thenation--2020-05-22--Trump Has No Secret Intel on the Coronavirus’s Origins

There ’ s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media : “ Those who don ’ t study history are doomed to repeat it .
Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.
” That ’ s funny .
What ’ s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers , led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton , have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hussein ’ s Iraq .
At that time , the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the US intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear , biological , and chemical weapons .
Fantasy claims they may have been , but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral , illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed .
This time around , it ’ s the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Covid-19—maybe man-made , maybe not , advocates of this conspiracy theory argue—was released perhaps deliberately , perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan , China , the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year .
It ’ s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right , from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars ’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself , including President Trump .
Unlike with Iraq in 2003 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planning on going to war with China , at least not yet .
But the Trump administration ’ s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China ’ s alleged culpability in creating a worldwide health crisis only raises tensions precipitously between the planet ’ s two great powers at a terrible moment .
In the process , it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures .
That makes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter of life and death .
Back in 2002 , the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify , distort , and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein ’ s Baghdad .
At the Pentagon , neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intelligence on Iraq .
Just in case the message didn ’ t get across , Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley , Va. , to badger analysts to come up with something useful .
In 2003 , in “ The Lie Factory , ” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones , we reported on how Wolfowitz , Feith , allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode , and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser , then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Donald Trump on Iran ) , actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence .
A year later , veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book , A Pretext for War .
In 2020 , however , President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community , or IC .
He ’ s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there .
His bitter antipathy began even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC , including the CIA and FBI , that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election .
Since then , he ’ s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “ the deep state.
” And he ’ s assigned his authoritarian attorney general , Bill Barr , to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller , the FBI , and the Justice Department itself , most recently by dropping charges against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s first national security adviser .
To make sure that the IC doesn ’ t challenge his wishes and does his bidding , Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence , or ODNI , created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11 .
The effort began in February when Trump named US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI .
A highly partisan , sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former national security adviser John Bolton , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump loyalist , as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon .
On arriving in Bonn as ambassador , Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe ’ s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon ’ s Breitbart News .
To bolster Grenell , the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader , Kash Patel .
He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes ’ s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tarring former vice president Joe Biden .
Following that , Trump renamed Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas , one of the president ’ s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment , to serve as Grenell ’ s permanent replacement at ODNI .
In 2019 , Trump first floated Ratcliffe ’ s name for the post , but it was shot down days later , thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress , not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits .
Now , he ’ s back , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag team , combined with Trump ’ s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries , has softened them up enough for the administration ’ s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19 .
As is often the case , that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets .
On January 24 , the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “ Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London ’ s Daily Mail the previous day .
Written like a science-fiction thriller , that story drew nearly all its ( unverified ) information from a single source , an Israeli military intelligence China specialist .
Soon , it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets .
Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast , “ War Room : Pandemic , ” calling the piece “ amazing.
” A few days later , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( later much-debunked ) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus , purporting even to name the scientist .
A couple of weeks later , Fox News weighed in , laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel , The Eyes of Darkness , about “ a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.
” The day after that , Senator Tom Cotton—appearing on Fox , of course—agreed that China might indeed have created the virus .
Then the idea began to go… @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus . )
By late February , the right ’ s loudest voice , Rush Limbaugh , was on the case , claiming that the virus “ is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.
” ( A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index . )
Starting in March , even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19 , both Trump and Secretary of State @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it as the “ China virus ” or the “ Wuhan virus , ” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory .
In late March , Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America ’ s allies in the Group of Seven , or G7 , by demanding that they agree to use the term “ Wuhan virus.
” It didn ’ t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19 , while he began comparing the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pearl Harbor .
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ’ s ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged , whether by design or accident , from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control , a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
An April 30 article in The New York Times broke the story that administration officials “ have pushed American spy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan , China , was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak , ” and that Grenell had made it a “ priority.
” Both Trump and Pompeo would , in the meantime , repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “ evidence ” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab , though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn ’ t say anything more about it .
“ I can ’ t tell you that , ” he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to tell you that.
” Asked during an appearance on ABC ’ s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan , Pompeo answered : “ There is enormous evidence that that ’ s where this began.
” On April 30t , the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement , saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “ not manmade or genetically modified , ” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “ the result of an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There is , however , no evidence of such an accident , nor did the ODNI cite any .
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002–03 should be on all our minds today .
Then , top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein ’ s nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear , chemical , and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them ( while paying no attention to their conclusions ) .
Now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality , while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear .
Because those professionals know that their careers , salaries , and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them , there is , of course , a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands , shade what IC officials call the “ estimate ” in the direction the White House wants , or at least keep their mouths shut .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , given that Grenell , Patel , and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies , the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them .
There was near-instant pushback from scientists , intelligence officials , and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab .
Dr. Anthony Fauci , the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert , promptly shot it down , saying that the virus had “ evolved in nature and then jumped species.
” That ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ genome of the virus and its mutations , unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab .
Among America ’ s allies—Australia , Britain , Canada , and New Zealand—in what ’ s called the Five Eyes group , there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “ naturally occurring ” one and had mutated in the course of “ human and animal interaction.
” Australia , in particular , rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab , while German officials in an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ a calculated attempt to distract ” attention from the Trump administration ’ s own inept handling of the virus .
Finally , according to Bloomberg News , those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “ largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.
” In the end , however , that doesn ’ t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won ’ t tailor their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ John McLaughlin , who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration , believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago .
“ What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida , ” he said .
“ They kept asking the CIA , and we kept coming back and saying , ‘ You know , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Whether the tug-of-war between Trump , Pompeo , and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “ deep state ” or whether it ’ s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen .
Ironically enough , in January and February of this year , the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus , following clarion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide—warnings that Trump either failed to notice , disregarded , or downplayed through March .
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy , he might have paid more attention back then .
Had he done so , there would undoubtedly be many fewer dead Americans right now and he wouldn ’ t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days .

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There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the US intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.
This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19—maybe man-made, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue—was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the United States isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet. But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a worldwide health crisis only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002–03, a matter of life and death.
Iraq Redux?
Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans. It was dedicated to fabricating intelligence on Iraq. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory,” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial adviser to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 book, A Pretext for War.
In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state.” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security adviser. Current Issue View our current issue
To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former national security adviser John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview with Bannon’s Breitbart News.
To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel. He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former vice president Joe Biden.
Following that, Trump renamed Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back, awaiting likely confirmation.
It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.
The Wuhan Lab Lies
As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.
On January 24, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece that had appeared in London’s Daily Mail the previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic,” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.
A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in, laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton—appearing on Fox, of course—agreed that China might indeed have created the virus. Then the idea began to go… well, viral. (Soon Cotton was even tweeting that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index.)
Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, while he began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
And all of that was but a prelude to the White House’s ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30 article in The New York Times broke the story that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”
Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”
On April 30t, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement, saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.
A Finger on the Scale
The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002–03 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, and bioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.
Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.
There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down, saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree that it was not generated in a lab.
Among America’s allies—Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand—in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.”Australia, in particular, rejected what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.
Finally, according to Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.
John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida,” he said. “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”
Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “deep state” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following clarion calls from China and the World Health Organization that what was happening in Wuhan could spread worldwide—warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.
Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many fewer dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.
By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.


thenation--2020-05-22--Cruise Ship of State

Cruise Ship of State

A president without a moral compass steers us toward the rocks .

Cruise Ship of State
Cruise Ship of State
A president without a moral compass steers us toward the rocks.


thenation--2020-05-23--The Infinite Heartbreak of Loving Hong Kong

Twenty-three years after the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong , the Chinese government has announced that it is imposing a long-dreaded “ national security ” law on the territory , effectively criminalizing dissent .
Just as stunning as the content of the law is how it will be passed : Instead of moving through Hong Kong ’ s legislature—which is already rigged in favor of the city ’ s unpopular pro-Beijing establishment—the law will be enacted unilaterally by China ’ s top lawmaking body , the National People ’ s Congress Standing Committee .
It ’ s a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incontestability and Beijing ’ s total authority over Hong Kong and its people.1 Something profound has been lost .
It is not democracy , because Hong Kong was never democratic .
It is not autonomy , because Hong Kong never enjoyed self-determination .
It is certainly not the will to resist ; as I write this , activists are already planning a full calendar of mass protests , determined to fight until the bitter end.2 What is lost is the feeling that Hong Kong ’ s future could be an open question .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ beginning of a new disorientation.3 In the near term , Hong Kongers ’ greatest concern is safety .
The law could be approved by next week and enacted by June .
Officials close to Beijing suggest the law may be enforced by state security agents , the same group known for “ disappearing ” mainland activists without trial .
This will have wide-reaching consequences in Hong Kong .
The city is not only home to pro-democracy activists ( and recently , a burgeoning union movement ) , it has long been a refuge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dissidents , and a base for groups fighting to protect migrants , refugees , queer folks , sex workers , and other communities , both in Hong Kong and across the border .
The city also headquarters journalists from all over the world , including many from mainland China.4 Hong Kong Was Never Built to Stand Up to China Until recently , all of these people worked relatively freely in Hong Kong .
They were able to speak critically of authorities without fearing government reprisal .
But if the new law is anything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will soon be over .
Already , Hong Kongers anticipating increased surveillance have rushed to download VPNs , lock down their social media accounts , and scrub their public profiles of any traces of political opposition .
5 The danger is not theoretical .
In recent weeks , under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic , the Hong Kong Police Force has rounded up and arrested hundreds of pro-democracy protesters , as well as prominent activists , on charges of everything from disorderly conduct to violating anti-virus measures .
Officers have pepper sprayed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forcing them to the pavement ; one photojournalist said she was choked .
This follows nearly a year of protests during which more than 8,000 people , including children as young as ten , are believed to have been arrested .
Some protesters later reported they were tortured and sexually assaulted in detention.6 It bears repeating that the protest movement ’ s central “ five demands ” are astonishingly humble .
Its participants first mobilized around a single ask : that the local government withdraw an ill-conceived extradition bill that would ’ ve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opaque legal system .
When Hong Kong ’ s leader Carrie Lam responded with a police crackdown , protesters cohered into a movement : They began to call for an investigation into police violence , for the government to stop calling the protests “ riots ” ( which exposes protesters to rioting charges , punishable by up to ten years in prison ) , amnesty for detainees , and the free elections long promised by Beijing itself.7 These demands are hardly radical ; polls show they ’ re supported by a decisive majority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chinese Communist Party ’ s dishonest rationale for the new national security law , which is that the protest movement somehow represents separatism or even terrorism .
In reality , Hong Kong ’ s present crisis is wholly a creation of the state ’ s refusal to engage with the people ’ s concerns—and its decision to , instead , bring violence against them.8 It could have turned out so differently .
In 1984 , when the United Kingdom and China inked the treaty called the Sino-British Joint Declaration , the two countries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years , ” and that the city ’ s residents would eventually elect their own leader .
At the time , many of Hong Kong ’ s pro-democracy activists sympathized deeply with the mainland , and spoke passionately of bringing liberal-progressive values to China—a desire echoed by reformers in China ’ s top ranks .
In 1984 , before the Joint Declaration was signed , a group of Hong Kong University students mailed a letter to Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang to ask whether they could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ handover .
His response from May 22 , almost exactly 36 years ago : “ It is a matter of course.
” 9 Since then , Hong Kong ’ s pro-democracy movement has been defined by one heartbreak after another .
The first was the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square .
The incident effectively extinguished the Chinese democracy movement , along with the lives of peaceful demonstrators .
This unspeakable act of violence tore open a chasm between authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong ’ s stunned democrats , whose cautious optimism was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came in 2014 , when years of attempts by Hong Kong ’ s democrats to pass a reform package for free elections ended in defeat .
As a last-ditch effort to restart the reform process , student activists led a massive , 79-day street occupation around Hong Kong ’ s government headquarters—the Umbrella Movement—which authorities ultimately cleared by force , without making a single concession .
The failure of that movement opened the gates to rapidly accelerating repression : In the years that followed , its leaders were jailed , and opposition-party legislators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ booksellers who had published volumes critical of Xi Jinping were abducted across the border , where they were imprisoned and forced to record confessions .
So when the extradition bill was proposed last year , it was seen as the final straw.11 We are experiencing a third heartbreak now .
If the path from the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration to the extradition bill was marked with increasingly ominous warnings , the national security law is the point of no return .
From here on , Hong Kongers will be no longer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government—Beijing ’ s inept and obsequious proxy—but against the CCP itself .
And nobody knows exactly how to proceed.12 The problem speaks to a moment of global danger .
It is no coincidence that Hong Kong ’ s increasing desperation has mirrored China ’ s worsening relations with the United States .
Since its inception as a colonial trading post , Hong Kong ’ s defining characteristic has been its in-betweenness .
China ’ s euphemism for Hong Kong ’ s postcolonial status— “ one country , two systems ” —points to its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an interface for capital between China and the West .
The territory has never been allowed to derive stability from its own resources or interests , but rather from the intersections of multiple others ’ .
Hong Kong ’ s place in the world depends on its ability to mediate between external powers .
Its existential struggle is likewise a symptom of a larger collapse.13 The last time Hong Kong faced a comparable crisis was more than 50 years ago , at the height of the Cold War and the beginning of China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , spilled-over unrest from the mainland sparked with local labor grievances , igniting a violent anti-colonial uprising that pushed the occupying British regime to the brink .
What ’ s happening now is a kind of cruel inversion : The same brutal policing tactics and authoritarian legal frameworks developed by the British to suppress leftist dissent are being recycled by Chinese authorities against pro-democracy Hong Kongers .
The CCP constantly casts itself as the answer to Western imperialism .
But Chinese state media now argues Hong Kong ’ s new national security law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ British security framework—in other words , that it wants to bolster , not dismantle , the colonial machinery of repression.14 Today , Hong Kong is caught within the contradictions of global capitalism .
The cosmopolitan , at times even utopianist neoliberalism of the 1990s—when Hong Kong enjoyed its heyday—has unraveled through repeated financial crises .
The result is a world that has not so much rejected market ideologies , as it has locked into increasingly bitter , nationalist competition , with powerful states wrestling for control over diminishing returns .
The Covid-19 pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a shared international response .
Instead , it has only exacerbated the fallout , with top officials in the United States and China—our “ global leaders ” —hurling conspiracy theories at each other over social media.15 The middle ground that Hong Kong occupies is more precarious than ever .
Denied agency , increasing numbers of Hong Kongers feel pressure to align with an external power—if not the CCP , then the West .
Last fall , some pro-democracy Hong Kongers took the new step of directly lobbying the United States for assistance .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ wield yet another symbolic cudgel against China , signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law last September .
The act purports to “ safeguard ” the city ’ s autonomy using a type of suicidal logic : Whereas current US policy treats Hong Kong as an entity separate from China for the purposes of trade and immigration , the HKHRDA threatens to revoke this policy altogether , should China continue to infringe upon Hong Kong ’ s autonomy .
The unspoken assumption is China would not dare hurt its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ goose that lays the golden eggs .
With the new Hong Kong national security law , China has called the United States ’ bluff.16 It ’ s unclear what Hong Kongers could still accomplish by continuing to lobby the US government , providing ammunition for a conflict in which Hong Kongers would be the first to suffer .
But neither is it straightforward for Hong Kongers to align with mainland Chinese , despite now facing increasingly similar state repression .
Intense censorship on the mainland makes it difficult to gauge the level of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activists , artists , writers , and ordinary internet users have been detained for expressing even mild support for the protests .
Moreover , Chinese state media appears determined to continue its false portrayal of Hong Kong democrats as secessionist traitors , if not foreign operatives—a storyline designed to whip up domestic nationalist fervor .
Even Hong Kong-based labor rights groups , community organizations , and social activists have found it increasingly impossible to work in China , thanks to the central party ’ s intensifying crackdown against NGOs.17 To make things worse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up a minority of protesters—have harassed and even assaulted mainland Chinese immigrants , tourists , and workers .
This all but forecloses the few viable paths forward for solidarity.18 An escape route for Hong Kong could ’ ve meant an escape route for all of us .
Few other places have served as such a dramatic meeting point , where competing desires are held in continuous tension .
Hong Kong ’ s defiance of geopolitical binaries made it a rare space for their negotiation .
Certainly , Hong Kong ’ s exceptionality has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of colonizers , compradors , financiers , and oligarchs for whom the city was chiefly designed .
Hong Kong is also a space contested and shaped by the struggles of migrants and misfits , dreamers and dissidents who—as oppressed people have so often done—found in the intersections of contradictory systems a starting point for their own rebellions.19 The way out was never going to be simple .
Liberating Hong Kong from any law or state power , from the totality of these clashing histories , would require undoing colonialism , capitalism , nationalism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This was both Hong Kong ’ s impossible challenge and the source of its emancipatory potential : to not just stand at the midpoint of competing poles , but produce alternative ways of being.20 We have briefly glimpsed these new worlds .
During the Umbrella Movement , thundering traffic overpasses became tranquil encampments ; during the ongoing protests , elderly Hong Kongers stand on the frontlines to protect young protesters from police , while students-turned-volunteer medics cleanse strangers ’ eyes of tear gas .
This is the spirit that has allowed Hong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inaction during the pandemic—to wear masks , and survive .
This consciousness often feels like a new , invisible society overlaid upon the old .
It is an idea that is hard to describe in ways an economist , party official , or American congressperson would find legible .
It is also , I believe , the true source of people ’ s deep love for Hong Kong.21 Our lives can not become permanent political mobilizations .
If Hong Kong ’ s future can not be won on our own terms , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our stories .
Hong Kongers mark the anniversaries of pivotal dates like secret codes : We refer to 8-3-1 , 7-1 , 6-4 , and , now , 5-2-1 .
Some of these dates represent bitter political tragedies , others moments of euphoric togetherness—each of them a waypoint toward our shared self-knowledge .
Languages like these do not so much circumvent censorship as guard against forgetting .
Knowing the CCP ’ s efforts to bury remembrances of similar events in China under the sediment of disinformation , we will need even more imaginative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , while protests still raged in the streets , a Hong Kong internet user started a Facebook thread asking friends what they would do with their lives if the city became truly free .
The post—now deleted—went viral , as protesters glimpsed each other under the masks .
Some responses were refreshingly quotidian : “ I want to open a fishball stand , ” wrote one person , “ Because I like eating curry fishballs.
” Many others expressed the desire to become storytellers , archivists , museum curators , librarians , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to tell children how their brothers and sisters fought for them.
” 23 One day , perhaps beyond our lifetimes , these dreams could guide Hong Kongers home .
24

Twenty-three years after the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has announced that it is imposing a long-dreaded “national security” law on the territory, effectively criminalizing dissent. Just as stunning as the content of the law is how it will be passed: Instead of moving through Hong Kong’s legislature—which is already rigged in favor of the city’s unpopular pro-Beijing establishment—the law will be enacted unilaterally by China’s top lawmaking body, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee. It’s a declaration of both the law’s incontestability and Beijing’s total authority over Hong Kong and its people.
Something profound has been lost. It is not democracy, because Hong Kong was never democratic. It is not autonomy, because Hong Kong never enjoyed self-determination. It is certainly not the will to resist; as I write this, activists are already planning a full calendar of mass protests, determined to fight until the bitter end.
What is lost is the feeling that Hong Kong’s future could be an open question. China’s apparent answer marks the beginning of a new disorientation.
In the near term, Hong Kongers’ greatest concern is safety. The law could be approved by next week and enacted by June. Officials close to Beijing suggest the law may be enforced by state security agents, the same group known for “disappearing” mainland activists without trial. This will have wide-reaching consequences in Hong Kong. The city is not only home to pro-democracy activists (and recently, a burgeoning union movement); it has also long been a refuge for China’s labor organizers and dissidents and a base for groups fighting to protect migrants, refugees, queer folks, sex workers, and other communities, both in Hong Kong and across the border. The city also headquarters journalists from all over the world, including many from mainland China. Related Article Hong Kong Was Never Built to Stand Up to China Yukiko Kobayashi Lui
Until recently, all of these people worked relatively freely in Hong Kong. They were able to speak critically of authorities without fearing government reprisal. But if the new law is anything like its mainland counterpart, those days will soon be over. Already, Hong Kongers anticipating increased surveillance have rushed to download VPNs, lock down their social media accounts, and scrub their public profiles of any traces of political opposition. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
The danger is not theoretical. In recent weeks, under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic, the Hong Kong Police Force has rounded up and arrested hundreds of pro-democracy protesters, as well as some prominent activists, on charges of everything from disorderly conduct to violating anti-virus measures. Officers have pepper-sprayed reporters who were covering a protest, forcing them to the pavement; one photojournalist said she was choked. This follows nearly a year of protests during which more than 8,000 people, including children as young as 10, are believed to have been arrested. Some protesters later reported they were tortured and sexually assaulted in detention.
It bears repeating that the protest movement’s central five demands are astonishingly humble. Its participants first mobilized around a single ask: that the local government withdraw an ill-conceived extradition bill that would have exposed Hong Kongers to China’s opaque legal system. When Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam responded with a police crackdown, protesters cohered into a movement: They began to demand an investigation into police violence, that the government stop calling the protests “riots” (which exposes protesters to rioting charges, punishable by up to 10 years in prison), amnesty for detainees, and the free elections long promised by Beijing.
These demands are hardly radical. Polls show that they’re supported by a decisive majority of Hong Kongers. This undercuts the Chinese Communist Party’s dishonest rationale for the new national security law, which is that the protest movement somehow represents separatism or even terrorism. In reality, Hong Kong’s present crisis is wholly a creation of the state’s refusal to engage with the people’s concerns—and its decision to, instead, bring violence against them.
Police officers wielding pepper spray run into a group of protesters and journalists at a shopping mall in Hong Kong, May 10, 2020. (Yat Kai Yeung / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
It could have turned out very differently. In 1984, when the United Kingdom and China inked the treaty called the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the two countries agreed that Hong Kong’s “way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years” and that the city’s residents would eventually elect their own leader. At the time, many of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists sympathized deeply with the mainland and spoke passionately of bringing liberal-progressive values to China—a desire echoed by reformers in China’s top ranks. In 1984, before the Joint Declaration was signed, a group of Hong Kong University students mailed a letter to Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang to ask whether they could expect a democratic Hong Kong after the handover. His response from May 22, almost exactly 36 years ago: “It is a matter of course.”
Since then, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement has been defined by one heartbreak after another. The first was the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. The episode effectively extinguished the Chinese democracy movement, along with the lives of peaceful demonstrators. This unspeakable act of violence tore open a chasm between authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong’s stunned democrats, whose cautious optimism was replaced by intense fear.
The second heartbreak came in 2014, when years of attempts by Hong Kong’s democrats to pass a reform package for free elections ended in defeat. As a last-ditch effort to restart the reform process, student activists led a massive, 79-day street occupation around Hong Kong’s government headquarters—the Umbrella Movement—which authorities ultimately cleared by force, without making a single concession. The failure of that movement opened the gates to rapidly accelerating repression. In the years that followed, its leaders were jailed, and opposition-party legislators were ejected from their seats. Small-time booksellers who had published volumes critical of Xi Jinping were abducted at the border and spirited away to prison, where they were forced to record confessions. So when the extradition bill was proposed last year, it was seen as the final straw.
We are experiencing a third heartbreak now. If the path from the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration to the extradition bill was marked with increasingly ominous warnings, the national security law is the point of no return. From here on, Hong Kongers will be no longer be organizing just against the Hong Kong government—Beijing’s inept and obsequious proxy—but against the CCP itself. And nobody knows exactly how to proceed.
The problem speaks to a moment of global danger. It is no coincidence that Hong Kong’s increasing desperation has mirrored China’s worsening relations with the United States. Since its inception as a colonial trading post, Hong Kong’s defining characteristic has been its in-betweenness. China’s euphemism for Hong Kong’s postcolonial status—one country, two systems—points to its raison d’être: to be an interface for capital between China and the West. The territory has never been allowed to derive stability from its own resources or interests but rather from the intersections of multiple others’. Hong Kong’s place in the world depends on its ability to mediate between external powers. Its existential struggle is likewise a symptom of a larger collapse.
The last time Hong Kong faced a comparable crisis was more than 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War and the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. In 1966, spilled-over unrest from the mainland sparked with local labor grievances, igniting a violent anti-colonial uprising that pushed the occupying British regime to the brink. What’s happening now is a kind of cruel inversion: The same brutal policing tactics and authoritarian legal frameworks developed by the British to suppress leftist dissent are being recycled by Chinese authorities against pro-democracy Hong Kongers. The CCP constantly casts itself as the answer to Western imperialism. But Chinese state media now argues Hong Kong’s new national security law would improve on the “frail” British security framework—in other words, that it wants to bolster, not dismantle, the colonial machinery of repression.
Today, Hong Kong is caught within the contradictions of global capitalism. The cosmopolitan, at times even utopianist neoliberalism of the 1990s—when Hong Kong enjoyed its heyday—has unraveled through repeated financial crises. The result is a world that has not so much rejected market ideologies as it has been locked into increasingly bitter, nationalist competition, with powerful states wrestling for control over diminishing returns. The Covid-19 pandemic could have been an opportunity for a shared international response. Instead, it has only exacerbated the fallout, with top officials in the United States and China—our “global leaders”—hurling conspiracy theories at each other over social media. Related Article Congress’s Hong Kong Bill Is Giving Cover to Nationalism Tobita Chow and Jake Werner
The middle ground that Hong Kong occupies is more precarious than ever. Denied agency, increasing numbers of Hong Kongers feel pressure to align with an external power—if not the CCP, then the West. Last fall, some pro-democracy Hong Kongers took the new step of directly lobbying the United States for assistance. US lawmakers eagerly accepted the chance to wield yet another symbolic cudgel against China, signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law last September. The act purports to “safeguard” the city’s autonomy using a type of suicidal logic: Whereas current US policy treats Hong Kong as an entity separate from China for the purposes of trade and immigration, the act threatens to revoke this policy, should China continue to infringe upon Hong Kong’s autonomy. The unspoken assumption is China would not dare hurt its prized conduit to global capital, the goose that lays the golden eggs. With the new Hong Kong national security law, China has called the United States’ bluff.
It’s unclear what Hong Kongers could still accomplish by continuing to lobby the US government, providing ammunition for a conflict in which Hong Kongers would be the first to suffer. But neither is it straightforward for Hong Kongers to align with mainland Chinese, despite their now facing increasingly similar state repression. Intense censorship on the mainland makes it difficult to gauge the level of sympathy for Hong Kong democracy; Chinese activists, artists, writers, and ordinary Internet users have been detained for expressing even mild support for the protests. Moreover, Chinese state media appears determined to continue its false portrayal of Hong Kong democrats as secessionist traitors, if not foreign operatives—a storyline designed to whip up domestic nationalist fervor. Even Hong Kong–based labor rights groups, community organizations, and social activists have found it increasingly impossible to work in China, thanks to the central party’s intensifying crackdown against NGOs.
To make things worse, some hard-line nativist Hong Kongers—who make up a minority of protesters—have harassed and even assaulted mainland Chinese immigrants, tourists, and workers. This all but forecloses the few viable paths forward for solidarity.
An escape route for Hong Kong could have meant an escape route for all of us. Few other places have served as such a dramatic meeting point, where competing desires are held in continuous tension. Hong Kong’s defiance of geopolitical binaries made it a rare space for their negotiation. Certainly, Hong Kong’s exceptionality has been the key to enriching the generations of colonizers, compradors, financiers, and oligarchs for whom the city was chiefly designed. Hong Kong is also a space contested and shaped by the struggles of migrants and misfits, dreamers and dissidents who—as oppressed people have so often done—found in the intersections of contradictory systems a starting point for rebellions.
The way out was never going to be simple. Liberating Hong Kong from any law or state power, from the totality of these clashing histories, would require undoing colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism all at once. This was both Hong Kong’s impossible challenge and the source of its emancipatory potential: to not just stand at the midpoint of competing poles but also produce alternative ways of being.
We have briefly glimpsed these new worlds. During the Umbrella Movement, thundering traffic overpasses became tranquil encampments; today, elderly Hong Kongers stand on the front lines to protect younger protesters from police, while students-turned-volunteer medics cleanse strangers’ eyes of tear gas. This is the spirit that has allowed Hong Kongers to quickly organize themselves despite government inaction during the pandemic—to wear masks and to survive. This consciousness often feels like a new, invisible society overlaid on the old. It is an idea that is hard to describe in ways an economist, party official, or American congressperson would find legible. It is also, I believe, the true source of people’s deep love for Hong Kong.
Our lives cannot become permanent political mobilizations. If Hong Kong’s future cannot be won on our terms, we can at least complicate its emergence with our stories. Hong Kongers mark the anniversaries of pivotal dates like secret codes: We refer to 8-3-1, 7-1, 6-4, and, now, 5-2-1. Some of these dates represent bitter political tragedies, others moments of euphoric togetherness—each of them a way point toward our shared self-knowledge. Languages like these do not so much circumvent censorship as guard against forgetting. Knowing the CCP’s efforts to bury remembrances of similar events in China under the sediment of disinformation, we will need even more imaginative strategies for what lies ahead.
Last fall, while protests still raged in the streets, a Hong Kong Internet user started a Facebook thread asking friends what they would do with their lives if the city became truly free. The post—now deleted—went viral, as protesters glimpsed one another under the masks. Some responses were refreshingly quotidian: “I want to open a fishball stand,” wrote one person, “because I like eating curry fishballs.” Many others expressed the desire to become storytellers, archivists, museum curators, librarians, to preserve narratives of resistance: “I want to tell children how their brothers and sisters fought for them.”
One day, perhaps beyond our lifetimes, these dreams could guide Hong Kongers home.


thenation--2020-05-25--A Death in the Extended Nation Family: Omar Portillo, 1956–2020

The building where The Nation offices have been housed for the last three-and-a-half years is a sturdy neoclassical structure—all beige brick and upper terraces—hovering over the tumult of the Garment District .
For nearly 100 years , it has watched over the neighborhood , been part of the neighborhood , a hive buzzing within a vast , frenetic ecosystem .
Tending to that hive , keeping it humming , has been a dedicated band of janitors and freight operators , doormen and porters , handymen , superintendents , and jacks of all trade .
On March 27 , the building @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Omar Portillo .
A gentle soul who had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to working as a handyman in the building , Omar died from complications of the novel coronavirus in a crowded Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick , Brooklyn .
He would have turned 64 years old the next day .
He was a father of two daughters in Honduras and two sons in New York , a grandfather , and a husband to his wife , Scarlett .
He was also an adored colleague , known for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all remember Omar in the office for his warm hugs—he always asked everyone how they were doing and most importantly how their families were doing , ” wrote Jessica Leon , assistant manager for GFP Real Estate , which owns and operates the building where Omar worked , in an e-mail .
“ Our office will never be the same now.
” The Honduran native moved from his home in San Pedro Sula to New York City in the early 1980s and began working for GFP Real Estate in the mid-1990s .
After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his coworkers organized a fundraiser to help his family .
The fundraiser page is filled with comments in both English and Spanish from coworkers , friends , and relatives back in Honduras that have posted about how much they love and will miss Omar .
“ Omar was a beam of light in a dark world , my friend and such a beautiful soul , ” his coworker Nicole wrote .
Omar ’ s stepson , Eduardo Barahona , said that Omar was one of the first employees to be sent home when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ building .
Soon after , his son noticed that he was coughing .
Omar was worried about his coworkers and was upset to be stuck at home instead of working .
He had worked since the age of 12 and loved being around his coworkers .
“ Work was everything to him—work and family , ” Barahona said .
Omar loved family trips , and Barahona ’ s memories are filled with long summertime drives down to Florida and months spent in Honduras visiting family .
Omar had raised Barahona since he was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ grandfather to Barahona ’ s son .
In so many of the photos posted online by friends and family , Omar is seen with his thick cap of white and gray hair , smiling gently , putting his arm around someone or hugging them .
In one photo , a slightly younger Barahona can be seen sitting at a table with a birthday balloon as Omar gives him a kiss on the cheek .
Barahona remembers how funny and cheerful Omar was and how he tried to look on the bright side .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ remembers Omar saying that he was all right—and trying to cheer up everyone else around him .
Barahona also described how his mother and Omar would jokingly argue about what songs to listen to on the radio during one of the many long family drives .
Omar was a salsa and merengue lover , while Scarlett loved boleros and older romantic songs .
Barahona ’ s mother and Omar had dated back in Honduras when they were teenagers but lost touch when Scarlett moved to the United States with a relative .
Years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States , Omar and Scarlett bumped into each other and reconnected .
They rekindled a relationship in the early ‘ 90s and were married a few years later , Barahona said .
“ I feel like they were destined to be together , ” he said .
Over the years , Omar ’ s coworkers have gotten to know his family and have reached out to share memories and offer their condolences .
Barahona isn ’ t surprised that so many people have contributed to and commented on the fundraiser for his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the legacy Omar left behind as a worker and a friend .
“ It ’ s something I definitely feed off of , especially in these times , because it ’ s hard , ” Barahona said .
“ I remember how he was so driven regardless… .
This man was like , ‘ We ’ re gon na get through this , ’ and that ’ s what ’ s keeping me positive…because of his memory .
”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
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The building where The Nation offices have been housed for the last three-and-a-half years is a sturdy neoclassical structure—all beige brick and upper terraces—hovering over the tumult of the Garment District. For nearly 100 years, it has watched over the neighborhood, been part of the neighborhood, a hive buzzing within a vast, frenetic ecosystem. Tending to that hive, keeping it humming, has been a dedicated band of janitors and freight operators, doormen and porters, handymen, superintendents, and jacks of all trade.
On March 27, the building lost a member of that band, Omar Portillo. A gentle soul who had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to working as a handyman in the building, Omar died from complications of the novel coronavirus in a crowded Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He would have turned 64 years old the next day. He was a father of two daughters in Honduras and two sons in New York, a grandfather, and a husband to his wife, Scarlett. He was also an adored colleague, known for his kindness and warmth.
“We all remember Omar in the office for his warm hugs—he always asked everyone how they were doing and most importantly how their families were doing,” wrote Jessica Leon, assistant manager for GFP Real Estate, which owns and operates the building where Omar worked, in an e-mail. “Our office will never be the same now.”
The Honduran native moved from his home in San Pedro Sula to New York City in the early 1980s and began working for GFP Real Estate in the mid-1990s. After Omar’s passing, one of his coworkers organized a fundraiser to help his family. The fundraiser page is filled with comments in both English and Spanish from coworkers, friends, and relatives back in Honduras that have posted about how much they love and will miss Omar.
“Omar was a beam of light in a dark world, my friend and such a beautiful soul,” his coworker Nicole wrote. Current Issue View our current issue
Omar’s stepson, Eduardo Barahona, said that Omar was one of the first employees to be sent home when concerns about Covid-19 began rippling through the building. Soon after, his son noticed that he was coughing. Omar was worried about his coworkers and was upset to be stuck at home instead of working. He had worked since the age of 12 and loved being around his coworkers.
“Work was everything to him—work and family,” Barahona said.
Omar loved family trips, and Barahona’s memories are filled with long summertime drives down to Florida and months spent in Honduras visiting family. Omar had raised Barahona since he was 8 years old and loved being a grandfather to Barahona’s son. In so many of the photos posted online by friends and family, Omar is seen with his thick cap of white and gray hair, smiling gently, putting his arm around someone or hugging them. In one photo, a slightly younger Barahona can be seen sitting at a table with a birthday balloon as Omar gives him a kiss on the cheek.
Barahona remembers how funny and cheerful Omar was and how he tried to look on the bright side. Even when he was sick, Barahona remembers Omar saying that he was all right—and trying to cheer up everyone else around him.
Barahona also described how his mother and Omar would jokingly argue about what songs to listen to on the radio during one of the many long family drives. Omar was a salsa and merengue lover, while Scarlett loved boleros and older romantic songs. Barahona’s mother and Omar had dated back in Honduras when they were teenagers but lost touch when Scarlett moved to the United States with a relative. Years later, both then living in the United States, Omar and Scarlett bumped into each other and reconnected. They rekindled a relationship in the early ‘90s and were married a few years later, Barahona said.
“I feel like they were destined to be together,” he said.
Over the years, Omar’s coworkers have gotten to know his family and have reached out to share memories and offer their condolences. Barahona isn’t surprised that so many people have contributed to and commented on the fundraiser for his stepfather; it’s part of the legacy Omar left behind as a worker and a friend.
“It’s something I definitely feed off of, especially in these times, because it’s hard,” Barahona said. “I remember how he was so driven regardless…. This man was like, ‘We’re gonna get through this,’ and that’s what’s keeping me positive…because of his memory.”


thenation--2020-05-25--In New Zealand, David Confronts 2 Goliaths

After the election of Donald Trump , New Zealand became the go-to option for terrified Americans fantasizing about emigration .
Three years later , New Zealand has burnished its reputation as a credible refuge by successfully confronting two epidemics that continue to plague the United States—one political , the other medical .
New Zealand ’ s most recent success has been its handling of the coronavirus .
After seven weeks of an extraordinarily stringent lockdown—closed borders , suspended in-country travel , no takeout—the government has managed to keep Covid-19 infections at 1,500 , with only 21 deaths .
That ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 246 per million in the United States .
Thanks to rigorous testing and an updated contact tracing system , New Zealand has brought its active caseload to below 100 ( as of this writing ) .
Last week , Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced further steps to open the economy so that Kiwis can once again visit restaurants , movie theaters , and gyms .
The borders remain effectively closed , and Ardern promises to reimpose strict controls if cases spike .
But few other democratic countries can claim this kind of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zealand has a couple of advantages over other countries .
It ’ s a relatively small , isolated island nation with a very low population density .
It has a strong social welfare system that even its conservatives support .
Perhaps most importantly , the government and the people were tested a year ago by a different kind of outbreak .
New Zealand ’ s effective handling of the coronavirus was prefigured by its dramatic response to a right-wing murder spree in the country ’ s second-largest city .
I Left Norway ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Difference Is Shocking .
On March 15 , 2019 , a white supremacist originally from New South Wales in Australia opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch , killing 51 people and injuring 49 .
The shooter advertised his far-right credentials by titling his manifesto “ The Great Replacement , ” which linked him to other anti-immigration extremists , including shooters in El Paso in 2019 and Pittsburgh in 2018 , who believe that foreigners and immigrants are plotting to “ replace ” predominantly white majorities in the United States , Europe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the epidemic of far-right violence that has gathered force worldwide over the last decade .
The Christchurch attacks were a surprise to many inside and outside of New Zealand .
“ This is an incredibly tolerant , multicultural country , ” notes Paul Spoonley of Massey University in Auckland .
“ In an international value study , the proportion of New Zealanders who see immigrants as contributing positively to the country is probably two to four times higher that in countries in mainland Europe .
To be anti-immigrant or against a particular @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s current reputation for tolerance belies its history of discrimination against immigrants and the indigenous Maori .
The country has also been home to a small but globally connected far-right community , which was implicated in several murders and more than 100 incidents of racist violence between 2005 and 2013 .
Prior to 2019 , the Muslim community repeatedly complained that the New Zealand authorities weren ’ t properly addressing Islamophobic threats .
“ It was taken quite lightly because we always believed that New Zealand was the safest place on earth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else , ” observes Ikhlaq Kashkari , the president of the Muslim Association of New Zealand .
“ We were living with a false sense of security , even though we were getting more news every day from around the world about the promotion of Islamophobia.
” Christchurch itself was not immune to these trends .
“ When Christchurch emerged as having a problem , the defenses went up and local representatives said , ‘ We ’ re not a racist city , ’ ” says Rawiri Taonui , New Zealand ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There have been more racist incidents in Christchurch than pretty much anywhere in the country.
” Despite rising Islamophobia and a history of far-right organizing , the New Zealand authorities were not primed to look for a white man like the Christchurch shooter .
“ After 9/11 , a number of people here suddenly labeled all the Muslim people of New Zealand who were living peacefully in the country as terrorists , ” points out Meng Foon , New Zealand ’ s commissioner of race relations .
“ The New Zealand secret service @ @ @ @ @ @ @ missed the shooter last year in Christchurch .
They dropped the ball in terms of monitoring white supremacists.
” Such failures were on par with the performance of other countries .
But New Zealand ’ s response after March 15 was something altogether different .
Squarely addressing its failures , the Ardern government immediately and unequivocally responded to the Christchurch killings with an unusual combination of empathy for the victims and zero tolerance for the culture that nurtured the perpetrator ’ s hatred , all the while recognizing the need for cross-border coordination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s exactly the kind of policy approach that paid off a year later when the coronavirus hit .
After March 15 , Prime Minister Ardern demonstrated what leadership looks like .
Following the example of the mayor of Christchurch , Ardern swiftly called the massacre “ terrorism.
” She donned a hijab and reached out to the Muslim community , refused to speak the name of the perpetrator , and introduced sweeping gun-control measures .
She even went to the island of Fiji to console family members of those killed on March @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Coronavirus in Spain—but We ’ re Vastly More Prepared Than the US Ardern enjoyed broad support for these moves .
Unlike in the United States , where repeated mass shootings have not led to substantial gun control , New Zealand outlawed automatic weapons “ with widespread public support and universal parliamentary support ( 119 out of 120 MPs voted in favor ) , ” Paul Spoonley notes .
“ There was some grumbling among those who go hunting that the ban had gone too far or was actioned too rapidly .
Also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ registration and restrictions on sales .
But we ’ re light years away from the United States.
” The government moved more forcefully to preempt right-wing violence , launching dozens of investigations into extremist groups and individuals , jailing a neo-Nazi who shared a video of the Christchurch killings , and arresting a Defense Force soldier with links to the far right .
It has also pushed forward with a new effort to amend existing laws to outlaw hate speech .
“ If all the New Zealand government does is extend the Human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Act , it will safely avoid curtailing free speech , ” concludes Martin Cocker of Netsafe .
Although such prohibitions against hate speech set New Zealand apart from countries like the United States , the state has to be careful not to simply ban unpopular opinions .
“ It ’ s very difficult to combat the kind of things we ’ re seeing online without creating measures that could very easily impinge on free speech , ” Cocker notes .
Perhaps Ardern ’ s most ambitious project has been the Christchurch Call , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ companies to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.
” Only two months after the shootings , New Zealand joined France in pushing for change at the international level .
“ They knew that they were unlikely to drive global change on social media as a country of 5 million people far away from the main political centers in the US and Europe , ” observes Matthew Feldman of the Centre for the Analysis of the Right Wing .
“ They put white nationalism very squarely on the UN General Assembly agenda.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Microsoft , Amazon—all signed on to the Call , committing to develop algorithms and AI tools to quickly identify and remove hateful content from their platforms .
Any Kiwi who views extremist content online is now automatically directed to websites that help people leave hate groups .
The Call also inspired Australia to pass a law that criminalizes social media companies that don ’ t expeditiously remove “ abhorrent violent material.
” That ’ s all to the good , but it hasn ’ t yet detoxified the Internet .
The Call @ @ @ @ @ @ @ limited in its impact given the “ lack of alignment among countries and a lack of consistent pressure on multinationals , ” Martin Cocker adds .
“ If the Christchurch Call moved to the point of achieving consistency among countries in terms of what they demand from industry , it could continue to have some influence.
” When the Christchurch shooter pleaded guilty in late March , New Zealand was saved from the spectacle of a very public trial .
“ His guilty plea will likely reduce the priority of efforts to curb @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of The New Zealand Herald says .
“ My concern is that New Zealand still views him as a lone wolf , as one deranged individual , that it ’ s not our problem , that an Australian came here to do it .
That ’ s true , but the problem is global .
These groups operate across borders and see themselves as a brotherhood , not as citizens of a country .
Someone did an analysis of who logs on to 8chan .
You can ’ t see their identities , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on from , and New Zealand was very highly ranked.
” New Zealand was blindsided by the Christchurch killings last year and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic this year , even though there was indeed some advance warning in both instances .
Nevertheless , the Ardern government moved quickly to break the chain of infection through well-calculated , radical interventions .
It showed zero tolerance by jailing right-wing extremists after March 15 and , during the first week of the Covid-19 lockdown , demoting the health minister who blithely visited a beach @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in both cases , is not over .
It is continuing to monitor the coronavirus and right-wing extremism , because it understands that epidemics can recur .
Although the Covid-19 response has been more top-down , both efforts received overwhelming domestic support .
Ardern ’ s approval rating rose to 51 percent a month after the Christchurch killings and has soared to 65 percent during the coronavirus crisis .
In both cases , too , New Zealand has recognized that it can ’ t fight these problems alone .
It issued the Christchurch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spread of far-right ideology , and it has been cooperating regionally and internationally to address the coronavirus .
According to Meng Foon , the New Zealand government also learned from its initial mistake of ignoring the threat of white extremism .
It was determined to make sure that its response to the coronavirus was fully inclusive .
As a result , the virus has not had the kind of disproportionate impact on people of color so evident in the United States .
“ I don ’ t think any person of color has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Only about 4 percent of the total of those who contracted Covid-19 are Maori and Pacific Islander.
” For Ikhlaq Kashkari , the key commonality has been the quality of the social response .
He chokes up when he remembers how many people came out to support mosques in the days after the Christchurch shootings .
“ People have gone out of their way to help each other as they did on March 15 , ” he says .
“ Our slogan here is : Stay home , stay safe , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explain it all .
”

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After the election of Donald Trump, New Zealand became the go-to option for terrified Americans fantasizing about emigration. Three years later, New Zealand has burnished its reputation as a credible refuge by successfully confronting two epidemics that continue to plague the United States—one political, the other medical.
New Zealand’s most recent success has been its handling of the coronavirus. After seven weeks of an extraordinarily stringent lockdown—closed borders, suspended in-country travel, no takeout—the government has managed to keep Covid-19 infections at 1,500, with only 21 deaths. That’s 4.3 deaths per million, compared to 246 per million in the United States. Thanks to rigorous testing and an updated contact tracing system, New Zealand has brought its active caseload to below 100 (as of this writing).
Last week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced further steps to open the economy so that Kiwis can once again visit restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms. The borders remain effectively closed, and Ardern promises to reimpose strict controls if cases spike. But few other democratic countries can claim this kind of success with so few casualties.
New Zealand has a couple of advantages over other countries. It’s a relatively small, isolated island nation with a very low population density. It has a strong social welfare system that even its conservatives support.
Perhaps most importantly, the government and the people were tested a year ago by a different kind of outbreak. New Zealand’s effective handling of the coronavirus was prefigured by its dramatic response to a right-wing murder spree in the country’s second-largest city. Related Article I Left Norway’s Lockdown for the US. The Difference Is Shocking. Ann Jones
On March 15, 2019, a white supremacist originally from New South Wales in Australia opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 people and injuring 49. The shooter advertised his far-right credentials by titling his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” which linked him to other anti-immigration extremists, including shooters in El Paso in 2019 and Pittsburgh in 2018, who believe that foreigners and immigrants are plotting to “replace” predominantly white majorities in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. This ideology is integral to the epidemic of far-right violence that has gathered force worldwide over the last decade. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
The Christchurch attacks were a surprise to many inside and outside of New Zealand. “This is an incredibly tolerant, multicultural country,” notes Paul Spoonley of Massey University in Auckland. “In an international value study, the proportion of New Zealanders who see immigrants as contributing positively to the country is probably two to four times higher that in countries in mainland Europe. To be anti-immigrant or against a particular religion is politically damaging.” Current Issue View our current issue
New Zealand’s current reputation for tolerance belies its history of discrimination against immigrants and the indigenous Maori. The country has also been home to a small but globally connected far-right community, which was implicated in several murders and more than 100 incidents of racist violence between 2005 and 2013.
Prior to 2019, the Muslim community repeatedly complained that the New Zealand authorities weren’t properly addressing Islamophobic threats. “It was taken quite lightly because we always believed that New Zealand was the safest place on earth, that things like that happen somewhere else,” observes Ikhlaq Kashkari, the president of the Muslim Association of New Zealand. “We were living with a false sense of security, even though we were getting more news every day from around the world about the promotion of Islamophobia.”
Christchurch itself was not immune to these trends. “When Christchurch emerged as having a problem, the defenses went up and local representatives said, ‘We’re not a racist city,’” says Rawiri Taonui, New Zealand’s first professor of indigenous studies. “There have been more racist incidents in Christchurch than pretty much anywhere in the country.”
Despite rising Islamophobia and a history of far-right organizing, the New Zealand authorities were not primed to look for a white man like the Christchurch shooter. “After 9/11, a number of people here suddenly labeled all the Muslim people of New Zealand who were living peacefully in the country as terrorists,” points out Meng Foon, New Zealand’s commissioner of race relations. “The New Zealand secret service targeted them more and, unfortunately, missed the shooter last year in Christchurch. They dropped the ball in terms of monitoring white supremacists.”
Such failures were on par with the performance of other countries. But New Zealand’s response after March 15 was something altogether different. Squarely addressing its failures, the Ardern government immediately and unequivocally responded to the Christchurch killings with an unusual combination of empathy for the victims and zero tolerance for the culture that nurtured the perpetrator’s hatred, all the while recognizing the need for cross-border coordination. As it turned out, that’s exactly the kind of policy approach that paid off a year later when the coronavirus hit.
After March 15, Prime Minister Ardern demonstrated what leadership looks like. Following the example of the mayor of Christchurch, Ardern swiftly called the massacre “terrorism.” She donned a hijab and reached out to the Muslim community, refused to speak the name of the perpetrator, and introduced sweeping gun-control measures. She even went to the island of Fiji to console family members of those killed on March 15. Related Article We’re Struggling With the Coronavirus in Spain—but We’re Vastly More Prepared Than the US Ben Ehrenreich
Ardern enjoyed broad support for these moves. Unlike in the United States, where repeated mass shootings have not led to substantial gun control, New Zealand outlawed automatic weapons “with widespread public support and universal parliamentary support (119 out of 120 MPs voted in favor),” Paul Spoonley notes. “There was some grumbling among those who go hunting that the ban had gone too far or was actioned too rapidly. Also, illegal weapons are not subject to registration and restrictions on sales. But we’re light years away from the United States.”
The government moved more forcefully to preempt right-wing violence, launching dozens of investigations into extremist groups and individuals, jailing a neo-Nazi who shared a video of the Christchurch killings, and arresting a Defense Force soldier with links to the far right. It has also pushed forward with a new effort to amend existing laws to outlaw hate speech. “If all the New Zealand government does is extend the Human Rights Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act, it will safely avoid curtailing free speech,” concludes Martin Cocker of Netsafe. Although such prohibitions against hate speech set New Zealand apart from countries like the United States, the state has to be careful not to simply ban unpopular opinions. “It’s very difficult to combat the kind of things we’re seeing online without creating measures that could very easily impinge on free speech,” Cocker notes.
Perhaps Ardern’s most ambitious project has been the Christchurch Call, “a commitment by Governments and tech companies to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Only two months after the shootings, New Zealand joined France in pushing for change at the international level. “They knew that they were unlikely to drive global change on social media as a country of 5 million people far away from the main political centers in the US and Europe,” observes Matthew Feldman of the Centre for the Analysis of the Right Wing. “They put white nationalism very squarely on the UN General Assembly agenda.”
The big players—Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Amazon—all signed on to the Call, committing to develop algorithms and AI tools to quickly identify and remove hateful content from their platforms. Any Kiwi who views extremist content online is now automatically directed to websites that help people leave hate groups. The Call also inspired Australia to pass a law that criminalizes social media companies that don’t expeditiously remove “abhorrent violent material.” That’s all to the good, but it hasn’t yet detoxified the Internet. The Call, which is nonbinding, has been limited in its impact given the “lack of alignment among countries and a lack of consistent pressure on multinationals,” Martin Cocker adds. “If the Christchurch Call moved to the point of achieving consistency among countries in terms of what they demand from industry, it could continue to have some influence.”
When the Christchurch shooter pleaded guilty in late March, New Zealand was saved from the spectacle of a very public trial. “His guilty plea will likely reduce the priority of efforts to curb the far right,” Matt Nipert of The New Zealand Herald says. “My concern is that New Zealand still views him as a lone wolf, as one deranged individual, that it’s not our problem, that an Australian came here to do it. That’s true, but the problem is global. These groups operate across borders and see themselves as a brotherhood, not as citizens of a country. Someone did an analysis of who logs on to 8chan. You can’t see their identities, but you can see where they log on from, and New Zealand was very highly ranked.”
New Zealand was blindsided by the Christchurch killings last year and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic this year, even though there was indeed some advance warning in both instances. Nevertheless, the Ardern government moved quickly to break the chain of infection through well-calculated, radical interventions. It showed zero tolerance by jailing right-wing extremists after March 15 and, during the first week of the Covid-19 lockdown, demoting the health minister who blithely visited a beach. The government knows the battle, in both cases, is not over. It is continuing to monitor the coronavirus and right-wing extremism, because it understands that epidemics can recur.
Although the Covid-19 response has been more top-down, both efforts received overwhelming domestic support. Ardern’s approval rating rose to 51 percent a month after the Christchurch killings and has soared to 65 percent during the coronavirus crisis.
In both cases, too, New Zealand has recognized that it can’t fight these problems alone. It issued the Christchurch Call to spur international action against the spread of far-right ideology, and it has been cooperating regionally and internationally to address the coronavirus.
According to Meng Foon, the New Zealand government also learned from its initial mistake of ignoring the threat of white extremism. It was determined to make sure that its response to the coronavirus was fully inclusive. As a result, the virus has not had the kind of disproportionate impact on people of color so evident in the United States.
“I don’t think any person of color has died of Covid-19,” he notes. “Only about 4 percent of the total of those who contracted Covid-19 are Maori and Pacific Islander.”
For Ikhlaq Kashkari, the key commonality has been the quality of the social response. He chokes up when he remembers how many people came out to support mosques in the days after the Christchurch shootings. “People have gone out of their way to help each other as they did on March 15,” he says. “Our slogan here is: Stay home, stay safe, and be kind. Those three things explain it all.”