thenation--2020-12-08--A Salacious Press, an Unchecked Government: Heinrich Böll’s Prescient Fiction

On May 11 , 1972 , the Red Army Faction bombed an officers ’ club on a US Army base in Frankfurt , Germany , and the next day police buildings in Augsburg and Munich .
Like the artists and advertisers who would later monetize the RAF ’ s seditious zeal , the newspapers preferred a catchier appellation : the Baader-Meinhof Gang .
It was , no doubt , easier to bank on the exhilarating cadence and star magnetism of a Bonnie and Clyde–like name , but the RAF also knew a thing or two about branding .
They were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ group with roots in a student movement mobilized by mass-mediated atrocity , and the group ’ s cofounder and principal scribe , Ulrike Meinhof , was an accomplished journalist .
The RAF knew , too , that an explosion could say more than it could do .
A bomb , like a headline , wants an audience .
More than that : Both want to position their audience .
On May 13 , a day after the second RAF bombing , the Frankfurter Rundschau paired photographs of the wreckage with a telling headline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until now.
” For West Germany in the early 1970s , the Vietnam War remained the familiar apex of militant horror .
Most West German households had a TV set by the late 1960s , and extensive coverage of the war seemed to prepare both the press and the public with enough tropes of political violence for an oncoming decade of RAF actions .
One of the earliest films to depict these insidious enmeshments of media spectacle and state violence was Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta ’ s The Lost Honor of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ restored and rereleased by the Criterion Collection .
Adapted from Heinrich Böll ’ s 1974 novella of the same name , both the film and its source text vivisect a period that bared the many hypocrisies of a young liberal democracy .
In the postwar years , the Federal Republic of Germany had been a beneficiary of American exploits , its economy buoyed by more than a billion dollars from the Marshall Plan and the country dotted with US military bases .
The upturn lasted until 1966 , when the country ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a million for the first time since before the war , and West Germany saw growing waves of student demonstrations against police brutality , US imperialism , and the Federal Republic itself .
Lost in tabloid psychologizing and the flattening glamour of myth , the RAF ’ s founding anti-imperialist principles have largely been obscured by predictable narratives that frame their violence as mania and their mania as ( ahistorical ) anarchy .
By the end of 1977 , most of the high-profile members of the first RAF generation had died in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been held before and after their highly publicized trial .
Certain details made their purported suicides and suicide attempts cryptic—missing fingerprints , weapons of mysterious provenance—and opened their lives to even more interpretive fervor .
A notable crop of German directors worked their malleable legacies into cinema : Rainer Werner Fassbinder ’ s The Third Generation ( 1979 ) spun motivated radicals into nervous dilettantes , disarrayed by the logistics of organizing and , simply , living .
Von Trotta ’ s monumental Marianne and Juliane ( 1981 ) drew from the lives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Stammheim prisoners , and her sister Christiane , threaded with a study of the crushing guilt that cleaved a postwar generation from their parents .
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum centers on neither militants nor their radical politics but an ostensibly ordinary person caught between the state and its dissidents .
The film spotlights a problem occluded by the story of a newly democratic country : that the continued violence of the Federal Republic was not so disconnected from the fascist dynamics of its still recent past .
The story begins when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who works as a housekeeper , goes to a party and meets Ludwig Götten , an alleged bank robber .
So timid that friends call her “ the nun , ” Katharina unexpectedly takes him home that night , charmed to the bone by something only she knows .
At dawn , armed police and bureaucrats steal into her building and ram down her front door .
Somehow , Götten has vanished , despite gunmen at every exit .
There ’ s only the inscrutable Katharina , enrobed and mid-breakfast , insisting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The police don ’ t believe her , and she is arrested .
All this , so far , is prologue .
We know as little about any alleged crimes as Katharina does .
She asks her interrogators what her lover has done , what she has done , and is told practically nothing .
We know only that Götten has been under surveillance since the opening scene , where a cop feigning a tourist ’ s roving curiosity slyly films him from a boat .
The scene is intercut with the usual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a rushed zoom on Götten ’ s face in grainy black-and-white , overlaid with a marksman ’ s tell-tale bull ’ s-eye .
It ’ s only well into the next morning that we glean something of the state ’ s motive , when police escort Katharina to the station , through a carnival of onlookers and press thronged outside her apartment .
While she ’ s being manhandled into a van , the district attorney gives a statement to a reporter : “ We ’ re dealing here with one or several @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regard for human life.
” That speculation , offered as fact , is enough to dispel most of Katharina ’ s civic freedoms .
Her phone is wiretapped , her mail opened , her home searched .
Much of this rings familiar : The Stasi ’ s panoptic reach in East Germany has been well documented and dramatized over the years , but the West could hardly boast ironclad liberties .
After the shooting of Rudi Dutschke , a key figure in the student movement , tens of thousands marched through West Berlin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , part of weeks of demonstrations in over 20 cities .
At the end of the month , the West German parliament passed the restrictive and contentious Emergency Laws , but their foundations had been laid years prior .
Article 18 of the Federal Republic ’ s Constitution already made certain rights—freedom of expression , freedom of the press , the privacy of correspondence , among others—explicitly contingent .
If an individual exercised any of these rights to threaten the “ free democratic basic order , ” however tenuously construed , the person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 1972 , Heinrich Böll , already an accoladed novelist and essayist , sparked the media inferno that would lead to The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum .
In an article for Der Spiegel , Böll decried the tabloid maligning of Ulrike Meinhof ( a “ war of six against sixty million ” ) and questioned the intensity of public vitriol directed at the RAF .
He offered neither explicit defense of Meinhof nor of the RAF ’ s recourse to violence—his main target was the Bild Zeitung , a popular right-wing tabloid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whose antics will be familiar to anyone who has chanced upon Fox News : inflammatory headlines eked from blatant lies or tenuous facts , and doggedly anti-leftist anything .
In a move befitting a publication run by demagogues , the Bild Zeitung co-opted and distorted Böll ’ s critique , subjecting him to a long campaign of public harassment .
The government , too , clocked him as a terrorist sympathizer and placed him under years of surveillance .
When Böll wrote The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum in 1974 , many read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thrown into psychological terror for her vague proximity to leftist politics .
After Katharina is arrested and briefly imprisoned , the film plays as a kind of doubled procedural , where the usual vicissitudes of a police investigation are twinned with a play-by-play of a reporter manufacturing scandal ( for a fictional paper so subtly named the Zeitung ) .
Katharina is interrogated in office after office , surrounded by an omnipresent cast of officials who radiate silent authority .
Outside , the city is in festive disguise as it rolls through the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ costumed like day-trippers from another film set .
Despite the realist aesthetics of Schlöndorff and von Trotta ’ s adaptation , every now and then Katharina ’ s surroundings seem to court the absurd .
What ’ s also absurd , the film suggests , is the imperative to keep on living as usual after the sinister mechanisms of the state become known .
The film ’ s two main antagonists are a cop , Inspector Beizmenne , and a journalist , Werner Tötges , each spearheading his respective operation .
Each is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ threatens and screams at a soft-spoken Katharina until his thickly mustached face is magenta from the strain .
Within seconds of meeting her , he has slapped a piece of toast out of her hand and asked , “ Did he fuck you ?
” Meanwhile , Tötges lies and manipulates with an almost athletic effervescence .
Against the starkness of Katharina ’ s timidity and innocence , the depictions of Beizmenne and Tötges veer into hyperbole , but it ’ s this construction of a guileless woman in love that helps stoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also sets up a progression offered in the full title of Böll ’ s novella , which features a crucial subheading omitted from the film : The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum : Or how violence develops and where it can lead .
Staged at the novella ’ s opening but the film ’ s close , Katharina commits her first and only act of unambiguous physical violence : She shoots and kills Tötges .
In the damning causality of that subheading , there is a warning of contingency and chaos .
Any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as politically disinterested and nondescript a citizen as Katharina , can find herself trapped in some ominous momentum that will move her to force .
Böll ’ s full title also discloses an idea that almost seems too obvious to mention : that any assessment of violence also involves accepting or questioning the arbiters of its legitimacy .
Postures of civility and calls for nonviolence tend to collapse it into a monolith for convenient moral condemnation , without regard for its specific perpetrators , their reasons , or the cruel worlds and systems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Böll put it more frankly in another essay from 1972 : “ Isn ’ t a Bild Zeitung headline violent ?
” Katharina ’ s experiences of sexual harassment , stalkers , and various state-sanctioned harms invite pity and outrage , but to a certain kind of liberal , whose respectability politics reveals an enduring faith in the rule of law , never incitement to take physical action .
Where an instinct for survival might be called self-defense in light of imminent force , acts of violence responding to cumulative harm are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end of the film , there is a funeral for Tötges .
Against the contrived gravitas of a mourning chorus , an extravagant floral wreath and no fewer than four microphones pegged to a podium , a coworker gives a sophistic eulogy before guests and vulturous cameramen : “ The shots that killed him didn ’ t hit him alone .
They were aimed at freedom of the press , one of the most precious values of our young democracy , ” he proclaims .
“ Who doesn ’ t feel the breath @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the violence which is undermining the foundations of our liberal-democratic order , which we are so devoted to ?
” It ’ s a nice story , this illusion of the present order as a lapsed ideal wracked by “ savagery , ” and not one with sanitized terrors in its very design , maintained daily by different forms of violence .
There is , though , a kind of lifeline in the film , something that resists narrative distortion .
Like Böll ’ s novella , the film withholds the details @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , her motives for helping him , and the course of their brief intimacy .
The intensity of her feeling is illegible to all observers , be it newspapermen , cops , or bureaucrats , but Schlöndorff and von Trotta fold in something for the viewer alone .
Nothing so convenient as hope , more like a sustaining afterglow .
Early in the police investigation , the day after her evening with Götten , there is a moment when Katharina is finally alone in her holding cell .
Panicked and sweating , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to daub her brow , but it unravels , and confetti suddenly cascades down her front like a magic trick , the evening ’ s secret bliss conjured in a paper shower .
She sits in the dark and recalls their slow dance at the party , heads held low and faces pressed together , guarding the lambent thrill no wiretap or conniving journalist can find .

On May 11, 1972, the Red Army Faction bombed an officers’ club on a US Army base in Frankfurt, Germany, and the next day police buildings in Augsburg and Munich. Like the artists and advertisers who would later monetize the RAF’s seditious zeal, the newspapers preferred a catchier appellation: the Baader-Meinhof Gang. It was, no doubt, easier to bank on the exhilarating cadence and star magnetism of a Bonnie and Clyde–like name, but the RAF also knew a thing or two about branding. They were, after all, an urban guerrilla group with roots in a student movement mobilized by mass-mediated atrocity, and the group’s cofounder and principal scribe, Ulrike Meinhof, was an accomplished journalist. The RAF knew, too, that an explosion could say more than it could do. A bomb, like a headline, wants an audience. More than that: Both want to position their audience. On May 13, a day after the second RAF bombing, the Frankfurter Rundschau paired photographs of the wreckage with a telling headline: “Such attacks only in Vietnam until now.”
For West Germany in the early 1970s, the Vietnam War remained the familiar apex of militant horror. Most West German households had a TV set by the late 1960s, and extensive coverage of the war seemed to prepare both the press and the public with enough tropes of political violence for an oncoming decade of RAF actions. One of the earliest films to depict these insidious enmeshments of media spectacle and state violence was Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), newly restored and rereleased by the Criterion Collection.
Adapted from Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novella of the same name, both the film and its source text vivisect a period that bared the many hypocrisies of a young liberal democracy. In the postwar years, the Federal Republic of Germany had been a beneficiary of American exploits, its economy buoyed by more than a billion dollars from the Marshall Plan and the country dotted with US military bases. The upturn lasted until 1966, when the country’s first major recession drove unemployment to more than a million for the first time since before the war, and West Germany saw growing waves of student demonstrations against police brutality, US imperialism, and the Federal Republic itself.
Lost in tabloid psychologizing and the flattening glamour of myth, the RAF’s founding anti-imperialist principles have largely been obscured by predictable narratives that frame their violence as mania and their mania as (ahistorical) anarchy. By the end of 1977, most of the high-profile members of the first RAF generation had died in Stammheim Prison, where they’d been held before and after their highly publicized trial. Certain details made their purported suicides and suicide attempts cryptic—missing fingerprints, weapons of mysterious provenance—and opened their lives to even more interpretive fervor. A notable crop of German directors worked their malleable legacies into cinema: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979) spun motivated radicals into nervous dilettantes, disarrayed by the logistics of organizing and, simply, living. Von Trotta’s monumental Marianne and Juliane (1981) drew from the lives of Gudrun Ensslin, one of the Stammheim prisoners, and her sister Christiane, threaded with a study of the crushing guilt that cleaved a postwar generation from their parents. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum centers on neither militants nor their radical politics but an ostensibly ordinary person caught between the state and its dissidents. The film spotlights a problem occluded by the story of a newly democratic country: that the continued violence of the Federal Republic was not so disconnected from the fascist dynamics of its still recent past. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
The story begins when Katharina Blum, a quiet young woman who works as a housekeeper, goes to a party and meets Ludwig Götten, an alleged bank robber. So timid that friends call her “the nun,” Katharina unexpectedly takes him home that night, charmed to the bone by something only she knows. At dawn, armed police and bureaucrats steal into her building and ram down her front door. Somehow, Götten has vanished, despite gunmen at every exit. There’s only the inscrutable Katharina, enrobed and mid-breakfast, insisting that he left before she woke up. The police don’t believe her, and she is arrested.
All this, so far, is prologue. We know as little about any alleged crimes as Katharina does. She asks her interrogators what her lover has done, what she has done, and is told practically nothing. We know only that Götten has been under surveillance since the opening scene, where a cop feigning a tourist’s roving curiosity slyly films him from a boat. The scene is intercut with the usual shots that signal a political target: a rushed zoom on Götten’s face in grainy black-and-white, overlaid with a marksman’s tell-tale bull’s-eye. It’s only well into the next morning that we glean something of the state’s motive, when police escort Katharina to the station, through a carnival of onlookers and press thronged outside her apartment. While she’s being manhandled into a van, the district attorney gives a statement to a reporter: “We’re dealing here with one or several terrorists acting in cold blood with little regard for human life.”
That speculation, offered as fact, is enough to dispel most of Katharina’s civic freedoms. Her phone is wiretapped, her mail opened, her home searched. Much of this rings familiar: The Stasi’s panoptic reach in East Germany has been well documented and dramatized over the years, but the West could hardly boast ironclad liberties. After the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, a key figure in the student movement, tens of thousands marched through West Berlin in protest on May 1, 1968, part of weeks of demonstrations in over 20 cities. At the end of the month, the West German parliament passed the restrictive and contentious Emergency Laws, but their foundations had been laid years prior. Article 18 of the Federal Republic’s Constitution already made certain rights—freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the privacy of correspondence, among others—explicitly contingent. If an individual exercised any of these rights to threaten the “free democratic basic order,” however tenuously construed, the person would forfeit them. Related Article Eyewitness to the German Revolution Peter E. Gordon
On January 10, 1972, Heinrich Böll, already an accoladed novelist and essayist, sparked the media inferno that would lead to The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. In an article for Der Spiegel, Böll decried the tabloid maligning of Ulrike Meinhof (a “war of six against sixty million”) and questioned the intensity of public vitriol directed at the RAF. He offered neither explicit defense of Meinhof nor of the RAF’s recourse to violence—his main target was the Bild Zeitung, a popular right-wing tabloid owned by the corporate Springer Press, whose antics will be familiar to anyone who has chanced upon Fox News: inflammatory headlines eked from blatant lies or tenuous facts, and doggedly anti-leftist anything. In a move befitting a publication run by demagogues, the Bild Zeitung co-opted and distorted Böll’s critique, subjecting him to a long campaign of public harassment. The government, too, clocked him as a terrorist sympathizer and placed him under years of surveillance.
When Böll wrote The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum in 1974, many read Katharina as his avatar, another figure thrown into psychological terror for her vague proximity to leftist politics. After Katharina is arrested and briefly imprisoned, the film plays as a kind of doubled procedural, where the usual vicissitudes of a police investigation are twinned with a play-by-play of a reporter manufacturing scandal (for a fictional paper so subtly named the Zeitung). Katharina is interrogated in office after office, surrounded by an omnipresent cast of officials who radiate silent authority. Outside, the city is in festive disguise as it rolls through the annual Carnival, its residents masked and costumed like day-trippers from another film set. Despite the realist aesthetics of Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s adaptation, every now and then Katharina’s surroundings seem to court the absurd.
What’s also absurd, the film suggests, is the imperative to keep on living as usual after the sinister mechanisms of the state become known. The film’s two main antagonists are a cop, Inspector Beizmenne, and a journalist, Werner Tötges, each spearheading his respective operation. Each is rendered as distinctly repulsive: Inspector Beizmenne threatens and screams at a soft-spoken Katharina until his thickly mustached face is magenta from the strain. Within seconds of meeting her, he has slapped a piece of toast out of her hand and asked, “Did he fuck you?” Meanwhile, Tötges lies and manipulates with an almost athletic effervescence.
Against the starkness of Katharina’s timidity and innocence, the depictions of Beizmenne and Tötges veer into hyperbole, but it’s this construction of a guileless woman in love that helps stoke audience outrage at her mistreatment. It also sets up a progression offered in the full title of Böll’s novella, which features a crucial subheading omitted from the film: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: Or how violence develops and where it can lead. Staged at the novella’s opening but the film’s close, Katharina commits her first and only act of unambiguous physical violence: She shoots and kills Tötges. In the damning causality of that subheading, there is a warning of contingency and chaos. Any layperson, it cautions, even one as politically disinterested and nondescript a citizen as Katharina, can find herself trapped in some ominous momentum that will move her to force.
Böll’s full title also discloses an idea that almost seems too obvious to mention: that any assessment of violence also involves accepting or questioning the arbiters of its legitimacy. Postures of civility and calls for nonviolence tend to collapse it into a monolith for convenient moral condemnation, without regard for its specific perpetrators, their reasons, or the cruel worlds and systems that forge their beliefs. Or, as Böll put it more frankly in another essay from 1972: “Isn’t a Bild Zeitung headline violent?”
Katharina’s experiences of sexual harassment, stalkers, and various state-sanctioned harms invite pity and outrage, but to a certain kind of liberal, whose respectability politics reveals an enduring faith in the rule of law, never incitement to take physical action. Where an instinct for survival might be called self-defense in light of imminent force, acts of violence responding to cumulative harm are rarely framed as justified.
Toward the end of the film, there is a funeral for Tötges. Against the contrived gravitas of a mourning chorus, an extravagant floral wreath and no fewer than four microphones pegged to a podium, a coworker gives a sophistic eulogy before guests and vulturous cameramen: “The shots that killed him didn’t hit him alone. They were aimed at freedom of the press, one of the most precious values of our young democracy,” he proclaims. “Who doesn’t feel the breath of terror, the savagery of anarchy, the violence which is undermining the foundations of our liberal-democratic order, which we are so devoted to?” It’s a nice story, this illusion of the present order as a lapsed ideal wracked by “savagery,” and not one with sanitized terrors in its very design, maintained daily by different forms of violence.
There is, though, a kind of lifeline in the film, something that resists narrative distortion. Like Böll’s novella, the film withholds the details of Katharina’s relationship with Götten, her motives for helping him, and the course of their brief intimacy. The intensity of her feeling is illegible to all observers, be it newspapermen, cops, or bureaucrats, but Schlöndorff and von Trotta fold in something for the viewer alone. Nothing so convenient as hope, more like a sustaining afterglow. Early in the police investigation, the day after her evening with Götten, there is a moment when Katharina is finally alone in her holding cell. Panicked and sweating, she reaches into her bag for a handkerchief to daub her brow, but it unravels, and confetti suddenly cascades down her front like a magic trick, the evening’s secret bliss conjured in a paper shower. She sits in the dark and recalls their slow dance at the party, heads held low and faces pressed together, guarding the lambent thrill no wiretap or conniving journalist can find.


thenation--2020-12-08--Why Democrats Lose on Social Media While Republicans Lie and Win Big

If you ’ re baffled that nearly half of the United States could look at the last four years and say , “ I want more of that , ” you aren ’ t alone .
But that ’ s also not quite what happened .
What did happen is explained by the fact that much of the US electorate lives in a social media echo chamber saturated by disinformation , with falsehoods about climate change and the Green New Deal being a prime example .
As a result , many Trump supporters simply experienced a very different four years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ post-election rise of more right-wing outlets that aim to “ out-fox Fox ” means the GOP social media machine is poised to accelerate .
Fortunately , there is a playbook for closing the gap .
But it requires progressives to understand and master how to make content spread virally online and how best to debunk disinformation .
Conservatives have turned the term “ Green New Deal ” into an emotional weapon—part of their overall narrative casting Democrats as extremist , elitist socialists .
The attack isn ’ t fact-based , but as Dan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for his work in behavioral economics , explains , “ No one ever made a decision because of a number .
They need a story.
” UN Secretary General : Without the US in the Paris Agreement , Humanity Faces Climate ‘ Suicide ’ The Fall of Trump Propels the Climate Story Into a Decisive New Era The World Is Burning , but the Political Press Insists It ’ s a Horse Race More in this series The irony is that there is a compelling , positive story to tell about the Green @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pandemic has thrown millions of people out of work and spawned miles-long lines at food banks , a Green New Deal would create millions of well-paying jobs that can not be outsourced overseas .
These jobs would also address the overriding challenge of our time , the accelerating rise in global temperatures that threatens to make the planet unlivable for today ’ s young people .
A Green New Deal would put Americans to work installing solar panels , building wind turbines , restoring farms and forests to store carbon , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ With government investment priming the pump , a Green New Deal would boost revenues for business as well and thereby pay for itself through the resulting increased tax revenue and sustainable growth .
No surprise , then , that when pollsters describe the Green New Deal ’ s policies—a fast transition to a 100 percent clean-energy grid and an economy free from carbon pollution—the idea is quite popular with ordinary Americans .
Support plummets , however , if pollsters ask people how they feel about “ the Green New Deal.
” Why is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced their eponymous congressional resolution in February 2019 , the Green New Deal ’ s “ brand ” was tarnished by relentless right-wing attacks and misrepresentations of it as a socialist plot that will take away Americans ’ cars and hamburgers—while progressives did little to advance their own positive narrative .
The watchdog group Media Matters reported in 2019 that “ in the last week of March , Fox News aired more than twice as many primetime segments discussing the Green New Deal as MSNBC and CNN combined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with misinformation , mockery , and climate change skepticism.
” These attacks were repeated in other right-wing outlets and echoed throughout social media .
By April 2019 , Republicans were telling pollsters that they were both highly informed about the Green New Deal and strongly opposed to it .
Indeed , one poll found that 43 percent of Americans strongly opposed it while only 24 percent strongly supported it .
Given those numbers , it ’ s no wonder that Donald Trump and other Republican candidates hammered away at the Green New Deal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign refused to endorse the idea .
Republican Kelly Loeffler followed the same script with her robotic performance during the December 6 debate in the Georgia Senate runoff election , when she repeatedly cited the Green New Deal as proof that her Democratic opponent , the Rev .
Raphael Warnock , is a “ radical liberal.
” The right uses this strategy again and again .
As Vox has explained , first Democrats and the left “ find something , a candidate or a policy proposal , that sparks grassroots excitement and enthusiasm.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ media machine immediately smells blood and targets the person or policy with relentless negative coverage , ensuring that the right-wing base views the person or policy as almost comically evil.
” The result for the mainstream media , centrists , and moderate Democrats is that this issue or candidate becomes “ divisive ” and “ polarizing.
” Significantly , while the left sometimes sustains a short burst of intense messaging on a subject , typically Democrats and the mainstream media stop after a short while .
But the right never ends the demonization @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s failed pandemic policy into an attack line , as The New York Times reported in May : “ G.O.P .
Coronavirus Message : Economic Crisis Is a Green New Deal Preview.
” The stunning fact is that most Democrats and progressive groups mismanage or ignore the world ’ s largest media platform , Facebook .
Meanwhile , Republicans and right-wing media have been massively investing in compelling storytelling and viral memes for years .
They ’ ve been saturating the system with simple , well-tested messages like “ drain the swamp @ @ @ @ @ @ @ non-election years .
This viral content is “ clicky and sticky ” —something that makes people want to click on it and that sticks in the brain thanks to the tricks of modern marketing .
This is especially true for climate disinformation on social media .
On Twitter , more than a quarter of the tweets about climate change come from bots ( with the vast majority of these bots spreading lies ) .
Investigative reporting by The New York Times recently revealed a well-funded effort to create “ astroturf ” grassroots campaigns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were in fact funded by energy companies ) .
Right-wingers have long understood that fiction can be much more persuasive than truth , and that selling their pro-pollution , anti-worker platform requires them to lie .
“ A compelling story , even if factually inaccurate , can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth , ” as GOP strategist Frank Luntz advised conservatives in his infamous 2002 memo on climate messaging .
A disturbing number of the most viral stories on any given day are from far-right pseudo-news sources @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s conservative media arm , which is owned by the Wilks , a family that made billions on fracking .
Republicans are outperforming Democrats in this digital echo chamber , in no small part because they use a network of big Facebook pages to cross-promote content .
These efforts move voters .
Trump won 45 percent of Florida Latinos in 2020 , an 11-point jump from 2016—despite numerous overtly anti-Latino policies , like putting thousands of Latino kids in cages .
As CNN ’ s John King explained , when Trump “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it was because of “ niche marketing…to Latino voters from Cuba , Venezuela , and elsewhere , ” with the simple message “ socialism , socialism , socialism.
” Social media is what allows Republicans to do this cheap microtargeting with tested messages .
In contrast , Democrats often focus on uncoordinated , ineffective , and ambiguous messages that can be used against them , such as “ Defund the police.
” If Democrats want to stop underperforming at the ballot box , they need to master the social media playbook dominated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t mean progressives need to lie .
It means they need to engage much more intentionally on social media , using the proven techniques of viral marketing—supplemented with the sort of institutional and structural support Republicans have built into a digital and social media juggernaut .
The simplest first step for progressive donors , candidates , advocacy groups , and activists is to compare your Facebook strategy to that of more successful pages on the right and left .
If you aren ’ t getting good engagement and doing message testing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your most valuable assets .
Democrats and progressives have a choice .
Either ramp up the viral storytelling tactics Republicans are winning with or get ready to underperform in 2022 and beyond .

This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.
If you’re baffled that nearly half of the United States could look at the last four years and say, “I want more of that,” you aren’t alone. But that’s also not quite what happened.
What did happen is explained by the fact that much of the US electorate lives in a social media echo chamber saturated by disinformation, with falsehoods about climate change and the Green New Deal being a prime example. As a result, many Trump supporters simply experienced a very different four years from everyone else’s.
The post-election rise of more right-wing outlets that aim to “out-fox Fox” means the GOP social media machine is poised to accelerate. Fortunately, there is a playbook for closing the gap. But it requires progressives to understand and master how to make content spread virally online and how best to debunk disinformation. Covering Climate Now How to Stop the Spread of Climate Disinformation Erika Seiber and Michael Khoo A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency Mark Hertsgaard Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats? Mark Hertsgaard
Conservatives have turned the term “Green New Deal” into an emotional weapon—part of their overall narrative casting Democrats as extremist, elitist socialists. The attack isn’t fact-based, but as Dan Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work in behavioral economics, explains, “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
The irony is that there is a compelling, positive story to tell about the Green New Deal. At a time when the pandemic has thrown millions of people out of work and spawned miles-long lines at food banks, a Green New Deal would create millions of well-paying jobs that cannot be outsourced overseas.
These jobs would also address the overriding challenge of our time, the accelerating rise in global temperatures that threatens to make the planet unlivable for today’s young people. A Green New Deal would put Americans to work installing solar panels, building wind turbines, restoring farms and forests to store carbon, and performing a thousand other climate-friendly actions. With government investment priming the pump, a Green New Deal would boost revenues for business as well and thereby pay for itself through the resulting increased tax revenue and sustainable growth. 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung 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 My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
No surprise, then, that when pollsters describe the Green New Deal’s policies—a fast transition to a 100 percent clean-energy grid and an economy free from carbon pollution—the idea is quite popular with ordinary Americans. Support plummets, however, if pollsters ask people how they feel about “the Green New Deal.”
Why is that? From the moment Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced their eponymous congressional resolution in February 2019, the Green New Deal’s “brand” was tarnished by relentless right-wing attacks and misrepresentations of it as a socialist plot that will take away Americans’ cars and hamburgers—while progressives did little to advance their own positive narrative. The watchdog group Media Matters reported in 2019 that “in the last week of March, Fox News aired more than twice as many primetime segments discussing the Green New Deal as MSNBC and CNN combined”—and that coverage “was riddled with misinformation, mockery, and climate change skepticism.” These attacks were repeated in other right-wing outlets and echoed throughout social media. Section 230 Trump’s Trying to Take the Internet Down With Him John Nichols
By April 2019, Republicans were telling pollsters that they were both highly informed about the Green New Deal and strongly opposed to it. Indeed, one poll found that 43 percent of Americans strongly opposed it while only 24 percent strongly supported it. Given those numbers, it’s no wonder that Donald Trump and other Republican candidates hammered away at the Green New Deal during the 2020 campaign and the Biden-Harris campaign refused to endorse the idea. Republican Kelly Loeffler followed the same script with her robotic performance during the December 6 debate in the Georgia Senate runoff election, when she repeatedly cited the Green New Deal as proof that her Democratic opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, is a “radical liberal.”
The right uses this strategy again and again. As Vox has explained, first Democrats and the left “find something, a candidate or a policy proposal, that sparks grassroots excitement and enthusiasm.” But then the “enormous right-wing media machine immediately smells blood and targets the person or policy with relentless negative coverage, ensuring that the right-wing base views the person or policy as almost comically evil.” The result for the mainstream media, centrists, and moderate Democrats is that this issue or candidate becomes “divisive” and “polarizing.”
Significantly, while the left sometimes sustains a short burst of intense messaging on a subject, typically Democrats and the mainstream media stop after a short while. But the right never ends the demonization. They even managed to turn Trump’s failed pandemic policy into an attack line, as The New York Times reported in May: “G.O.P. Coronavirus Message: Economic Crisis Is a Green New Deal Preview.”
The stunning fact is that most Democrats and progressive groups mismanage or ignore the world’s largest media platform, Facebook. Meanwhile, Republicans and right-wing media have been massively investing in compelling storytelling and viral memes for years. They’ve been saturating the system with simple, well-tested messages like “drain the swamp,” repeated endlessly, even in non-election years. This viral content is “clicky and sticky”—something that makes people want to click on it and that sticks in the brain thanks to the tricks of modern marketing.
This is especially true for climate disinformation on social media. On Twitter, more than a quarter of the tweets about climate change come from bots (with the vast majority of these bots spreading lies). Investigative reporting by The New York Times recently revealed a well-funded effort to create “astroturf” grassroots campaigns supporting oil companies (when the campaigns were in fact funded by energy companies).
Right-wingers have long understood that fiction can be much more persuasive than truth, and that selling their pro-pollution, anti-worker platform requires them to lie. “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth,” as GOP strategist Frank Luntz advised conservatives in his infamous 2002 memo on climate messaging. Current Issue View our current issue
A disturbing number of the most viral stories on any given day are from far-right pseudo-news sources like The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative media arm, which is owned by the Wilks, a family that made billions on fracking. Republicans are outperforming Democrats in this digital echo chamber, in no small part because they use a network of big Facebook pages to cross-promote content.
These efforts move voters. Trump won 45 percent of Florida Latinos in 2020, an 11-point jump from 2016—despite numerous overtly anti-Latino policies, like putting thousands of Latino kids in cages. As CNN’s John King explained, when Trump “stunned the Democrats” in South Florida, it was because of “niche marketing…to Latino voters from Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere,” with the simple message “socialism, socialism, socialism.”
Social media is what allows Republicans to do this cheap microtargeting with tested messages. In contrast, Democrats often focus on uncoordinated, ineffective, and ambiguous messages that can be used against them, such as “Defund the police.”
If Democrats want to stop underperforming at the ballot box, they need to master the social media playbook dominated by conservatives. No, that doesn’t mean progressives need to lie. It means they need to engage much more intentionally on social media, using the proven techniques of viral marketing—supplemented with the sort of institutional and structural support Republicans have built into a digital and social media juggernaut.
The simplest first step for progressive donors, candidates, advocacy groups, and activists is to compare your Facebook strategy to that of more successful pages on the right and left. If you aren’t getting good engagement and doing message testing, then you’re squandering one of your most valuable assets.
Democrats and progressives have a choice. Either ramp up the viral storytelling tactics Republicans are winning with or get ready to underperform in 2022 and beyond.


thenation--2020-12-08--Trump’s Dilemma: Who Will Give Him Asylum Now?

“ Maybe I ’ ll have to leave the country.
” Those words that Donald Trump pronounced a month and a half ago in Florida , when he contemplated publicly what he would do if he was not reelected , must be haunting him now that “ safe harbor ” day has finally arrived , certifying that he has decisively lost to Joe Biden .
In effect , as soon as his rival is inaugurated on January 20 of next year , the former president—no longer protected from prosecution by the executive privilege of his office and unable to escape @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state level—will have to face the judicial consequences of his criminal and financial misbehavior .
In similar situations , many corrupt leaders who have lost power have departed their countries in order to avoid justice .
If Trump decides to follow their example , the question arises : Who would receive him ?
Who could truly guarantee his safety ?
Removing Trump Is Not Enough .
He Must Be Prosecuted .
The best candidate , by far , is Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un , the despotic ruler of North Korea .
I can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , if any offer has been made in the secret correspondence between these two men .
But here is a letter that I imagine Kim might well have been patiently and cunningly preparing since he first met Donald Trump in Singapore and in two subsequent meetings , a letter that , if I were he , I would have sent off as soon as the outcome of the election became clear : When there is trouble at home , it is wise to have friends elsewhere .
Never were the words of my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or more pertinent to this historic moment .
If I can be honest—and what are friends for , if not to tell each other the truth ?
—you face much trouble .
I am surprised that , given your command of the presidency , the armed forces , and all those militias that support your cause , you allowed Joe Biden and his fake news acolytes to steal this rigged election .
In any case , your triumphant enemies will now seek vengeance and demand that you be sentenced to prison and pay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It is a pity that you can not cling to power , heeding your own wise advice that when someone attacks you , you always attack back… except 100 times more .
And you certainly have tried !
But you have also stated that being a winner is knowing when to move on to something that ’ s more productive , knowing that the worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals .
It is such a deal that I wish to propose now , as you select @ @ @ @ @ @ @ once your term is up .
Forget your so-called allies , who were unreliable yesterday and will shun you even more today .
As for strong leaders you admire—Erdogan , Duterte , Sisi , Orbán , Putin , Bolsonaro—can any of them provide you with real security ?
Could they not be overthrown or lose an election ?
There is only one natural and solid choice for Your Excellency .
Who could be a more delighted host than myself , and what place could be safer than the Democratic People ’ s Republic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a dynasty , as you are , and learned from his father to be tough , as you learned from yours ?
Who else is assured of remaining in office till the day he dies ?
Is there any other nation that can boast not one Covid-19 case , ensuring that no one who accompanies you will come down with the virus that you have defeated with a speed that has astonished mankind ?
No other land will appreciate more your innumerable talents .
I own , after all , the best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between China and South Korea , with pristine , virgin beaches and valleys , vast resources , and cheap labor—and no meddling judges or pesky ecological fanatics to interfere with their stupid environmental regulations .
Even when you were bankrupt , you managed to procure the sort of capital to make miracles happen .
I am sure that you will be able to obtain huge investments from Russian oligarchs and petro-sheiks .
Casinos , hotels , skyscrapers , resorts , the Trump-Kim Towers—all of this is within reach .
While you , of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reach of your creditors .
What do I expect in return for granting asylum to you and your loved ones ?
As you are already planning to inflict , over the coming weeks , as much pain and havoc as possible on a country that has not been smart enough to recognize how you made it GREAT AGAIN , why not be remembered for a huge international victory as well ?
All you need do is announce the withdrawal of troops from South Korea and the lifting of all sanctions on my beloved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promise to totally denuclearize .
As your intelligence services have stressed ( an appraisal you have sagely ignored ) , I have no intention of giving up the DPRK ’ s nuclear arsenal or missiles .
In what other way can I protect myself from foreign aggression—and provide a big , beautiful shield for Your Excellency , if you accept my generous offer ?
Besides a surefire Nobel Prize for us both , for having secured the peace that has eluded our predecessors , my offer brings with it an extra advantage .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ permanently in Pyongyang will turn into the spectacle of the millennium , publicity the likes of which the world has never seen before .
And if you travel here on January 19 , you can undermine the coverage accorded to your rival—the worst and weakest candidate in history to gain the US presidency—and grab the spotlight for yourself .
Truly , a fantasy film for all involved .
I end with a Korean proverb : A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out .
Let @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Your Excellency as long as you have in me a real friend , someone who loves you as dearly as my people love me .
With enormous reverence and expectation for the great honor you are about to bestow upon your humble servant ,

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
“Maybe I’ll have to leave the country.”
Those words that Donald Trump pronounced a month and a half ago in Florida, when he contemplated publicly what he would do if he was not reelected, must be haunting him now that “safe harbor” day has finally arrived, certifying that he has decisively lost to Joe Biden.
In effect, as soon as his rival is inaugurated on January 20 of next year, the former president—no longer protected from prosecution by the executive privilege of his office and unable to escape the scrutiny of justice officials at the state level—will have to face the judicial consequences of his criminal and financial misbehavior. Looking for holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your gift list.
In similar situations, many corrupt leaders who have lost power have departed their countries in order to avoid justice. If Trump decides to follow their example, the question arises: Who would receive him? Who could truly guarantee his safety? Related Article Removing Trump Is Not Enough. He Must Be Prosecuted. Sasha Abramsky
The best candidate, by far, is Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, the despotic ruler of North Korea. I cannot know for sure, of course, if any offer has been made in the secret correspondence between these two men. But here is a letter that I imagine Kim might well have been patiently and cunningly preparing since he first met Donald Trump in Singapore and in two subsequent meetings, a letter that, if I were he, I would have sent off as soon as the outcome of the election became clear:


thenation--2020-12-08--Detective Trump Is on the Case

Detective Trump Is on the Case

Support independent cartooning : join Sparky ’ s List—and don ’ t forget to visit TT ’ s Emporium of @ @ @ @ @ book and plush Sparky !

Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!


thenation--2020-12-08--Indigenous Cultures Take Root in New York

The ongoing struggle for racial justice .
The future for immigrant families .
The health and well-being of all Americans .
The very fate of our fragile planet .
The United States faces a crossroads in 2020 .
Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar , The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What ’ s At Stake , a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers .
Follow the whole series here .
This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project .
When the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Próspero Martínez , a Mixe Indigenous migrant from the community of Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca , Mexico , began managing a community garden and green roof project at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge , Brooklyn .
The community was experiencing food shortages and many people were losing jobs or having hours cut .
People were scared .
For Próspero , joining with his neighbors to get through the crisis together just made sense .
“ Planting your own food is a way of resisting , of being autonomous—it is what we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our lives to preserve , ” he told me this summer .
“ It is a way to return to our origins , to revalue the work of the campesino , which in the labor hierarchy occupies the last step and , during the pandemic , we saw paradoxically , that he became the ‘ essential ’ and yet the most exploited worker.
” The food distribution network that Próspero is a part of , centered around the Good Shepherd Church , is largely run and led by Indigenous people , and for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are doing to keep their neighbors fed and housed draws heavily on the Indigenous practices they ’ re importing from their home communities .
( Full disclosure : My husband is the pastor at Good Shepherd Church , so I have deep connections with this congregation . )
Over the course of the pandemic , I have been visiting these centers of mutual support run by Indigenous migrants , photographing their work and talking to them about the importance these practices represent to them .
When Próspero came to New York City two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diverse mix of Mesoamerican Indigenous immigrant communities hailing from the mountains , jungles , and deserts of Mexico and Guatemala .
Though not wholly new ( Indigenous migrants have been in the United States for as long as the country has existed , and from the 1940s to the ’ 60s , Indigenous manual laborers from southeast and central Mexico worked as peasants in the US under the government ’ s “ Bracero Program ” ) , the pace of Indigenous migration to the United States has accelerated in recent decades .
Indigenous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new levels of economic precarity and violence in recent decades , which has displaced thousands of Indigenous people from their communities .
New York has become a destination for many of them , and the city is now home to Mixes , Totonacos , Mixtecos , Otomís , Tlapanecos , Tepehuas , Amuzgos from Mexico ; K ’ iches , Mams , Kaqchikels and Tz ’ utujils from Guatemala ; Nahua from across Central America ; and Quechuas and Aymaras from South America .
Each of these peoples come with their own language @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religion , oral history , philosophy and worldview that is glossed over or erased in many discussions of Latin American migration to the United States .
What many of these peoples share , however , is an idea of reciprocity and mutual support— “ giving , returning and receiving ” —as a social organizing system .
These concepts and practices are embodied in words and phrases like tequio , faena , la mano vuela , mayordomías , and compadrazgo , concepts that have no direct translation in English but that all imply an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the obligations that come with being part of a community .
I ’ ve been working with and photographing Indigenous communities for over a decade , and this work has been grounded in a personal search for my own roots .
My paternal family are Nahua from the community of Ahila Pahuatlán Puebla , Mexico , for years I lived in Indigenous Otomí , Nahua , Téenek , and Tepehua communities in Mexico , and when I first came to New York in 2011 , I lived in an Otomí community @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me to work as a community organizer with Indigenous K ’ iche ’ , Nahua , Otomí , Tepehua , and Tlapaneco communities in New York , creating long-standing ties of friendship and kinship .
Mario Cortés , a Nahua Indigenous migrant from Puebla , dressed as a Mexica warrior from pre-Hispanic times .
Mario is a dancer with the Mexica group Cetiliztli Nauhcampa , and has been working as a hairdresser in New York City for years .
“ We believe that a connection exists among all things .
The Mexica people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the Americas , have a rich culture in which the principle of interconnectedness is central .
Through our prayers in the form of dances , songs and ceremonies we honor this principle .
Our circle and its dances represent the circle of life and all that is found on Mother Earth .
It is our duty to keep these traditions alive and for future generations to do the same .
In keeping the energy of this vision flowing , the Indigenous people of this continent , as all of humanity , will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ connection between our spirit and the Mother Earth.
” ( Cinthya Santos Briones ) So when it came to documenting Indigenous communities during the pandemic , I wanted to draw upon the ethic of mutual support that guides many of these communities .
To make these portraits , I used the approach that guides all my work : Through collaboration , I asked how they wanted to be represented , and worked with them to create images that reflected what they wanted to express about their identities and their lives .
This more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is driven by my desire to create work collectively , in community with the people represented , in an effort to more accurately represent what Indigenous migrants consider to be important to them .
This mode of engagement stands in stark contrast to the way these non-Latino immigrants are treated by the institutions that exert outsize influence on their lives , be they the courts , the migration system , hospitals or other institutions that fail to recognize the diversity—linguistic and otherwise—of Indigenous migrants .
Many Indigenous migrants work low-paid and dangerous jobs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , nannies , domestic workers , and day laborers , making them particularly vulnerable during this time .
As the Indigenous peoples of the Americas , the fact that many of these migrants are also categorized as “ undocumented ” by a government that has existed for less than 250 years is another nonsensical affront to the enduring resilience of peoples who have made their lives and developed their cultures here for millennia .
A photo of the memorial and offering to Victorio Hilario Guzmán , with text by Elias : “ Lord @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spirit .
You left us a great void in your departure , but we will always carry you in our hearts .
This is not a goodbye .
Rest in peace , now you are already an angel , brother .
You left the house a month ago today , we are still waiting for you to come back to have dinner with us .
Your bed is still empty , just as you left it that day when you left the house .
We need you .
But we know that you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are in a better place , you suffered for a while .
We will always suffer.
” ( Cinthya Santos Briones ) Alongside the portraits , I asked people to write , in their own Indigenous language , what they wanted the world to read .
Their messages reveal the struggles they face , the ways they adapt to a system that holds them in low regard , and the way they are thriving in their adopted city .
From soup kitchens to Indigenous-language radio programs , green roofs to sports clubs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the diversity of efforts Indigenous migrants are currently leading points to the ways they are making New York City their own .
These photos , then , represent a fraction of the efforts underway across the city to build and sustain vibrant Indigenous cultures .

Cinthya Santos Briones, Magnum Foundation

This article appears in the January 11/18, 2021 issue.
The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The United States faces a crossroads in 2020. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
When the pandemic hit New York City this spring, Próspero Martínez, a Mixe Indigenous migrant from the community of Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico, began managing a community garden and green roof project at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The community was experiencing food shortages and many people were losing jobs or having hours cut. People were scared.
Polaroid photo of the green roof that Próspero Martinez created. Text written in the Ayuujk jää’y language by Próspero about his inspiration for the garden: “Sow and build to preserve the integrity of the universe to which we belong. Coexist as far as our mother earth allows our species. The wisdom of nature gives us the opportunity to interpret what is beautiful at heart. When a seed turns into a flower we state that we exist.” (Cinthya Santos Briones)
For Próspero, joining with his neighbors to get through the crisis together just made sense. “Planting your own food is a way of resisting, of being autonomous—it is what we, Indigenous peoples, have fought all our lives to preserve,” he told me this summer. “It is a way to return to our origins, to revalue the work of the campesino, which in the labor hierarchy occupies the last step and, during the pandemic, we saw paradoxically, that he became the ‘essential’ and yet the most exploited worker.”
The food distribution network that Próspero is a part of, centered around the Good Shepherd Church, is largely run and led by Indigenous people, and for many like him, the work they are doing to keep their neighbors fed and housed draws heavily on the Indigenous practices they’re importing from their home communities. (Full disclosure: My husband is the pastor at Good Shepherd Church, so I have deep connections with this congregation.) Over the course of the pandemic, I have been visiting these centers of mutual support run by Indigenous migrants, photographing their work and talking to them about the importance these practices represent to them.
“I am the musician of the Tecuanes group, I accompany the dance playing a flute and a drum,” says Jeffrey Perez, a 12-year-old boy who is part of the Los Tecuanes de San Juan Bautista’s dance group, which is mostly made up of children born in New York. La danza de los tecuanes, the dance of the jaguar, is a theatrical, Indigenous celebration that fuses magical-religious elements and fertility rites in its portrayal of a group of hunters trying to catch a tecuane, a word which itself is of Nahuatl origin. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
Dancer dressed as a jaguar or tecuani during the Mixtec carnival celebration in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “In Mixtec mythology there has been a battle between Tecuán and man since pre-Hispanic times, a struggle that is recreated today in the Tecuán dance that stages the persecution, hunt, and death of the Tecuán,” says Demetrio, an Indigenous Mixtec migrant from Puebla. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
When Próspero came to New York City two years ago, he was joining a diverse mix of Mesoamerican Indigenous immigrant communities hailing from the mountains, jungles, and deserts of Mexico and Guatemala. Though not wholly new (Indigenous migrants have been in the United States for as long as the country has existed, and from the 1940s to the ’60s, Indigenous manual laborers from southeast and central Mexico worked as peasants in the US under the government’s “Bracero Program”), the pace of Indigenous migration to the United States has accelerated in recent decades. Indigenous communities in Mexico and Guatemala have faced new levels of economic precarity and violence in recent decades, which has displaced thousands of Indigenous people from their communities. New York has become a destination for many of them, and the city is now home to Mixes, Totonacos, Mixtecos, Otomís, Tlapanecos, Tepehuas, Amuzgos from Mexico; K’iches, Mams, Kaqchikels and Tz’utujils from Guatemala; Nahua from across Central America; and Quechuas and Aymaras from South America. Each of these peoples come with their own language, culture, identity, gastronomy, religion, oral history, philosophy and worldview that is glossed over or erased in many discussions of Latin American migration to the United States.
Natalia Méndez Saavedra is a Mixtec Indigenous migrant from Oaxaca and co-owner with her family of La Morada restaurant in the South Bronx. When the pandemic began, La Morada opened its doors in an act of solidarity with the communities most in need, providing more than 5,000 meals a week. “This system has taken away everything and even our fear. In this crisis, we do not mind dying because our spirit and values as a family is to fight for equality, social justice, and human rights. To facilitate a place that the most needy can call home and thus to respond to this crisis as we as Indigenous people have always done,” Natalia told me. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
Portrait of the exterior of La Morada. The restaurant has operated for years as both a refuge for undocumented migrants and a cultural and political meeting point in New York City. “We have built a space where justice can be smelled and eaten, where our roots as Mixtec Indigenous people can be transmitted,” Natalia Mendez says. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
What many of these peoples share, however, is an idea of reciprocity and mutual support—“giving, returning and receiving”—as a social organizing system. These concepts and practices are embodied in words and phrases like tequio, faena, la mano vuela, mayordomías, and compadrazgo, concepts that have no direct translation in English but that all imply an individual’s responsibilities to the collective, and the obligations that come with being part of a community.
I’ve been working with and photographing Indigenous communities for over a decade, and this work has been grounded in a personal search for my own roots. My paternal family are Nahua from the community of Ahila Pahuatlán Puebla, Mexico, for years I lived in Indigenous Otomí, Nahua, Téenek, and Tepehua communities in Mexico, and when I first came to New York in 2011, I lived in an Otomí community in Queens. These experiences have led me to work as a community organizer with Indigenous K’iche’, Nahua, Otomí, Tepehua, and Tlapaneco communities in New York, creating long-standing ties of friendship and kinship.
“Weaving is a way of healing, being in community with women and empowering ourselves,” says Maria José Prudente, an Indigenous Tu’u savi migrant from the community of Yerba Santa, Guerrero, Mexico, who runs a collective weaving and embroidery group in which she teaches Indigenous women how to weave while speaking about social justice, domestic violence, and economic autonomy. During the pandemic, María José decided to start an audiovisual radio program in the Mixteco language, “Telling stories in Tu’u savi,” through Facebook, with the aim of preserving the language, rescuing memory, and using this platform to talk about problems and find collective solutions to the issues facing her community. “I consider myself an Indigenous feminist and through my skill as a cultural promoter and community organizer I want to provide legal, economic, and social tools to the women of my community so that they can get ahead and discover their power,” she told me. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
“Weaving in community is resisting” says Maria, center, with the weaving and embroidery group she runs in Owl’s Head Park, Bay Ridge. (Cinthya Santos Briones)
Mario Cortés, a Nahua Indigenous migrant from Puebla, dressed as a Mexica warrior from pre-Hispanic times. Mario is a dancer with the Mexica group Cetiliztli Nauhcampa, and has been working as a hairdresser in New York City for years. “We believe that a connection exists among all things. The Mexica people, like the many other Native nations from the Americas, have a rich culture in which the principle of interconnectedness is central. Through our prayers in the form of dances, songs and ceremonies we honor this principle. Our circle and its dances represent the circle of life and all that is found on Mother Earth. It is our duty to keep these traditions alive and for future generations to do the same. In keeping the energy of this vision flowing, the Indigenous people of this continent, as all of humanity, will be able to heal and reestablish a connection between our spirit and the Mother Earth.” (Cinthya Santos Briones)
So when it came to documenting Indigenous communities during the pandemic, I wanted to draw upon the ethic of mutual support that guides many of these communities. To make these portraits, I used the approach that guides all my work: Through collaboration, I asked how they wanted to be represented, and worked with them to create images that reflected what they wanted to express about their identities and their lives. This more horizontal, anti-hierarchical approach to image making is driven by my desire to create work collectively, in community with the people represented, in an effort to more accurately represent what Indigenous migrants consider to be important to them. This mode of engagement stands in stark contrast to the way these non-Latino immigrants are treated by the institutions that exert outsize influence on their lives, be they the courts, the migration system, hospitals or other institutions that fail to recognize the diversity—linguistic and otherwise—of Indigenous migrants. Many Indigenous migrants work low-paid and dangerous jobs, including as delivery workers, carwasheros, nannies, domestic workers, and day laborers, making them particularly vulnerable during this time. As the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the fact that many of these migrants are also categorized as “undocumented” by a government that has existed for less than 250 years is another nonsensical affront to the enduring resilience of peoples who have made their lives and developed their cultures here for millennia.
Elias Guzmán holding the portrait of his brother, Victorio Hilario Guzmán, who was making food deliveries on his bike in the Bronx when he was killed in a hit-and-run in the Bronx on September 23. “Being Indigenous and migrant is difficult because we cannot express ourselves accurately before the institutions, ask for justice, fight for our rights,” says Elías, a Meꞌphaa Indigenous migrant. Following his brother’s death, Elias organized, together with his family and community, a series of protests and vigils in a political act of saying: “Here we are, the Indigenous migrants, we deliver food to their tables. Yes, we are essential workers with many dreams.” (Cinthya Santos Briones)
A photo of the memorial and offering to Victorio Hilario Guzmán, with text by Elias: “Lord, into your hands I commend his spirit. You left us a great void in your departure, but we will always carry you in our hearts. This is not a goodbye. Rest in peace, now you are already an angel, brother. You left the house a month ago today, we are still waiting for you to come back to have dinner with us. Your bed is still empty, just as you left it that day when you left the house. We need you. But we know that you will never come back. Now you are in a better place, you suffered for a while. We will always suffer.” (Cinthya Santos Briones)
Migrants from Guerrero, Mexico, protest the death of Victorio Hilario Guzman on 180th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx with banners written in their Me’phaa Indigenous language. The banners say: “Enough of impunity, we want justice, not one more dead, justice for delivery workers.” “We want justice for Victorio Hilario Guzman. No more impunity, not one more killed.” (Cinthya Santos Briones)
Alongside the portraits, I asked people to write, in their own Indigenous language, what they wanted the world to read. Their messages reveal the struggles they face, the ways they adapt to a system that holds them in low regard, and the way they are thriving in their adopted city. From soup kitchens to Indigenous-language radio programs, green roofs to sports clubs, embroidery classes to community organizing drives, the diversity of efforts Indigenous migrants are currently leading points to the ways they are making New York City their own. These photos, then, represent a fraction of the efforts underway across the city to build and sustain vibrant Indigenous cultures.
Children of the dance group Los Tecuanes de San Juan Bautista’s participate in the celebration of the independence of Mexico, organized by the Mixtec organization in Sunset Park. (Cinthya Santos Briones)