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Why Fox News Lied to the Viewers It ‘Respects’
There are some stories that are important enough to pause the news cycle and linger on them, to explore not just what happened, but why. And so it is with Fox News’s role in the events leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Thanks to a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox, there is now compelling evidence that America’s most-watched cable news network presented information it knew to be false as part of an effort to placate an angry audience. It knowingly sacrificed its integrity to maintain its market share.Why? There are the obvious reasons: Money. Power. Fame. These are universal human temptations. But the answer goes deeper. Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being “Republican,” or “conservative,” but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation ultimately isn’t journalism at all.To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox. If conservative Christians face a threat to their civil liberties, the first call is to Fox. If you’re a conservative celebrity and you need to sell a book, the first call is to Fox.And Fox takes those calls. In the time before Donald Trump, I spent my share of moments in Fox green rooms and pitching stories to Fox producers. I knew they were more interested in stories about, say, religious liberty than most mainstream media outlets were. I knew they loved human-interest stories about virtuous veterans and cops. Sometimes this was good — we need more coverage of religion in America, for example — but over time Fox morphed into something well beyond a news network.Fox isn’t just the news hub of right-wing America, it’s a cultural cornerstone, and its business model is so successful that it’s more accurate to think of the rest of the right-wing media universe not as a collection of competitors to Fox, but rather as imitators. From television channels to news sites, right-wing personalities aren’t so much competing with Fox as auditioning for it.Take, for example, the online space. Fox News is so dominant that, according to data from December, you could take the total traffic of the next 19 conservative websites combined, and still not reach half of Fox’s audience.But that kind of loyalty is built around a social compact, the profound and powerful sense in Red America that Fox is for us. It’s our megaphone to the culture. Yet when Fox created this compact, it placed the audience in charge of its content.During the Trump years, Fox faithfully upheld its end of the bargain. If you were Republican and felt embattled for supporting Donald Trump, a quick visit to Fox (especially in prime time) would calm your mind and soothe your soul. There you’d be reminded that the Democrats are the real radicals. That the Democrats are the true threat to America. And if you voted for Trump even though you were uncomfortable with some of his conduct, it was only because “they” forced your hand.As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant. Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism, but also of courage. And what of conservatives, like myself, who opposed Trump? We were “cowards” or “grifters” who sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and airtime on MSNBC.Our disagreement was cast as an act of outright betrayal. People like me had allegedly turned our backs on our own community. We had failed in our obligation to be their voice.So you can start to understand the shock when, on Election Day in 2020, Fox News accurately, if arguably prematurely, called Arizona for Joe Biden. It broke the social compact. By presuming the fairness of the election and by declaring Joe Biden the winner of a previously red state, Fox sent a message to its own audience — an audience that had been primed to mistrust election results by Trump and by reports on Fox News — that it did not hear them. It did not see them.In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth” — an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture.But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances — such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election — it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders, and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.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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In Nigeria’s Presidential Election, A Rare Chance to Turn the Corner
In Nigeria’s presidential election on Saturday, voters are desperate to elect a leader who can unleash their youthful country’s potential and chart a new course after years of dashed hopes.Upon winning independence from its British colonizers in 1960, thousands of Nigerians watched as their new green and white flag was raised over the capital at the time, Lagos, at midnight. As fireworks lit up the streets, hope and promise filled the air.Nigerians’ hopes have been dashed many times since then. They have endured a bitter civil war, decades of military dictatorship and, in the past eight years, rising violence and economic failures under President Muhammadu Buhari. A record 89 percent of Nigerians think the country is going in the wrong direction.But in this weekend’s presidential election — one of the most consequential in the 23 years since the last dictatorship ended and democracy took hold — many see a chance to change course.And as Nigerians made their way on Saturday to polling stations across their huge and diverse country, the race to lead their young democracy and its legions of youthful citizens seemed wide open.People began arriving at the polls long before they opened. In Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, voters searched for their names on lists pasted on walls. Young men played soccer on streets that would usually be choked with traffic but had been cleared for the election.Some polling units were slow to open, prompting a few voters’ anger, but mostly their patience. In Abuja, the capital, three young women spread a blanket on a patch of grass and settled in to wait.The monopoly on power that the two major parties have held for two decades has been shaken up by a surprise third-party candidate, Peter Obi. Multiple polls have shown him in the lead, propelled by enthusiastic young voters, but whether they will turn out in large enough numbers to elect him is uncertain.Other polls have shown both the governing party’s candidate, Bola Tinubu, and Atiku Abubakar, a businessman and perennial opposition candidate, in the lead.In a country of 220 million, Africa’s most populous, more than 93 million people registered for permanent voting cards, the most ever, the election commission said.Waiting for money outside a bank this month in Lagos. A shortage of bank notes has made it hard to pay for food, medicine and other daily essentials.John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA market this month in Lagos. A record 89 percent of Nigerians think the country is going in the wrong direction.John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn a recent afternoon outside an event hall in Lagos, one remorseful former Buhari voter, Joshua Pius, 34, a drummer on a break from performing, said he was now earning so little that his young family had been forced to cut back on food. His children are 1 and 3.Mr. Pius was determined to make his next vote count, he said, as bouncy highlife music from a funeral streamed from the hall. Funerals in Nigeria are often celebrations of life rather than somber occasions.He said, using the shorthand for the permanent voter’s card, “The only hope you have is your P.V.C.”Like many Nigerians, Mr. Pius has been blindsided by a sudden countrywide shortage of cash — a crisis precipitated when the government decided to redesign and roll out new currency just before the election. Nigeria’s central bank took billions of naira (the local currency) out of circulation, while putting only a fraction in new notes back in. Even those with money in the bank cannot find cash to pay for food, medicine and other essentials, causing widespread suffering.Peter Obi speaking this month to market workers in Lagos.Taiwo Aina for The New York TimesBola Tinubu, the presidential candidate for the governing party, the All Progressives Congress, arriving on Tuesday by bus at Teslim Balogun Stadium in Lagos.Patrick Meinhardt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSorting out that mess is just one of the mammoth tasks the election winner will face. G.D.P. per capita has plummeted during Mr. Buhari’s tenure. Oil production fell last year to its lowest point in over three decades. The army is deployed all over the country, fighting Islamist militants, secessionists, kidnappers and communal clashes.But the potential of Africa’s biggest democracy is perhaps greater than the challenges. Nigerians speak proudly of their country’s natural riches: As well as oil, it has profuse supplies of gas and solid minerals, as well as greater agricultural potential than almost any other African country because of its vast, fertile lands and abundant water.And that is to say nothing of its human capital. The country’s unofficial motto, “Naija no dey carry last” — pidgin English for “Nigerians never come last” — speaks to their drive and creativity, on display in the booming tech sector, the Nollywood film industry and the global musical phenomenon that is Afrobeats.Recently, however, the young people who drive that innovation have been leaving in droves, or are making plans to.One of those, Henry Eze, 31, a music producer, was on the sidelines of a political rally in Lagos this month, natty in a three-piece suit despite the heat. Mr. Eze said he left Nigeria for Europe in 2017, but ended up instead in a Libyan detention center, where he witnessed horrific abuses and had to bury dozens of his friends before he was rescued and brought home.Rabiu Kwankwaso, the presidential candidate of the New Nigerian People’s Party, greeting his supporters during a final election campaign rally on Thursday in the northern city of Kano.Sani Maikatanga/Associated PressA presidential hopeful, Atiku Abubakar, joined worshipers at a mosque in northeastern Yola on Friday, the day before the presidential election.Esa Alexander/ReutersThe rally he was attending was for Mr. Obi, who six months ago was not seen as a serious contender, but who has run a remarkably successful campaign, particularly online. He is the unexpected challenger against the governing party’s candidate, Mr. Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos, and Mr. Abubakar, the perennial opposition candidate. Of the 18 total candidates, a fourth candidate, Rabiu Kwankwaso, could prove a spoiler by splitting the vote in parts of the north.Mr. Eze said that if Mr. Abubakar or Mr. Tinubu, whom he called “a vampire” for sucking the country’s riches, won the election, he would not hesitate to leave Nigeria again, even though he was traumatized by his first attempt to escape.“Anywhere is better than Nigeria,” Mr. Eze said.Searching for his polling station on Saturday morning in Ikoyi, an upscale neighborhood of Lagos, Maxwell Sadoh, 18, a student and Obi supporter, echoed his words.“It’s so painful to see what we’ve become,” Mr. Sadoh said.Many Nigerians think their leaders, also, cannot get much worse.Some, like Mr. Eze, are putting their hopes in Mr. Obi. Others think Mr. Abubakar’s business acumen will help put Nigeria back on a prosperous path. Many support Mr. Tinubu, who has a reputation for spotting the talent and experience many say the country needs.Michael Odifili, a professional fumigator who was at the Lagos polling station where Mr. Tinubu voted on Saturday morning, said that Mr. Tinubu’s experience as governor put him in good stead to lead the country.“We want Tinubu to correct everything, all the mistakes of the past eight years,” Mr. Odifili said.A man accused of being a pickpocket was attacked on Tuesday in Lagos during a rally for the All Progressives Congress, the party of the current president.Michele Spatari/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNigerian Army troops outside the Central Bank of Nigeria in the southeastern city of Awka on Friday.Patrick Meinhardt/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAll three of the front-runners — who have all faced accusations of corruption or wrongdoing — are promising several major departures from the way things have been done in the past: an end to the fuel subsidies that have helped push Nigeria into a fiscal hole and allowing the exchange rate to be set by market forces rather than officials.For the first time, not one of the top contenders has a military background, a big deal considering former military rulers turned democrats have been at Nigeria’s helm for 16 of the 23 years since democracy was reborn in 1999.For a country so youthful, with a median age of just over 18, politics is dominated by old men, in many ways playing by the old rules.A well-known though murky phenomenon in Nigerian politics is the role of godfathers, a loose term for the “big men” who play an outsize role in making or breaking politicians’ careers.Mr. Tinubu is one of the country’s best-known godfathers, boasting that he handpicked his successors as the governor of Lagos state. Mr. Tinubu even claims that without him, Mr. Buhari would never have become president.This goes some way to explain the slogan coined by Mr. Tinubu and most often associated with his own presidential bid: “It’s my turn.”Churchgoers prayed for Nigeria on Friday at the Celestial Church of Christ on Lagos Island.Ben Curtis/Associated PressCampaign posters for Mr. Tinubu and others under a highway this month in Lagos.John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Abubakar, of the main opposition party, has run and lost five times before. He could be forgiven for thinking it is his turn, too.And at a recent visit to a Lagos market, Mr. Obi told the crowd: “If it is anybody to talk about ‘It’s my turn,’ it should be me,” a reference to the fact that there has never been a president from his region, the southeast.Recently, other West African countries have experienced a wave of coups. Afrobarometer, a survey organization, noticed that several factors came together in the lead-up to those coups: dissatisfaction with the direction the country is headed, a lack of trust in the presidency, approval of the military, and a perception that corruption is increasing.In Nigeria, the indicators are going that way too, according to the head of Afrobarometer.On that last night of British rule in 1960, after the flag raising and the fireworks display ushering in their first day of independence, Nigerians waited for the dawn.Often in the years since, analysts have predicted the disintegration of Nigeria, invoking the words of its most beloved writer, Chinua Achebe, who was quoting W.B. Yeats: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”So far, it has held.At a beach this month in Lagos.Michele Spatari/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesElian Peltier More
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Nigerian Politician Arrested With Nearly $500,000 on Eve of Election, Police Say
For years, Nigerian politicians have been accused of buying votes. The lawmaker, the police say, was caught with dollar bills and a list of possible recipients.A Nigerian politician was arrested on Friday with nearly $500,000 in U.S. bills in his car and a list of possible recipients for the money, the police said, announcing his detention on the eve of a closely watched presidential election in which vote buying has worried officials.Vote buying, long a problem in Nigeria, is one of several potential threats to the election, which is set to take place on Saturday. For years, politicians in the country have been accused of handing out cash for votes, knowing that many Nigerians — more than 60 percent of people live in poverty — are in need. The local police on Friday identified the arrested politician as Chinyere Igwe, a lawmaker in Nigeria’s lower parliamentary chamber and a member of the opposition People’s Democratic Party. They said he was arrested on suspicion of money laundering but did not announce formal charges. Mr. Igwe could not immediately be reached for comment, and it was not clear whether he had a lawyer.The police also asserted that Mr. Igwe, a representative in the southern city of Port Harcourt, was found not with the national currency, naira, but with large piles of American $100 bills in his car.The government decided last year to replace its currency with new notes, in part to prevent politicians from stockpiling naira to buy votes. President Muhammadu Buhari, who has reached his term limit and is not standing for re-election, said it had reduced the influence of money on politics. But since the transition period for changing old notes ended this month, the currency change has thrown the country into chaos, with most Nigerians unable to withdraw their cash.The possibility that a politician planned to buy votes with U.S. dollars, as the police indicated, suggested that the issue of vote buying may not be limited to Nigeria’s local currency. (It is not limited to money, either; in past elections, some votes were bought with food, like bags of rice.) Some nongovernmental organizations have urged the country’s central bank to track suspicious bank transfers before the vote.Vote buying is one of many issues that could tarnish the integrity of Nigeria’s election, a close race in which three candidates have a good chance of winning: Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a 70-year-old former governor of Lagos who is the candidate of the governing All Progressives Congress; Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president who has run for the presidency five times; and Peter Obi, a 61-year-old surprise front-runner who is seen as the candidate of the youth.In a separate operation, Nigeria’s antigraft agency announced on Friday that it had seized 32.4 million naira, or about $70,000, which it asserted was meant for vote buying in Lagos, the country’s largest city. It said someone had been taken into custody, but didn’t name the person or say whether they were acting on behalf of a party.Another threat is the risk of election-related violence, which could discourage voters from going to polling stations.Mutmaina Omobolame, a 20-year-old computer science student in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third-largest city, said this week that she did “not feel like voting,” even though she holds a voting card, because she was afraid violence could break out.Nigeria’s electoral body said this week that 87 million Nigerians had collected their voting cards and would be able to cast a ballot on Saturday, the largest figure ever for a democratic election in Africa.Whether that will translate into high voter turnout remains to be seen. More
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Marjorie Taylor Greene Has a Dream
Marjorie Taylor Greene, now one of the most influential Republicans in the House of Representatives, says it is time for Americans to consider a national divorce.“Tragically, I think we, the left and right, have reached irreconcilable differences,” Greene wrote a few days ago on Twitter. “I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic&government policy beliefs.”And how will this national divorce work in practice? Greene says that “red” states and “blue” states will simply go their separate ways.On education, for example, “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and L.G.B.T.Q. indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government-controlled gender transition schools.”On gun policy, in red states, “law abiding gun owners wouldn’t go to jail for shooting an attacker” while in blue states, “the left could achieve their dreams of total and complete lawlessness.”The federal government would still exist, Greene explains, but it would be a minimal state, devoted to border security and defense — an update, of sorts, of America under the Articles of Confederation. Everything else would be up to the discretion of the states, including voting and elections.“In red states,” Greene wrote, “they would likely pursue one day elections with paper ballots and require voter ID with only the red state citizens or even red state tax payers voting. And blue states would be free to allow illegal aliens from all over the world to vote freely and frequently in their elections like the D.C. City Council wants. Dead people could still vote. Criminals in jail could vote that is if blue states even have jails or prisons anymore.”You can probably tell, from the substance of Greene’s comments, that this “national divorce” is more paranoid fantasy than serious proposal. Even so, it rests on a set of ideas and tropes that are in wide circulation in the public at large.Let’s start with the idea that individual states constitute singular political communities, meaning that there is a real distinction between Americans who live in “big states” versus “small states,” between the residents of Montana and those of Massachusetts. There’s also the idea that partisan divides between states represent fundamental differences of culture and interest. And then there’s the idea, underneath all this, that states are, or ought to be, the fundamental unit of representation in the American political system.Taken together, those ideas make a “national divorce” seem, if not likely, then at least plausible. But there’s a problem. States are not actually singular political communities. There are partisan divides between states, even large ones, but they do not represent fundamental differences of culture and interest. And although states play an important role in the American political system, they are not the autonomous, nearly independent units of either Representative Greene’s imagination or the folk civics that shapes political understanding for tens of millions of Americans.It is true that in debates over representation during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, small-state delegates insisted on equal representation of states in at least one chamber of Congress, so that they might preserve their interests against those of the larger states. William Paterson of New Jersey worried that his state would be “swallowed up” by Virginia, Massachusetts and others if the Senate were apportioned by population, like the House. Likewise, Luther Martin of Maryland called apportion by population “a system of slavery for ten states.” For these delegates, the states were sovereign units with distinct interests that deserved representation in Congress.For James Madison, a fierce proponent of proportional representation in the House and Senate, this was nonsense. Far from unitary, each state was, in his view, a collection of diverse and divergent factions — of a “greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions” — that could only speak with a single voice on issues of broad agreement and consensus.On this question of representation and apportionment, the upshot of Madison’s theory of faction was that states, as states, did not have interests to represent in Congress.“States possessed interests,” the historian Jack Rakove explains in “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,” “but these were rooted in the attributes of individuals: in property, occupation, religion, opinion, and the uneven distribution of human faculties. Moreover, since congeries of interests could be found within any state, however small — witness Rhode Island — the principle of unitary corporate representation was further undercut.”Madison lost the battle for proportional representation in the Senate — small-state delegates threatened to torpedo the convention rather than accept an outcome that might undermine their influence in the national legislature. But he would return, years later, to this argument about the nature of the states, and the divergent interests within them, in a letter written just before his death.Addressed, in substance, to critics of majority rule like John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Madison again challenged the idea that states represent distinct and singular political communities.In Virginia, he notes, there is “a diversity of interests, real or supposed” and “much disagreement” on questions of infrastructure and “public patronage.” If majority rule threatens abuse of power in national government — because one interest may grow in size over another — then it would have to do the same within each individual state, rendering “a majority government as unavoidable an evil in the States individually as it is represented to be in the States collectively.”But let’s say you could split each state into its constituent interests, so that majorities would not form against it. Well, then, Madison says, you would find yourself in the same situation as before: “In the smallest of the fragments, there would soon be added to previous sources of discord a manufacturing and an agricultural class, with the difficulty experienced in adjusting their relative interests, in the regulation of foreign commerce if any, or if none in equalizing the burden of internal improvement and of taxation within them.”No matter how small you go, in other words, you run into the simple fact that there’s no such thing as a truly homogeneous political community. There will always be differences of belief and interest, and the only way to deal with them in a representative, republican government is through deliberation and majority rule.What was true in the 18th and 19th centuries is true now. A “national divorce” is possible only if the states represent singular political communities. But they don’t. A conservative, deep “red” state like Oklahoma still has liberal, “blue” cities and suburbs with conflicting interests. If you tried to separate conservative rural areas from liberal urban ones, you’d quickly find that within those subdivisions lie profound political differences among both individual people and groups of people.We are not actually 50 separate communities tied together by a single document. We are a single, national community of diverse and divergent interests in every corner of the union. The states aren’t hard borders of culture and politics, and there’s no way to divide the country so that all Americans live in their own camp, with their own side. Perhaps if conservatives and Republicans win enough elections, we’ll have a much smaller and less expansive federal government than we do now. But that will not solve the problem of political conflict and majority rule; it will simply push the problem down to the next level of government.What advocates of a “national divorce” or some other separation want is a resolution of the struggle of democratic life, a point at which they must no longer contend with alternative and conflicting ways of living. But that is just another fantasy.The great virtue (or perhaps curse) of democracy is that it doesn’t settle — it keeps moving. There are no final victories, but there are no final defeats either. There is only the struggle for a more humane world or, for some among us, a more hierarchical one.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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Kidnappings in Nigeria and Other Security Crises Concern Voters Ahead of Election
Nigerian voters say that insecurity is the most important issue in this week’s presidential election. One man who was kidnapped said, “You can only survive on your own in Nigeria.”A 61-year-old civil engineer was supervising a digging project on a farm in southern Nigeria when five young men carrying AK-47s stormed the place and dragged him into the bush.For five days, the kidnappers held the engineer, Olusola Olaniyi, and beat him severely. Only after his family and employer agreed to pay a ransom was he released, in the middle of the night, on a road a few miles away from where he had been kidnapped.Nigeria has faced an outbreak of kidnappings in recent years, affecting people of all ages and classes: groups of schoolchildren, commuters traveling on trains and in cars through Nigeria’s largest cities, and villagers in the northern countryside. With youth gangs and armed bandits finding that kidnapping for ransom produces big payoffs, such crimes have only multiplied.As Nigerians go to the polls on Saturday to choose a new president, insecurity is the top issue facing the country, according to a survey by SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian risk consultancy. Between July 2021 and June 2022, more than 3,400 people were abducted across the country, and 564 others were killed in kidnapping-related violence.“Insecurity has become a function of Nigeria’s economy,” said Mr. Olaniyi, whose family paid about $3,500 in ransom after he was kidnapped in 2021. “Many young men see kidnappings as a job.”This epidemic of kidnappings is just one of multiple security crises that are creating levels of violence unseen for decades in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, with nearly 220 million people.Relatives of the Kaduna train kidnapping victims holding a protest in Abuja, Nigeria, last July, following a threat from bandits to kill the victims if the ransom was not paid.Afolabi Sotunde/ReutersIn the northeast, militants with the extremist groups Boko Haram and local affiliates of the Islamic State have killed at least 10,000 people in the past five years, and displaced 2.5 million people.In the northwest and northern center of the country, armed gangs known as bandits have stolen cattle, kidnapped thousands of people and forced schools to close for months to keep students safe.In the southeast, separatist movements have attacked dozens of police stations, prisons and courthouses.And in July, in the country’s capital, Abuja, militants from the Islamic State West Africa Province broke into one of the country’s most secure prisons and freed hundreds of detainees.“In the past, Boko Haram was Nigeria’s main security problem,” said Nnamdi Obasi, a researcher with the International Crisis Group, based in Abuja. “Now we have three or four of those major crises.”Muhammadu Buhari, the departing president and a former general, was elected in 2015 in part on promises that he could get the violence under control. He has now served the maximum of two terms, and claims to have scored some successes in the northeast against Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province.But violence has grown more widespread. In the last year alone, armed groups killed more than 10,000 people, according to a tally by the International Crisis Group.Now election officials must secure more than 176,000 polling stations for the vote on Saturday. Threats to polling stations could discourage voters from showing up. Fifty electoral commission offices were attacked between 2019 and 2022. A senate candidate was killed on Wednesday in the south of the country, according to news reports.In Kaduna, in northwestern Nigeria on Thursday. Kidnappings have been especially frequent there.Yagazie Emezi for The New York TimesThe three leading candidates have all pledged to tackle insecurity, whether by recruiting more security personnel or upgrading the military. But many analysts argue that these promises remain vague and fail to address the root causes of the insecurity, such as poverty and unemployment.The kidnappings have stymied Nigeria’s development — displacing families and disrupting farming (leading to hunger), slowing infrastructure projects, and limiting trade and employment, since travel has become risky throughout the country.Last year, Nigerian lawmakers made kidnapping punishable by death if the victims die, and made paying ransom illegal. Yet in practice, little has changed. Between July 2021 and June 2022, more than $1.1 million was paid in ransom, according to SBM Intelligence. The ransoms, even small ones, are painful in a country where more than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.“It’s taking people’s entire savings,” Idayat Hassan, the director of the Abuja-based Center for Democracy and Development, said about the ransoms.The kidnappings have been especially frequent in the northern state of Kaduna, where last March, gunmen attacked a train connecting Abuja to the city of Kaduna. Officials had boasted that the train route was safe.Regina Ngorngor, a 47-year-old librarian, was in a first-class coach and hid under a seat when the gunmen ordered passengers to get out. She was later rescued by the Nigerian military, but at least eight people were killed and 26 injured in the attack. Dozens of kidnapped passengers were released months later.Ms. Ngorngor took the risk of hiding under the seat because she said she knew what would have awaited her. Eight months earlier, her 17-year-old son Emmanuel was studying for a chemistry exam at his boarding school, when gunmen stormed the building and kidnapped him, along with dozens of classmates.Regina Ngorngor and her 17-year-old son, Emmanuel. Both were victims of kidnapping attempts. Emmanuel was held for three months after he and his schoolmates were abducted.Yagazie Emezi for The New York TimesFor three months, Ms. Ngorngor said, she waited for news while Emmanuel was detained in a camp run by bandits who would only negotiate with the school’s principal.Only after paying 1.5 million naira, about $3,280, was she able to free him.Emmanuel, now back home in Kaduna, said he hopes to study medicine in college. He said he struggles to fall asleep at night and often wakes up from nightmares.Ms. Ngorngor said that after the train attack, she stayed at home for a month, too afraid to go out. She has since traveled back to Abuja, but by road — even though, because of kidnappings, the roads are more dangerous than the train.Abductions in Ms. Ngorngor’s state of Kaduna and in neighboring Zamfara are still happening daily, so many that “you lose track,” said Malik Samuel, an Abuja-based analyst with the Institute for Security Studies. In the last quarter of 2022, there were 1,640 abductions nationwide, according to Beacon Consulting, a security firm.Mr. Olaniyi, the civil engineer in Ibadan, said he would vote on Saturday, but he wasn’t sure yet for whom or whether it was worth it. No candidate cared about people’s security, he said, turning his wrists up to show the scars left on his arms by his kidnappers’ beatings.“You can only survive on your own in Nigeria,” he said.Shoes left behind by kidnapped students from Government Science Secondary School in Kankara, Nigeria, in December, 2020.Sunday Alamba/Associated PressOladeinde Olawoyin contributed reporting. More
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Let’s All Do the DeSantis Shimmy!
I suppose all contemporary young politicians dream of meeting their moment. At the enthusiastic dawn of their politico careers, they entertain a fantasy that some day, as a great historical challenge looms into view, their future selves will rise to the occasion — and masterfully dodge it!They envision themselves bobbing and weaving, triangulating and feinting — filling the air with meaningless clichés so that no one knows where they stand and no one can hold them accountable. Their political career sails on, soaring upward, their electoral viability unbruised and glorious!Ron DeSantis is now trying to live out that dream.There are two dominant views on Ukraine within the Republican Party. The first one, embraced by, say, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, holds that Russia’s assault on Ukraine threatens the liberal world order. Helping the Ukrainians push back is in America’s vital national interest.The second view, embraced by the populist wing, is that the United States has no vital national interests in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson has said he doesn’t really care what Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine. Donald Trump has suggested that the war will last longer if the United States continues to send aid.DeSantis has magically cast himself in between these two positions. In the past, DeSantis was tougher on Russia than Trump. In 2017, he noted that Putin “wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire,” and chided Trump for being too soft on Putin, saying that “you’re better off dealing with Putin by being strong.” If Putin thinks he can gain an inch, DeSantis argued, “he’s apt to take a mile.”But this week DeSantis went on “Fox & Friends,” where great statesmen have always gone to unfurl their foreign policy doctrines, and he feinted in a Trump-like direction.He said the war wouldn’t have happened if Joe Biden weren’t so weak. He said he didn’t want to give the Ukrainians a “blank check” (as if anyone does). He said Biden should be more concerned with securing the border at home and less concerned with borders far away. He minimized the threat Putin poses to the West, adding, “I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea.”It was like that Richard Gere character in the musical “Chicago” — giving them the old razzle-dazzle, even if his dance steps are more plodding. It’s not clear if DeSantis is for more Ukraine aid or not. No one can quite pin him down. Tippity tap. Tappity tip.This has been DeSantis’s general approach to Trump. He doesn’t want to take on Trump directly, so he shimmies. This month, Trump insinuated that DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher. Instead of slamming Trump, DeSantis shimmied. Trump calls DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.” DeSantis glides blithely by.The problem with running a campaign in which you are trying to be Trumpy-but-not-Trump is that you’re never your own man. You have to compete with the king without crossing him. You’re always trying to find that magic sweet spot between just-MAGA and plain-crazy.If he were more of a strategic thinker and less a tactician, I think DeSantis would realize that he’s either going to have to fight Trump directly on some issue or copy him right down the line. And I think he’d realize that he’s already locked himself into a position in which he’s going to have to copy him.On Ukraine policy, for example, I suspect that DeSantis will soon be enthusiastically parroting the Trump position. I say that for two interrelated reasons.First, DeSantis, for better or worse, has hitched his wagon to the populist movement. This movement is now broad and deep in the Republican Party and has deep roots running back through American history. This movement has long been opposed to the cosmopolitan East Coast elites, has long adopted the posture that we need to pull inward and take care of our own, and is now allergic to talk about America being actively involved in preserving a liberal world order. This is where populist voters are, and this is where DeSantis, running as a populist, needs to be.Then there is Tucker Carlson. The DeSantis campaign won’t be able to survive if Carlson and the rest of the right-wing media sphere start blasting him for being a “globalist,” the way Trump already is.“Globalist” is to foreign policy what “C.R.T.” is to education. No one knows precisely what it means but everybody in MAGA-world knows it’s really bad. DeSantis has to take whatever position will get that label off his back.This week’s dancing makes me realize DeSantis is in a weaker position than I thought. The G.O.P. is evenly split on foreign policy and significantly split on whether the party should be fiery populist or more conventionally conservative. According to a Pew survey, 40 percent of Republicans think the United States is giving too much aid to Ukraine, while 41 percent believe America is giving Ukraine the right amount of aid or not enough. This data illustrates something also evident in the 2022 election results — that while there are a lot of populists in the party, there are still a lot of normie Republicans who are not.As the campaign wears on, and the debate on Ukraine continues, DeSantis will be condemned to playing Mini-Me to Trump in trying to win that populist 40 percent. Meanwhile, he’ll be cutting ties to many in the nonpopulist 41 percent. That will leave room for some normie Republican in the Brian Kemp/Tim Scott mold to rise.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
