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      America is now in fascism’s legal phase | Jason Stanley

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      America is now in fascism’s legal phase The history of racism in the US is fertile ground for fascism. Attacks on the courts, education, the right to vote and women’s rights are further steps on the path to toppling democracy“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her.Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In keeping with a tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win elections and gain power.Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.Fascist propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. A police militarized to address the wounds of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national humiliation by enemies both internal and external. As WEB Du Bois showed in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.The novel development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”Constructing an enemyTo understand contemporary US fascism, it is useful to consider parallels to 20th century history, both where they succeed and where they fail.Hitler was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would have been among the very best Nazis.” We American Jews feel firmly at home. Now, where the fascist movement’s internal enemies are leftists and movements for Black racial equality, there certainly could be fascist American Jews.Germany’s National Socialist party did not take over a mainstream party. It started as a small, radical, far-right anti-democratic party, which faced different pressures as it strove to achieve greater electoral success.Despite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was something the party had outgrown. It represented itself as the antidote to communism, using a history of political violence in the Weimar Republic, including street clashes between communists and the far right, to warn of a threat of violent communist revolution. It attracted support from business elites by promising to smash labor unions. The Nazis portrayed socialists, Marxists, liberals, labor unions, the cultural world and the media as representatives of, or sympathizers with, this revolution. Once in power, they bore down on this message.In his 1935 speech, Communism with its Mask Off, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described Bolshevism carrying “on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such”. By contrast, “National Socialism sees in all these things – in [private] property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism – these forces which carry on every human civilization and fundamentally determine its worth.”The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization.Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi government of the 1930s was not genocidal, nor were its notorious concentration camps packed with Jewish prisoners, at least until the November pogrom of 1938. The main targets of the regime’s concentration camps were, initially, communists and socialists. The Nazi regime urged vigilante violence against its other targets, such as Jews, separating themselves from this violence by obscuring the role of agents of the state. During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the insidious threat of communism.Violent militias occupied an ambiguous role between state and non-state actors. The SS began as violent Nazi supporters, before becoming an independent arm of the government. The message of violent law and order created a culture that influenced all the Nazi state’s institutions. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “for violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards.”In the US, the training of police as “warriors”, together with the unofficial replacement of the American flag by the thin blue line flag, auger poorly about the democratic commitments of this institution.For a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically by projecting its own violations of it on to its opponents.In the case of the takeover of the mainstream rightwing party by a far-right anti-democratic movement, the pretense must be stronger. The movement must contend with members of that party who are faithful to procedural elements of democracy, such as the principle of one voter one vote, or that the loser of a fair election give up power – in the United States today, figures such as Adam Kinzinger and Elizabeth Cheney. A fascist social and political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently anti-democratic agenda.In the face of the attack on the US capital on 6 January, even the most resolute skeptic must admit that Republican politicians have been at least attempting to cultivate a mass of violent vigilantes to support their causes. Kyle Rittenhouse is becoming a hero to Republicans after showing up in Kenosha, WI as an armed vigilante citizen, and killing two men. Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, deliberate deception.Black rebellion, white backlashStreet violence proved invaluable to the National Socialists in their path to power. The Nazis instigated and exacerbated violence in the streets, then demonized their opponents as enemies of the German people who must be dealt with harshly. Trump’s rise followed Black protest, at times violent, of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore. More recently, the murder of George Floyd and a historic protest movement in the US in the late spring has given fuel to fascist misrepresentation.All of these recent developments take place as only the latest in a long US history of Black rebellion against white supremacist ideology and structures, and a parallel history of white backlash.White vigilante groups regularly formed in reaction to Black rebellions, to “defend their families and property against Black rebellion”, the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in her recent history of these rebellions. Hinton shows that police often acted in concert with these groups. For decades, the instigator of these rebellions has typically been an incident or incidents of police violence against members of the community, following a long period of often violent over-policing that exacerbated these communities’ grievances.Street movements in the US have often been accompanied by vigorous campus protests, from the protests against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, to recent campus protests for racial justice that attracted media rebuke (paradoxically, for “chilling free speech”). Politicians in both parties have feasted on these moments, using them to troll for votes. During these episodes of protest and rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwater onwards, placing campus protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:
      You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
      Politicians have shown less interest in addressing the underlying conditions that lead to violence in poor Black urban communities – the widespread availability of guns, the massive and persistent racial wealth gap and the effects of violent policing and mass incarceration. And why should they? As long as these underlying conditions persist, politicians of either party can run for office by milking fear and promising a harsh law and order response. Morrison’s 1995 address is a warning that these conditions are ripe for harnessing by a fascist movement, one targeting democracy itself.In its most recent iteration, in the form of the reaction against Black Lives Matter protesters and the demonization of antifa and student activists, a fascist social and political movement has been avidly stoking the flames for mass rightwing political violence, by justifying it against these supposed internal enemies.Rachel Kleinfield, in an October 2021 article, documents the rise of the legitimation of political violence in the US. According to the article, the “bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending – and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.”This kind of justification of political violence is classically fascist – a dominant group threatened by the prospect of gender, racial and religious equality turning to a leader who promises a violent response.How to topple a democracyWe are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.The key to democracy is an informed electorate. An electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects of over-policing and over-incarceration, will be unsurprised by mass political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these problems. An electorate ignorant of these facts will react not with understanding, but with uncomprehending fear and horror at Black political unrest.Sometimes, you trace a fascist movement to its genesis in Nazi influence on its leaders, as with India’s RSS. In the United States, the causal relations run the other way around. As James Whitman shows in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Jim Crow era in the United States influenced Nazi law. In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate impact on minority communities (as in Texas). By obscuring in our education system facts about this era, one can mask the reemergence of legislation that borrows from its strategies.Indeed, the very tactic of restricting politically vital information to schoolchildren is itself borrowed from the Jim Crow era. Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today.Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.According to National Socialist ideology, abortion, at any point in pregnancy, was considered to be murder. Just as it was acceptable to murder disabled people and other groups whose identities were considered dangerous to the health of the “Aryan race”, it was acceptable to perform abortions on members of these groups. In the first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of a fascist future.If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.Donald Trump has shown others what is possible. But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will outlive him. As Toni Morrison warned, it feeds off ideologies with deep roots in American history. It would be a grave error to think it cannot ultimately win.
      This article was amended on 22 December 2021 to fix a typo.
      TopicsThe far rightUS politicsTrump administrationRaceRace in educationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical anger

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      ‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerA short history of the Roe decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.This schism played out in the US supreme court on Wednesday, when the new conservative-dominated bench heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion rights case since Roe.In somber arguments, justices questioned whether the state of Mississippi should be allowed to ban nearly all abortions at 15 weeks gestation, nine weeks earlier than the current accepted limit. While the ruling, expected by the end of June next year, is far from a foregone conclusion, justices in the conservative majority appeared to signal their support for severely restricting abortion access, a right Americans have exercised for two generations.The divisive question among the conservative majority appeared to be whether abortion should be restricted to earlier than 15 weeks, weakening Roe, or if the precedent set in Roe should be overturned entirely.Summarizing Mississippi’s argument, the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was controversially nominated to the court by Donald Trump in 2018, said “the constitution is neither pro-life nor pro-choice … and leaves the issue to the people to resolve in the democratic process.” If the issue is returned to the states, 26 states would be “certain or likely” to ban or severely restrict abortion access.The religious right in the US has been laying the foundations of this decisive challenge to abortion rights for years. According to historians and researchers, it has taken decades of political machinations for the campaign to reach this zenith. The movement has intersected with nearly every major issue in American politics for the last five decades, from segregation to welfare reform to campaign finance.The conservative anti-abortion movement “was a kind of historical accident”, said Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Dartmouth University and author of the recently released book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.It wasn’t until Republican strategists sought to “deflect attention away from the real narrative”, which Balmer argues was racial integration, “and to advocate on behalf of the fetus”, that largely apolitical evangelical Christians and Catholics would be united within the Republican party. Balmer argues that advocacy was nascent in 1969.Although the supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education called for an end to racial segregation in schools in 1954, many schools continued de facto segregation 14 years later.Then, the supreme court weighed in again, and ordered schools to integrate “immediately”. This prompted white southerners to form “segregation academies”, whites-only private Christian schools which registered as tax-exempt non-profit charities. African American parents in Mississippi sued, arguing this was taxpayer-subsidized discrimination. They won, and in 1971, tax authorities revoked the non-profit status of 111 segregated private schools.In Balmer’s view, revoking the non-profit status of segregated private schools catalyzed evangelical Christian leaders, but even in the early 1970s defense of racial segregation was not a populist message. However, defense of the fetus could be.Republican operations began to test abortion as a vessel for the collective anxieties of evangelical Christians, and Roe as a shorthand for government intrusion into the family after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Eventually, abortion became the reason for evangelicals to deny the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, himself an evangelical Christian, a second term.Evangelical opposition to abortion “wasn’t an anti-abortion movement per se”, said Elmer L Rumminger, an administrator at the then whites-only Christian college Bob Jones University, said in Balmer’s book. “For me it was government intrusion into private education.”At the same time, the anti-feminist Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly was connecting anxiety about women’s changing roles in society with abortion. In a 1972 essay, she described the feminist movement as “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion,” and the writing of contemporaneous feminists as “a series of sharp-tongued, high-pitched whining complaints by unmarried women”.By the 1978 midterm congressional elections, Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of modern conservatism, was testing abortion as a campaign issue with evangelical Christians with a small fund from the Republican National Committee. Roman Catholic volunteers distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets in church parking lots in Iowa, New Hampshire and Minnesota, and their efforts prevailed. Four anti-abortion Republicans ousted Democrats.The groundwork laid by Schlafly and Weyrich made “Roe shorthand for a host of worries about sex equality and sexuality”, wrote Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate.“Even as late as August 1980, the Reagan-Bush campaign wasn’t certain abortion would work for them as a political issue,” said Balmer. However, as Reagan sailed to victory, he was carried in part by religious voters hooked on the promise of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. When a constitutional amendment failed, a new strategy took hold: control the supreme court.Historians said segregation was only one part of a complex and multifaceted movement, which has long seen itself as a human rights campaign. By the 1970s, “there was an anti-abortion movement which was influential and pretty effective in the states that was ready for the new right to work with,” said Ziegler.In the coming years, Reagan would recast the politics of reproduction through a new racist prism, as he introduced the mythical stereotype of the “welfare queen”. The image allowed politicians to portray “all single mothers as persons of color and all persons of color as dependent on public assistance”, wrote the reproductive rights activists Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger in their 2017 book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction.The image divorced family wellbeing and welfare support from abortion access and rights. Thus, the “broad middle ground” of issues that anti-abortion and pro-choice voters agreed on became “firmly partisan”, said Julia Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, and professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.By the 1990s, anti-abortion activists had professionalized. So called “right to life” organizations rallied the base, and religious law firms dedicated themselves to fighting abortion in courts. The supreme court weighed in on abortion again in 1992, in another watershed case called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey. The case allowed states to restrict abortion, as long as such restrictions did not create an “undue burden” on the right to abortion and served the purpose of either protecting the woman’s health or unborn life.States hostile to abortion passed “Trap” laws, or targeted regulations of abortion providers, which required abortion clinics to become the “functional equivalents of hospitals”, according to legal scholars. States instituted 24-hour waiting periods for abortion, state-mandated inaccurate information and invasive sonograms.Many clinics went out of business as they struggled to meet the expensive new requirements, and pregnant people struggled to obtain abortions as they had to travel further and spend more to find a provider.These laws would also play an outsized role in the Dobbs hearing. Conservative justices debated whether they could keep the “undue burden” standard while jettisoning a central tenet of Roe, that women can terminate a pregnancy until a fetus can survive outside the womb, or “viability”.“Why is 15 weeks not enough time?” asked Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, in the hearings.The politics of reproduction spurred new debates on acceptable restrictions on birth control, stem cell research and sex education during the George W Bush administration. But it was the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, that supercharged Republican opposition.In 2010, the Tea Party swept the midterm elections. More extreme candidates entered Congress and statehouses through the practice of challenging incumbents in districts gerrymandered to be reliably Republican. And, in a decision not typically thought of as an anti-abortion victory, the chief counsel for National Right to Life successfully argued a supreme court case that would unleash vast sums of dark money into American elections – Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.“The anti-abortion movement, over time with other conservative allies, worked to change things like the rules of campaign finance for the conservative movement,” said Ziegler. “Anti-abortion lawyers played an integral part in cases like Citizens United.”By the time Donald Trump ran for president, evangelical Protestants had become more anti-abortion than the Catholic voters who were once the bedrock of anti-abortion advocacy. Seventy-seven per cent of white evangelical Christians say the procedure should be illegal, compared with just 43% of Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center.Trump harnessed the anger of white evangelicals for a victory in 2016, with a mix of hardline anti-abortion politicsand xenophobic nativism. Trump abandoned his 1999 stance as “very pro-choice”, saying there should be “punishment” for women who have abortions, and promised to nominate conservative supreme court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v Wade.Today, overwhelmingly white “Christian nationalist” voters believe their religion should be privileged in public life, a goal to be attained “by any means necessary”, according to social researchers such as Indiana University associate professor Andrew Whitehead.Supreme court decisions are notoriously difficult to predict, but abortion rights activists believe Wednesday’s hearing shows that conservative justices are ready to significantly weaken or perhaps overturn Roe v Wade. If that happens, young, poor people of color will disproportionately suffer, forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Such an outcome is so severe human rights advocates have said state abortion bans would violate United Nations conventions against torture and place the US in the company of a shrinking number of countries with abortion bans.On Wednesday, the court’s three outnumbered liberal justices argued neither the science, the enormous consequences of pregnancy nor the American polity had changed since the court last decided a watershed abortion rights case. But, because of the work of anti-abortion politicians, the makeup of the court’s bench had.“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?” asked the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “I don’t see how it is possible.”TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS politicsRaceUS supreme courtfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Carrie Meek, daughter of Black sharecroppers who blazed path to Congress, dies aged 95

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      Carrie Meek, daughter of Black sharecroppers who blazed path to Congress, dies aged 95Tributes note her dedication to Miami’s Haitian community, to economic opportunity for the poor and affirmative action Carrie Meek, who died on Sunday, was remembered as a trailblazer, a descendent of enslaved people who became one of the first Black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction.Lee Elder, golfer who broke colour barrier at the Masters, dies at age of 87Read moreThe late congressman John Lewis had another way of describing her.“We see showboats and we see tugboats. She’s a tugboat. I never want to be on the side of issues against her,” Lewis said of Meek in 1999.Politicians and public figures recalled a pioneering career, with many noting Meek’s devotion to working-class families in her Miami district as well as her powerful oratory, in an outpouring of support after her death at 95 after a long illness.“Throughout her decades of public service, she was a champion for opportunity and progress, including following her retirement, as she worked to ensure that every Floridian had a roof over his or her head and access to a quality education,” said the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.“On the appropriations committee where we both served, she was a force, bringing to bear the special power of her soft accent and strong will for her community and country. Indeed, she was formidable in meeting the needs of her community, including by advocating for Haitian immigrants and refugees and creating economic opportunities for working families in her district.”Meek was 66 when she won the 1992 Democratic primary in her Miami-Dade county district, later winning the seat in an unopposed general election. On her first day in Congress, Meek reflected that while her grandmother, enslaved on a Georgia farm, could never have dreamed of such an accomplishment, her parents told her anything was possible.“They always said the day would come when we would be recognized for our character,” Meek said.In Congress she was a champion of affirmative action, economic opportunities for the poor and efforts to bolster democracy in and ease immigration restrictions on Haiti, the birthplace of many of her constituents.As a member of the powerful appropriations committee she worked to secure $100m in aid to rebuild Dade county after Hurricane Andrew.In a statement, Congresswoman Frederica S Wilson called Meek an “exemplary role model for elected officials like me who broke down barriers so that we could follow the path she paved and succeed”.“Congresswoman Meek was the granddaughter of slaves who likely never have imagined how far she would go, but to the benefit of generations yet unborn, her parents encouraged her to believe that she could achieve anything she set her mind on – and she did,” Wilson said.Even before Meek’s death, lawmakers lauded her work.“Only in America can the granddaughter of a slave and the daughter of a former sharecropper believe that she can achieve and conquer all that presents itself in opposition to her dreams,” the congressman Alcee Hastings, who died in April, said of Meek in 2003.“Carrie Meek has set the stage and perpetuated the legacy of political astuteness for all of us, but particularly for African American women everywhere.”TopicsRaceUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ilhan Omar: Boebert is a ‘buffoon’ and ‘bigot’ for ‘made up’ anti-Muslim story

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      Ilhan Omar: Boebert is a ‘buffoon’ and ‘bigot’ for ‘made up’ anti-Muslim story‘Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout,’ says Omar after Boebert claims to have joked about terrorism when sharing elevator The Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar called the Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert a buffoon, a bigot and a liar for claiming to have joked about terrorism when sharing an elevator in Congress.Trump photo with Rittenhouse reveals ‘Mount Trumpmore’ sculptureRead more“Fact,” Omar wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “This buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.“Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny and shouldn’t be normalised. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”One of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, Omar is also a member of a prominent “Squad” of House progressives.Boebert is a first-term far-right Trump ally who consistently seeks controversy. Her connections to the deadly attack on the Capitol on 6 January remain under investigation.She made the comments about Omar in her home district over the Thanksgiving break.“Actually I have an Ilhan story for you,” Boebert told an audience, to laughter. “So, the other night on the House floor was not my first ‘Jihad Squad’ moment.“So I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers. You know, we’re leaving the Capitol and we’re going back to my office and we get an elevator and I see a Capitol police officer running to the elevator. I see fret all over his face, and he’s reaching, and the door’s shutting, like I can’t open it, like what’s happening. I look to my left, and there she is. Ilhan Omar.“And I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.’The audience laughed and applauded.“We only had one floor to go,” Boebert continued. “I said, ‘Oh look, the Jihad Squad decided show up for work today.’”The audience whooped and applauded again.“Don’t worry,” said Boebert, “it’s just her staffers on Twitter that talk for her, she’s not tough in person. So … there’s a little bit of interactions with these folks.”The remarks raised calls for Boebert to face formal censure – as recently did Paul Gosar of Arizona, for tweeting a video which depicted him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another prominent progressive, and threatening Joe Biden.Boebert’s reference to “the other night on the House floor” was to remarks in support of Gosar in which she called Omar “the Jihad Squad member from Minnesota” and repeated rightwing conspiracy theories about her.In response to those remarks, Omar called Boebert an “insurrectionist who sleeps with a pervert”, a reference to Boebert’s husband, who in 2004 pleaded guilty to public indecency and lewd exposure and spent time in jail. Omar also said Boebert “shamefully defecates and defiles the House”.In a statement on Friday, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council for American-Islamic Relations (Cair), called Boebert’s remarks “digusting” and “merely the latest symptom of the anti-Muslim bigotry that has plagued the Republican caucus in the House for years”.“Leader [Kevin] McCarthy should repudiate Representative Boebert’s remarks,” Mitchell said, “and call on all Republican members of Congress to treat their American Muslim colleagues and constituents with the respect and decency everyone deserves.”‘Inciting violence begets violence’: Paul Gosar censured over video aimed at AOCRead moreBoebert later tweeted an apology “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Representative Omar”.She also said she had “reached out to her office to speak with her directly. There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction.”Omar retweeted support from another member of the “Squad”, Cori Bush of Missouri.“Capitol Hill is a toxic work environment for Muslim members and staff,” Bush wrote, “when bigots routinely spew racist, Islamophobic vitriol unchecked and with no consequence.“Congresswoman Omar, we love you, and we pray for your well-being and protection from this despicable abuse.”TopicsIlhan OmarUS politicsRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shock | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shockMoustafa BayoumiThe jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules | Michael HarriotRead moreThe facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.Then why did it keep getting reported this way?There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was. By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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      This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got away | Akin Olla

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      This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got awayAkin OllaThe verdict is welcome, but it rings hollow given the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers The three white men who hunted down Ahmaud Arbery in a neighborhood in Glynn county, Georgia, have been found guilty in court. The US held its breath as the jury deliberations entered their second day this Wednesday. Travis McMichael, who fired the shots that killed the 25-year-old Black man, his father, Greg, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were all convicted of the 23 February 2020 murder. While the verdict is a welcome one, it rings somewhat hollow given the recent not guilty verdict in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse and the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers.How the murder of Ahmaud Arbery further exposes America’s broken and racist legal systemRead moreDespite the trial’s outcome, the actual process of the case was steeped in various justifications of the killers’ actions, from the racially-tinged fearmongering of the defense attorneys to the fact that the killers were arrested 74 days after Arbery’s murder. Justice cannot be served as long as the current system remains, and it seems unlikely that even this verdict will dissuade future vigilantes.A defense attorney must, of course, make the best case for their client. It speaks volumes about our country that much of what could be mustered during this trial were attempts to attack Arbery as a person – a tactic commonly deployed to justify the murders of Black Americans. The judge dismissed attempts by the defense to introduce prior acts by Arbery into evidence, and a move to include the fact that trace amounts of THC were found in his system when he was killed. After those failed efforts, the defense moved to disparage the young man’s body, telling jurors that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”, and criticizing the shorts that he wore the day he was shot – as if Arbery had called this crime on to himself for the way he dressed; as if the McMichaels and Bryan were aware of anything about him before they decided to chase him down and execute him; as if it was Arbery’s toenails that caused Travis McMichael to exclaim “fucking nigger” above the dying man.Though many of the defense’s attempts to use racist dog-whistles were defeated in pre-trial decisions by the presiding judge, they were still successful in ensuring that the jury would be nearly all white, despite the county itself being about 27% Black. This effort is not uncommon among attorneys and is seeped in a larger system of racism that leads to underrepresentation of people of color on juries.There were many others who participated in the process of justifying the vigilante behavior of the father-and-son duo and their neighbor, who captured it all on video. The police who arrived at the scene took the word of the murderers and did not place them under arrest. The officer accepted their story of self-defense, that these men were simply defending the neighborhood from a Black burglar. Greg Michael had, luckily for their little lynch mob, served as a county police officer for seven years and 30 as an investigator for the local district attorney’s office. The same district attorney’s office was later accused by county commissioners of preventing the arrests of the killers. According to Allen Booker, commissioner: “The police at the scene went to [district attorney Jackie Johnson], saying they were ready to arrest both of them … [s]he shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.” The district attorney shifted blame to police and claimed that they could have used their own discretion to make the arrest.After the video of Arbery’s death went viral and fueled protests demanding action, it still took two months for police to arrest his killers. This bias in favor of police officers and former police officers is all too common in the US, and definitely not rare in Glynn county, known for allegations of officers being shielded from consequences.While crimes like this allow us to focus on the individual white vigilantes, it is important to zoom out and see the many others – from the defense, to the district attorney, to the arresting officers and the institutions they influence and control – who are implicated. Arbery’s murder was of a pattern with a history. It is rooted in the segregation and violent racism that shaped the borders of towns and countries across the US. It is rooted in the legacies of the mobs that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in a white supremacist coup. It is also reflected in other modern examples, like the “Karens” who unleash police officers onto their Black neighbors, or Rittenhouse, who was recently found not guilty of a crime not so different from that committed by the McMichaels and Bryan.Like Rittenhouse, this was a case of white Americans taking up arms to protect what they perceived as Black threats against property. Although the people whom Rittenhouse shot were white, he chose to arm himself during an uprising following the shooting of a Black man, and it is difficult to believe that stereotypes about violent Black looters and killers did not play a role in his perceptions of the uprising – the same kinds of stereotypes that fueled the attack on Arbery.Much like Rittenhouse’s case, the defense lawyers of Arbery’s three assailants claimed their clients engaged in self-defense. Despite showing up to the scene with weapons, Rittenhouse and the men who killed Arbery thought they were the ones under threat. The verdict against the McMichaels and Bryan may feel like a victory, but Rittenhouse’s verdict has done more than enough to justify future vigilantism by white men deeply fearful that somewhere out there Black people might be disrupting the status quo.The verdict here matters for the family. Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, reacted to the verdict saying: “We conquered that lynch mob.” This case exposed the various layers of the justice system that work in tandem to justify murders committed by white men on a political mission. But justice cannot be truly served until this entire system is ripped down and built anew. Rittenhouse’s claims of protecting property are already being used by the defense attorney of a member of the far-right Proud Boys group. And despite the scrutiny the Proud Boys received for participating in the 6 January riot in Washington DC, the organization has begun showing up at rightwing marches and protests claiming to be there for security purposes.While the desire to celebrate the Arbery verdict is understandable, the decision will not stop white men from murdering Black people and others they deem to be a threat to property or the political order. It will take a movement to do that, a movement that will have to overcome the violence of white vigilantes and an entire system held up by their atrocities.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
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      Kyle Rittenhouse verdict declares open hunting season on progressive protesters | Cas Mudde

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      Kyle Rittenhouse has walked free. Now it’s open season on protestersCas MuddeDemonstrators in the US must fear not only police brutality but also rightwing vigilantes

      Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal: follow the latest
      Kyle Rittenhouse – the armed white teenager whose mother drove him from Illinois to Wisconsin to allegedly “protect” local businesses from anti-racism protesters in Kenosha, whereupon he shot and killed two people and injured another – has been acquitted of all charges. I don’t think anyone who has followed the trial even casually will be surprised by this verdict. After the various antics by the elected judge, which seemed to indicate where his sympathies lay, and the fact that the prosecution asked the jurors to consider charges lesser than murder, the writing was on the wall.I do not want to discuss the legal particulars of the verdict. It is clear that the prosecution made many mistakes and got little to no leeway from the judge, unlike the defense team. Moreover, we know that “self-defense” – often better known as vigilantism – is legally protected and highly racialized in this country. Think of the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013.In essence, the Rittenhouse ruling has created a kind of “stand your ground” law for the whole country. White people now have the apparent right to travel around the country, heavily armed, and use violence to protect the country from whatever and whoever they believe to be threatening to it. Given the feverish paranoia and racism that has captured a sizeable minority of white people in the US these days, this is a recipe for disaster.In the coming hours and days, many media outlets will eagerly await riots or other potentially violent reactions from the other side – from the anti-racists and progressives of all colors and races who are disturbed by this verdict – and use the existence of those riots, if they occur, to push a misguided “both sides” frame. If there is protest or rioting, don’t expect the police to be as courteous and supportive as they were towards Rittenhouse and his far-right buddies.The most worrying effect of this verdict may be this: giving rightwing vigilantes a legal precedent to take up arms against anyone they consider a threat – which pretty much runs from anti-fascists to so-called Rinos (Republicans in Name Only) and includes almost all people of color – means it is now open hunting season on progressive protesters.‘A travesty’: reaction to Kyle Rittenhouse verdict marks divided USRead moreDon’t get me wrong; this ruling alone did not start this kind of lopsided law and order. It is just the latest in a centuries-old American tradition of protecting white terror and vigilantism. Civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, particularly but not exclusively in the south, were not just denied police protection; the demonstrators were attacked and abused by the police. That was also the case at many Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.A Boston Globe investigation found that “between [George] Floyd’s death on 25 May 2020 and 30 September 2021, vehicles drove into protests at least 139 times”, injuring at least 100 people. In fewer than half of the cases the driver was charged, and only four drivers have been convicted of a felony. Moreover, in response to these attacks, Republican legislators have proposed laws to protect the drivers from legal action in case they hit a protester. Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma have already passed such laws.It takes courage to publicly protest in any situation, particularly when protesting state powers. Now protesters in the US will have to fear not only police brutality but an emboldened and violent far right, fired up by the Republican party and the broader rightwing media and protected by the local legal system.All of this comes at a crucial point in US democracy. From Georgia to Wisconsin, the Republican party is attacking the electoral system, while their supporters are terrorizing poll workers and those signing up to be poll workers in the next elections. In the event that Democrats win important elections in conservative states in 2022 – think Stacey Abrams in Georgia or Beto O’Rourke in Texas – there is a big chance that these results will be contested and judged by highly partisan forces protected by state politicians.Similarly, should President Biden or another Democrat win the 2024 presidential election, the result will again be challenged in conservative states, but this time independent poll workers could be absent or outnumbered and the few Republicans who withstood Donald Trump’s pressure in 2020 will have been replaced or have fallen in line.At that point, Democrats, and indeed all democratic-minded citizens, will have to go into the streets to protest. They will confront an alliance of heavily armed civilians and police and national guard, who can attack protesters with effective immunity. Remember: Kyle Rittenhouse has just been acquitted after killing two people and injuring a third at a protest.In my home country, the Netherlands, we have a saying that is used regularly in political discussions: “Democracy is not for scared people.” Most of the time when it is used, we mean that democracy is not for people who are afraid of change or of critique. In the US, in the wake of today’s verdict, this saying has become both more real and more sinister.
      Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist
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      The fake news sites pushing Republicans’ critical race theory scare

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      The fake news sites pushing Republicans’ critical race theory scare Local sites in Virginia published tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles, many of them misleading or wrong, in the past 11 months Rightwing operatives in the US are using a huge network of fake local news sites to target crucial state elections, with the sites publishing tens of thousands of conservative-skewed articles on politically charged subjects, many of them misleading or wrong, over the past 11 months.An investigation by Popular Information, an online newsletter founded by journalist Judd Legum, found that in Virginia 28 sites, each purporting to be local news outlets and all owned by the same company, published almost 5,000 articles about critical race theory in schools.CRT is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. It is not taught in Virginia schools. But the idea of CRT has become an inflammatory call to arms, or at least to the ballot box, among the right wing.The Virginia sites published the articles, many of which addressed spurious Republican claims about CRT threatening to dominate school curriculums, as the gubernatorial race in the state loomed.Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, triumphed over Terry McAuliffe in the 3 November election, after he exploited concerns over teaching about race and promised to ban CRT from classrooms.The Virginia “local news” sites, which include the Central Virginia Times and the Fredericksburg Leader, are run by Metric Media, an organization that operates more than 1,300 “community news sites” across the US and is linked to Locality Labs, both of which are overseen by Brian Timpone.In 2020 the New York Times revealed that the two companies, along with others involved in publishing the sites, “have received at least $1.7m from Republican political campaigns and conservative groups”. The Times reported that conservative organizations were able to “order” articles from news websites owned by Metric Media and its affiliates attacking Democratic political candidates.Metric Media and Brian Timpone did not respond to requests for comment. Between January and November 2021, the 28 Virginia Metric Media sites published 4,657 articles about critical race theory in schools, Popular Information found.Many of those stories were automated, referencing an online pledge to “refuse to lie to young people about US history and current events” – described by Metric Media as a pledge by educators to teach CRT. But there is no evidence on the website for the pledge that the people who have signed it are teachers.Signees must list their city and state, and Metric Media appears to use an automated system to generate articles based on whether anyone has signed from a town or city covered by a Metric Media news outlet.That system enables the Central Shenandoah News, which theoretically covers the area in north-west of Virginia, to run regular articles based on the same source. Last week, it ran the following two pieces:No new teachers in Harrisonburg sign pledge on Nov. 2 to teach Critical Race TheoryNo new teachers in Harrisonburg sign pledge on Nov. 1 to teach Critical Race TheoryThe Central Shenandoah News has run the same version of the Harrisonburg article since August, including almost daily since the beginning of October. It has also regurgitated the format for nearby Staunton.Timpone is an ex-journalist with a track record of operating dubious news organizations. Timpone’s predecessor to Locality Labs was a company called Journatic, which saw a licensing contract with the Chicago Tribune torn up after it published plagiarized articles and made up quotes and fake names for its writers.Popular Information found that as well as targeting Virginia with anti-CRT articles, Metric Media has also ramped up the tactic in other states with looming governor elections.News sites owned by the company have published 11,988 anti-CRT articles in Florida over the past 11 months, 10,096 articles in Texas, and 6,262 in Ohio. Sites claiming to represent New Hampshire have published 2,162 anti-CRT articles.Legum said he found no evidence that any of the Media Metric sites have significant traffic or readership: “But I don’t really think that’s the purpose,” he said.“I think that it’s more the idea of injecting something into the political conversation and giving it a more credible sheen than if you were just to put it out as an advocacy group or something like that.”After one of the “news sites” covers a candidate or political group, that person or organization can use quotes or cite favorable coverage from the related article. Quotes from an outlet like the Central Shenandoah News could be used for online ads, tv ads, or political mail-outs.In Virginia, Youngkin won the governorship by a little more than 60,000 votes. The fake news sites might not win an election by themselves, but in a tight race, every little bit helps.“I think that they could have a meaningful impact. Not because necessarily they’re going to influence that many voters, but because elections are decided at the margins,” Legum said.“So I don’t think it necessarily will reach that many people, but I do think it can make a meaningful difference, and it’s one of the things in the toolkit that could make a difference.”TopicsVirginiaRaceUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More