Elections

Lee and Dennis Horton maintained their innocence through 27 years behind bars. The brothers were convicted in a 1993 robbery and fatal shooting in Philadelphia that they say they did not commit.“We were forgotten men,” Lee Horton said. “Nobody was paying us any mind. John Fetterman reached out and pulled us up. He saved our lives because there’s no doubt we would have died in prison.”Mr. Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 in large part to rejuvenate the Board of Pardons as a last stop for justice. One of the lieutenant governor’s few duties is to be the chair of the board, which had grown moribund.Under his leadership, the number of inmates serving life sentences who were recommended for clemency and release, including the Hortons, has greatly increased.Now that record has become a top issue for Mr. Fetterman’s opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, with Republicans training intense fire on the Democrat on social media, in email blasts and in $4.6 million in TV ads accusing him of “trying to get as many criminals out of prison as he can.”After the Horton brothers were released in 2021, Mr. Fetterman gave them jobs as field organizers for his campaign.“If John Fetterman cared about Pennsylvania’s crime problem, he’d prove it by firing the convicted murderers he employs on his campaign,” Brittany Yanick, a spokeswoman for Dr. Oz, said this month.Mr. Fetterman, in an interview, accused Dr. Oz of fear-mongering and twisting the facts of the Hortons’ case and those of others he championed. “Of course, these ghouls are going to do that kind of thing and distort and lie about the truth,” he said.Across the country, Republicans have taken up the issue of crime to rally midterm voters, confronting a rise in violence in most major cities that began during the coronavirus pandemic. Among them is Philadelphia, which is on pace to equal last year’s record 562 homicides.While attacking Democrats as soft on crime may be standard for Republicans in most election years, Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed contrast because Mr. Fetterman has turned the pardons board into a cause célèbre over four years.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.Rather than soft-pedaling his record, Mr. Fetterman expressed satisfaction in winning the release of inmates who served decades in prison, generally with model records.“There were some wrongs that needed to be put right, and there were a lot of people caught up in this system that were innocent or deserving” of release, he said.If Republicans “weaponize” his record and “destroy” his career over his advocacy for second chances, Mr. Fetterman added, including for the Hortons and other men he said were wrongly convicted, “then so be it.”Mr. Fetterman with the Horton brothers on Saturday at a rally in Philadelphia. Hannah Beier/ReutersIn a poll of Pennsylvania voters by The Morning Call/Muhlenberg College last week, only 3 percent named crime as the most important issue in the midterms, well behind the economy (22 percent) and abortion (20 percent). But the pollster, Chris Borick, suggested Mr. Fetterman’s 41 percent disapproval was driven by Republican portrayals of him as “too left-leaning,” which have included attacks on his pardons record. The lieutenant governor led Dr. Oz, a former heart surgeon and celebrity TV host, by 49 percent to 44 percent, within the margin of error.Barney Keller, a spokesman for Dr. Oz, said his campaign would continue to attack Mr. Fetterman on crime. “Dr. Oz has surged in the polls because John Fetterman is the most pro-murderer candidate in America,” Mr. Keller said.While individual pardon cases are complex, requiring voters to absorb details and nuance, the G.O.P. attacks on Mr. Fetterman are meant to deliver the opposite: a blunt, visceral punch.The Oz campaign created a website called Inmates for Fetterman, highlighting the crimes of convicted murderers whose release Mr. Fetterman sought, and asking for donations to Dr. Oz.The Oz campaign has singled out the Horton brothers, whose release Mr. Fetterman calls one of the pinnacles of his career in public office. The brothers share a name but are not related to the most infamous released inmate in a political attack ad, Willie Horton, whose crime spree while on a furlough program hurt the presidential candidacy of Michael Dukakis in 1988.Invoking that episode explicitly, Mr. Fetterman said he had anticipated that opponents would “Horton us” over his championing the brothers’ release.Like more than 1,100 lifers in Pennsylvania’s prisons, 70 percent of them Black, the Horton brothers were convicted of second-degree murder, a charge filed against suspects who participate in a felony — such as robbery, arson or rape — that leads to a death. It also includes accomplices not directly responsible for a fatality who drove a getaway car or acted as a lookout..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Pennsylvania is an outlier in mandating life without parole for second-degree murder, and reformers argue that it violates constitutional protections against unduly cruel punishments.With no possibility of release through the normal parole process, these inmates have been encouraged by Mr. Fetterman to seek commutations before the pardons board. The board can recommend either pardons (for inmates already released) or commutations (for those still behind bars). The five-member board, which includes Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, must unanimously approve commutations, and the governor must sign off. Mr. Fetterman said that in each commutation case he supported, he asked the prisoner’s warden if he would want that individual as a neighbor. “And they’re like, ‘Absolutely,’” he said.Commutations — typically, a reduction of a life sentence to time served — were once common, but in the tough-on-crime era beginning in the 1990s they all but ended. Mr. Fetterman argued that “those who didn’t take a life” and had clean records over decades in prison should be “living out their lives at home.”Under his chairmanship, the board has recommended 50 commutations of life sentences, compared with just 10 in the preceding two decades.In addition to commutations, Mr. Fetterman is under fire from Republicans for opposing certain life sentences for murder and for a statement he once made that he “agreed” with a corrections official that prison populations could be cut by a third with no harm to the public.“John Fetterman wants to release one-third of prisoners and eliminate life sentences for murderers,” claimed Dr. Oz’s first TV ad of the general election. The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has run five ads leveling similar attacks, including its latest, which calls Mr. Fetterman “dangerously liberal on crime.”For purposes of soft-on-crime attacks, it little matters that murders rose during the pandemic in blue states and in red states alike, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas. Studies show low recidivism rates for lifers released after their sentences were commuted: about 1 percent for inmates over age 50, in a Pennsylvania study from 2005.Mr. Fetterman said he did not support releasing a third of all prisoners — about 12,000 of Pennsylvania’s 36,000 inmates. He said the official who remarked that cutting prison populations by a third would not threaten public safety was a former secretary of corrections appointed by a Republican governor. And the life sentences he seeks to end are for second-degree murder.Last week, in a visit to Philadelphia to promote safe streets, Dr. Oz criticized Mr. Fetterman’s record on the pardons board and proposed his own anticrime measures, including support for the First Step Act. That law, passed in 2018 with bipartisan support, includes sentence reductions for federal inmates with good behavior — a version of the second chances that Mr. Fetterman espouses.At a campaign event last week in Philadelphia, Dr. Mehmet Oz spoke with Sheila Armstrong, who lost her brother to gun violence.Ryan Collerd/Associated PressMalcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative from Philadelphia, said that if Dr. Oz and Senate Republicans cared about high crime rates, they would support investments in poor communities such as raising the minimum wage, and gun safety measures that go beyond the limited bipartisan bill signed by President Biden in June. That law expanded background checks for gun buyers under age 21 and funds red-flag laws that let authorities take guns from people deemed dangerous.“Dr. Oz and Senate Republicans do not give a damn about people in Philadelphia and about the crime that folks are enduring,” Mr. Kenyatta said.Mr. Keller, the Oz spokesman, did not answer directly when asked whether Dr. Oz would have voted for the bipartisan gun law. “Doctor Oz is interested in how the implementation of this law will occur, and was particularly interested in the new funding for mental health,” Mr. Keller said.Mr. Fetterman was so convinced that the Horton brothers were wrongfully convicted that after the pardons board rejected their first clemency petition in 2019 — Mr. Shapiro, the attorney general, voted against it — he suggested he would run for governor if that’s what it took to get them out.“The trajectory of my career in public service will be determined by their freedom or lack thereof,” he once told The Philadelphia Inquirer.The deputy superintendent of the state corrections department endorsed the Hortons’ release. A brother of the man killed in the 1993 shooting, for which the Hortons and a third man were convicted, was opposed. “They took a human life, and they don’t deserve to be out in society,” the victim’s brother, Reinaldo Alamo, told The Inquirer. The third man in the case, who police records said was the actual gunman, was released in 2008.The brothers finally won clemency in their second try, in 2020. Mr. Fetterman set his sights on the Senate, and Mr. Shapiro ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor.Since the brothers returned home to Philadelphia, the corrections department has invited them to speak monthly to cadets training to be prison guards, Lee Horton said.Their work for the Fetterman campaign includes attending ward meetings, telling their story at rallies and simply walking the streets.“On any given day we’re out talking to people about John Fetterman’s policies about minimum wage, how he would make average, everyday working people’s lives better,” Dennis Horton said.His brother added: “We’re not angry. We gave up the anger years ago but, you know, we want to be able to live our lives and to be able to feed our families. We want to be able to have jobs.”Lee Horton dropping campaign signs off at businesses in Philadelphia on Friday.Hannah Beier for The New York Times More

Paul Gicheru was accused of tampering with witnesses in favor of President William Ruto, whose trial at The Hague collapsed in 2016. The cause of death is not yet known.NAIROBI, Kenya — A Kenyan lawyer on trial at the International Criminal Court on charges of witness tampering in a case linked to President William Ruto was found dead at his home in a suburb of the capital, Nairobi, his family and the police said on Tuesday.The lawyer, Paul Gicheru, had been awaiting a verdict in the trial, which took place in The Hague from February to June. Prosecutors accused him of bribing and intimidating witnesses to prevent them from testifying against Mr. Ruto over his role in post-election violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008.Mr. Ruto, who announced his new cabinet on Tuesday, was sworn in as president on Sept. 13 after winning last month’s hard-fought election by a narrow margin.Michael G. Karnavas, Mr. Gicheru’s lawyer, confirmed his death, which was received with shock by many in Kenya — the latest twist in a decade-long legal journey at the International Criminal Court, punctuated by collapsed trials, disappearing witnesses and accusations of meddling, that has drawn in Kenya’s leaders and framed its politics.Kenyan news reports, citing the police, said that Mr. Gicheru went to sleep on Monday after a meal at his home in Karen, a wealthy Nairobi suburb, and was found dead later that night. His son was taken to a hospital and complained of stomach pains after eating the same meal.Mr. Karnavas said that he suspected foul play and called on the Kenyan authorities and the International Criminal Court to open a full investigation into the death. “It’s somewhat odd that after the election in Kenya, and before the court issues its judgment, there is this incident,” he said, speaking by phone. “This warrants the I.C.C. stepping up to the plate.”But in comments to reporters in Kenya, John Khaminwa, a lawyer for the Gicheru family in Kenya, downplayed suggestions of poisoning, and said the family was waiting for an autopsy to be completed and for the police to issue its preliminary report.Mr. Gicheru caused a sensation in Kenya in late 2020 when he flew to Amsterdam to present himself to the International Criminal Court, after years of refusing to stand trial and resisting the court’s efforts to have him extradited to The Hague.When the trial started this year, Mr. Gicheru pleaded not guilty and declined to testify. He returned to Kenya when the trial ended in June to await the verdict. A spokesman for the International Criminal Court said in an email that under the court’s guidelines, a verdict should be delivered within 10 months.President William Ruto of Kenya at the U.N. General Assembly last week. He was sworn in this month after winning a hard-fought election in August by a narrow margin.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe Kenya Human Rights Commission called the news of his death “shocking,” and urged the authorities to mount a swift investigation. In a statement, the Law Society of Kenya reiterated that call, noting that “several witnesses in the I.C.C. cases have either disappeared or died,” and wished a speedy recovery to Mr. Gicheru’s hospitalized son.Mr. Gicheru’s trial stemmed from a series of high-profile prosecutions that implicated some of Kenya’s most prominent politicians in a wave of violence after the disputed 2007 elections that killed at least 1,200 people and forced another 600,000 to flee their homes.In 2011, the International Criminal Court indicted Mr. Ruto for crimes against humanity over accusations that he orchestrated violence in his home area, the Rift Valley, distributing weapons and issuing kill lists of opposition supporters from rival ethnic groups.Uhuru Kenyatta, then a political rival of Mr. Ruto, was also indicted on similar charges.By 2016, the cases against both men collapsed after key witnesses recanted their testimony and the Kenyan government stopped cooperating with the court. By then, Mr. Ruto and Mr. Kenyatta had resolved their political differences to unite as a formidable force. Together they won the 2013 election, with Mr. Kenyatta as president and Mr. Ruto as his deputy, and were re-elected in 2017.Not only did the I.C.C. charges unite the two leaders, but it also provided them with a powerful electoral argument. After becoming president in 2013, Mr. Kenyatta denounced the court as a “toy of declining imperial powers.”But in dismissing the charge against Mr. Ruto, the court did not declare him innocent, leaving open the possibility that he could face a new trial. And it had already, in 2015, indicted Mr. Gicheru, a provincial lawyer from the same area as Mr. Ruto, on accusations that he ran a witness tampering scheme responsible for scuppering the trial.During the trial that started in February, prosecutors said that Mr. Gicheru had intimidated or offered bribes of up to $41,600 to witnesses who withdrew their testimony against Mr. Ruto and Joshua Sang, a radio journalist accused of stoking political violence in the Rift Valley after the 2007 vote.Prosecutors told the court that Mr. Gicheru’s actions, from 2013 to 2015, had caused four “vital” witnesses to recant their testimony. Eight people testified against him, including witnesses who said that they been threatened and that they feared for their lives.The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, recused himself from the Gicheru case because he had represented Mr. Ruto as a defense lawyer during the trial that collapsed in 2016.Protesters and the police in Eldoret, Kenya, in 2008. Mr. Gicheru had been accused of intimidating witnesses to prevent them from testifying against Mr. Ruto over his role in post-election violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008.Ben Curtis/Associated PressAfter Mr. Ruto’s case collapsed, the International Criminal Court prosecutions receded from prominence in Kenya. Mr. Gicheru, by then a senior Kenya government official, successfully opposed efforts by the court to have him extradited to The Hague.But the affair returned to prominence in November 2020 when Mr. Gicheru voluntarily flew to The Hague with his wife and presented himself for trial at The Hague.The unexpected move by Mr. Gicheru stoked widespread speculation inside Kenya that it was linked to the crumbling relationship between Mr. Kenyatta and Mr. Ruto. Two years earlier, Mr. Kenyatta had signed a political pact with Raila Odinga, a veteran opposition leader expected to contest the 2022 election, that his deputy, Mr. Ruto, saw as a betrayal.When Mr. Gicheru presented himself for trial in 2020, reports in Kenyan news media speculated that he had been pressured or inducted to present himself for trial as part of an effort to resurrect the I.C.C. case against Mr. Ruto.His lawyer, Mr. Karnavas, said Mr. Gicheru’s motivation was simply to clear his name. “It was a sword of Damocles,” Mr. Karnavas said.During the hearings early this year, no evidence emerged that directly linked the witness tampering scheme to Mr. Ruto, and the issue hardly figured in the bitterly fought election campaign that ended in August, with Mr. Ruto’s narrow victory over Mr. Odinga.Mr. Karnavas said the prosecution’s case was weak and, had Mr. Gicheru lived to hear the verdict, he was confident he would have been acquitted.“Here’s someone who came voluntarily to clear his name, knowing the consequences,” he said. “Even if there’s no foul play, there needs to be an investigation.” More

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it had discovered and taken down what it described as the first targeted Chinese campaign to interfere in U.S. politics ahead of the midterm elections in November.Unlike the Russian efforts over the last two presidential elections, however, the Chinese campaign appeared limited in scope — and clumsy at times.The fake posts began appearing on Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Twitter, in November 2021, using profile pictures of men in formal attire but the names of women, according to the company’s report.The users later posed as conservative Americans, promoting gun rights and opposition to abortion, while criticizing President Biden. By April, they mostly presented themselves as liberals from Florida, Texas and California, opposing guns and promoting reproductive rights. They mangled the English language and failed to attract many followers.Two Meta officials said they could not definitively attribute the campaign to any group or individuals. Yet the tactics reflected China’s growing efforts to use international social media to promote the Communist Party’s political and diplomatic agenda.What made the effort unusual was what appeared to be the focus on divisive domestic politics ahead of the midterms.In previous influence campaigns, China’s propaganda apparatus concentrated more broadly on criticizing American foreign policy, while promoting China’s view of issues like the crackdown on political rights in Hong Kong and the mass repression in Xinjiang, the mostly Muslim region where hundreds of thousands were forced into re-education camps or prisons.Ben Nimmo, Meta’s lead official for global threat intelligence, said the operation reflected “a new direction for Chinese influence operations.”“It is talking to Americans, pretending to be Americans rather than talking about America to the rest of the world,” he added later. “So the operation is small in itself, but it is a change.”The operation appeared to lack urgency and scope, raising questions about its ambition and goals. It involved only 81 Facebook accounts, eight Facebook pages and one group. By July, the operation had suddenly shifted its efforts away from the United States and toward politics in the Czech Republic.The posts appeared during working hours in China, typically when Americans were asleep. They dropped off noticeably during what appeared to be “a substantial lunch break.”In one post, a user struggled with clarity: “I can’t live in an America on regression.”Even if the campaign failed to go viral, Mr. Nimmo said the company’s disclosure was intended to draw attention to the potential threat of Chinese interference in domestic affairs of its rivals.Meta also announced that it had taken down a much larger Russian influence operation that began in May and focused primarily on Germany, as well as France, Italy and Britain.The company said it was “the largest and most complex” operation it had detected from Russia since the war in Ukraine began in February.The campaign centered around a network of 60 websites that impersonated legitimate news organizations in Europe, like Der Spiegel, Bild, The Guardian and ANSA, the Italian news agency.The sites would then post original articles criticizing Ukraine, warning about Ukrainian refugees and arguing that economic sanctions against Russia would only backfire. Those articles were then promoted across the internet, including on Facebook and Instagram, but also on Twitter and Telegram, the messaging app, which is widely used in Russia.The Russian operation involved 1,633 accounts on Facebook, 703 pages and one group, as well as 29 different accounts on Instagram, the company’s report said. About 4,000 accounts followed one or more of the Facebook pages. As Meta moved to block the operation’s domains, new websites appeared, “suggesting persistence and continuous investment in this activity.”Meta began its investigation after disclosures in August by one of Germany’s television networks, ZDF. As in the case of the Chinese operation, it did not explicitly accuse the government of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, though the activity clearly mirrors the Kremlin’s extensive information war surrounding its invasion.“They were kind of throwing everything at the wall and not a lot of it was sticking,” said David Agranovich, Meta’s director of threat disruption. “It doesn’t mean that we can say mission accomplished here.”Meta’s report noted overlap between the Russian and Chinese campaigns on “a number of occasions,” although the company said they were unconnected. The overlap reflects the growing cross-fertilization of official statements and state media reports in the two countries, especially regarding the United States.The accounts associated with the Chinese campaign posted material from Russia’s state media, including those involving unfounded allegations that the United States had secretly developed biological weapons in Ukraine.A French-language account linked to the operation posted a version of the allegation in April, 10 days after it had originally been posted by Russia’s Ministry of Defense on Telegram. That one drew only one response, in French, from an authentic user, according to Meta.“Fake,” the user wrote. “Fake. Fake as usual.” More

Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish author, sees parallels between Donald Trump’s claims of election theft and the 2016 attempt to depose Recep Tayyip Erdogan.This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which convenes this week in the Greek capital to examine the ways in which self-governance might evolve.When President Donald J. Trump announced in November 2020 that he had been robbed of victory in the presidential election that month, the author and political commentator Ece Temelkuran (pronounced eh-jeh) drew direct parallels with her homeland, Turkey.“Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup,” she wrote in an editorial for The Guardian. “If it were happening in Turkey, the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.”Ms. Temelkuran spoke from experience. She lived through the July 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and left the country to avoid the crackdown that followed. Three years later, she published “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” a nonfiction book that charted a democratic country’s potential slide into authoritarianism.Ms. Temelkuran was born into a political family. Her mother was a student activist who was imprisoned after a military coup in Turkey in the 1970s and rescued by a young lawyer whom she would go on to marry.When she was 16, Ms. Temelkuran started writing for a feminist magazine and went on to become one of Turkey’s most widely read political commentators.She remains a high-profile commentator today while she lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.In a recent interview, Ms. Temelkuran spoke of the threats to democracy in the West and in her native Turkey. This conversation has been edited and condensed.Since you published your book “How to Lose Your Country,” a few things have happened. Mr. Trump is no longer in power. Nor is the British prime minister Boris Johnson, who championed Britain’s exit from the European Union. How do you view the world today?I think there’s too much optimism, and also too much pessimism. The optimists think that if they get rid of Boris Johnson or Trump, everything will be back to normal in terms of democracy — that we can just fix a few mechanisms in the democratic machine, and we will be fine after that. I think this is a deeper crisis: a cluster of crises, actually, that we have to look deeper into.The crisis of democracy is very much intertwined with the crisis of capitalism. There is no way out, unless we address the issue of social equality.Ece Temelkuran is an author and political commentator who lives in Hamburg, Germany, where she is a fellow at the New Institute’s Future of Democracy program.Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesYou say democracy in its present form is dead, because capitalism is essentially incompatible with democracy. Can you explain?Right-wing populist movements did not suddenly appear in the last 10 years. We have to go back to the 1980s to understand what really is happening in the world today, especially in terms of democracy.Democracy stands on the fundamental promise of equality and social justice. Capitalism does not promise social justice. If people are not equal in real terms, meaning financially and economically, how can you promise them equality as citizens?Why do you believe that capitalism is at odds with social justice?People pretend as if the rights that workers enjoy — Sundays off, eight-hour work days, etc. — are all thanks to capitalism. In fact, whatever the working classes have achieved or earned has come after a very long and hard struggle against the ruling classes.The depoliticization of society in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to an infantilization of citizens — to their perception of politics as being dirty. This massive depoliticization contributed to the right-wing populist movements of today. That’s why we have all these masses who believe that Trump is the savior, or that Brexit will make Britain great again.Another consequence was that we were made to be afraid of words like socialism, social democracy, regulation, financial regulation. These words became taboo after the 1970s.We’ve ended up in a place where we don’t even allow ourselves to think of a better system than capitalism. It is as if the end of capitalism were to lead to the end of the world.You use the word fascism to describe political realities in the West. That word has serious historical resonance. Why use it?Because I think we should use that word. We were made to believe that fascism was buried in the battlefields of the Second World War. The version that wears boots and uniform was buried, yes. But fascism does not just come in a uniform and boots, marching in goose step. If freedom of speech, freedom of organization, and the rights of the working classes are oppressed, that builds up to fascism.In countries such as the United States and Britain, the democratic establishment is powerful enough to protect itself. But in countries where the political and democratic establishment is not mature enough, you see fully formed oppression. There is no doubt that these are regimes that we can easily call fascism — in Turkey, in India, and in several other countries.Parliamentary democracies aren’t suddenly going to turn Hitlerian, are they?They don’t need to. At the time of Hitler, there was a need to be oppressive and violent because there was a massive union movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, a socialist movement. Nowadays, there is no such thing. So why use violence? They can use post-truths or social media to manipulate people, to spread misinformation and so on.If we can shift global politics to being more progressive, then we can get rid of these movements. At the moment, the center of the political spectrum is empty. Centrist politicians don’t have a story with which to mobilize and organize people. There’s a vacuum.Take French President Emmanuel Macron, for example. Why is he there? Because everybody is so afraid of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. For the last decade, at least, voting has become a tool to protect us from the worst.This is not politics. It’s a survival reaction.Unless the center opens its arms to the left and to progressives, there is no way out for democracy in the world.Turkey was for a long time a model when it came to the transition to democracy in the Muslim world. What’s going on there now?It’s a massive form of dictatorship. But then these dictatorships do not have to use violence. Now they’re using a different political tool, which is this very wide web of political money that spans the entire country. Even the smallest sympathizer to the party is getting this money. They have a good life. If you are part of the party, or in the party circle, you have a life. Otherwise, it’s not just economic transactions that are impossible. You cannot exercise your basic rights as a citizen.There are first-class citizens who are submissive to the party or Erdogan, and the others. The others, as Erdogan has said, are welcome to leave, and they are leaving. There is a massive brain drain from Turkey at the moment. It’s another tragic story. Doctors, nurses, well-educated people, academics: They’re all leaving.What’s the way out?The way out, which Turkish political forces are in a very inadequate way trying at the moment, is coming together: for all the opposition parties, despite their political differences, to come together and, in the interests of democracy, participate in elections. More

The committee investigating what led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its first hearing since July on Wednesday, entering the final stage of its inquiry.WASHINGTON — A day before resuming its televised hearings and with only months remaining before it closes up shop, the House Jan. 6 committee is wrangling over how best to complete its work, with key decisions yet to be made on issues that could help shape its legacy.The panel, whose public hearings this summer exposed substantial new details about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, must still decide whether to issue subpoenas to Mr. Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.It has yet to settle on whether to enforce subpoenas issued to Republican members of Congress who have refused to cooperate with the inquiry, or what legislative recommendations to make. It must still grapple with when to turn its files over to the Justice Department, how to finish what it hopes will be a comprehensive written report and whether to make criminal referrals. It cannot even agree on whether Wednesday’s hearing will be its last.The panel has not disclosed the topics it intends to cover in the 1 p.m. hearing, its first since July. But it is still working to break new ground with its investigation.It recently had a breakthrough when Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, agreed to a voluntary interview about her role in seeking to keep Mr. Trump in office. That interview is expected to take place within weeks.The committee also issued a subpoena to Robin Vos, the Republican House speaker in Wisconsin whom Mr. Trump tried to pressure as recently as July to overturn the 2020 election, suggesting that the panel tracked Mr. Trump’s activities long after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his departure from office two weeks later. (Mr. Vos has sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena.)“Our hearings have demonstrated the essential culpability of Donald Trump, and we will complete that story,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.But the committee has debated whether and how to highlight certain information related to the Jan. 6 attack. For instance, some members and staff have wanted to hold a hearing to highlight the panel’s extensive work investigating the law enforcement failures related to the assault, but others have argued that doing so would take attention off Mr. Trump.And it has struggled in recent weeks with staff departures and is facing public criticism from a former aide, Denver Riggleman, who says it has not been aggressive enough in pursuing connections between the White House and the rioters.The final stages of its planned 18 months of work are playing out against a shifting political climate. Polls suggest that Democrats could lose control of the House in November’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump is showing every intention of seeking the presidency again, and the committee’s Republican vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lost her primary in August, appears to be positioning herself as the party’s anti-Trump White House candidate for 2024, with the panel’s conclusions as part of her platform.Ms. Cheney on Saturday seemed to contradict other committee members by describing this week’s hearing as unlikely to be the last. Other members, including the committee’s chairman, have said it would likely be their final presentation.With that backdrop, Wednesday’s hearing could be seen as the first step in the closing stages of the committee’s work.“What they have to do is strategic,” said Norman L. Eisen, who was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including for the first impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump. “The first part of the end game is to close the deal with the American people.”The panel set high expectations for itself by revolutionizing what a congressional hearing could look like. Preparing for the hearing on Wednesday has consumed the committee’s focus in recent weeks..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“They’ve pretty uniformly met and exceeded expectations,” Mr. Eisen said. “And when you’ve done that eight times, that suggests that you know what you’re doing. I suspect part of the reason that they took a lengthy hiatus — and by all reports worked very hard over the summer — was to be able to come back in September with a bang.”To some degree, the committee is now competing for attention with other investigations into Mr. Trump and his allies. The New York attorney general has filed a sweeping fraud suit against Mr. Trump and his family. Prosecutors in Georgia are conducting grand jury interviews about efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there. And the Justice Department is now conducting criminal inquiries into both the events that led to the Jan. 6 attack and Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents he took with him upon leaving the White House.To help with its end game, the panel has quietly rehired John Wood, a former federal prosecutor who is close to Ms. Cheney. Before he left the panel for a brief, unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in Missouri, Mr. Wood led the committee’s “Gold Team,” which investigated Mr. Trump and his inner circle.It has also expanded its number of staff members from about 50 up to 57, according to Congress’s latest financial data, and has spent about $5.3 million over its first year in existence.But at the same time, the committee has had five staff members put in resignation notices in recent weeks. Among them is Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor who was featured in a committee hearing and led the panel’s “Green Team,” which investigated the money trail connected to Jan. 6, including political donations and the funding of the rallies that preceded the violence.The hearing on Wednesday is expected to feature new video of the Jan. 6 attack and also new clips of some of the committee’s hundreds of interviews with witnesses.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said the panel would focus some of its energy on ongoing threats to democracy, such as 2020 election deniers gaining power over election systems.“We have found additional information,” Ms. Lofgren said. “We worked throughout the summer.”The panel’s investigators pursued a number of topics this summer, traveling to Copenhagen, for example, to review footage shot by a documentary film crew of the political operative and Trump confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. Committee members have hinted that some of that material could turn up in Wednesday’s hearing.They held closed-door interviews with senior Trump administration officials in an effort to uncover more about the period between Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked Congress, and Jan. 20, when President Biden was sworn in, including talks about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.The panel at one point considered inviting generals who worked for Mr. Trump to deliver firsthand accounts of his behavior. (The idea has not moved forward.)Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said the panel recently received a trove of documents from the Secret Service in response to a subpoena it issued after the news that agents’ text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, had been lost.A spokesman for the agency said the Secret Service provided a “significant level of detail from emails, radio transmissions, Microsoft Teams chat messages and exhibits that address aspects of planning, operations and communications surrounding January 6th.” But the spokesman said the documents did not include any additional text messages, such as those sought by the committee that were erased during an upgrade of phones.Members of the committee had originally seen their investigation, and the possibility of a criminal referral, as a way of putting pressure on the Justice Department to pursue a criminal case. But with federal prosecutors now investigating elements of Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power despite losing at the ballot box, the House committee is considering a new suggestion for the information it uncovered about Mr. Trump and his allies raising money by promoting baseless assertions about election fraud: making a referral to the Federal Election Commission, a largely toothless body that can weigh abuses of campaign finance laws.“F.E.C. would be a good possibility,” Mr. Thompson said. “Obviously we looked seriously at some of the fund-raising that went on around Jan. 6.”Members have also been discussing what legislative recommendations they should make. Last week, to close off the possibility of another president trying to have a vice president block the certification by Congress of the Electoral College results, Ms. Cheney and Ms. Lofgren introduced an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which quickly passed the House. (A somewhat different version is awaiting action in the Senate.)Members are also discussing reforms to the Insurrection Act, legislation related to the 14th and 25th amendments and regulation of militia groups. Members also are likely to recommend improvements to Capitol security.Not all the panel’s recommendations have found agreement. Mr. Raskin, for instance, has pushed for recommending the Electoral College be eliminated, but that idea has been met with resistance from Ms. Cheney and others and is unlikely to be included in the final recommendations.Maggie Haberman More

There are some signs of a drift toward issues where the party has an advantage, like the economy and immigration.You’re reading the The Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only. More

The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, wants his newsletter, The Tilt, to be like a “cooking show for polling.”Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections is packed with dizzying statistics. Voters are regularly inundated with polling numbers: There are conflicting data points, varying sources of information and different lenses to interpret it all. The Tilt, a subscriber-only newsletter from The New York Times that started this month, tries to make sense of the electoral whirlwind.The goal is to do “the best job we can of honestly appraising what we know and don’t know,” said Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, who writes the newsletter. Using polling data collected by The Times and other outlets, as well as surveys and electoral trends, The Tilt examines the historical context behind the numbers.The Tilt is an evolution of Mr. Cohn’s “polling diary,” a 2020 analysis of daily election polls. In an interview, he discussed what readers can expect from the newsletter. This conversation has been edited.What is the difference between The Tilt and the “polling diary”?I thought that the 2020 polling diary was a success, but it really tried to cover every base possible: It tried to tell readers about almost every poll that came out on a given day and how to make sense of all of it.In a presidential election, I do think there is a demand from a certain segment of readers to have every last data point interpreted. I don’t think that’s necessarily true in a midterm election when there’s a little less interest, and I think it’s a little harder to justify, given how poorly the polls have done over the last few cycles. We need to step back away from the data as often as we need to be in it. The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.So The Tilt moves beyond the numbers?We’re going to talk a lot about our own work here at The Times, whether it’s in terms of our own polling or election night modeling. We’re also going to have the opportunity to talk about historical precedence and the other factors that underlie the way that we analyze elections.Take this midterm election, for instance: One of the biggest reasons people believe Republicans will regain control of the house is because there’s a long history of the party that’s out of power doing well in midterm elections. Diving into that history, and whether what we’re seeing this year lines up with the past or something different, is the thing we can do that’s different from just adding and subtracting the latest polls.How will The Tilt pull back the curtain on the process?I sometimes think of cooking shows as an analogy. If you step into a kitchen, or you watch a cooking show, you get to see how it all gets made. You come away with a different level of respect for the chef, even if it’s not the food you would have made yourself. We can be a little bit more of a cooking show for polling.There are plenty of reasons to look at the recent track record of polling and be a little skeptical of just how accurate it can be. But to the extent that readers can at least understand all the work that goes into it and why it is what it is, and where it can go wrong, they will be better prepared to make sense of it.Why should voters be invested in polling?Polling is sort of the lifeblood of our democracy. You may not like it that way, but in a democratic system, the responsibility of our elected officials and the political candidates is to represent the public, and the role of citizens is to engage in the democratic process. Polling is one of the major ways that all of the political actors I just mentioned make sense of public opinion, and then choose how they want to engage with that system.When the polling is bad, that’s really bad for the system in important ways. If the polls aren’t accurately representing the public’s attitudes, then elected officials don’t make decisions that reflect the will of the public.We don’t have very many other ways to measure the attitudes of the population without this. Otherwise, we would assume that our own prejudices about what ideas sound good or don’t sound good are probably held by other people. Or we might assume that the rest of the country looks like the places where we live. We’ve learned over the last decade that that’s almost certainly not true, even if we had deceived ourselves into that view beforehand. More

There have been accusations of cowardice, name-calling and, of course, liberal use of a chicken suit motif.With six weeks until Election Day, the candidates in the New York race for governor have fully embraced a now-familiar rite of passage to the governor’s mansion in Albany: the debate over the debate.Republican Lee Zeldin, a Republican from Long Island, had for weeks challenged Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent vying for her first full term, to as many as five debates ahead of the general election on Nov. 8.The taunting played out in typical New York fashion: Mr. Zeldin incessantly accused Ms. Hochul of “chickening out” on Twitter and in emails to supporters, while The New York Post ran a front page of Ms. Hochul — whom they called “scaredy Kat” — in a bright yellow chicken suit.Despite the goading, Ms. Hochul remained noncommittal until last week, when she said she would apparently participate in only one debate: an event hosted by Spectrum News NY1 on Oct. 25.Mr. Zeldin decried her decision as “cowardly” and insisted that the candidates should have several debates. Mr. Zeldin has accepted invitations to two other debates that Ms. Hochul has not agreed to. But he has not, as of now, accepted the invitation to the Oct. 25 debate, in an apparent sign of protest, posturing or bargaining — or all three.The impasse, however long it lasts, has only escalated the one-upmanship between the campaigns. On Thursday, Ms. Hochul’s press secretary posted an image on Twitter of Mr. Zeldin in a chicken suit; Mr. Zeldin shot back with a statement challenging Ms. Hochul to “come out, come out wherever you are!”So, as matters stand, it remains unclear when, or even if, New Yorkers will get an opportunity to watch Ms. Hochul and Mr. Zeldin face off as they contend for the state’s highest office, in a race largely defined by competing visions around issues of public safety, affordability and reproductive rights.As is typical for challengers seeking to unseat incumbents, Mr. Zeldin would stand to benefit the most from the free airtime associated with debates. It is plausible that he will eventually capitulate to Ms. Hochul’s offer of a lone debate.Some recent public polls show Mr. Zeldin trailing Ms. Hochul, who enjoys wider name recognition, by roughly 15 percentage points, though other surveys suggest that the race may be tighter. Ms. Hochul, who took office last year after former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo abruptly resigned over sexual harassment allegations, has also amassed a considerably larger campaign war chest that she has deployed to flood the airwaves with a barrage of TV ads attacking Mr. Zeldin.Ms. Hochul’s stance is not unusual for incumbent governors in New York.Mr. Cuomo, who was often reluctant to debate his rivals, held out until about two weeks before Election Day in 2018 before committing to a single debate with his Republican opponent, Marcus J. Molinaro, who had repeatedly accused him of making “a mockery of democracy” and “hiding from public scrutiny.” (Tabloids and chicken suits were also involved in that process).Mr. Cuomo came under similar monthslong pressure from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who unsuccessfully challenged him during the Democratic primary earlier that year, until he finally agreed to one debate.Years before, in 1994, George E. Pataki was not given the chance to debate former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a three-term Democrat. Mr. Pataki, a Republican, prevailed nonetheless in an upset victory, but he did not debate his opponents in the following election in 1998.In announcing Ms. Hochul’s participation in the Oct. 25 debate, which will take place at 7 p.m. at Pace University, her campaign said that she had participated in two debates during the Democratic primary earlier this year. It added that she would announce “additional public forums and speaking engagements” ahead of November.“Governor Hochul looks forward to highlighting the clear contrast between her strong record of delivering results and Lee Zeldin’s extreme agenda,” Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for the Hochul campaign, said in a statement.Mr. Zeldin’s campaign said that Mr. Zeldin had already accepted two debate requests — from WCBS-TV and WPIX-TV — and urged the local networks to proceed with the debates “without her and with an empty podium.” The debate on Spectrum News NY1, the campaign said, could also be limited to cable viewers, potentially leaving out television viewers who mostly rely on broadcast channels or are subscribed to another cable provider.The Zeldin campaign also noted that the Oct. 25 debate would take place over a month after election officials began mailing absentee ballots to voters.“Voters should have the opportunity to hear where the candidates stand before they vote, not after,” Mr. Zeldin said in a statement. “Scaredy cat Hochul can run but she can’t hide from her absolutely abysmal record on the issues most important to New Yorkers, including rising crime, skyrocketing cost of living and an eroding quality of education.” More