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In the summer of 2000, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the Democratic Party dynasty, took time out of his schedule as an environmental attorney to write an op-ed for the New York Times. In the piece, Kennedy hailed consumer advocate Ralph Nader as his friend and hero, but he lambasted him for mounting a third-party run for president. Nader could siphon votes from Vice President Al Gore, who was running against Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Kennedy warned, saying it was irresponsible for Nader to argue that there was little distinction between the Democratic and Republican nominees. A vote for Nader, Kennedy asserted, is a vote for Mr. Bush and for what he considered a disaster: the Republicans anti-environment agenda.

That was then.

Twenty-four years later, now an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, Kennedy has broken with the Democratic Party and is running for president as an independent. He insists that unlike Nader, hes no spoiler, and he dismisses the notion that his presence in the race will help either former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden. Political analysts are uncertain which candidate will benefit more from Kennedys campaign. The Kennedy brand could hold appeal for some Democrats, but his paranoia-drenched attacks on the public health community could also be catnip for Trump voters. I think Americans should have a choice, Kennedy told NBC News, that they shouldnt be forced to choose the least of two evils.

Democratic and Republican political pros have good cause to be jittery about how third-party or independent presidential candidates might impact this race. The reason is simple: The last two elections have been decided by extremely narrow margins in a tiny number of states. The odds are strong that this years contest will be similarly close. If so, theres potential for one or more of the third-party or independent contenders already in the raceKennedy, Green Party leader Jill Stein, or author and professor Cornel Westto influence the outcome by drawing a small slice of voters from Biden or Trump. Given the circumstances, it is far easier to view these outside presidential bids as potential threats to a major candidate rather than as well-intentioned movements to expand the horizons of American politics. That is especially true considering that an outsider campaign can be weaponized by other political players pursuing quite different agendas than those of the third-party candidates themselves. With the 2024 election shaping up to be a referendum on American democracy, a minor candidate might end up helping to determine the future of the republic.

For decades, voices across the political spectrum have railed against the party duopoly. Occasionally, a serious independent or third-party presidential candidate has emerged, but none have won a presidential contestor even come remotely close. Only a few insurgents have significantly shaped the final outcome. Notably, Theodore Roosevelts post-presidency run in 1912 under the banner of the Progressive Party (a.k.a. the Bull Moose Party) essentially doomed the reelection campaign of Republican President William Howard Taft and helped New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, win the White House.

Other third-party presidential candidates have fared worse but still gained notoriety and attention for their ideological agendas. Socialist Eugene Debs was on the ballot in five presidential races between 1900 and 1920. (During his last bid, he ran while imprisoned after being convicted of sedition for urging resistance to the military draft.) Progressive Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette sought the presidency in 1924. South Carolinas white-supremacist governor, Strom Thurmond, was the candidate for the States Rights Democratic Party (otherwise known as the Dixiecrats) in 1948. Twenty years later, Alabama Gov. George Wallace campaigned as the head of the pro-segregationist American Independent Party. Businessman Ross Perots independent 1992 bid drew 19 percent of the votethe best outing by an outside-the-system candidate since Roosevelt. To this day, political scientists argue about whether Perot pickpocketed more votes from Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush.

The Nader effect was clearer. In 2000, running on the Green Party ticket, he pulled in 22,198 votes in New Hampshire, more than three times the 7,211 vote lead George W. Bush had over Gore. In Florida, where Bush edged out Gore by 537 votes, Nader bagged 97,488. While impossible to prove, it is a reasonable hypothesis that had Nader not been on the ballot, Gore, a noted environmentalist, would have picked up enough of those Nader votes to win. (Also complicating that election was ultra-conservative commentator Pat Buchanans Reform Party; his vote total in Florida was boosted by a poorly designed ballot in Palm Beach County that likely cost Gore more than 2,000 votes.)Had Gore triumphed in 2000, you can imagine the United States taking vigorous steps to address climate changewhich President George W. Bush did notand avoiding the catastrophic invasion of Iraq that yielded the deaths of more than 4,000 American troops and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians. In 2000, RFK Jr. was right.

During the 2016 showdown between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Trump, Green Party candidate Jill Stein bagged 1 percent of the national vote, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson collected 3.3 percent. In key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, these candidates combined vote totals exceeded the marginby which Trump beat Clinton. Theres no telling how many of the Stein and Johnson voters would have pulled the lever for Clinton had those other choices not been available. Stein justified her campaign by arguing Clinton and Trump were equivalent: We have two ways to commit suicide here, she said, and I say no thank you to them both.

The years since then have demonstrated just how stark the differences between those two candidates really were. The list of consequences of that election result is long and includes the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Trump inciting a mob to lay siege to the Capitol in an attempt to illegally remain in office.

The stakes are even higher this year, and outsider candidates may be better positioned to affect the outcome. Third-party and independent presidential candidates could play a more significant role in 2024 than in most presidential elections in recent memory, says Bernard Tamas, a political science professor at Valdosta State University and the author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties. He explains that the growth of third parties over the last 60 years is the result of the rising contentiousness of a steadily more polarized conflict between the two major parties. During the 2024 election cycle, the mutual hostility has escalated to the point where each party accuses the other of subverting democracy. The result? This combination of high public dissatisfaction with well-known candidates could fuel a significant increase in the protest vote against both Biden and Trump, Tamas says.

Understandably, then, the prospect of third-party spoilage is a source of dread for political strategists. For much of the past year, Democrats and never-Trumpers fretted over No Labels, a dark-money group that used millions of dollars raised from anonymous sources to win spots on state ballots for a supposed centrist, bipartisan ticket. (Mother Jones and other news organizations have revealed some of its funders; as a group, they tilt toward the GOP.) Founded by former Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobsonher husband is Mark Penn (once a top strategist for President Bill Clinton), who advised Trump during his first impeachmentthe No Labels project was generally seen by political insiders as unlikely to succeed in running a viable candidate and widely regarded as being more beneficial for Trump than for Biden.

Democrats and other anti-Trumpers who considered No Labels something of a pro-Trump front took steps to neutralize this venture, decrying the group, challenging its petition drives, and putting pressure on prospective donors. In response, No Labels called on the Justice Department to investigate its opponents for trying to prevent it from obtaining ballot access. Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and the potential No Labels candidate mentioned most often, eventually withdrew from consideration, noting that he did not want to help Trump win. That left the group with no obvious standard-bearer and the lingering question of whether it would field a surprise candidate or fizzle.

A less-organized and less-funded third-party endeavor still could throw sand into the gears this year and alter the course of the race. Once again, Stein is seeking the presidency as a Green Party candidate. (She skipped the 2020 election. Howie Hawkins, a longtime progressive activist and trade unionist, garnered a measly 0.3 percent of the vote for the Greens.) Theres no reason to believe Steins appeal has widened since 2016, but the Green Party does have ballot lines in at least 20 states and Washington, DC, including the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida. So she could be a factor in a tight race.

As could Cornel West. The celebrity academic (formerly of Harvard and Princeton), fiery anti-racism campaigner, and onetime leader of Democratic Socialists of America has mounted a long-shot bid as an independent. In January, he announced he also was forming the Justice for All Party to help him gain ballot access in several states, particularly Florida, Washington, and North Carolinathe last of which could be a key BidenTrump battleground. (In some states, its easier for a party than a nonaffiliated candidate to win a line on the ballot, which partly explains Wests desire to form a party.) As of February, he had only qualified to be on the ballots of Oregon, South Carolina, and Alaska. His success in Alaska illustrates the strange-bedfellows world of third-party politics. His campaign paid $10,000 to Scott Kohlhaas, a state ballot access expert who has run and lost races for the US Senate and the Alaska legislature as a Libertarian Party candidate. Kohlhaas also has spearheaded an effort for Alaska to secede from the United States.

Per usual, the national Libertarian Party plans to have a candidate in the 2024 hunt. The partys past efforts have been uneven. In 2016, the Libertarian ticket of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld appeared on the ballots in all 50 states, but the partys nominee in 2020 is now a trivia question for politicos (A: Jo Jorgensen). At the end of May, upward of 1,000 delegates will gather for aconvention to choose to choose the partys candidate. Kennedy has held talks with Libertarians about possibly heading their ticket, though there were wide ideological differences between his crazy-quilt collection of policy stances and the Libertarians anti-government positions.

It is Kennedy who may well be the true X factor in 2024, even if its unclear which candidate his presence could hurt more. When Donald Trump Jr. slammed Kennedy as a radical liberal, it suggested that the Trump camp feared his impact on the contest.

The Democratic National Committee is also worried. In February, it filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that a super-PAC supporting Kennedy (which has received millions of dollars from a Trump funder) and his campaign had illegally coordinated their workan allegation Kennedys campaign denied. The DNC also hired a veteran political operative to lead its opposition to third-party presidential bids, with Kennedy as a top concern.

Third-party and independent candidates always talk about the legitimate need to enlarge the political debate. But they also present the major parties, billionaires, and even foreign governments with opportunities for political mischief.

In 2000, a Republican group aired ads featuring Nader attacking Gore. Four years later, when Nader ran again and drew less support, conservative outfits helped him win ballot access, and Republican funders donated directly to his campaign. This was before Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited amounts of anonymous money from billionaires, corporations, and unions to pour into the political system. The profusion of dark money makes it easier for political conniversdomestic and foreignto secretly influence elections, including by using third-party or independent candidates for their own ends.

These days, there are many ways to exploit such a candidate. Heres a possible scenario: West makes it onto the ballot in North Carolina. Then, in the closing days of the campaign, a Republican donoror several donorssets up a private corporation, which doesnt have to reveal its owners. This entity pours a large amount of cash into a newly created super-PAC. This super-PAC then uses those funds to air ads on radio stations in, say, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Durham that slam Biden for not doing enough for Black voters and urge a vote for West. Could that cause several thousand voters to defect from Biden to West? Could a difference of several thousand votes decide the election in that state? Could the results in North Carolina swing the entire election? Sneaky moves like this could be attempted in any swing state.

Nor should we forget the history of Russian interference in our elections. In 2016, Russian trolls ran a social media blitz to boost Stein, as part of Moscows clandestine scheme to undermine the US presidential election and help Trump. This operation included the hack-and-leak operation that targeted Clinton, via the release of emails and documents stolen from the Democrats, and, no doubt, contributed to her loss. In 2020, Russian operatives colluded with Rudy Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer, to spread false information about Joe Biden and his son Hunters activities in Ukraine.

This year, Moscow will undoubtedly try to intervene in the American election. Third-party and independent candidateswho, of course, have the right to run and be considered on their meritsoffer the Russians and other bad-faith actors avenues for meddling. These schemers can exploit attempts to expand democracy in order to undercut it.

Americans drawn to a third-party or independent candidate might have all sorts of worthy reasons for doing so. Some may see their vote as a blow against the duopoly, while others view it as a means to embrace a purer ideological agenda. Voting for an outsider candidate could be perceived as a way to express a particular frustration with a major-party candidatesay, with Bidens approach to the IsraelHamas war. A lifelong Republican who is fed up with a corrupt would-be autocrat who encouraged an insurrection might want an alternative that does not entail marking the ballot for a Democrat. Yet, given the hard-and-fast realities of Americas political systemand the ability of political operatives, big-money donors, and foreign governments to utilize these candidacies for their own purposesa vote for one of these candidates could lead to results on Election Day and beyond that run counter to third-party voters aims for the nation.

It is inconceivable that a candidate whos not a Democrat or a Republican could win the 2024 presidential contest. But it is not inconceivable that one or more of these outsider candidates could change the course of the election and determine the victorin other words, be a spoiler. This will likely be a contest that hinges on a small number of swing voters in a handful of states. With the scales evenly balanced, it might not take much to tip them. And if the main choice is indeed between a candidate who threatens democracy and one who abides by its rules and norms, these other presidential wannabesand their votersmay play a crucial role in deciding the fate of the United States.

See the original post:
Will RFK Jr. and Other Third-Party Candidates Help Doom Democracy? Mother Jones - Mother Jones

NEW DELHI After the Indian government last week arrested opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal in a case of alleged corruption just weeks before a national election, U.S. and German officials issued public statements gently reminding India about the importance of the rule of law.

The response from New Delhi was anything but gentle. Instead, it reflected the tough new brand of diplomacy embraced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cheered by his nationalist supporters.

The Indian Foreign Ministry immediately summoned German and U.S. diplomats for a dressing-down in New Delhi. It lashed out at Washington for casting aspersions and making completely unacceptable comments about Indias internal affairs after the State Department reiterated its concerns about Kejriwals arrest and the freezing of an opposition partys campaign funds.

On Thursday, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar raised a complaint frequently heard among Modis supporters: that the United States is moralizing, overbearing and prone to interfering.

There are people in the world who want to lecture us on our judicial behavior, Dhankhar told the American Bar Association at a conference in New Delhi. Dhankhar went on to dismiss U.S. officials recent comments about a controversial new Indian citizenship law as ignorant.

We are not a nation to get scriptures from others, Dhankhar said. We are a nation with a civilizational ethos of more than 5,000 years.

The shift in tone is one facet of Indias changing face as it grows into global power under Modi. While the Biden administration has assiduously wooed the Indian prime minister as a geopolitical partner and invested heavily in deepening technology cooperation with the worlds fifth-largest economy, it has been met with a Modi government that pushes back with a prickliness that has drawn occasional comparisons to Chinas Wolf Warriors or officials from other, more adversarial nations.

This seems to be a trend the last few years with the foreign minister very vocally articulating a sense that India will also push back unlike in the past, when India would absorb some of these challenges, said Harsh V. Pant, vice president of studies and foreign policy at the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank that has ties with the Indian Foreign Ministry. This is a more self-assured government that says, Look, were doing well, were coming back to power, were very comfortable politically, and we represent a wide swath of opinion that wants us to reflect that confidence.

While analysts and diplomats say the spats are just that verbal clashes that are unlikely to derail the fundamental trajectory of deepening bilateral relations they reflect the many serious differences between the two countries on subjects ranging from Indias relationship with Russia to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Partys treatment of religious minorities and its suppression of political opponents.

This month, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, who often goes viral on Indian social media when he delivers one of his trademark ripostes to Western critics, pointedly defended Indias friendship with Russia and accused the West of cherry-picking principles on Ukraine.

Jaishankar and other officials have also hit back at the West for harboring Sikh terrorists following U.S. and Canadian allegations that the Indian government may have been involved in a campaign of targeted killings of Sikhs abroad. After Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly claimed in September that he had credible allegations tying Indian officials to the killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil, India responded with fury and then raised the ante by expelling 41 Canadian diplomats.

As a result, Western diplomats in New Delhi often say they struggle to calibrate their messaging with the Indian government, because even mild criticism in public can provoke a verbal lashing from the Hindu nationalist BJP government. In recent weeks, after India passed a law that fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslims fleeing persecution from Muslim-majority neighbors, U.S. Ambassador Eric Garcetti and other American officials spoke in public about the principle of equal treatment of different religious communities under law drawing condemnation in India. Other U.S. allies chose to deliver their concerns in private.

C. Raja Mohan, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said U.S. and Indian leaders were in the midst of reelection campaigns. The U.S. has to do its democracy-promotion bit, and India has to make its sovereignty argument for the home audience, he said. Its theater.

Indeed, the tough diplomatic rhetoric has fit neatly with Modis domestic brand. Backed by a pliant media and a vast social media messaging machine, he has cultivated an image as a leader who is more respected by world powers and more feared by Indias enemies than any Indian before him.

This week, television channels showed footage of U.S. and German diplomats being summoned as anchors explained to their audiences how India used very strong words to reprimand the Americans. You will remember that this did not happen until very recently, noted Sudhir Chaudhury, a prominent personality on the Hindi Aaj Tak channel.

The meeting lasted 40 minutes. Im sure the Indian side had a lot to say, said Palki Sharma, another anchor popular on the Indian right. She added that today, the United States and Germany needed India, and Indias message to both countries is: Stay in your lane.

The BJPs tough diplomacy has also set alight its grass-roots supporters. After the U.S.-India spat exploded on Indian social media, some right-wing accounts dug up information about the Washington-based journalist who had asked the State Department about Kejriwals arrest and began to troll him as an agent backed by George Soros and the Ford Foundation.

Others, like Gujarat-based social media influencer Raushan Sinha, 35, celebrated Indias newfound swagger.

In January, he gained online notoriety by calling the Maldives new pro-China administration a puppet government, feuding with Maldivian ministers on X and leading a call for Indians to boycott the popular holiday destination.

This week, Sinha was again cheering the Modi government. In an X post to his 247,000 followers, Sinha posted a video of a U.S. diplomat being summoned and said, The New India doesnt give a damn about you. He garnered 6,700 retweets.

In a telephone interview, Sinha said that many Indians of his generation support Modi precisely because he fills them with self-confidence and pride.

Under the Modi government in the past 10 years, we have done great work; you can see things improving, so why should we tolerate such stuff? Sinha said. We, India, are not a third-class country. We are as important as you now. So start treating us the same way.

Excerpt from:
India slams U.S. and Germany over Kejriwal arrest criticism - The Washington Post

Metas Instagram and Threads apps are slowly rolling out a change that will no longer recommend political content by default. The company defines political content broadly as being potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.

Users who follow accounts that post political content will still see such content in the normal, algorithmically sorted ways. But by default, users will not see any political content in their feeds, stories or other places where new content is recommended to them.

For users who want political recommendations to remain, Instagram has a new setting where users can turn it back on, making this an opt-in feature.

This change not only signals Metas retreat from politics and news more broadly, but also challenges any sense of these platforms being good for democracy at all. Its also likely to have a chilling effect, stopping content creators from engaging politically altogether.

Read more: From curry nights to coal kills dresses: how social media drives politicians to behave like influencers

Meta has long had a problem with politics, but that wasnt always the case.

In 2008 and 2012, political campaigning embraced social media, and Facebook was seen as especially important in Barack Obamas success. The Arab Spring was painted as a social-media-led Facebook Revolution, although Facebooks role in these events was widely overstated,

However, since then the spectre of political manipulation in the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal has soured social media users toward politics on platforms.

Read more: Cambridge Analytica scandal: Facebook's user engagement and trust decline

Increasingly polarised politics, vastly increased mis- and disinformation online, and Donald Trumps preference for social media over policy, or truth, have all taken a toll. In that context, Meta has already been reducing political content recommendations on their main Facebook platform since 2021.

Instagram and Threads hadnt been limited in the same way, but also ran into problems. Most recently, the Human Rights Watch accused Instagram in December last year of systematically censoring pro-Palestinian content. With the new content recommendation change, Metas response to that accusation today would likely be that it is applying its political content policies consistently.

Notably, many Australians, especially in younger age groups, find news on Instagram and other social media platforms. Sometimes they are specifically seeking out news, but often not.

Not all news is political. But now, on Instagram by default no news recommendations will be political. The serendipity of discovering political stories that motivate people to think or act will be lost.

Combined with Meta recently stating they will no longer pay to support the Australian news and journalism shared on their platforms, its fair to say Meta is seeking to be as apolitical as possible.

Read more: How will Meta's refusal to pay for news affect Australian journalism and our democracy?

With Elon Musks disastrous Twitter rebranding to X, and TikTok facing the possibility of being banned altogether in the United States, Meta appears as the most stable of the big social media giants.

But with Meta positioning Threads as a potential new town square while Twitter/X burns down, its hard to see what a town square looks like without politics.

The lack of political news, combined with a lack of any news on Facebook, may well mean young people see even less news than before, and have less chance to engage politically.

In a Threads discussion, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri made the platforms position clear:

Politics and hard news are important, I dont want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platforms perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (lets be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.

Like for Facebook, for Instagram and Threads politics is just too hard. The political process and democracy can be pretty hard, but its now clear thats not Metas problem.

Instagrams announcement also reminded content creators their accounts may no longer be recommended due to posting political content.

If political posts were preventing recommendation, creators could see the exact posts and choose to remove them. Content creators live or die by the platforms recommendations, so the implication is clear: avoid politics.

Creators already spend considerable time trying to interpret what content platforms prefer, building algorithmic folklore about which posts do best.

While that folklore is sometimes flawed, Meta couldnt be clearer on this one: political posts will prevent audience growth, and thus make an already precarious living harder. Thats the definition of a political chilling effect.

For the audiences who turn to creators because they are perceived to be relatable and authentic, the absence of political posts or positions will likely stifle political issues, discussion and thus ultimately democracy.

For Instagram and Threads users who want these platforms to still share political content recommendations, follow these steps:

Read more: Social media apps have billions of 'active users'. But what does that really mean?

Visit link:
Instagram and Threads are limiting political content. This is terrible for democracy - The Conversation Indonesia

The lies the Supreme Court used to justify abolishing a half-century of constitutional rights for American women to make their own decisions about abortion caught up with those justices last week and most of them ran for cover.

The Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court would rather not be hearing another rightwing attack on abortion rights by the 5thCircuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, the Trumpiest regional appeals court in America, during this election year but they brought it on themselves.

It was the 5thCircuit courts support for Mississippis brazen destruction ofRoe v. Wadethat the court eagerly used to roll back 50 years of constitutional rights for women to make decisions about their own bodies and their own lives.

Guess what? When Supreme Court justices destroy religious freedom in America to allow a minority of rightwing politicians to impose their personal religious beliefs on everyone else by law, the issue isnt over. They have to keep reliving their destruction of constitutional rights in our democracy over and over again. Happy Groundhog Day.

The raging political backlash creating record turnouts in state elections restoring the constitutional rights of women to control their own lives isnt going to die down. Neither at this point will the nations most anti-abortion courtsthe current Supreme Court and the 5thCircuit appeals courtever support the freedom of women to make decisions about their own lives.

No one should be fooled into believing Supreme Court justices are moderating their opposition to abortion by dodging for now whether to ban medication abortions that use safe and effective nonsurgical abortion pills.Abortion opponents despise abortion pills because theyaresafe, effective and easily obtained from abortion rights advocates to be used privately at home. Theyre the most common abortion procedure today and the only one that can be self-administered in states where abortion is banned.

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The only reason the justices who abolished abortion rights arent ready to ban abortion pills yet is they havent figured out a fraudulent legal cover story to do so. Fewer than 1% of millions of abortions using the pills over the past quarter-century have ever resulted in any physical complications. Theyre safer than over-the-counter Tylenol.

That didnt stop the House Republican Study Committee, which includes 80% of House Republicans, from releasing a budget last week that would rescind the Food and Drug Administrations approval of abortion pills and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.

Separately, on the rightwing Heritage Foundations Project 2025 website detailing Trumps plans to act as dictator in his second term not just on Day One, but all the other days as well lists withdrawing federal approval of abortion pills, the single greatest threat to unborn children, as a top priority for the former president right up there with jailing the Biden family.

That puts Trump at odds withall three of his Supreme Court appointees. Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett appeared satisfied with government assurances doctors opposed to abortion were already shielded under federal law from participating in the procedure. Justice Gorsuch sided with Justice Jackson in objecting to the overreach by the seven anti-abortion doctors who were exempt from using the abortion drugs suing to prevent doctors with no objections to providing abortion care from using safe medications.

As expected, the strongest objections came from Justices Alito and Thomas who absurdly invoked the 151-year-old Comstock Act passed in 1873 by crusading U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock obsessed with banning obscene, lewd or lascivious material from the mail including pornography and contraceptives.

Alito and Thomas made it clear from the moment Alitos draft destroying constitutional abortion rights began circulating that it was just the beginning. Racial, cultural and sexual diversity were out of control in America. All different kinds of people who looked nothing like Americans were claiming to have constitutional rights now. They wanted it stopped.

But theres a large majority of Americans who appreciate the rich, cultural diversity of our country. Kids who grew up in small towns like I did are moving to metropolitan areas because of everything that is going on there.Republicans are terrified of losing the votes of the violent White supremacists who support Trump. They should be more worried about losing the votes of their own kids. Kids know how absurd it is to ban books about sex and Americas racist history from their schools instead of banning the assault weapons that could kill them tomorrow.

Most Americans have no desire to live 25 years, 50 years or 150 years in the past. A majority of Americans have been waiting four years for Trump to be prosecuted for the most violent insurrection in history to overthrow democracy.

Trumps Supreme Court is intentionally delaying that prosecution, but Americas voters can assure the trial takes place and their fight to restore democracy can continue.

Joel McNally is a national-award-winning newspaper columnist and a longtime political commentator on Milwaukee radio and television. Since 1997, Joel has written a column for the Shepherd Express where he also was editor for two years.

Apr. 01, 2024

11:53 a.m.

View original post here:
Trump's Courts Can't Stop the Battle to Restore Democracy - Shepherd Express

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nearly six months into Israels assault on Gaza, the health sector has been completely decimated. Before October 7th, Gaza had 36 hospitals. Nearly six months later, only two are minimally functional, and 10 are partially functional, according to the United Nations. The rest have shut down completely after either being shelled, besieged and raided by Israeli troops, or running out of fuel and medicine.

The death toll from the Israeli assault has topped 32,500, including over 14,000 children, with nearly 75,000 wounded. The entire population of Gaza is facing high or catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, and famine is imminent in the north. At least 27 people, mostly children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration.

AMY GOODMAN: In Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest hospital in Gaza, an Israeli raid is continuing for the 10th day. Israeli forces there have killed at least 200 people and detained over 400.

Meanwhile, the U.N. reports that as of Tuesday, Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis has ceased functioning. That leaves the remaining hospitals in Gaza that are able to partially function completely overwhelmed. One of those is the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. Our next guest just spent two weeks volunteering at and living there with a team of international doctors.

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who works with Doctors Without Borders. Shes co-founder of the social media account @GazaMedicVoices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza. She just left Gaza yesterday. Shes joining us now from Amman, Jordan.

Tanya, welcome back to Democracy Now! I know youre absolutely exhausted. Can you just share your experiences of the last two weeks, what you feel its most important for people around the world to understand?

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. Thank you. Just to clarify, I was in Gaza with a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians UK, MAP UK.

Its really difficult to describe in words the horrors that we saw in our two weeks there. You know, you watch the news, you have some idea of what youre going to see. But experiencing in real time entire family structures collapsing, entire families being wiped off the civil registry, having to tell a father or a mother that their entire family, their lifelong partner and all of their children, have just been killed and you werent able to resuscitate them, is something that was very difficult to experience and something that I hope I never have to experience again. And frankly, its something that I just feel ashamed that were still talking about, you know, seven months into this. It just is such a stark representation of our failure, of our failure as humanity. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is the worst of what humanity is capable of, and its entirely all man-made. And when you witness it firsthand, its an unbearable injustice.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, thank you for that account. If you could also talk about some of the nurses with whom you worked? For our television viewers, youve seen some of the images that Tanya sent to us. And if you could speak specifically about a nurse whose name you cannot reveal for security reasons, who holds in his hand an infant, which well show now on screen? If you could talk about the story of what happened with this nurse and the child in his hands?

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. I think this photo is very representative of the utter exhaustion and yet ongoing determination of the healthcare staff there. Healthcare workers in general have been targeted since day one, as have health facilities. Al-Aqsa Hospital is a smaller hospital in the scheme of Gazan hospitals. The largest two hospitals are, first, Al-Shifa Hospital and, then, Al-Nasser Hospital. And as you mentioned in your introduction, both of them have been directly besieged. Theyve been targeted, bombed, deprived of resources. Their healthcare staff have been forced to flee. Many of the healthcare workers are arrested. They describe they describe changing out of their scrubs or being told by civilians to change out of their scrubs when theyre fleeing. Weve had civilians give healthcare workers their own clothes so that theyre not seen wearing scrubs, because we know that healthcare workers have been systematically targeted in this particular in this particular war. So, I think I wanted to start by saying healthcare workers are under an enormous amount of pressure. Theyre directly targeted. These healthcare workers evacuate, travel a very long way, and then, ultimately, are back at work, work extremely hard, do all that they can to keep patients alive.

And in this particular photo, this particular nurse, one of the most hard-working nurses that I worked with, had come to the end of a 24-hour shift, had tried very hard to resuscitate this infant, and unfortunately was unable to, and then just passed out, out of exhaustion, onto the stretcher in front of him, carrying the now-dead child. A lot of times we cant even tell the parents that their child has been killed, because there are no parents to be found. And thats, unfortunately, a very common occurrence.

In many of the other photos that youll see in front of you Im not sure which photos, Democracy Now!, youre sharing; I cant see them on my end but you can see the carnage, the very difficult circumstances under which the emergency room department is trying to operate. A lot of the senior doctors have fled. Junior doctors, who are straight out of medical school, are on call overnight, receiving mass casualties, mass casualties with stories I can share with you, but stories that are very difficult and unbearable to experience, let alone talk about. But Im happy to share more.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about where you stayed; if you slept, where you slept?

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, we slept in a room in the hospital. They had the female healthcare workers in one room on mats, and the male healthcare workers in another room. And we basically worked day and night. We had a surgical team with us that operated through most of the night just so that we can get through the very large backload of cases. I mean, this is a very small hospital that has a capacity of about 200 patients and is running with over 700 patients at the moment, and then there are thousands of internally displaced people there, as well. So they have a backlog of patients that require medical attention, that require surgical procedures, to prevent their wounds from becoming infected, to stabilize fractures. And, unfortunately, they dont have the surgical space or workforce to get those cases done. So our team was just trying to offload some of that work. The teams there are also just utterly exhausted. I mean, theyve been doing this for over 170 days. We did it for two weeks, and were exhausted. I cannot begin to fathom what it feels like for them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, if you could you mentioned, in the image that you sent us and that we showed of the child in the nurses hands you said that there were no parents or family members to whom you could convey the information of what happened to this child. The last time we had you on, you spoke about this new acronym, wounded child, no surviving family. Obviously, this child was among those. If you could talk about the number of children who were coming in, either on their own or who were left on their own?

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: Yeah, certainly. In fact, there are a number of them that are living in the hospital at the moment and being cared for by strangers or relatives. Often what happens is well receive children, dead or still alive. Well attempt to resuscitate them, and well start asking around, Does anybody know if theres family for this child in the hospital that have come in with the same mass casualty? And well have a distant relative look at us and say, like, Theyve unfortunately been martyred, or Theyve been killed. And so, it was a very common occurrence to have a child that we were resuscitating and not know if any of their family were alive, or be told that their family had been killed, or be told that that other woman that were resuscitating simultaneously on the floor is the childs mother.

I remember one incident where we received a young boy who the side of his face had been blown off, and we were providing care for him while providing care for his sister in the adjacent bed. His sister had 96% of her body burned. Their parents and all of their other siblings had been killed in the same attack. And he kept asking for his family, and he had a distant cousin who was at his bedside, who kept saying, Theyre fine. Theyre fine. Theyre injured. Theyre going to be fine. And he kept saying, Wheres my sister? He could see the patient next to him. He just couldnt recognize her, because she was so badly burned. But that was his sister. She unfortunately died despite our efforts. A 96% body surface area burn is essentially a death sentence, particularly under those resource circumstances. She died a couple days later in the intensive care unit. And he is still in the hospital receiving reconstructive surgery for his neck and face. But as of the moment I left, his distant relatives hadnt had the heart to tell him that they had all died. He was suspecting it. So, when I would pass by to check on him, he would say, I have a feeling my family has been martyred. I wish I had been martyred, too. So I think he knows. But its utterly unbearable.

Theres another child that has an external fixator, so rods in his leg after some complex fractures, that, you know, lives in the hospital at the moment for ongoing care and is cared for by strangers because he doesnt have any relatives in the hospital. And his car was bombed as they were trying to flee. And his family was killed, but he still thinks his family is in the north.

Other children know that their family has been killed, and are being cared for by extended relatives. Fortunately, their faith is strong, and they are able to rationalize, in whatever way this is youre able to rationalize these atrocities. I find them very difficult, if not impossible, to rationalize. This is an utter and complete failure of humanity, and, to be frank, I feel ashamed to be an American citizen. I feel ashamed to be part of a society that has allowed this to continue. And I am very much hoping and looking forward to the moment where we decide to take a courageous stance and put an end to this massacre.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go back, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan? You have been there a number of times.

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: So, I had been there over the last 10 years to teach. This is an area thats been besieged for 16 years. And you have healthcare providers that are working under unimaginable circumstances before October 2023. And I think witnessing what was happening from a distance thereafter, witnessing the injustice, witnessing the immense pressure under which our colleagues were working, I found it unbearable not to be there with them. And, in fact, I probably felt most at ease in the last since October, the moment I arrived in Gaza and knew that I could now actually join them in solidarity, in providing care for their patients, because theyre doing exactly exactly what we signed up to do in our Hippocratic Oath. And theyre doing it with a level of commitment and determination that is incomprehensible. It is so impressive. And yet theyre being attacked and directly targeted. And I think most healthcare workers that I know that are aware of whats happening feel the same way I do and cannot wait to be there in person to provide solidarity, or are providing that solidarity in different ways from a distance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And as you were treating Dr. Haj-Hassan, as you were treating children, people with such horrific injuries, if you could talk about the kind of equipment you had to work with? There are reports of aid trucks being denied entry because there were basic medical supplies, scalpels, scissors. Explain what doctors there have to work with as they confront these absolutely unimaginable injuries.

DR. TANYA HAJ-HASSAN: So, theres certainly a shortage of a lot of things we need to work. And I think, at a very basic level, theres just shortage of space. So, you can imagine, when we resuscitate a single patient that arrives into an emergency department, we put them in a resuscitation bed in a bay surrounded by equipment. That is not at all whats happening in these hospitals. When you receive a mass casualty, the most critical cases get moved into this red area. There are three beds in the red area. And then the rest we resuscitate on the floor in the red area or the yellow zone. And so, well have amputations that we do on the floor of the yellow zone of an emergency department.

And, you know, basic things that we take for granted are just not available sterile suture kits. Ketamine, I have to beg for. Its a drug that we use to provide pain relief and sedation when we do basic procedures. But, you know, I tend to use it on most pediatric cases when we need to do painful procedures in the emergency department, but theyre short on supplies, so you have to pick and choose which patients you provide it to and how much you provide, because you know that, you know, its opportunity cost for another patient. And thats a very hard reality, and its not one that Ive had to deal with before in my career, despite working in humanitarian medicine for a long time. We often have to think about resource limitations, but these particular resource limitations are very difficult to bear.

And I should mention that Al-Aqsa Hospital is better off than so many of the other health facilities throughout the Gaza Strip, that have either been destroyed or are completely cut off. I mean, you think about the north, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital, and how cut off its been from the very beginning, or Al-Nasser Hospital, that was besieged for so long, and the healthcare staff inside those institutions not having access to food or water for several days and sometimes weeks. That is a much more extreme situation than that which Im describing to you at Al-Aqsa Hospital, where, despite me describing severe resource shortages, we were still better off than many of the other areas in the Gaza Strip.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, we want to thank you so much for being with us, pediatric intensive care physician, was in Gaza for two weeks with Medical Aid for Palestinians. She just left on Wednesday, co-founder of the social media account @GazaMedicVoices, which shares firsthand accounts from healthcare professionals in Gaza, speaking to us from Amman, Jordan.

Coming up, we go to a State Department official who just resigned in protest over the Biden administrations support for Israels assault on Gaza. Back in 20 seconds.

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