Culture

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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.
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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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    [post_content] => The Modi government placed Kashmir under the longest internet shutdown ever imposed in a democracy. 

Two prolonged lockdowns in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir have taken a toll on the region’s children. The first began on August 5, 2019, when the Modi government unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the constitution, which had guaranteed autonomy for the disputed region since 1947. To pre-empt protests, the government blocked internet access and phone connectivity, while the army deployed soldiers on the streets to implement draconian policies that included arrest and detention without charge, curfews, and mandatory home confinement. Schools and universities were closed for about six months. Two weeks after the military closure was lifted and schools reopened, the government in New Delhi announced a country-wide pandemic lockdown that closed all the schools and colleges in India—indefinitely. But while children in the rest of India were able to attend school online, the government refused to restore internet access in Kashmir.

The two million children of Kashmir missed nearly two years of formal schooling. Meanwhile, those from disadvantaged backgrounds had no means of accessing the internet even when the government restored access. The pandemic has exacerbated the digital divide between India’s rich and poor, since very few parents of children who attend public schools can afford smartphones to access online classes.

For those who live in remote areas that lack infrastructure, internet and mobile connectivity are poor even under normal circumstances. Now, with the pandemic keeping the schools closed, a recent BBC News report shows children in rural villages walking miles and even traversing mountains for an internet signal that might allow them to access their online schoolwork. But the signal is so weak that downloading tutorials can take hours. At that speed, online video classes are impossible.

[caption id="attachment_2923" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Kashmiri children walking home from school in winter.[/caption]

Mental health experts and teachers report that the lockdowns have also exacerbated pre-existing physical and mental health problems, causing trauma that could take generations to heal.

Dr. Majid Shafi, a clinical psychiatrist who treats children and adolescents in the central and southern districts of Kashmir said restrictions on children, who are confined to their homes for long periods during extended lockdowns, has adversely affected their physical, emotional, and cognitive health.

“Almost every parent of kids and teenagers in Kashmir is complaining these days about increased behavioral issues in their children,” said Dr. Shafi, adding that he had seen an “appreciable increase” in symptoms such as a feeling of hopelessness, anxiety, mood disorders, and a decline in academic performance

Isha Malik, a clinical psychologist at a government-run children’s hospital in Srinagar, said the months-long suspension of phone and internet connectivity had severely hampered delivery of mental health-care services. As a consequence, she said, many of her patients had relapsed or seen their symptoms worsen.

Ms. Malik, who also treats psychosocial and mental health problems in children and women at her own clinic in Srinagar, said that drug abuse among adolescents has increased with the lockdowns because they could not “release their pent-up emotions” by meeting up with friends. Data collected by physicians at Kashmir’s Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences (IMHANS) shows that heroin consumption in Kashmir increased an astonishing 1,500 percent between 2016-19. There are only three addiction treatment centers for the region’s population of 12.5 million.

During the same period of 2016-19, IMHANS found that the number of children hospitalized in psychiatric wards increased from 17,000-30,000. One small survey conducted by a psychologist in Srinagar showed that 72 percent of school-age children said they felt a lack of purpose in life.

But even before the current lockdowns, Kashmir suffered from high rates of mental illness due to ongoing political unrest and repeated military incursions, going back to the 1990s.

According to a 2016 report, co-authored by psychiatrists and researchers from IMHANS and ActionAid International, the mental health situation in Kashmir was already “alarming.” The researchers found that 11.3 percent of the adult population suffered from mental illness, which is significantly higher than the Indian national average of 7.3 percent.

A 2015  study—jointly prepared by Doctors Without Borders, IMHANS, and the University of Kashmir—found that Kashmir was suffering from a mental health crisis of “epidemic proportions,” with 50 percent of women and 37 percent of men suffering from depression and/or PTSD.

In 2019, shortly after the Modi government revoked Kashmir’s autonomous status, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), roughly equivalent to the ACLU in the United States, released a fact-finding report that found the suspension of internet and phone communication had “hugely hampered” the medical system in its efforts to provide mental healthcare to patients in Kashmir—which mirrors the experience of Ms. Malik, the clinical psychologist in Srinagar.

Amit Sen, a New Delhi-based child and adolescent psychiatrist who was part of the PUCL fact-finding team that visited Kashmir in 2019, described his deep concern for the welfare of the region’s children in a powerful essay for The Indian Express. The city of Srinagar had become a ghost town, he wrote, with the children he had seen playing on the street during previous visits now absent. The minority of children who could access mental healthcare were suffering from “acute anxiety, panic attacks, depressive-dissociative symptoms, post traumatic symptoms, suicidal tendencies and severe anger outbursts.” The violent aggression and abuse perpetrated by the military on civilians, wrote Dr. Sen, could take “generations” to heal.

History of school closures 

School closures are a familiar aspect of life in Kashmir. Students have called for academic strikes in response to political unrest—particularly after the army and government forces killed civilians. In 2016 there was a student strike to protest the military’s killing of Burhan Wani, a popular 21-year-old militant commander in southern Kashmir. In March 2018, the government closed academic institutions for 32 days, when protests erupted after military shelling resulted in the deaths of five members of a single family, along with two militants. In other words, the more recent lockdowns have only exacerbated long-simmering political tensions.

Digital divide, unequal access     

Access Now, an international advocacy group that tracks internet shutdowns across the world, reported in March that the government’s seven-month suspension of Kashmir’s internet access in 2019-20 was the longest in any democracy. According to the group’s analysis, the Indian government blocks internet access more than any country on earth.

The Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a prominent civil rights group, called the government’s communications blackout “digital apartheid.” Only in February 2021 did the government finally restore 4G mobile data service.

Umar Rashid Bhat, a public school teacher in Chandoosa, a village in northern Kashmir, says that 60 percent of his students are from households living below the poverty line, and thus cannot afford smartphones that would allow them to access online tutorials—or to participate in online classes via conference calls, which some private schools offered during the internet shutdown.

About one in five children attended private schools before the pandemic, but enrolment is dropping because the pandemic has put so many parents out of work and has thus made them unable to pay tuition. Meanwhile, 175,000 children have dropped out of public schools. Sharif Bhat, who heads the Jammu and Kashmir office of Save the Children, said the organization believes many of those children left school in order to find odd jobs that would help support their families during the precipitous economic downturn caused by the long lockdowns.

Shah Fozia Hussain, a government middle school teacher in Seer Shaksaz, a village about 37 miles from Srinagar, noticed that one of her eighth-grade pupils joined her online class after an absence of more than a month. The student told her privately that he had been out working with his father, who had been unable to earn a living for months due to the lockdowns. After saving for several months, the son had been able to buy a smartphone that enabled him to rejoin his class. “I was in tears when I heard his story,” said Ms. Hussain. For the hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri children who are suffering under the government’s decision to place nationalism over their welfare and the ongoing ravages of the global pandemic, owning a smartphone that allows them to access their basic right to an education has become a privilege.
    [post_title] => Kashmir's lost generation of children
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Kashmir’s lost generation of children

by Majid Maqbool

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    [post_content] => The disappearance of privacy in the digital age is irreversible. Now we have to figure out how to protect ourselves.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Technology and social media are frequently manipulated by bad actors. As a digital investigator, I see the effects of this firsthand. Often, my  prospective clients want me to utilize my knowledge of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) to stalk and harass someone they don’t like. Recently, a man contacted me to ask how much I would charge to cyberstalk his adult daughter and “expose [her] as a slut.” Of course I declined the commission, but I know there are plenty of less-than-scrupulous OSINT experts who will do the job for him. 

OSINT is a methodology by which one collects and analyzes online data that is in the public domain. OSINT can and does include leaks, and it can also involve information that was never meant to be shared widely—which is why a good investigator should always seek to protect a potentially vulnerable source, even if that source shared something publicly. 

On the micro level, OSINT can be manipulated to stalk an individual—a good example of this is people poring over clues in the photos you post to your social media accounts in order to figure out where you live and/or hang out. On the macro level, governments can and do utilize OSINT— as well as more traditional spying methods—in order to spy on their citizens.

The combination of both OSINT and other new sophisticated technologies means that none of us are truly safe from those who want to pry into our personal lives. Sometimes, this can lead to truly terrifying outcomes. If you saw “The Dissident,” the documentary film about the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, you know how easy it is to hack a phone, for example. The film shows how the Saudi regime used Israeli spyware to read communications between Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz and Jamal Khashoggi, who was then a columnist for The Washington Post. There is convincing circumstantial evidence in the film to support the theory, shared by Turkish Intelligence and the University of Toronto’s City Lab, that Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful Saudi crown prince, ordered his henchmen to murder Khashoggi at his country’s consulate in Istanbul—based on information he obtained from using Pegasus spyware to take over both men’s phones.

Or, consider the case of model Ines Helene, whose stalker geolocated her apartment building using the reflections of the buildings in the selfies she posted online.



Ines Helene’s stalker didn’t need to employ sophisticated spyware to find her address. All he needed was to be obsessive and pay attention to detail. 

If all of this scares you—well, it should. We live in a world where anyone can find out vital information about you and use it for malevolent reasons. This genie is out of the bottle in many respects, but there are ways in which legislation can catch up to our worst privacy concerns: legislation against revenge porn, which 48 states and the District of Columbia have passed, is a good example here.

There are also ways in which an environment where nothing stays secret for long is a good thing. For example, investigators can use data breaches and leaks to expose crimes that individuals or governments are trying to hide. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its four-part series on the detention and long-term incarceration of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region; to prove the existence of concentration camps the Chinese government was trying to hide, BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan collaborated with architect Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek, a programmer and digital security trainer in using open source technology to locate and identify the mass prison camps in which over 1 million Uyghurs are being held and, according to first person accounts, tortured. The importance of this type of work is in its clarity and effectiveness: by identifying and documenting irrefutable facts on the ground, it cuts through a well-funded and cynical propaganda machine to expose the truth. 

That’s not all, of course. Many of you reading this have undoubtedly experienced what it’s like to be lied to or conned. In this digital age we can expose liars and con artists before it’s too late. Worried about that guy you’re going on a date with? You can find out if he has a criminal record, or if he’s married. Concerned that a scam artist may be targeting a loved one? You can investigate the person to see what is really going on. 

Stolen valor has traditionally been a popular way for grifters to scam people—faking military service has a long, ignoble, and sadly profitable tradition—but today, there are enough tools at our disposal to figure out if someone is lying or not. 

Our social mores will eventually catch up to our changing understanding of public versus private. In fact, our comparative lack of privacy is beginning to change our very culture — making certain aspects of our past and present irrelevant. 

Consider the #infosecbikini Twitter storm. It started when a female Twitter user who works in information security was shamed for posting a relatively tame bikini photo; this led to a backlash against random sexism and harassment in cybersecurity. 

The more frequently people are “shamed” and “exposed,” it would seem, the less weight such harassment will carry in our lives. 

Simply put, we might soon reach a critical mass of “embarrassing” content, revenge porn, and other content routinely used to harass or denigrate people. So much so that a lot of this content will  become just another form of internet white noise. 

Oh, your emails were leaked? Well, so were a bunch of other people’s emails. Not only will many people have some kind of “scandal” or another in their past, there will simply be too much data to sift through. 

Similarly, the enormous amount of data out there presents a challenge for prying governments too. Russia is one example of a mass surveillance state. The scope of Russia’s surveillance system, SORM, is so great, however, that it creates logistical challenges. Nobody has time to watch everyone all the time, and unless the government is actually zeroing in on you because you stand out to them, you can still manage to fly under the radar. 

I understand that none of this is particularly reassuring for dissidents. In fact, it becomes less reassuring when we consider how evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to tap into mass surveillance systems over time—gradually reducing the human component and watching us all with renewed vigor and precision. 

Again, we have a window of opportunity to enact better legislation on AI now. Instead of being defeatist, we can think about ways in which AI can be regulated so as to reduce the potentially harmful impact of this data mining on private citizens. 

Perhaps, eventually, a healthy balance between constant hypervigilance online and going completely off-the-grid to raise chickens in a remote part of Montana will even be possible for those of us—most of us—who are trying to stay safe while also living our lives and doing our work. 

Of course, this healthy balance will not be available to private citizens of authoritarian regimes for as long as they remain authoritarian. But for those of us who still have democratic institutions to fall back on, creating the legal blueprints for how our digital rights can work better for all of us is possible. With smart activism, it is also attainable.
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We wish to inform you that privacy is dead

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => The former comedian is out of jail, but his own sworn deposition confirms that he is a rapist.

When I was 21 years old, I was drugged and raped by a man I met in college. I didn’t tell this story to anybody, including myself, until December 2014, when a series of women–some famous, some not–came forward to describe in unsparing detail what it was like to be sexually violated by “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby. After reading Beverly Johnson’s story in Vanity Fair, in which she recounted how Cosby lured her into his home under false pretenses and gave her a coffee—“My head became woozy, my speech became slurred, and the room began to spin nonstop”—I could no longer deny that a similar thing had once happened to me. I read each new account, seeing myself over and over again in these women’s horror stories, and decided, finally, to tell my own. 

It was with disappointment—though, honestly, not much surprise—that I saw Cosby trending on Twitter on June 30; the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania had overturned his 2018 conviction on three felony counts for drugging and raping Andrea Constand, a former employee of Temple University. By then, Cosby, who is Temple’s most famous alumnus, had already served almost three years of his three-to-10 year sentence in a maximum security prison. When he walked out of there he flashed the “V” for victory sign at his supporters, as though his release from jail represented some kind of exoneration. 

Victims and their advocates were understandably devastated, expressing concern that the decision would discourage women from reporting sexual assault in the future. 

“The semblance of justice these women had in knowing Cosby was convicted has been completely erased with his release today,” wrote Time’s Up chief executive Tina Tchen in a statement. 

“Bill Cosby is free on a technicality, but the women he assaulted, who bravely came forward to bring him to justice, are suffering anew,” said the National Organization for Women in a press release. 

“I fear that this is going to really hinder other survivors from coming forward,” Angela Rose, founder and president of Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment told NPR.

Attorney Gloria Allred, who has represented almost half of the Cosby victims, was asked in an interview if she thought that the decision was a blow to the #MeToo movement; she paused before delivering her assessment: “It’s not a win.” 

I do not believe the decision to set Cosby free is a blow to the #MeToo movement, or that it will discourage women from speaking out in the future. Nor do I think that justice has been completely erased. Cosby can make a “V” sign with his hands as often as he likes, but he has not scored a victory; he was not exonerated, but rather freed on a technicality. His premature release from prison is just another example of the Patriarchy Industrial Complex on full display, with rich men paying their expensive lawyers to identify procedural loopholes so they can wiggle their way out of consequences for their behavior.

In a 79-page opinion that led to Cosby’s release from prison, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that Cosby should not have been tried in criminal court, owing to a non-prosecution deal that his lawyers cut years earlier with former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor. If that name rings a bell, it’s because Castor went on to become Donald Trump’s lawyer in his second impeachment trial. (Remember the guy in a boxy pinstripe suit that was two sizes too big, delivering non sequiturs about how “Nebraska is quite a judicial thinking place”? Yeah, that’s him.) 

Cosby’s agreement with Castor was similar to the sweetheart deal that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein obtained in 2008 from another Trumpworld lackey: Alex Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Acosta rose to become Trump’s Secretary of Labor—a position from which he was forced to resign in 2019 after Epstein’s second arrest. As the former President likes to say: only the best people. 

In 2015, upon learning that Risa Ferman, then District Attorney of Montgomery County, was reopening the criminal case against Cosby after several more of his victims came forward, Bruce Castor informed her by email of the 2005 non-prosecution agreement. This was the first she had heard of it. In response to Ferman’s request that Castor send her a copy of the binding legal agreement, he instead sent her a press release–a press release!–claiming it was actually a “written declaration” that had been approved by Constand’s lawyers. 

One need not be trained in the law to know that a press release does not constitute a legally enforceable document. I am thus extremely curious as to why the justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled, in a split decision, that Castor’s oral promise to Cosby’s attorneys was binding. 

In a statement released June 30, Constand’s lawyers asserted that they “were not signatories to any agreement of any kind” and that Castor’s press release “had no meaning or significance to us in 2005 other than being a press release circulated by the then-District Attorney.” Was there a non-prosecution agreement or was there not a non-prosecution agreement? Once again, we find ourselves in familiar territory—her word against his.  

The bigger, more consequential question is why Castor gave Cosby any type of assurance, whether verbal or written, that he wouldn’t face future criminal prosecution. His stated reasons speak volumes about the discrimination against sexual assault survivors that is embedded in our judicial system. 

Without even interviewing Andrea Constand, Castor determined in 2005 that there was not enough evidence to successfully prosecute a criminal case against Cosby. His reasons: The victim waited a year to come forward with her allegations; and she stayed in contact with her attacker after the assault. 

Anyone who has been sexually assaulted can explain how and why fear and shame prevent them from going to the police, as can the many psychologists who were interviewed by major media outlets in recent years about this common behavior pattern. Victims stay in touch with their rapists—I know I did—because their brains are paralyzed, trapped in survival mode, trying to deny the enormity of what has taken place, particularly when the crime is committed by someone they know and trust. Such cognitive dissonance, as Cosby’s victims can attest, can take a very long time to overcome. In my own case, it took 16 years.

Constand prevailed in her civil lawsuit against Cosby, winning a $3.4 million settlement in 2006. Cosby testified in a sworn deposition that he had obtained prescription Quaaludes, which render a person physically immobile, with the intent of giving them to women with whom he wanted to have sex. Nine years later, after new accusers came forward, the Associated Press successfully petitioned the court to unseal the records of the civil trial. This is what led to Cosby’s re-arrest and trial for aggravated sexual assault against Constand: He incriminated himself with his own words, spoken in a sworn deposition more than a decade earlier. 

The timeline that led to Cosby’s re-arrest and trial was miraculous: In July 2015 a judge agreed to unseal the documents; on November 3, voters elected a new district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, who then helped bring charges against Cosby; and on December 30 the former actor was arrested, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations on Constand’s criminal complaint was set to expire. 

Cosby’s attorneys argued unsuccessfully that the deposition he had given in Constand’s civil suit should be inadmissible, because their client had made his incriminating statements only because he believed he had immunity from criminal prosecution. By then more than 50 women had come forward, all with disturbingly similar stories about Cosby drugging and raping them. In July 2015, New York Magazine published a striking black-and-white cover photo showing 35 of those women, seated and looking directly into the camera, under the headline: “I’m No Longer Afraid.” Five of those women testified at the 2018 trial that resulted in Cosby’s conviction.







 























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The outcome of that trial was shocking. Given his wealth, power, and all the systemic barriers rape victims face in our society, there was every reason to expect that Cosby would once again avoid prison. But the #MeToo movement laid the groundwork for victims to come forward, finding strength and solidarity with one another as they told the truth about Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and so many other men.

All things considered, when I think about Andrea Constand’s 14-year journey to see her rapist behind bars, I am reminded of the aphorism, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” This is not to say we shouldn’t be furious about the incompetence and malice of Bruce Castor, or about the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to believe his story about the non-prosecution agreement that might or might not actually exist. But we should stop and marvel that Cosby was convicted at all. His was the first big trial of a famous man in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and it resulted in an undeniable moment of reckoning. These women were telling the truth. There would be more to come. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Cosby obtained early release from prison. He’s an old, rich, entitled narcissist with nothing to lose by appealing the verdict. Constand, by contrast, had nothing to gain by revisiting her trauma. She had won her multi-million-dollar settlement in 2006, and was finally getting her life back, working as a massage therapist in Toronto. Still, she agreed to testify against Cosby at his 2017 trial, which resulted in a mistrial, and then again in 2018. She did this because she felt it was the right thing to do. The statute of limitations for all the other victims had run out. She was their only hope. 

An accomplished college athlete who later oversaw operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball team, Constand knows how to play the long game. Her fight inspired sexual assault victims all over the world, including me, and led to the elimination of statutes of limitations in rape cases in several states. This is her legacy. 

At 83 years old, Bill Cosby is technically a free man, in that he no longer lives behind bars. But he’s also a pariah in the entertainment industry, his reputation destroyed thanks to the #MeToo movement and its allies. Remember that it was Hannibal Burress, a Black male comedian, who ignited the media firestorm against Cosby by courageously calling him out as a rapist at Philadelphia’s Trocadero comedy club back in October 2014. Seven years later, as he faces another civil lawsuit for sexual battery in Los Angeles, Bill Cosby’s legacy will never amount to anything more than a sick joke. 
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Bill Cosby’s release from prison has nothing to do with #metoo

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => There is a tendency to present the Mitfords as Nancy did: as eccentric and therefore unthreatening aristocrats.

Britain is ever wreathed in class and class obsession. Now, there is another adaptation of The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford’s wildly popular 1945 novel about an eccentric, country-dwelling aristocratic family with an overbearing father, an exasperated mother, six sisters, and one brother. Essentially, it is a sanitized portrait of Mitford’s own interwar upbringing at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire.

The three-part adaptation is directed by Emily Mortimer, was broadcast on the BBC in May, and will stream on Amazon from July 30. Lily James (Lady Rose Aldridge in Downton Abbey) is Linda Radlett and Andrew Scott (the “hot” priest in Fleabag) is the whimsical Lord Merlin. Reviews have been positive to ecstatic (“fantastically enjoyable”; “absolutely glorious”; and “quite profound”). Critics have noted that this adaptation targets the Bridgerton generation with modern interpretations; but the coverage has declined to focus on the Nazism of the most notorious Mitford sisters, Diana and Unity, and the politics of their brother Tom, who died fighting the Japanese in the Pacific theatre because he could not bring himself to fight Germans.


Nancy Mitford performs an enchantment with her pen: She combines her sisters into one dazzling Romantic heroine, Linda Radlett. Linda is a benign composite, with elements borrowed from each sister (except Unity, the Nazi, who was incapacitated by 1945, having shot herself in the head when war broke out. Unity is singular).

[caption id="attachment_2788" align="alignleft" width="218"] Nancy Mitford[/caption]

Linda abandons her first husband: that is Diana, who left her own husband to marry Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain’s tiny smudge of fascists. She falls in love with a communist: Jessica. Then a Frenchman: Nancy. She is superficially kind: Deborah.

Linda is that mercurial thing: charming. Charm is the ability to seduce people against their better instincts. She is a feather in the wind. Such people do not take responsibility. They do not have to. The Pursuit of Love is essentially redemptive: for the Mitfords and for the aristocracy. It is the founding document of the Mitford cult—without it, there would be no cult—and it is self-serving. They only pursued love, after all—who doesn’t? In response, I can only purse my lips and say: Nazis?

The truth of their fascism—Diana was Mosley’s lover and helpmeet and Unity stalked and worshipped Hitler—is more repulsive than mere viewers of The Pursuit of Love can know. There is, for instance, no scene in the novel or TV adaptation in which Unity, living in Germany, boasts that her home is a flat belonging to Jews. Which Jews, and where are they now? (It would have made a better novel than Linda shtupping a boring Communist, but Nancy was writing absolution, and the family appreciated it. On reading it, Lord Redesdale wept with happiness.)

There are many examples. “Everyone should know I am a Jew hater,” wrote Unity to the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, in case mere speech was not loud enough. As late as the 1980s, Diana was blaming global Jewry for the Holocaust. If they had stepped in and saved German Jews from the consequences of their own evil—by resettling them, she suggests—it might not have happened. Consider the 1938 Evian Conference, at which the assembled representatives of 32 countries expressed their regrets at being unable to provide refuge for the Jews of Germany and Austria. Apparently she missed it.

There is a tendency to present the Mitfords as Nancy did: as eccentric and therefore unthreatening aristocrats whose attachment to murderous tyranny in life was no more significant than their clothing, their manners, or their speech. They were young and they succumbed to the jackboot: that is, the line. (Unlucky, that’s all. Poor Lady Redesdale.) It is convenient—it defends the wider aristocracy from accusations of racism, of hating democracy—and it is unjust. That Unity failed to kill herself when war broke out—she lived for nine years with a bullet in her skull—does not forgive the bullets she wished on others, if they were Jews. She was once found in the garden of a friend, practising shooting for the day she could legally kill Jews. (She was a terrible shot. When she shot herself, she missed.) In England, she is only remembered as a bit odd.

[caption id="attachment_2771" align="aligncenter" width="677"] The Mitford Family in 1928.[/caption]

I think that, in retrospect, their vernacular absolved them. It makes them sound unserious; gossip columnists near tyrants, and amateurs at that. For this I blame Noël Coward and Enid Blyton. We are so used to hearing the cadence and idioms of English as it was spoken in the light comedies and children’s stories of the 1930s, that it is easy to laugh at Diana’s defence of Julius Streicher, which Jessica, the sister who married a Communist, moved to America and became a civil rights activist, related in her memoir Hons and Rebels: “‘But darling!’ Diana drawled, opening her vast blue eyes, ‘Streicher is a kitten!’”

It is equally easy to laugh at Unity’s typical sign-off in letters from Munich, where she went to accost Hitler: “best love and Heil Hitler! Bobo.” (They all had nicknames. Nancy called Jessica, the Communist, “Squalor.”) Then there is Unity’s unique interpretation of Nazi in-fighting: “It must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Röhm himself & tore off his decorations. POOR HITLER.” (The caps are hers.) You may laugh, but she meant it. Or Diana’s moronic observation: “His [Hitler’s] hands were white and well-shaped.” Or Diana’s other moronic observation: “I never once saw him [Hitler] eat a cake of any sort.” It’s not a profound thing to meet Hitler, if that is what you come away with. Diana wrote and so, writer to writer: Thank God you had a private income too.

The only possible defence for these Mitford sisters is a feminist defence: They did not, due to an upbringing in which they were chaperoned as fiercely as they were unschooled, know how to manage lust. (In The Pursuit of Love the narrator, Fanny, is properly educated. I can hear Nancy’s envy in the prose.) Today they would be described as “radicalized.” Nanny Blor—aristocratic children were raised by nannies and governesses—was wise about her ungovernable charges. She cautioned against Unity’s involvement with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists: “All those men!” she said, and she would know—though Unity was at this point, in Mel Brooks’ phrase, only playing ping-pong with the balls. When Jessica ran away with a Communist Blor wailed, “Jessica has only taken two pairs of knickers & they are both too small for her & I’m afraid they will burst.” Too late, Nanny Blor. Too late.

[caption id="attachment_2776" align="alignleft" width="251"] Diana Mitford, later Lady Mosley.[/caption]

Diana does not write about her physical passion for Oswald Mosley, but it is made obvious by what she gave up for it. She left a rich, loving husband—Bryan Guinness— to be Mosley’s mistress, only marrying him after his wife died (of peritonitis or heartbreak, depending on who is telling). Diana not only ruined her reputation for Oswald; she was also interned for three years as a fascist sympathizer during the Second World War. She could never admit to need (six siblings and stubbornness prohibit it) and was never short of words—she posed quite successfully as a pseudo-intellectual, mostly on the basis of possessing books—but on her passion for Mosley she only said: “He was completely sure of himself and of his ideas.” Conviction was not something her father, Lord Redesdale, who raged and squandered his fortune, ever had.

Redesdale was self-hating. His older brother Clement was killed in the First World War, and he was the remnants: a disappointing younger brother in competition with a ghost. In response he destroyed the great fortune that shamed him, which is now a few cottages, a pub, and a snack bar. (He was also likely a manic depressive. But if aristocrats had family therapy the history of Great Britain would be a different tale.) So that was that: Diana settled into Mosley’s iron fist like a pretty bird. She called him “The Leader"; by the end she was almost the only follower. Having read almost everything about Diana, I wonder if her fascism was both convenient and retrospective. Because the best and worst thing I can say about Diana Mosley is that she isn’t a convincing fascist. She was trivial and flinty; she was skin deep. She said in old age, “I don’t mind in the least what people’s politics are.”

Her family say she never changed her views: Were these, then, her views? I believe it because she was no intellectual—we are back to Hitler’s dietary imperatives and beautiful hands—and, after she was imprisoned with Mosley during the war for national security, how could she perform a retreat, admit a wrong? Diana destroyed herself for lust, and so trapped herself. It is a fair fate for someone so visual.

Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who was conceived in a small town in northern Ontario called Swastika—which still exists—is more horrifying. She went to Munich in 1932 to stalk Hitler. She hung round at Nazi party offices and lurked in his favourite restaurant—the Osteria Bavaria—with the confidence of the British aristocrat with golden hair. He considered her a lucky charm—she was related to Winston Churchill by marriage—but it consumed her. You know how stupid some people sound on Twitter? Unity wrote like that on paper. “It was all so thrilling,” she writes of one encounter with Adolf, “I can still hardly believe it. When he went, he gave me a special salute all to myself.” She would stand on street corners to “waggle a flag” at him.

It was not abnormal for women to react to him like that. One account reads, “Women by the thousand abased themselves at Hitler’s feet, they tried to kiss his boots, and some of them succeeded, even to the point of swallowing the gravel on which he had trod.” I hope that is apocryphal.

[caption id="attachment_2790" align="alignleft" width="220"] Unity Mitford in 1938, wearing a swastika pin.[/caption]

One biography has Unity having formal orgies—she was English, after all—with SS officers under Swastikas and relating the details to Adolf at his request. I’m not sure that I believe that—though with Unity anything is possible, and she did sunbathe nude in the Englischer Garten in Munich—but family accounts refer to shaking, sighing, and trembling in HIS presence. She especially thrilled to his rage: “He got angrier & angrier,” she wrote to Diana, “& at last thundered— you know how he can— like a machine-gun—‘Das nächste Mai, dass die Richter so einen Mann freilassen, so lasse ich ihn von meiner Leibstandarte verhaften und ins Konzentrationslager schicken; und dann werden wir sehen, welches am stärksten ist, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law oder MEINE MASCHINEN GEWEHRE!’” (Essentially, he is threatening someone with imprisonment in a concentration camp and death by a machine gun held by someone else. Those beautiful hands were technically clean.) Her gasping payoff is—and you can hear the throbbing lust on the page— “It was wonderful.”

Can a bucolic English childhood make you crave that much anger, if you are a victim of home schooling? I’m glad some people enjoyed tourism in Nazi Germany, but I wonder if Nancy’s title is quite right. It is better called The Pursuit of Rage.
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‘The Pursuit of Love’: a sanitized portrait of the Nazi-loving Mitford sisters

by Tanya Gold

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    [post_content] => The ability to intuit the feelings of an emotionally uncommunicative man can make a woman feel strong—or not.

Recently I rewatched Bridget Jones’ Diary. It was one of my favorite films when I was a teenager, and now that I am 32—Bridget’s age in the movie—I’m more impressed than ever with the way the film and eponymous book capture the comic conundrums of the average woman. But there was one character that I viewed with new eyes: our leading man, the ever-diffident Mark Darcy.

I was a Jane Austen fan growing up, so I found his demeanor very appealing. The way he expressed feeling through actions rather than words, combined with his utter inability to demonstrate affection, struck me as thoroughly classy, strong and “masculine.” Now, another term sprang to mind: emotionally unavailable. 

My therapist asked me recently whether or not I have a tendency to gravitate toward emotionally unavailable men, and I told her that I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between “emotionally unavailable” and reserved. It seemed she didn’t know either, so we just stared at one another uncomfortably over Zoom for a moment. 

Truth be told, I’m not sure the modern take about people who are unable to express themselves emotionally—i.e., that they lack feeling—is accurate. My ex-boyfriend was (surprise!) a lot like Mark Darcy. The closest he ever came to being effusive was when he looked at me over the corner of his newspaper and gave a “Oh, very nice” nod. When we broke up, I was certain that he had never actually cared about me; I only changed my mind because his best friend told me that he didn’t leave his room for six months and subsisted on deliveries of beer and fried chicken. 

My father is (again, surprise!) another classic example. The man physically stiffens at any attempt at a hug, and I can count on one hand the number of times he’s said something affectionate. In fact, I’m not sure I remember him saying anything at all to me throughout my childhood other than, “You hungry? You want something to eat?” But if I called him at 3 a.m. to tell him I was stranded in Sheepshead Bay he said “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” no questions asked. My father is also an alcoholic in recovery. During a recent relapse, he sobbed and said he’d always loved me but didn’t know how to show it, and I could see the pain that inability had caused him. 

I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for Mark Darcy. I feel sorry for many of the men I’ve dated, and I feel a little like Wendy in Peter Pan, when she tells the Lost Boys that they’re all just little boys who didn’t have a mother. I feel as though my natural urge to nurture will compensate for whatever hole their mothers left, which it sometimes does and sometimes does not. When it doesn’t, I wonder if I’m falling into the classic Narcissist—Empath relationship, and whether I should feel a little sorry for myself as well, for once. 

Society often portrays women like me, who choose to deal with these men, as a little pathetic. People say we lack self-esteem, that we are tragically conditioned by our toxic upbringing and the unhealthy attachment styles it wrought. Some of that is (unfortunately) true. But I have to say—as someone who does a fair amount of deep digging into her psyche on a daily basis—it doesn’t feel that way. It feels the opposite. It makes me feel strong. 

Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding. It gets tiresome, sometimes, to deal with the men that I deal with, and it frustrates me that the patience and understanding aren’t really a two-way street. I’m expected to be inherently “better” in some ways, more immune to proclivities, because I am a woman—a belief that has no logical basis in reality. But it certainly feels like a form of strength and it gives me a sense of pride.

I will also continue to argue, as I have done in the past, that people are a tradeoff and men like this have certain upsides that are difficult to find in today’s society. They take forming attachments very seriously, so you don’t have to worry about them love-bombing you and then promptly ghosting you the way some of the more “modern” men seem to have a tendency to do. They also feel a firm sense of responsibility and obligation toward a woman—you never have to worry about them waking up one morning and telling you that they’re moving to Thailand for a year to find themselves and that you’re both just on different journeys right now. 

I went to a book reading for Helen Fielding’s long-awaited third installment to the series, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and someone asked her why she (spoiler alert) killed off Mark Darcy. “I needed Bridget to be single,” she responded, “And Mark would never leave her.” There’s a sense of security to men like this that isn’t all that easy to find these days. 

Still, I find myself wondering how much of their actions comes from a place of love and how much of it stems from a sense of obligation, and whether or not there’s a difference between the two. 

I watched another movie recently that gave me pause: My Fair Lady. I’ve always adored Henry Higgins, so I texted a friend joking that it seems like my love affair with emotionally stunted, confirmed bachelors who try to mold a woman into their version of “the perfect woman” began early. Men like the ones I’ve described tend to get a lot of flak for being very controlling, and it is–truth be told—more than a little depressing to feel you will only be loved if you are a very certain way all the time. But I don’t mind it so much so long as we’re aligned on what that vision is, because I welcome any extra motivation to be my best self. I think there’s strength in that, too, because God knows it takes a lot of effort. 

And—try as I might—I can’t help but always find the ending scene romantic. Eliza leaves, and Higgins sings a song called “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which seems to be the closest to admitting that he loves her that he can manage. He walks into his drawing room, and puts on an early recording of her because he misses her. She walks in at one moment, turns it off and says the last line out loud. “Eliza?” he rises from his chair, then settles back in, puts his hat over his face, and says, “Where the devil are my slippers?” 

It’s pathetic, really, the sexist statement and the fragility of his masculinity–the fact that he can’t simply tell her how happy he is that she’s back, and needs to lower his hat in order to hide his emotional response. It shows a lot of strength and self-esteem—I think—that she recognizes precisely what’s happening. It’s not a healthy form of love, for sure. But it is, nonetheless, love. 
    [post_title] => Mark Darcy and the allure of taciturn men who love with actions instead of words
    [post_excerpt] => Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding.
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Mark Darcy and the allure of taciturn men who love with actions instead of words

by Diana Bruk

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    [post_content] => Is Melinda Gates trying to get ahead of uncomfortable revelations about her husband's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

When I read the news last week that Bill and Melinda Gates were divorcing after 27 years of marriage, my first reaction was empathy. The pandemic has been hard on all couples, I thought, even the ones who happened to have been quarantining in a 66,000-square-foot compound with 18.75 bathrooms called Xanadu 2.0. Melinda told The New York Times in October 2020 that being stuck working from home with her husband, after years of frenetic traveling, “was a piece that I think we hadn’t really individually prepared for quite as much.” This was somewhat relatable. No matter the size of your home, there is such a thing as too much togetherness. 

But then there were questions. Foremost among them: Why now? After all, thanks in part to the efforts of the Gates Foundation, which has donated more than $1.75 billion to Covid-19 research, 130 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the vaccine. As we approach herd immunity, we are slowly emerging from our pandemic hidey holes. Businesses are reopening. People are talking about wearing jeans again. Couldn’t the world’s biggest philanthropists just carry on living separate lives, united by their passion for giving back? We already know that Melinda is pretty laissez faire when it comes to her marriage, allowing Bill to vacation every year with his ex-girlfriend. The couple owns a far-flung real estate portfolio with at least seven properties totaling $170 million. Melinda could take up residence at Xanadu 2.0 while Bill could stay in their $12.5 million home in Palm Desert, California, from whence he signed the divorce papers. Or they could resume traveling around the world, perhaps staying at the Four Seasons, which they own a large stake in through Bill’s firm Cascade Investment LLC. 

A few days after the divorce announcement, we started to get a possible answer to the timing question. The Daily Beast broke the news that Melinda was reportedly “furious” after her husband took her to meet with Jeffrey Epstein at his Upper East Side mansion back in September 2013. The anger is understandable given that one of Melinda’s top priorities at the Gates Foundation is to invest in gender equality and women’s empowerment—and Jeffrey Epstein at the time was a registered sex offender. The Wall Street Journal followed up this week, reporting that Melinda met with divorce lawyers in 2019 after the New York Times published a story detailing the extent of her husband’s relationship with Epstein. The Times reported that Gates sent an effusive email to his colleagues upon meeting Epstein, describing his lifestyle as “very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” The Gates PR machine then went into full-on spin mode, telling the Times that Gates “was referring only to the unique décor of the Epstein residence.” Ah, yes, the unique décor! 

I remember reading that Times article in 2019 and shaking my head. Did I think it was creepy that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. Did I think that Bill Gates was raping girls who Epstein had trafficked? No, I did not. 

Given his wealth, power and involvement in scientific pursuits, Bill Gates has been a magnet for truly wacko conspiracy theories, such as the idea that he wants to use vaccine shots as a vehicle to insert trackable microchips into people’s bodies. Believers in QAnon, the umbrella conspiracy theory that holds that there exists a secret child trafficking ring run by Satan-worshipping Democrats—including President Biden, Hillary Clinton and George Soros–have been having a field day with the divorce announcement, speculating in chat forums that Bill Gates is either about to be arrested or that the breakup is intended to somehow cover up for the fact that both Gateses are dead (don’t ask). I can now see how these types of bonkers narratives had the unusual effect of pushing my mind toward the exact opposite explanation, which is that Bill Gates is a brilliant but oblivious man who, like so many others, unwittingly got swept up in Epstein’s net. 

But now I’m not so sure. Is it possible that Bill Gates’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein went beyond fundraising for philanthropic projects? It is. And the thing that makes me think it is possible is the extent to which Gates downplayed his links to Epstein, both to the press and, apparently, to his wife. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal tied to a Netflix documentary about Gates, he denied having any sort of relationship with the pedophile financier, saying “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that.” This turned out to be a big lie: Not only had the two men met many times over the years, but the Times report revealed that Gates flew on Epstein’s Gulfstream plane, known as “the Lolita Express” from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach in 2013. The New Yorker also reported that Gates made a $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab in 2014, a donation that was said to be directed by Epstein. 

At the heart of any good conspiracy theory is a twisted kernel of truth. Could it be that there is, in fact, an elite illuminati-like pedophile ring running the world–except that, instead of being controlled by prominent Democrats, the cabal transcends any particular political ideology? If that turns out to be the case, then is it even remotely possible that Bill Gates, in collaboration perhaps with two other powerful Bills—Barr and Clinton—may have conspired to have Jeffrey Epstein murdered in jail, so that their involvement is kept secret? When my brain goes down these (admittedly speculative) rabbit holes, I start to feel like I’m getting swallowed up in the Matrix, until I remember that it’s one thing to be running around spouting nonsense about Pizzagate and frazzledrip, and quite another to see evidence of an actual conspiracy unfolding before your eyes. Because something here really does not make sense. 

We need answers as to why Bill Gates, the fourth-richest man on earth who runs the biggest charitable organization in history, needed Epstein’s “help” with philanthropy, even after his wife expressed serious reservations about interacting with him. We need to understand why the Gates Foundation’s former science adviser, a man named Boris Nikolic, was named executor of Epstein’s estate before he died. We need to know how Melanie Walker, a longtime adviser to Epstein, came to be part of Gates’s inner circle. Then there’s the question of Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, who, according to Vanity Fair, palled around with Epstein in Palm Beach and Manhattan and was accused by Alan Dershowitz of having sex with one of Epstein’s underage victims. We need to understand why Bill Gates brushed off all these intersections between his orbit and Epstein’s, not to mention why he suddenly stepped down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway last year. 

And before we let Melinda Gates off the hook, we need to understand what she knew and when she knew it. Any evidence of complicity should disqualify her from being an advocate for women and girls. 

Hopefully soon, we will get some answers. Last summer, Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested at a 156-acre property in New Hampshire and on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan announced that the trial will begin after Thanksgiving. It was originally slated to commence in July, but her lawyers argued that they needed more time to prepare after a new sex-trafficking charge was filed this year that alone carries a maximum sentence of 40 years. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried, it is Ghislaine Maxwell. Indeed, she may already be cooperating with investigators in exchange for leniency. 

Suddenly, the carefully coordinated Gates divorce announcement makes more sense as a calculated PR move on the part of Melinda to get ahead of the Epstein narrative and distance herself from its stench. If you are trying to run a foundation that advocates for women and girls around the world, being tied to a global child sex-trafficking ring is not exactly great for the brand. 

There’s no question that the $50 billion Gates Foundation, in its 21 years of existence, has done a lot of good work. Because of their work, the incidence of polio around the world has declined by 99 percent. They have prevented 1.5 billion cases of malaria and donated billions to fighting HIV and AIDS. And of course, the coronavirus. But we cannot ignore the fact that the Foundation has also helped launder Bill Gates’s reputation, transforming him from a ruthless Robber Baron 2.0 who built his success by crushing the competition (and foisting a sub-optimal product on consumers), into a champion of public health, an expert on climate change, a thought leader for the Davos set. As Anand Giridharadas put it in his book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.

We as a society need to question whether relying on the voluntary largesse of an ascendant billionaire class is the best way to solve the world’s problems. Why should the takers, the hoarders of the world’s wealth, be presumed to be experts on giving? The Gates divorce reminds us that it might be more effective, more conducive to a thriving democracy, to simply raise their taxes. 
    [post_title] => What did Melinda Gates know—and when did she know it?
    [post_excerpt] => If you are trying to run a foundation that advocates for women and girls around the world, being tied to a global child sex-trafficking ring is not exactly great for the brand. 
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What did Melinda Gates know—and when did she know it?

by Rachel Dodes

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