US Politics

‘Tell everyone on this train I love them’: the meaning of a hero’s final wordsMaeve HigginsAfter he was stabbed and lay dying on a train, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche had a message I will never forget It was 26 May 2017 on the Portland MAX light rail service when a white supremacist named Jeremy Christian began threatening two teenage girls; one of the girls was black, the other in hijab. Three other men, all strangers on the same train, stood up to Christian, defending and ultimately saving the girls. Christian attacked the three men with a knife, killing 53-year-old Ricky John Best and 23-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and injuring Micah David-Cole Fletcher.As Taliesin was bleeding, another passenger, a woman named Rachel Macy, knelt with him, comforting him and staunching his wounds. Taliesin knew he was dying. “Tell everyone on this train I love them”, he said to Macy in his final moments.These beautiful words stopped me in my tracks when I first heard them. They gave me a directive, a way of being. At my best moments, this stranger’s last words guided where I looked, how I acted, and what I chose to do with my time.Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche’s mother describes her son’s last words as “the most important thing in the whole process”. Taliesin’s father says that when he heard what his son said, “It was literally a saving grace for me.” They were a saving grace for me, too: they changed my life.Loving everyone on the train meant I could love people I didn’t yet know. What Taliesin said felt instinctually correct to me yet was simultaneously baffling. It often seems there are impossibly huge chasms between me and others, so how could I love them?The heroism of the men on the train spurred many to react in all sorts of ways. A crowdfunding account called “Muslims Unite for Portland Heroes” raised more than $600,000. Many people, myself included, took Taliesin’s final message into their hearts. Strangers wrote songs and made videos and artworks about his actions and words.The public reaction to the men who saved the girls on the train, and Taliesin’s words, helped his family through the trauma of his death. I talked with his parents last month. “I think if there weren’t such a major up-swell of compassion and energy that came out of that, I would have had a lot harder time with the whole thing,” his father, Christopher DuPraw, said.“It was quite miraculous just how it expanded. That energy of ‘tell everyone on this train I love them’ completely shot around the world and on some level made it OK.” He laughed a little as he said that last part, still seeming to marvel at the fact.There is much to marvel at in the story of Taliesin’s life and his death. He was young, just 23, and according to his friends and family members he was a funny, energetic, compassionate person with a drive for adventure and a deep understanding of the need for social justice. Women adored him and vice versa; he loved to gamble; his friends stayed his friends for ever.Taliesin’s mother, Asha Deliverance, said, “He really fully believed that his life could help make change happen. And he had enough fire behind him to really believe that. He was not a lost soul at all; he was a soul with purpose.”The last time she saw Taliesin was on Mother’s Day, and she asked him why he didn’t drive to work, offering to pay for a parking garage so that he didn’t have to take the train. He told her he just preferred public transport. Asha wonders now if that was her mother’s intuition warning her to get him off the train. At the same time, she is confident that Taliesin was on a path, and was not to be diverted. He was intentional about the importance of love, and when he defended the girls against Islamophobia and racism on the train, he meant it. She knew he was living his beliefs when he was killed.“He chose to do that. That became very apparent within a few days, that this was a massive statement he was making. I never questioned or doubted his choices.”Christopher sees his son’s last words as having meaning that will carry into the future. “I feel like this is an ongoing saga. His message was a unifying message, but so much of what we are dealing with today is so divisive, from Trump to Covid, and it makes it so hard, just so difficult for people to get back to the unified consciousness.”He sounds sad, just for a moment, but I hear him brightening, and he adds, “But there is always that reminder somewhere if people look for it. And hopefully, they’ll keep looking for it.”I find that reminder in Taliesin’s words whenever I think of them. For Asha, the words that have come to mean so much to so many people still remind her mostly of one person: her son. “Of course, I miss him sometimes, but also I don’t miss him because he often just shows up the minute I think of him – and I feel the love.”
Maeve Higgins is a Guardian US columnist and the author of the book Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them
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Interview‘Food is doing more injustice than mass incarceration’: New York mayor Eric Adams on veganismEd Pilkington in New York Adams appears to have had some personal success with a vegan diet after a health scare, but can he replicate it among all New Yorkers?One morning in March 2016, before Eric Adams burst onto the national stage as the charismatic new mayor of New York City, he had a very rude awakening.The then Brooklyn borough president was startled to find that he could barely see the alarm clock that was sounding his morning call. His bedroom looked shrouded in mist.“I thought it was just sleep in my eyes and my eyes adjusting to the light,” Adams says. “But the cloudiness didn’t change. Something wrong was going on here.”He leapt out of bed only for the horror to intensify. Through the fog he could see that his right eye was bloodshot. His left eye was totally blind.“I had a piercing pain in my stomach which didn’t leave. I guess everything was breaking down all at once.”Adams is no stranger to fear. As he lays out in his book, Healthy At Last, he experienced plenty of it over more than two decades as an NYPD officer, patrolling the streets at night, raiding drug dens, investigating homicides, investigating the dark side of urban American life.This was different. This was the start of a journey into his physical dark side and the ugly truths he found there. He was quickly delivered a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Doctors told him that his condition and the multiple pills he would now be forced to swallow every day would define him for the rest of his life.American politics thrives on personal narratives of overcoming adversity, and Eric Adams is no exception. He didn’t accept the medical advice. He kept on searching until, with the help of scientists at the Cleveland Clinic, he discovered a way to beat his ailment with a radical whole-food plant-based diet.Now 61, Adams is reveling in his new stature as New York’s second Black (after David Dinkins in the 1990s) and first (almost) vegan mayor. Since he started in the post on 1 January he has been ubiquitous, popping up all over the city brandishing his trademark swagger. “When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger,” is his mantra.There are many aspects of Adams’ first month in office that beg attention. He likes to present himself as the future of the Democratic party, a “radically practical” politician who is tough on both police brutality and crime, who gives working-class New Yorkers what they need and want while being scathingly dismissive of the progressive left.The stance clearly resonates with many New Yorkers who narrowly gave him victory in the Democratic primaries in July and with it the keys to Gracie Mansion. But Adams has had a troubled start, some of it self-inflicted.He tried to put his brother Bernard into a $210,000 job as his top bodyguard (the city’s conflict of interests board whittled that down to a $1 salary as an adviser). He appointed as head of public safety Philip Banks, who in 2015 came under federal investigation as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a major NYPD corruption scandal.Adams doesn’t want to talk about all that. Before he sits down for an interview with the Guardian, his press team stipulates that he will answer no questions about politics – he will only talk about his journey back from ill-health and his exuberant championship of a plant-based diet, as laid out in his book. Even here Adams is placing himself in choppy waters. A few days after the Guardian interview, he incensed groups helping those impacted by the opioid crisis by likening excessive cheese consumption to heroin addiction.Then Politico came out with a report that quoted several people claiming to have seen Adams regularly dining out on fish. The story inevitably spawned the Twitter handle #FishGate, and forced Adams to put out a statement saying “I am perfectly imperfect, and have occasionally eaten fish.”Adams clearly needs to get his story straight. Is he a strict vegan who only ever eats plant-based foods? (No.) Is he a pescatarian? (Maybe.) Is he someone who was given the scare of his life by contracting a devastating disease and drastically changed his life as a result?At least that last one is a definite yes. After Adams received his diabetes diagnosis, he began asking himself difficult questions about his lifestyle. He started reflecting on all those years of NYPD night shifts and the terrible diet that entailed.There were the inevitable McDonald’s drive-throughs and Wendy’s shakes and burgers. He became a connoisseur of the dollar menu, the double cheeseburger, coffee and fried chicken at KFC. It took its toll – by the time of the blindness episode he had such a stunningly elevated blood sugar level that his doctor said it could have put him in a coma.And then Adams dug deeper. Looking further into the root causes of his condition, he thought about the soul food that he had grown up with in New York and that his mother Dorothy and forebears had consumed in rural Alabama. He thought about the sugared buttered rolls, the chitterlings (pigs’ intestines), pigs’ feet and ears, fried chicken, ham hocks, fried steak and catfish.He thought how delicious. And how deadly. So much of it smothered in sugar, high in cholesterol and saturated fats, contributing to the epidemic of modern American diseases – diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and heart conditions.And then he thought, picking up on a debate that has been happening in African American communities for many years, this is not soul food, this is survival food, slavery food. “This was the diet our slave masters gave to us hundreds of years ago,” Adams writes. “We adopted a diet born from slavery and made it our own.”I asked Adams to elaborate upon the idea that the modern diet of millions of Americans today, in 2022, has its roots in the scraps of food tossed at slaves from the master’s table. All these years later, he replied, the long tail of slavery is still killing African Americans through morbid ill health.“Sometimes we think of being enslaved and we think about physical restraints,” he said. “Our hands and feet are in shackles. And we don’t acknowledge that the term ‘enslaved’ also applies to something you can’t free yourself of – and that’s what bad food is.”He goes on: “We have to free ourselves of it mentally. Sometimes physical restraint is easier to free yourself from than emotional restraint.”It’s striking that at a time when the enduring injury of slavery is increasingly being studied and debated, whether in terms of racial inequality or the injustices of the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, the same unbroken link to enslavement is rarely drawn when it comes to American food.“Food is doing more of an injustice than mass incarceration,” he says. “They are both bad, but the number of lives we are losing from bad food are X times the number lost to mass incarceration.”That’s a bold statement, given that there are about 670,000 Black people currently behind bars in the US. Yet Black Americans are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than white Americans, and that more than five million of them are assailed with the illness today.Certainly, he has witnessed the impact of food-related ill-health within his own family. He describes how diabetes was so rampant among his relatives that they even had a pet word for it – “sugar”. His aunt Betty died of sugar aged 57 – one year older than Adams was when he was struck with temporary blindness.No matter how prevalent disease has been among his community, it must have been a tall order trying to persuade people accustomed to soul and fast food to follow him into the strictly vegan, no-oil, non-processed, plant-based and whole food diet he has adopted. Among the recipes offered in his book are quinoa and tempeh stir-fry, chia oats with berries, and sweet potato and flaxseed smoothies. Try selling that to someone accustomed to St Louis ribs, hush puppies and oxtail.Adams said there have been times when friends would accuse him of elitism, turning his back on the traditional foods of his community and going all “white” on them. “There is a lot of pushback,” he told me.“Remember, when you talk about what a person is eating you are also talking about the emotions attached to what they are eating. When you talk about not eating soul food, people tend to believe that you are too good for it. ‘My grandmother was raised on this’, they’ll say.”So how does he go about trying to get beyond such resistance? “I give them the history. I make the connections. Sometimes people just need to connect the dots. When you start showing them the origins of fried chicken, the origins of chitterlings and pigs’ feet, of all the other food that were the scraps and waste from the slave master’s table, that hits folks and they begin to think differently about it.”It is ironic that his book, with its recipes and self-help bullet points, is focused very much on the individual. But out in East New York or in Brownsville, where Adams was born, and other low-income areas of the city, African Americans have scant chance of eating healthily even if they wanted to, given the food deserts they live in.Isn’t it the case that in neighborhoods where fast-food restaurants and delis stocked with sugary fatty products are the only outlets, a more systemic – rather than individualist – approach is needed?Yes, he says. “What I’m hoping to do, it’s almost like the Marines taking control of the beach. If I plant this seed in the minds of people while we are transforming these communities to have access to healthy food, then we will go from ‘Wait a minute, I don’t have access to it’, to ‘Hey, this is what Eric was talking about’.”I ask him what he means. “Imagine you see something on the shelf like quinoa and couscous, and you have no idea why you would want to eat those meals. But if you are given information before you walk into the supermarket then you might try this healthy meal next time round.”That’s all very well, but how are the food deserts in low-income African American neighbourhoods ever going to get access to the kinds of whole-grain, plant-based foods that Adams espouses? There is no shortage of guidance that Adams could draw on from other parts of the country where Black communities have long experimented with community gardens and vegan hot lunches in schools.When he was Brooklyn borough president he initiated “meatless Mondays” in local public schools, and campaigned to have all processed meat removed from school meals. Now that he’s mayor, he is expanding his push for healthy food. This week he introduced “vegan Fridays” for all New York public schools – a reform to the quality of school food that Adams still stands by despite his difficulties with #FishGate.Will there be more coming, and if so how will he use his new power to make lasting change? “How do I do it?” Adams says. “I look at where as government we are feeding people and I change that. We feed 1.1 million New Yorkers every day at school, people in hospitals, correction facilities, senior centres. How about giving them all healthy food?”It’s early days for the Adams administration, too early to make firm assessments. So far there are no signs of detailed plans emerging for actually carrying out such a food revolution.It leaves a question mark hanging over his undoubtedly powerful and positive mission to change what we eat. In his own life, the results of the transformation are dramatic and unanswerable, fish or no fish. He shed 35lbs, kicked diabetes, and now exudes glowing good health.He appears to have had some personal success, but can he replicate it among all New Yorkers?TopicsEric AdamsNew YorkUS politicsVegan food and drinkVeganismFoodinterviewsReuse this content More

Nearly one in five applicants to white supremacist group tied to US militaryLeaked documents show that about 18 out of 87 applicants, or 21%, to Patriot Front were currently or formerly affiliated with military Nearly one in five applicants to the white supremacist group Patriot Front claimed to hold current or former ties to the US military, according to leaked documents published and reviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and alternative media collective Unicorn Riot.Some 18 out of the 87 applicants, or 21%, said they were currently or previously affiliated with the military. One applicant, who claimed to be a former Marine, also said he currently worked for the Department of Homeland Security, according to the SPLC’s Hatewatch, a blog that tracks and exposes activities of American rightwing extremists.A white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group, Patriot Front emerged as a rebrand of the neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America in the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.According to the SPLC, the Patriot Front “represents one of the most prominent white supremacist groups in the country” and is led by Thomas Rousseau, a 23-year old man based in Dallas, Texas. “A nation within a nation is our goal. Our people face complete annihilation as our culture and heritage are attacked from all sides,” Rousseau once said.In January, Unicorn Riot published over 400 gigabytes of data that included “ostensibly private, unedited videos and direct messages [that] reveal a campaign to organize acts of hatred while indoctrinating teenagers into national socialism (Nazism),” the journalist collective said.Group members and applicants expressed an open admiration for Nazi ideologies, with the latter expressing various motivations for joining the group.One applicant, who said he lived in San Diego, claimed to be a current DHS employee and told Patriot Front he was inspired to join after he “found out about the Jews while in the marines”.Another applicant used derogatory language about LGBTQ+ people and said he “first saw” them during his time in the military.Someone else from Salt Lake City said he “shifted focus and questioned things” after his second deployment and went from being a Republican to joining the far right.Applicants also touted their various skill sets, including “great land-navigation, great physical fitness, able to clear rooms” and “basic medical training”. Others said they had been “trained in firearms”. One claimed to train people in “marine corps martial arts” and said he was the leader of the Kansas Active Club, an affiliate of the Rise Above Movement, a Southern California-based SPLC-designated hate group.‘We are desperate for new people’: inside a hate group’s leaked online chatsRead moreIn addition to alleged military affiliations, the leak also revealed that the group targets minors. According to Unicorn Riot, Patriot Front recruits “members through the internet who are still legally minors, indoctrinating them with white supremacist ideology and even encouraging them to lie to their parents so the group can transport them across state lines for fascist events”.Patriot Front’s official policies require members to be at least 17 and a half years old, but it “goes by a case by case basis” with certain members being below that age.In the past year, there has been growing concern surrounding the far-right radicalization of current and former military members. More than 80 defendants charged for their affiliation with the deadly January 6 riots have been found to have ties to the military, with most being veterans.Last March, the Pentagon released a report that cited domestic extremist groups posing an increasing threat to the military by attempting to recruit service members and in certain situations join the military to gain combat experience.“Military members are highly prized by these groups as they bring legitimacy to their causes and enhance their ability to carry out attacks,” the report said. “In addition to potential violence, white supremacy and white nationalism pose a threat to the good order and discipline within the military,” it added.In October, a House panel convened to discuss ways to address veterans being increasingly targeted for recruitment by extremist groups.“They provide them with a tribe, a simplistic view of the world and its problems, actionable solutions and a sense of purpose, and then they feed these vulnerable individuals a concoction of lies and an unrelenting narrative of political and social grievance,” retired Marine Lt Col Joe Plenzler said at the panel.A study last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that in 2020, 6.4% of all domestic terror attacks and plots were committed by active-duty or reserve personnel, up from 1.5% in 2019 and none in 2018.TopicsThe far rightRaceAntisemitismUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, evacuated from school after bomb threatSecond gentleman was at Dunbar high school in DC for Black History Month event when he was escorted out Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice-President Kamala Harris, was whisked out of an event Tuesday at a Washington high school by Secret Service agents following an apparent bomb threat.Emhoff was at Dunbar high school for an event in commemoration of Black History Month. He was in the school’s museum for about five minutes before a member of his security detail approached him saying, “We have to go.” Emhoff was removed from the building into his waiting motorcade.Students and educators at the school were instructed to leave the school, with an announcement saying, “Evacuate the building.”District of Columbia public schools spokesman Enrique Gutierrez said there was a bomb threat. It was not known if it was related to Emhoff’s visit or the Black History Month event.Emhoff spokesperson Katie Peters said the school alerted the Secret Service about what she termed a “security incident or a report of a potential security incident”.“US Secret Service was made aware of a security threat at a school where the Second Gentleman was meeting with students and faculty,” Peters added in a later tweet. “Mr Emhoff is safe and the school has been evacuated. We are grateful to Secret Service and DC Police for their work.”The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Students at the school were dismissed for the day, since it was expected to take several hours for security officials to sweep the building, principal Nadine Smith said.TopicsWashington DCBlack History MonthKamala HarrisUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Arkansas officials praise doctor accused of giving inmates ivermectin without consentDespite lawsuit filed against Dr Robert Karas by four inmates, local officials have praised him for a ‘job well done’ An Arkansas doctor accused of prescribing ivermectin to inmates in his state without their consent has been praised by local officials for a “job well done” despite widespread outrage at his actions.In January, the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Dr Robert Karas, the physician at Arkansas’s Washington county detention center, on behalf of four inmates who said they were given ivermectin to treat Covid-19 as a form of “medical experiment”.“Plaintiffs ingested incredibly high doses of a drug that credible medical professionals, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), all agree is not an effective treatment against Covid-19 and that if given in large doses is dangerous for humans,” the lawsuit said.According to the lawsuit, Karas told the inmates that the prescribed drugs “consisted of mere ‘vitamins’, ‘antibiotics’ and/or ‘steroids.’”The CDC, as well as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have put out advisories warning against using ivermectin for Covid-19, though it is a cause celebre for some rightwing figures and anti-vaxxers.Despite the lawsuit, some prominent local leaders of Washington county have lauded Karas for his Covid treatment efforts.On Monday, Patrick Deakins, a Washington county justice of the peace, introduced a resolution to a local quorum court’s jail and enforcement committee to praise Karas for his handling of the pandemic in Washington county jail.“I don’t know the science behind Covid and I’m not so sure anybody does. I’m certainly not a doctor and I’m certainly not a virologist, and none of us on this panel are,” Deakins said.He went on to add, “I don’t know the value of one treatment or the appropriateness of it is. I don’t know the efficacy of ivermectin and I don’t know the most useful ways to treat any one individual, and those are not the debate of this resolution, I just want what’s best for the health and safety of the county.”“While over 850 cases of the infection have been recorded in the Washington county detention center, Dr Robert Karas and Karas Correctional Health have effectively treated those cases which have resulted in zero fatalities from the virus,” the resolution said.According to the document, Karas provided “exceptional medical care” to inmates and that the “Washington County Quorum Court commends Dr Robert Karas and Karas Correctional Health for a job well done despite the unique challenges.”Despite the resolution getting passed by the committee, other local officials pushed back against Karas.“If you talk to individuals at our local hospitals that are treating patients after Dr Karas has treated them, they are very ill,” said justice of the peace Eva Madison. “The reality is that he doesn’t know … He can’t possibly know what the side-effects are of the treatment that he has given,” she added.“How can we tout nobody died when the individuals in this lawsuit claimed health consequences from what he did to them,” Madison said in reference to the inmates. “You can agree or disagree with the lawsuit, Dr Karas, but why in the world would this body endorse a practice that’s being challenged in court?”In the lawsuit filed by ACLU last month, inmates complained that they suffered from various side-effects after ingesting ivermectin, including vision issues, diarrhea, bloody stools and stomach cramps. The inmates were also subject to payment of fees for medical examinations that they sought after experiencing the side-effects.Karas, who has had numerous lawsuits filed against him over the years for allegedly providing inadequate and poor medical care to inmates, has filed a motion to dismiss ACLU’s lawsuit against him.TopicsArkansasCoronavirusUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and Trump ally, to step down from Meta boardThiel, a major donor to the Republican party, was seen by critics as part of the reason why Facebook did not censor Trump Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, is stepping down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, after 17 years.Finally, Facebook can say it’s not the most toxic social network | Marina HydeRead moreThiel, Facebook’s longest-serving board member and a major donor to the Republican party, plans to focus on backing Donald Trump’s allies in the November midterm elections, according to the New York Times. He recently donated $10m each to the Senate campaigns of Blake Masters, who is running for a seat in Arizona, and JD Vance, who is running in Ohio. Masters is the chief operating officer of Thiel’s family office and Vance used to work at one of Thiel’s venture funds.Thiel has long been a controversial figure on Facebook’s 10-person board, particularly as one of a few major tech figures who vocally supported Trump. Thiel, who donated millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign and served on the ex-president’s transition team, was seen by critics as a part of the reason Facebook did not take down Trump’s posts that violated its community standards. Thiel is a close confidant of Zuckerberg’s. He accompanied him to a private dinner with Trump in 2019 and has successfully advocated he withstand pressure to take political speech and ads off the platform.But recently he has publicly criticized Facebook’s content moderation decisions, saying he’d “take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth”.Thiel joined Facebook’s board in 2005, a year after the company was founded and seven years before its made its debut on Wall Street. The company said on Monday that he would stay on until Meta’s next shareholder meeting later this year, where he would not stand for re-election.“Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he’s done for our company,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, in a statement. “Peter is truly an original thinker who you can bring your hardest problems and get unique suggestions.”In a statement on Monday, Thiel called Zuckerberg “one of the great entrepreneurs of our time” and praised his “intelligence, energy and conscientiousness”.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting.TopicsFacebookMetaSocial networkingPeter ThielRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More