of the biggest obstacles to “a world where everyone has a home and housing is not treated as a commodity” is that “we’ve been so convinced by the profiteers” that there is no other way. “It’s this attitude of impossibility that stops us from doing things that are really quite simple and that we have models for, even in [the U.S.], going back decades,” she added.

Part of expropriation’s appeal is that it allows people to stay where they already live. Thomas McGath, an American ex-pat living in Berlin and a spokesperson for the campaign to expropriate Germany’s largest landlords, said Berliners are beginning to ask themselves, “‘How do I benefit if somebody plops down a thousand apartments in a field somewhere? It doesn’t do anything for me in my neighborhood, where the rents are rising rapidly and/or exorbitantly.’” The idea, he said, is to create a city “that meets the needs of everybody who lives here, and continues to have its unique character defined by those people.”

McGath said he moved to Berlin in 2013 in part to escape the growing unaffordability of U.S. cities. “If we own our own cities and we have more democratic control over the things that we own…it really makes it easier for us to make the city more sustainable, more affordable, more livable,” he said, rather than morphing into a “big playground for investors to build vanity projects that really don’t have a social purpose.”

If housing is a human right, it’s fair to question whether faceless for-profit corporations should be able to determine who gets it, for how long, and on what terms. A home is more than shelter; it’s where people feel a sense of comfort and belonging. Expropriation is one tool advocates are using to help restore housing to its original purpose: sustaining and enriching human life.
    [post_title] => To house the people, expropriate the landlords
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To house the people, expropriate the landlords

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_title] => How the Soviet Jews changed the world: a graphic tale of tragedy and triumph
    [post_excerpt] => Soviet Jews played a critical role in the history of the USSR and, by extension, the trajectory of the Cold War and the history of the twentieth century. 
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How the Soviet Jews changed the world: a graphic tale of tragedy and triumph

by Miriam Libicki

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