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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman, as we turn from the Electoral College to the issue of voting from home and the question, Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic? Thats the headline of this weeks New York Times Magazine cover story.

In it, reporter Emily Bazelon writes, quote, Two-thirds of Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November, according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center. A successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called absentee balloting the terms are synonymous) than have ever done so before. Its also important to make adjustments to keep polling places open for people who dont have stable mailing addresses a group that increases as people are uprooted during an economic downturn or whose disabilities, like blindness, make it hard to fill out a ballot unassisted, she writes.

This comes as President Trumps son-in-law, senior adviser Jared Kushner, was asked by Time magazine this week if he thought the election would be held in November.

BRIAN BENNETT: Is there any scenario, including a second outbreak in the fall, where the elections move past November 3rd?

JARED KUSHNER: Thats too far in the future to tell. Nothing that Im aware of now, but, again, our focus right now is just on getting the country

BRIAN BENNETT: Well, will you commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd?

JARED KUSHNER: Its not my decision to make, so Im not sure I can commit one way or the other. But right now thats the plan.

AMY GOODMAN: Thats Jared Kushner being interviewed by Time magazines Brian Bennett. Too far in the future to tell?

Well, for more, were joined by Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Again, her cover story asks, Will Americans Lose Their Right to Vote in the Pandemic? Shes also the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School.

Also with us is Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whos quoted in the piece. Colorado is one of five states that send ballots by mail to every registered voter.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why dont you start with that, Emily Bazelon, Jared Kushner saying its too far in the future to tell whether the elections will be held in November?

EMILY BAZELON: So, Congress passed a law in 1845 setting the date of the election on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Its very precise. It would take both houses of Congress to change that law. It has nothing to do with Jared Kushner. And I assume that he didnt know anything about that when he tried to answer that question.

AMY GOODMAN: So, lets talk about your piece. You begin in Wisconsin, that amazing moment. Explain what happened with that primary.

EMILY BAZELON: Wisconsin had a really difficult election on April 7th. There was a lot of confusion leading up to the election about whether it was going to happen. The governor tried to postpone it. He is a Democrat. The Republican-controlled Legislature said no. The governor also proposed sending absentee ballot applications to all the registered voters in the state. The Republican Legislature also refused to do that. The election challenges to the election went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, and they refused to also postpone the election, by splitting on ideological lines.

So, there were many, many more people trying to vote by mail in Wisconsin than had ever done so before. They went from 3% to over 70%. And that was really hard for local election officials to handle. They got behind on mailing out ballots. There were probably about 12,000 people who didnt get their ballots in time to vote.

The other problem was there were cities that could only open a few polling places, because a lot of their poll workers, a lot of them older, didnt feel safe working the polls. So you saw these very long lines of people trying to social distance, standing in line to vote. And unfortunately, there have been some coronavirus infections that were linked to the polls that day.

AMY GOODMAN: How many, do you expect?

EMILY BAZELON: The last time I checked, it was over 50.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to ask you about that moment in the Wisconsin primary, which really laid bare the voting crisis that coronavirus poses here. The election took place, as you said, on April 7th, after this protracted battle between the Democratic Governor Tony Evers and the states Republican Legislature. After the state Supreme Court blocked Evers ruling to delay the election 'til June, thousands of voters braved the statewide remain-at-home order and queued in these long lines to cast ballots. In Milwaukee, home to Wisconsin's largest African American community, just five of the citys usual 180 sites were open.

And what went viral we want to turn to this clip its Wisconsins Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos defending his support for in-person voting during the deadly pandemic, while wearing a surgical mask, gloves and hospital gown at a polling place.

ASSEMBLY SPEAKER ROBIN VOS: Everybody is here safe. They have very minimal exposure. Actually, theres less exposure here than you would get if you went to the grocery store or you went to Walmart or you did any of the many things we have to do to live in the state of Wisconsin.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Robin Vos saying its perfectly safe. Hes covered head to toe. Emily Bazelon?

EMILY BAZELON: Right. So, I think the response of a lot of voters was, You may feel safe, because you have all the protective equipment you need, but we dont. And you have forced us today to choose between our health and safety and being able to exercise our right to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: So, lets take this national, and what this means, what has to happen. The cover of The New York Times Magazine is a mask, and on the side of it is a little I voted sticker. And on the inside of the piece is a mailbox with covered in I voted stickers. Lets talk right now about the significance of mail-in voting, in a way that people havent felt perhaps the urgency before.

EMILY BAZELON: There are many states in the country, the majority of states, where you can request an absentee ballot, and you dont need to make an excuse. You dont have to say Im sick or Im traveling. You can just ask for one. However, a lot of those states have never rolled out a huge mail-in election before. So, Jena Griswold, your other guest, she comes from Colorado. Her state, she knows how to do this. Theyve done it before.

In my state of Connecticut, only, in the past, 3 or 4% of people have voted absentee in previous elections. So, you imagine, if Connecticut, if 50 or 60 or 70% of us want to vote absentee this time, the state is going to have to change how they do business. Theyre going to have to order much, much more paper. Theyre going to have to make sure that they have relationships with vendors that can handle an order like that. They need new machines to tabulate votes. They need to train election officials to verify signatures and make sure the ballots are OK to be counted.

This is a huge task. And its a logistical task. Its like planning for testing and tracing in the pandemic. It takes advance planning and organization, and it takes a lot of money. And that is a big burden on the states that they are just starting to ramp up for. And they, as yet, do not have adequate funding for that from Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Emily, I think, for the first time, perhaps, most Americans now understand what supply chain is all about, because when it comes to tests, when it comes to masks, that have been so woefully inadequate in this country, what planning means again, the election is in November. So, lets bring Jena Griswold into this conversation, Colorados secretary of state. Explain exactly how the system works in Colorado, Secretary.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: So, we believe in accessible voting. So we have online voter registration, early voting for several weeks before Election Day, same-day voter registration. And then, the big one, we mail a mail ballot to every registered voter. And to share with you the results, in just our presidential primary, 97.5% of Coloradans voted at home.

AMY GOODMAN: Say that number again, and compare it to how many people vote nationally in the United States.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: Sure. So, in our presidential primary, 97.5% of Coloradans voted their mail ballot. And to put that into perspective, not only do we have the highest rate of registered eligible people in the nation, we also have the highest turnout rate consistently. So, our presidential primary, we surpassed the turnout rate of every other state in the nation, with almost nearly everyone voting their mail ballot.

Now, it is important to maintain in-person voting, which were about to do for our June 30th statewide primary, because there are going to be some people who, for different reasons, just cant vote that mail ballot.

But the bottom line is, mail ballot needs to be expanded nationally as soon as possible. Wisconsin should serve as a wake-up call. If we do not expand national ballot, not only will Americans have to choose between safeguarding their health and casting a ballot; what I do fear that were going to see is the pandemic used to suppress turnout. And if we have too low of turnout, that really affects the legitimacy of an election.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Trump, to get your response to what he said. This was in an interview on Fox & Friends, where he was celebrating the fact that the $2.2 trillion stimulus package left out provisions by Democrats in earlier versions of the bill that would have expanded voting access.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If you look at before and after, the things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, youd never have a Republican elected in this country again.

AMY GOODMAN: He continually also attacks mail-in voting, though he does that himself. I want to get Secretary Griswold, and then Emily Bazelon, talking about what Trumps opposition to this means.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: Well, I think, in this instance, President Trump was very straightforward: He opposes mail ballot because he thinks Republicans will lose seats. Not only is it reprehensible to put politics above Americans health and force Americans into unhealthy voting, having really crowded polling locations, not enough polling locations thats bad in itself. But on top of it, its just untrue. Colorado shows that Republicans can win in mail ballot systems. A U.S. senator has won. Many statewide officials have won on the Republican side under our system. So the claim that it benefits one side more than the other just isnt true.

And at the end of the day, if this nation does not act, we will see Republicans, Democrats and independents all deciding whether to sit out the November election. Thats not good for our democracy. And frankly, thats not good for President Trump, either. And I wish he could recognize that.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Bazelon, if you could also respond to this point hes making, that Republicans will lose if more people vote?

EMILY BAZELON: Yeah, its really interesting, because the research shows what Secretary Griswold was pointing to, which is that voting by mail does not actually have a partisan effect. Its neutral. It doesnt help Democrats; it doesnt help Republicans. What it does do is boost turnout. And so, there is this assumption that President Trump and some other Republicans make this assumption, as well that if more people vote, they are more likely to lose.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about the repeated attacks on vote-by-mail by people, of course, other than by President Trump, by Republicans claiming to be attacking voter fraud. In Georgia, the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has announced an absentee ballot fraud task force to investigate signature mismatches and other issues. In your New York Times Magazine piece, you quote Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action, who says the task force is a submission to the Trump voter-suppression machine. Explain.

EMILY BAZELON: So, yes. In Georgia, I think the concern of voting rights advocates, like Lauren Groh-Wargo, is that people will hear theyre going to be investigated if they vote by mail, and theyll get nervous about it. And that will intimidate them in a way that will discourage voting.

I think its also important to connect this to a longtime voter suppression tactic among conservatives. So, you go back to the '60s, you had poll taxes, literacy tests, to try to prevent African Americans from voting. Then we have the Voting Rights Act. It becomes illegal to do things like that. But you start to see a push for voter identification at the polls. And the justification for voter ID laws was we're preventing fraud.

So, it turns out theres almost no fraud at the polls. If you think about it, it would be really hard to turn an election by having people show up and vote twice. Youd need a lot of people to do that and get away with it. It just isnt really a problem.

And so, that does not stop conservatives and a lot of Republicans, however, from making this charge over and over again. Were seeing it now with a complaint about voting by mail, even though states like Secretary Griswolds, with a really good track record and practically universal voting by mail, have very low levels of fraud.

And you also see it with something called purging, which is this idea of cleaning up the voter rolls by cutting people off of them if they havent voted for a while or if their names dont exactly match in other databases. And similarly, the rationale given for purging the rolls is to prevent fraud.

But the reality of fraud is just much, much smaller really tiny compared to the amount of people who end up with barriers to voting for these reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Bazelon, is the Trump campaign spending its election money on efforts to limit voting by mail?

EMILY BAZELON: There is at least $10 [million], I think now its up to $20 million, that the Republican National Committee has set aside for lawsuits relating to the election. You know, this is perfectly normal. The Democrats are spending money on lawsuits, too. But the Republicans are doing things like challenging an all-vote-by-mail primary in New Mexico, a conservative group challenging a similar effort in Nevada.

And then we also are seeing the Republicans just gear up for election monitoring, for their efforts on the day of the election, for the people who do vote at the polls, you know, perhaps to interfere with their right to vote. That is something that has happened in the past. Theyve been blocked from doing whats called ballot security for many years because of a consent decree they agreed to in the 1980s. But that consent decree will be gone for the first presidential election in 40 years. And so thats another potential for spending this kind of money on.

AMY GOODMAN: The military has been doing mail-in voting for what? Two hundred years?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, yeah. It started in the Civil War. Youre right. Thats where we get the idea of absentee balloting from. There was actually a struggle through World War I and World War II over how much absentee balloting soldiers would be able to do. But yes, they have been doing it this way for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me conclude where we started, with the title of your New York Times piece::https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/magazine/voting-by-mail-2020-covid.html: Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, it certainly can. South Korea just had a completely calm and orderly election. People voted by mail. They also socially distanced at the polls. It went fine. Theres no reason why America cant do this. And we still have time. But its an urgent task to get everything ready. And because Congress hasnt passed the funds to make that easily possible, I think this is a time for kind of concern and paying a lot of attention to this issue.

AMY GOODMAN: What would it cost?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, the estimates from the Brennan Center for Justice are $4 billion. That would include all the primary elections as well as the general election in November. So far, Congress has pledged only $400 million. So you see theres a really big gap there. And that is really hamstringing some of the states.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Emily Bazelon, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, we will link to your cover story, Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic? And I want to thank Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, joining us from Denver.

And that does it for our broadcast. The amazing Democracy Now! team is working with as few people as possible on site, the majority of our team working from home. Special thanks to our general manager, Julie Crosby. Democracy Now! is produced with Rene Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Libby Rainey, Nermeen Shaikh, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Adriano Contreras and Mara Taracena. Special thanks to Miriam Barnard, Denis Moynihan, Paul Powell. Im Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

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Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?: Election Hangs in the Balance as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting - Democracy Now!

Among the questions that loomed after September 11, 2001, was how intelligence agencies would handle the power theyd acquired through a confluence of unprecedented public license, massive funding, and new technology.

As the internet fuelled a post-9/11 revolution in covert capabilities, that explosion in resources funded a multinational empire of contractors, freelancers, and off-the-books operatives. The degree to which that powertelegraphed in the early post-9/11 narratives of the Iraq intelligence fiasco and the reporting that legitimized itundermined democracy in the worlds sole superpower was evident in the hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee by the CIA over the post-9/11 torture report and the Edward Snowden revelations of global surveillance by what had become a borderless behemoth of intelligence agencies, including Canadas.

Two decades on from 9/11, its hard not to be struck by the irony that a fateful power shift from elected to unelected hands in Washington and elsewhere, justified by the need to protect democracy and uphold freedom, has produced a global bedlam of bullying authoritarians, stolen elections, weaponized imbeciles, and hourly instalments of intelligence-style, intelligence-insulting narrative warfare that has commodified deceit on an unprecedented scale.

The intelligence community has been the dog that didnt bark in the battle against what has proven to be a greater threat than terrorism to the rules-based international order: a reality-hijacking cocktail of corruption, propaganda, andfor lack of a less melodramatic, more accurate termweaponized evil; a Third World War waged with an industrial escalation of disinformation campaigns, deception operations, psychological warfare, and every other trick inEspionage for Dummies.

If the intelligence community isnt fighting fire with fire in a war its ideally equipped to win, whatisit doing?

Much of this has been rationalized by the concurrent, two-decade expansion of Chinas power as the bad cop in a systematic degradation of democracy and American influence across the globe. In their annual threat report before Congress in February 2019, U.S. intelligence officials offered an explanation for the past two decades preposterous even by todays stratospheric standards of preposterousness.

While we were sleeping in the last decade and a half, China had a remarkable rise in capabilities that are stunning, said then-director of national intelligence Dan Coats.

You do not have to have spent the past two decades as an intelligence asset, target, or operative to know that the post-9/11 era has been anything but drowsy for spooks. What were those doubled intelligence budgets spent on if not the gathering, analyzing, and acting upon of information about a geopolitical power realignment so obvious to the naked eye that some of us wrote quite a few words about it in real time, including from Washington? The War on Terror didnt come with blinders to the rest of reality and was not conducted by somnambulists.

How does a dog not only not bark but not twitch during an assault so brazen that it produced the relentless, deadly lunacy of Donald Trumps presidency and still spend$500 billion? If the intelligence community wasnt bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against global anti-democracy interests, who was it bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against?

Now, with a global pandemic being leveraged as a power grab by those same anti-democracy interests and a presidential election under attack by not just Russia and other usual suspects, but also by the incumbent himself, can the intelligence community marshal its formidable outcome-curating powers to thwart corruption, restore sanity, and save democracy?

Taking public responsibility for the integrity of the process that will produce Novembers U.S. election result might be a good start. If that fails, at least people will know precisely what sort of war theyre dealing with. It seemsso far, at leastits not a cold one.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and was a Washington and New York-based editor at UPI, AP, and ABC. She writes a weekly column for The Hill Times.

The Hill Times

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Can the intelligence community save democracy? - The Hill Times

A federal court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by the New York Board of Elections and ruled the state's Democratic presidential primary must take place on June 23 as scheduled, a decision that supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang celebrated as a win for democracy.

"We expect New York to work to make voting safe, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying to disenfranchise New York voters." Faiz Shakir, campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld District Court Judge Analisa Torres' May 5 ruling that ordered New York to restore Sanders, Yang, and other Democratic presidential candidates to the ballot after state election officials voted to remove them last month.

Yang and seven other New York residents sued the state Board of Elections over the decision on April 28.

"The removal of presidential contenders from the primary ballot not only deprived those candidates of the chance to garner votes for the Democratic Party's nomination," Torres wrote, "it deprived Democratic voters of the opportunity to elect delegates who could push their point of view in that forum."

Three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirms ruling that New Yorks June 23 presidential primary should go forward. Kudos to @AndrewYang for pressing this pro-democracy fight, and to voting rights advocates and to @BernieSanders and his backers for amplifying it. pic.twitter.com/MEGXm9WeTb

John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) May 19, 2020

Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York Board of Elections, said in a statement after Tuesday's ruling that there are no plans to file an appeal with the Supreme Court.

Faiz Shakir, Sanders' campaign manager, said the ruling "confirmed what we knew: the state of New York acted illegally in trying to cancel the Democratic presidential primary."

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"With today's decision, which affirmed the District Court's recent ruling, we expect New York to work to make voting safe, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying to disenfranchise New York voters," said Shakir. "This ruling is a victory for democracy. Congratulations go to Andrew Yang, his delegates, and our delegates for standing up to this abuse of power."

Yang celebrated the ruling on Twitter.

"Thrilled that democracy has prevailed for the voters of New York!" Yang tweeted.

New York election officials claimed the effort to cancel the presidential primary was driven by concerns about spreading Covid-19, but critics said that justification did not make sense given that down-ballot races are still scheduled to take place on the same day.

"One can't help but see this as the New York Board of Elections trying to protect machine Dems from insurgent progressive primary challengers," Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos wrote last month.

Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout, a Sanders supporter, tweeted that Tuesday's ruling affirms that "you can't just say 'pandemic' and give away unconstrained power to change ballot rules."

"Good," said Teachout.

Read more here:
'Democracy Has Prevailed': Federal Court Rules NY Primary Must Go Forward With Sanders, Yang, and Others on Ballot - Common Dreams

'Rethinking Democracy - The Everyday is the fourth in a five-part series presented by The Trinity Long Room Hub

The Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin will be live streaming its discussion Rethinking Democracy - The Everyday on Wednesday, May 20 at 4:30 pm GMT / 11:30 am EST.

You can tune into the live stream discussion here on IrishCentral or over on our Facebook page, where well be live streaming in conjunction with Trinitys Long Room Hub.

Read More: WATCH: "Rethinking Democracy" discussion from Trinity College

Rethinking Democracy is a five-part series organized by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The conversations will build upon issues addressed in the free, online Crises of Democracy curriculum launched earlier this year. The curriculum, which includes videos, podcasts, and readings, is the product of the Global Humanities Institute on the crises of democracy funded by the CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes) and the A.W. Mellon Foundation. Both the Trinity Long Room Hub and the Heyman Centre were involved in this project with partners from Brazil, India, and Croatia.

Read More: WATCH: Trinity live panel discussion on Conflict and Change

Of Wednesdays event, organizers say: As health systems struggle to cope with the rapid spread of Covid-19, billions of people worldwide are currently living in some state of lockdown. Schools are closed. Movement is restricted. Physical interactions are limited to members of the same household. In the most extreme cases, permits are required to leave the house at all.

In a new world of social distancing and #stayathome, access to green spaces and time outdoors is increasingly valued. Online concerts and digital exhibitions are opening up new virtual worlds. The arts are not only providing much-needed sources of distraction, but also the tools to process the trauma of the crisis. Humans are adapting and creating new routines. The lasting psychological impacts of the pandemic and the associated isolation and economic downturn, however, are not yet known.

The fourth in a five-part series, this workshop will examine the implications of the Covid-19 on the everyday. Our speakers will discuss their daily lockdown routines, how their work has been shaped by the pandemic, and why walking is a superpower. The floor will then be open for participants to respond: to ask questions and to widen the parameters of the conversation.

Read More: WATCH: Trinity panel discusses inequality and COVID-19

Rita Duffy is currently Artist in Residence at the Trinity Long Room Hub. She is one of Northern Ireland's groundbreaking artists who began her work concentrating primarily on the figurative/narrative tradition. Her art is often autobiographical, including themes and images of Irish identity, history and politics. Read about Rita's Raft Project at the Trinity Long Room Hub here.

Rishi Goyal is Director of Medicine, Literature and Society at Columbia University, and an Emergency Medicine doctor. He is broadly interested in the intersection of medicine and culture and is more specifically interested in the areas of medical cognition and identity and representation after illness.

Shane OMara is a Professor of Experimental Brain Research and Director of the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His work explores brain systems supporting learning, memory, and cognition, and brain systems affected by stress and depression. He is the author of In Praise of Walking: The new science of how we walk and why its good for us (2019).

Resources:

Duffy, Rita. Art in a Time of Pandemic: Jogging in Lipstick.

Goyal, Rishi. A Letter from the Emergency Room. Synapsis. May 15, 2020.

Read More: WATCH: Trinity College live panel discussion on public health crises and democracy

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TUNE IN: Trinity live panel discussion on Rethinking Democracy tonight - IrishCentral

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman. Forty-eight states are at least partially reopening this week, even as more than a dozen states are seeing an uptick in cases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns the U.S. death toll will pass 100,000 by the beginning of June. Last week, ousted U.S. vaccine chief Rick Bright testified that if the U.S. fails to improve its response to the virus, COVID-19 could resurge after summer and lead to the darkest winter in modern history. Coronavirus hot spots Italy and United Kingdom are both also slowly reopening businesses.

This comes as the World Health Organization will meet virtually today with all 194 member states, and the global coronavirus death count passes 315,000 with more than 4.7 million confirmed infections. This is Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organizations Emergencies Programme, speaking at a recent briefing.

DR. MICHAEL RYAN: To put this on the table, this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities. And this virus may never go away. HIV has not gone away, but weve come to terms with the virus.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as global leaders prepare to discuss what to expect in the months and years to come, were going to look back today at the history of pandemics and how they end, with the renowned historian Frank Snowden. Hes a professor emeritus of the history of medicine at Yale University and author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Professor Snowden is joining us from Rome, Italy, where he traveled for research before the coronavirus outbreak and has remained under quarantine since. He has recently recovered from COVID-19 himself. He also lived through a cholera outbreak in Rome while conducting research there almost half a century ago.

In his book, Professor Snowden writes, quote, Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning. On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities. To study them is to understand that societys structure, its standard of living, and its political priorities.

Professor Frank Snowden, its wonderful to have you with us, albeit from Rome, where youre under lockdown. What an amazing history yourself, as you are an expert in pandemics. In Italy, you survived the cholera outbreak half a century ago, and now, though getting COVID-19, you have survived this coronavirus pandemic. Can you talk about those two experiences?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, certainly. Thank you. Im delighted to be with you.

And the cholera outbreak was in 1973. Its one of the reasons that I was I took up an interest in the field, because the sorts of events that I was witnessing as a young man were quite extraordinary. They included such things as Naples was the epicenter. Rome was nonetheless affected, but Naples was the center. And cars with Naples license plates were being stoned in the center of Rome. And there are open-air markets in Rome, and the vendors there were having their stalls overturned, and they were being attacked by crowds as being guilty of spreading the disease.

At the same time, Italy, at this time, lets remember, was the seventh industrial power in the world, in the 1970s. And the minister of health of this power went on television. And what he did was to say that the microbe that causes the cholera is exquisitely sensitive to acid, so all you need to do is to take a lemon and squeeze just a bit of it on your raw muscles, and then youll be perfectly safe. And, of course, if you believe that, youre likely to believe just about anything. And so, it was this sort of event that caught my attention.

And later on, when I was studying something else entirely, there was a cholera outbreak in Italy, and I began thinking, in my studies, that actually this showed more conclusively what values were in Italy, in Italian society, what living standards were, and so on, than any other kind of work that I might do. And so I moved into studying the history of epidemic diseases, and Ive been doing that alongside an interest in modern Italian history, those two things ever since. So, thats the cholera story.

With the coronavirus story is that I finished a book, my book that you mentioned, kindly, in October. It was published then. And I had been quite concerned about the possibility of a major pandemic disease not just myself, but many people were and I wrote that in the book. And so, I was stunned, though. I didnt know when it was likely to happen; I thought one day in the future. And so I was stunned that in December the epidemic started.

And then, by the time I came to Italy in January, it really began to ramp up. And very soon, I was living in the epicenter of the coronavirus at that time. So, that was a very important experience for me. I was not able to do the research I came to do, and Ive devoted myself ever since to doing that. And I guess you might say that I had a little bit too much enthusiasm for my work and caught the disease myself fortunately, a mild case, and Im here to tell the tale, and so I was lucky in that regard. But I certainly have had a close look at this event, this series of events, in Italy, and Ive been reading intensively about it and talking to people about it around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And our condolences on the death of your sister just a few weeks ago.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, arent you kind? Yes, that was not a result of coronavirus, but, yes, and I wasnt able to go back. And thats, you know, another part of the times were living in. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, your family history is so fascinating, your father the first African American envoy to Italy in the 1950s. He goes on to write Blacks in Antiquity and Before Color Prejudice. And your connection, all of these years, to studying Italy, until now you are locked down there for months. Can you talk about the comparison of the lockdown there and what youre viewing, your country here, the United States? You joked about not really joked, but talked about lemon as a cure. Do you see comparisons to the president of the United States, President Trump, telling people to inject themselves with disinfectants?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Im glad you asked that question. And I would say that what Ive observed here, Ive heard a lot of discussion across in the States, about Italys terrible response to the coronavirus. And I find that surprising, because it seems to me quite the opposite.

First thing has to do with compliance. And there, I think a lot has to do with the messaging. That is to say that in this country, you have a single health authority, and it acted it acted quickly and responsibly, and it imposed social distancing. And as it did so, there wasnt a cacophony of noise from a president speaking differently from his advisers, differently from the governments of 50 states, from local school boards, local mayors, different members of Congress. No, there was one policy. It was announced. It was explained very clearly to the population that until we have a vaccine, that we have exactly one weapon to deal with this emergency, and thats social distancing. And therefore, if we Italians were told, if we Italians want to save our country, we have to do it together. Were all in the same boat. This is the only means available to save the country, to save our families, to protect our communities, to protect ourselves.

And as a result, theres been and Ive observed this even in the neighborhood where Im living, that the compliance has been extraordinary. There havent been protests against it as in the States. And I would say that its interesting that the local newspaper its called Il Messaggero, which means The Messenger had an article in which it said this is the first time in 3,000 years of Romes history that the population of Romans has ever been obedient. And I think thats because people were the government was very clear. Vans went through the neighborhoods. There were posters everywhere. The regulations were explained to everyone. They were very severe, more severe than in the States. But people were justifiably afraid. The government explained why this was a danger, and people were afraid, and they wanted to do something.

I myself heard the kinds of conversations that people had when they were waiting outside grocery stores, were wearing their masks, and they were conversing with each other and saying things like I wonder if this was like the way it was during World War II. Is this maybe the way it was during the Blitz in London, that everyone is in this together, its a terrible sacrifice, but this is what we have to do? This was the attitude that I observed.

And now that Im able to go outside again the last few days, Ive observed on the streets again that this compliance is continuing. People have been well educated in the dangers of the coronavirus. And quite frankly, no one wants it to surge up again. I would say thats the basis of it.

The opposite is happening and has happened in the United States, where we had, as I said, this cacophony of fragmented authorities all saying different things in an extraordinarily confusing way, and our great CDC, the world sort of model, the gold standard for emergency response, being underfunded and almost invisible throughout this crisis. So, its been staggering, a country that has extraordinary medical centers, has this extraordinary CDC, wonderful doctors, an extraordinary tradition of scientific research in universities, national labs like the NIH, and yet and yet, when this virus approaches, it has been unable to respond unwilling to respond, in a scientific, coherent way with a single message to the American public. And so the public is confused.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have the president also defunding the World Health Organization, an organization you have studied for years. You quote Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization upon his return from China. Can you tell us what he said, Professor Snowden?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. He said that the world China has had a model response, and the world will soon realize that it owes China a debt of gratitude for the long window of opportunity it provided by delaying the further onset of this virus, which gave the world a chance to prepare to meet it. Thats essentially what he said on return.

AMY GOODMAN: Did he also talk about people having to change their hearts and minds to deal with this global catastrophe?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. That was the second thing he said, that he said we must be prepared. And people said, Well, how do we prepare? And he said, The first thing that happens is that we need to change our hearts and minds, because thats the premise for everything else that we need to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Frank Snowden, you have long studied epidemics, and I was wondering if, in the brief time we have together, though we do have the whole show if you can go back in time to the bubonic plague and very briefly talk about the Black Death, caused by a bacteria, then move on to smallpox, how it wiped out Indigenous people, from Haiti to the United States, and its connection to this caused by a virus its connection to colonization, to colonialism. Start with the Black Death.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Oh, absolutely. The Black Death reached Western Europe in 1347. It broke out first in the city of Messina in Sicily and spread through the whole continent. And it lasted until, in Western Europe the story to the east is rather different, but in Western Europe, the last case was once again in Messina in 1734. So, that makes, unless I have my math wrong, 400 years in which it ravaged Europe and killed extraordinary numbers of people.

Now, this is a disease thats spread by fleas, also by and theyre carried by rats. It also can be spread through the air in a pulmonary form. And its extraordinarily lethal. Its something like 50% of those who get the disease from being bitten by fleas perish. Nowadays we have antibiotics, but at the time of the Black Death, we didnt, of course, and so 50% of those afflicted died. And the pneumonic version of the disease is 100% lethal. Even today, its almost 100% lethal.

And so, this is an extraordinarily dangerous disease. Its symptoms are also extremely powerful, painful and dehumanizing, and patients die in agony. And this can it strikes very quickly, and so people can also be struck down in public. And so this becomes a terrifying public spectacle as people collapse in the streets. So, this

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, the people suffered from what? Buboes, these massive inflammations of the lymph nodes?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Thats as the disease spreads from the flea bite to the lymph node. Theres a massive inflammation, and you have a swelling, let us say, in your thigh or under your armpit or in your neck, thats maybe the size of an orange, a large navel orange, under your skin. And it was said to be so painful that people even jumped into the in London, into the Thames, into the Arno in Florence, to escape from the agony of this terrible pain they were suffering.

But there were other symptoms, as well: terrible fevers and also hallucinations, as people it has neurological effects. Thats part of the dehumanizing side of it. There are these skin discolorations. There are many symptoms, and its an entirely dreadful and horrible disease.

It still exists, by the way. There are people who think that its just a medieval disease. No, there are something like 3,000 people around the world who die of bubonic plague every year, and some a trickle in the United States, in the Southwest in particular, where there is a reservoir of it. So, its still there.

AMY GOODMAN: You knew a woman in Arizona who had bubonic plague?

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes, I knew someone in Arizona who got the bubonic plague, because theyre a disease endemic disease of prairie dogs in the Southwest of the United States. And if pet dogs are taken out into areas where the prairie dogs live, they can have an exchange of fleas, and the fleas can be brought back to a hotel or motel. And thats what happened to my friend. There were contaminated fleas in the room where she slept, and therefore she became a she survived but was a victim of bubonic plague in the 21st century. So, we could be

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, you talk about the bubonic plague, the responses to it, being quarantined, the sanitary cordons, mass surveillance and other forms of state power. And I also want to follow that through with these pandemics, is you have you also are a scholar of fascism and the direction countries can go when such a crisis happens.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Well, one of the things, I think, if a 15th century Florentine were to come back in a time machine today to look at what we as a society are doing, he or she would find it a rather familiar landscape. That is to say, the things that youre saying were adopted and devised as self-protection by the Italian city-states that were at the center of the trade in the Mediterranean, and so were repeatedly scourged.

So, yes, there was this terrible disease, and they dealt with it by creating health magistrates we call them boards of health by creating the first forms of personal protective equipment, PPE, the masks, the long gowns, social distancing, hospital systems for dealing with this one single disease, the measure of quarantine quarantine even being an Italian word, quaranta, for 40 days, because people were locked down for 40 days before they were released. It had sanitary cordons. All of this was part of the defensive measures that we see today and that were also present during the Spanish influenza.

Public health was a legacy of the bubonic plague. So, while we look at these terrible events, we also need to remember that human beings are inventive and that there have been silver linings. The development of public health, the development of science and scientific medicine are also gifts of these terrible events. And indeed, I would say that the modern state is also part of it was molded in part by the need for a centralized authority as part of our life protective system. So, yes, the bubonic plague does that, and it affected every area of society.

Its not true to say that pandemics all do the same things. There are some things that have been repeated again and again. During the bubonic plague, the Black Death, the first years of it, there was this horrible surge of anti-Semitism across Europe, in France, in the Rhineland, in northern Italy, elsewhere. And this was, in a way, the first Holocaust, when Jews were persecuted and put to death, not just in spontaneous ways by crowds, but the bureaucratic apparatuses of political authorities were used to torture Jews into submission, to confessing crimes that of course they had never committed, and then they were judged and burned. The Holy Roman Empire did this, and local authorities and leaders of city-states. So this was a systematic purging and killing of Jews, who were thought to have or so the case against them was that they were trying to put an end to Christendom and were poisoning the wells of Christians. And so, you have Jews tortured, broken on the wheel, burned alive, run through by the sword, and so on.

So, this xenophobia is this blame, scapegoating, we see that today with the coronavirus. Its something that can happen, has repeatedly happened, with the idea that this is a Chinese disease. Its a foreign disease, were told, and therefore shutting borders against Chinamen. And we see that Chinese Americans, children being attacked in schools, Chinese Americans afraid to ride alone on the New York subway and arranging to travel in groups so they wont do that. This is part of a long-term legacy of these diseases. And we see it in Europe, as well. Chinatowns were deserted long before the coronavirus actually arrived. And the right-wing nationalist politicians of Europe have been using that, saying its been imported by immigrants. So, thats one of the false stories thats followed in the wake of this. So thats another really terrible recurring feature of these pandemic diseases.

They dont always lead to you were asking about does this always increase state power. Well, certainly, the Black Death in Eastern Europe, there were authoritarian countries, and they used these draconian, violent measures. Yes, it was part of their assertion of power. Indeed, this is one reason that these draconian measures appealed, because rulers, not knowing what to do, this gave the impression that they did: They knew what they were doing, and they were taking decisive measures. And so, it was thought that these sorts of measures would possibly be effective, and would certainly be a display of power and resolution. So, we do see that happening.

But lets take the Spanish influenza of 1918, when, again, its a good comparison to today, because it was the time its a respiratory disease. It was terribly much more contagious than this and deadly. Something like 100 million people are thought to have died around the world as a result of the Spanish influenza. And people practiced social distancing. Assemblies were banned. The wearing of masks was compulsory. Spitting in public, which was very popular at the time, was forbidden, and there were heavy fines in places like New York City for doing so. But it doesnt result measures were taken, but they were revoked at the end of the emergency, and one doesnt find this leading, as it may in some countries, to a long-term reassertion of draconian power by political authorities.

With COVID-19, I think the message is mixed. And remember, anything anyone says about it, we have to remember that this is very early in this pandemic, and so well have to wait and see what the final results will be. But we know already that Hungary and Poland have witnessed rulers who use COVID-19 as a cover for ulterior motives of becoming prime minister for life, with the capacity to rule by decree, to censor and shut down the press, to put their political enemies under arrest and so on. And those arent public health measures. So, I would say, yes, it has this potential, but its not necessarily something that well see around the globe, although there is that danger, and weve seen those two countries where it clearly is leading to exactly those results.

AMY GOODMAN: Frank Snowden, we have to break. Then were going to come back, and I want to ask you about smallpox, about Haiti, the island of Hispaniola, and about Native Americans. Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. He is speaking to us from the lockdown in Rome, Italy. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Killing Me Softly with His Song, performed by Marcella Bella. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Were spending the hour with professor Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. He has devoted his life to looking at epidemics and teaching thousands of students. He is now in Rome, Italy, where he has been for months, coincidentally went there for another project but got caught in the lockdown, got COVID-19, has recovered from that, and we are lucky enough to have him as our guest for the hour.

Professor Snowden, take us to Hispaniola in 1492, a different version of history that we learn about Hernn Corts and Pizarro, from the Incas in Peru to the Aztecs of Mexico, what happened in Haiti and in the United States when it came to smallpox.

FRANK SNOWDEN: Yes. Well, Columbus landed at Hispaniola, the first place. His idea the Arawaks were the Native population, and there were a couple of million inhabiting the island when he arrived. His idea was that he would be able to reduce them to slavery. He wrote about how friendly the Arawaks were and how welcoming to him, his ships and his men. But Im afraid that the hospitality wasnt reciprocal. And Columbuss view was this was a money-making expedition, and here it would be wonderful to have the Native population as mines in slaves, and mines to cultivate the fields.

The problem was that there was a differential mortality. This has come to be called the Columbian exchange. That is to say that Native populations in the New World didnt have the same history of exposure to various diseases, and therefore not the same herd immunity to them. The most dramatic example is smallpox. Measles was another. That is to say that Native Americans had never experienced those diseases. Columbus and his men, on the other hand, had, because it was rife in Europe. And so, unintentionally, for the most part, the Arawaks simply died off as they were exposed to these new diseases, smallpox and measles, and by 15, 20 years later, there were just a couple thousand left.

And it was at this time that in Hispaniola there was the beginning this is one of the reasons for the beginning of the African slave trade. The Native population of the United States died from these diseases, and so the Europeans turned instead to importing people from Africa, because they shared many of the same bacterial histories, and therefore immunities, and could survive being enslaved in the Caribbean and then in the New World, on North America and also in South America. So, we get the beginning of the slave trade in part as a result to this differential immunity.

This, then, on the wider scale of the New World, this was something that was devastated the Native population. When the Spaniards, the British, the French came, the Native population contracted their diseases and just was destroyed. This destroyed the Inca and Aztec empires. In fact, they were so devastated, that they lost their religion. They thought the White man had much more powerful gods than they did, and so this drove the missionary and conversion experience, as well, and cleared the land for European settlers across the whole of the continent. This was a tremendous impact of smallpox disease. Its called a virgin soil disease because they were so the population had never experienced it and had no herd immunity.

Theres an irony that we can see. Lets go back to Hispaniola, that is now the island divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And lets talk about Haiti. It was Saint-Domingue at the time, by the 18th century certainly. And lets remember that the French this is now an island that had become, extraordinarily enough to think, the wealthiest colony in the world, the jewel of the French Empire. And that is because of its sugar plantations. And the sugar was exported to Europe and was the foundation of French wealth in this period. And slaves are continuing to be imported throughout the 18th century at breakneck speed to cultivate the fields of sugarcane.

During the French Revolution, French power was neutralized. The attitude of the French revolutionaries toward slavery was entirely different. And you got this upsurge of the slaves with the greatest slave revolt in history, led by the Haitian Spartacus, Toussaint Louverture. And the colony was functionally operating under Toussaint Louvertures control and was independent of France. Napoleon there was regime change, however, by 1799, and Napoleon comes to power. And by 1803, hes thinking that he wishes to put an end to this rebellion, to restore the Haitian rebels, to reenslave them and to restore the colony to being this economic warehouse for France. So he sends a tremendous armada, led by a general who was married to his sister Pauline. And it was something like 60,000 troops and sailors who were sent to the former Hispaniola, now Saint-Domingue, to crush the revolt.

Once again, we see a difference in immunity to disease that proved decisive. That is to say that yellow fever was something to which the African slaves had a differential immunity, whereas Europeans had no immunity. They had no history of experience with yellow fever. And so, what happens is that the French soldiers in Saint-Domingue begin to die at a rapid rate of a terrible epidemic of yellow fever that sweeps through the Caribbean and especially through Saint-Domingue. And what happens, by Toussaint Louverture was very aware of this and took advantage of it, luring the French troops, not fighting them in pitched battles but only small guerrilla campaigns, waiting for the summer months to come, and an upsurge of the disease, which happens. And pretty soon the French commander writes to Paris to say

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Snowden, Im only interrupting because we only have a minute. Of course, Haiti becomes the first country born of a slave rebellion, as you are so graphically describing with an alternative view of history, that many may not have understood, with the role of disease. But in this last minute we have, I wanted to ask you about how pandemics end and what you think will happen now.

FRANK SNOWDEN: I think theres not one answer to that. Pandemics are all different, and they end in different ways. Some die out because of sanitary measures that people take against them, so that were not vulnerable in the industrial world to cholera or typhoid fever, that are spread through the oral-fecal group, because we have sewers and clean, safe drinking water. And other diseases end, like smallpox, because of vaccination, the development of a scientific tool. So it really depends. Some diseases are not very good candidates for vaccines.

And I would say that COVID-19, Im sure that we will develop a vaccine, but I also fear that it may not be the it wont be the magic bullet that people believe, that it will put this behind us, because the sort of features you want are, for an ideal candidate, like smallpox, a vaccine that doesnt have an animal reservoir so it cant return to us. A vaccine is an ideal candidate if in nature it produces a robust immunity in the human body, so people, having once had it, are totally immune for life. That doesnt seem to be the case with COVID-19. So I expect it to become long-term with us. Were going to have to learn to live with this disease. Its probably going to become an endemic disease, and so were going to have to adjust to

AMY GOODMAN: Were going to have to leave it there. And I want to thank you so much, Professor Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of history of medicine at Yale University, author of the new book, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Im Amy Goodman. Stay safe.

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