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    In Iraqi Elections, Guns and Money Still Dominate Politics

    Iraqis vote Sunday in parliamentary elections called a year early, after huge anti-government protests. Most parties are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.BAGHDAD — Outside the headquarters of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, one of the main Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, fighters have posted a giant banner showing the U.S. Capitol building swallowed up by red tents, symbols of a defining event in Shiite history.It’s election time in Iraq, and Asaib Ahl al-Haq — blamed for attacks on American forces and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization — is just one of the paramilitary factions whose political wings are likely to win Parliament seats in Sunday’s voting. The banner’s imagery of the 7th century Battle of Karbala and a contemporaneous quote pledging revenge sends a message to all who pass: militant defense of Shiite Islam.Seventeen years after the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator, the run-up to the country’s fifth general election highlights a political system dominated by guns and money, and still largely divided along sectarian and ethnic lines.The contest is likely to return the same main players to power, including a movement loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a coalition connected to militias backed by Iran, and the dominant Kurdish party in the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Other leading figures include a Sunni businessman under U.S. sanctions for corruption.A poster for the Sadrist Movement on display at the entrance to Sadr City, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. Posters for a candidate from another party hang nearby. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesIn between are glimmers of hope that a reformed election law and a protest movement that prompted these elections a year early could bring some candidates who are not tied to traditional political parties into Iraq’s dysfunctional Parliament.But persuading disillusioned voters that it is worth casting their ballots will be a challenge in a country where corruption is so rampant that many government ministries are more focused on bribes than providing public services. Militias and their political wings are often seen as serving Iran’s interests more than Iraq’s.Almost no parties have put forth any political platforms. Instead they are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.“I voted in the first elections and it did not meet our goals and then I voted in the second election and the same faces remained,” said Wissam Ali, walking along a downtown street carrying the bumper of a car he had just bought at a market. “The third time I decided not to vote.”Mr. Ali, from Babil province south of Baghdad, said he taught for the last 14 years in public schools as a temporary lecturer and has been unable to get a government teaching position because he does not belong to a political party.Anti-government protestors at a demonstration in Bagdad’s Tahrir Square this month commemorating activists killed by security forces and militia gunmen.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesStarting in October 2019, protests intensified, sweeping through Baghdad and the southern provinces demanding jobs and basic public services such as electricity and clean water. The mostly young and mostly Shiite protesters demanded change in a political system where government ministries are awarded as prizes to the biggest political blocs.The protesters called for an end to Iranian influence in Iraq through proxy militias that now are officially part of Iraq’s security forces, but only nominally under government control.In response, security forces killed almost 600 unarmed protesters, according to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights. Other estimates place the toll at 800. Militia fighters are blamed for many of the deaths and are accused of killing dozens more activists in targeted assassinations.The current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, came to power last year after the previous government was forced by the protests to step down.While early elections were a key campaign promise, Mr. Kadhimi has been unable to fulfill most of the rest of his pledges — bringing to justice those behind the killings of activists, making a serious dent in corruption and reining in Iranian-backed militias.While the parties already in power are expected to dominate the new Parliament, changes in Iraq’s electoral law will make it easier for small parties and independent candidates to be elected. That could make this vote the most representative in the country’s postwar history. Despite faults in the election process including, in previous years, widespread fraud, Iraq is still far ahead of most Arab countries in holding national and provincial polls.A poster for an independent candidate hung on the fence of a soccer field in Sadr City. Changes in election rules have made it easier for independent candidates to win seats. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“It’s not a perfect system but it’s much better than the old one,” said Mohanad Adnan, an Iraqi political analyst.He said he believed the protests — and the bloody suppression of them — had resulted in some established parties losing part of their support. Some candidates are hoping to capitalize on a backlash against traditional political blocs.Fatin Muhi, a history professor at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said she was encouraged by her students to run for office. Ms. Muhi, who is running with a party affiliated with the anti-government protests, said many people in her middle-class constituency had planned to boycott the elections but changed their minds.“When they found out we were candidates for the protest movement they said ‘we will give you our votes,’” Ms. Muhi said. “We will be an opposition bloc to any decision issued by corrupt political parties.”In addition to anger and apathy, serious fraud in the last parliamentary election has fueled the boycott campaign.To counter voter distrust that led to a record low turnout in the 2018 polls, election workers have been going to people’s doors in some neighborhoods with voter registration cards. Election authorities “wanted to make it as easy as possible for voters who don’t have trust in the system,” said Mr. Adnan, the political analyst. “They are not motivated to register or pick up their cards.”Customers at a cafe in Sadr City with the lights switched off. State electricity provides the cafe with only two hours of power at a time before it must rely on a generator.  Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesThe country’s 21 million registered voters include an estimated one million old enough to vote for the first time. Despite TikTok campaign spots and other tactics aimed at reaching young voters, many of them are boycotting the election.“Our country is for us and not for them,” said Helen Alaa, 19, referring to the political parties and the militias. Ms. Alaa, a first-year college student who said she would not vote, was at a demonstration commemorating slain protesters. “We tried so hard to explain to them but they always try to kill us. Now they try to calm down the situation so they can win in the election and bring back the same faces.”Ahmed Adnan, 19, said, “Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets.” The candidate keeps being elected, he said, but none of those things have been done.To help support his family, Mr. Adnan, who is unrelated to Mohanad Adnan, works at a shop selling ice, making about $8 a day. He is trying to finish high school by studying at home and going in only to take exams.His friend, Sajad Fahil, 18, said a candidate came to his door and offered to buy his vote for $300.“Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets,” said Ahmed Adnan, center. He wants to finish high school but needs to work to help support his family.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“He refused to say which party he was running for,” said Mr. Fadhil, who studies at a technical institute and is also boycotting the vote.In some areas where there is more money and races are more hotly contested, the going price for buying a vote is up to $1,000, according to several tribal officials.Sheikh Hameed al-Shoka, head of the Anbar Tribal Leaders Council, said groups commissioned by some political blocs were buying up people’s biometric voting cards by the thousands. Under that scheme, voters agree to relinquish their cards and later retrieve them outside polling sites — ensuring that they actually do turn out — where they then vote as directed.In a race between the powerful Sunni speaker of Parliament, Mohammad al-Halbousi, and Iraqi businessman Khamis al-Khanjar, Sheikh Hammeed said he had told his followers to support Mr. Khanjar. The tribal leader said both political figures were suspected of corruption, including Mr. Khanjar whom he acknowledged having “corrupt friends.”“But his friends have worked in the government and offered something for people,” said the tribal leader. “The others did not offer anything. They only provided for themselves.”Fishing on the banks of the Tigris river in Baghdad.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesFalah Hassan and Sura Ali contributed reporting from Baghdad. Nermeen al-Mufti contributed reporting from Kirkuk, Iraq. More

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    The Artists Bringing Activism into and Beyond Gallery Spaces

    At a time when the basic power structures of the art world are being questioned, collectives and individuals are fighting against the very institutions funding and displaying their work.I.It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Eyal Weizman is at his central command — his London living room, which has been his base of operations since the outset of the pandemic. A vase of peonies is visible on the table behind him. His dog, Bernie, leaps into the frame, something about his shaggy visage evoking his eponym. His teenage daughter wanders through, making goofy faces to distract her father. His phone buzzes incessantly.It’s a stressful time for Weizman, the founder of Forensic Architecture, a roughly 30-member research group comprising architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, artists, scientists and lawyers that he started at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010, and which has become well known in the art world for data-driven museum exhibitions that serve as detailed investigations into human atrocities that history has tended to ignore; he describes their headquarters as a cross between an artist’s studio and a newsroom.This summer at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Forensic Architecture unveiled a new investigation into the cybersurveillance of human rights workers; at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, it presented new evidence in its inquiry into the 2011 shooting by London police of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Black man (thanks to F.A.’s investigation, Duggan’s family was able to negotiate a financial settlement). A third show, “Cloud Studies,” at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, included a major new investigation in Louisiana linking the development of land on the Mississippi River by petrochemical plants — land on which burial grounds of enslaved people have been found — to centuries of human and environmental exploitation. The day of our conversation in May, Weizman had just gotten off the phone with the Colombian Truth Commission, and had earlier taken a call from a lawyer involved in an inquiry into London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. (Forensic Architecture is making a film recreating the event, which killed 72 people, a disaster that evidence seems to show was partly caused by the construction’s failure to meet fire-resistance requirements.) Meanwhile, bombs had been falling on Gaza for over a week, and colleagues and sources there and in the West Bank were in danger. His own world had shrunk, too, the cost of doing the kind of work he does; he’d been advised not to travel to Russia or Turkey after investigations involving those countries; even the United States was off the table.Welcome to the life of a 21st-century activist artist, whose work is as likely to be exhibited at an international human rights tribunal as it is a museum, and in which death threats and cyberattacks are all in a day’s work. Forensic Architecture was a finalist for the 2018 Turner Prize in part for an investigation it presented at Documenta in 2017 involving the 2006 murder of a German man of Turkish descent by a neo-Nazi group in Kassel, Germany — in the presence, as F.A. proved, of a national intelligence agent. “In the art world, the reviews were saying, ‘This is evidence, this is not art,’” Weizman recalls. Later, it became part of a parliamentary inquiry. “And when it was taken to the tribunal, the tribunal said, ‘That’s art, that’s not evidence, you cannot have it here. How can you pull out a piece of art from Documenta, which we know is an art exhibition, and put it in a parliamentary commission?’ But it didn’t help them, and the agent that we found complicit in killing was actually made to watch the artwork at the parliamentary commission. So to a certain extent, we love it, being not this and not that. It’s part of our power.” A 2020 work by Decolonize This Place about how to topple a racist monument. The New York-based group campaigns against systemic racism and human rights violations in museums.Content by Sarah Parcak, 2020, courtesy of Decolonize This PlaceActivism has become a powerful force in contemporary art of late — exciting, resonant, even potentially reparative in nature, rather than irritatingly salubrious. In recent years, the photographer Nan Goldin helped popularize this new era of cultural institutions as the site of active protest by staging die-ins at museums including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to highlight the philanthropic support of the Sackler family, owners of the company that produces OxyContin. This led to a host of institutions, including the Guggenheim, the Met and the Tate galleries embargoing further donations from the family. This year, the art collective Decolonize This Place, which has organized actions at the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, among other institutions, was one of the groups involved in Strike MoMA, which originated as an effort to call attention to the ties of the former board chairman and hedge fund billionaire Leon Black to the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In March, days after Strike MoMA announced a series of protests calling for an end to “toxic philanthropy” and for Black’s resignation, he told colleagues that he would not seek re-election for his position. The tipping point for these shake-ups in institutional power came in 2019 when Warren B. Kanders, the C.E.O. of the munitions company Safariland, stepped down as vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board of trustees. The movement, in this case, came from inside the museum: After articles connecting Kanders to the company appeared online, staff members at the Whitney wrote a letter to the museum’s leadership condemning his position; Decolonize This Place organized protests to support those efforts and the sculptor Michael Rakowitz declined his invitation to participate in that year’s Whitney Biennial. Forensic Architecture, for its part, showed what is probably its best-known work in the United States: the 2019 11-minute film “Triple-Chaser,” a collaboration with Laura Poitras’s Praxis Films that illuminates the link between Kanders and Safariland. It includes unsparing footage of migrant families being tear-gassed at the U.S.-Mexican border and a protester being shot in Gaza, his leg ripped apart by a bullet. (The film’s title comes from the name of the tear-gas grenade that separates into three pieces in order to allow “increased area coverage.”) This synergistic response to a war profiteer’s effort to launder his reputation with philanthropic efforts felt galvanizing.II.We’ve always been fascinated by art that has a real-world impact. But why is there so much of it now, and why is it suddenly so effective? Art is, as Barbara Kruger puts it in a 1990 essay, “What’s High, What’s Low — and Who Cares?,” a way of showing and telling, through an eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive at a particular point in time. But certain times are more volatile than others, and art has risen, once again, to meet the politically charged moment, in which desire for accountability has taken hold across the culture, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. This fall marks the 10-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which led to a greater understanding of the structures that uphold inequality, including the cultural institutions that prop up the forces degrading the values art and culture purport to protect. The very concept of freedom has been co-opted by bare-chested men in coonskin caps storming the U.S. capital, or legislators constraining teachers’ discussions of the racism endemic to American history. We’re free to be killed by a lunatic wielding a military-style weapon at the supermarket; we’re free to be taxed a quarter of our incomes while the wealthiest pay one-tenth of 1 percent. What use is freedom these days, really? As a concept, it’s always been of limited use, depending on where you were born or the color of your skin. It’s no wonder, then, that the conversation around art is one that calls for reckoning and repair.Hans Haacke’s “MoMA Poll” (1970) asked visitors of New York’s Museum of Modern Art whether or not they would support Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose family remains one of MoMA’s major donors.Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York/Vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery, New YorkThese groups operate in different modes — Decolonize This Place recognizes the emotional impact of protest and spectacle (close to a thousand people attended a 2018 protest at the American Museum of Natural History), while Forensic Architecture seeks to build a legal case — but they share a belief in art as a revolutionary practice, and an emphasis on the value of collaborative efforts between artists and the public. They recognize common cause across a host of issues, including police brutality, Indigenous rights, income inequality and gentrification. (Both groups have also stoked controversy among their ideological opponents, most recently pro-Israel activists, who have said their support of Palestine has helped contribute to antisemitic violence, an accusation that members of Decolonize This Place and Forensic Architecture vehemently deny.) In the same way that Safariland tear gas can be used in Palestine, Ferguson, Baltimore, Egypt and at the southern border of the United States, or that ultranationalism and self-victimization have global reach, this new fusion of art and human rights work crosses borders of geography and identity, rather than siloing causes. As with other social justice movements worldwide, there is a collective structure to this work that serves as a rebuke to the artist as superstar, the narrative of the great man or woman as creator. Anticommercial and antiauteur, the emphasis is on the relational, a recognition that by working synergistically and across areas of professional expertise, everyone becomes emboldened to address entrenched asymmetries of power. What these groups also share is a belief in art that’s self-aware — transparent about process, explanatory in nature, seeking to pierce the fog of complication and misinformation with data — the tool by which we hold people, institutions and corporations accountable. That so much contemporary activist art is centered around marshaling and corralling data also speaks to our moment, in which willful ignorance is arguably more widespread than at any other time in history. In a fake news, post-truth world, in which conspiracy theories and foolishness (rigged elections, space lasers) have flourished faster than Silicon Valley coders can intercept them, data has become the de facto authority, summoned up to debate everything, from the pandemic to critical race theory to bias in general, not just within institutions but in one-on-one arguments. No one really has credibility anymore; we assume everyone is distorting information to suit their interests until we see hard proof. Accompanying the dissemination of untruths are the constant undermining and defunding of those who do, in fact, buttress factual information, such as universities, scientists and journalists. The desire for something resembling definitive truth is all-encompassing. It makes sense, then, that we would want art that not only incites empathy or starts a conversation but that makes our fragmentary, mediated world graspable and actionable. Thinking of art — in this hyperverified form, meticulously crafted — as a kind of tool against injustice is undoubtedly like bringing a flash drive to a sword fight. But it may be the best weapon we have.III.Inequalities are visible everywhere we go in the modern world. It’s the West Bank security wall; it’s which neighborhood gets a beautiful new park and which one gets the petrochemical plant. Weizman, 51, who is Jewish and grew up in Haifa, Israel, has written at length about the ways in which the structures of power and politics manifest themselves. “Israeli apartheid is evident in everything in the built environment, from the way the city is organized to the way that communities are clustering, in where roads go and where forests are being planted. It’s in where new settlements are being established. It’s in where there is a flyover, and where there is a tunnel. Politics is actually a physical architectural reality, it has that sort of immersive dimension. You’re in politics. It’s not something you read about; you can bump your head into it,” he says. As an architecture student, he was drawn to writing and researching; as a young adult, he volunteered at the Palestinian government’s Ministry of Planning in Ramallah, where he was tasked with photocopying Israeli documents like maps and aerial images that Palestinians could not access.A 2019 protest in front of the Pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, opposing the museum’s ties to the Sackler family. The demonstration was organized by the activist group P.A.I.N., or Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which was founded by Nan Goldin.Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty ImagesOften, though, the powerful forces that shape our lives and well-being can be difficult to see and touch. We can pull down racist monuments (the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of New York’s Natural History museum, a locus of D.T.P. protests, is set to be replaced next year), but structural racism remains. Over the past decade, a number of prominent artists have been focused on making those unseen forces visible and tangible. Think of Trevor Paglen’s work in artificial intelligence that “sees” us, or Hito Steyerl’s 2019 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory, “Drill,” which was built around gun violence testimonials. In the case of Forensic Architecture, this “making visible” often involves deploying the very technologies that surveillance states and corporate entities use against us. Compiling data fragments of all kinds — witness accounts, leaked footage, photographs, videos, social media posts, maps and satellite imagery — they create platforms to compile the information, cross-reference it and uncover the hidden connections between dispersed events. In the 21st century, revolution is still about winning hearts and minds, but it’s also a technology war.When I ask Weizman if he considers himself an artist, he brings up the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, an early inspiration for F.A.; Farocki was making a film about Forensic Architecture when he died in 2014. “He compared what we do to a bird building a nest,” Weizman says. “You take a little bit of reed, you take some nylon, you take some plastic, you take some leaves, and somehow one assembles shape from there. So there’s an act of construction, and in an act of construction there’s always imagination that comes into it, but it does not mean that it reduces its truth value. The truth comes out of that aesthetic work.” Using satellite imagery, aerial photographs and centuries-old historical records, F.A. creates a timeline of evidence; that evidence is used to close the gaps between probable and provable, meeting a burden of truth (something that, Weizman has said, we need like air and water). Unlike Farocki, who used security camera footage in his work to make a point about our disembodied reality, or documentary filmmakers such as Errol Morris, who creates re-enactments to show us the subjective nature of memory and testimony, F.A. makes video work that strives to bear the scrutiny of judicial interpretation. Protecting sources is paramount to F.A.; meetings involving sensitive information are conducted in a special room called the Fridge, in which cellphones aren’t allowed; identifying information on vulnerable sources is written down instead of stored on computers.Forensic’s work assists the imagination by pulling together vast quantities of fragmentary evidence, moving backward in time to establish a record of accounting. Sometimes, this timeline can be short — the shooting of Mark Duggan, for example, transpires over the course of a few seconds; other times, it can be vast: The Louisiana investigation involves a time span of three centuries, from the first arrivals of enslaved people on the Mississippi River to today’s Cancer Alley, so named in the 1980s for the skyrocketing cancer rates among the largely Black communities living there. Increasingly, the area is referred to as Death Alley, making the history of exploitation clearer. “Our ancestors are ultimately at the front line of resistance to this industry,” says Imani Jacqueline Brown, the project’s coordinator. “Slavery,” she notes, “not only established this notion of sacrificing populations from whom life and labor can be extracted in order to produce profit for others but also literally lay the grounds for the petrochemical plants to come in.”A rally, organized in part by Decolonize This Place, outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019.Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty ImagesF.A.’s work often physically manifests itself as short videos that closely examine their source material and their methodology. It is not visually unappealing, but it has the look of a formal presentation, almost like an exhibit at a criminal trial. The Louisiana project was, tellingly, unveiled this past June to the public not in a gallery or museum but on The New York Times home page, in a short film produced with the paper’s video team. The fact that a phase of the project, which includes 3-D models and detailed cartography that illustrate how the Louisiana landscape has changed over time, was part of an exhibition at an art space across the Atlantic from the actual site the group is investigating is also not an accident: Nearly every cultural institution in Louisiana is funded by the oil and gas industry. One irony of contemporary art that critiques or transcends the institution is just how central the institution remains to it. Indeed, the complexity of the art ecosystem as a reflection of global power is at the heart of F.A.’s origin story. In 2002, Weizman was asked, along with his partner in his Tel Aviv practice, Rafi Segal, to represent Israel at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. But their project, which examined in detail the spatial form of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and how their physical layout is informed by politics, was abruptly withdrawn by the Israel Association of United Architects. That widely reported censorship created an immediate buzz, and the work was exhibited instead at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2003. In 2004, Weizman co-curated with Anselm Franke an exhibition called “Territories,” which focused on spatial warfare — the way in which dominion is built into the construction and destruction of the landscape, housing and infrastructure. It was part of a shift in architecture away from flashy luxury developments and toward a more politically engaged construction, practiced over the past decade by everyone from Shigeru Ban to Rem Koolhaas, which explicitly tries to respond to issues like climate change and inequality. When Goldsmith’s hired Weizman to establish an architecture program in 2005, it was with the goal of creating an alternative paradigm to existing studio-based architectural education models, a refuge for architects that want to take part in reform and activism.“We thought, ‘Art will allow us to do what we need,’” Weizman tells me wryly. “And then we realized, ‘No, we have another war to wage here.’” F.A. had already been invited to contribute to the Whitney Biennial when he read the articles linking Kanders to Safariland. Weizman immediately thought of a 2016 demonstration in the West Bank in which he’d participated. “I was running with a young woman toward the Israeli army, and they shot a tear-gas canister at us, and she got hit in the head,” he recalls. “And after tending to her, I looked at the thing, I took a photo of it. And when we heard about Kanders, I realized that that canister was actually something I had breathed: You breathe with your eyes and with your nose, and it’s kind of like everything is watering, an extremely unpleasant, intense sort of sensation. Fast-forward to 2017, and we realized, ‘OK, hold on, that stuff that was thrown at me is now funding our contribution.’ We knew that we had a slightly different role than other artists because we had a capacity: We had people on the ground, we had the technology, we knew that we could investigate. We wanted to turn the art world into a site of accountability.” The Death Alley investigation will be exhibited in October in Louisiana at community spaces, and eventually, Brown hopes, the platform will be handed off to local activist groups. While the stories F.A. tells aren’t designed to elicit emotion or push aesthetic boundaries, these things have a way of seeping in. If violence has an aesthetic, so do the physical traces it leaves behind. Looking at the aerial imagery Brown and her team scour for anomalies, clues that might indicate the site of an unmarked burial ground, she points out a lone oak — the last remaining descendant of trees once planted by people who didn’t have access to stone to mark the graves of their loved ones — and for a moment, neither of us can speak.Forensic Architecture’s “Cloud Studies” (2008-2021), at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery.Courtesy Forensic Architecture and the Whitworth, the University of ManchesterIV.It’s impossible, in thinking about what transpired at the Whitney, not to recall one of the earliest examples of what would later be called institutional critique, Hans Haacke’s 1970 installation “MoMA Poll.” Visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art were asked to deposit their answers to a question — “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” — into one of two transparent plexiglass ballot boxes, one for “Yes” and another for “No.” Nelson Rockefeller, whose family money had funded MoMA in the first place, was up for re-election, and was a major donor and board member at the museum, but in this case his reputation went relatively unharmed, even though, by the end of Haacke’s exhibition, there were twice as many “Yes” ballots as there were “No” ballots. While the flow of money hasn’t changed much since Haacke’s day (several Rockefeller family members remain on the museum’s board), the call for transparency has grown very loud; hence, the rise of the term “artwash” to describe the way in which art and culture are used — by institutions, by the state, by individuals — to normalize and legitimize their reputations.Activist art has a way of capturing our attention during culture wars. By the 1960s, conceptual art movements had taken art out of museums and into the wider world; that inspired the political art movement of the 1970s, as well as the ecological and feminist art movements. Institutional critique reached its apotheosis in the 1980s, when artists historically excluded from museum spaces began to take on the mainstream. In 1989, Andrea Fraser made “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,” in which she performed the role of a museum docent in order to mock the robber baron mentality of art connoisseurship; the video work was produced at a time when federal cuts to cultural funding meant that museums increasingly had to rely on corporate sponsorship and private donors. But in the years since, that irreverence has fallen away. In 2016, Fraser published a 950-page study titled “2016 in Museums, Money and Politics,” breaking down the donations of 5,458 museum board members to party-aligned organizations during the general election. There was no wit, or cheekiness, here, only the numbers telling their own inarguable story: The people who support cultural institutions that fly the flag of diversity and inclusion are also major donors to conservative politicians who fight against those very causes.Then there’s the rebirth of collectives, a mainstay of ’60s-era art, which have also taken up the cause of post-institutional work. In the 1990s, the Artnauts, a group founded by the sociologist and artist George Rivera, created actions and self-curated installations in locations that drew attention to issues that generally fell outside of art’s traditional purview, from post-Pinochet Chile to the closed borders at the Korean DMZ Museum. Decolonize This Place, with its sit-ins and eye-catching graphics, draws from a lineage of activist art established by the Situationist International, or S.I., which was founded in 1957 after the French theorist Guy Debord brought together a number of art collectives in Alba, Italy, for a meeting of the First World Congress of Free Artists. The Situationist manifesto draws from philosophers like Gyorgy Lukacs to examine culture as a rigged game dominated by powerful interests that squelches dissent or commodifies subversive thinking, and now feels uncannily current.A 1987 poster, “Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney,” by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist collective that has spent decades examining gender disparity at arts institutions across the world. © Guerrilla Girls, Courtesy guerrillagirls.comOne of the more iconic progenitors of today’s data-driven activist art collectives is the Guerrilla Girls, which arose in 1985 amid a frustration with the commercialism of art. The Guerrilla Girls, who wear gorilla masks and use the names of deceased female artists as noms de guerre, targeted spectators in public with posters and slogans that challenged the status quo using language borrowed from advertising. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” one 1989 poster asked, beside a graphic of an odalisque wearing a gorilla mask, noting in the text that while less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern section were women, 85 percent of the nudes were female. Then, as now, critics of these movements suggested there was a certain hypocrisy afoot, given that many artists involved in institutional critique were having their work funded by and exhibited at those very institutions. But this was, according to the artists, always the point: Rather than purifying the art world, it’s about liberating it.“We still do street posters and banners dissing museums, but we also diss them right on their own walls,” Käthe Kollwitz, a longtime Guerrilla Girls member, wrote to me in an email (her name is a pseudonym). Their latest project, “The Male Graze” (2021), is a series of billboards that reveal a history of exploitative behavior by male artists. Their focus remains largely unchanged: “We say to everyone who cares about art: ‘Don’t let museums reduce art to the small number of artists who have won a popularity contest among big-time dealers, curators and collectors,’” Kollwitz writes. “Unless institutions show art as diverse as the cultures they represent, they’re not showing the history of art, they’re just preserving the history of wealth and power.”Revolutions, like art, begin as works of imagination: a reshaping of the world in a new image. Nitasha Dhillon, a co-founder, along with Amin Husain, of Decolonize This Place, points me to a 1941 essay by the surrealist theorist Suzanne Césaire, in which she envisions a “domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic. … Here are the poet, the painter and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversion of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness.” We can all agree that the world has gone mad; can the art of reckoning and trauma show us a way forward? The fact is, there’s no blueprint for decolonization; nothing involving people working together for greater justice is especially utopian or marvelous. There will always be disagreement, imperfection, more to learn, more work to be done. This kind of art is nothing if not effortful; it comes at a personal cost. And so, while groups like Forensic Architecture and Decolonize This Place have already had their proven successes — in courts of law, in art spaces — I can’t help but think that it’s the less measurable impact that might, in the end, be the more powerful one, as models of cooperation and correction in a cynical, self-interested and often violent world. If nationalism and greed are globally transmissible, then so, perhaps, is idealism. Accountability, in the end, means paying attention to whose suffering is footing the bill for our lifestyle, our comfort, even our beauty. The fear of being canceled is, after all, about the fear of facing those hard truths and being found complicit. The question, maybe, has never really been whether or not art can heal us but rather to what extent we have the courage to heal ourselves. More

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    German Protesters Call for Climate Action as Election Nears

    Protests took place worldwide, but those in Germany had heightened urgency amid calls for the next government to do something about climate change. Thousands of people took to the streets in Berlin to call for urgent action on climate change ahead of national elections in Germany. They were joined by the activist Greta Thunberg who urged them to continue pressuring their political leaders.Markus Schreiber/AP AP, via Associated PressBERLIN — Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world on Friday returned to the streets in the first global climate protest since the coronavirus pandemic forced them into lockdowns.Protesters gathered in Bangladesh, in Kenya, the Netherlands and in many other countries. But nowhere was the call to action more urgent than in Germany, where an estimated several hundred thousand people turned out in more than 400 cities, putting pressure on whoever wins a national election Sunday to put climate protection at the top of their agenda.Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old climate activist who started the Fridays for Future protests in Stockholm in 2018 by skipping school as a way of shaming the world into addressing climate change, made a guest appearance at a protest in Berlin.“Yes, we must vote and you must vote, but remember that voting will not be enough,” she told the crowd, urging them to stay motivated and keep up the pressure on politicians.“We can still turn this around. People are ready for change,” she said. “We demand the change and we are the change.”Greta Thunberg speaking at the protest in Berlin.Maja Hitij/Getty ImagesPeople of all ages marched through the center of Berlin, then rallied on the lawn before the Reichstag, where Germany’s Parliament meets. Thousands turned out for similar protests in other cities across the country. Germans will elect new representatives to Parliament on Sunday, and never before has the issue of climate change played such a role in a German election. Despite entering office with ambitions to reduce carbon emissions in 2005, four successive governments under Chancellor Angela Merkel failed to significantly reduce Germany’s carbon footprint. It remains in the top 10 of the world’s most polluting countries, according to the World Bank.It has been young climate activists, inspired by Ms. Thunberg, who have succeeded in bringing the climate debate to the forefront of Germany’s political discussion. This year, they successfully took the government to court, forcing a 2019 law aimed at bringing the country’s carbon emissions down to nearly zero by 2050 to be reworked with more ambitious and detailed goals to reduce emissions through 2030.Recent polls have shown the next German government could include left-leaning environmentalists who many hope will bring real change. The Social Democratic Party has been in the lead for several weeks, ahead of the conservative Christian Democrats, with the Greens firmly in third place, raising hopes that whichever party wins will include them in the next government.Demonstrators in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin on Friday.John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut some young Germans are concerned that even the environmentally focused Greens may not enact policy aggressively enough to speed up Germany’s exit from coal, currently set for 2038. They are also demanding that Germany speed up its plan to reach climate neutrality, when net carbon emissions hit zero, 10 years earlier than planned, to help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the lower boundary defined in the Paris Agreement.“The last few months have shown how dishonestly the parties have been campaigning on the climate crisis, without even beginning to advocate sufficient measures to combat it,” said Maia Stimmimg, a spokeswoman for Fridays for Future Germany. “As one of the main polluters, Germany must finally stop the destruction,” she said. “Without massive pressure from us on the streets, no coalition will keep the 1.5-degree limit after the election.”Alexandra Petrikat, an entrepreneur and mother of two young children who attended the demonstration in Berlin, said she was impressed by how peaceful and respectful the protesters were. At the same time, she said their message was loud and clear.“I think that we sent a signal that whoever forms the next government can’t close their eyes to our demands,” Ms. Petrikat said. “We will not give up. We will keep growing and we will keep up the pressure.”Christopher F. Schuetze More

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    Debunking the Pro-Trump Right’s Claims About the Jan. 6 Riot

    A rally scheduled for Saturday in Washington is intended to continue a Republican effort to rewrite the narrative of the assault on the Capitol. The facts undercut their assertions.In the eight months since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, some Republicans have tried to build a case — belied by the facts — that the vast federal investigation of the riot has been essentially unfair, its targets the victims of political persecution.The people charged in the Jan. 6 attack are “being persecuted so unfairly,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement on Thursday.That sentiment is the organizing principle behind the rally scheduled in Washington on Saturday, billed as “Justice for J6.” According to the permit application submitted by the organizers, a group called Look Ahead America, the event is meant to “bring awareness and attention to the unjust and unethical treatment of nonviolent Jan. 6 political prisoners.”The rally is the latest effort in the right’s continuing attempt to rewrite the history of the mob attack on Congress, which prosecutors say led to as many as 1,000 assaults against the police and sought to disrupt certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Here is what the facts say about assertions from those seeking to promote a false narrative about Jan. 6.The rioters weren’t just tourists who now face excessive criminal charges.One of the first claims that pro-Trump conservatives made about Jan. 6 was that the rioters were little more than tourists and that those arrested were victims of prosecutorial overreach. Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, described the scene at the Capitol that day as “a normal tourist visit,” implying that hundreds of people taken into custody were facing excessive charges.But, in fact, nearly half of the more than 600 people charged have been accused only of misdemeanors like trespassing and disorderly conduct, rather than more serious felonies.At this point, more than 50 of these low-level defendants have pleaded guilty. All of them will serve prison terms of six months or less, or no time at all — fairly modest sentences for the federal penal system. But even when the authorities have agreed to lenient penalties, they have still insisted that no one who broke into the Capitol is innocent.“A riot cannot occur without rioters,” prosecutors wrote in a recent memo proposing no jail time for Valerie Ehrke, a California woman who only spent one minute in the building. “And rioter’s actions — from the most mundane to the most violent — contributed, directly and indirectly, to the violence and destruction of that day.”The government hasn’t widely detained nonviolent protesters.At an event last month hosted by Republican officials in his home state of North Carolina, Representative Madison Cawthorn repeated an oft-heard myth. He complained that hundreds of people taken into custody after Jan. 6 were “political hostages.”The truth is that about 15 percent of those arrested so far in connection with the riot have been denied bail and remain in pretrial custody — much lower than the overall federal pretrial detention rate of 75 percent. Moreover, all of those being detained on charges related to Jan. 6 are facing serious charges like assault or obstruction of Congress; none have been accused of only misdemeanors.Far from jailing everyone, in fact, judges have granted bail to numerous defendants accused of violent attacks on the police or of belonging to extremist groups like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers militia.There are a handful of cases in which people have been denied bail without having engaged in physical violence, but those are the exceptions to the rule.This week, a lawyer for Ethan Nordean, a leader of the Proud Boys, complained in court that his client has been in jail for months not because of anything he personally did on Jan. 6, but rather because he is a member of a reviled political organization.Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was appointed to the federal bench by Mr. Trump, responded that the law alone was guiding Mr. Nordean’s case.“Politics has nothing to do with it,” Judge Kelly said. “Not one whit.”Capitol Police officers preparing riot equipment at the Capitol before the rally on Saturday.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJan. 6 defendants haven’t been treated more harshly than racial justice protesters.The assertion has become a staple on the right: Trump supporters were charged with violent crimes in the Capitol attack because of their conservative beliefs while many leftist activists had similar charges stemming from the racial justice protests last year in cities like Portland, Ore., reduced or dismissed.This summer, a Jan. 6 defendant named Garret Miller filed court papers making that argument. Mr. Miller, who lives in Dallas, claimed he had been “treated differently by the government than the Portland rioters based upon the politics involved,” his lawyer wrote.In rebutting these claims, the government argued there was no comparison between the protests last year prompted by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the storming of the Capitol. While prosecutors acknowledged that those arrested during weeks of unrest at the Portland federal courthouse had committed “serious offenses,” they insisted that the rioters in Washington were involved in “a singular and chilling event” that threatened not only the Capitol but also “democracy itself.”Trying to explain why many cases in the racial justice protests were eventually dismissed, prosecutors also said they have much better evidence against Capitol rioters like Mr. Miller than they ever had against protesters in Portland. Among the material they collected after Jan. 6 were thousands of hours of video footage from surveillance and body cameras worn by the police, and hundreds of thousands of social media posts.A few months after Mr. Miller filed his claims, The Associated Press published an analysis of more than 300 criminal cases stemming from the protests incited by Mr. Floyd’s murder. The analysis undercut the argument that pro-Trump defendants were treated more harshly than Black Lives Matter protesters, showing that many leftist rioters had received substantial sentences.There’s no evidence that Jan. 6 defendants are being treated worse than others in jail.Perhaps the loudest grievances about Capitol defendants concern the jail conditions of those denied bail.The accusations have been many and wide-ranging. Some defendants have complained of being locked in their cells for 23 hours a day in what amounts to solitary confinement. Others have claimed that they have been denied the right to hold religious services and that their hygiene needs have been restricted.One defendant, charged with assaulting the police, has said that he was zip-tied and then “savagely” beaten by a correctional officer in the District of Columbia jail, according to his lawyer. The assault resulted in a broken nose, a dislocated jaw and the loss of sight in the man’s right eye.Jail, of course, is a terrible place to be, regardless of one’s politics. But at least so far, no one has offered evidence that the authorities have imposed harsh conditions on Jan. 6 defendants because of their political beliefs.A spokeswoman for the District of Columbia jail said the 23-hour lockdown was not imposed solely on the Capitol defendants but was a medical provision used throughout the jail to curb the spread of the coronavirus. It has recently been lifted, she said.The Justice Department is using a novel charge in some cases.Prosecutors have taken a legal risk in the way they have chosen to prosecute scores of Capitol cases. The potential problem concerns the use of a federal obstruction law to charge people with disrupting Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote. Lawyers for some of the defendants are challenging the Justice Department in court over use of the law, but pro-Trump activists have yet to make it a big public issue.Instead of using politically fraught and hard-to-prove charges like sedition or insurrection to describe the attempt to block certification of the election results, the Justice Department used a much more measured — albeit novel — law: obstruction of an official proceeding.The law is not a perfect match for what happened on Jan. 6; indeed, it had never before been used in a situation like the Capitol attack.Passed in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a corporate overhaul law, the measure was devised to prohibit things like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses. Several lawyers have filed papers arguing that the law does not apply to the riot at the Capitol. Two federal judges have signaled that they might agree and could decide to toss the charge for more than 200 defendants.The Justice Department’s use of the obstruction law is arguably the most political move prosecutors have made to date. After all, as some defense lawyers have noted, the government did not use the same charge in 2018 when left-wing activists swarmed the Capitol to protest the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. More

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    Portraits of the Lasting Trauma of the Capitol Riot

    WASHINGTON — Three months after supporters of President Donald J. Trump violently stormed the Capitol, Alisa La, a close aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sat in the office suite where she had hid from the rioters, describing the lasting effects of her traumatic experience on Jan. 6. Just as she finished speaking, an intercom began […] More

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    Bolsonaro Está Ficando Desesperado, e Não Há Dúvidas Sobre Suas Intenções

    SÃO PAULO, Brasil — Há semanas, o presidente brasileiro Jair Bolsonaro tem incitado seus apoiadores a tomar as ruas. Por isso, no dia 7 de setembro, Dia da Independência, eu quase esperava ver hordas de pessoas armadas vestindo camisas verde-amarelas, algumas com chapéus de pele com chifres, invadindo o edifício do Supremo Tribunal Federal — nossa própria versão da invasão do Capitólio.Felizmente, não foi o que ocorreu. (A multidão acabou indo para casa, e ninguém tentou se sentar nas cadeiras dos juízes do Supremo.) Mas os brasileiros tiveram sua cota de caos e consternação.Para Bolsonaro, foi uma demonstração de força. Pela manhã, dirigindo-se a uma multidão de cerca de 400 mil pessoas em Brasília, ele disse que pretendia usar o tamanho do público como um “ultimato para todos os que estão na Praça dos Três Poderes.” À tarde, em um protesto em São Paulo com 125 mil pessoas, o presidente chamou as eleições de 2022 de “uma farsa” e afirmou que não irá mais cumprir as decisões de um dos juízes do Supremo. Seu propósito: “dizer aos canalhas”, urrou, “que nunca serei preso!”Parece ser parte de um plano. Ao comprar briga especificamente com o Supremo Tribunal Federal — que abriu inúmeras investigações sobre o presidente e seus aliados, incluindo seu papel em um esquema potencialmente corrupto de compra de vacinas e seus esforços para desacreditar o sistema de votação brasileiro — Bolsonaro está tentando semear uma crise institucional, com vistas a se manter no poder. No dia 9 de setembro ele tentou recuar um pouco, dizendo em uma carta que não teve “nenhuma intenção de agredir quaisquer dos poderes.” Mas suas ações são claras: ele está de fato ameaçando dar um golpe.Talvez essa seja a única saída para Bolsonaro. (Com exceção de governar propriamente o país, algo que aparentemente não lhe desperta o interesse.) Os atos bizarros do presidente, que está debilitado nas pesquisas e se vê ameaçado pela perspectiva de um impeachment, são um sinal de desespero. Mas isso não quer dizer necessariamente que não podem ter êxito.Bolsonaro tem bons motivos para se desesperar. A incompetência do governo em lidar com a pandemia de Covid-19 resultou na morte de 587 mil brasileiros; o país ostenta taxas históricas de desemprego e desigualdade econômica; e também sofre com uma crescente inflação, pobreza e fome. Ah, e temos uma enorme crise energética a caminho.Tudo isso cobrou um preço alto do prestígio de Bolsonaro junto aos brasileiros. Em julho, a taxa de reprovação do presidente subiu para 51 por cento, maior índice da história, de acordo com o Datafolha. E para as eleições presidenciais do ano que vem, a situação também não é muito favorável. Na verdade, as pesquisas indicam que ele vai perder. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ex-presidente de centro-esquerda, está superando Bolsonaro com certa folga. Se as coisas continuarem como estão, Bolsonaro perde para todos os possíveis adversários no segundo turno.Isso explica a avidez do presidente em promover acusações infundadas de fraude no sistema eletrônico de votação do Brasil. “Não tem como comprovar que as eleições foram ou não foram fraudadas,” ele declarou sobre eleições passadas (inclusive a que ele venceu), durante uma transmissão pela TV que durou duas horas, em julho, enquanto falhava em fornecer quaisquer provas para apoiar suas alegações. Ele ameaçou repetidamente cancelar as eleições se o sistema de votação atual continuar em vigor — e embora o Congresso tenha recentemente rejeitado sua proposta de emitir recibos impressos, continua a lançar dúvidas sobre o sistema eleitoral. (Parece familiar? Alguém?)E tem também a corrupção. Há um número crescente de acusações de corrupção contra o presidente e dois de seus filhos, que também detêm cargos públicos. (Um deles é senador e o outro é vereador do Rio de Janeiro.) Promotores sugerem que a família Bolsonaro participou de um esquema conhecido como “rachadinha,” que consiste em contratar familiares ou pessoas próximas como funcionários e embolsar uma parte de seus salários.Para Bolsonaro, que foi eleito em parte com a promessa de acabar com a corrupção, essas investigações lançam uma pesada sombra. Diante desse cenário de inépcia e escândalo, os eventos de 7 de setembro foram uma tentativa de distrair e desviar a atenção pública — e, é claro, de cimentar a discórdia.Os esforços para destituir Bolsonaro por meios parlamentares estão empacados. Ainda que a oposição tenha apresentado 137 pedidos de impeachment, o processo precisa ser iniciado pelo presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Arthur Lira, que não parece inclinado a aceitá-los. (Isso não é nada surpreendente: Lira é um dos líderes de um conjunto de partidos de centro-direita conhecido como “Centrão,” a quem Bolsonaro distribuiu cargos importantes no governo, na esperança de se blindar contra processos de impeachment.) Apenas enormes manifestações populares são capazes de quebrar o impasse.Não há tempo a perder. Os protestos da semana passada não foram um simples espetáculo político. Foram mais um passo para fortalecer a posição de Bolsonaro para uma eventual tomada de poder antes das eleições do ano que vem. Ele não conseguiu exatamente o que queria — os números, ainda que expressivos, foram muito menores do que os organizadores esperavam — mas ele vai continuar tentando.O 7 de setembro agora marca um outro momento emblemático na história do Brasil — quando os objetivos totalitários do nosso presidente se tornaram inequívocos. Para a nossa jovem democracia, pode ser uma questão de vida ou morte.Vanessa Barbara é a editora do sítio literário A Hortaliça, autora de dois romances e dois livros de não-ficção em português, e escritora de opinião do The New York Times. More

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    After Brazil’s Independence Day, It’s Clear What Bolsonaro Wants

    SÃO PAULO, Brazil — For weeks, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has been urging his supporters to take to the streets. So on Sept. 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, I was half expecting to see mobs of armed people in yellow-and-green jerseys, some of them wearing furry hats and horns, storming the Supreme Court building — our very own imitation of the Capitol riot.Fortunately, that was not what happened. (The crowds eventually went home, and no one tried to sit in the Supreme Court justices’ chairs.) But Brazilians were not spared chaos and consternation.For Mr. Bolsonaro, it was a show of force. In the morning, addressing a crowd of around 400,000 people in Brasília, he said he intended to use the size of the crowd as an “ultimatum for everyone” in the three branches of government. In the afternoon, at a demonstration in São Paulo of 125,000 people, the president called the elections coming in 2022 “a farce” and said that he will no longer abide by rulings from one of the Supreme Court justices. “I’m letting the scoundrels know,” he bellowed, “I’ll never be imprisoned!”It seems to be part of a plan. By picking a fight in particular with the Supreme Court — which has opened several investigations of him and his allies, including of his role in a potentially corrupt vaccine procurement scheme and his efforts to discredit Brazil’s voting system — Mr. Bolsonaro is attempting to sow the seeds of an institutional crisis, with a view to retaining power. On Sept. 9 he tried to back down a little, saying in a written statement that he “never intended to attack any branch of government.” But his actions are plain: He is effectively threatening a coup.Perhaps that’s the only way out for Mr. Bolsonaro. (Apart from properly governing the country, something that apparently doesn’t interest him.) The antics of the president, struggling in the polls and menaced by the prospect of impeachment, are a sign of desperation. But that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed.Mr. Bolsonaro has good reason to be desperate. The government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the deaths of 587,000 Brazilians; the country faces record rates of unemployment and economic inequality; and it’s also afflicted by soaring inflation, poverty and hunger. Oh, and there’s a huge energy crisis on the way, too.That has taken its toll on Mr. Bolsonaro’s standing with Brazilians. In July, his disapproval rating rose to 51 percent, its highest-ever mark, according to Datafolha Institute. And ahead of next year’s presidential elections, things are not looking rosy. In fact, polling suggests he’s going to lose. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the center-left politician and former president, is comfortably outstripping Mr. Bolsonaro. As things stand, Mr. Bolsonaro would lose to all possible rivals in a second-round runoff.This explains Mr. Bolsonaro’s eagerness to push unfounded claims of fraud in Brazil’s electronic voting system. “There’s no way of proving whether the elections were rigged or not,” he said about past elections (including the one he won), during a two-hour TV broadcast in July, while failing to provide any evidence to support his allegations. He has repeatedly threatened to call off the elections if the current voting system remains in place — and although Congress recently rejected his proposal to require paper receipts, he continues to cast doubt on the voting process. (Sound familiar, anyone?)Then there’s the corruption. A growing number of corruption accusations have been made against the president and two of his sons, who both hold public office. (One is a senator; the other sits on Rio de Janeiro’s City Council.) Prosecutors have suggested that the Bolsonaro family took part in a scheme known as “rachadinha,” which involves hiring close associates or family members as employees and then pocketing a portion of their salary.For Mr. Bolsonaro, who was elected in part for his promise to rout out corruption, these investigations cast a long shadow. Against this backdrop of ineptitude and scandal, the events of Sept. 7 were an attempt to distract and divert attention — and, of course, to cement divisions.Efforts to remove Mr. Bolsonaro by parliamentary means are stalled. Though the opposition has so far filed 137 impeachment requests, the process must be initiated by the speaker of the lower house, Arthur Lira, who does not seem inclined to accept them. (That’s not especially surprising: Mr. Lira is a leader of a cluster of center-right parties, known as the “centrão,” to whom Mr. Bolsonaro has handed out important government positions, in the hope of shielding himself from impeachment proceedings.) Only enormous public protests can break the impasse.There’s no time to lose. The demonstrations last week were not simply political showmanship. They were yet another move to strengthen Mr. Bolsonaro’s position for an eventual power grab ahead of next year’s elections. He didn’t get exactly what he wanted — the numbers, though substantial, were far less than organizers hoped for — but he will keep trying.Sept. 7 now marks another signal moment in Brazil’s history — when the totalitarian aims of our president became unmistakably clear. For our young democracy, it could be a matter of life or death.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    McCarthy Threatens Technology Firms That Comply With Riot Inquiry

    The top House Republican said his party would retaliate against any company that cooperated with an order to preserve the phone and social media records of G.O.P. lawmakers.WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Mr. McCarthy’s warning was an escalation of his efforts to thwart a full accounting of the deadly attack at the Capitol carried out by a pro-Trump mob, and his latest attempt to insulate the former president and Republican lawmakers from scrutiny of any ties to the violence. It came after he led the G.O.P. opposition to the creation of an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot, and then pulled five Republican congressmen from the select committee that Democrats created on their own, boycotting the proceedings.In preservation orders the special committee sent to 35 technology firms this week, members of the panel included the names of hundreds of people whose records they might want to review, among them some of Donald J. Trump’s most ardent allies in Congress, according to several people familiar with the documents who were not authorized to speak about their contents.The 11 Republicans are Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jody B. Hice of Georgia, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.The preservation demands were accompanied by a statement that said the committee was merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual.” But the inclusion of the Republicans’ names, reported earlier by CNN, indicated that the panel planned to scrutinize any role they may have played in fueling the violence.“These are the individuals who have been publicly supportive of Jan. 6 and the people who participated in the insurrection on Jan. 6,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s chairman, said in an interview.“We need to find out exactly what their level of participation in this event was,” he said. “If you helped raise money, if you provided misinformation to people, if you served on a planning committee — whatever your role in Jan. 6, I think the public has a right to know.”The panel has not asked to preserve the records of Mr. McCarthy, who has said he had a tense phone call with Mr. Trump as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, but Mr. Thompson said the top Republican’s name could yet be added.Mr. Thompson said Mr. McCarthy’s protestations were “typical of somebody who may or may not have been involved in Jan. 6 and doesn’t want that information to become public.”On Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy said Republicans would “not forget” and “hold accountable” those tech companies that preserve records sought by the committee. His remarks followed denunciations of the committee’s work by Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, who has called the panel’s tactics “authoritarian,” and Mr. Trump, who has called it a “partisan sham.”Ms. Greene threatened on Fox News that telecommunications companies that cooperated with the investigation would be “shut down.”Mr. McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to cooperate with the inquiry, even though congressional investigations have obtained phone records before. He said that if his party won control of the House, it would use its power to punish any that did.“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said he was stunned by Mr. McCarthy’s remarks, describing them as akin to obstructing an investigation.“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “That’s an astounding turn of events. Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the Jan. 6 attack?”Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, called Mr. McCarthy’s claims “baseless,” noting that the panel had not requested the content of any communication.“He is falsely portraying the committee as overreaching so that he can protect his own political interests, to the detriment of Congress’s ability to do its job and the public trust in our institutions of government,” she said.In the past week, the select committee has ramped up its work, taking three wide-ranging investigative steps: a records demand to seven federal agencies focusing in part on any ties Mr. Trump may have had to the attack’s planning or execution; a document demand to 15 social media companies for material about efforts to overturn the election and domestic violent extremists who may have been involved; and the record preservation orders including the Republican representatives.The 11 Republicans include lawmakers who spearheaded the effort to challenge the election outcome in Congress on Jan. 6 and those who played at least some role in the “Stop the Steal” effort to protest the results, including promoting rallies around the country and the one in Washington whose attendees attacked the Capitol.Some of the lawmakers named in the order have continued to publicly spread the election lies that inspired the riot, and to allude to the possibility of more violence to come. Mr. Cawthorn falsely claimed on Sunday that the election had been “rigged” and “stolen,” telling a crowd in Franklin, N.C., that if elections were not safeguarded in the future, it could result in “bloodshed.”The select committee has been meeting twice a week, even during Congress’s summer recess, as its members plan their next steps. Mr. Thompson said two more hearings were in the works, one to dig deeper into the pressure campaign Mr. Trump and his allies started to overturn President Biden’s victory, and another to explore who encouraged militia and extremist groups to come to Washington before the assault.Representative Bennie G. Thompson, right, and members of the select committee have ramped up their work in the past week. Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“There’s a concern on the committee about the executive branch leaning on state elected officials to change the outcome of the election,” Mr. Thompson said. “There’s concern about the identification with domestic terrorist organizations and their participation and encouragement to participate in the Jan. 6 march and insurrection.”Last week, the panel sought communications among top Trump administration officials about attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions in the run-up to the attack; the planning and funding of pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and 6; and other attempts to stop or slow the process of Mr. Trump handing over the presidency to Mr. Biden.It demanded records of communications between the White House and Ali Alexander, who publicized the “Stop the Steal” rallies, as well as Tom Van Flein, Mr. Gosar’s chief of staff.Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member, said the requests were “broad” by design as the panel sought to produce a “comprehensive report.” He said they could be expanded to include more members of Congress if evidence emerges to suggest it is necessary.“We know that there are members who were involved in the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally; we know that there are members who had direct communications with the president while the attack on the Capitol was going on,” he said. “There are any number of members who have very pertinent information.”On Friday, the panel sent letters to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website theDonald.win — seeking any documents in their possession pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.The committee had already asked for records on extremist groups and militias that were present at the Capitol that day, including QAnon, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. A person familiar with the committee’s discussions said its members intended to investigate more deeply plans among militia groups to coordinate.At least 10 suspected militia extremists attended paramilitary training in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina before the breach, according to court documents. Suspected domestic violent extremists also “coordinated efforts to bring tactical equipment to the event, presumably in anticipation of violence,” according to an April homeland security analysis obtained by The New York Times through a public records request filed by the group Property of the People.“There were undoubtedly insurrectionist groups that were dead-set on committing violence,” Mr. Raskin said. “If you listen to their chatter post-Jan. 6, it’s all abut how close they came, and next time they will be carrying arms.”The records preservation request delivered on Monday asked telecommunications companies to keep on file information about cell tower locations, text messages and call logs, and information uploaded to cloud storage systems.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, emphasized that the request was “an investigation, not an accusation.”“We’ll see what we find out,” she said. “It’s fair to say you didn’t have 10,000 people just happen to show up and attack Capitol Police officers, maim them and threaten to kill the vice president and members of Congress just because they felt like it. There was a reason, there was a structure to this, and we need to uncover everything about that.” More