Law

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    [post_content] => On the sad anniversary of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, The Conversationalist's Executive Director has assembled a list of the best analysis she's read in the U.S.'s mainstream media. 

On the one-year anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, I've assembled some of the best reporting and analysis reflecting on how the United States got to this point, and what comes next. The articles cover a range of topics and points of view, from Osita Nwanevu's systemic analysis to Margaret Sullivan's media criticism. Rebecca Solnit and Barton Gellman offer eloquent explainers on authoritarian lies, with Solnit's essay looking backwards to Birtherism, and Gellman looking ahead to 2024. Jennifer Rubin has an interesting read on how to fight her former party's extremism, and Vice has disturbing updates on Proud Boys embedding themselves in local community organizing. 

Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

Rebecca Solnit’s New York Times essay on truth, lies, and authoritarian control is brilliant; George Orwell would have been proud. She begins by tracing the series of GOP lies leading from the Tea Party to Trumpism. Delving into notions of gullibility, cynicism and true belief, Solnit paraphrases Hannah Arendt: "among those gulling the public, cynicism is a stronger force; among those being gulled, gullibility is, but the two are not so separate as they might seem." Lucky for us, Solnit is comfortable with grey areas. Where many writers might be tempted to let the deluded off the hook, especially anti-vaxers now dying from COVID, Solnit digs into their complicity, "gullibility means you believe something because someone else wants you to. You’re buying what they’re selling." 

'Trump's next coup has already begun'

Barton Gellman’s piece for The Atlantic is a strong summary of the ongoing threat to the 2024 election; he explains why and how January 6 was a practice run for future GOP violence. This is a clear and cogent breakdown of how the Big Lie incites the GOP base to violently overthrow democracy. It is an urgent call to action, but also self-conscious about not entering crisis-mode sooner. Take, for example, the source with a "judicious temperament" who "cautioned against hyperbole" last year but is now on board with U.S. democracy's death throes. The extended illness isn't examined. 

“Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs," writes Gellman. But he shouldn’t take pride in being a latecomer to an obvious crisis. There are entire fields dedicated to studying authoritarianism, extremism, propaganda, and personality cults. Those scholars haven't been silent. If being wrong is reasonable, I was a hysterical alarmist, because when Trump first ran I said he would never leave office peacefully, that it was the end of elections as we know them, and that his party-cult base would back him. 

If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, addresses the mainstream media's failure to make the threat to democracy THE story. Why aren't more outlets openly pro-democracy? Quoting Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Thomas Zimmer, both prominent scholars of authoritarianism, Sullivan argues that the piecemeal approach to covering democratic decline is failing. While the media is finally taking note (she provides plenty of links to further reading) as we approach the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, most are still failing to center the most important political story in decades. Sullivan encourages publications and editors to take a stand for democracy. "Don’t be afraid to stand for something as basic to our mission as voting rights, governmental checks and balances, and democratic standards. In other words, shout it from the rooftops. Before it’s too late."

Trump isn't the only one to blame for the Capitol Riot

In an essay for The New York Times, Osita Nwanevu argues persuasively that the American political system is to blame for the structural advantages that bred Republican entitlement to power. Yes, January 6 was an attack on our democratic institutions, but "our institutions also helped produce that violent outburst by building a sense of entitlement to power within America’s conservative minority." Citing a laundry list of undemocratic institutions and rules, including the Electoral College, stacked courts, and the Senate filibuster, Nwanevu takes issue with the outsized political power of rural voters in sparsely populated states. Structural advantages insulate Republican demagoguery from criticism, radicalizing the party faster in the name of patriotism. Meanwhile, Democrats are still reluctant to consider systemic reforms that would help address the imbalance. 

Opinion: Polling on Jan. 6 shows the vast majority of Americans aren’t crazy

Jennifer Rubin, a formerly conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wants to look on the bright side of the fact that the majority of Republicans believe the election was stolen and that Democrats are illegitimately in control. She encourages Biden and the Department of Justice to be more outspoken, and connects Christian nationalism to the insurrection, noting the Christian symbols at the insurrection, a topic The Conversationalist has covered extensively. Being Jennifer Rubin, she also wants to build out the law enforcement capacity to deal with the threat, but fails to mention rising extremism within those institutions.

The Proud Boys Changed Tactics After Jan. 6. We Tracked Their Activity.

Vice reports on how the extremist Proud Boys retreated from the national stage after January 6 to focus on local organizing. There was some speculation that the Proud Boys were going to collapse after two major events—nearly 50 of them faced federal charges, and a report showed that their "chairman" was an informant for the feds. But they did not collapse. Instead, they took a three month break and then began embedding themselves further in local communities across the country. Since then they've joined anti-vax, anti-CRT groups showing up at school board and city council meetings, and made an effort to blend in with local far-right activism. As a result, their base of support has grown. 
    [post_title] => Media roundup: how should we analyze the impact of last year's attempted coup?
    [post_excerpt] => On the sad anniversary of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, Anna Lind-Guzik has assembled a list of the best analysis she's read in the U.S.'s mainstream media. 
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Media roundup: how should we analyze the impact of last year’s attempted coup?

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Pro-choice Americans need to stop deferring to institutions that don't represent them and start organizing. 

I was 15 in October 1998 when an anti-abortion zealot murdered Dr. Barnett Slepian, a doctor who performed abortions in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. A married father of four, Dr. Slepian had just returned home from his synagogue, where he’d attended a memorial service for his father. It was a Friday evening and he was standing in his kitchen heating split-pea soup in the microwave when the sniper hiding in his backyard shot him in the chest.

I did not know Dr. Slepian, but my family knew people who did. I also knew that two of his young sons were in the room when he was shot. That detail haunted me the most. My father is not a doctor, but he is a kind, caring, socially conscious Jewish man who believes strongly in a pregnant person’s right to end a pregnancy. I adore my father and the thought of two children younger than I was at the time witnessing the sudden, violent death of theirs was hard to bear. Even at 15 I knew that Dr. Slepian’s life had been a full one cut brutally short—one on which many other people, including his children, had depended. What he did with it helped fully formed adult women live theirs. It was the first time I realized that caring for vulnerable women could get you killed.

The U.S. Supreme Court is, following its December 1 hearing about the legality of Mississippi’s most recent abortion ban, widely expected to overturn or gut Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that formalized a pregnant woman’s human right to end her pregnancy. For nearly 50 years, Roe has prevented states from banning abortion at any time before fetal viability outside the womb. This suggests (a) that a woman has more rights than an incubator; and (b) that a person who exists—one with hopes, dreams, relationships, and obligations—matters more than one who does not.

Reversing or substantially weakening Roe would flip that formula and reduce women from fully fledged people to single-purpose objects. It would make obtaining an abortion a dangerous, degrading, and difficult-to-impossible undertaking for millions of women. At least 21 states will ban or severely restrict abortion virtually overnight if the Court dismantles Roe. Those who believe that forcing a woman to undergo pregnancy and labor against her will is a uniquely misogynistic form of torture are understandably alarmed. A right that’s been under threat for decades is still a right. Abortion bans harm women and their children and terrorize anyone who tries to help them. Overturning Roe would restructure American society for decades to come by forcing into existence millions of children, many of whom will not be adequately cared for.

As a result of laws and policies that limit or ban access to medical terminations, women in the U.S. and parts of Europe are today in greater danger of being prosecuted, punished, or allowed to die horribly from being denied an abortion than they are of being harmed by the procedure itself.

Shockingly, the prevailing response from legacy media outlets in the U.S. has been terrifyingly passive and fatalistic—heavy on doom and gloom and light on practical solutions. Pro-choice voters are being told what we have been told in every election cycle since at least the 1980s: that our most fundamental rights are hanging in the balance and voting has never mattered more. Rarely do liberal columnists remind faithful Democratic voters that our loyalty has been rewarded with the most reactionary Court and the direst threat to Roe in decades. House Democrats did manage to pass a bill in late September that would enshrine the protections guaranteed by Roe in federal law. But thanks to antiquated procedural rules like the filibuster, which President Biden and Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been reluctant to eliminate, there’s virtually no chance of passing it in the Senate. Despairing references to The Handmaid’s Tale and the fact that women will soon be legally reduced to “vessels” abound.

This despair is often cloaked in gallows humor, and there is a dark comedy to the whole situation: imagine living in a country where women can do anything—vote, live alone, drive a car, buy a house, get a divorce, become a Supreme Court justice—and still be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, despite the availability of pills that can safely and easily end an early pregnancy in the privacy of one’s home. The most privileged women are the least likely to be denied this right. Women of means, who are used to living freely, will continue to do so. Those who lack money, child care, the ability to travel, supportive partners or family, understanding bosses, and/or other forms of support will suffer even more. But what can we do? First Trump, then the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, then COVID, then Amy Coney Barrett, and now this. Given that the right controls the Court, we’re basically doomed, the thinking seems to go. Now get out there and vote Democratic in the midterms!

It’s time to acknowledge that this playbook has failed women for decades. If I were a theist I would consider freedom from forced pregnancy and labor a God-given right, as many deeply religious people do. Just as Black people have always been full human beings with inalienable rights to life and liberty, regardless of what the Court has, at various times, decreed, those with the power to bring forth life have an inherent right to decide whether and under what circumstances to use it. These rights cannot be revoked by judicial fiat; we should stop behaving as if they can. Six judges cannot strip us of a right that exists whether or not they recognize it.

Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start confronting state power, as Irish women did in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did in 2020, and as women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries did in 2021—in response to far graver threats to their humanity. Even in the U.S., where abortion is restricted but legal, women have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. Over the last decade or so Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has helped liberalize abortion laws throughout the region “with aggressive campaigns and mass popular protests organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights,” as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.

The pro-choice movement in the United States is comparatively piecemeal and diffuse, given the country’s size and diversity, and far less effective than it should be. The 2017 Women’s March, which was described at the time as the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history, was the last time U.S. women protested sexist oppression en masse. But while I saw plenty of signs referring to abortion rights, the women’s march was not specifically or exclusively about reproductive justice; it was a general expression of rage at Trump’s election. The largest abortion rights demonstration in the U.S. in the last 20 years was the April 2004 March for Women’s Lives, which drew hundreds of thousands of people (organizers put the number at over a million).

There will almost certainly be large street protests in June, when the Court is expected to issue its response. But we cannot wait until then to defend these rights. “I think it's going to mobilize people to go to the polls,” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently said, referring to the impact the Court’s expected ruling could have on the 2022 midterms. “You will see an outcry like you've never seen before.” About seven months after the 2004 march, George W. Bush, whose policies had prompted it, was reelected by a clear margin, winning with over three million votes more than his Democratic rival, John Kerry.

In other words, while anger motivated American women to show up for a large demonstration, it did not drive them to sweep Bush out of office or defend abortion rights against further attack. This is partly because U.S. women’s attitudes toward abortion do not differ substantially from men’s; pro-choice Americans, including men, need to defend these rights more vigorously. Voting is not enough. U.S. voters swept Trump out of office in 2020, but only after he had packed the Court with far-right ideologues. And in the absence of major structural reforms—expanding or abolishing the Supreme Court, eliminating the filibuster and passing federal voting rights legislation, amending the Constitution, abolishing the Senate—which many organizers are demanding but the Democratic Party has so far been unwilling to do, we cannot vote our way out of the devastation that will result if Roe is gutted.

There are a number of ways to help:


Although medication abortion has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for over 20 years, the agency continues to restrict one of the medications, mifepristone, for reasons that have more to do with politics than safety. According to Carrie N. Baker, who chairs the American Studies department and teaches courses on gender, law and public policy at Smith College, abortion medications are “safer than Tylenol” and “six times safer than Viagra,” which is commonly prescribed and easy to purchase online.

“The Supreme Court doesn’t get the last word on this,” Brown told me by phone. She mentioned the abortion rights bill Democrats passed in the House and could, in theory, pass in the Senate. “Technology has outstripped the anti-abortion strategy,” she added. Women in countries that criminalize abortion have known for years how to end pregnancies safely; according to Brown, pharmacy techs in Brazil discovered that misoprostol could be used to induce abortion when they were warned not to handle the drug while pregnant. “There’s never been a better time to have an at-home abortion than now,” Brown said. “In the 1960s we faced butchery, and that is completely unnecessary at this stage because the pills are widely available overseas.” The FDA suspended rules barring doctors from mailing the abortion pill to patients due to COVID.

On December 16 the agency announced that it would allow doctors to send the pill by mail on a permanent basis—a victory for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the restrictions in court, and one that will enable many more doctors to prescribe the drugs and many more women to order them online and receive them by mail. But over a dozen Republican-controlled states have already passed laws restricting access to the pills, including by outlawing delivery by mail. A Texas law that went into effect on December 2 bans prescribing abortion pills online and mailing them to patients in the state. Providers who break it could be jailed or fined up to $10,000.

Regardless of how the Court rules, women will keep getting abortions, as they did before and after abortion was criminalized in the U.S. and before Roe. There will be protests and marches and underground networks and sympathetic providers willing to break what they know to be unjust laws. Those who refuse to be bullied into abandoning their patients will be threatened, prosecuted, jailed, or worse.

That is why we cannot afford resignation or childlike deference to institutions that have outlived their usefulness, like the Supreme Court. An unelected, unrepresentative, and thoroughly politicized entity willing to endanger pregnant women, their children, and abortion providers has no moral authority. We are not vessels or chattel; we are people, with lives as real and complicated and meaningful to our families and communities as those of any other human being. Reactionary judges are not just threatening choice or women’s health care or a specific medical procedure; they are calling into question our fundamental humanity. There is no reason, especially in the age of the abortion pill, to sit back and let them. There will always be disagreement on the morality of abortion. But the personhood of women and those who care for them is not up for debate.
    [post_title] => Women are people, no matter what the Supreme Court says
    [post_excerpt] => Anyone serious about defending the rights and dignity of all women needs to stop mourning and start organizing.
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Women are people, no matter what the Supreme Court says

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => Maxwell's defense team is expected to claim her accusers have faulty memories and that they are money-grubbing whores. 

When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested by the FBI in the summer of 2020, the victims of Jeffrey Epstein rejoiced: “[I]t truly means that the justice system didn’t forget about us,” one of them, Jennifer Araoz, said at the time.

The victims were forgotten in 2008, when Epstein was granted a sweetheart non-prosecution deal without the knowledge of their attorneys. They were forgotten again a year later when Epstein got out of jail after serving just 13 months and quickly resumed his activities as a philanthropist, surrounded by the world’s most powerful people and institutions. They were forgotten yet again when Epstein was left alone and unmonitored in his prison cell, a situation which led to his death. Now, the trial of Epstein’s longtime companion and accused co-conspirator represented a chance for these women, abused as teens, to finally witness some semblance of accountability for crimes which have been downplayed or downright ignored by authorities for more than a decade. 

A 59-year-old Oxford-educated former British socialite, daughter of disgraced and deceased media mogul Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine has been charged with recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse. She is accused of participating in the abuse herself. Arrested on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019, Epstein died in his cell in the Metropolitan Correction Center of New York City on August 19, 2019; the death was officially ruled a suicide, but some people, including me, still have questions. Whatever the cause, his death was a tough break for Maxwell: She was widely expected to flip on him in exchange for leniency. Now she has absolutely no leverage, and faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted on all counts. She has pleaded not guilty to all of them. 


Originally scheduled for the summer of 2021, the Maxwell trial was pushed into the fall after the prosecution filed a superseding indictment in April containing more serious charges and adding an additional victim. So, after so many delays and false starts, it’s fair to say that as Maxwell entered the federal courtroom in downtown Manhattan on November 29 wearing a cream cashmere sweater, there was plenty of pent-up anticipation about what was going to transpire. I fully expected that this story, involving obscene wealth, power and a child sex-trafficking ring, would dominate the headlines, and that the trial would contain shocking revelations. But neither of those predictions has come to pass.  

Things started out on an exciting note, when Maxwell had the audacity to sketch the sketch artist who was sketching her, a visual metaphor for the defense team’s defiant DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) strategy. Power lawyer Bobbi Sternheim came out guns blazing, stating in her opening arguments that her client was being used as a scapegoat to pay for the crimes of her dead boss: “Ever since Eve was accused of tempting Adam with the apple, women have been blamed for the bad behavior of men,” she said, ignoring the fact that there is plenty of bad behavior here to go around. Over the course of the next 10 days in court, the prosecution called about 20 witnesses—including four victims who told harrowing stories of being befriended as teens by Maxwell and Epstein, who promised mentorship and financial support, only to betray them with unwanted and traumatic sexual encounters. Then on Friday, the prosecution summoned their star witness: Annie Farmer, whose sister–also an Epstein victim–went to the FBI back in 1996 to report Epstein’s abuse. A full 25 years later, Annie, a self-possessed 42-year-old psychologist, took the stand and told jurors of a nightmarish visit to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, where he and Maxwell molested her. “I felt sick to my stomach,” she told Assistant U.S. Attorney Lara Pomerantz.   

I also felt sick to my stomach, fearing yet another miscarriage of justice when, following Farmer’s emotional testimony, the government shocked everyone—including Judge Alison Nathan—by resting its case two weeks earlier than anticipated. An early wrap-up would have been exciting if the prosecution, led by 32-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey—daughter of former FBI director James Comey—had nailed its case. By all accounts, however, it did not. 



Despite the strong testimony from the victims, the government’s case was weaker than expected, their young lawyers outmatched by Maxwell’s high-priced, seasoned team and unprepared for their counterarguments, according to media reports. For example, Maxwell’s lawyers tried to undermine the claims of one victim, Jane Doe, who said that she had flown with Maxwell on Epstein’s plane, arguing that Epstein had an assistant with the same first name—even thought that particular assistant didn’t work for Epstein at the same time, or even in the same decade. The prosecution took days to provide an adequate rebuttal, underscoring its lack of nimbleness.

But it’s possible that all is not lost. Cameras and recording devices are not permitted in federal court, so all the information about the Maxwell trial is filtered through the media’s lens. Expectations are high and impressions can be distorted, particularly since it feels as though this case got overshadowed by a mountain of other equally disturbing news, ranging from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision to the steady drumbeat of information about the January 6 insurrection, and the trial of another high-profile woman, Elizabeth Holmes. Many have noted the similarities between Maxwell’s and Holmes’s defenses, in which they lay the blame for their alleged misdeeds on powerful men, as if “women simply don't have the agency to be true criminal masterminds,” as Salon put it.

Starting on Thursday, December 16, Maxwell’s defense team gets its chance to make their client’s case, casting doubt on the victims’ recollections. Based on their questioning of the witnesses under cross-examination, it’s clear that they will continue to paint the accusers as money-grubbing whores who are being manipulated by a platoon of greedy lawyers. It’s truly a disgusting argument, but the defense must realize that Maxwell does not have any other cards to play. One promising sign: witnesses for the defense are so embarrassed at being associated with Maxwell and Epstein that they have requested to testify under pseudonyms, a highly unusual move. The request was denied, but the sheer chutzpah of putting it in writing is rich given that an attorney for the defense “accidentally” name-checked two of the anonymous victims last week.

On Friday December 10, lawyers for Maxwell said that the defense would take just four days, possibly fewer, to present its case. That’s probably because they want to wrap up before the holidays so the jury won’t be stuck in court, resentment spilling over into their deliberations. Ghislaine’s 60th birthday happens to fall on Christmas. We will soon find out if her victims will finally be remembered, or if this lifelong bottom feeder will be given the gift of impunity. 
    [post_title] => The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell: justice delayed—and possibly denied
    [post_excerpt] => An early wrap-up of the trial would have been exciting if the prosecution, led by 32-year-old Assistant US Attorney Maurene Comey—daughter of former FBI director James Comey—had nailed its case. By all accounts, however, it did not. 
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The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell: justice delayed—and possibly denied

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => The government has recognized its error and resigned, but the women's lives are still in tatters. 

Franciska Manuputty’s ordeal with the Dutch tax authorities began in 2010, when she received notification to repay €30,000 (about US $35,000) in childcare tax benefits, to which the government alleged she had not been entitled. Manuputty, 49, is a low-income single mother of two. She was soon behind on the rent, couldn’t pay her electricity bills, and turned to a food bank to feed her family. Her daughter, now 20 years old, told her recently that as a child she had lived in constant fear of returning home from school to discover they had been evicted from their apartment. 

Manuputty is one of the victims of what the Dutch media calls the child benefits scandal. Over the course of around a decade the government falsely accused thousands of eligible families of having committed fraud and ordered them to repay childcare tax benefits to which they had, in fact, been entitled. 

A parliamentary investigation published in December 2020 found that the tax authorities had set up a child benefits system with bureaucratic rules so rigid that even the smallest administrative error in filling out forms caused the system to flag beneficiaries, who were then pursued by the courts and forced to repay all the money they had received—plus fines. The total number of victims is not yet clear; but based on a parliamentary investigation and the number of people who applied for the initial compensation of €30,000 (about $35,000), at least 35,000 people have been affected. 

The fallout from the scandal led to the government’s resignation in January 2021. 

Families that were forced to repay tens of thousands of euros faced bankruptcies, job losses, forced sale of houses, homelessness, divorce—even suicide. Several families saw their children removed by child protection authorities, on the basis that they were no longer able to care for them after losing their homes and financial stability. 

The €30,000 compensation doesn’t even begin to solve Manuputty’s problems. Because the tax authorities labelled her a cheat in 2009, her name is now in the system and her credit is ruined. Over the past decade all her applications for financial aid were rejected, which forced her to keep borrowing money and leave bills unpaid. She now owes €100,000 ($115,000) to various creditors. “I hold on to life for my children,” said Manuputty.

Investigative journalists discovered, via the parliamentary freedom of information act, that the algorithms had been designed to flag “cheats” based on the amount a parent received—i.e., the more benefits they received, the more likely they were to fall under suspicion. The result: the people targeted were those whose low-paid jobs made them most eligible for childcare benefits. 

A disproportionate number of people in that group were single mothers with foreign citizenship, so the algorithm de facto flagged poor women who were either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants, adding racism to the scandal.  The Ministry of Finance brought a discrimination suit against the tax authorities, but the  public prosecutor dismissed the case, saying the issue must be solved politically. Victims of the false accusations are appealing that decision. A parliamentary commission will be  appointed to investigate the matter later this year or next year. 

Via a WhatsApp group for victims of the scandal, Franciska Manuputty met Batya Brown, 35,  a part-time employee at a daycare center who is now pregnant with her fifth child. When the two were asked to address an anti-racism demonstration about their experiences they decided to collaborate on their speeches and provide one another with moral support. They were joined by Kristie Rongen, 45, a small truck driver, who had recently  confronted Prime Minister Rutte during a widely viewed live broadcast of a political TV show. 

While Rongen holds only Dutch citizenship, Batya Brown was born in Ethiopia. Manuputty’s parents are from the Maluku Islands, formerly a Dutch colony—now occupied by Indonesia. For the latter two women, their relationship with the Dutch state is informed by their ethnic identities, which is further compounded by the role that racism played in the tax scandal.

Brown was adopted as a child from Ethiopia, arriving in the Netherlands when she was six years old. Because of a bureaucratic error that she is fighting to correct, she is still ineligible for a Dutch passport. Meanwhile, in 2007 the tax authorities began demanding that she repay her benefits . The resulting financial problems forced her to move often and, while the tax authorities recently annulled her remaining debts, her struggle with the immigration authorities continues. In other words, she has been battling with both the tax authorities and the immigration office for her entire adult life.

Manuputty suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and transgenerational trauma. Her grandfather is a South Mollucan, a member of an Indonesian indigenous group that fought in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) alongside colonial forces in the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-9), then were brought to the Netherlands after the Dutch reneged on a promise to grant them territorial sovereignty. The Mollucan community feels humiliated to this day by their treatment at the hands of the Dutch. “As a victim of the child benefit scandal, I have been neglected and robbed of my dignity again,” said Manuputty, adding that she felt as though history were repeating itself.

Rongen acknowledged that she presents in her media appearances as a strong woman, which she is; but behind the scenes she is emotionally devastated. “I cry a lot, every day,” she said. Her ordeal with the tax authorities began in 2010, with her debt topping out at €92,000 ($123,000). After four years of debt counselling, the government annulled what was left of that amount and granted her compensation in December 2020. Her battle with psychological trauma is ongoing. She has dedicated herself to helping reunite parents with children they lost to foster care, a calling that provides her with a feeling of purpose. “When a mother messages me for help, I dry my eyes and get going again,” she said. In a matter-of-fact tone she added, “I would prefer not to live anymore. But what would happen to my children if I were no longer here?”

In addition to their media appearances and participation in anti-racism demonstrations earlier this year, the three women have initiated demonstrations of their own, to garner public support and amplify their demands. These include: cancellation of all the victims’ debts by the end of 2021; financial compensation of at least €1 million ($1.16 million) to each victim; and the immediate reunification of parents with children who were taken from them and put into foster care. They also want psychological support. And they want those responsible for the scandal to be brought to justice.

When the government resigned in January the women hoped the new administration would deal with the matter quickly, but they now understand the process will take years. One egregious reason for the slow pace: the commission tasked with defining the amount of compensation that each victim should receive is severely understaffed; at the current rate they will need 975 years to complete their work.

 “Applying for everything costs so much time and energy, which I would prefer to dedicate to my children,” said Batya Brown. Kristie Rongen added: “Instead of asking for more effort from the victims, they should just give every one of them half a million euros to settle the matter. Our lives have been destroyed.” 

Franciska Manuputty agrees. “I have been trying for years to regain my independence by setting up my own business,” she said, explaining that her applications for business loans have all been rejected because the “fraudster” label destroyed her credit rating. “I struggle for freedom, it’s in my genes, but I feel trapped in a prison without walls.”

The women have also reached out to other victims, organizing small events like picnics and activities for children, which they pay for via crowdfunding, just to relax and start healing together. Coming together has energized the women. “Our suffering has become visible,” said one. Then, with tears in her eyes and a voice choked with anger: “Years ago, when he was ten, eleven years old, I promised my oldest son that everything would be okay. He is 16 years old now! I am determined to keep my promise to him.” 
    [post_title] => 'I cry a lot, every day': victims of the Dutch child benefits scandal fight for compensation
    [post_excerpt] => Thousands of Dutch families were destroyed by financial hardship after the tax authorities falsely accused them of submitting fraudulent applications for childcare tax benefits, requiring them to pay back the allowances they had received in their entirety—plus fines.
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‘I cry a lot, every day’: victims of the Dutch child benefits scandal fight for compensation

by Fréderike Geerdink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deplatforming can also have a damaging impact on fragile democracies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jillian C. York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_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_content] => If your internal organs are open to legislation you are not free.

On September 1 Texas enacted a law effectively banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, dealing a body blow to the physical autonomy of half the population. In a new and vicious twist, the law incentivizes Texans to report anyone who’s had an abortion, performed or assisted someone in obtaining an abortion, or merely “intends to engage in the conduct”—even if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest—by offering them $10,000.

Much of what can be said about the law, TX SB8, has been said: It’s flatly unconstitutional; other states will use it as a template; it won’t stop abortion in Texas, only safe abortion; requiring survivors of rape and incest to carry to term pregnancies resulting from their violation is abhorrent; the law’s effect will be to deepen poverty, immiserate lives, and ruin the health of countless Texans, some of whom will no doubt die.

The Texas law is shocking and brutal. It is also a logical step in the steady, years-long erosion of reproductive rights across the United States. The patchwork of legislation, regulation, and flat out lies has done half the work simply by making abortion access confusing, chaotic, and difficult. With all the will in the world, the very young, the very poor, and the deliberately misinformed often see their luck and time run out; and where that doesn’t work, there’s always violence or the threat of violence to keep them away from abortion clinics. The goal, however, has always been not chaos but exquisite clarity: legal abortion, eliminated.

In the 48 years since the Supreme Court ruled that “a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” falls under the rubric of the 14th Amendment’s definition of privacy, the abortion argument has been presented as a binary: “life” and “choice”—i.e., between carrying a pregnancy to term or choosing a termination. Anti-abortion activists accuse those who support the right to choose of murderous intent and licentiousness; we respond with tales of medical necessity and sexual assault. “Abortion is healthcare!” we shout—because it is. Occasionally we add that “women’s rights are human rights!”—because they are, but it’s only there, with that last rallying cry, that we begin to approach the true essence of the argument.

In a democracy, individual rights and freedoms— “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for instance—are the presumed foundation on which civic life is constructed. I would submit, however, that if your internal organs are open to legislation, you are, manifestly, not free.

Roughly half of all Americans, as a class and by virtue of the organs with which they were born, are judged not to have the bodily autonomy inalienable to the other half. Should anyone in that class happen to find themselves in a physical state that precludes fertility—whether youth, age, or any other physiological limitation—that fact reflects freedom  bestowed solely by fortune’s vicissitudes. Dodging a bullet doesn’t mean there was no gun. Either your body is yours to command—or it isn’t.

Some have recently appropriated the mantra of “my body, my choice” to different ends, however, so this last point bears further clarification: Much as “Blue Lives Matter” is a spurious hijacking of the ideas animating the Black Lives Matter movement, so too is the suggestion that government-mandated vaccinations are the moral and legal equivalent of government-mandated third-party control of one’s reproductive organs. A police officer can discard the uniform; an anti-vaxer can make choices—however onerous or unpleasant—to avoid vaccination. But neither skin color nor anatomy can be discarded or sidestepped.

The need to police that dividing line informs moral panics past and present surrounding not just women in society but also the visible existence of anyone in the LGBTQ community. This is particularly the case for those who identify as trans or nonbinary. If our relative humanity and relative position to power are determined by our internal organs, I really need to know which ones you have.

All of this is true no matter where you live or under what system of government; human rights are inherent to all humans and can’t be granted, only honored or violated. Yet for half the citizens of a democracy to be fighting, still, for the most basic liberty in their own persons is particularly striking. Were we all created equal? Or are people born in male presenting bodies more equal than others?

TX SB8 at least does us the favor of stripping away any pretense of the former. By cutting off access at six weeks, far too early for the vast majority of people to know if they’re pregnant, and failing to allow exceptions for rape or incest, behind which “moderates” have long been able to hide, the law clears up any ambiguity about who owns your ovaries. It’s not you.

But while this law is the work of the Texas GOP, it’s crucial that we consider not just the actions of Republicans. The “moderates,” across the political spectrum, have also been instrumental in bringing about this dark day.

I’ve been a Democrat and activist for women’s rights since before I could vote. My party has been bartering with and chipping away at my rights and freedoms for my entire life—usually, but not always, in the name of a “Big Tent” or “bipartisanship.” Misogyny is foundational not just to the GOP but to all of American society. It is the very definition of systemic.

Misogyny expresses itself in many ways but is at base a supremacist ideology; as with any supremacist ideology, it posits a strict dichotomy: There are those to whom power naturally inheres, who may act, and those who are, by nature, acted upon.

Open rejection of cisgender heterosexuality, gender binaries, or the inherent right of men to act on the lives of women threatens the power structure on which society rests, which is why so many citizens of a purported democracy are still struggling to attain the rights that cis, straight men take for granted—and that’s before we factor in the realities of race in America. As a white, upper-middle-class, straight, cis woman, I might not enjoy genuine freedom, but if I live in Texas and need an abortion, it’ll be a lot easier for me to find and pay for a simulacrum of it than almost anyone else born with the same set of parts.

And having said all that: It’s well and good for me to argue for a more essentialist and ultimately political understanding of the fight for reproductive freedom, but at the end of the day—at the end of this and every day, for the foreseeable future—lives are being destroyed by the entire web of American anti-choice legislation. I want my country, or at least the party for which I’ve voted and knocked on doors all my life, to acknowledge that abortion is a matter of the most basic rights that inhere to all humans, but I also want them to come to the immediate aid of those now in desperate need of help.

There’s still a long fight ahead. But right now, we can at least ease the path of some of those for whom we’re fighting. Americans can demand our elected representatives take action to secure abortion rights on a federal level (starting with the Biden Administration’s newly announced suit against the State of Texas); donate to legal defense or abortion funds; act to ensure the free exchange of trustworthy information; serve as clinic escorts; or just drive a scared friend across state lines. And should Texas blink and offer compromise legislation, we must not back down.

Feminism has always been the radical notion that women are people. To deny people born with a uterus the right to make decisions about their own organs is to legislate a lie about their humanity and undermine the very idea of democracy. Our efforts to build a more perfect union can only falter, as long as half of us are not yet, truly, free.
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According to Texas law, your body doesn’t belong to you

by Emily L. Hauser

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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] => LGBT groups across the Middle East and North Africa rely on social media for networking, information, and empowerment. Now police are exploiting the platforms to arrest & detain them, often destroying their lives. 

Sarah Hegazy, an Egyptian queer feminist, raised a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo. Rania Amdouni, a Tunisian queer activist, protested deteriorating economic conditions and police brutality in Tunis. Mohamad al-Bokari, a Yemeni blogger in Saudi Arabia, declared he supported equal rights for all, including LGBT people.

The common thread in these cases is that all three were identified in social media posts, which allowed their governments to monitor their online activity and target them offline. What happened afterward ruined their lives.

In Sarah Hegazy’s now infamous photo she is hoisted on a friend’s shoulders, smiling elatedly as she waves a rainbow flag at a 2017 performance in Cairo by Mashrou’ Leila, the popular Lebanese band whose lead singer is openly gay. The photo was posted on Facebook and shared countless times, garnering thousands of hateful comments and supportive counter-messages in what became a frenzied digital debate.

Days later, the Egyptian government initiated a crackdown. Police arrested Hegazy on charges of  “joining a banned group aimed at interfering with the constitution,” along with Ahmed Alaa, who also raised the flag, and then dozens of other concertgoers. In what became a massive campaign of arrests against hundreds of people perceived as gay or transgender, Egyptian authorities created fake profiles on same-sex dating applications to entrap LGBT people, reviewed online video footage of the concert, then proceeded to round up people on the street based on their appearance.

Hegazy spoke about her post-traumatic stress after she was released on bail. She had been jailed for three months of pretrial detention, during which police tortured her with electric shocks and solitary confinement. They also incited other detainees to sexually assault and verbally abuse her. Fearing re-arrest and a prison sentence, she went into exile in Toronto, where, on June 14, 2020, she took her own life. The 30-year-old woman ended her short farewell note with the words: “To the world, you’ve been greatly cruel, but I forgive.”

Rania Amdouni was on the front line during the country-wide demonstrations in Tunisia that began in January 2021, protesting economic decline and rampant police violence. People who identified themselves as police officers took her photo at a protest, posted it on Facebook, and captioned it with her contact information and derogatory comments based on her gender expression.

Soon after, her profile was flooded with death threats, insults—including from a parliament member—and messages inciting violence against her. When police harassment extended to the street—outside restaurants she frequented and near her residence—she tried to file a complaint. At the police station, officers refused to register her complaint, then arrested her for shouting.

Tunisian security forces also targeted other LGBT activists at the protests with arrests, threats to rape and kill, and physical assault. LGBT people were smeared on social media and “outed”—their identities and personal information exposed without their consent. The offline consequences were catastrophic—people lost their jobs, were expelled from their homes, and even fled the country.

Amdouni was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine. Though released upon appeal, she reported suffering acute anxiety and depression as well as continued harassment online and in the street.

Mohamed al-Bokari traveled on foot from Yemen to Saudi Arabia after armed groups threatened to kill him due to his online activism and gender non-conformity. While living in Riyadh as an undocumented migrant, he posted a video on Twitter declaring his support for LGBT rights; this prompted homophobic outrage from the Saudi authorities and the public. Subsequently, security forces arrested him.

He was charged with promoting homosexuality online and “imitating women,” sentenced to 10 months in prison, and faced deportation to Yemen upon release.  Security officers held him in solitary confinement for weeks, subjected him to a forced anal exam, and repeatedly beat him to compel him to “confess that he is gay.” Al-Bokari is now safely resettled, with outside help, but remains isolated from his community and cannot safely return home.

Across the Middle East and North Africa region, LGBT people and groups advocating for LGBT rights have relied on digital platforms for empowerment, access to information, movement building, and networking. In contexts  in which governments prohibit LGBT groups from operating, activist organizing happens mainly online, to expose anti-LGBT violence and discrimination. In some cases, digital advocacy has contributed to reversing injustices against LGBT individuals. But governments have been paying attention, and they have a crucial advantage—the law is on their side.

Most countries in the  region have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Even in the countries that do not—Egypt, ironically, is one of them—spurious “morality laws,” debauchery and prostitution laws are weaponized to target LGBT people.

When I was documenting the systematic torture of LGBT people in Egypt’s prisons, the targeting pattern was unmistakable: Egyptian authorities relied on digital evidence to track down, arrest, and prosecute LGBT people. People who had been detained told me that police officers, unable to find “evidence” when searching their phones at the time of arrest, downloaded same-sex dating apps on their phones and uploaded pornographic photos to justify keeping them in detention. The cases I documented suggest a policy coordinated by the Egyptian government online and offline, to persecute LGBT people. One police officer told a man I interviewed that his entrapment and arrest were part of an operation to “clean the streets of faggots.”

In recent years, government digital surveillance has gained traction as a method to quell free expression and silence opponents. Concurrently, the application of anti-LGBT laws has extended to online spaces—regardless of whether same-sex acts occur—chilling even the digital discussion of LGBT issues.

The consequences of digital surveillance and online discrimination spiked for LGBT people just as the Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures closed down groups that had offered safe refuge, diminished existing communal safety nets, threatened already dire employment and health access, and forced individuals to endure often abusive environments.

In Morocco, a campaign of “outing” emerged in April 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ordinary citizens created fake accounts on same-sex dating apps and endangered users by circulating their private information, alarming vulnerable groups. LGBT people, expelled from their homes by their families during a country-wide lockdown, had nowhere to go.

Activist organizations in the region play a significant role in navigating these threats and responding to LGBT people’s needs, regularly calling upon digital platforms to remove content that incites violence and to protect users. Yet in most of the region, these organizations are also hobbled by intimidation and government interference.

In Lebanon, for example, a gender and sexuality conference, held annually since 2013, had to be moved abroad in 2019 after a religious group on Facebook called for the organizers’ arrest and the cancellation of the conference for “inciting immorality.” General Security Forces shut down the 2018 conference and indefinitely denied  non-Lebanese LGBT activists who attended the conference permission to re-enter the country. The crackdown signaled the shrinking space for LGBT activism in a country which used to be known as a port in a storm for human rights defenders from the Arabic-speaking world.

These are not isolated incidents in each country. When state-led, they often reflect government strategies to digitalize attacks against LGBT people and justify their persecution, especially under the pretext of responding to ongoing crises. It is no coincidence that oppressive governments in varied contexts across the region are threatened by online activism — because it works.

Exposing these abusive patterns highlights the urgency of decriminalizing same-sex relations and gender variance in the region. Instead of criminalizing the existence of LGBT people and targeting them online, governments should safeguard them from digital attacks and subsequent threats to their basic rights, livelihoods, and bodily autonomy.

Meanwhile, digital platforms have a responsibility to prevent online spaces from becoming a realm for state-sponsored repression. Corporations that produce these technologies need to engage meaningfully with LGBT people in the development of policies and features, including by employing them as engineers and in their policy teams, from design to implementation.
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‘Clean the streets of faggots’: governments in the Middle East & North Africa target LGBT people via social media

by Rasha Younes

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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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    [post_excerpt] => The former comedian is out of jail, but his own sworn deposition confirms that he is a rapist.
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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] => For corporate loggers, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

Holly Friesen has spent most of her life documenting nature’s beauty. The Montreal-based landscape artist recently spent some time in British Columbia as the Artist in Residence at Eden Grove on Vancouver Island, and was awe-struck by the stunning ancient forest.

“The air was thick with moisture and dense silence and the forest was dripping with a thousand shades of green,” she said. “Giant cedars, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce were thrumming with life, some of them 1,000 years old and more.”

The Eden Grove protection camp, established in 2020 to prevent road building by the Teal-Jones logging corporation, is five minutes from the residency. The corporation is currently locked in a months-long dispute with forest protectors at Fairy Creek, a nearby old-growth watershed.

Moved by the forest’s beauty, Friesen auctioned off a large painting she made of Eden Grove, with all the money going toward the Fairy Creek blockades. “These forests help us to remember who we are and where we come from,” she says. “Their protection for future generations is essential. This is sacred land.”

[caption id="attachment_2829" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Amy Iredale dwarfed by one of the ancient trees at Fairy Creek.[/caption]

Some, however, don’t see anything holy here. For them, millennia-old forests are just land that should be exploited and trees that can be replanted.

A growing environmental movement

At the heart of the Fairy Creek dispute is, on one hand, a logging company that wants to exploit the land in what it claims is a sustainable way and, on the other, environmental protectors who don’t believe that profit should come at the expense of these precious ecosystems. A group that calls themselves the Rainforest Flying Squad has blockaded the watershed on unceded Pacheedaht First Nation’s territory for the past 10 months. Their goal is simple: to stop Teal-Jones from cutting down rare intact old-growth forest. Protesters have been camped here since last summer, demanding that the provincial government put an immediate end to old-growth logging and transition to an ecologically responsible forest economy.

The movement to protect these ancient forests is not new, but it was the widely shared photo of a massive, ancient spruce tree being hauled down Vancouver Island on a flatbed truck that garnered international publicity. Even those least inclined to label themselves tree-hugging environmentalists knew there was something wrong with a tree older than many of the world’s most famous historic landmarks being reduced to a lifeless stump in order to supply lumber for someone’s deck. Lorna Beecroft, the woman who took the photo and posted it on her Facebook wall, said: “It’s like watching someone shoot the last dodo.”

The international outrage attracted the support of Hollywood celebrities and activists. Marc Ruffalo and Leonardo di Caprio recently used their online platforms and considerable media clout to raise awareness. Margaret Atwood, Bryan Adams, Jane Fonda, and Greta Thunberg were among the 100 prominent people who signed a letter calling on John Horgan, the premier of British Columbia, to stop old-growth logging. The letter begins: “Some things can’t be replaced.”

The crux of the dispute

Renowned for its natural, untamed beauty, British Columbia is home to 60 million hectares of temperate coastal rainforest. The provincial government claims that 25 percent of the province’s forests are composed of old-growth trees; but the Old Growth Strategic Review, an independent study commissioned by the government in 2020, found that only 3 percent of the province is capable of supporting large trees. Within that small portion, old trees represent only 2.7 percent. Logging has cannibalized the ancient forests.

“These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old-growth forests. They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging,” concluded the authors of the report from Veridian Ecological Consulting.

[caption id="attachment_2821" align="alignleft" width="400"] Freshly cut old growth trees in the Caycuse River Valley.[/caption]

Old-growth forests cannot be replaced because replanted forests—referred to as second growth—do not recreate the rich conditions and biodiversity of the ancient trees. The study urged the government to “immediately place a moratorium on logging in ecosystems and landscapes with very little old forest.” The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs also passed a resolution last year calling on the government to do the same.

Fairy Creek’s 12.8 hectares of unlogged ancient old-growth forests are in fact extremely rare, making up less than 1 percent of what remains in the province. And yet, despite their importance and rarity, these ancient trees are still being cut down. Teal-Jones still has government approval to log in mostly old-growth forests.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia granted an injunction in April for the RCMP to come in and remove protesters and tree-sitters at a string of blockades on logging roads in the area. Over 185 people have so far been arrested, but Canada’s legacy media has given the story little coverage. Independent media outlets Ricochet and The Narwhal have filled the vacuum.

Teal-Jones has set up a roadblock of its own to block media and public access to Waterfall Camp. Reports from the frontlines and from independent media outlets confirm that the RCMP are preventing access to accredited media and legal observers, as well as Indigenous leaders on their own lands. The Canadian Association of Journalists, along with a coalition of news organizations and press freedom groups, announced last week that it’s taking the RCMP to court over its decision to restrict media access.

Chainsaw massacre

Fairy Creek is near Port Renfrew, a tiny community that touts itself as the “Tall Tree Capital of Canada.” The area includes the world’s largest Douglas fir and Canada’s largest Sitka spruce, as well as endangered animal species like Western screech owls, Northern Goshawk, and Northern Red-legged frogs. The residents have built up a recreational tourism brand with its tree tourism, a reminder that conservation and commerce can coexist successfully. With proper infrastructure and policies in place, these beautiful trees can be worth more to the local economy standing than cut down.

“I moved to BC after taking one of these big-tree tours and I live here because of their beauty,” says Michael Simkin, a lawyer originally from Montreal. “I can understand the intellectual tension between the access provided to these areas because of logging, and the consequences of logging. I understand that many people’s livelihoods depend on this industry.” Simkin insists the issue is complex and involves many angles: economic, cultural, environmental, employment, social, and climate change, as well as Indigenous land claims. “But factually speaking,” he said, “There just aren’t many of these trees left, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

It’s not hard to see why so many people are invested in protecting them. Pictures of old-growth forests are mesmerizing. The soaring height of these trees gives visitors some perspective on the tiny importance humans have on this planet. Images of massive tree trunks chopped down, with humans looking like tiny Lilliputians next to them, only add to the looming sense of devastation.

Growing resistance 

Premier Horgan promised to implement the Old Growth Strategic Review Panel’s 14 recommendations to work with Indigenous leaders and environmental organizations during his electoral campaign. More than a year later, none of those proposed changes have been fully implemented.

“In fact,” says Simkin, “old-growth logging permits have increased by close to 50 percent in the past few years.”

The government’s failure to act has sparked widespread resistance by long-standing local environmental protection agencies. Among them, the Ancient Forest Alliance, a non-profit that aims to enact province-wide legislation ending the logging of endangered old-growth trees, and Stand.earth, a Vancouver-based environmental advocacy organization. Tzeporah Berman—Stand.earth’s International Programs Director—was among the people recently arrested for defending old-growth forests near Fairy Creek headquarters.

In early June, tired of the inaction, the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht, and Huu-ay-aht First Nations formally gave notice to the province to defer old-growth logging for two years in the Fairy Creek and Central Walbran areas while the nations prepare resource management plans.

“For more than 150 years they have watched as others decided what was best for their lands, water, and people,” they wrote in their statement. The BC government, under increasing pressure, agreed on June 9 to a two-year moratorium on logging in the Fairy Creek watershed and Central Walbran areas. Land protectors see this as a good first step, but they are pushing for more permanent solutions.

We’ve lost our connection to nature 

Amy Iredale is a kindergarten teacher in Cumberland on Vancouver Island. She teaches nature kindergarten, which means that her students do at least 50 percent of their learning and growing outside in the forests surrounding the schools. She has spent time at the blockades and has also raised awareness and funds for those on the front lines.

Seeing the area through the eyes of children has given her a newfound appreciation for the forests. “Children have this innate connection to the natural world around them that so many of us adults have lost,” she says. “Spend a day in the forest with a five-year-old and you will notice and learn more than you have in a long time. This connection, for whatever reason, is severed as we grow up.”

Iredale and her class spend most of their time in their Cumberland second-growth community forest, a forest that was protected after millions of dollars of fundraising and decades of community love and support.

“This is a community that was built on coal mining and logging,” she explains, “but they also understand that forests provide much more value standing, they are not anti-logging, they’re pro-balance.”

This great, big, interconnected world

Ross Reid, an outdoor adventure sports filmmaker, runs a popular website, Nerdy About Nature, where he combines his passion for nature with his storytelling skills. In his videos, Reid educates and motivates people to protect their surroundings. He believes that it’s possible to be both pro-logging and pro-environment. The fight isn’t “loggers vs. environmentalists” but “people versus systemic wealth, power and greed.” The goal, he says, should be to create sustainable forest management with Indigenous and local communities for the long-term benefit of everyone.

Reid emphasizes that, beyond their beauty, old-growth forests are vital for mitigating climate-related disasters like flooding, droughts, fires, and heatwaves. Clearcutting exacerbates heatwaves and increases the number and size of forest fires. It also increases the risk of flooding, erosion, and landslides. By protecting endangered old-growth forests, restoring intact forests, and reforming forest management, the government can support the health and safety of communities by mitigating climate-related disasters before the climate crisis worsens.

“I'd say the most crucial thing we all need to understand about these forests is that they are so much more than just the trees,” he says, when I ask what his most vital message is about Fairy Creek.

“They are complex, intricate, integrated and interconnected ecosystems that have evolved over millions and existed for thousands of years, whose functions are so far beyond the scope of our comprehension that we're only just now beginning to scratch the surface of understanding their role in the grand scheme of life on this planet. We can't even begin to understand the way that our actions will impact the rivers, the waters, the hydrological flows across both micro and macro climates for the next few thousand years to come.”

He worries that many can’t see the forest for the trees.

“Considering that our 'modern society' is only a couple hundred years old and that our calendar alone is only 2021 years old, when we cut these ecosystems down, we are literally erasing them from the planet forever, in human time-scale terms, and replacing them with tree plantations that we expect to grow back on 70-year rotations, essentially creating a cornfield where a forest used to be.”

“This,” he says, “jeopardizes the ability for life on this planet to survive— including ours.”

If you would like to add your voice to those calling for a stop to old-growth logging, Greenpeace Canada has compiled a handy list of 12 ways you can do so. You can find it here. 
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‘Irreplaceable’: the battle to save the last ancient trees of Canada’s temperate rain forest

by Toula Drimonis

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