Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to abortion, was decided 7-2.
According to Politico, the Supreme Court will soon strike down Roe v. Wade on a 5-4 vote.
While the U.S. right has organized for decades in hopes of this result, it would never have come close to success without one factor: the Electoral College. There have been eight presidential elections over the past 30 years, and also eight Supreme Court vacancies. The bizarre reality of the U.S. political system is that Republicans have won the popular vote in just one of the eight elections, but got to choose five of the eight new justices. Of these five GOP picks, four are reportedly voting to reverse Roe.
In an alternate history in which presidents were elected by a simple plurality of voters, Roe would likely soon be upheld in the relevant case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, by a 7-2 or even 8-1 margin — assuming that the court even heard Dobbs in the first place.
Here are the details of this history:
Politico’s article features a draft opinion striking down Roe, which was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Politico also reports that Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett will vote with Alito.
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were appointed by President Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College 304-227, thanks to extremely narrow victories in key states. Yet Trump got just 46.1 percent of the popular vote, while Hillary Clinton received 48.2 percent. In numerical terms, 65.854 million Americans voted for Clinton, while 62.985 million voted for Trump — an almost 3 million margin for Clinton.
Moreover, voter turnout in 2016 was, by one way of measuring it, 59.2 percent. This means that just 27.3 percent of eligible voters chose Trump. Yet he was able to pick a third of the current Supreme Court. (And, of course, there were three vacancies for Trump rather than two because then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refused to even allow a vote for the vacancy when Antonin Scalia died in 2016, during Barack Obama’s presidency.)
Then there’s Alito, who was nominated by George W. Bush in 2005. Officially, Bush won the Electoral College against then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000 by a margin of 271-266. In reality, a study of Florida ballots released in November 2001 found that Gore actually won the state, under any counting standard, and thus actually won the Electoral College vote. But since this was just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, no one dared bring it up.
Gore also won the popular vote, 48.4 percent to 47.9 percent. Over half a million more Americans voted for Gore than Bush. Voter turnout in 2000 was 54.3 percent, meaning Bush was the choice of 26.0 percent of eligible voters.
It is true that Bush won both the Electoral College and the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004. However, it’s extremely unlikely that Bush would have run again if he’d lost in 2000. The last time a president got his party’s nomination, lost, and then got the nomination again and won, was Richard Nixon 54 years ago in 1968. Perhaps another Republican would have beaten Gore in 2004, or perhaps not.
The remaining justice apparently poised to strike down Row is Thomas, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush. Bush won both the Electoral College and popular vote in 1988.
Of course, it’s impossible to know precisely how history would have played out if the United States had a system in which the candidate who got the most votes became president. But polls show that overturning Roe has been deeply unpopular for as long as the question’s been asked. So if the composition of the Supreme Court reflected anything close to the perspective of most Americans, this day would never have come. Now that it’s here, it’s hard to know whether the court will retain any legitimacy. The basic facts suggest that it should not.
Earlier this week, in a meeting of employer-side attorneys and union suppression consultants, Ken Hurley, the vice president of human resources and labor relations at The Kellogg Co., spoke candidly about a new environment that has shifted the traditional power of employers and emboldened workers and labor unions.
In hushed tones, Hurley described the tactics employed by activists during a nearly 10-week cereal plant strike last fall. The strike prevented concessions from workers and forced Kellogg’s to back off a plan to expand its two-tier wage system. “In my view,” Hurley said, “the union leadership at the bargaining table were behaving more like terrorists than partners.”
The conversation was hosted by a human resources and labor relations trade group called CUE. Hurley said he was surprised by the aggressive nature of the union, which generally has not engaged in confrontational tactics or strikes. Hurley claimed that the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union, which represented workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants, “really became somewhat intoxicated” by other strikes last year, including work stoppages at plants owned by Frito-Lay and Nabisco.
What’s more, he said, workers at the plants benefited from outside support that hasn’t existed in the recent past. Plant employees and union activists galvanized support on social media, including Facebook and TikTok, while Kellogg’s management had trouble connecting with workers.
And in an unprecedented moment, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh walked in solidarity along the picket line with Kellogg’s workers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. President Joe Biden later in December issued a statement sharply criticizing efforts by Kellogg’s to bring in nonunion replacement workers during the strike.
The Biden statement, said Hurley, was “basically an anti-Kellogg public release. … We were really getting it from both barrels.”
Reached for comment, Kellogg Chairman and CEO Steve Cahillane issued a statement in response to Hurley’s presentation at CUE. “We are just learning about these statements, as they were not authorized by Kellogg. We are embarrassed as a company – the comments and the tone in which they were delivered do not reflect the values of our organization or our position,” wrote Cahillane. “We sincerely apologize. We have a long and productive history of working with our unions. We fully expect that will continue moving forward.”
Trevor Bidelman, president of BCTGM Local 3G, which represents workers at the Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg’s plant, bristled at the description of his union as “terrorists.”
“This is a company that keeps coming to the table with hundreds of millions of dollars of profit yet thinks it’s OK to take away from the worker. That’s what this strike boiled down to,” said Bidelman.
The negotiations centered on a two-tier system of pay for many workers, with lower wages of $9 an hour less than “legacy” employees and partial benefits for “transitional workers.” This was a sticking point for union activists, in addition to higher overall wages. The final contract, signed in December, provides cost-of-living adjustments and a pathway for low-paid transitional workers to become full-time legacy status workers, who make around $33 an hour.
“You know, Ken Hurley fully believes that U.S. Kellogg’s workers have too much and we should be giving things back to make sure the business succeeds,” said Bidelman. “Well, I’m sorry, nobody stood up for 20 years and everybody kept acquiescing to the fact that CEOs get paid $10 million and stock profits,” he added.
“This is a company that keeps coming to the table with hundreds of millions of dollars of profit yet thinks it’s OK to take away from the worker. That’s what this strike boiled down to.”
At the conference, Hurley also spoke in awe and derision of a new media startup that covers labor activism, More Perfect Union, which brought viral attention to the strike by interviewing workers and spotlighting creative attempts on Reddit to stifle strike-breaking attempts by Kellogg’s. More Perfect Union was founded in 2021 by Faiz Shakir, formerly Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign manager.
A reporter for More Perfect Union, Hurley said, “ambushed” him when he went to Washington, D.C., for negotiations with BCTGM. “It’s a George Soros-funded, pro-union activist organization; they had a camera, and a reporter was asking us questions as we entered the room,” said Hurley.
Later, during a question-and-answer portion of the conference, Hurley called More Perfect Union a “worthy adversary” and “very sophisticated.” The media outlet, he added, churns out “very impactful videos, and they’re a force to be reckoned with. … I will say, it’s really impossible for a company, a large company, to combat the kind of cinematography and emotion that comes out of those social media posts when they’re produced so well.”
The negotiation “ambush” interview, he said, “was all set up by the union.”
Kellogg’s comments did not surprise Shakir, who laughed at Hurley’s characterization of his small media team as more powerful than Kellogg’s, which has a market capitalization of over $23 billion and teams of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts. He clarified that his organization has received grant money from the Open Society Foundations, a philanthropic network backed by billionaire George Soros.
“The purpose of covering the stories of working people is to make them feel like they have power, and that’s exactly what these union-busters are responding to.”
More Perfect Union, Shakir said, did not coordinate with the union and does not “accept any funding, not one penny, from any union.” The labor union establishment, added Shakir, doesn’t want his media outlet involved in contract negotiations and is generally opposed to confrontational tactics on behalf of workers.
During the meeting this week, Hurley warned the other employers in attendance — including representatives of John Deere, Ross Stores, and Lowe’s — that companies need to “think in new ways and more creatively about how to connect on a personal level with their workforce.” Kellogg’s, Hurley said, set up a special contract negotiations website, monitored social media posts, and communicated almost every day of the contract talks. But it was too little, too late. “We needed to start that four years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago, so that we engage our workforce directly.”
“You got to throw out the playbook. You’ve got to get aggressive, you’ve got to take some risks, you’ve got to get your story out there,” said Hurley.
For proponents of labor power, the Kellogg’s executive’s comments simply reinforce the notion that more labor activism yields greater impact and more victories for working-class Americans. “After strikes at Kellogg’s and John Deere and Kroger, and the victory at Amazon, so many workers now take inspiration from each other,” said Shakir.
“The purpose of covering the stories of working people is to make them feel like they have power,” continued Shakir, “and that’s exactly what these union-busters are responding to. They are fearful and afraid of the fact workers might be taking matters into their own hands to reclaim power and rights that are rightfully theirs.”
Attendees cheer on J.D. Vance, Republican Senate candidate for Ohio, as he speaks during the “Save America” rally with former President Donald Trump at the Delaware County Fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23, 2022.
Photo: Eli Hiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Since the mid-20th century, the U.S. has seen no fewer than three political movements broadly described as the “New Right.” There was the first New Right of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and conservative student groups, with their right-libertarianism, anti-communism, and emphasis on social values. The second generation to earn the moniker — the New Right of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and both George Bushes — leaned harder into conservative Christianity, populism, and free markets.
These New Right waves were different largely in tone and presentation; there was considerable overlap in ideology and even personnel. The high-minded conservatism of a Buckley and the pandering populism of a Bush have never been oppositional approaches, despite attempts to explain them this way. Every version of the New Right has been propelled by more or less explicit white supremacist backlash and robust funding.
Now, in our era of Trumpian reaction, we are seeing reports about a new New Right. Like the New Rights that came before it, it’s a loose constellation of self-identifying anti-establishment, allegedly heterodox reactionaries. The newest of the Rights is similarly fueled by disaffection with liberal progress myths and united by white supremacist backlash — this time, with funding largely from billionaire Peter Thiel.
The new New Right has made headlines in recent weeks. In particular, Vanity Fair published a thoroughly and thoughtfully reported feature detailing the emergence of a rising right-wing circle made up of highly educated Twitter posters, podcasters, artists, and even “online philosophers,” most notably the neo-monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin. And the New York Times dedicated a fluffy feature to the founding of niche online magazine Compact, which claims to feature heterodox thinking but instead offers predictable contrarianism and tired social conservatism.
Alongside GOP candidates for office like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, this motley scene follows the ideological weft and warp of Trumpist nationalism, while alluding to greater intellectual and revolutionary ambitions, sometimes wearing cooler clothes, and receiving money from Thiel.
The turn to the New Right is a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and — crucially — money.
The focus on these groups is all fine and well: Why shouldn’t the media do fair-minded reporting on a burgeoning political trend? Yet there is the risk of reifying a ragtag cohort into a cultural-political force with more power than it would otherwise have.
More crucially, there’s a glaring omission in the coverage. Today’s New Right frames itself as the only force currently willing to fight against the “regime,” as Vance calls it, of liberal capitalism’s establishment power and the narratives that undergird it. “The fundamental premise of liberalism,” Yarvin told Vanity Fair’s James Pogue, “is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.”
The problem is that characters like Yarvin had another choice; the march to the far right is no more inexorable than misplaced faith in liberal progress. There is a whole swath of the contemporary left that also wholly rejects liberal establishment powers, the logic of the capitalist state, and liberalism’s progress myths. Rejection of liberal progress propaganda has been a theme of left-wing writing, including mine, for years, and I’m hardly alone. Such positions are definitive of a radical, antifascist, anti-racist left.
Donald Trump delivers remarks at a “Save America” event with guests J.D. Vance, Mike Carey, Max Miller, and Madison Gesiotto Gilbert in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23, 2022.
Photo: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
These leftist, liberatory tendencies may not be empowered in the Democratic Party, even on its left flank, but they are still present and active throughout the United States. They exist, they are accessible, and they have raged against the “regime” of contemporary power long before the current New Right came into its embryonic form.
This matters when thinking about the forces of neo-reaction because it clarifies the type of choice members of the New Right are making. While neo-reaction is indeed often based on the rejection of the liberal mainstream and its hollow promises, that rejection alone does not itself push someone into the New Right; moves to the anti-racist far left can begin the exact same way.
So what distinguishes the New Right turn? It’s a choice, by people with privilege and options, in favor of white standing, patriarchy, and — crucially — money. You cannot discount the cash: There’s serious money to be made, so long as your illiberalism upholds all the other oppressive hierarchies. And it’s of note that the key source of funding — Thiel’s fortunes — skyrocketed due to President Donald Trump’s racist immigration policies, which remain almost entirely in place under the Biden administration. Ethnocentrism is central to Vance’s and Masters’s platforms now.
The Vanity Fair piece highlights the irony that these so-called anti-authoritarians of the New Right, obsessed as they are with the dystopianism of the contemporary U.S., wholly overlook “the most dystopian aspects of American life: our vast apparatus of prisons and policing.”
Pogue is far from credulous and has said in interviews that the subjects of his story — however heterogeneous they claim to be — share an investment in authoritarianism. Yet the failure of New Right figures to talk about prisons and policing is no oversight: It is evidence of a white supremacism that need not be explicitly stated to run through this movement. This strain of reaction, after all, comes in the wake of the largest anti-racist uprisings in a generation, one that cannot be dismissed as liberal performance. The timing lays bare how this New Right fits into the country’s unbroken history of white backlash.
The decision of the disaffected to join the forces of reaction might appear understandable when it is presented as the only route for those willing to challenge the yoke of liberal capitalism and its pieties. This is harder to justify on those terms when it is clarified that an anti-capitalist left exists. The difference is that, unlike the New Right, the far left abhors white supremacist patriarchy and rejects the obvious fallacy that there is something pro-worker, or anti-capitalist, about border rule and labor segmentation.
The matter of money should not be understated. Radical left movements, unlike the New Right, are not popular among billionaire funders; that’s what happens when you challenge the actual “regime” of capital. To highlight the path not chosen by the New Right, then, is to show their active desire not for liberation but for domination — which is nothing new on the right at all.
In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.
Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.
Company materials obtained by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry provide new details of just how powerful Anomaly Six’s globe-spanning surveillance powers are, capable of providing any paying customer with abilities previously reserved for spy bureaus and militaries.
According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction. With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next. This enormously augmented capability would be an obvious boon to both regimes keeping tabs on their global adversaries and companies keeping tabs on their employees.
The source of the materials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, expressed grave concern about the legality of government contractors such as Anomaly Six and Zignal Labs “revealing social posts, usernames, and locations of Americans” to “Defense Department” users. The source also asserted that Zignal Labs had willfully deceived Twitter by withholding the broader military and corporate surveillance use cases of its firehose access. Twitter’s terms of service technically prohibit a third party from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” using its access to the platform, though the practice is common and enforcement of this ban is rare. Asked about these concerns, spokesperson Tom Korolsyshun told The Intercept “Zignal abides by privacy laws and guidelines set forth by our data partners.”
A6 claims that its GPS dragnet yields between 30 to 60 location pings per device per day and 2.5 trillion locational data points annually worldwide, adding up to 280 terabytes of location data per year and many petabytes in total, suggesting that the company surveils roughly 230 million devices on an average day. A6’s salesperson added that while many rival firms gather personal location data via a phone’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections that provide general whereabouts, Anomaly 6 harvests only GPS pinpoints, potentially accurate to within several feet. In addition to location, A6 claimed that it has built a library of over 2 billion email addresses and other personal details that people share when signing up for smartphone apps that can be used to identify who the GPS ping belongs to. All of this is powered, A6’s Clark noted during the pitch, by general ignorance of the ubiquity and invasiveness of smartphone software development kits, known as SDKs: “Everything is agreed to and sent by the user even though they probably don’t read the 60 pages in the [end user license agreement].”
The Intercept was not able to corroborate Anomaly Six’s claims about its data or capabilities, which were made in the context of a sales pitch. Privacy researcher Zach Edwards told The Intercept that he believed the claims were plausible but cautioned that firms can be prone to exaggerating the quality of their data. Mobile security researcher Will Strafach agreed, noting that A6’s data sourcing boasts “sound alarming but aren’t terribly far off from ambitious claims by others.” According to Wolfie Christl, a researcher specializing in the surveillance and privacy implications of the app data industry, even if Anomaly Six’s capabilities are exaggerated or based partly on inaccurate data, a company possessing even a fraction of these spy powers would be deeply concerning from a personal privacy standpoint.
Reached for comment, Zignal’s spokesperson provided the following statement: “While Anomaly 6 has in the past demonstrated its capabilities to Zignal Labs, Zignal Labs does not have a relationship with Anomaly 6. We have never integrated Anomaly 6’s capabilities into our platform, nor have we ever delivered Anomaly 6 to any of our customers.”
When asked about the company’s presentation and its surveillance capabilities, Anomaly Six co-founder Brendan Huff responded in an email that “Anomaly Six is a veteran-owned small business that cares about American interests, natural security, and understands the law.”
Companies like A6 are fueled by the ubiquity of SDKs, which are turnkey packages of code that software-makers can slip in their apps to easily add functionality and quickly monetize their offerings with ads. According to Clark, A6 can siphon exact GPS measurements gathered through covert partnerships with “thousands” of smartphone apps, an approach he described in his presentation as a “farm-to-table approach to data acquisition.” This data isn’t just useful for people hoping to sell you things: The largely unregulated global trade in personal data is increasingly finding customers not only at marketing agencies, but also federal agencies tracking immigrants and drone targets as well as sanctions and tax evasion. According to public records first reported by Motherboard, U.S. Special Operations Command paid Anomaly Six $590,000 in September 2020 for a year of access to the firm’s “commercial telemetry feed.”
Anomaly Six software lets its customers browse all of this data in a convenient and intuitive Google Maps-style satellite view of Earth. Users need only find a location of interest and draw a box around it, and A6 fills that boundary with dots denoting smartphones that passed through that area. Clicking a dot will provide you with lines representing the device’s — and its owner’s — movements around a neighborhood, city, or indeed the entire world.
As the Russian military continued its buildup along the country’s border with Ukraine, the A6 sales rep detailed how GPS surveillance could help turn Zignal into a sort of private spy agency capable of assisting state clientele in monitoring troop movements. Imagine, Clark explained, if the crisis zone tweets Zignal rapidly surfaces through the firehose were only a starting point. Using satellite imagery tweeted by accounts conducting increasingly popular “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT, investigations, Clark showed how A6’s GPS tracking would let Zignal clients determine not simply that the military buildup was taking place, but track the phones of Russian soldiers as they mobilized to determine exactly where they’d trained, where they were stationed, and which units they belonged to. In one case, Clark showed A6 software tracing Russian troop phones backward through time, away from the border and back to a military installation outside Yurga, and suggested that they could be traced further, all the way back to their individual homes. Previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal indicates that this phone-tracking method is already used to monitor Russian military maneuvers and that American troops are just as vulnerable.
In another A6 map demonstration, Clark zoomed in closely on the town of Molkino, in southern Russia, where the Wagner Group, an infamous Russian mercenary outfit, is reportedly headquartered. The map showed dozens of dots indicating devices at the Wagner base, along with scattered lines showing their recent movements. “So you can just start watching these devices,” Clark explained. “Any time they start leaving the area, I’m looking at potential Russian predeployment activity for their nonstandard actors, their nonuniform people. So if you see them go into Libya or Democratic Republic of the Congo or things like that, that can help you better understand potential soft power actions the Russians are doing.”
To fully impress upon its audience the immense power of this software, Anomaly Six did what few in the world can claim to do: spied on American spies.
The pitch noted that this kind of mass phone surveillance could be used by Zignal to aid unspecified clients with “counter-messaging,” debunking Russian claims that such military buildups were mere training exercises and not the runup to an invasion. “When you’re looking at counter-messaging, where you guys have a huge part of the value you provide your client in the counter-messaging piece is — [Russia is] saying, ‘Oh, it’s just local, regional, um, exercises.’ Like, no. We can see from the data that they’re coming from all over Russia.”
To fully impress upon its audience the immense power of this software, Anomaly Six did what few in the world can claim to do: spied on American spies. “I like making fun of our own people,” Clark began. Pulling up a Google Maps-like satellite view, the sales rep showed the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. With virtual boundary boxes drawn around both, a technique known as geofencing, A6’s software revealed an incredible intelligence bounty: 183 dots representing phones that had visited both agencies potentially belonging to American intelligence personnel, with hundreds of lines streaking outward revealing their movements, ready to track throughout the world. “So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now,” Clark noted.
The NSA and CIA both declined to comment.
Anomaly Six tracked a device that had visited the NSA and CIA headquarters to an air base outside of Zarqa, Jordan.
Screenshot: The Intercept / Google Maps
Clicking on one of dots from the NSA allowed Clark to follow that individual’s exact movements, virtually every moment of their life, from that previous year until the present. “I mean, just think of fun things like sourcing,” Clark said. “If I’m a foreign intel officer, I don’t have access to things like the agency or the fort, I can find where those people live, I can find where they travel, I can see when they leave the country.” The demonstration then tracked the individual around the United States and abroad to a training center and airfield roughly an hour’s drive northwest of Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Zarqa, Jordan, where the U.S. reportedly maintains a fleet of drones.
“It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to see how foreign spies can use this information for espionage, blackmail, all kinds of, as they used to say, dastardly deeds.”
“There is sure as hell a serious national security threat if a data broker can track a couple hundred intelligence officials to their homes and around the world,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a vocal critic of the personal data industry, told The Intercept in an interview. “It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to see how foreign spies can use this information for espionage, blackmail, all kinds of, as they used to say, dastardly deeds.”
Back stateside, the person was tracked to their own home. A6’s software includes a function called “Regularity,” a button clients can press that automatically analyzes frequently visited locations to deduce where a target lives and works, even though the GPS pinpoints sourced by A6 omit the phone owner’s name. Privacy researchers have long shown that even “anonymized” location data is trivially easy to attach to an individual based on where they frequent most, a fact borne out by A6’s own demonstration. After hitting the “Regularity” button, Clark zoomed in on a Google Street View image of their home.
“Industry has repeatedly claimed that collecting and selling this cellphone location data won’t violate privacy because it is tied to device ID numbers instead of people’s names. This feature proves just how facile those claims are,” said Nate Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Of course, following a person’s movements 24 hours a day, day after day, will tell you where they live, where they work, who they spend time with, and who they are. The privacy violation is immense.”
The demo continued with a surveillance exercise tagging U.S. naval movements, using a tweeted satellite photo of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Mediterranean Sea snapped by the commercial firm Maxar Technologies. Clark broke down how a single satellite snapshot could be turned into surveillance that he claimed was even more powerful than that executed from space. Using the latitude and longitude coordinates appended to the Maxar photo along with its time stamp, A6 was able to pick up a single phone signal from the ship’s position at that moment, south of Crete. “But it only takes one,” Clark noted. “So when I look back where that one device goes: Oh, it goes back to Norfolk. And actually, on the carrier in the satellite picture — what else is on the carrier? When you look, here are all the other devices.” His screen revealed a view of the carrier docked in Virginia, teeming with thousands of colorful dots representing phone location pings gathered by A6. “Well, now I can see every time that that ship is deploying. I don’t need satellites right now. I can use this.”
Though Clark conceded that the company has far less data available on Chinese phone owners, the demo concluded with a GPS ping picked up aboard an alleged Chinese nuclear submarine. Using only unclassified satellite imagery and commercial advertising data, Anomaly Six was able to track the precise movements of the world’s most sophisticated military and intelligence forces. With tools like those sold by A6 and Zignal, even an OSINT hobbyist would have global surveillance powers previously held only by nations. “People put way too much on social media,” Clark added with a laugh.
As location data has proliferated largely unchecked by government oversight in the United States, one hand washes another, creating a private sector capable of state-level surveillance powers that can also fuel the state’s own growing appetite for surveillance without the usual judicial scrutiny. Critics say the loose trade in advertising data constitutes a loophole in the Fourth Amendment, which requires the government to make its case to a judge before obtaining location coordinates from a cellular provider. But the total commodification of phone data has made it possible for the government to skip the court order and simply buy data that’s often even more accurate than what could be provided by the likes of Verizon. Civil libertarians say this leaves a dangerous gap between the protections intended by the Constitution and the law’s grasp on the modern data trade.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that cellphone location information is protected under the Fourth Amendment because of the detailed picture of a person’s life it can reveal,” explained Wessler. “Government agencies’ purchases of access to Americans’ sensitive location data raise serious questions about whether they are engaged in an illegal end run around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. It is time for Congress to end the legal uncertainty enabling this surveillance once and for all by moving toward passage of the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.”
Though such legislation could restrict the government’s ability to piggyback off commercial surveillance, app-makers and data brokers would remain free to surveil phone owners. Still, Wyden, a co-sponsor of that bill, told The Intercept that he believes “this legislation sends a very strong message” to the “Wild West” of ad-based surveillance but that clamping down on the location data supply chain would be “certainly a question for the future.” Wyden suggested that protecting a device’s location trail from snooping apps and advertisers might be best handled by the Federal Trade Commission. Separate legislation previously introduced by Wyden would empower the FTC to crack down on promiscuous data sharing and broaden consumers’ ability to opt out of ad tracking.
A6 is far from the only firm engaged in privatized device-tracking surveillance. Three of Anomaly Six’s key employees previously worked at competing firm Babel Street, which named all three of them in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the legal filing, Brendan Huff and Jeffrey Heinz co-founded Anomaly Six (and lesser-known Datalus 5) months after ending their employment at Babel Street in April 2018, with the intent of replicating Babel’s cellphone location surveillance product, “Locate X,” in a partnership with major Babel competitor Semantic AI. In July 2018, Clark followed Huff and Heinz by resigning from his position as Babel’s “primary interface to … intelligence community clients” and becoming an employee of both Anomaly Six and Semantic.
Like its rival Dataminr, Zignal touts its mundane partnerships with the likes of Levi’s and the Sacramento Kings, marketing itself publicly in vague terms that carry little indication that it uses Twitter for intelligence-gathering purposes, ostensibly in clear violation of Twitter’s anti-surveillance policy. Zignal’s ties to government run deep: Zignal’s advisory board includes a former head of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Charles Cleveland, as well as the CEO of the Rendon Group, John Rendon, whose bio notes that he “pioneered the use of strategic communications and real-time information management as an element of national power, serving as a consultant to the White House, U.S. National Security community, including the U.S. Department of Defense.” Further, public records state that Zignal was paid roughly $4 million to subcontract under defense staffing firm ECS Federal on Project Maven for “Publicly Available Information … Data Aggregation” and a related “Publicly Available Information enclave” in the U.S. Army’s Secure Unclassified Network.
The remarkable world-spanning capabilities of Anomaly Six are representative of the quantum leap occurring in the field of OSINT. While the term is often used to describe the internet-enabled detective work that draws on public records to, say, pinpoint the location of a war crime from a grainy video clip, “automated OSINT” systems now use software to combine enormous datasets that far outpace what a human could do on their own. Automated OSINT has also become something of a misnomer, using information that is by no means “open source” or in the public domain, like commercial GPS data that must be bought from a private broker.
While OSINT techniques are powerful, they are generally shielded from accusations of privacy violation because the “open source” nature of the underlying information means that it was already to some extent public. This is a defense that Anomaly Six, with its trove of billions of purchased data points, can’t muster. In February, the Dutch Review Committee on the Intelligence and Security Services issued a report on automated OSINT techniques and the threat to personal privacy they may represent: “The volume, nature and range of personal data in these automated OSINT tools may lead to a more serious violation of fundamental rights, in particular the right to privacy, than consulting data from publicly accessible online information sources, such as publicly accessible social media data or data retrieved using a generic search engine.” This fusion of publicly available data, privately procured personal records, and computerized analysis isn’t the future of governmental surveillance, but the present. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency “buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant,” a surveillance method now regularly practiced throughout the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and beyond.
A woman writes a message of support on a truck as protests against coronavirus vaccine mandates continue in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 13, 2022.
Photo: Amru Salahuddien/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
For over two weeks now, protests against Covid-19 public health mandates have occupied Ottawa, Canada’s capital, under the banner of the “Freedom Convoy.” Would that an anti-authoritarian liberation struggle worthy of the name could have such staying power; if only those in the fight against racial capitalism could take a city and hold it, putting state power on the back foot.
The right, of course, doesn’t have some of the baked-in obstacles that the left faces — above all, the police, whose light touch so far has been key to the right-wing-led protesters’ ability to set up camp in front of the Canadian Parliament. Videos even show some cops offering words of support to the protesters. On more than one occasion, cops have cleared counterprotesters out of the way of truck convoys joining the blockade.
In contrast, Indigenous land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation have been met in recent years with consistent police violence when they have attempted to use blockades to stop pipeline construction. Which is not to say that the left wants the police on their side: Left-wing, Black, and Indigenous-led liberation movements cannot, and would not, seek the understanding of the police forces that oppress them.
There are other lessons, however, for the left to take away from the occupations and blockades in Ottawa — lessons that in no way entail supporting state power or embracing the protesters as potential working-class, anti-authoritarian allies. Instead, the left should seek to employ the same disruptive power on display in these protests, but only on its own terms.
A protester shows a police service statement issued as truckers continue their protest against public health mandates in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 16, 2022.
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
A Three-Way Fight
The relative leniency with which police have met the convoy protesters could be coming to an end. Ottawa’s police chief was ousted this week amid criticism of his inaction against the convoy. And on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a national public order emergency — the first time a Canadian government has taken such action in half a century — to clear the occupation and allied blockades along the Canadian border. The emergency order gives the federal government extraordinary powers, including overriding rights to public assembly and permits blocking anyone believed to be taking part in the protest from using financial institutions.
There is nothing for the left to support in the invocation of these repressive powers. Those same measures will be used to quash the movements we support. Poor, marginalized, and racialized communities are already summarily arrested, deported, surveilled, and excluded from the economy.
And the Canadian state is not showing a unique willingness to repress right-wing movements; rather, we are seeing Trudeau’s government forced into a corner, having ceded ground to these protesters that no left-wing, anti-racist protesters would be permitted.
We need not join liberal calls for police and state intervention in order to oppose the occupation and the copycat convoys it inspires. Instead, we can support the counterprotesters pushing back against the convoys as an antifascist response to the presence of far-right forces in their midst.
Likewise, we might find sympathy for the Ottawan locals who understandably want a return to peace in their normally quiet city, rattled nightly by the occupation’s honking trucks and late-night music. Yet the problem with the occupation is not that it is disruptive — blocking key points of capital’s circulation is a strategy to be embraced.
The same tactical logic informed the Arab Spring, the European Square movements in 2010, and the Occupy encampments the following year; taking over tracts of city space is hardly an invention of the trucker convoy. The truckers’ ability to hold a city center for weeks in a powerful nation like Canada is nonetheless worthy of note.
These dynamics together sum up how the danger, as ever, lies not in drawing lessons from the right-wing protests but in drawing the wrong ones.
Demonstrators outside the Parliament dance with placards during a protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and the Trudeau government in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 13, 2022.
Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Wrong Ideas of “Freedom”
It is true that the Canadian protesters are not uniformly white nor all committed to a Trumpian white nationalism; there are participants who have seen an opportunity, albeit catalyzed by a pathetic anti-mandate movement, to protest Trudeau’s government and its neoliberal policies.
One could squint and see the potential for anti-authoritarian affinities to be found. Squint that hard, though, and you might find your eyes are closed. We cannot ignore the white supremacist notion of autonomy that undergirds the movement, which is not an incidental aspect that could be exorcised to reveal a working-class movement based on solidarity.
Needless to say, there’s nothing salutary in the individualist rejection of masks and vaccines. The historian Taylor Dysart in the Washington Post rightly characterized these truckers’ notion of “freedom” — the ability to move freely and potentially spread disease across the occupied Indigenous lands of the U.S. and Canada — as the “freedom” of settler colonialists.
The settler colonialism was evident in the occupiers’ offensive misuse of Indigenous ceremony — which Indigenous groups have condemned — and the way the convoy protesters ignore Native communities’ calls for the end of this occupation on already occupied land.
The “Freedom Convoy” is also not a challenge to the U.S. and Canada’s violent border regimes, even though it began in protest of the border policy mandating that truck drivers be vaccinated to cross between the U.S. and Canada. A number of the movement’s leaders have openly expressed racist, anti-immigrant sentiments and been involved in far-right organizing.
The anti-mandate protesters are not in the struggle for the freedom of anyone’s movement but their own.
Tear gas surrounds protesters as they clash with police during a Yellow Vest demonstration near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Dec. 1, 2018.
Photo: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images
Yellow Vests Example
A useful comparison might be drawn with the Yellow Vest movement, which exploded onto the streets of France in late 2018. The protests were initially in response to the ur-neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron’s increase on fuel taxes — a putatively ecological measure that in fact put an extraordinary financial burden on the working class while refusing to challenge major corporations. The protests erupted into a generalized uprising against the French status quo of austerity and economic injustice.
Under the Yellow Vest umbrella, fascist elements were also pushing for harsh immigration policies, while antifascist leftists were taking to the streets against the police and capitalist institutions. The movement contained deep internal conflicts, and left-wing participants were faced with the question of whether it was worth trying to fight the racist and fascist elements of the uprisings from within the movement. Many, though, deemed the alternative — to allow far-right forces to direct and control the revolutionary moment — unacceptable.
Could the same logic also speak to the anti-state protests in Canada and beyond today? Should the left refuse to cede the ground of anti-state dissent and circulation struggles to the right-wing conspiracy theorists?
Any worthwhile response to the “Freedom Convoy” occupations and blockades must take effect on wholly anti-racist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist terms.
The difference between the current blockades and the Yellow Vests is that the “Freedom Convoys” are not only incidentally rich in far-right elements; the notion of autonomy driving the movement is essentially a white supremacist, individualist one. Notably, too, American right-wing support of the blockades is only anti-state insofar as the state is not a Trumpian one. And it’s worth recalling that when Canada saw its own Yellow Vest movement emerge in response to France’s, it was explicitly right-wing and anti-immigrant in character; the current blockades are within this legacy.
If there is a Yellow Vests-related legacy to carry forward toward more liberatory aims than those of the Ottawa occupations, we might instead recall the Black Vests, or “Gilets Noirs” in French. This huge collective of undocumented immigrants in France carried out major protest actions in 2019, including occupying a terminal in Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.” The movement understood, too, the importance of striking at major points of circulation: sites of the free flow of capital and brutal limits on the movement of peoples.
Like the Black Vests’ answer to the Yellow Vests, any worthwhile response to the “Freedom Convoy” occupations and blockades must take effect on wholly anti-racist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist terms. On this side of the Atlantic, the way has already been paved — and not by anti-mandate protesters. Indigenous land and water defenders from Standing Rock to the Wet’suwet’en territories have shown us what it looks like to take up the struggle against capitalist circulation in the service of collective, rather than individual, freedom.
An Air Force AC-130 gunship in this undated photo was used by the U.S. military to attack targets around Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2001.
Photo: U.S. Air Force/Getty Images
My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000.
How does America react when it kills civilians? Just last week, we learned that the U.S. military decided that nobody will be held responsible for the August 29 drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. After an internal review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chose to take no action, not even a wrist slap for a single intelligence analyst, drone operator, mission commander, or general. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby bizarrely said, “We acknowledge that there were procedural breakdowns” but that “it doesn’t necessarily indicate that an individual or individuals have to be held to account.”
There has been quite a lot of savagery-adjacent news to absorb this month. The New York Times just published a two-part series by Azmat Khan, based on military documents, revealing that U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians but that the Pentagon has done almost nothing to discern how many were harmed or what went wrong and might be corrected. As Khan noted, “It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.”
Savagery consists of more than the act of killing. It also involves a system of impunity that makes clear to the perpetrators that what they are doing is acceptable, necessary — maybe even heroic — and must not cease. To this end, the United States has developed a machinery of impunity that is arguably the most advanced in the world, implicating not only a broad swathe of military personnel but also the entirety of American society.
Elite Accountability
Impunity tends to begin at the top. No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress about these disasters. The opposite has occurred — stars have usually been added to their shoulders, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march into well-paid positions as board members in the weapons industry or elsewhere (even though they are not strapped for resources, thanks to pensions that can reach $250,000 a year). The reputation-protection racket is so galling that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article in 2007 that noted: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
We should not be surprised. We are a society that excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin (also zero), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them). And let’s not forget the politicians and pundits who goaded America into an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and suffered no consequences. It’s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of these elites benefit from the con.
Military impunity is somewhat unique because it stretches downward, too. If an intelligence analyst or drone operator or fighter pilot follows orders and procedures for an airstrike that kills dozens of civilians in a wedding party — which has happened — they need to be excused of wrongdoing. After all, who gave the orders, and who set the procedures? These questions would require looking up the chain of command, and for that reason, they are not asked with any intention of finding the answers. That’s why it was with no sense of alarm that secret military documents published by The Intercept in 2015 noted that in a two-year campaign called Operation Haymaker, 9 of 10 Afghans killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. For the U.S., this was the acceptable cost of doing business.
The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses.
The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses. Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the financial industry, or the IRS, which oversees taxpayers, or the Senate and House ethics committees, which keep an eye on members of Congress, the U.S. military has wide authority and deep resources to impose an array of penalties, from pay reductions to loss of rank and death sentences. The military avidly uses these powers, too. In 2020 alone, there were more than 37,000 cases of discipline in the armed forces, and since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases.
Yet these powers have been used sparingly or not at all when it comes to airstrikes that kill civilians. One of the worst massacres in two decades of warfare occurred not long ago, on March 18, 2019, when U.S. warplanes dropped bombs that killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children, in an Islamic State enclave in Syria. The carnage was immediately apparent. As the Times reported last month, an analyst who watched the attack on a drone video typed into a secure chat system, “Who dropped that?” Another analyst wrote, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” A quick battle assessment settled on 70 people killed.
A legal officer flagged it as a possible war crime that warranted an investigation, the Times noted, “but at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.” The Pentagon’s inspector general looked into what happened, but even its report was “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.” An evaluator who worked on the inspector general’s report, Gene Tate, was forced out of his job after complaining about the lack of progress and honesty. Tate told the Times: “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.”
I could go on for thousands of words describing other airstrikes that killed civilians and resulted in no discipline or slight reprimands that were issued only after embarrassing reports from news organizations and human rights groups. For instance, there was a 2015 airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 patients and staffers; the military’s reluctant discipline included counseling and retraining for some of the personnel involved. The point is this: A military establishment that has enthusiastically enforced requirements for things as petty as wearing a reflector belt while jogging has consistently failed to discipline soldiers for wrongful bombings that its own battle assessments acknowledge have killed civilians.
The machinery of impunity actually has two missions: The most obvious is to excuse people who should not be excused. The other is to punish those who try to expose the machine, because it does not function well in daylight. That’s why Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran whom the government accused of leaking those classified drone documents to The Intercept, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to more than four years in prison. It is not the act of killing civilians that will result in definite and heavy punishment, but exposing the act of killing.
The charred remains of a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders is seen after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Oct. 16, 2015.
Photo: Najim Rahim/AP
Undoing Impunity
In 1992, I interviewed a Muslim girl in Bosnia who had been raped. “The Višegrad warlord took a fancy to her,” I later wrote, “and one night dragged her and her younger sister away from their mother, who of course was crying hysterically and holding onto the legs of the warlord, who kicked her away and shouted, ‘I am the law.’”
The warlord’s name was Milan Lukić, and he was one of the most evil men in a war that had a surplus of them. He killed women and children with particular ruthlessness, one time setting fire to a house in which 59 civilians were sheltering; they all perished. But Lukić was saying one honest thing when he kidnapped the sisters: He was the law. His paramilitary thugs had a monopoly on violence in Višegrad and the full support of Serb political and military authorities. At the time, I didn’t imagine that their crimes would catch up with any of them.
My interest right now is in the durability of these machines of impunity, not the comparative depravity of the crimes they protect (what happened in Bosnia was genocide). It seems ridiculous to think that the U.S. military’s cover-ups will be undone. The Pentagon is now getting even more support from the country in a form that is easy to measure and crucial to sustaining its clout: funding. Congress has just passed a military budget of $768 billion, which is more than was allocated in 2020, even though U.S. troops withdrew this year, in a humiliating fashion, from their forever war in Afghanistan. Despite what has happened, America’s elected representatives are not loosening their protective embrace of the Pentagon.
Yet the impunity that seemed eternal in Bosnia turned out to be short-lived, at least for the elites of criminality. Lukić is now in prison with a life sentence, thanks to his conviction at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. Key wartime leaders were extradited to the Hague too. Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, died of a heart attack before his trial concluded, but Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of Bosnia’s Serbs, were convicted of genocide.
America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to pressure from larger nations. But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies — they are still at work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn’t bet against them.
Last Monday, a Democratic firm hosted focus groups with women in Virginia who voted in 2017 for Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, in 2020 for Democratic President Joe Biden, and then this month for Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin. It was centered on suburban women: a group that pivoted significantly to the right in the governor’s election.
Consultant Danny Barefoot said that Anvil Strategies called roughly 30,000 people in Virginia. Most didn’t answer, but several hundred of them fit the criteria he was looking for: people who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections. Those people were called back and offered a $100 gift card if they’d do a lunch-hour Zoom and talk about why they voted the way they did. Ninety-six women, a fifth of whom were not white, were broken into three different sessions. Barefoot sat in on one of them and got permission from the funders to share quotes and results.
Focus groups are put together differently than surveys, which weigh the responses to reflect the population at large. While 96 respondents isn’t enough for a robust polling sample, it’s a chance to dig deeper into the views of a slice of the electorate. Virginia is about two-thirds white, and this sample was 79 percent white — so slightly whiter than the state at large but not by a ton. Eleven percent of them were Black women, 6 percent Latina, and 4 percent Asian American. They came from around the state. Barefoot said he didn’t ask about college education, because what he was interested in was people who lived in the suburbs regardless of race or educational background.
What Barefoot found is that while the women agreed with Democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”
When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. When asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.
“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”
“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.” That fall, Davis cut an ad for Youngkin, citing his commitment to keep schools open as decisive.
And while the group made a Democrat angry at Democrats the face of its opposition, behind her was a coterie of Republican operatives. The bulk of the group’s financing came from N2 America, a conservative nonprofit, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Snyder. Its co-founder was a Republican who lost a 2019 race for school board, and the rest of its officers were Republican operatives too. A slick nonprofit named Parents Defending Education was launched in 2020 to help guide the local groups. Little effort was made to conceal who was behind it: A longtime Koch network operative, Nicole Neily, was placed at the helm of the “grassroots” organization. Aside from Davis, nearly every mom and dad brought onto Fox News to complain about critical race theory held a day job as a senior Republican operative.
It was the purest expression of the way Republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a GOP theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of Trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from Republicans into the arms of Democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by Democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.
The tactic was even more potent in northern Virginia, where many professional Republican operatives and lobbyists live. In Loudoun County this November, McAuliffe outpaced Youngkin 55 percent to 44. But Biden had beaten Trump there by 62 percent to 37. Youngkin’s showing was only 11,000 votes fewer than Trump won a year earlier, while McAuliffe notched 50,000 fewer votes than Biden had. While Biden carried Fairfax by 42 points, McAuliffe only took it by 31.
That the GOP didn’t make even bigger inroads, given their heavy investment in the issue, may be the one silver lining for Democrats — who, witnessing a dishonest astroturf campaign take shape and get twisted beyond all recognition on Fox News, decided, perhaps understandably but to their later regret, to ignore the question. After McAuliffe’s debate gaffe, in which he delivered up the perfect sound bite to Youngkin — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — he took weeks to respond, initially not recognizing the danger. “Everybody clapped when I said it,” McAuliffe insisted later.
Even where Republicans spent heavily against outmatched Democrats, they made only marginal gains in school board races. But if the issue continues to go uncontested, their luck may run out. National Democrats have no coordinated response yet, leaving school board members — unstaffed, underfunded, borderline volunteers — hung out to dry, with nothing to rely on but mainstream media assertions that there’s actually nothing to see here.
A voter walks past election signs as she walks to the Fairfax County Government Center polling location on Election Day in Fairfax, Va., on Nov. 2, 2021.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
In the Virginia election, two arguments that have been running parallel in Democratic circles for the past several years finally collided. One is the question of how Democrats should position themselves in the ongoing culture war, with jockeying over fraught and contested concepts like wokeness and cancel culture. Critical race theory is one example of this; Democrats can’t seem to agree on whether it’s a good thing that should be taught and defended or a Republican fabrication that’s not being taught in elementary schools at all. The other is the round-and-round debate over race and class: Are voters who flee Democrats motivated more by economic anxiety or by racial resentment and eroding white privilege?
While these debates have unfolded, Democrats have seen a steady erosion in support among working-class voters of all races, while gaining support among the most highly educated voters. That movement would point toward class divisions driving voter behavior, but the rearing up of critical race theory as a central plank of the Republican Party appeared to throw the question open again. Maybe it’s racism, after all?
Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.
Now, for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party. Take, for instance, one of the women in Barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if Democrats share their cultural values, she said, “They fight for the right things and I usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.”
For many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party.
Barefoot’s results rhymed with the conclusions of a memo put out by strategist Andrew Levison, who has long made the argument that Democratic efforts at connecting with working-class voters are fundamentally flawed. The memo, published after the Virginia election but not directly responding to it, looks at how Democrats can win support among a growing number of anti-Trump Republicans. Rather than convince the entire white working class — which is typically approximated in polls by looking for white voters without a college degree — Levison argues that Democrats should “identify a distinct, persuadable sector of the white working class” and then figure out how to get members of that specific group to vote Democratic.
Levison, citing data from multiple election cycles, notes that Democrats roughly win about a third of white working-class votes. The party loses about a third right out of the gate: hardcore right-wing people who would never consider voting for Democrats and think even a Democrat like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — known for much of his career as “Wall Street Chuck” — is a flaming socialist and a traitor. Levison calls that third “extremists,” and argues they are not gettable under any circumstances; he distinguishes them from the final third, which is made up of what he calls “cultural traditionalists.”
Strategist Andrew Levison’s characterizations of “extremist” and “cultural traditionalist” voters.
Screenshot: The Intercept
His category of cultural traditionalists, he acknowledges, is not meant to capture every voter who is gettable by Democrats; likewise, many cultural traditionalists have competing and conflicting views on various issues. But just as corporations work to create consumer profiles before going to market with an ad campaign, Democrats need to define who that persuadable person among the white working class is. To do so, Levison relies on years of survey data, much of it collected by Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, that does tens of thousands of in-person interviews with working-class people around the country each year looking to identify those who are persuadable.
As Levison defines them, cultural traditionalists are people who don’t follow the news closely but have an easy-going personality and an open mind — contrasted with cranky, short-tempered people who are more likely to fall into the “extremist” category. They believe in patriotism and the “American way of life” but also believe that diversity, pluralism, and tolerance are essential characteristics of that American way of life. When it comes to race, these traditionalists have something of a Michael Scott view, rooted in the cliche that they “don’t see race” or “don’t see color.” They also have religious and moral values they’d happily describe as “old fashioned” but say they have no problem with people who have different views. When these voters shifted their views on marriage equality, accepting it as something that ought to be legal even if they were skeptical of it, the dam had broken.
Cultural traditionalists, according to Levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think Democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”
Levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many Black and Latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that Democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of Democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.
They’re the sort of voter that would be gettable for Democrats without compromising on a racial justice agenda if it is sold as the United States continuously striving to close the gap between reality and its values. But, Levison adds, there are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and Republicans have become adept at exploiting them. He defines them as: pride in their culture, background, and community; respect for tradition; love of freedom; belief in personal responsibility, character, and hard work; and respect for law, strict law enforcement, and the right of individual self-defense.
There are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and Republicans have become adept at exploiting them.
In other words, they express the same sensibility as the women in Barefoot’s group who wanted to teach their children a positive history of the United States. One suburban Black woman in his group put it this way: “Our kids should be taught about slavery and all of that awfulness but America is also a good country and that’s what I want my kids to learn.”
Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States. Instead, to the extent it has seeped into the public consciousness, it has done so around the notion of rejecting 1776 as the date of our birth and supplanting it with 1619 as our “true founding,” in a phrase that became so controversial it was deleted.
1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?
That section too has since been edited, blunting some of its edge, and creating another situation where supporters of the project at once say that there was nothing off-base about it, while changing it in response to the criticism. As schools around the country began teaching the project, Republicans made a national issue out of it, one that can’t be disentangled from the fight over critical race theory.
Liberals often suggest that parents who are skeptical of the New York Times’s 1619 Project reject the idea of teaching the truth about American history. More often, as with the woman in the focus group, it’s a question of framing rather than truth. Believing or conceding that we as a people are defined by the worst of the past might actually be true, but the concession is seen as cutting off any hope of a better future. As an adult, if that’s the view you’ve come to — and I flirt with it often myself — it’s a more than understandable conclusion. But we want our children to remain hopeful about the possibility of a better world, since it’s the world they’ll inherit and build after we’re all gone. The argument that slavery was essential to the development of capitalism in the United States is well-established scholarship by this point. But absent a call to overthrow capitalism, that notion, particularly when compressed into something an elementary school student could absorb, loses any meaning beyond nihilism. And so of course parents of all races reject the framing and look askance at a party of elites who seem to be blithely suggesting — though not really meaning it — the overthrow of a capitalist system that benefits them before all others. And if they’re not suggesting that, then what?
Levison, meanwhile, argues that Democrats need to lean into the kind of patriotic rhetoric that makes many progressives recoil. Democrats have the potential to split “extremists” off from “traditionalists” by couching Democratic values as truly American, and extremists as “un-American.” As an example of such possible rhetoric, he offers, is, “I love the American flag as much as any American but I would never use a flagpole flying our flag as a club to assault other Americans that I call my ‘enemies.’ That is not the American way.” Or: “The values I grew up with are good values and I want them to endure. But the values of the people who want to turn Americans against each other and divide our country are not my values.”
An attendee signs the campaign bus of Glenn Youngkin, Republican gubernatorial candidate for Virginia, during a campaign stop at the Alexandria Farmers Market in Alexandria, Va., on Oct. 30, 2021.
Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
At the end of Barefoot’s focus group, the women were asked if they’d have considered changing their vote if Democrats had passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bill, which was passed by the House the following week, is something that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, has claimed would have helped win the election for McAuliffe.
Ninety-one percent of the suburban women said no, 9 percent said yes, and one woman laughed and said, “What does that have to do with anything?”
She’s right to laugh. But that 9 percent actually points to something hopeful. In a close race, a 9-point swing like that can matter. If Democrats had passed the reconciliation bill as well and could talk about universal pre-K, the child tax credit, clean energy investments, and subsidies for child care, they might have won even more back. And if Democrats were out of touch culturally, though, that swing could be even higher
A major new survey from Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics points to another way that cultural chasm can be bridged: with candidates who focus on these economic issues but don’t talk like juniors at Oberlin.
The survey design was unusual: Instead of asking about issue preferences or messaging alone, it concocted prototypes of candidates and asked which of them was more appealing. When it came to a candidate’s background, the survey found — somewhat awkwardly for a socialist magazine — that voters of all races and classes had the most positive reaction to small-business owners. The most disliked candidates were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Working-class candidates — teachers, construction workers, and veterans — also fared well, though not as well as mom and pop.
Broadly, Jacobin did not find evidence to support the Great Left Hope that if the masses would turn out in full at the ballot box, they’d eagerly support democratic socialists candidates and policies. “Many working-class voters in advanced economies have actually moved to the left on questions of economic policy (favoring more redistribution, more government spending on public goods, and more taxation of the very wealthy), while remaining culturally or socially moderate,” they write. They contrast this from where mainstream Democrats have gone: left on culture while “tempering their economic progressivism.”
But the survey also pointed to how they could be won over, and the results mapped with Levison’s and Barefoot’s findings. Language Jacobin described as “woke” created a cultural barrier between voters and candidates that diminished support for both “woke progressive” and “woke moderate” candidates, while universal, populist language did best for Democrats. Notably, “woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics,” they write. “For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.” Startlingly, the survey found a 30-plus point gap between support for a teacher running on a populist, universalist message versus a CEO running with a moderate economic platform, couched in woke rhetoric reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
A South Carolina National Guardsman meets a school bus as it arrives with Black students at the Lamar School on March 23, 1970, in Lamar, S.C.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
In today’s debate over critical race theory, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the busing wars in the 1970s and ’80s. Like with busing, Democratic elites are creating conflict within the working class while protecting their own class and cultural interests. By the early 1970s, white school districts had spent nearly two decades resisting Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in schools, and national attention had turned to redlining and the dug-in segregation of housing.
The 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act had banned residential discrimination and empowered the federal government to forcibly integrate neighborhoods. In 1973, Donald Trump and his father were sued by the Department of Justice for racial segregation in their housing and settled two years later. That same year, a Gallup survey asked Black residents to choose from a list of preferred solutions to school desegregation, and the top choice was the most intuitive: neighborhood integration and an end to redlining. Only 9 percent of Black residents named busing as their preferred approach to school desegregation which, again, is intuitive: Attending the neighborhood school is always preferable, all things being equal, than being bused somewhere else. The same was true for white voters: Just 4 percent supported busing.
But neighborhood integration would require white residents to give something up. Even today, according to law professor Dorothy Brown, the author of “The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — and How We Can Fix It,” when neighborhoods integrate, with the Black population reaching at least 10 percent, property values either decline or grow more slowly. Facing that systematic decline in wealth, many white residents fought neighborhood housing integration. Busing, meanwhile, could be avoided by the well-off by sending their kids to private school. And so Democrats went with busing over housing. Republicans began to use busing in campaigns as a dog whistle to bigoted parents resistant to desegregating education, banking on the fact that there was additional political gain to be had among a majority of voters who opposed it for a variety of reasons. In 1981, Gallup found 60 percent of Black voters supported busing as a means to integration, though opposition was strong as well.
“‘Antibusing’” is a code word for racism and rejection,” wrote Jesse Jackson in 1982. “True, some blacks oppose busing, but not for racial reasons. Blacks sometimes are against busing because all decisions about desegregation are being made for them, not with and by them.”
Battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.
White parents who couldn’t afford private school fled to the suburbs, creating new school districts along racial lines; since busing only happened within a school district, that meant it was largely going on inside big cities, with the suburbs immune. White working-class voters who remained in the cities noted rightly that the professional class in the suburbs, which proudly supported busing in the city, was merely signaling its own virtue, while engaging in the same bigoted resistance to — or avoidance of — integration.
Today’s white Democratic elites are also confronted with school systems that have substantially resegregated, persistent racial income and wealth gaps, and test scores that reflect those patent inequalities. Their answer has been to thoughtfully interrogate the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism by examining interpersonal relationships and developing a new vocabulary that gives its speaker license to feel as righteous about things today as white folks did in the Boston suburbs in 1975. But, as Jamelle Bouie writes, battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.
We must remember that the problem of racism — of the denial of personhood and of the differential exposure to exploitation and death — will not be resolved by saying the right words or thinking the right thoughts.
That’s because racism does not survive, in the main, because of personal belief and prejudice. It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.
Bouie answers with Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
Telling the truth about King and his politics has always been too much for American liberals. The vulgar version of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives popular in boardrooms and school workshops is meant to fill the void created by a refusal to assault the roots of racism; they provide a way to talk about racism that strips it of its material reality and slots it instead into the world of individual self-improvement. Without the systemic context, it merely trains people in how to enact roles, identify people failing to play their proper role, and properly “call them out.”
One woman in the focus group, asked how she understood critical race theory, said, “It teaches our kids America is defined by the worst parts of its past.” Instead of hiring corporate consultants to pretend to tear down white supremacy in the classroom, Democrats could dedicate themselves to the pursuit of living up to the values on which the nation claims it was founded. Frederick Douglass’s famous speech delivered in 1852 — “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” — pounds at the conscience of the nation by describing the gap between its founding principles and its everyday reality.
“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost,” Douglass said.
Teaching the truth about American history, including all of its awfulness, doesn’t require teaching kids that they or their country are defined by the worst of its past. Quite the opposite: America’s greatest heroes have always defined their project within the outlines of the promise and spirit of the nation’s founding, daring and challenging it to live up to its promises.
“Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country,” Douglass concluded on that Fourth of July. “There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope — while drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”
That’s something “cultural traditionalists” can all get behind. It would still, of course, trigger the far right. But the resulting fight would isolate the extremists, exposing their hostility to Douglass’s message as the raw racism it is. Democrats win the argument when it’s about Charlottesville, but lose if it’s Loudoun County. But Loudoun County isn’t Charlottesville, just as Glenn Youngkin isn’t Donald Trump. Let the right lose its mind attacking Frederick Douglass. Make him and his allies like Robert Smalls — those who fought oppression against the worst odds — the true heroes of American history. And not one more word, for the love of God, from Robin DiAngelo.
In the introduction to “The Spoils of War,” an extraordinary new book by Andrew Cockburn, he makes a straightforward assertion about the U.S. military. “War-fighting efficiency has a low priority,” he writes, “by comparison with considerations of personal and internal bureaucracies. … The military are generally not interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement.”
This is not a popular perspective in Washington, D.C., to say the least. It’s of course legal for the New York Times and the Washington Post, or network television, to make this case. But just to be on the safe side, they never do.
Intriguingly, it’s also not a left-wing critique, exactly. Leftist analysis of the American war machine generally credits it with a coherent plan to rule the world and an implacable lust for the violence needed to make it happen. “If you’re a dove, you think the whole thing’s really rotten,” Cockburn said in a recent appearance on Intercepted. However, “a lot of my good sources, and indeed friends, whose political views in other areas might make your hair stand on end” despise the military’s profligate behavior for their own reasons.
Courtesy of Verso Books
Cockburn suggests that the Pentagon and the corporations that feed off it have generated the largest and most byzantine bureaucracy in human history, filled with innumerable fiefdoms far more focused on besting their internal rivals than outside enemies. Today’s generals and admirals don’t engage in unnecessary activities like trying to win wars, but instead while their days away plotting how to join the board of General Dynamics six hours after their retirement party. Mid-level whistleblowers who suggest the military should procure helmets that protect soldiers from roadside bombs — rather than actually amplifying the damage — are energetically ostracized. Then, as with Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon analyst who testified in the 1980s before Congress on the soaring costs of complex weapons, they are punished. (Spinney managed to keep his job but his higher-ups stopped giving him anything of significance to do, leaving him lots of time to ponder his misdeeds before his retirement 20 years later.)
Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.”
The array of panjandrums in Cockburn’s compendium of avarice and folly at the top of the military world therefore appear like an expanded, hyperviolent version of the Roy family on the HBO show “Succession” — that is, they spend 98 percent of their time jockeying for wealth and power within the organization, and at most a residual 2 percent attempting to do what the organization purportedly exists to accomplish.
Even the most wised-up cynic might rebel at this worldview. Can it possibly be true that the U.S. military — which converts wedding parties in Pakistan into scraps of wet red flesh with drones piloted from 8,000 miles away and possesses the ability to end human civilization in 30 minutes — is simultaneously this venal and preposterous?ButCockburn relentlessly piles fact upon fact until readers have no option but to admit that the answer is yes.
Here are a few of the many, many examples that Cockburn provides:
During the first winter of the Korean War in 1950-51, half of American casualties were caused by frostbite. Incredibly enough, U.S soldiers hadn’t been equipped with warm boots and were forced to raid North Korean positions to steal their functional footwear. U.S. military spending had jumped following the beginning of hostilities, but much of the increase went to things that had nothing to do with the war, such as B-47 strategic nuclear bombers, a Boeing product far more profitable product than boring old boots.
More recently, in 2014, a $300 million B-1 bomber accidentally dropped two 500-pound bombs on five Special Forces soldiers in a nighttime raid near Kandahar in Afghanistan. In theory, the B-1 crew should have been able to tell these were American troops, since Special Forces wear infrared beacons visible with standard night vision goggles. In practice, the B-1’s night vision camera detects a different section of the infrared spectrum, and no one informed the crew of this. So why was the B-1 being sent on such missions in the first place, instead of planes better suited for it? Because the Air Force needed something for B-1s to do, since they were gratifyingly expensive but turned out not to be suited for their original mission of flying nuclear weapons to drop on Russia. With a full load of bombs, Cockburn writes, the B-1 can’t fly high enough to cross the Rockies.
Washington is currently in a tizzy over China purportedly testing nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles. Russia has already done so years ago, supposedly. Hypersonic missiles differ from standard intercontinental ballistic missile because they fly at a much lower altitude and are meant to be maneuverable (rather than following a predictable parabola like an ICBM). This is turn means they allegedly can evade America’s Star Wars missile defense systems. However, as Cockburn cogently explains, there are powerful technical reasons to believe that hypersonic missiles will never work as advertised. Meanwhile, with pleasing symmetry, Star Wars does not function and never will. Cockburn aptly quotes one Pentagon weapons designer in the 1960s telling new hires that they would be making “weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.” Experts in the U.S., China, and Russia all must know that the entire field of hypersonic missiles is pointless, but hyping the threat from each other is a potent way for the military-industrial complex in each country to extract large chunks of cash from their citizens. In 2019, Lockheed Martin’s CEO broke ground on a new facility to develop hypersonic weapons with a golden shovel, presumably billed to the government on a cost-plus basis.
Cockburn, currently the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, has been covering the Pentagon for decades, and it shows. He possesses a uniquely detailed knowledge of the arcane, lucrative machinations of this world, as well as a deep historical understanding of the forces that built it. And while the specifics change, the stories he tells all have the same shocking moral. “People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy,” he quotes a former Air Force colonel as saying. “They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow.’”
If you’re still not convinced, the proof of this unpalatable pudding is in the eating. Consider America’s just-concluded 20-year war in Afghanistan. As the Taliban took over the country in days, it might have seemed that the whole thing was a colossal failure. But if you check your portfolio of defense contractor stocks, and visit the enormous mansions in the northern Virginia suburbs surrounding the Pentagon, you’ll see that, in fact, it was an incredible success.
The dark-money group No Labels remains optimistic that it has been able to delink the bipartisan infrastructure bill away from the larger reconciliation package that includes the bulk of the Biden agenda, with the possibility of outright killing the bigger bill still in play, according to a note sent by the group’s executive director to its donors.
“It is now clear that the reconciliation package will be delinked in time from the infrastructure bill and will be less than $3.5 trillion (if it passes at all), in theory making support from House Republicans for the infrastructure bill more likely,” the email from Margaret White reads.
The message goes on to applaud Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for her relentless fight on their behalf.
The reconciliation package includes major investments in combating climate change, support for child care and elder care, and expansion of Medicaid and Medicare, among a host of other policy advances. But major donors to No Labels stand to see significant tax hikes to offset those costs if the reconciliation package becomes law. The House Ways and Means Committee approved $2.9 trillion in new taxes on the rich over the next decade.
Progressives have insisted that both packages go together so that centrists don’t simply notch a victory on the bipartisan bill and then turn around and kill the more expansive piece of legislation. Centrists have claimed that progressive fears of such a betrayal are unfounded and that while they also support the Biden agenda, they simply want to approve the bipartisan infrastructure bill as quickly as possible. Those assurances lose credibility each time the financial backers of the centrist Democrats celebrate the possibility they may be able to kill reconciliation, even if they do so in semi-private.
In White’s email, she acknowledged that her group was short of the votes needed to pass the bipartisan legislation on Monday, because progressives have vowed to oppose it until the reconciliation package is on President Joe Biden’s desk. “The biggest warning sign is on the left, where the Progressive Caucus leadership continues to object to the delinkage and claims they have the votes to kill the infrastructure bill, leading them to suggest Speaker Pelosi should cancel the vote or risk embarrassment,” White wrote. “In the post-Brexit, post-Trump, free-agent, populist era in which we live now, don’t assume that Speaker Pelosi and President Biden can definitely deliver the votes on the left.”
“This only reinforces that No Labels is not only No Values but now also No Clue,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.
Biden hosted multiple groups of Democrats at the White House on Wednesday, meeting with an ideological range of his party colleagues. “The best way to help the American people is by passing the President’s Build Back Better Agenda, which includes the Build Back Better Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure agreement,” said Pocan, who was present for the meeting. “The President agreed and reiterated his position that we need to pass both to move America forward. The debates we’re having are not about progressives versus moderates, but it’s a fight between the special interests who don’t want to pay their fair share and making sure we build back better for the American people.” White did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted that she told the president during the meeting that a majority of her members — enough to sink the bill — would vote no if both pieces of his agenda were not finished.
The full text of the email from White is below.
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 12:03 p.m.
Subject: State of Play Update
I wanted to share this note to provide both a state of play update on the critical infrastructure negotiations but also as a call to action for our community to reach out to Senator Sinema’s office and thank her for her heroic efforts in working to get this bill over the finish line. Please see below:
Days to promised infrastructure vote: 5
Vote count: well short of 218 public commitments
Latest news:
Mostly good!
* The infrastructure vote has been reaffirmed by the Democratic leadership for Monday (or perhaps Tuesday or later next week if the debate goes long).
* Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer seem determined to whip the vote to get the bill passed and have begun the process, making a strong argument for the substance and politics of the measure.
* The President is scheduled to meet in person at the White House today with House members to get them on board. Josh Gottheimer is expected to be among those there.
* It is now clear that the reconciliation package will be delinked in time from the infrastructure bill and will be less than $3.5 trillion (if it passes at all), in theory making support from House Republicans for the infrastructure bill more likely.
The biggest warning sign is on the left, where the Progressive Caucus leadership continues to object to the delinkage and claims they have the votes to kill the infrastructure bill, leading them to suggest Speaker Pelosi should cancel the vote or risk embarrassment.
In the post-Brexit, post-Trump, free-agent, populist era in which we live now, don’t assume that Speaker Pelosi and President Biden can definitely deliver the votes on the left.
To get to 218 votes, the Speaker and the President are going to have to keep a very high percentage of House progressives on board, while House Republicans will likely have to deliver more “yes” votes than currently exist.
All of this remains tied up in what the media continues to pay more attention to, which is the partisan standoff over the debt ceiling and a potential government shutdown. How that will impact getting the majority vote for infrastructure remains a mystery
Message/actions of the day:
* Support Senator Sinema by calling her office to show your encouragement: 202-224-4521.
The dark-money group No Labels offered to raise $200,000 for two of the so-called Unbreakable Nine — the House Democratic faction blocking the party’s agenda this week — if they would cancel an appearance last Saturday at a Napa Valley fundraiser hosted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to two congressional sources familiar with the proposal.
Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux, D-Ga., and Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas, had both been scheduled to appear at Pelosi’s fundraiser, which was jointly hosted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Their appearance would have created awkward optics for No Labels because the group had been working to project a united front of opposition to Pelosi’s legislative agenda, which hinges on a plan to hold back a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to maintain leverage over a complementary $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The larger package includes significant tax increases on the private equity barons and other wealthy individuals who fund No Labels, and the group has unleashed a flood of money in order to stop it.
Bourdeaux attended Pelosi’s fundraiser. Gonzalez canceled his appearance. “Absolutely no such agreement was made,” said Isaac Baker, a senior adviser to Gonzalez. Margaret White, executive director of No Labels, denied there was any such offer. “This is false,” she said.
An official with the DCCC said that despite Gonzalez’s lack of attendance, his campaign will still benefit from the fundraiser.
“Congressman Gonzalez spent the weekend at home in McAllen, Texas, to work on safely evacuating Americans and our allies out of Afghanistan, and to monitor the urgent situation at the border and a spike in COVID-19 cases that is overwhelming local hospitals,” Baker added. Bourdeaux did not respond to texts or voicemail messages requesting comment.
On Tuesday afternoon, after the group secured a promise of a floor vote on the infrastructure plan by September 27, Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., the leader of the rebellion; Bourdeaux; Jared Golden, D-Maine; and Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., gathered over Zoom with dozens of No Labels donors for a victory lap. “You should feel so proud, I can’t explain to you, this is the culmination of all your work. This would not have happened but for what you built,” Gottheimer told them, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The Intercept. “It just wouldn’t have happened — hard stop. You should just feel so proud. This is your win as much as it is my win.”
The call was led by Andrew Bursky, managing partner of Atlas Holdings, a major private equity fund in Connecticut, which operates heavily in the construction and development sectors. “When it comes to their ringleader this is about one thing and one thing only: blocking tax increases on the private equity guys who fill his campaign account,” said one House source, reflecting the broadly held view among House Democrats that the effort by Gottheimer and No Labels was singularly focused on preventing tax increases on the wealthy, corporations, and tax-advantaged sectors like private equity and hedge funds. “No Labels professes to value bipartisanship, but from my experience they value ‘buypartisanship,’” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a former No Labels member who resigned from the group when they declined to disclose donor identities. “Clearly they want to advocate for their donors more than good government, and that means things like corporate tax breaks and the like.”
The efforts by No Labels donors come as corporate groups have pushed to defeat the investments in combating inequality funded through taxes on the wealthy and certain business sectors. The finance industry has deployeddozens of lobbyists on Capitol Hill to block the infrastructure provisions centered on increasing taxes on private equity. Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of the largest publicly traded companies in America, has retained former Democratic staffers to fight the tax provisions.
Whether the House’s concession on infrastructure amounts to a win is dubious and hotly debated on Capitol Hill, but there’s no question No Labels has organized its donors to fight the taxing and spending battles of the Biden administration.
In June, No Labels co-founder Nancy Jacobson — the spouse of operative Mark Penn, a mentor to Gottheimer — was explicit in her plan to use donor money to “reward” members of Congress who voted the way the organization insisted, according to audio of another private meeting, which The Intercept obtained that month.
“Now the truth is, there’s no other group in the center that’s putting the hard dollars together,” Jacobson told a group of donors in the June meeting, which also included Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. The term “hard dollars” refers to money given directly to a candidate for federal office, which candidates find more valuable than outside spending because they have full control over their own funds, whereas super PACs make their own spending decisions. Candidates also have access to discounted television commercial rates, while outside groups pay the full freight. Jacobson noted that while many other dark-money organizations put up “big numbers … that’s a lot of soft dollars, it’s a lot of super PACs, it’s things they don’t control. They” — members of Congress — “love the hard dollars, and I would be hard-pressed to think of any other group that can raise that sort of money. Our hope is at least $20 million over the cycle with this group, and hopefully keep doubling it as we go.”
Jacobson added that the recipients of the largesse remained to be determined. “We’re gonna see what happens with this next vote and we want to reward those people that, you know, get to party solutions,” she said.
By making the linkage between votes — known in the legal ethics world as among a set of “official acts” — and campaign funding so explicit and direct, No Labels isn’t just exposing members of Congress it supports to accusations of run-of-the-mill corruption, but also potentially exposing them to legal liability. On the question of whether accepting campaign funds as a “reward” for the right vote on the infrastructure bill would break the law, a Congressional Research Service summary explains that accepting such money could indeed be off-limits, if it was given because of how they voted: “The prohibition on bribery precludes officials from accepting contributions in exchange for performance of an official act. The prohibition on illegal gratuities does not require that the contribution be made in exchange for the official act, but instead precludes officials from accepting contributions made because of the official act.”
On Tuesday, Gottheimer said that both the White House and congressional leadership had put intense pressure on the group, but the support they had from their donors was key to bucking up their strength. “We got on the phone every single day for a conference call and everyone stuck together. And they beat the shit out of us. Excuse my language. They really, really were tough on us. I mean, they used every single thing, every tool they had to put pressure on us and you know it, and they wanted us to break apart and we wouldn’t break apart,” he said during the Zoom meeting. “You had people from the DCCC threaten our members to cut them off financially. People threatened redistricting, people threatened primaries — our own people, our own leadership. Justice Democrats, which is the Squad, are running ads against me and my colleagues in our district right now. But we fought back and you all really helped us.”
Kurt Schrader, the former chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, told the group Tuesday that the so-called win gives them leverage to target the reconciliation package. “This is a big deal. I just wanna thank you guys so much for your support, having our backs, being a big part of why we are, where we are today,” he said.
“Let’s deal with the reconciliation later. Let’s pass that infrastructure package right now, and don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have at this point,” Schrader said. The Oregon lawmaker went on to note that severing the traditional infrastructure vote from the broader package showed that bipartisanship is still alive and well. “You can build real relationships. … I’ve talked to a lot of our Republican Congress members. It’s a huge win.”
On Monday, Pelosi and her leadership team put the screws to Gottheimer and his crew, deploying the range of threats Gottheimer described later. No Labels put out an ad defending what they dubbed the “unbreakable nine,” characterizing them as heroes of our time and comparing them to the late politicians Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Chase Smith, and John McCain.
Aside from Bursky, the Tuesday evening donor call was attended by a slew of some of the country’s richest people, who all stand to pay high taxes thanks to the multitrillion-dollar legislation’s design to balance its spending with revenue increases on corporations and the wealthy. A variety of approaches have been floated, from raising the corporate income tax rate to increasing funding for the IRS so that the agency could pursue audits of complex, high-end tax returns. The bill’s backers also contemplate changing the structure of the tax code for private equity firms and hedge funds, whose partners currently enjoy much lower tax rates than wage earners.
The call’s list of attendees included billionaire Howard Marks, co-chair of Oaktree Capital Partners; Andrew Tisch of Loews Corporation, whose name is plastered around New York City thanks to the Tisch family’s charitable giving; Gordon Segal, the co-founder of Crate & Barrel, now managing director of the private equity firm Prairie Management Group; Kenneth Schiciano, managing director of major private equity firm TA Associates; Pelican Ventures’ Jim Stanard, founder of RenaissanceRe and former chair of TigerRisk Partners LLC; Jim Tozer, managing director of real estate investment firm Vectra Management Group; John Cushman, chair of global transactions at commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield; Steve Fifield, head of his real estate investment firm Fifield Co.; and former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a co-founder of the group.
The source who provided the recording acted out of disappointment that powerful donors would come together to try to sink the side of the spending effort focused on “social economic inequities that we see in this nation.”
The broader reconciliation bill — focused on unprecedented investments in free child care, education, and health care — represents the most transformative program in decades to alleviate poverty, benefits that will disproportionately flow to many communities that have experienced systemic racism in the past. The source said the fact that No Labels would mobilize its strength to defeat such a groundbreaking proposal provided the motivation to share the recording with The Intercept.
“For every one dollar investment in the early development of a child, the returns are double digit, in terms of workforce participation, health care, longevity, crime reduction,” said the source.
“These No Labels donors are overwhelmingly old, rich and white people, from finance and from Wall Street,” the source added, noting that deficit concerns are only raised in the context of spending, not when taxes on the rich are slashed. “They don’t mind the tax cuts [they got previously]. And they don’t talk about ‘pay-fors’ when it’s a tax cut. They only care when it’s a program to confront systemic racism that is embedded in the numbers in terms of poverty.”
