theintercept--2020-10-17--Amy Coney Barrett and the Looming Google Antitrust Case

Republicans appear set to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Ryan Grim talks to Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America about the last 50 years of right-wing legal activism. Then Luther Lowe, senior vice president for public policy at Yelp, breaks down what could become the biggest antitrust case since Microsoft.
[Musical interlude.]
RG: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome, to Deconstructed.
We’re less than 18 days away from the Election, and Senate Republicans have spent the past week pushing Amy Coney Barrett through the Judiciary Committee.
Anger at the audacity of Republicans for moving so quickly to fill RBG’s seat, even as people are already voting for the next president, has triggered a historic flood of small dollars to Joe Biden and Senate Democratic candidates.
Here’s South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham:
Senator Lindsey Graham: My opponent will raise almost $100 million. I’m being killed financially. This money is ‘cause they hate my guts.
RG: And it’s given Democrats the higher ground in those races. Here’s Lindsey Graham’s opponent, Jamie Harrison, in their recent debate:
JH: Your words, your promise was that no judicial nominee considered or approved or what have you, in the last year of an election. And you even named President Trump when you said it. Just be a man of it, and stand up, and say, “You know what? I changed my mind. I’m going to do something else.” But don’t go back and blame it on somebody else, for a flip-flop that you’re making yourself.
RG: In the third quarter, Harrison raised a stupefying $57 million, and Graham, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, clearly thought that this hearing would be a way to even the score.
Here he is in a Senate office building this week. Bear in mind when listening that soliciting campaign cash inside a federal building is a crime:
LG: I think people in South Carolina are excited about Judge Barrett. I don’t know how much it affected fundraising today. But if you want to help me close the gap, lindseygraham.com, a little bit goes a long way.
RG: For their part, Democrats made the confirmation hearings about the Affordable Care Act. But if the court does strike down the ACA in the upcoming case, Democrats can fix it with a one-line piece of legislation if they control Congress in the White House next year. Still, it was clearly smart, short-term politics and has Republican incumbents scrambling to promise they’ll protect people with pre-existing conditions and on and on.
Roe v. Wade, however, is not so safe. Listen to what Barrett told Graham about whether she could ever see Brown v. Board of Education being overturned:
LG: One of the reasons you can say with confidence that you think Brown v. Board of Education is super-precedent is that you’re not aware of any effort to go back to the good old days of segregation by a legislative body, is that correct?
Amy Coney Barrett: That is correct. And I’ve also said in lectures that Brown was correct as an original matter. So that is the kind of thing since I’ve said it in writing, I felt like I could express before the committee.
RG: Graham also has a piece of legislation that would ban abortion after 20 weeks. Listen to what she said when he asked about that.
LG: So that Roe v. Wade compared to Brown v. Board of Education is not super-precedent.
ACB: Not super-precedent, as I was using that term in the articles that have been referred to.
RG: If ACB is confirmed, opponents of Roe would have 5 votes to overturn it. Maybe they’ll blink, or maybe Democrats will make sure there are 6 votes to uphold it by expanding the court. But, either way, the fight isn’t over.
It’s not often that politicians talk openly about the forces that are driving the agenda. To understand that, we need to go back to the 1970s, when radical Republican operatives figured out how to link the interests of big business with the grassroots energy of the evangelical vote, by manufacturing concern about he issue of abortion, which had been non-controversial even into the mid-to-late-1970s.
That project has now grown extraordinarily sophisticated and well funded, as democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse laid out during the hearing:
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Pretty big deal. I’ve never seen this around any court that I’ve ever been involved with, where there’s this much dark money and this much influence being used. Here’s how The Washington Post summed it up: “This is a conservative activist’s behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the nation’s courts. And it’s a $250 million dark money operation” — $250 million is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it. The Republican Party platform tells us to look at how they want judges to rule to reverse Roe, to reverse the Obamacare cases, and to reverse Obergefell and take away gay marriage. That is their stated objective and plan. Why not take them at their word?
RG: That Amy Coney Barrett is on the brink of the Supreme Court is the culmination of that strategy. We’re joined now by Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and author of the new book “The Lie That Binds.”
Ilyse, welcome to Deconstructed.
Ilyse Hogue: Thank you Ryan. It’s great to be here.
RG: I wanted to start with Mike Lee. He made some news this week with a kind of startling assertion on Twitter, and was a point that he kind of elaborated on during the confirmation hearings and on Twitter he wrote that, Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”
Now, that sentiment sounded awfully familiar to me after reading your book. One of the founders of the Christian conservative movement, Paul Weyrich, said this at a 1980 convention, where Reagan and Jerry Falwell also spoke.
Paul Weyrich: Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
RG: And so, Ilyse, who was Paul Weyrich and what’s the link to people like Mike Lee?
IH: Paul Weyrich is the most influential person on the right-wing that most people have never heard of. He was sort of the cornerstone that started the new radical right, funded so much infrastructure that dominates the landscape today, including Heritage, including Federalists Society. And he called himself a dominionist. He straight-up said he believed God gave white Christian men dominion over all systems of power, certainly including the family, but including economic systems, social systems, and political systems.
And you have to remember, he was living and working to build this infrastructure in the late 60s and early 70s, when the country was in the throes of change! You know, the civil rights movement had become mainstream, the gay liberation movement was underway, women’s lib, black power, and he essentially said, in order to maintain order — in order to maintain order in this society, sound familiar — we have got to assert tighter control over these systems and that requires actually minority rule. So how do we do that?
And I think the straight line between him and what Mike Lee said this week is not just the shared philosophy that you’ve got a white male power structure that is intent on maintaining a status quo against people clamoring for change, but that, in fact, this is the end game for a strategy that Weyrich launched, which did involve subverting democracy — certainly through suppressing the vote, certainly through disinformation and monopolization of the narrative, but absolutely, through capturing the courts. And that strategy, which was initiated through the 70s and the 80s, is what we are living through, end-game this week, with these hearings.
RG: And so, you and others have talked about the way that he linked up kind of big business interests, and this nascent, you know, Christian Right in order to create kind of an electoral front for the movement that you talked about to kind of defend the status quo. So you know, Mike Lee is a part of that. Josh Hawley, too — he’s on the committee, he’s another religious conservative who talks a lot about right-wing populism and kind of reining in the monopoly power of big tech.
Now, he went to the Senate floor recently, after the Bostock decision, that was the Supreme Court decision that said that LGBT protections apply in the workplace, essentially. He went to the Senate floor, and just ripped into it and spoke more openly about the alliance that you’ve talked about, then I’ve ever really seen in public, at least on the Senate floor.
Senator Josh Hawley: Now, this is a very significant decision. And it marks a turning point for every conservative, and it marks a turning point for the legal conservative movement.
You know, the legal conservative project has always depended on one group of people in particular, in order to carry the weight of the votes to actually support this out in public, to get out there and make it possible electorally. And those are religious conservatives. I’m one myself. Evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Jews, they’re the ones — let’s be honest — they’re the ones who have been the core of the legal conservative effort.
And the reason for that dates back decades, back to the 1970s. The reason for that is these religious conservatives are from different backgrounds, but what they have consistently sought together was protection for their right to worship, for their right to freely exercise their faith as the First Amendment guarantees, for their right to gather in their communities, for their right to pursue the way of life that their scriptures variously command and that the Constitution absolutely protects.
RG: So, Ilyse, what’s he saying there? And what does a speech like that say about where this alliance is headed?
IH: I mean, it’s really fascinating, isn’t it? Because they were kind of trying to have it all ways. You have a founding infrastructure deeply committed to economic rule, which requires alliances with increasingly unaccountable corporations. But that doesn’t lead to a lot of foot soldiers, right? Not a lot of corporate executives are going to be knocking doors in the districts and states that you need.
So they created all of this narrative and infrastructure around exactly the constituencies that Josh Hawley lays out, right? Pretty extreme fundamentalists in certain elements of religious society that previously had not been mobilized to politics generally. But if they had been and had been around an entirely different set of issues. And they had been lulled into politics by actually the idea that they’re being threatened — threatened by these changes in society.
RG: To their way of life.
IH: Their way of life, right?
And arguably, that’s true, and we think their way of life was not threatened, right? But their way of life was threatened as being the only way of life that was acceptable in this society.
RG: Right.
IH: And those of us who stand for social progress and plurality and diversity think that is a positive thing. And I think what Hawley is speaking to is the fact that there were always that one sort of crack in the armor, because a lot of these people are actually working people who do stand to lose from the very same aims of this movement, when you look at the way that they have sided with corporate titans over working people. And it’s a very interesting thing.
Now, where does that mean the movement is heading? I mean, I think we’ve seen that. Right? Isn’t Trump the manifestation of that right-wing populism and his constant tension with the more establishment Republicans, and he makes them a little crazy. So I think that we are potentially headed for a very big rift in the GOP that has been very fragile-y bound together for the last 40 years. And you know, I think that would be a positive thing, quite honestly.
RG: Now, does Amy Coney Barrett make somebody like Josh Hawley happy, finally? It seems like he’s saying, look, you know, we’re suffering in this alliance, because our people are getting hurt by these corporate titans. But all we asked for is that our status quo be maintained, yet it’s not being. But if you get an Amy Coney Barrett, does he say, “OK, fine, this alliance was worth it. Is that kind of what the implication is here?”
IH: I think that they really do believe that the cementing of a right-wing majority — an unimpeachable super-majority, some would argue, on the Court, if they have a 6-3 ideological split — plus what she personally represents, which is this sort of perversion of what we believe the intention of religious liberty is. You know, we define religious freedom as: I get to do what I want, in my home, because of my own religion, you aren’t going to tell me not to do that. But I don’t get to tell you, Ryan Grim, what you should do, because of my faith.
They, on the GOP side, actually, completely invert that, and say: anytime I don’t get to tell you what to do because it offends my faith, that’s religious persecution. And I think they see her as simpatico in that. Right? I think that’s why they’re trying so hard to goad the Democrats into a fight over faith, which you know, I will give them credit, they did not take the bait. Right? And nor should they, because this is a question of record decisions, ability to actually judge impartially. And she has absolutely failed on all of those fronts. But they are trying so hard to make this a war over faith.
And they’ve been wanting this war over faith for a long time. Right? This goes fundamentally back to when they fought school desegregation in the late 60s, because they claimed that it violated their religion to have to integrate their schools. Their interpretation of their own religious faith and their own religious liberty is so tied up in control, power, and oppression of others, that it is not actually an acceptable interpretation through the Courts, through legislation, or any other mechanism to embrace that in a diverse and pluralistic society.
And guess what? Whether they like it or not, that’s what America is.
RG: Ilyse, you’ve also talked about the role of women in this particular movement. And so I want to finish up with Marsha Blackburn, who was kind of the clean-up hitter at the hearing. I’ll play a little bit of what she said and get your take.
Senator Marsha Blackburn: You don’t fit into their elitist format. You’re a girl from the South, from New Orleans. You went to school at Rhodes, in Memphis. I don’t know if my colleagues have ever been to Memphis or ever been to Rhodes, but you don’t fit into their Harvard, Ivy League group. You’re not a part of the clique or the club. You came to D.C.; you clerked. But Judge, you messed up: you went back to Notre Dame, and you chose to teach and to have a family. They don’t want to admit you got where you got; you earned it. And that is why we are so honored to support you.
RG: What is Marsha Blackburn doing there?
IH: So, I mean, begrudgingly Ryan — you know how begrudgingly — I actually thought she did an excellent job of what she was trying to do. What Marsha Blackburn is saying, over the backdrop of an entire American public who does not want this nominee rammed through, wants to actually be able to elect a next president and have that president fill this seat, what Marsha Blackburn is saying to a constituency that the GOP has been losing steadily for the last four years since Trump was elected, which is predominantly suburban white women — right — she’s saying you, women, have more in common with Amy Coney Barrett than you do with those coastal elites. They don’t like you, they don’t respect your way of life, and by them opposing this nominee, they are actually rejecting who you have chosen to be in the world.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. [Laughs.]This nominee is way too extreme for most of this constituency of voters. But what Marsha Blackburn is doing is relying on the allegiance of optics, the allegiance of “I look like her, I sound like her, I’m a mom like her,” over an examination of what are quite fundamentally radical views that would put off the same constituency of voters.
So Marsha Blackburn was sent out there to do a specific thing, which was to not just put a capstone on this illegitimate confirmation that they’re pushing through, but actually to try and mitigate the damage that it will do with a constituency of voters that they very much need, not even just to hold the White House, which, you know, the gender gap is so big at this point, it’s hard to believe. But she was saying, you know, even down-ballot, even the Senate races, even these people sitting on this dais, like Tom Tillis, like Lindsey Graham, who are on the ballot in 19 days, these people respect who you are, the other side does not.
I mean, this is literally from the playbook of Ronald Reagan when he was absolutely hemorrhaging women because of his policies and his misogynistic tendencies in his first term. And they were like: What do we do? What do we do? And they were like: I know! Let’s just name the first woman Supreme Court Justice, and they did, with Sandra Day O’Connor. And it saved them that time. I think it’s a much higher hill to climb for this to win women voters back to Trump.
RG: Republicans are pushing such an unpopular agenda here. How is it that Democrats can’t stop them? What are they doing wrong here?
IH: Yeah, I mean, the fundamental thing that they’ve done wrong is the Republicans have played the long-game. I mean, we lay out in the book that this is the culmination of over 40 years of strategy — almost 50 years of strategy — and the Democrats tend to treat each election cycle as though it’s a new one [laughs], responding to what’s happening in the moment, which I understand the allure of that and there is certainly a lot happening in this moment.
But you know, we have not seen that same kind of long-term strategy in support of an aspirational vision and ideals on the Democratic side in some time. And then I would argue that there is probably a well-intentioned but misguided over-reliance on the norms and practices that sort of bind together a democracy. And I think that’s true explicitly in the Senate, where we have a lot of institutionalists; you hear a lot of nostalgia for times gone by where you could work across the aisle, you know?
And it’s like: I’m so sorry that those times are gone. But how much more evidence do you need that those times are gone. Right? I mean, you can’t look at the Coney Barrett nomination without going back to 2016 and watching what they did to Merrick Garland and stopping him from even having a hearing, even though Scalia died, and even though Obama nominated him 10 months before the Election, right?
And that was a high-stakes gamble for McConnell at the time. It was such an abrogation of norms, that they basically dared people to call them out and make them pay a huge political price for it. But they thought it was worth it, because they understood the overarching strategy and how crucial this moment was to them in the long game. And they did it. And they won! And they weren’t even punished for it. Right?
RG: Yeah.
IH: And so what do they do? They go on to continue to break rules. And I think that Democrats have, you know, Democrats want democracy to work. So I give them absolute points for their feelings and their intentions there. But they have been slow to recognize that this is just like asymmetrical warfare, where you have one side breaking the system to get minority rule and the other side trying to just play within a broken system in a way that’s never gonna allow them victory.
RG: Well, Ilyse, thanks so much for joining us.
IH: Thank you, Ryan, and thanks for all you do.
[Musical interlude.]
RG: That was Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
If Barrett is confirmed, Josh Hawley and Mike Lee will be getting what they want on the culture war front, but it may come at the expense of their top corporate concern, monopoly power. On that front, Barrett and her allies have tended to side with corporate power.
While Coney Barrett was being grilled, Washington was buzzing about two major big tech stories, both related to the Supreme Court. One was the rumor that the Justice Department will soon be filing an antitrust complaint — The United States v. Google. That case has been in the works for years, and, if it’s finally filed, it’ll make one of the biggest fights between the government and concentrated corporate power since Microsoft was beaten back in the 1990s.
This comes as the House Antitrust Committee has just released a major, new bipartisan report calling out Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple for abusing their market power, a sign that Congress is ready to move.
Justice Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, also made news this week by arguing that Section 230 — an important provision of law that shields tech companies from liability for what appears on their platforms — should be scaled back, which is one of the Congress’s biggest weapons in its fight with big tech.
Trump latched onto that argument at a North Carolina rally on Thursday:
President Donald J. Trump: And if big tech persists in coordination with the mainstream media, we must immediately strip them of their section 230 protection. [Cheers and applause.] OK? It’s very simple.
Now, we all believe in freedom of the press, but don’t forget, big tech got something years ago that let them become big tech — they got total protection. They don’t get sued; they don’t get anything. They’re totally protected.
So the government gave that. So that takes away that little feeling that, “Oh, gee, we can’t talk to them about freedom of the press, et cetera.” No. We’re going to take away their Section 230 unless they shape up.
RG: The second major tech story was the decision by Twitter and Facebook — though, quite interestingly, not Google — to suppress an article by The New York Post that was based on emails from Hunter Biden it obtained. The Post claimed that the emails had been found on a computer that had been turned in at a repair shop. That’s an awfully unlikely story, and people were quick to surmise that the emails had been harvested from a hack by a foreign adversary.
But so far, the emails themselves have not been debunked as fake.They show a Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter Biden for creating an opportunity for him to meet with his dad, Joe Biden, and they show Hunter Biden leveraging his relationship with his dad for financial gain. The latter we already knew, but the former — potentially helping arrange a meeting with his dad — that would be news.
Biden’s camp has denied that any formal meeting like the one described was on Biden’s schedule, but they haven’t ruled out the possibility that the two met informally at an event in Washington, which is how you’d expect Hunter to connect somebody with his dad. After all, before the pandemic, Biden likely chatted up dozens of people at events every week. But, by the end of the week, Twitter had reversed itself, and said it made a mistake in censoring the story.
The big tech battle is just beginning, though, and to understand more about it, we’re joined now by Luther Lowe, who is the senior vice president for public policy at the company Yelp.
Luther, welcome to Deconstructed.
Luther Lowe: Hey, thanks for having me, Ryan. Great to be here.
RG: So this is a really exciting time, in the world of antitrust. You don’t just have the House antitrust subcommittee report; you’ve got the rumors of the United States v. Google complaint coming. You’ve got the talk of the Attorney Generals getting together to sue Google over various practices. And you’ve got this Supreme Court nominee winding through the process, you know, who is going to have the power to kind of reshape or constrict what, you know, what prosecutors are able to do when it comes to Google.
I wanted to have you on ‘cause you’ve had such a long running back and forth with Google, that you know this area about as well as anybody. So for people who are kind of new to this, can you tell us a little bit about how Yelp first wound up in Google’s crosshairs back in the day?
LL: Sure. Well, we’ve got a long history, complicated relationship with our friends down in Mountain View. And it started, really, as a friendship. When Yelp was a tiny startup in 2005, we entered a partnership with Google. And for example, if you did a search on Google for sushi in San Francisco, and really Yelp was pretty tiny back then and really probably only had content for places like LA and San Francisco, you would see a box at the top of the screen, not just 10 blue links, but they’d kind of created this new user interface, and inside the box, you have a map and you have some businesses with reviews. And those reviews would be coming from Yelp — it wouldn’t be all of our stuff, it would be like a snippet of it. And then the idea would be that, you know, it sort of was a win-win: Google would be able to offer this richer search result page, and Yelp would be rewarded with traffic for helping cultivate that content. And they had these types of partnerships with TripAdvisor and some of the other sites as well.
And this lasted for two years. And then in 2007, there was a moment where the license was about to expire and Google added a button that said “Click here to write reviews.” And you know, if you’re sitting there looking at Yelp or TripAdvisor content, you see a button that says click here to write reviews, you might think: OK, I’m about to go write reviews on Yelp or TripAdvisor. But of course, it was the beginning of their competitive posture where they’re sort of collecting content of their own.
So we said: You know what? Thanks, but no thanks, on the partnership; we’ll just live in the 10 blue links world. And from ’07-’09, we know now through some documents that leaked out of the FTC, that Google was sort of ripping its hair out, frustrated that without the third-party content from TripAdvisor and Yelp to help power its local search results, people were not really that inclined to leave reviews.
So it’s sort of like a chicken-egg problem — you have to have some content before people feel like the need to leave content. And so in ’09, those FTC documents showed that executives at Google said, “Hey, Eric Schmidt, can we try to buy Yelp?” And in late ’09, Google tried to buy Yelp and, for a variety of reasons, we decided to stay independent. And then that began the era of scraping where they were just taking everybody’s content and powering their local experience, kind of like they were from ’05-’07. But in this case, they were offering no link-back or no attribution — and so:
RG: Right, so what were they doing? They were just copying your reviews and just pasting them right into Google?
LL: Yeah, like if you went to a Verizon store in like, May of 2010 and bought an Android phone, and ripped off the cellophane and booted it up, you would see an app called Google Places. It was like literally un-deletable, it’s on the first page, you click on it, and if you pulled up reviews for you know, like Cheesecake Factory in Kansas City, you’d be reading Yelp reviews with no link-back or no attribution.
And so it was really bad for over a year and a half. Google was was doing this and saying, when we protested behind the scenes, saying, listen, if you don’t like it, you can just like de-index yourself; you can go to robots.txt and say, “No follow” and effectively, you know, giving us this false choice of like if you don’t like how we’re treating your content, you can basically kill yourself and knock out this thing that gives you 80 percent of your traffic or whatever.
RG: Go live on yahoo.com.
LL: Exactly, yeah. People I’m sure will find you on Bing or whatever.
RG: Right. You hear echoes of that argument today. If you don’t like Twitter censoring your news, then just, you know, go elsewhere.
LL: Right. No. There is definitely — Matt Stoller had a funny tweet yesterday dunking on Justin Amash about how monopoly is sort of the limit of libertarian logic. Because the whole idea of monopolies, you don’t have a choice, there’s actually no alternatives.
RG: Right.
LL: And these services are kind of like the guts of the information infrastructure. And so you can’t escape Google; you can’t escape these large tech platforms.
But anyway, what ended up happening was we went to a conference of Attorneys General in July of 2011, and kind of had our coming-out-of-the-closet party, if you will, and appeared on a panel where we publicly kind of described what Google was doing to us. And there were like, 35 state agencies in the room, plus Google lobbyists and, like, literally the next day, Marissa Mayer, who at the time was running all local search stuff at Google at the time, called our CEO and said: Hey, we got some exciting updates! We’re not going to use third-party content anymore.
So the lightbulb sort of went on for us that, wow in antitrust, your weakness is your strength. It’s sort of like a judo move. And that, you know, the a-word is like the only thing that Google respects. And so ever since then, we’ve had a scrappy effort to try to agitate and create as much attention to how they sort of put their hand on the scale on the internet, and it’s finally kind of coming to this really important crescendo.
RG: Now, so many people use Yelp, that I would expect it’s easier to get publicity around the problems that you guys are facing with Google. You know, all of those AGs sitting in that room, you know, had probably used Yelp at one point or another. And there’s something kind of valorous about it.
You know, people love that idea that people are going to shops and restaurants and using their own time to drop a review, to just help out the community and try to make the community a better place.
And so I wonder if you know you’ve got some of that sort of political capital. You’re not a small business, but you kind of have the virtues of having one in the minds of people like those AGs. Most companies don’t have that. So, you know, what’s it like for other other small businesses that are trying to deal with the problem as it relates not just to Google, but to some of these other platforms as well?
LL: Yeah, I mean, I think we’re, we’re pretty lucky because we’re sort of in this Goldilocks zone of we invested early enough in having an app on the iPhone, that we were able to dis-intermediate Google, and we were out there early enough that people kind of knew what Yelp was, at least people in the U.S., and so when folks started buying iPhones and smartphones and downloading apps, that allowed them to sort of sidestep even using Google as the middleman.
And that has really kind of saved our bacon as a company and created the, you know, the ability for us to have a little bit of budget to sort of stir the pot and try to agitate on these issues. But it’s a great point. Like, one of the compelling testimonies in the House antitrust subcommittee that you read about and also, Adrian Jeffries covered this story as well for I believe it was The Outline, but his story has come out a little bit.
This guy that runs this website Celebrity Net Worth, and it’s kind of a silly website, like the premise is like, you know, we’re gonna make an educated guess on what this person might be worth based on stuff in the public domain. But the reality is that he is responding to demand in the marketplace. It turns out it is like a very common thing that people search for, even though there’s no way to know it because people’s bank accounts are private.
RG: Right.
LL: But for maybe some public company officers where there have to be disclosures.
RG: I’ve noticed that if you google anybody’s name, what pops up after it is Net Worth.
LL: It pre-populates. Exactly. Because it’s such a common query.
RG: We’re so weird.
LL: Yeah. [Laughs.]
So anyway, but this guy, he’s clever. And he said: Hey, there’s a lot of folks who are doing these types of searches. And nobody is even making an attempt at making an educated guess of what people might be worth. And so I’m going to create content to sort of respond to this.
And that was the original bargain with Google, it was like, to consumers: If you come to Google, and you do a search, I promise you, you’re never going to use Yahoo or AltaVista ever again, because our technology is so much better.
To webmasters: Hey, if you architect your site in this particular way, if you focus on cultivating great content, you’ll be rewarded with an audience. And so he was sort of responding to that tacit promise that, listen, you will be rewarded if you create content that people are looking for.
And so, anyway, at the height of this business he was making millions of dollars, he had 12 employees and a pretty interesting story.
And then, at some point, basically the same playbook that they used on us, they came in, they called and said, “Hey, could we get all your data in sort of a structured format, we want to start powering our answer boxes with it.”
And he said, “Why would I do that?” Then people will just sidestep going to my site and seeing the ads, and it’ll ruin my business. And basically, what happened was they didn’t give him a choice anymore, they just took his stuff. And he had to lay everybody off. And now it’s just kind of like a side project.
There are countless stories about how Google, I think, really betrayed the web. Because roughly the first decade of Google it was all about: Hey, let’s get you out to the web, let’s get you on Google, out to the web as quickly as possible. We are a turnstile.
RG: Right.
LL: But now they’re more of a portal. It’s all about sort of keeping people, keeping the traffic on Google, such that another finding of that House Antitrust Subcommittee report was that last year, the majority of traffic going to Google either terminated on Google or went to Google’s secondary pages. So it’s really just the negative externalities, in terms of how it’s negatively impacted small startups and little websites. It’s really hard to understate.
RG: And the premise of Google was always that, you know, they’re going to give you the most relevant, best results that they possibly can with the most sophisticated algorithm that’s ever been developed. And if you type something into Google, you know, you can trust that they’re doing their absolute best to return to you what you’re looking for, and that’s what’s going to keep you coming back.
And then they’re going to sell ads around the side: there’s going to be ads on the side, there’s going to be some ads on the top, and consumers kind of understand that bargain in a capitalist society — if I want to click on the ad, I’ll click on the ad. But if I just want an organic result, then I’ll click on that.
But what’s emerged is that those aren’t actually organic anymore, that Google has a kind of algorithmic tweak that says that if their own products don’t win the search, they win anyway. How did they pull that off? And is that something that prosecutors are looking at?
LL: I hope so. And we’re going to know pretty soon. I think the latest report suggests that the DOJ filing is imminent, like within days, and we’ll be able to see some of the details laid out in that complaint.
But I think you’ve said it well. You know, it used to be 10 blue links and ads. And now there’s like this third category of content, and it’s just sort of like their house product. And the problem with that is it doesn’t go through the same kind of merit-based processes that everybody on the web has to go through.
So for example, I mean, using a local search, which is, you know, where we operate. It turns out local searching is like the most common thing people do on Google — 46 percent of all searches on Google have some kind of local intent.
And so let’s say I’m looking for a pediatrician in New York City. If I type in “pediatrician NYC today” on my smartphone. First of all, it’s most likely I’m doing it on my smartphone: 65 percent of search volume comes from smartphones. The screen size is much smaller on a smartphone. And so Google’s user interfaces, this map and the information being pinned to that map looks useful, because it’s businesses and ratings and stuff. But none of that stuff has gone through the standard organic algorithms. It’s just Google kind of pulling its own pediatrician reviews out of its back pocket. And what that leads to is people are just completely oblivious to the fact that you, if you scroll down the page, you’re going to get far richer reviews from services like ZocDoc, or RateMDs, or Healthgrades, or Yelp.
And what ends up happening is like 80 percent of the people click on stuff that’s powered by Google. And they’re just unwittingly mismatched with this objectively lower-quality information. So I hope that’s a component of the antitrust case, because, really, in antitrust you can show that there’s a quality loss; if you’re not showing a price increase, you can kind of substitute quality loss for price increase in antitrust. And so I hope that that is a component of what the DOJ brings.
RG: And what, in general, are the targets of the prosecution, both the AG and also the U.S.? In other words, what can you do about this? Like, let’s say that we’re only gonna have one dominant search engine, what can you do to a company like Google or Alphabet when it comes to antitrust?
LL: I think we’re gonna see three different angles of attack. On the DOJ case, it sounds like it’s all about defaults. So, for example, I think it’s been estimated that over the last 12 months, Google has paid Apple $13 billion for defaults on iOS. So when I buy a brand new iPhone, and I boot it up, and I start using Siri to search for stuff, unless it’s something that’s like, easily accessible for Siri, the query gets kicked over to Google and Google’s paying top dollar for those defaults.
You know, Google, aggressively ships browsers like Chrome, and even pays — I mean, Firefox effectively is a subsidiary of Google, because all of their money is from the defaults, that for the most part, the defaults that Google buys. And then, of course, Android is an entire strategy to protect Google defaults. It’s like, hey Samsung, and all you phone manufacturers that are non-Apple? You know, good news, we’ve got a free iOS for you; bad news, you have to set it up exactly as we prescribe or you don’t get any of the cool features.
And so all of these you could imagine as being components of a defaults case, which is what the DOJ is apparently poised to file.
And then not long after that the state of Texas. We know this — sunshine laws in Texas are pretty good — so reporters have been basically getting all the case files and subpoenas that have been sent to Google headquarters from the Texas AG. And that case looks like it’s all oriented around advertising technology.
So if you imagine, if you run a blog, and you don’t want to have Salesforce selling ads against the traffic on your blog, you go to your code; you put in HTML and add a little bit of code. And you’ve got a little advertising widget and you know, the entire ad tech stack, as it’s called, Google controls so many elements of that.
It’s a more complicated case, I admit, I’m not the most eloquent on that particular issue. But that is one area of focus. And Texas has a really big and robust team and lots of resources. Their Attorney General is under some controversy, but it appears that’s not slowing their effort.
And then finally, you have a multi-state, bipartisan group that includes states like Iowa, and Nebraska, Colorado, New York. And they’re looking at the search page. So vertical search — things like the how Google self-preferences, and search advertising. So it seems like it’s going to be a really robust set of issues that they take up. And it could ultimately get consolidated, but it’s really just hard to imagine kind of a worse situation for Google with all this antitrust activity in the U.S..
RG: Yeah, I remember watching in real time back in the late 2000s, when Google changed its advertising policy and, in one fell swoop, basically obliterated the independent blogosphere. The blogosphere as we know it doesn’t exist anymore, because overnight, people who’d been able to make a living off of ads on their blogs, couldn’t do it anymore. Now the ones that remain have been sucked up by media institutions, which themselves are now getting annihilated by these monopolistic platforms.
So this fight against Google, it is probably just the beginning. I don’t think you can call a titanic clash like this a warm-up, but Amazon and Apple and Facebook must be watching this very closely.
And I’m curious: for people like Mike Lee and Senator Hawley who have been kind of outspoken on the anti-monopoly front, but who are also outspoken advocates of confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and of a kind of conservative legal movement that has been, in many ways, empowering corporations — Clarence Thomas’ statement the other day about Section 230 notwithstanding — are they sort of taking a culture-war win here and taking an anti-monopoly loss? Is the kind of populist right going to kind of vanish from this scene as we go forward?
LL: It’s a great question. I mean, it’s honestly hard to speculate. But if you look at who vets the sort of judiciary for Republicans, it’s the Federalist Society. And if you actually dig in at all to how the Federalist Society views the world when it comes to antitrust, it’s incredibly narrow, it’s incredibly hostile to enforcement, in plaintiffs, and so I don’t what the long term sort of squaring of the circle is, from, you know, the rhetoric we hear from someone like Senator Hawley, and the type of judges that ultimately, when they get into office, and they hear an antitrust case, inevitably make the jurisprudence so much more narrow.
And so it’s, it’s a real problem. And I think that’s what’s, you know, been a large part of the energy that’s, that’s come about from the so called Neo-Brandeisians that, hey, we need to write new laws to make sure that judges aren’t just being overly restrictive in terms of how antitrust law is enforced, because it’s generated this serious concentration problem in our economy that’s produced all kinds of negative externalities including loss of wage growth and things like this.
RG: If you’ve still got time, I wanted to ask you about Section 230. You know, Trump is making a big stink about Section 230 now; you had the Clarence Thomas statement this week. You know a lot of folks on the left have said that Section 230 needs to be reformed. And that’s essentially a provision of law that says that a platform is not liable for content that it hosts, user-generated content.
In other words, you’re not liable if I post some crazy comment on an article; it’s not the responsibility of that website. And so the push is to say: Well, that’s not fair, that’s giving them too much leeway, and they’re kind of abusing it.
But I also wonder, how do you hold a place — even like Yelp — or Facebook responsible for something content generated by billions of people around the world? I don’t have an easy answer to this one. Where do you come down on this?
LL: You know, we are ardent defenders of Section 230. And it’s not as fun of an issue to talk about, I joke, because it sort of pushes me into Google’s corner. And we agree.
Everybody I talked to on Capitol Hill, who is kind of saber-rattling around 230, I always kind of say: Let’s take a step back. Would we even be talking about this if we were living in an alternate universe where Google and Facebook were not as large? And the answer is always: Of course not.
And so our position has been: Listen, let’s focus on enforcing antitrust laws. Let’s make sure that the enforcers have all the tools that they need to bring successful cases. And then your grievances about what you think 230s are going to solve go away.
Section 230 is axiomatic to the existence of the modern internet. And I think once you start monkeying with the intermediary liability protections, it really unleashes a lot of negative outcomes.
And so, I think part of the problem is that so many of the trade associations and groups that are out there defending 230 take money from big tech, and people just don’t trust them. And it’s like the same guy that’s going in there pitching you on why we shouldn’t enforce the antitrust laws is also saying why 230 is sacrosanct. And I really think there needs to be a coalition of consumer groups and small companies whose pitch is basically: Listen, we hate them too! You know we are not happy about these large tech companies either, but 230 is not the right angle of attack.
It’s going to obviously wind its way through Congress. And there’s going to be some more debates about it. But I hope that we wind up in a more reasonable place on 230. But I think it’s kind of silly season right now, that we’re a couple weeks away from the Election.
RG: Right? Yeah. I’m trying to imagine somebody suing The Intercept, because some crank posted something in our comments section or a restaurant owner sues Yelp because they don’t like one of the reviews that’s posted there. It’s hard to imagine having, like you said, kind of a functioning website — I guess you basically couldn’t have user-generated content, it seems like.
LL: I don’t see how you do it either. And so that’s why it’s really important. And I think next year, I mean, maybe some of this momentum will stall if there’s an administration shift and if there’s a blue wave, who knows. But I think that there’s an appetite by many Democrats to tinker with it as well. And so, you know, hopefully this, this leads to a broader conversation and sort of clear heads will prevail.
RG: Well, I really appreciate you taking some time to join us. Luther Lowe, senior vice president for public policy at Yelp.
Luther Lowe: Thank you again, Ryan. Thanks for the invitation.
[Musical interlude.]
RG: That was Luther Lowe, senior vice president for public policy at Yelp, and that’s our show.
Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief for The Intercept. Ilyse Hogue’s book, “The Lie That Binds,” was published by Strong Arm Press, of which I’m a cofounder. If you’d like to support Deconstructed, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
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See you next week.


theintercept--2020-10-17--After the Beirut Explosion, Lebanon’s Women-Led Civil Society Is Building on the Edge of Despair

O of August 4 , Aya Zantout sat in Al Makan , the cultural center in the Mar Elias neighborhood of Beirut , where she often volunteered .
Suddenly , from her seat just a few feet from the office ’ s glass door , she heard a strange boom , followed by a thunderous sound that shook the building and sent the door heaving from its hinges .
Glass shattered in every direction .
“ I can ’ t describe it in words , ” she recalled to me in early August , “ the way the door flew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scary.
” Dazed , Zantout stood on shaky legs and rushed to find Al Makan ’ s founder , Hiba Khodr , and Khodr ’ s daughter Jude Chehab down the hall .
Surrounded by broken glass , they huddled together , the ground beneath them quaking .
“ We thought Israel must be bombing us , ” she said .
They strained for the sound of another bomb , furtively checking their phones .
The signal was scrambled .
A few moments later , they opened the front door , dashing across @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighbors , to the top-floor apartment shared by Khodr and Chehab .
They found a home in disarray : furniture blown out of place and chunks of the ceiling littering the floor .
From the window , they stared in the direction of the sea , where an enormous , poison-pink cloud billowed on the shore .
Below , Beirut lay in pieces .
In the immediate aftermath , Zantout wanted only to contact her family and find a way home .
Her parents were safe , while her brother , when they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of shock .
“ He almost died , ” she said .
He was at a restaurant near the port and had watched as the ceiling collapsed onto a waiter and other patrons .
“ His hair was covered in glass.
” It took Zantout all evening to make her way home across a devastated city .
She spent the night laying awake , haunted by flashbacks , and rose the next morning with an overwhelming need to be out amid her grieving city .
“ My first thought was I need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I can ’ t just be inside watching the news or I ’ ll go crazy.
” She messaged Chehab , who was experiencing a similar restlessness , and the two met at Al Makan , along with Khodr and another woman from the neighborhood .
The scene on the streets was “ apocalyptic , ” Zantout recalled , choking up , “ I kept thinking , this is our city , all we ’ ve ever known , destroyed .
It ’ s devastating.
” Before long , the group had purchased @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the streets , offering what help they could .
They worked for hours , a sense of agency mingling with their despair .
They met fellow Beirutis , young and old , who were likewise searching for a way to help : neighbors laboring together to sift through rubble , searching for survivors , or transporting the wounded to hospitals .
Some circulated missing persons reports , while others appeared bearing snacks and water for cleanup crews .
“ Everyone had the same understanding , ” said Zantout .
“ We knew we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , because there was no way the government would.
” C Lebanon is hard-won — and warranted .
The blast came after a year of crises wrought by government corruption and mismanagement , including the collapse of the Lebanese lira as a result of exploitative banking practices by the ruling elite .
When the coronavirus pandemic hit , the economy buckled further , with poverty rates soaring to around 55 percent and unemployment exceeding 35 percent .
Standing there with their brooms on a blown-out port-side street , Zantout ’ s small group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This was more than a cleanup job — what was needed was a resurrection .
“ We were just a few friends who wanted to help .
We didn ’ t have a plan , we weren ’ t an NGO , ” said Zantout .
Yet a strategy began to form .
They used social media to raise money , roughly $ 60,000 in the first two weeks , largely from abroad .
Their ranks also grew to include at least 45 volunteers .
Al Makan became the headquarters for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ repair , check-ins , and the distribution of food and hygienic products , serving a roster of over 100 household and individual cases ; by late September , the number topped 240 .
Throughout , Chehab focused on something the government frequently forsook : transparency .
“ In Lebanon , there are a lot of fake NGOs and a lot of corruption with international aid , ” Chehab said .
The group posted live updates almost daily , detailing where and how its money was being spent .
“ Everyone knows that aid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Everywhere , people around us were looking for ways around the institutions.
” Across the city , Beirutis shared a similar skepticism of a government that had repeatedly , and spectacularly , failed them .
For many , enough was enough — the country , under the current government , would not survive without real , systemic change .
As hundreds mobilized to address immediate needs , and worked through their own trauma and grief in the process , they also began gearing their efforts toward wider structural and political change .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ extensive community surveys to identify gaps in government and NGO relief efforts .
Based on the findings , Khaddit Beirut focused on “ community health , environmental issues , education , and small and medium enterprises.
” So far , the group has identified roughly 100 local businesses that it aims to help reopen , creating 1,600 jobs .
So far , they ’ ve secured funding for three .
It laid groundwork for a community health clinic in Karantina , a low-income neighborhood near the port that was profoundly impacted by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ address chronic dysfunction in Lebanon ’ s school system .
Khaddit Beirut ’ s vision sets it in direct opposition to the dynamics of partisanship , dependency , and corruption that have defined Lebanese politics for the last 30 years .
Geha and her colleagues posit a “ big picture ” that would overwrite the current , sectarian system — an alternative that poses both danger and hope .
“ We won ’ t get through this without the entire community working together — our fates are intertwined , ” said Geha .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ The more civil society rises to the task , the riskier the work becomes .
“ It ’ s one thing to say we hate our politicians — and it ’ s another thing to show that we have the abilities within our community to solve these problems without them , ” she added .
“ That ’ s when they really start pushing back.
” The beginnings of this conflict surfaced quickly , as the people ’ s grief gave way to anger and set the stage for just such a showdown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had led to the explosion , the streets of Lebanon began to seethe .
“ Something inside us shattered , ” said Tania Chams Koleilat , a mother of three who volunteers with Khodr and Chehab .
“ I don ’ t know if it will ever heal completely .
But it made us feel furious , helpless .
After everything we ’ ve been through in the last year , we just couldn ’ t take anymore.
” Thousands of Beirutis paused their cleanup efforts and flowed toward Martyr ’ s Square @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of protest .
“ It was both a moment of anger and collective grieving , ” recalled Chehab , who attended a rally on August 8 .
“ We were crying out our pain , but also saying , ‘ We want them all out , not just one or two , but the whole system.
” The demonstrations quickly turned violent .
Across the city fires ignited as protesters stormed government buildings , performed mock executions on effigies of politicians , and clashed with law enforcement .
Hundreds were injured and arrested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rights Watch later accusing the Lebanese police and army of excessive force .
“ It was unbelievable , ” said Chehab .
“ We are people who have just been traumatized by an explosion !
We need to mourn , and you ’ re shooting at us ?
” T of Lebanon are well acquainted with protest .
The last year alone has seen months of mass demonstrations , which erupted on October 17 , 2019 , and lasted through the new year .
The catalyst was not a violent explosion but something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 6 a month on internet voice call services , such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger .
Yet , coming on the heels of months of economic decline , political scandals , municipal dysfunction , and a badly bungled wildfire , the tax was a bridge too far .
Spontaneous protests quickly coalesced in the streets and on social media , where messages of outrage and calls to action circulated widely .
At home in Beirut , Ahmad Tahan , then 24 , watched these developments stream across his Instagram feed last October @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over , ” he recalled .
But he was soon drawn in .
“ Of course , by then I was fed up with the government too , ” he said , citing the lack of job prospects , decrepit infrastructure , and collapsing economy .
“ You get to a point , as people , where you just boil over.
” By the next day , Tahan was on the street , where he met many young Beirutis like himself : disenchanted , well-educated , and broke .
Notably , he also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : the elderly , blue-collar and rural workers , non-Lebanese migrant workers and refugees .
The crowds also encompassed all of the 18 sects represented by Lebanon ’ s confessionalist government .
The factionalism fostered by this complex system had often prevented collective action in the past , as politicians exploited partisan divides to garner votes and deflect from their own inadequacies and corruption .
But , beginning in October , the streets became an incubator for new alliances , forged across political , religious , and socioeconomic differences , driven by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ addition to political and religious diversity , Tahan noted , the protests also transcended class divides .
He had participated in the “ You Stink ” movement of 2015 — after a government breakdown left municipal services halted and the streets flooded with garbage — but said these demonstrations were often dismissed as “ bougie , ” centering the young , urban , and upper-class .
“ The October protest was started by the poorer communities — the people who really couldn ’ t afford that $ 6 tax — and then the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he said .
The fervor of the protests grew quickly , as did their creativity .
Tahan began spending every day on the streets , watching in awe as the movement , which became known as the October Revolution , swept beyond Beirut and into more traditionally conservative areas .
“ It was everywhere , ” Tahan said .
“ We ’ d never experienced anything like that.
” Protesters staged dramatic actions , such as blocking highways and building a 170-kilometer human chain spanning the country from north to south .
Tahan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ full-fledged organizer .
He and his brother used social media to call for a breakfast protest at Beirut ’ s seaside Zaitunay Bay , which brought out thousands with just a few days ’ preparation .
Tahan ’ s favorite memory of the entire revolution was November 22 , 2019 , Lebanon ’ s independence day .
The occasion is traditionally marked by government-run military displays , but last year the protesters staged a counter-celebration , substituting “ citizen brigades ” for the traditional martial ceremony .
“ Groups from the different professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the journalists , the dentists , the doctors , the teachers .
It was a display of our capacities as a society , a way of saying , look at how big and wide our movement is .
We deserve to choose the future of our society.
” The daytime events ended with an “ all-night party , ” recalled Tahan , complete with DJs and dancing .
T included more drastic scenes , too , from the storming of government buildings to brutal clashes with law enforcement .
The government began to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Prime Minister Saad Hariri .
Even so , the bulk of the ruling class clung on , angering and galvanizing protesters .
The role of local journalists in the movement was key .
By spearheading investigations that exposed government corruption in explicit terms , reporters seeded a new culture of accountability .
“ For the first time , people were naming names on a big scale , ” said Mona Harb , a professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut and long-time researcher on movements .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them — they ’ d try to go out to restaurants and they ’ d be publicly shamed.
” This new demand for transparency has endured , said Harb : “ It ’ s no longer easy or popular to be a politician in Lebanon.
” Yet the politicians proved remarkably immune to embarrassment , preferring to try to wait out and intimidate the demonstrators rather than comply with their demands .
The October Revolution activists sustained their public protest for months , in the face of violent crackdowns , arbitrary detentions , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even torture .
In the end , said Tahan , it was “ mostly the weather ” that put a stop to public demonstrations : “ Our roads are terrible , and they basically flood in the winter.
” By around February , in the face of inclement weather and the emerging coronavirus pandemic , the beleaguered demonstrators largely dispersed .
At the time , Tahan and his co-conspirators had no idea that the issues they were protesting — the corruption , nepotism , and incompetence of the ruling elite — had also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blast .
Yet thousands of October Revolutionaries were left asking themselves where to go with their newly acquired political consciousness .
“ We crossed a threshold in October , as many people broke out of sectarian thinking and lost their fear of criticizing the government , ” said Harb .
“ But is that something that can be maintained , especially as people continue to suffer ?
” That suffering soon deepened , as the political class botched the country ’ s response to the pandemic , and the economy further unraveled .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to hell , ” said Khouri , “ and the government continued to do nothing.
” Quarantined in his apartment , Tahan felt his hope wane , along with the fading momentum of the monthslong protests .
He said , “ Some people became so desperate , they started going back to their partisan leaders .
They were looking for any kind of help they could get.
” He recalled a pervasive sense of hopelessness : “ Once again , after we ’ d already had all we could take , things got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they worsened again — in unimaginable ways .
After the explosion , Tahan responded reflexively , heading back to the streets .
Like Chehab , Zantout , and the Al Makan crew , Tahan also knew “ not to count on the government to take care of us.
” Networks established in the October Revolution sprung back to life , as WhatsApp groups and social media campaigns quickly coordinated efforts , rallied resources , and called out predatory NGOs .
When protests erupted soon after , veterans like Tahan were joined by newcomers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mostly stayed home in October .
The blast , compounding the suffering of 2019 and the coronavirus crisis , may have been a wakeup call for those who the October Revolution didn ’ t reach .
“ Each crisis has activated new people , but this blast shook something deeper .
Now , people are asking questions they ’ ve never asked before , ” she said .
“ They ’ re questioning the very structure of the sectarian system , asking , ‘ Is this what we really want ?
’ That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s also garnered much more involvement and support from the Lebanese diaspora than any past action , she added : “ It ’ s really interesting to see how many Lebanese abroad , especially young people , suddenly want to be a part of shaping the country ’ s future.
” How to shape that future remains open for debate .
This time around , Tahan said , no one expects protests alone to suffice .
“ We stood in the streets for months and nothing changed , ” he said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ s minds , but we didn ’ t change the government.
” Many , like Chehab and Zantout , have stopped going to protests , choosing instead to focus on grassroots work .
Koleilat , who has become a regular volunteer with the group , attended an early protest , but said that , after witnessing the government ’ s harsh response , she “ lost hope ” in the demonstrations .
“ In the end , even though I love this country , and I believe in this cause , can I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my life in danger , when I know it won ’ t make a difference ?
” The combination of delay tactics and violent crackdowns may prove enough to break the burgeoning resistance movement , said Khouri .
“ This is a population that has tasted a unified national vision and their determination is real , but it ’ s not clear whether this can withstand all the challenges they face .
This elite ruling class has been in power for 30 years , and they not only have incredible networks of clients @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the guns.
” The Lebanese state has become “ increasingly militarized ” in the face of repeated uprisings , Khouri added .
Even as more Lebanese struggle to meet their daily needs , any impulse to protest must be weighed against the growing possibility of state violence .
“ It seems that things can not go on this way much longer , ” he said .
“ But then again , many of us felt that was true six months ago.
” In the more optimistic view , the blast and the organic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as an acceleration in the development of such an “ alternative vision.
” As people like Chehab , Zantout , and Khodr spontaneously respond to the crises around them , they demonstrate civil society ’ s ability to bypass government stalemate and corruption .
Yet the scale of the problems can be overwhelming .
“ We ’ d start by fixing a window , and then the woman would say , ‘ Could I have some money to buy milk for my child ?
Could you help me get diapers ?
’ Now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for help with school supplies , ” Khodr said .
As donations have slowed and some of their college-age volunteers have returned to class , Khodr said the group is currently assessing new strategies .
Two months since the blast , they are unanimous about the need to shift to a more durable vision .
So far , they ’ ve expanded beyond food aid and cash assistance to more long-term projects like vocational training for women and mental health care for children .
Geha said she and her colleagues have been grappling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from dependency on NGOs and politicians to self-reliance is heartening .
“ We need to all realize that programs are reversible , ” she said , “ that these manmade disasters can be changed .
When we come together and ask these questions , we help each other open our minds.
” Other community-based organizations , such as Nusaned and Beit El Baraka , have emerged to address large-scale issues such as equitable housing , a sector which was marred with corruption long before the blast .
Others haven ’ t given up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organizer and founding member of Khat Ahmar , or the Red Line , said he ’ s working to harness the momentum of the last year of protest into a coherent political strategy .
His organization has spent recent months reaching out to the scores of activist groups that emerged in 2019 , seeking to build coalitions under a shared vision of nonsectarian , democratic opposition .
Nader and his colleagues hope to identify and groom members to run in the next parliamentary elections , scheduled for May 2022 , but say that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ priority .
“ The time for details and differences is later , ” he said .
“ What we want now is simple : We want the politicians out.
” F or all the passion of those like Nader , Chehab , and Geha , Harb worries about the long-term viability of such civil society initiatives .
After documenting activism for two decades , she said the momentum of the last year has been “ unprecedented , ” but notes the dim track record for the grassroots in Lebanon : “ With police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ often civil society makes one or two steps forward , then gets pushed 10 steps back.
” Not everyone can afford to wait .
Thousands of Lebanese citizens have emigrated in the last year , with many more desperate to do the same .
Exact numbers are hard to tally , complicated by the pandemic shutdowns , but many local experts and journalists have decried a growing “ exodus ” since the blast .
Already , between 10 million and 15 million Lebanese are estimated to live outside the country , compared to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In a striking role reversal , Lebanese have begun loading onto boats traditionally used by Syrian and other refugees to make risky , illicit attempts to escape across the Mediterranean Sea .
( Several Lebanese citizens , including children , have died in these mostly unsuccessful journeys . )
Tahan said most Lebanese are either trying to leave or know someone who is .
“ Not one of my friends wants to stay here , ” he said .
“ We are tired of being resilient , we are tired of surviving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while he ’ s still working daily to help rebuild , he ’ s also started the application process to emigrate to Canada .
“ I really don ’ t want to do it , ” he said .
“ I cry every time I think about it .
If I saw any hope , I ’ d stay .
But when you try to change something for the better and you keep getting denied — it feels almost like you ’ re getting kicked out.
” Zantout also struggles to see a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now leaving feels impossible .
In the past , she ’ d hoped to move abroad to pursue a master ’ s degree in architecture , but with her family hit hard by the economic crisis , she ’ s let that dream go for now .
Still , she said the “ fantasy ” of emigration helps her get through hard days : “ That dream of escape — everyone needs some kind of escape right now .
It ’ s all too much.
” Khodr plans to stay but said she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ daughter either way .
“ I ’ d miss her if she leaves , but in the end , my generation understands why our children go — we left them a country full of problems , ” she said .
For Chehab , who spent much of her life in the United States , the last two months have brought her closer to her Lebanese roots .
“ Doing all this work has connected me to this city , ” she said .
“ it ’ s made me feel I can truly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , she had plans to relocate to the U.K. , but the disaster changed everything .
“ All I knew was , I can ’ t abandon Beirut now .
”

O n the afternoon of August 4, Aya Zantout sat in Al Makan, the cultural center in the Mar Elias neighborhood of Beirut, where she often volunteered. Suddenly, from her seat just a few feet from the office’s glass door, she heard a strange boom, followed by a thunderous sound that shook the building and sent the door heaving from its hinges. Glass shattered in every direction. “I can’t describe it in words,” she recalled to me in early August, “the way the door flew, the sounds, it was so scary.”
Dazed, Zantout stood on shaky legs and rushed to find Al Makan’s founder, Hiba Khodr, and Khodr’s daughter Jude Chehab down the hall. Surrounded by broken glass, they huddled together, the ground beneath them quaking. “We thought Israel must be bombing us,” she said. They strained for the sound of another bomb, furtively checking their phones. The signal was scrambled. A few moments later, they opened the front door, dashing across a street covered with debris and stunned neighbors, to the top-floor apartment shared by Khodr and Chehab. They found a home in disarray: furniture blown out of place and chunks of the ceiling littering the floor. From the window, they stared in the direction of the sea, where an enormous, poison-pink cloud billowed on the shore. Below, Beirut lay in pieces.
It would be more than an hour before Zantout, Chehab, and Khodr got any understanding of what had happened: At the Port of Beirut, nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate had ignited, triggering one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in history and sending a supersonic blast through Lebanon’s capital. Over the coming days, reports would detail the extent of the human cost — over 200 dead, 6,000 injured, and 300,000 left without homes — along with the financial blow of an estimated $5 billion in direct damages alone.
Aya Zantout, a 23-year-old volunteer looks out window in “Al Makan” in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 10, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
In the immediate aftermath, Zantout wanted only to contact her family and find a way home. Her parents were safe, while her brother, when they finally located him, was coming out of shock. “He almost died,” she said. He was at a restaurant near the port and had watched as the ceiling collapsed onto a waiter and other patrons. “His hair was covered in glass.”
It took Zantout all evening to make her way home across a devastated city. She spent the night laying awake, haunted by flashbacks, and rose the next morning with an overwhelming need to be out amid her grieving city. “My first thought was I need to be on the streets doing something. I can’t just be inside watching the news or I’ll go crazy.” She messaged Chehab, who was experiencing a similar restlessness, and the two met at Al Makan, along with Khodr and another woman from the neighborhood. The scene on the streets was “apocalyptic,” Zantout recalled, choking up, “I kept thinking, this is our city, all we’ve ever known, destroyed. It’s devastating.”
Before long, the group had purchased gloves and brooms and began moving through the streets, offering what help they could. They worked for hours, a sense of agency mingling with their despair. They met fellow Beirutis, young and old, who were likewise searching for a way to help: neighbors laboring together to sift through rubble, searching for survivors, or transporting the wounded to hospitals. Some circulated missing persons reports, while others appeared bearing snacks and water for cleanup crews. “Everyone had the same understanding,” said Zantout. “We knew we had to take care of these things, because there was no way the government would.”
A view of the Port of Beirut is seen following the blast on August 4th in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 9, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
C ynicism in Lebanon is hard-won — and warranted. The blast came after a year of crises wrought by government corruption and mismanagement, including the collapse of the Lebanese lira as a result of exploitative banking practices by the ruling elite. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the economy buckled further, with poverty rates soaring to around 55 percent and unemployment exceeding 35 percent.
Standing there with their brooms on a blown-out port-side street, Zantout’s small group assessed the enormous financial demands of recovery. This was more than a cleanup job — what was needed was a resurrection. “We were just a few friends who wanted to help. We didn’t have a plan, we weren’t an NGO,” said Zantout. Yet a strategy began to form. They used social media to raise money, roughly $60,000 in the first two weeks, largely from abroad. Their ranks also grew to include at least 45 volunteers. Al Makan became the headquarters for a multilevel operation that included cleanup, home repair, check-ins, and the distribution of food and hygienic products, serving a roster of over 100 household and individual cases; by late September, the number topped 240.
Throughout, Chehab focused on something the government frequently forsook: transparency. “In Lebanon, there are a lot of fake NGOs and a lot of corruption with international aid,” Chehab said. The group posted live updates almost daily, detailing where and how its money was being spent. “Everyone knows that aid that goes through the government usually disappears. Everywhere, people around us were looking for ways around the institutions.”
Across the city, Beirutis shared a similar skepticism of a government that had repeatedly, and spectacularly, failed them. For many, enough was enough — the country, under the current government, would not survive without real, systemic change. As hundreds mobilized to address immediate needs, and worked through their own trauma and grief in the process, they also began gearing their efforts toward wider structural and political change.
From the left, Aya Zantout, Hiba Khodr, and Jude Chehab, sitting on a sofa in the Al Makan center, under calligraphy spelling out Arabic poet Ibn Arabi’s words — “The place that has no feminine influence cannot be trusted” — from which the center takes its name, in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 10, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
“The blast was the culmination of a spiral of disasters we’ve been living through, from broken sewage systems, to lack of internet and electricity, to the financial crisis — it is clear the system is not working, not even trying to work for the people anymore,” said Carmen Geha, an associate professor of public administration at the American University of Beirut and a long-time organizer. “We need an alternative.” Geha has worked tirelessly for that alternative, co-founding Khaddit Beirut — literally, Beirut Shake Up — the day after the blast. The group aims to harness grassroots energy like that of Zantout, Chehab, and Khodr to supplant failed government bureaucracy and, eventually, to challenge it directly.
“It’s one thing to say we hate our politicians — and it’s another thing to show that we have the abilities within our community to solve these problems without them.”
Since the blast, Khaddit Beirut conducted extensive community surveys to identify gaps in government and NGO relief efforts. Based on the findings, Khaddit Beirut focused on “community health, environmental issues, education, and small and medium enterprises.” So far, the group has identified roughly 100 local businesses that it aims to help reopen, creating 1,600 jobs. So far, they’ve secured funding for three. It laid groundwork for a community health clinic in Karantina, a low-income neighborhood near the port that was profoundly impacted by the blast, and began grassroots efforts to address chronic dysfunction in Lebanon’s school system.
Khaddit Beirut’s vision sets it in direct opposition to the dynamics of partisanship, dependency, and corruption that have defined Lebanese politics for the last 30 years. Geha and her colleagues posit a “big picture” that would overwrite the current, sectarian system — an alternative that poses both danger and hope. “We won’t get through this without the entire community working together — our fates are intertwined,” said Geha. “This makes the government nervous.” The more civil society rises to the task, the riskier the work becomes. “It’s one thing to say we hate our politicians — and it’s another thing to show that we have the abilities within our community to solve these problems without them,” she added. “That’s when they really start pushing back.”
The beginnings of this conflict surfaced quickly, as the people’s grief gave way to anger and set the stage for just such a showdown. As reports emerged that government negligence had led to the explosion, the streets of Lebanon began to seethe. “Something inside us shattered,” said Tania Chams Koleilat, a mother of three who volunteers with Khodr and Chehab. “I don’t know if it will ever heal completely. But it made us feel furious, helpless. After everything we’ve been through in the last year, we just couldn’t take anymore.”
Thousands of Beirutis paused their cleanup efforts and flowed toward Martyr’s Square and Parliament Square, setting off days of protest. “It was both a moment of anger and collective grieving,” recalled Chehab, who attended a rally on August 8. “We were crying out our pain, but also saying, ‘We want them all out, not just one or two, but the whole system.”
The demonstrations quickly turned violent. Across the city fires ignited as protesters stormed government buildings, performed mock executions on effigies of politicians, and clashed with law enforcement. Hundreds were injured and arrested over the following days, with Human Rights Watch later accusing the Lebanese police and army of excessive force. “It was unbelievable,” said Chehab. “We are people who have just been traumatized by an explosion! We need to mourn, and you’re shooting at us?”
(Left/top) Georges is a volunteer architect visiting an old heritage to help families and their homes in Gemayze, near the Beirut Port explosion. (Right/bottom) Every day, Hussein helps transport food and aid to more than a thousand families in need. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
T he streets of Lebanon are well acquainted with protest. The last year alone has seen months of mass demonstrations, which erupted on October 17, 2019, and lasted through the new year. The catalyst was not a violent explosion but something seemingly banal: a government-imposed tax of $6 a month on internet voice call services, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Yet, coming on the heels of months of economic decline, political scandals, municipal dysfunction, and a badly bungled wildfire, the tax was a bridge too far. Spontaneous protests quickly coalesced in the streets and on social media, where messages of outrage and calls to action circulated widely.
At home in Beirut, Ahmad Tahan, then 24, watched these developments stream across his Instagram feed last October. “I thought it would blow over,” he recalled. But he was soon drawn in. “Of course, by then I was fed up with the government too,” he said, citing the lack of job prospects, decrepit infrastructure, and collapsing economy. “You get to a point, as people, where you just boil over.” By the next day, Tahan was on the street, where he met many young Beirutis like himself: disenchanted, well-educated, and broke. Notably, he also met many from other sectors of society: the elderly, blue-collar and rural workers, non-Lebanese migrant workers and refugees.
The crowds also encompassed all of the 18 sects represented by Lebanon’s confessionalist government. The factionalism fostered by this complex system had often prevented collective action in the past, as politicians exploited partisan divides to garner votes and deflect from their own inadequacies and corruption. But, beginning in October, the streets became an incubator for new alliances, forged across political, religious, and socioeconomic differences, driven by a growing recognition of common crises.
“It was a moment of historic clarity, when people from all the sects in the country were united, realizing they were in the same boat.”
This shift heralded an “unprecedented moment of political consciousness” in Lebanese society, said Rami Khouri, senior public policy fellow and director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. “It was a moment of historic clarity, when people from all the sects in the country were united, realizing they were in the same boat: They were not only all poor, but they were facing a life that had been degraded in every possible way, the kind of deprivations that really drive people to action.”
Watching people break out of their strict, party-line thinking was revolutionary for Tahan, who had grown up in a Lebanon defined by sectarianism. “I’m used to seeing people just follow their leaders without thinking,” he said. “But in October, people started recognizing that the parties were more interested in protecting themselves than their voters.” Political corruption fosters rampant inequality in Lebanon, where, in 2019, the top 10 percent of adults owned 70.6 percent of the country’s wealth.
Ahmad Tahan, an October Revolution activist and filmmaker, was heavily involved in last year’s protests and has been volunteering on the ground every day since the August 4th blast in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 9, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
In addition to political and religious diversity, Tahan noted, the protests also transcended class divides. He had participated in the “You Stink” movement of 2015 — after a government breakdown left municipal services halted and the streets flooded with garbage — but said these demonstrations were often dismissed as “bougie,” centering the young, urban, and upper-class. “The October protest was started by the poorer communities — the people who really couldn’t afford that $6 tax — and then the rest of us joined in,” he said.
The fervor of the protests grew quickly, as did their creativity. Tahan began spending every day on the streets, watching in awe as the movement, which became known as the October Revolution, swept beyond Beirut and into more traditionally conservative areas. “It was everywhere,” Tahan said. “We’d never experienced anything like that.” Protesters staged dramatic actions, such as blocking highways and building a 170-kilometer human chain spanning the country from north to south.
Tahan soon found himself moving from spectator to full-fledged organizer. He and his brother used social media to call for a breakfast protest at Beirut’s seaside Zaitunay Bay, which brought out thousands with just a few days’ preparation.
Tahan’s favorite memory of the entire revolution was November 22, 2019, Lebanon’s independence day. The occasion is traditionally marked by government-run military displays, but last year the protesters staged a counter-celebration, substituting “citizen brigades” for the traditional martial ceremony. “Groups from the different professional unions marched, instead of soldiers: the journalists, the dentists, the doctors, the teachers. It was a display of our capacities as a society, a way of saying, look at how big and wide our movement is. We deserve to choose the future of our society.” The daytime events ended with an “all-night party,” recalled Tahan, complete with DJs and dancing.
Lebanese security forces contain clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters in the centre of the capital Beirut during the 13th day of anti-government protests on October 29, 2019. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
T he protests included more drastic scenes, too, from the storming of government buildings to brutal clashes with law enforcement. The government began to waver, most notably in the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri. Even so, the bulk of the ruling class clung on, angering and galvanizing protesters.
The role of local journalists in the movement was key. By spearheading investigations that exposed government corruption in explicit terms, reporters seeded a new culture of accountability. “For the first time, people were naming names on a big scale,” said Mona Harb, a professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut and long-time researcher on movements. “Politicians suddenly felt that people were watching them — they’d try to go out to restaurants and they’d be publicly shamed.” This new demand for transparency has endured, said Harb: “It’s no longer easy or popular to be a politician in Lebanon.”
Yet the politicians proved remarkably immune to embarrassment, preferring to try to wait out and intimidate the demonstrators rather than comply with their demands. The October Revolution activists sustained their public protest for months, in the face of violent crackdowns, arbitrary detentions, character assassinations, online harassment, and even torture. In the end, said Tahan, it was “mostly the weather” that put a stop to public demonstrations: “Our roads are terrible, and they basically flood in the winter.” By around February, in the face of inclement weather and the emerging coronavirus pandemic, the beleaguered demonstrators largely dispersed.
At the time, Tahan and his co-conspirators had no idea that the issues they were protesting — the corruption, nepotism, and incompetence of the ruling elite — had also laid the groundwork for a soon-to-ignite deadly blast. Yet thousands of October Revolutionaries were left asking themselves where to go with their newly acquired political consciousness. “We crossed a threshold in October, as many people broke out of sectarian thinking and lost their fear of criticizing the government,” said Harb. “But is that something that can be maintained, especially as people continue to suffer?”
That suffering soon deepened, as the political class botched the country’s response to the pandemic, and the economy further unraveled. “Daily life for people went completely to hell,” said Khouri, “and the government continued to do nothing.”
Quarantined in his apartment, Tahan felt his hope wane, along with the fading momentum of the monthslong protests. He said, “Some people became so desperate, they started going back to their partisan leaders. They were looking for any kind of help they could get.” He recalled a pervasive sense of hopelessness: “Once again, after we’d already had all we could take, things got worse.”
(Left/top) A volunteer helps an older woman get goods for cooking from the food provided outside Beit El Baraka. (Right/bottom) Maya Chams, founder and president of Beit El Baraka, welcomes the United Nations in their center in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 9, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
O n August 4, with the blast, they worsened again — in unimaginable ways. After the explosion, Tahan responded reflexively, heading back to the streets. Like Chehab, Zantout, and the Al Makan crew, Tahan also knew “not to count on the government to take care of us.” Networks established in the October Revolution sprung back to life, as WhatsApp groups and social media campaigns quickly coordinated efforts, rallied resources, and called out predatory NGOs. When protests erupted soon after, veterans like Tahan were joined by newcomers like Chehab and Zantout, who had mostly stayed home in October.
The blast, compounding the suffering of 2019 and the coronavirus crisis, may have been a wakeup call for those who the October Revolution didn’t reach. “Each crisis has activated new people, but this blast shook something deeper. Now, people are asking questions they’ve never asked before,” she said. “They’re questioning the very structure of the sectarian system, asking, ‘Is this what we really want?’ That’s never happened before.” It’s also garnered much more involvement and support from the Lebanese diaspora than any past action, she added: “It’s really interesting to see how many Lebanese abroad, especially young people, suddenly want to be a part of shaping the country’s future.”
How to shape that future remains open for debate. This time around, Tahan said, no one expects protests alone to suffice. “We stood in the streets for months and nothing changed,” he said. “Well, we changed people’s minds, but we didn’t change the government.” Many, like Chehab and Zantout, have stopped going to protests, choosing instead to focus on grassroots work. Koleilat, who has become a regular volunteer with the group, attended an early protest, but said that, after witnessing the government’s harsh response, she “lost hope” in the demonstrations. “In the end, even though I love this country, and I believe in this cause, can I as a mother of three really put my life in danger, when I know it won’t make a difference?”
The combination of delay tactics and violent crackdowns may prove enough to break the burgeoning resistance movement, said Khouri. “This is a population that has tasted a unified national vision and their determination is real, but it’s not clear whether this can withstand all the challenges they face. This elite ruling class has been in power for 30 years, and they not only have incredible networks of clients and allies, but they also have the guns.” The Lebanese state has become “increasingly militarized” in the face of repeated uprisings, Khouri added. Even as more Lebanese struggle to meet their daily needs, any impulse to protest must be weighed against the growing possibility of state violence. “It seems that things cannot go on this way much longer,” he said. “But then again, many of us felt that was true six months ago.”
“The time for details and differences is later. “What we want now is simple: We want the politicians out.”
The rising desperation could help build or undo the movement. For Geha, the co-founder of Khaddit Beirut, the fact that the Lebanese people have “so little to lose” opens up the possibility for bold new steps. “So many of us have no salaries, no health, nothing left,” she said. “The very least we deserve is to allow ourselves to imagine a different way.”
During a workshop on mental health and healing at Al Makan, Lea and Ryan work to overcome their fears and anxiety after the Beirut's blast explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 10, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
In the more optimistic view, the blast and the organic grassroots efforts that followed can be seen as an acceleration in the development of such an “alternative vision.” As people like Chehab, Zantout, and Khodr spontaneously respond to the crises around them, they demonstrate civil society’s ability to bypass government stalemate and corruption.
Yet the scale of the problems can be overwhelming. “We’d start by fixing a window, and then the woman would say, ‘Could I have some money to buy milk for my child? Could you help me get diapers?’ Now, they’re calling us asking for help with school supplies,” Khodr said. As donations have slowed and some of their college-age volunteers have returned to class, Khodr said the group is currently assessing new strategies. Two months since the blast, they are unanimous about the need to shift to a more durable vision. So far, they’ve expanded beyond food aid and cash assistance to more long-term projects like vocational training for women and mental health care for children.
Geha said she and her colleagues have been grappling with similar issues, but the shift from dependency on NGOs and politicians to self-reliance is heartening. “We need to all realize that programs are reversible,” she said, “that these manmade disasters can be changed. When we come together and ask these questions, we help each other open our minds.” Other community-based organizations, such as Nusaned and Beit El Baraka, have emerged to address large-scale issues such as equitable housing, a sector which was marred with corruption long before the blast.
Others haven’t given up on revolution. Ralph Nader, an organizer and founding member of Khat Ahmar, or the Red Line, said he’s working to harness the momentum of the last year of protest into a coherent political strategy. His organization has spent recent months reaching out to the scores of activist groups that emerged in 2019, seeking to build coalitions under a shared vision of nonsectarian, democratic opposition. Nader and his colleagues hope to identify and groom members to run in the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for May 2022, but say that overthrowing the current government is the first priority. “The time for details and differences is later,” he said. “What we want now is simple: We want the politicians out.”
Ralph Nader, the general secretary for the group “I Am The Red Line,” standing in front of the Beirut Port explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 9, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
F or all the passion of those like Nader, Chehab, and Geha, Harb worries about the long-term viability of such civil society initiatives. After documenting activism for two decades, she said the momentum of the last year has been “unprecedented,” but notes the dim track record for the grassroots in Lebanon: “With police suppression growing more violent over time, often civil society makes one or two steps forward, then gets pushed 10 steps back.”
Not everyone can afford to wait. Thousands of Lebanese citizens have emigrated in the last year, with many more desperate to do the same. Exact numbers are hard to tally, complicated by the pandemic shutdowns, but many local experts and journalists have decried a growing “exodus” since the blast. Already, between 10 million and 15 million Lebanese are estimated to live outside the country, compared to only about 5 million who remain there. In a striking role reversal, Lebanese have begun loading onto boats traditionally used by Syrian and other refugees to make risky, illicit attempts to escape across the Mediterranean Sea. (Several Lebanese citizens, including children, have died in these mostly unsuccessful journeys.)
Jude Chehab sits in the spot where she was when the explosion happened on August 4th in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 9, 2020. Photo: Carmen Yahchouchy for The Intercept
“All I knew was, I can’t abandon Beirut now.”
Tahan said most Lebanese are either trying to leave or know someone who is. “Not one of my friends wants to stay here,” he said. “We are tired of being resilient, we are tired of surviving one disaster after another.” And, while he’s still working daily to help rebuild, he’s also started the application process to emigrate to Canada. “I really don’t want to do it,” he said. “I cry every time I think about it. If I saw any hope, I’d stay. But when you try to change something for the better and you keep getting denied — it feels almost like you’re getting kicked out.”
Zantout also struggles to see a future in Lebanon but said that right now leaving feels impossible. In the past, she’d hoped to move abroad to pursue a master’s degree in architecture, but with her family hit hard by the economic crisis, she’s let that dream go for now. Still, she said the “fantasy” of emigration helps her get through hard days: “That dream of escape — everyone needs some kind of escape right now. It’s all too much.”
Khodr plans to stay but said she’s careful not to press her daughter either way. “I’d miss her if she leaves, but in the end, my generation understands why our children go — we left them a country full of problems,” she said.
For Chehab, who spent much of her life in the United States, the last two months have brought her closer to her Lebanese roots. “Doing all this work has connected me to this city,” she said. “it’s made me feel I can truly call myself Beiruti.” Before the blast, she had plans to relocate to the U.K., but the disaster changed everything. “All I knew was, I can’t abandon Beirut now.”