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    Alvin Bragg Wins, Becoming First Black D.A. in Manhattan

    A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Bragg will take over an office that has brought charges against the family business of former president Donald J. Trump.Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday and will become the first Black person to lead the influential office, which handles tens of thousands of cases a year and is conducting a high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, a former federal prosecutor who campaigned on a pledge to balance public safety with fairness for all defendants, beat out seven other Democrats for the nomination earlier this year and will succeed Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat who did not seek re-election. Mr. Bragg had been heavily favored to prevail over his Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, given that Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in the borough.He will take over an office that continues to disproportionately prosecute Black defendants, and Mr. Bragg throughout his campaign has drawn on his personal experiences growing up in New York to illustrate the types of changes he wishes to make. Mr. Bragg has said he would show leniency to defendants who commit low-level crimes and has emphasized the importance of accountability for the police and the office’s prosecutors.Mr. Bragg will be working in close partnership with a police department run by Eric Adams, who won the race for mayor on Tuesday night. Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg have some policy disagreements — Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has called for the restoration of the department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which Mr. Bragg opposes.In an interview earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Bragg pointed toward experiences that he said would inform his work and set him apart from his predecessors.“Having been stopped by the police,” he said. “Having a homicide victim on my doorstep. Having had a loved one return from incarceration and live with me.”Mr. Bragg’s election follows that of like-minded prosecutors around the country. His experience in law enforcement separates him from some of his peers in what has come to be known as the progressive prosecutor movement, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But Mr. Bragg’s policy positions are largely in line with others who have won office over the past decade, including Rachael Rollins in Boston and Kim Foxx in Chicago.His victory comes as Democrats are seeking to balance sweeping changes to the criminal justice system with some voters’ concern about rising gun crime. In 2020, millions of people around the country took to the streets to protest the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and called for change. But after rises in homicides and shootings in New York and other cities, voters have expressed fears about public safety.Those fears may have influenced two prosecutorial races in Long Island, the results of which were far less decisive on Tuesday night. In Nassau County, with about 13 percent of the vote counted, the Republican candidate, Anne Donnelly, was leading her opponent Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator, 51 to 49 percent. In Suffolk County, the Republican challenger, Ray Tierney, was leading the incumbent district attorney, Timothy Sini, 54 percent to 46 percent with about 31 percent of the vote accounted for.But Mr. Bragg won handily, and The Associated Press called the race for him just before 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Mr. Bragg held a commanding 68-point lead late Tuesday night with more than half of precincts reporting.At an election night party at Harlem Tavern, a crowd roared its approval when he arrived several minutes after the race was called. “We have been given a profound trust tonight,” Mr. Bragg said. “The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety.”He said that under his administration the racial disparities in the criminal justice system would be “shut down”; the trauma of sexual assault survivors would be a central focus; and those suffering from mental health issues would not be prosecuted.“The Day 1 job is guns,” Mr. Bragg said, mentioning shootings that had occurred nearby in the last several weeks. He said he planned to address the problem with “new tools,” not with the tools of the past.Mr. Bragg said getting people out of jail was another urgent priority, making tacit reference to what he called “a humanitarian crisis” on Rikers Island.On Twitter on Tuesday night, Mr. Kenniff congratulated Mr. Bragg. “While we may have competing visions on the role of D.A.,” Mr. Kenniff wrote, “we are aligned in our commitment to public safety and a fair criminal justice system.”Thomas Kenniff, who spent election night at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side, congratulated Mr. Bragg on Twitter.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesBy far the most high-profile case confronting Mr. Bragg is the investigation into Mr. Trump and his family business. Over the summer, the business and one of its top executives were charged with running a yearslong tax scheme that helped executives evade taxes while compensating them with off-the-books benefits.Mr. Vance’s investigation into Mr. Trump and his business is ongoing; Mr. Bragg has faced questions about it throughout his campaign and will continue to do so. Though he cited his experience of having sued the former president over 100 times while at the state attorney general’s office, Mr. Bragg has said he will follow the facts when it comes to the current inquiry.A lifelong resident of Harlem, Mr. Bragg began running for district attorney more than two years ago and slowly accumulated support from local political clubs and unions, and from figures including Representative Jerrold L. Nadler and Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District who hired Mr. Bragg as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.In the primary he was flanked on his left by three candidates who argued against electing anyone with prosecutorial experience. Still, he was able to win important endorsements from progressives like Zephyr Teachout after releasing detailed plans about his vision for a new sex crimes unit and an expansion of the bureaus that oversee economic crimes. He beat out another former federal prosecutor, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, for the nomination, in a close race that came to focus more on public safety as gun crime rose.A sign of Mr. Bragg’s success at unifying Democrats came on Saturday when two other Democrats who ran in the primary, Eliza Orlins and Liz Crotty, showed up at a campaign stop in Union Square to lend him their support.Ms. Orlins was among the candidates who had argued that no one with prosecutorial experience should hold the job, while Ms. Crotty emphasized the need for public safety from the start of the race and won endorsements from several police unions.In interviews, both said that while they disagreed with Mr. Bragg on certain points, they trusted him to do the right thing.“He’s had experience of seeing loved ones incarcerated and their lives destroyed by the criminal legal system,” Ms. Orlins said. “He understands those things fundamentally.”Ms. Crotty said it was important for Mr. Bragg to have a holistic vision of public safety for every neighborhood.“I think that that’s a responsibility he’s always taken seriously,” she said.On Tuesday, a number of voters in Harlem who said they had chosen Mr. Bragg described being impressed by what they perceived as his fundamental decency. Mimsie Robinson, 58, said that he heard Mr. Bragg speak at his church and had been struck by his integrity.“For me, a lot of times that’s what I’m looking at,” Mr. Robinson said. “Is this person sincerely committed to helping this community, this city, move forward?”Mr. Bragg, a graduate of Harvard Law School, began considering a career as a prosecutor while working for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he saw how influential those in the role could be. He worked for several years as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer before being hired by the New York attorney general’s office, where he investigated public corruption and white-collar crime.After a stretch working for Mr. Bharara in Manhattan, he returned to the attorney general’s office, where he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He spent the final week before his election in a virtual courtroom, questioning members of the Police Department in a judicial inquiry into the circumstances that led to the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. More

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    One Final Day of Campaigning

    The elections for mayor in New York City and Buffalo could signal the direction of the Democratic Party in the state.It’s Monday. We’ll take a last look at the campaigns and the candidates. Did I mention that tomorrow is Election Day?Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFrom Buffalo to Brooklyn, the contests voters will decide tomorrow pose fresh tests and create fresh tension about the identity and direction of the Democratic Party in New York.Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, has presented himself as both a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” A former police captain who fought for reforms from within the system, he disdained the “defund the police” movement. He has said that public safety was a prerequisite to prosperity and has reached out to the city’s big-business community. And he defeated several more liberal candidates in the June primary.A different face of the Democratic Party has emerged in the closely watched contest for the mayor of Buffalo. India Walton, a democratic socialist, defeated the incumbent, Byron Brown, in the June primary. Brown is now running as a write-in candidate in what has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats. Walton has referred to Brown as a “Trump puppet” who has become complacent about Buffalo. His campaign has questioned her character and painted her proposals as “too risky,” a message that she countered was fearmongering.My colleague Katie Glueck writes that power dynamics are now being renegotiated at every level of government. “There’s a battle of narratives in New York,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Brooklyn socialist. “New York is in the midst of finding itself.”Curtis Sliwa as the Republican in the raceIn New York City, Adams’s opponent is Curtis Sliwa, who presents his main qualifications as his decades of patrolling the subways and leading the Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing vigilante group he founded.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is an open question, a question that also trails Adams. Sliwa is a Republican newbie — he registered as a Republican only last year — and when he announced his candidacy, some people wondered whether it was just another publicity stunt.Attention-getting soon defined Sliwa’s campaign. He went to an apartment building in Fort Lee, N.J., where Adams co-owns an apartment with his partner, to suggest that Adams did not live in New York. On Twitter, Sliwa called Adams’s residency “the biggest unanswered question since Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster & Bermuda Triangle combined.” (Adams has said that his primary residence is a townhouse he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.)Sliwa’s tactics were no surprise to those who have followed his career. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a talk-radio show with Sliwa and is now a trenchant critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”A likely district attorney who has been a police adversaryAlvin Bragg, who is favored to be the next Manhattan district attorney, spent time last week in a virtual courtroom. He was questioning a police lieutenant about the day that an officer held Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.For the last several years, Bragg has represented Garner’s family in their continuing fight for details about what happened before Garner, who was accused of selling untaxed cigarettes, died in 2014. The Garner case underscored some of the messages of Bragg’s campaign. He has said that he will not pursue some low-level crimes.He has also spoken frequently about police accountability. The district attorney typically works closely with the New York Police Department. Bragg’s involvement in the Garner inquiry — which highlighted a shameful episode for the department — suggested that his relationship with the police is likely to be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.Where Republicans stand a chanceIn some New York City Council races, Republicans are trying to win over voters who cast their ballots for Republicans for president and Democrats in local races. In a race in a Brooklyn district that is home to many Orthodox Jews and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a robocall for the Republican City Council candidate, Inna Vernikov.“They’re trying to make it about the presidential election,” said Steven Saperstein, the Democrat in the race. “People in this district understand and they know that national elections are one thing, but on the local level you have to vote for the person.”In Queens, Democrats hope to flip the last Republican-held City Council seat in the borough. The Democrat in the race is Felicia Singh, a teacher who has been endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party. She is running against Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party.Voting maps and environmental rightsThere’s more on the ballot than the mayoral elections. All 51 City Council members will be chosen in New York City. And five potential amendments to the State Constitution are also on the ballot.One would redraw the state’s legislative maps, which occurs every 10 years. Among other things, it would cap the number of state senators at 63. Michael Li, a senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told my colleague Ashley Wong that the cap was necessary to prevent gerrymandering.Another ballot measure — a so-called environmental rights amendment — would enshrine a constitutional right to clear air, clean water and a “healthful environment.” The language is vague on just what a “healthful environment” is or how such a standard would be enforced.WeatherIt’s a new week, New York. Enjoy the sunny day in the high 50s, with clouds moving in at night and temps dropping to the mid-40s.alternate-side parkingSuspended today (All Saints Day) and tomorrow (Election Day).The latest New York newsSexual harassment and assault by detainees are compounding the crisis at Rikers Island.And in case you missed it …Complaint against Andrew Cuomo: Craig Apple, the Albany County sheriff, defended the decision to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo, who resigned as governor in August. Apple said he was confident that the district attorney would prosecute even though Apple had not coordinated the filing with prosecutors. The district attorney, David Soares, has not committed to going ahead with the case.Apple also rejected accusations that the filing was a “political hit job.”Cuomo was charged with forcible touching, a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to one year in jail, in connection with allegations that he groped a female aide’s breast. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, said he had “never assaulted anyone.” Cuomo is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 17.Letitia James’s candidacy: James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the inquiry into the sexual harassment claims that led to Cuomo’s resignation, declared her candidacy for governor. She begins the campaign as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger. Others, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, may throw their hats in the ring, too.James, the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in New York, is seeking to become the first Black female governor in the country. As attorney general, she made headlines for suing the National Rifle Association and investigating President Donald Trump. “I’ve sued the Trump administration 76 times — but who’s counting?” James said in the video announcing her campaign.Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and is white, was the first governor in more than a century to have deep roots in western New York. Either would be the first woman elected governor.What we’re readingNew York’s Irish Arts Center is moving from a former tenement to a $60 million state-of-the-art performance facility.Inevitably, the last of the authentic delis have been joined by an increasing number of designer delis.MetROPOLITAN diaryDiscovering schavDear Diary:I was shopping for groceries with my mother at a supermarket in Riverdale. I noticed a dozen or so jars of something called schav lined up against a wall in the Jewish food section.I had never seen it before. It looked like a greenish vegetable soup.When we got out to the street, I asked my mother what it was.Before she could answer a man who was walking in front of us turned around.“What?” he said, looking me right in the eye. “You don’t know what schav is? You eat it with a cold boiled potato and it’s delicious!”— Nancy L. SegalIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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    Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's Likely Next D.A., Questions NYPD Over Eric Garner

    Days before the election, Alvin Bragg, who is heavily favored to win office, is participating in an inquiry into Eric Garner’s killing by the N.Y.P.D.It was the week before Election Day, but Alvin Bragg was not glad-handing or fund-raising, not out on the campaign trail or meeting with veterans of the office he hopes to run.Instead, he was in a virtual courtroom, questioning a member of the New York Police Department about the events of July 19, 2014, the day that Eric Garner told a police officer who held him in a chokehold that he could not breathe.Mr. Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney who is heavily favored to win the office in the general election on Tuesday, has, for the last several years, represented the family of Mr. Garner as they have continued to seek details about the lead-up to his killing that day, an event that brought urgent attention to the way that Black men are policed in New York City and around the country.This week, that fight culminated in a judicial inquiry during which Mr. Bragg and others closely questioned members of the police department, shedding more light not only on Mr. Garner’s death but the departmental focus on fighting low-level crimes that led the police to pursue him in the first place.While Mr. Bragg could not have planned for the election and the judicial inquiry into Mr. Garner’s death to coincide so closely, the case drives home some of the key messages of his campaign: He has said that he will cease to pursue a number of low-level crimes, and has spoken frequently about police accountability.The district attorney works hand-in-hand with the New York Police Department and Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry — which highlights anew a shameful episode from the department’s recent past — indicates that his relationship with the department will be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.“I think that there are risks involved for him, because he is going to need to work with the police department as district attorney,” said Jessica Roth, a director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law at Cardozo University.But, she added, Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry was consistent with priorities he had articulated throughout his campaign.“The inquiry is to try to find out what happened, and whether people acted consistently with their duty,” Ms. Roth said. “Bragg has worked in law enforcement for most of his career and worked productively with police. Holding people accountable and thinking about issues systemically does not necessarily put one at odds with the police department.”Gwen Carr, center, the mother of Eric Garner, said she was grateful that Alvin Bragg, left, has stayed with the case. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Bragg, 48, is a former federal prosecutor who also worked at the New York State attorney general’s office, where he rose to become chief deputy attorney general. He is running to lead an office that handles the cases of tens of thousands of defendants each year, the majority of them built on arrests made by the New York police.Though the office can decline to charge defendants arrested by the police, it does not do so often: In 2019, under the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the office declined to prosecute 9 percent of all the arrests it evaluated.That number is low in part because the Police Department responds to policy decisions made by the district attorney. When prosecutors in the office stopped charging defendants with fare evasion, for example, arrests on that charge dropped.While that responsiveness is likely to continue if Mr. Bragg assumes the office, any disagreement between him and the department — or the likely next mayor, Eric Adams, who plans to restore the police’s anti-crime unit — may lead to public friction of the type that has become more common between prosecutors and police representatives, particularly in cities like Philadelphia where the police union has actively campaigned against the sitting district attorney, Larry Krasner.Mr. Bragg’s Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, has also called for the restoration of the anti-crime unit, and for a renewed focus on low-level crimes.Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former police officer, said in an interview that both prosecutors and the police had become more politicized in recent years, a dynamic that can stoke tensions, but that the police would respect a judicious approach from Mr. Bragg.“He has to be an honest broker,” Mr. O’Donnell said of Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg has made his own fraught encounters with the police a foundational part of his campaign narrative, and police accountability is at the heart of his résumé.During his second stint at the New York attorney general’s office, he led a unit charged with investigating the police killings of unarmed civilians, which was created in part as a response to Mr. Garner’s death. (Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, was present when Mr. Cuomo signed the order that led to the creation of that unit.)Upon taking office as district attorney, Mr. Bragg plans to establish a Police Integrity Unit that will report directly to him, siloed off from the rest of the office to avoid any conflict with other bureaus.Mr. Bragg has a long history of working with law enforcement agents. He is not widely seen as a bomb-thrower, but instead, a coalition-builder with an ability to make varied parties feel as if their concerns have been heard.“I say what I don’t want officers to do, but I think it’s important in the next breath to say what I want them to do: to be our partners in fighting against gun trafficking and sexual assaults,” Mr. Bragg said, adding that he had always been “profoundly aware” that he stays at his desk while law enforcement agents are in the field.“The police officers I work with are the ones who will then go do the arrest or do the search warrant and that’s challenging, profoundly important and can be dangerous,” Mr. Bragg said.Mr. Bragg did not grandstand or otherwise draw attention to himself during the judicial inquiry this week, as he questioned Lt. Christopher Bannon, the police commander who, after being told of Mr. Garner’s death via text message, said that it was “not a big deal.”Still, Mr. Bragg fought to nail down every last detail, asking a number of questions about a meeting at which the police department discussed cracking down on the illegal sale of cigarettes and the protocol of filling out a memo book. The judge, Erika Edwards, who has referred to the inquiry as a “trailblazing” effort at transparency, was occasionally compelled to hasten him along.Mr. Bragg mentioned his representation of Mr. Garner’s family with pride throughout the campaign and Ms. Carr has, in return, expressed her gratitude toward him, particularly for his presence in the courtroom over the course of this past week.“I am truly pleased he chose to represent me in this inquiry when he could be out campaigning,” she said. “He said he would see this inquiry through to the end. My family and I are grateful for that.”Troy Closson More

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    The Fate of the Minneapolis Police Is in Voters’ Hands

    In the city where the “defund the police” movement took off, voters will decide next week whether to replace their Police Department with a new public safety agency.MINNEAPOLIS — Days after a police officer murdered George Floyd, protesters gathered outside Mayor Jacob Frey’s home demanding that the Minneapolis Police Department be abolished. The mayor said no. The crowd responded with jeers of “Shame!”On Tuesday, nearly a year and a half since Mr. Floyd’s death thrust Minneapolis into the center of a fervent debate over how to prevent police abuse, voters in the city will have a choice: Should the Minneapolis Police Department be replaced with a Department of Public Safety? And should Mr. Frey, who led the city when Mr. Floyd was killed and parts of Minneapolis burned, keep his job?Minneapolis became a symbol of all that was wrong with American policing, and voters now have the option to move further than any other large city in rethinking what law enforcement should look like. But in a place still reeling from the murder of Mr. Floyd and the unrest that followed, residents are deeply divided over what to do next, revealing just how hard it is to change policing even when most everyone agrees there is a problem.“We’re now known worldwide as the city that murdered George Floyd and then followed that up by tear-gassing folks who were mourning,” said Sheila Nezhad, who decided to run for mayor after working as a street medic during the demonstrations, and who supports the proposal to replace the Police Department. “The message of passing the amendment is this isn’t about just good cops or bad cops. This is about creating safety by changing the entire system.”Sheila Nezhad decided to run for mayor after working as a street medic during the demonstrations after George Floyd was murdered by the police.Caroline Yang for The New York TimesMany residents have a dim view of the Minneapolis Police Department, which before Mr. Floyd’s death had made national headlines for the 2015 killing of Jamar Clark and the 2017 killing of Justine Ruszczyk. In recent weeks, a Minneapolis officer was charged with manslaughter after a deadly high-speed chase and, in a separate case, body camera video emerged showing officers making racist remarks and seeming to celebrate hitting protesters with nonlethal rounds. A poll by local media outlets last month found that 33 percent of residents had favorable opinions of the police while 53 percent had unfavorable views.Despite those misgivings, the overwhelmingly Democratic city is split over how to move forward. Many progressive Democrats and activists are pushing to reinvent the government’s entire approach to safety, while moderate Democrats and Republicans who are worried about increases in crime say they want to invest in policing and improve the current system. In the same poll last month, 49 percent of residents favored the ballot measure, which would replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety, while about 41 percent did not.The divisions extend to the top of the Democratic power structure in Minnesota. Representative Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, support replacing the Police Department. Their fellow Democrats in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, oppose it, as does Mayor Frey.Police officers along Lake Street in Minneapolis during protests last year.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times“I know to my core that we have problems,” said Mr. Frey, who said his message of improving but not defunding the police had resonated with many Black voters, but not with white activists. “I also know to my core that we need police officers.”Since Mr. Floyd’s killing, many large cities, Minneapolis included, have invested more money in mental health services and experimented with dispatching social workers instead of armed officers to some emergency calls. Some departments scaled back minor traffic stops and arrests. And several cities cut police budgets amid the national call to defund, though some have since restored funding in response to rising gun violence and shifting politics.In the days after Mr. Floyd’s death, as protests erupted across the country, Minneapolis became the center of a push among progressive activists to defund or abolish the police. A veto-proof majority of the City Council quickly pledged to disband the Police Department. But that initial effort to get rid of the police force sputtered, and “defund the police” became a political attack line for Republicans.If the ballot measure passes next week, there would soon be no Minneapolis Police Department. The agency that would replace it would focus on a public health response to safety, with more City Council oversight and a new reporting structure. And though almost everyone expects the city would continue employing armed police officers, there would no longer be a required minimum staffing level. The ballot language says the new Department of Public Safety “could include licensed peace officers (police officers), if necessary.”Supporters of the measure, which would amend the City Charter, have largely steered away from the “defund” language, and there is little agreement on what the amendment might mean in practice. Some see it is a first step toward the eventual abolition of the police, or a way to shrink the role of armed officers to a small subset of emergencies.But other supporters of the amendment, including Kate Knuth, a mayoral candidate, say they would actually add more officers to a new Public Safety Department to make up for large numbers who have resigned or gone on leave since Mr. Floyd’s murder.Kate Knuth, a mayoral candidate and former state lawmaker, supports the amendment and says the number of officers would go up if it passes.Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times“It’s clear people want to trust that we have enough officers to do the work we need them to do,” Ms. Knuth, a former state lawmaker, said. “But the goal is public safety. Not a specific number of police.”Concerns about police misconduct persist in Minneapolis: This year, the city has fielded more than 200 complaints.But worries about crime also are shaping much of the conversation, and even as Minneapolis voters weigh replacing the department, city officials have proposed increasing the police budget by $27.6 million, or 17 percent, essentially restoring earlier cuts. At least 78 people have been killed in the city this year, and 83 people were killed last year, the most since the 1990s.“Minneapolis is in a war zone — this is a war going on where your kids are not safe,” said Sharrie Jennings, whose 10-year-old grandson was shot and severely wounded in April while being dropped off at a family member’s house. “We need more police.”For his part, the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, has urged voters to reject the amendment, saying it fails to provide a clear sense of what public safety would really look like if the Police Department were to vanish.“I was not expecting some sort of robust, detailed, word-for-word plan,” Chief Arradondo said in a news conference this week. “But at this point quite frankly I would take a drawing on a napkin.”Some Black leaders have cast the amendment as the work of well-intentioned but misguided progressive white residents whose views are shaped by the relatively safe neighborhoods where they live. About 60 percent of Minneapolis residents are white.AJ Awed, a mayoral candidate, said he resented seeing white residents angered by the death of Mr. Floyd rushing to get rid of the Police Department.Caroline Yang for The New York TimesAJ Awed, another of Mr. Frey’s challengers, said he agreed that policing in Minneapolis needed to be overhauled and that the current system was prejudiced against Black residents. But he said he resented seeing white residents angered by the death of Mr. Floyd rushing to get rid of the Police Department, describing that as “cover because you feel guilty because of what you saw.”“We are very much sensitive to the delegitimization of our security apparatus,” said Mr. Awed, who is part of the city’s large Somali American community, and whose family sought refuge in the United States after a breakdown of public safety. “Policing is a fundamental structure in society.”Not everyone sees it that way.Minneapolis remains deeply shaken by what happened over the past 18 months: The video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck. The looting and arson and police crackdown that followed. The months of boarded windows and helicopters flying overhead. Then the trial this year of Mr. Chauvin, who was convicted of murder.For some, trust in law enforcement has been frayed beyond repair.Demetria Jones, 18, a student at North Community High School, said she planned to vote for the amendment and had become more wary of officers since Mr. Floyd’s death.“I didn’t realize how much they didn’t care about us and didn’t care about our lives until I watched that video,” Ms. Jones said.Among Black residents, who make up about 19 percent of the population, the amendment fight has laid bare a generational divide. Many older leaders, some veterans of the civil rights era, are opposed, while younger activists were largely responsible for the campaign that collected signatures to put the amendment to a vote.Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and the former head of the Minneapolis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., opposes the amendment, saying the language is too vague.The police station for the Third Precinct was burned during unrest.Aaron Nesheim for The New York Times“When you think about the history of policing in the city of Minneapolis and how hard so many of us have fought over the years to bring awareness, to push for policy changes,” Ms. Levy Armstrong said, “it doesn’t make sense to me at this point that there is not a written plan.”One evening last week, Matthew Thompson, 33, stood holding his baby in Farwell Park in North Minneapolis. He had been an early supporter of proposals to defund the police and had fully expected to vote for the amendment. But when he recently dropped his young son at day care, he learned that the car windows of one of the employees had been shattered by a stray bullet, and he had been hearing more gunshots at night, he said.All of it left him uncertain about how he will vote on Tuesday. “I’m still really conflicted on this,” he said. 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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    When the ‘Silent Majority’ Isn’t White

    In her 1990 book “Fear of Falling,” Barbara Ehrenreich detailed how the widely broadcast violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to an immediate, dramatic paradigm shift in media coverage. In the month before the event, Mayor Richard Daley had denounced the various anti-Vietnam War protest groups who were planning to converge outside the city’s International Amphitheater. When those protesters arrived, Daley fought back with his police force who, on Aug. 28, attacked protesters in Grant Park.In scenes that would be echoed a half-century later during the George Floyd protests, the police beat, detained and intimidated everyone from the Yippies to the Young Lords to Dan Rather. In both 1968 and 2020, the press heightened its critique against the police and the mayor once they saw their own being attacked in the streets.Then came the reckoning. Ehrenreich writes:Polls taken immediately after the convention showed that the majority of Americans — 56 percent — sympathized with the police, not with the bloodied demonstrators or the press. Indeed, what one could see of the action on television did not resemble dignified protest but the anarchic breakdown of a great city (if only because, once the police began to rampage, dignity was out of the question). Overnight the press abandoned its protest. The collapse was abrupt and craven. As bumper stickers began to appear saying “We support Mayor Daley and his Chicago police,” the national media awoke to the disturbing possibility that they had grown estranged from a sizable segment of the public.Media leaders moved quickly to correct what they now came to see as their “bias.” They now felt they had been too sympathetic to militant minorities (a judgment the minorities might well have contested). Henceforth they would focus on the enigmatic — and in Richard Nixon’s famous phrase — silent majority.The following months would provide even more evidence that the media had misjudged the moment. A New York Times poll conducted a day after showed an “overwhelming” majority supported the police in Chicago. CBS reported that 10 times as many people had written to them disapproving of their coverage of the events as had written in approval.In response, the media class spent the next few years, in Ehrenreich’s words, examining “fearfully and almost reverently, that curious segment of America: the majority.” The problem, of course, was that the same people who had just believed the world ended at the Hudson were the same people who now would be tasked with discovering everything beyond its banks. As a result, the media’s coverage of “the silent majority” was abstract and almost mythic, which allowed it to be shaped into whatever was most convenient.There are a couple of obvious questions here: A year after the nationwide George Floyd protests, has mass media, which I’ll define here as the major news outlets and TV networks, undergone a similar paradigm shift? And if there is a new “silent majority” whose voices must be heard, who, exactly, is it?Are we seeing a media backlash to the summer of 2020?A quick caveat before we go much further into this: I am generally skeptical of the types of historical matching games that have become popular these days, especially on social media, where false symmetries can be expressed through heavily excerpted screenshots or video. Just because something looks vaguely like something that happened in the past doesn’t mean that the two events are actually analogous. More important, I do not see the need to take every current injustice by the hand and shop it around to a line of older suitors — if nothing else, the act of constant comparison can take away from the immediacy of today’s problem.But regardless of whether the comparison between 1968 and 2020 is apt, plenty of people made it. Most notably, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who, after what was seen as a disappointing result in a handful of House races, compared the slogan “defund the police” to “burn, baby, burn” from the 1965 Watts riots and said such talk was “cutting the throats of the party.” Omar Wasow’s work on voting patterns during the civil rights movement and how the public and media responded to different images of violence also became a central part of opinion discourse.As was true in 1968, we’ve also seen a shift in public opinion polls, perhaps confirming Wasow’s claim that while images of law enforcement committing violence against protesters will generate a significant upsurge in sympathy, images of looting and rioting will have the opposite effect. A Washington Post-Shar School poll conducted in early June of 2020 found that 74 percent of respondents supported the protests, including 53 percent of Republicans­­ — stunning results that suggested a radical shift in public opinion had taken place — and the media followed suit with an enormous amount of coverage.Writing in The Washington Post, Michael Heaney, a University of Glasgow lecturer, wrote, “Not since the Kent State killings, in which National Guard troops shot and killed four student protesters in May 1970, has there been so much media attention to protest.” Heaney also pointed out that the coverage had been “generally favorable.” But as of this summer, polling of white Americans on support for Black Lives Matter and policing reform had reverted to pre-2020 levels. Has media coverage followed suit?We might look at coverage of the recent New York City mayoral race as a kind of case study. The campaign of Eric Adams, a former N.Y.P.D. officer who largely positioned himself against his more progressive opponents on public safety and school issues, was cast as a referendum on last summer. The media attributed Adams’s victory in the Democratic primary almost entirely to his pro-police platform. In June, a Reuters headline read, “Defying ‘Defund Police’ Calls, Democrat Adams Leads NYC Mayor’s Race.” In July, The Associated Press wrote that Adams’s win was part of a “surge for moderate Democrats” and said the centerpiece of his campaign was a rejection of activists’ calls to defund the police.This echoed the coverage of Clyburn’s declarations after the election and fell in with a spate of media coverage about the shift in opinions on policing. So, some regression of media sympathy toward the summer of 2020 does seem underway — although we shouldn’t believe the media underwent some fundamental change during the summer of 2020, or, for that matter, in the months leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Those moments should be seen, instead, as flare-ups that subsequently shamed the media into seeking out “the real America” or whatever.Who is the silent majority in 2021?In 1968, the turn in opinion came mostly at the expense of Black radicals and young protesters in favor of what was largely then assumed to be white working-class voters.Today’s silent majority certainly does include white voters, but this time, recent coverage suggests that the media is reproaching itself for a somewhat different failing: neglecting the perspective of more-moderate voters of color.The post-mortem of the 2020 election — in which more immigrants than anticipated, whether Latinos in Florida and Texas or Asian Americans in California, voted for Donald Trump — coincided with the need to make some sense of what had happened to public opinion after last summer. Connections were made. By the time Adams gave his victory speech, a narrative about the diverse silent majority had taken hold: People of color supported the police, hated rioting and wanted more funding for law enforcement. They did not agree with the radical demands of the Floyd protests — in fact, such talk turned them off.There’s a lot of truth to the concerns about how much the mass media actually knows about minority voters. When the Latino vote swings from Texas and Florida came to light on election night, Chuck Rocha, a political strategist who specializes in Latino engagement, went on a media tour and placed the blame on “woke white consultants” who believed that a broad message of antiracism would work for “people of color.” As I wrote in a guest essay, a similar pattern held in Asian American communities — it turns out that Vietnamese refugees who reside in Orange County, Calif., might have different opinions on Black Lives Matter, capitalism or abortion rights than, say, second-generation Indian Americans at elite universities.These mistakes came from a grouping error: Liberal white Americans in power, including members of the media, tended to think of immigrants as huddled masses who all shook under the xenophobic rhetoric of the Republican Party and prayed for any deliverance from Donald Trump. They did not see them as distinct populations who have their own set of political priorities, mostly because they took their votes for granted.So, if the media is actually overlooking an entire population and sometimes misrepresenting them, what’s the big deal if it’s now correcting for this?A few things can be true at once: Yes, the media overwhelmingly misconstrued the actual beliefs of minority voters, particularly in Latino and Asian American communities. Yes, those voters tend to have more moderate view on policing.The problem isn’t one of description, but rather of translation. The media took a normal regression in polling numbers, mixed it with some common sense about how minority populations actually vote and created a new, diverse “silent majority.” This is a powerful tool. These unheard, moderate minorities carry an almost unassailable authority in liberal politics because of the very simple fact that liberals tend to frame their policies in terms of race. If those same objects of your concern turn around and tell you to please stop what you’re doing, what you’ve created is perhaps the most powerful rebuttal in liberal politics. Over the next few years, I imagine we will see an increasing number of moderate politicians and pundits hitch their own hobbyhorses to this diverse silent majority. The nice thing about a vaguely defined, still mysterious group is that you can turn it into anything you want it to be.Some version of this opinion engineering, I believe, is happening with the police and public safety. There’s not a lot of evidence that Latino and Asian voters care all that much either way about systemic racism or funding or defunding the police. (Black voters, on the other hand, listed racism and policing as their top two priorities leading up to the 2020 election.) Polls of Asian American voters, for example, show that they prioritize health care, education and the economy. Latino voters listed the economy, health care and the pandemic as their top three priorities. (“Violent crime” ranked about as high as Supreme Court appointments.) If asked, a large number of people in both of these groups might respond that they support the police, but that’s very different from saying they base their political identity on the rejection of, say, police abolition. If they’re purposefully voting against the left wing of the Democratic Party, it’s more likely they are responding to economic or education policy rather than policing.And so it may be correct to say that within the new, diverse “silent majority,” attitudes about the police and protest might be much less uniform than what many in the mass media led you to believe in the summer of 2020. It may also be worth pointing out that reporters, pundits and television networks should probably adjust their coverage to accurately assess these dynamics, just as I’m sure there were legitimate concerns with media bubbles in 1968. But it also seems worth separating that assessment from the conclusion that the media should now see the summer of 2020 as political kryptonite and cast the millions of people who protested in the streets as confused revolutionaries who had no real support.After 1968, the mass media’s turn away from the counterculture of the ’60s and its indifference to the dismantling of Black radical groups narrowed the scope of political action. This constriction would be aided over the next decade by lurid, violent events that all got thrown at the feet of anyone who looked like a radical. When Joan Didion wrote of the Manson murders, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled,” she was saying that all the fears of the so-called silent majority had come to pass.We are living through some version of that today. But what seems particularly telling about this moment is that the retreat no longer requires Charles Manson, the fearmongering over Watts or the police riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Those images hover above the public’s consciousness as evergreen cautionary tales; the paranoia they fulfilled will do just fine.The question at the outset of this post, then, has a split answer: Yes, we seem to be reliving a moment of media revanchism in the name of the (diverse) silent majority, but it is also a replay of a replay, akin to filming a television screen with your phone’s camera, with all of its inherent losses in resolution, clarity and immediacy.What I’m Reading and Watching“Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch” by Rivka GalchenA beautifully written, hilarious novel set during a witch hunt in 17th-century Germany. The sentences, as in all of Galchen’s work, go beyond the sometimes dull, narcissistic boundaries of modern fiction and still manage to feel extremely relevant.“Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism” by Thomas BrothersThe second of Brothers’s big books on Louis Armstrong and the early years of jazz. Like the first book, “Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans,” this isn’t so much a blow-by-blow retelling of Armstrong’s life, but an ethnography of how his music came to be.Have feedback? Send a note to kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang) writes for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Loneliest Americans.” More

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    Colombia’s Troubles Put a President’s Legacy on the Line

    SEOUL — Iván Duque swept into Colombia’s presidency in 2018 as a young, little-known technocrat riding a surging right-wing movement. He tapped public anger against a peace deal that he said had treated the country’s deadly insurgents too softly. And he warned that the proposals of his left-wing opponent could stifle steady growth.Three years and a global pandemic later, it is Mr. Duque who is presiding over high unemployment and an angry electorate — and who is on the defensive about the steps he has taken to tame persistent violence by militants.Mr. Duque contends his policies have opened opportunities for the middle- and low-income classes, encouraged entrepreneurship and paved the way for Colombia to return to its prepandemic growth. He also touted social policies that could address issues of police conduct and social inequality that led to violent clashes this year, killing dozens.Mr. Duque after he won office in 2018, riding a surging right-wing movement. Three years into his term, he is presiding over high unemployment and an angry electorate.Andres Stapff/Reuters“The three pillars of our overall plan of government, which were legality, entrepreneurship and equality, have been producing results,” Mr. Duque said last week in an interview in South Korea with The New York Times. “Obviously, they were affected by the pandemic. But I think we have demonstrated our resilient spirit.”Mr. Duque’s legacy — and that of his patron, the firebrand former President Álvaro Uribe, who still dominates Colombian politics — is on the line. Colombian voters go to the polls in May, when Gustavo Petro, a former presidential candidate, previous mayor of Bogotá and a onetime guerrilla member, could become the country’s furthest-left leader in its history at a time when leftists are again claiming victories across South America.Mr. Duque can’t run again because of term limits, and his party’s candidate hasn’t been determined. Still, his government faces some of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. Colombia’s economy, trade and investment from abroad were hit hard by the coronavirus, which exacerbated long-running social tensions over stark wealth inequality and police conduct.Colombia’s economy, trade and investment from abroad were hit hard by the coronavirus, which exacerbated long-running social tensions.Federico Rios for The New York TimesHe has also come under increased pressure to tame Colombia’s armed insurgencies and hasten the fulfillment of the government’s peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, despite his criticism of the terms of the deal on the 2018 campaign trail.In South Korea, Mr. Duque was seeking trade and investment opportunities, such as expansions by Korean manufacturers and increased sales of Colombian coffee, avocados and bananas. He even cited the filming of a South Korean movie — Mr. Duque has long championed creative investments in areas like the arts and research — in Bogotá.The president is trying “to get South Korean investors interested in playing big ball,” said Sergio Guzmán, of the Bogotá-based consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis.The challenge for Mr. Duque, Mr. Guzmán added, is that a victory by Mr. Petro could undo what he and his predecessors had accomplished.“He’s a weak president,” said Mr. Guzmán. “He’s a lame-duck president. He’s a president whose most important legacy will be for his successor not to be able to undo his own policies.”FARC rebels in the mountains of Colombia in 2018. Mr. Duque has come under increased pressure to tame Colombia’s armed insurgencies.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Duque disputed that, saying that his efforts — including wage subsidies and a proposal to widen university access — could help put the economy back on track. Though a protégé of Mr. Uribe, the charismatic leader who revved up the government’s offensive against FARC nearly two decades ago, Mr. Duque never fully fit the populist mold. Born into a politically prominent family, the 45-year-old president worked for years in development banking. He speaks in clipped, think-tank English: “I will give you very concise numbers,” he said at one point before doing exactly that.He was elected after campaigning on increasing economic growth and changing the terms of the peace accord with FARC, but he quickly ran into challenges. In 2019, frustration over the lack of opportunities and possible pension changes sparked mass protests. So did a tax proposal this year meant to close a fiscal hole exacerbated by the pandemic.Mr. Duque’s tax proposal had merit, said Luis Fernando Mejía, director of the Colombian research institute Fedesarrollo, but he seemed unable to sell it to the public.The firebrand former President Álvaro Uribe, who still dominates Colombian politics.Federico Rios for The New York Times“It was a very, very good reform,” he said, “but he was not able to consolidate political capital and to create an adequate strategy to push through a reform that I think had been very important.”Mr. Duque is also trying to thread the policy needle in a polarized time, making it increasing difficult to please both his party’s base and unhappy voters.The tax protests became part of broader unrest over inequality and police violence. Some police used brutal and deadly force on demonstrators.In the interview, Mr. Duque cited his efforts to increase scrutiny on the police and to equip them with body cameras. But he said some of the demonstrators had been spurred by “people producing fake news” and other instigators to elevate the violence.His trickiest balancing act may be enacting the peace accord with FARC. In 2019, his effort to alter the terms, including tougher sentencing for war crimes, failed on legal grounds. Internationally, he is under intense pressure to carry out the accord, but domestically, his party and other conservatives continue to criticize it.Students protesting against changes to the tax code in Bogotá, the capital, in 2019.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJust weeks ahead of the deal’s five-year anniversary, more than half of its measures have not been applied or have barely begun, according to the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, an independent entity charged with oversight of the deal. Opposition groups and some of the electorate say Mr. Duque missed a critical window to push it forward.Mr. Duque and his supporters point to the accord’s time frame, which calls for its tenets to be enacted over 15 years. In the interview, he said that he had done more than his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, to put in place the peace deal’s landownership overhauls and development plans that would give poor farmers and former rebels jobs and opportunities.“We have been not only implementing, but the issues that we have been implementing are going to be decisive for the evolution of the accords,” he said, adding, “We have made a good progress.”Mr. Duque must balance competing interests overseas, as well. Tensions have risen between the United States — Colombia’s longtime ally — and China, a growing source of business for the country. China, Colombia’s second-largest trading partner after the United States, has invested in mines in the country and successfully bid on engineering contracts.A temporary hospital set up in April to house Covid patients in Bogotá.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Duque said that the Chinese companies had won the work in open bids and that relations with the United States remained warm. “We try to build our relationship with our partners based on investment and trade and common opportunities. But usually I have to highlight that in the case of the United States, our alliance has been existing for almost 200 years, and we will continue to see the United States as No. 1.”With the United States, relations hit an awkward moment last year when members of Mr. Duque’s party endorsed Donald J. Trump and Republicans in the election, provoking a rare rebuke from the U.S. ambassador.“I think that was unwise,” Mr. Duque said. “I think that should have not been done.”These examples of polarization, he said, have complicated efforts to fix deep-rooted problems. The world is polarized, he said, as people “connect demagoguery and populism with violent sentiments and algorithms and people producing fake news and manipulating the truth.”He added, “That’s why we have concentrated in our administration not to promote polarization, but to move the country to the right direction.”Gustavo Petro, center, during a protest against tax changes in 2019. A former presidential candidate, he could become the country’s furthest-left leader in its history.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCarlos Tejada More

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    Belarus Leader Lashes Out at the West, a Year After Crushing Protests

    In an eight-hour news conference, President Aleksandr Lukashenko called Britain an “American lapdog” and took credit for averting World War III.MINSK, Belarus — President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic ruler of Belarus, summoned his acolytes, docile members of the media and a few independent journalists on Monday to present his version of reality: The tens of thousands of Belarusians who rose up in mass protests against his disputed re-election last year were a clueless minority, he said, manipulated by the insidious West seeking to cleave his country from Russia.He insisted that his actions were not only justified, but had actually preserved world peace.“Today, Belarus is the center of attention of the whole world,” he proclaimed in the course of an eight-hour news conference in his vast, marble-floored Palace of Independence. “If we had shown weakness during the protests,” he asserted, it would have precipitated a new world war.While Mr. Lukashenko has worked hard to support his view of events, it is widely dismissed as nonsense by Belarusian activists, Western governments and independent analysts. In fact, they say, after blatantly stealing the election he ordered his law enforcement agencies to crack down on protesters using violence unseen in Europe for decades.Since then, he has driven hundreds of opposition leaders and others into exile, scrambled a fighter jet to force down a commercial plane carrying an opposition activist, and silenced independent media outlets by jailing entire newsrooms. He has paid several visits to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, seeking financial help to buoy his country’s sanctions-stricken economy.On Monday, a year after the most serious challenge to his rule, Mr. Lukashenko struck a defiant tone, receiving rapturous applause from most people in the audience as he held forth without taking a single break. Outside the palace, walls were decorated with photos of him with foreign dignitaries, and one displayed personal photos from his youth.Mr. Lukashenko lashed out at the few Western journalists who asked questions about the allegations that his regime is torturing its opponents and repressing civil society.“There were no repressions and there will be no repressions in the future because I do not need that, it would be like shooting myself in the head,” he said. His assertion contradicts findings by the United Nations; a Belarusian human rights organization, Viasna; and other watchdogs.He acknowledged that a prison in Minsk’s main detention center was “not a resort” as he had referred to it earlier in his address, but he denied allegations of torture, resorting instead to whataboutism.“Why have you killed a girl in Congress?” he asked a journalist from CNN, referring to the death of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer as she and other rioters raided the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. After that, Mr. Lukashenko said, “a question about repressions against civil society from my part just can’t be compared to the situation in your country.”He also belittled the Belarusian Olympic athlete Kristina Timanovksaya, who last week fled to Poland after openly criticizing her coaches for registering her in a race she had not trained for.“Who is she?” he asked, trying to diminish her record as a sprinter.Members of Mr. Lukashenko’s cabinet, pro-government bloggers and mostly friendly journalists from the region frequently interjected to show their support, to thank their president and to push back at the few critical questions from other journalists.Mr. Lukashenko has been living in his own, imagined world “for many years,” said Artyom Shraibman, an independent Belarusian analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who watched the marathon speech from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. He had fled Belarus, fearing he would be arrested there. Mr. Shraibman said some members of the audience intervened after uncomfortable or challenging questions “to convince Lukashenko that the majority in the room is on his side.”Inside the ornate presidential palace on Monday.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThose few questions, like one about the economic price of suppressing the largest-scale protest Belarus has seen since independence from the Soviet Union, seemed to throw Mr. Lukashenko off balance.“You can choke on your sanctions,” he said, referring to additional penalties imposed by Britain and the United States on Monday against him and his allies.“We didn’t know what this ‘Britain’ was for 1,000 years, and we don’t want to know it now,” he said. “You are American lap dogs!”The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday added 27 individuals and 17 entities to the list of those under sanctions, which drain the country’s export revenues. Last month, President Biden met with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s unlikely opposition leader, who was forced to flee the country shortly after claiming victory in the presidential election.Over the years, Mr. Lukashenko has performed a balancing act with his foreign policy, playing the West off against Russia in an effort to preserve his independence while extracting economic succor from both. But Mr. Putin’s support during the protests — including a veiled threat to intervene militarily if necessary — was a critical lifeline for Mr. Lukashenko. Western sanctions have been pushing Mr. Lukashenko even closer to Mr. Putin.But during the news conference, billed as “the big conversation with the president,” Mr. Lukashenko portrayed Russia and Mr. Putin as more dependent on Belarus than vice versa. He asserted that Belarus, which borders Poland and the Baltic States, both NATO members, is Russia’s last bulwark against the West.Following that line of argument, he insisted that the protests against him last year were caused by Western countries seeking to attack “the heart of Russia” by fomenting unrest in Belarus.“Together with the Russian president, we immediately realized what they wanted from us,” he said.Today, his protestations notwithstanding, Mr. Lukashenko’s rule hangs on his personal relationship with Mr. Putin, said Katia Glod, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis. At any moment, Mr. Putin can “make some other decision,” regarding the Belarus leader, she said, for instance “push him toward a referendum” on a new constitution and resignation.While allowing during the news conference that Belarus is in talks with Russia on another $1 billion loan, Mr. Lukashenko insisted that his country would remain independent and never merge with Russia.Visitors at the presidential palace, which features a display of Soviet flags.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMr. Lukashenko has little leverage against the West. But he has been accused by the European Union of retaliating for its sanctions by trying to foment another immigration crisis in Europe when he allowed 4,000 migrants to cross into Lithuania this year, compared with 81 in 2020.“You put us under economic pressure, why should we protect you?” he asked, referring to the E.U.’s measures, which include a ban on commercial flights to Belarus.“If your planes do not fly to our country, some other planes will come,” he said. “And if planes from Afghanistan come, we will also accept them,” he added, referring to the increasing exodus from that country as the Taliban gain control of increasing territory.At the end of the news conference, Mr. Lukashenko issued a warning to the few Western journalists who were admitted to the event.“If you bring this war to us, we will have to respond,” he said. “But in this case our community, our society, is united. You can’t break us.”At that, nearly the entire audience rose in a rousing ovation. More