theintercept--2020-10-04--First She Was Separated From Her Family, Now She's Separated From School

Génnezys is one of the thousands of immigrant children who were torn from their parents in 2018 by the Trump administration ’ s “ zero tolerance ” family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border .
I wrote about the desperate efforts of Cruz , her incarcerated mother , to find her 10-year-old daughter .
They were reunited after about six weeks .
Cruz later borrowed $ 6,000 from a friend for a coyote to smuggle her three-year-old daughter into the U.S .
The child was detained for a few days then released to Cruz .
I asked Génnezys to invent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. government reprisal , and she came up with a fanciful one based on the Spanish pronunciation — HEH-neh-sees — of the first book in the Old Testament .
Today the family resides in a small Southern city .
Cruz works as a janitor , earning a bit less than $ 10 an hour .
They live in a small apartment with one bedroom , which Cruz and the girls share with her boyfriend .
He is also an immigrant , and he pays half the rent .
He ’ s employed in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very early in the morning .
Cruz goes to work after taking her four-year-old daughter , whom I ’ ll call Bety , by bus to a daycare center .
With school strictly online now because of Covid-19 , Génnezys stays in the apartment all by herself from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. , often supervising an 8-year-old girl who has her own school computer with headphones .
This child ’ s Latina immigrant mother works , too , so Génnezys acts as babysitter .
Before online school started in September , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the home would be lonely and scary .
I live hundreds of miles away , so I volunteered to sit with her via FaceTime .
She says that she feels much better when I ’ m with her .
During the first two days of remote school , the teachers , all young or middle-aged white women , cycled though a dither of confusion and kind but mostly fruitless efforts to actually see and hear their students .
One problem was that the online platforms were glitchy .
The class links often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Génnezys , with blank screens .
But by week ’ s end , the kinks were worked out — yet the students remained silent phantoms .
“ Know that I see you .
I hear you .
I ’ m with you , ” one young teacher intoned to the kids right after introducing herself .
They had names like Hassan , Rasheeda , Yennifer , and Travis .
“ Black Lives Matter , ” the teacher added .
She was met by silence from her new students , and she could not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them to turn on their mics and cameras , but getting them to comply was harder than pulling their teeth .
“ What did you do all summer ?
How did you deal with Covid ?
Talk about your family !
” A boy with an Arabic name turned on his mic just long enough to say that he had a baby sister .
Indeed , the loud wailing of an infant could be heard .
The teacher skipped a beat , then the boy ’ s mic went dead .
No other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even Génnezys , who had earlier proved she was not shy .
When the teacher mispronounced her name on the first day of school , Génnezys politely but firmly corrected her .
She is a brilliant girl who knew no English whatsoever two years ago yet speaks it almost perfectly now , and who scrolls through the internet on her own initiative for details about the accident that crippled Frida Kahlo .
Though she has defended her name and sometimes has been the only student to answer her teachers ’ questions about math @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the details of her life .
The family all got sick in late May , with many days of fever , coughing , muscle aches , nausea , dizziness , and diarrhea , as well as loss of appetite , taste , and smell .
They recovered , but Cruz is suffering now from hair loss — a condition just recently recognized as a complication of Covid-19 .
When Cruz got sick , she was employed in housekeeping at an upscale chain hotel .
She said she fell ill after being ordered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a woman who was coughing .
She was not given PPE for the job .
Cruz estimates that in her building complex of a few dozen apartments , about 20 other people came down with Covid-19 .
“ No one died , but some were carried off to hospitals in ambulances , ” she said , adding that all were immigrants from Latin America .
Latinos comprise fewer than one in five residents in the county .
But they make up about half of the people in Cruz ’ s census tract @ @ @ @ @ @ @ almost everyone is white and owns a house .
In Cruz ’ s tract , many of the Latinos live in cramped little rental apartments .
During the outbreak and their own illnesses , Cruz and her children were never tested for Covid-19 .
Nor did she contact me , though she instructed her preteen daughter to call me for help if she took a turn for the worse .
The family just stuck it out , but Cruz was fired by the hotel because of her sickness and missed work .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as she felt better .
She couldn ’ t self-quarantine : She had rent to pay , kids to feed .
None of this is something Génnezys wants to talk about in online seventh grade .
She doesn ’ t turn on her camera either .
It ’ s hard to know exactly why the students as a group refuse to show themselves to their teachers or to each other .
Middle school is the empire of peer pressure — pressure not to stand out , even in normal times , when rows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with each other , along with a teacher in a real room .
But the kids ’ reluctance now seems at least partly due to how dispirited and disconnected their virtual classrooms feel .
Génnesyz ’ s teachers practically stand on their heads coaxing interactions with the students , but the teachers ’ energy seems TV-ish , abstract .
It ’ s hard to know exactly why the students as a group refuse to show themselves to their teachers or to each other .
Middle school is the empire of peer pressure — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in normal times , when rows of children are looking at and breathing with each other , along with a teacher in a real room .
But the kids ’ reluctance now seems at least partly due to how dispirited and disconnected their virtual classrooms feel .
Génnesyz ’ s teachers practically stand on their heads coaxing interactions with the students , but the teachers ’ energy seems TV-ish , abstract .
The kids are alone .
They have no books .
The only class that resembles normal school is math .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ figures on a board and explains what they mean .
The other classes are a mishmash of hyperactive YouTube science videos with men who speak too fast , and a woman with a white coat and test tubes performing experiments — work the students normally would be absorbed with in a classroom lab , but which they can only stare at now from afar , wall-eyed .
An art class features hip-hop music , whose teaching intention is muddled , and digital choose-and-drag stickers and emojis .
Strange , sci-fi cartoon people in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to recount the high points of the antebellum human bondage , the Civil War , and the Black Codes .
After that lesson , I asked Génnezys if she understood what a slave was .
She still didn ’ t know — though she did remember the cartoon guy saying that a man named Frederick Douglass had been forcibly separated from his mother .
She knew what that meant , from firsthand experience , but didn ’ t mention it in class .
With me , she minimized her experience .
She ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infant when he was taken .
“ But , um , I was 10 when it happened , ” she said .
“ I was a big kid , not a little kid.
” One teacher conducted a lesson about why students should participate in small- group , online “ breakout ” chat rooms .
“ Because they help us get to know each other ?
” said Génnezys , daring to speak .
“ Very good !
Thank you for that , Génnezys !
” chimed the teacher , saying all the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students that they must use “ appropriate language ” in the chat rooms , and that their language was being watched .
This teacher also held a “ correct answer ” contest , with her pupils silently checking T ’ s and F ’ s on their screens .
“ True or false : If you fight at a school bus stop , you will be punished as severely as if you ’ d fought a school .
True !
Right , Brian !
Brian gets a point !
He ’ s pulling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ True or false : If you touch the private body part of someone else at school , whether on purpose or by accident , you will be punished the same , either way .
Yay , Corinne !
She ’ s back in play !
” But there are no school bus stops now .
There are no “ someone else ” s at school .
Génnezys has another reason not to turn on her camera : She is ashamed of her clothes .
She fits a girl ’ s 14 now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago , when she was size 10 and 12 .
Her shirts are too tight for her rapidly developing body .
In the morning she puts on her mother ’ s dresses .
They are several sizes too large .
Cruz can ’ t afford to take her daughter shopping .
She just lost another week of work , and wages , due to Covid-19 .
Two co-workers at her janitorial job tested positive and one is in the hospital .
Because Cruz worked closely with both infected women , she was quarantined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proof that she had already contracted Covid-19 .
She had to stay home , along with Bety , who ran around the apartment laughing , yelling , and rifling Génnezys ’ s little desk while her sister tried to pay attention to online class .
An employee from the county health department came by to deliver some onions and pieces of fruit .
Cruz finally got a negative test result but still had to finish the quarantine .
Génnezys did not tell her teachers what was happening .
Génnezys also avoids the camera @ @ @ @ @ @ @ obsession.
” On the second day of school , a teacher asked , “ What is your favorite thing to do ?
” Amid the mass silence , Génnezys activated her mic and bravely answered : “ Play with slime , ” she said .
“ Ah .
OK. Yeah .
Slime .
Well , that sounds relaxing !
” “ Slime ” is a faddish kid product that ’ s been around since the 1970s .
Back then , it was valued by boys for its gross-out appeal .
Now it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is all the rage among preteen and teen girls .
Many make it from a home recipe involving glue , borax , food coloring , and plastic beads from craft stores like Michael ’ s .
Génnezys was already into slime by age 10 , back in Central America .
Cruz ’ s partner there , an extremely violent man who was neither of the girls ’ fathers , was terrorizing and assaulting Cruz and the children , threatening them with death .
The girls witnessed the violence .
Cruz made plans to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the U.S. with Génnezys .
Meanwhile , Génnezys discovered slime .
“ In my country , ” she remembered , “ it was called moco , ” which is Spanish for snot .
She pushed it , pulled it , rolled and wrapped it , over and over and over .
It calmed her , Cruz remembers .
After a grueling trip north , including a stay in a filthy , crowded stash house , things got worse at the border when the Trump administration took Génnezys from Cruz and shipped her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ center .
There , she was warehoused with mostly older Central American girls who ’ d come to the U.S. by themselves , pregnant or already with babies .
After spending six weeks with these young women , according to Cruz , 10-year-old Génnezys was using racy language and discussing sex .
After she was reunited with her mother , she experienced night terrors and walked in her sleep for three months .
She had three sessions with a psychologist .
Then , said Cruz , “ She entered a new phase of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ she hardly talked about what happened.
” Even so , Cruz added , “ Two weeks ago , after Génnezys had an eye exam that showed a problem with one of her eyes , she mentioned to me that an older girl in the detention center hit her hard in that eye with a ball .
That was two years ago .
She ’ d never told me till now .
Sometimes I worry about what ’ s in her head.
” Outside of her head is slime : jars and jars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , from shiny and glistening to rough and frothy .
“ I love YouTube slime videos , ” Génnezys told me .
The site has a plethora of young girls extolling their slime collections , as well productions with sexy women ’ s voices doing ASMR routines , and images of long , manicured fingernails digging languorously into the goo .
“ I worry about it , ” said Cruz .
“ It ’ s such a waste of money .
But she would rather have slime , even , than clothes that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activate her camera for her classmates and teachers , they might see her furiously and endlessly twisting , pulling , and punching her strange doughs as she fidgets at the computer and tries hard to do her schoolwork .
A few months ago , Wired magazine interviewed a neuroscientist and psychologist who suggested that people might be gravitating toward slime during the Covid-19 crisis to simulate the feeling of touching actual people .
As a Central American refugee child , Génnezys has been traumatized by murderous violence , forced family separation , poverty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however , nonrefugee children in America are joining her in the grief and fear of being apart and alone .
How many of these kids are scrunched over their own computers , secretly toying with slime ?
“ I don ’ t know , ” Génnezys said when I asked her that question .
“ Maybe I ’ m the only one .
Before the virus , I didn ’ t play with it in school because school was good .
Now , I don ’ t think I could do school @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Without it I ’ d be dying .

Every weekday morning, a 12-year-old refugee named Génnezys logs into her seventh grade online classroom. She sits at a tiny table in a corner of her cluttered living room. Before logging in, she tapes her phone to a chair and dials my number on FaceTime. Once we’re connected, I peer into the screen of a laptop lent to her by her public middle school. For hours, I observe coronavirus pandemic-era education for Génnezys and about 20 other children of multiple races, nationalities, and economic circumstances. What I see is both heroic and tragic.
Génnezys is one of the thousands of immigrant children who were torn from their parents in 2018 by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. I wrote about the desperate efforts of Cruz, her incarcerated mother, to find her 10-year-old daughter. They were reunited after about six weeks. Cruz later borrowed $6,000 from a friend for a coyote to smuggle her three-year-old daughter into the U.S. The child was detained for a few days then released to Cruz.
I asked Génnezys to invent a pseudonym to protect her family from U.S. government reprisal, and she came up with a fanciful one based on the Spanish pronunciation — HEH-neh-sees — of the first book in the Old Testament.
Today the family resides in a small Southern city. Cruz works as a janitor, earning a bit less than $10 an hour. They live in a small apartment with one bedroom, which Cruz and the girls share with her boyfriend. He is also an immigrant, and he pays half the rent. He’s employed in construction, and he leaves for work very early in the morning. Cruz goes to work after taking her four-year-old daughter, whom I’ll call Bety, by bus to a daycare center. With school strictly online now because of Covid-19, Génnezys stays in the apartment all by herself from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., often supervising an 8-year-old girl who has her own school computer with headphones. This child’s Latina immigrant mother works, too, so Génnezys acts as babysitter. Before online school started in September, she worried intensely that being without an adult in the home would be lonely and scary. I live hundreds of miles away, so I volunteered to sit with her via FaceTime. She says that she feels much better when I’m with her.
During the first two days of remote school, the teachers, all young or middle-aged white women, cycled though a dither of confusion and kind but mostly fruitless efforts to actually see and hear their students. One problem was that the online platforms were glitchy. The class links often crashed, leaving the students, including Génnezys, with blank screens. But by week’s end, the kinks were worked out — yet the students remained silent phantoms.
“Know that I see you. I hear you. I’m with you,” one young teacher intoned to the kids right after introducing herself. They had names like Hassan, Rasheeda, Yennifer, and Travis. “Black Lives Matter,” the teacher added. She was met by silence from her new students, and she could not see their reactions either. She asked them to turn on their mics and cameras, but getting them to comply was harder than pulling their teeth. “What did you do all summer? How did you deal with Covid? Talk about your family!”
A boy with an Arabic name turned on his mic just long enough to say that he had a baby sister. Indeed, the loud wailing of an infant could be heard. The teacher skipped a beat, then the boy’s mic went dead. No other students turned on their microphones. Not even Génnezys, who had earlier proved she was not shy. When the teacher mispronounced her name on the first day of school, Génnezys politely but firmly corrected her. She is a brilliant girl who knew no English whatsoever two years ago yet speaks it almost perfectly now, and who scrolls through the internet on her own initiative for details about the accident that crippled Frida Kahlo.
Though she has defended her name and sometimes has been the only student to answer her teachers’ questions about math, Génnezys remains strenuously silent about most of the details of her life. The family all got sick in late May, with many days of fever, coughing, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness, and diarrhea, as well as loss of appetite, taste, and smell. They recovered, but Cruz is suffering now from hair loss — a condition just recently recognized as a complication of Covid-19.
When Cruz got sick, she was employed in housekeeping at an upscale chain hotel. She said she fell ill after being ordered to enter and clean a room occupied by a woman who was coughing. She was not given personal protective equipment for the job.
Cruz estimates that in her building complex of a few dozen apartments, about 20 other people came down with Covid-19. “No one died, but some were carried off to hospitals in ambulances,” she said, adding that all were immigrants from Latin America.
Latinos comprise fewer than one in five residents in the county. But they make up about half of the people in Cruz’s census tract, while just across a main thoroughfare almost everyone is white and owns a house. In Cruz’s tract, many of the Latinos live in cramped little rental apartments.
During the outbreak and their own illnesses, Cruz and her children were never tested for Covid-19. Nor did she contact me, though she instructed her preteen daughter to call me for help if she took a turn for the worse. The family just stuck it out, but Cruz was fired by the hotel because of her sickness and missed work. She got the janitorial job just as soon as she felt better. She couldn’t self-quarantine: She had rent to pay, kids to feed. None of this is something Génnezys wants to talk about in online seventh grade.
She doesn’t turn on her camera either.
Illustration: Lorena Mondragón for The Intercept
It’s hard to know exactly why the students as a group refuse to show themselves to their teachers or to each other. Middle school is the empire of peer pressure — pressure not to stand out, even in normal times, when rows of children are looking at and breathing with each other, along with a teacher in a real room. But the kids’ reluctance now seems at least partly due to how dispirited and disconnected their virtual classrooms feel. Génnesyz’s teachers practically stand on their heads coaxing interactions with the students, but the teachers’ energy seems TV-ish, abstract.
The kids are alone. They have no books. The only class that resembles normal school is math. As in times past, the teacher writes figures on a board and explains what they mean. The other classes are a mishmash of hyperactive YouTube science videos with men who speak too fast, and a woman with a white coat and test tubes performing experiments — work the students normally would be absorbed with in a classroom lab, but which they can only stare at now from afar, wall-eyed. An art class features hip-hop music, whose teaching intention is muddled, and digital choose-and-drag stickers and emojis. Strange, sci-fi cartoon people in Génnezys’s American History class purport to recount the high points of the antebellum human bondage, the Civil War, and the Black Codes. After that lesson, I asked Génnezys if she understood what a slave was. She still didn’t know — though she did remember the cartoon guy saying that a man named Frederick Douglass had been forcibly separated from his mother. She knew what that meant, from firsthand experience, but didn’t mention it in class. With me, she minimized her experience. She’d learned that Frederick Douglass was an infant when he was taken. “But, um, I was 10 when it happened,” she said. “I was a big kid, not a little kid.”
One teacher conducted a lesson about why students should participate in small- group, online “breakout” chat rooms. “Because they help us get to know each other?” said Génnezys, daring to speak.
“Very good! Thank you for that, Génnezys!” chimed the teacher, saying all the syllables correctly. Then she warned the students that they must use “appropriate language” in the chat rooms, and that their language was being watched.
This teacher also held a “correct answer” contest, with her pupils silently checking T’s and F’s on their screens. “True or false: If you fight at a school bus stop, you will be punished as severely as if you’d fought a school. True! Right, Brian! Brian gets a point! He’s pulling ahead of Corinne! Next question. True or false: If you touch the private body part of someone else at school, whether on purpose or by accident, you will be punished the same, either way. Yay, Corinne! She’s back in play!”
But there are no school bus stops now. There are no “someone else”s at school.
Génnezys has another reason not to turn on her camera: She is ashamed of her clothes. She fits a girl’s 14 now, but her wardrobe dates from a year ago, when she was size 10 and 12. Her shirts are too tight for her rapidly developing body. In the morning she puts on her mother’s dresses. They are several sizes too large.
Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants
Cruz can’t afford to take her daughter shopping. She just lost another week of work, and wages, due to Covid-19. Two co-workers at her janitorial job tested positive and one is in the hospital. Because Cruz worked closely with both infected women, she was quarantined for 14 days. She had no proof that she had already contracted Covid-19. She had to stay home, along with Bety, who ran around the apartment laughing, yelling, and rifling Génnezys’s little desk while her sister tried to pay attention to online class.
An employee from the county health department came by to deliver some onions and pieces of fruit. Cruz finally got a negative test result but still had to finish the quarantine. Génnezys did not tell her teachers what was happening.
Génnezys also avoids the camera because of what Cruz calls “her obsession.” On the second day of school, a teacher asked, “What is your favorite thing to do?” Amid the mass silence, Génnezys activated her mic and bravely answered: “Play with slime,” she said.
“Slime?” said the teacher, nonplussed.
“Yeah. Slime.”
“Ah. OK. Yeah. Slime. Well, that sounds relaxing!”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Slime” is a faddish kid product that’s been around since the 1970s. Back then, it was valued by boys for its gross-out appeal. Now it’s prettier, smells nice, and is all the rage among preteen and teen girls. Many make it from a home recipe involving glue, borax, food coloring, and plastic beads from craft stores like Michael’s.
Génnezys was already into slime by age 10, back in Central America. Cruz’s partner there, an extremely violent man who was neither of the girls’ fathers, was terrorizing and assaulting Cruz and the children, threatening them with death. The girls witnessed the violence. Cruz made plans to hide Bety with her sister and flee to the U.S. with Génnezys. Meanwhile, Génnezys discovered slime. “In my country,” she remembered, “it was called moco,” which is Spanish for snot. She pushed it, pulled it, rolled and wrapped it, over and over and over. It calmed her, Cruz remembers.
After a grueling trip north, including a stay in a filthy, crowded stash house, things got worse at the border when the Trump administration took Génnezys from Cruz and shipped her 2,000 miles away to a child detention center. There, she was warehoused with mostly older Central American girls who’d come to the U.S. by themselves, pregnant or already with babies.
After spending six weeks with these young women, according to Cruz, 10-year-old Génnezys was using racy language and discussing sex. After she was reunited with her mother, she experienced night terrors and walked in her sleep for three months. She had three sessions with a psychologist. Then, said Cruz, “She entered a new phase of her life: adolescence,” and “she hardly talked about what happened.” Even so, Cruz added, “Two weeks ago, after Génnezys had an eye exam that showed a problem with one of her eyes, she mentioned to me that an older girl in the detention center hit her hard in that eye with a ball. That was two years ago. She’d never told me till now. Sometimes I worry about what’s in her head.”
Outside of her head is slime: jars and jars of it in all colors and textures, from shiny and glistening to rough and frothy. “I love YouTube slime videos,” Génnezys told me. The site has a plethora of young girls extolling their slime collections, as well productions with sexy women’s voices doing ASMR routines, and images of long, manicured fingernails digging languorously into the goo.
“I worry about it,” said Cruz. “It’s such a waste of money. But she would rather have slime, even, than clothes that fit her.”
If Génnezys were to activate her camera for her classmates and teachers, they might see her furiously and endlessly twisting, pulling, and punching her strange doughs as she fidgets at the computer and tries hard to do her schoolwork. A few months ago, Wired magazine interviewed a neuroscientist and psychologist who suggested that people might be gravitating toward slime during the Covid-19 crisis to simulate the feeling of touching actual people.
As a Central American refugee child, Génnezys has been traumatized by murderous violence, forced family separation, poverty, and plague. More and more, however, nonrefugee children in America are joining her in the grief and fear of being apart and alone. How many of these kids are scrunched over their own computers, secretly toying with slime?
“I don’t know,” Génnezys said when I asked her that question. “Maybe I’m the only one. Before the virus, I didn’t play with it in school because school was good. Now, I don’t think I could do school if I didn’t have slime. Without it I’d be dying.
“Dying of what?”
“Boredom.”


theintercept--2020-10-04--The Real Cancel Culture: Pro-Israel Blacklists

a group of over 150 artists and intellectuals issued a public letter in Harper ’ s Magazine warning of what they called a growing atmosphere of coerced ideological conformity in the U.S. Decrying an “ intolerance of opposing views ” and “ a vogue for public shaming and ostracism , ” the letter went on to add that “ restriction of debate , whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society , invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.
” One of the people who found themselves agreeing with these noble sentiments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ born in the Gaza Strip and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Canada , Farah spent years studying to become licensed as a therapist in Toronto .
The letter resonated with him because he has had very intimate experience with what it feels like to have one ’ s free speech stifled : attacks on his student pro-Palestinian activism have dogged Farah into adulthood , leading to recurring problems in his professional life .
“ People are against cancel culture , and that ’ s great .
I ’ m also very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ But the most outrageous cases of people getting canceled are Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with us .
When it comes to Palestinians standing up for our own rights , it ’ s very difficult .
Our free speech and freedom of expression has been attacked over and over.
” Amid the heated debate about free speech and censorship in the United States , the attacks against pro-Palestine activism stand as a less remarked upon yet much more ruthless type of silencing .
Few of the high-profile public intellectuals who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speech side of the national debate have highlighted the incredible degree of suppression on speech supportive of Palestinian rights — particularly among ordinary people lacking access to elite platforms .
It ’ s a blind spot not lost on people like Farah , who have experienced blacklists and other forms of suppression firsthand .
“ We have to be consistent , ” he said .
“ We have to recognize that there is a clear double standard here .
And that is not right.
” Firings and censorship relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and politics .
Just this month , a prominent academic , Valentina Azarova , had a job offer rescinded by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law after a major donor reportedly “ expressed concerns in private over Azarova ’ s past work on the issue of Israel ’ s human rights abuses in Palestine.
” Instead of taking up a defense of pro-Palestine speech , the debate among journalists and intellectuals has mostly focused on their own discomfort as a class .
Yet , when it comes to this blind spot , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people has been fierce : threats to immigration status , personal lives , careers , restrictions on foreign travel , and more .
And , unlike high-profile public figures able to call on magazines and newspapers for support when they feel silenced , Farah and other ordinary people targeted for their speech generally lack the ability to get their stories told .
Lacking powerful platforms , they generally suffer their “ cancellations ” in mute anonymity .
“ It ’ s the first thing that comes up when you Google my name , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terrorist supporter and an extremist , ” said A.H. , a former activist working on Palestinian issues , who asked to remain anonymous for fear of suffering further consequences from speaking out .
Speaking nervously by phone , A.H. told me she had been peripherally involved in pro-Palestinian activism , including commenting online and attending protests .
Her relatively low-level involvement in the cause had still gotten her listed on Canary Mission , a site maintained by anonymous pro-Israel activists to track activists , scholars , and students supportive of Palestinian nationalism .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything other than a blacklist .
As with Farah and others , A.H. ’ s profile on the site became the most prominent online trace of her life .
It had taken a toll not just on her career but on her personal life and mental health .
While some conservatives warn that a “ soft-totalitarianism ” of progressive intolerance is growing in the U.S. , when it comes to Israel-Palestine , full-blown authoritarian coercion , like the blacklisting carried out by Canary Mission , is already well entrenched .
Even after ceasing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longer so much as posting on social media about the Middle East conflict , for instance — A.H. remains haunted by her place on the list .
“ I ’ m afraid to apply for a new job or even update my LinkedIn to show where I ’ m working now , ” she said .
“ Sometimes I meet people and then later they just disappear .
I ’ m always left wondering if it ’ s because of what they saw when they searched my name online.
” we can kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mission as a good way to see who you can date or be friends with by describing them as having good politics , ” said Sumaya Awad , a former student activist at Columbia University .
Awad , too , is listed on the Canary Mission site .
She has also been involved in attempts to push back against it , including by helping found the website Against Canary Mission to raise awareness about the blacklist .
Though the site ’ s operators remain cloaked in anonymity , previous investigations into Canary Mission @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backers , including Israeli American real estate investor Adam Milstein .
Unlike the version of “ cancel culture ” presently being debated by U.S. intellectuals , the version supported by Canary Mission is more dangerous for influencing government actions .
The site is believed to be employed by Israeli government authorities for intelligence-gathering purposes .
Chillingly , for the question of free speech in America , the blacklist has reportedly also been used by the FBI to question individuals over their activism .
( Canary Mission did not respond to a request for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mission ’ s content into official files is a massive cause of concern for those listed on its pages .
Awad , a Palestinian from Jordan who lives in the U.S. , worries that her immigration status puts her at particular risk from the type of blacklisting practiced by the site .
Like many other Palestinians , being listed on the site can allow the Israeli military , which controls access to the Palestinian Territories , to physically bar entry to the territories — even for innocuous reasons like family visits .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported that Israeli authorities had internally cited Canary Mission profiles when making the decision to reject people for entry into Israel and , by extension , the Palestinian territories .
In Awad ’ s case , the concerns aren ’ t only centered on Israeli-controlled borders : She has also become concerned about the potential impact of being blacklisted even on her own ongoing U.S. immigration process .
For many people from minority backgrounds already harshly scrutinized by law enforcement , or who do not have U.S. citizenship , inclusion on the blacklist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ability to live in the United States .
“ Later on , when I was applying for immigration , I noticed that this page about me on Canary Mission — using these scare-words that had nothing to do with me like ‘ terrorist-sympathizer ’ , ‘ Hamas , ’ and ‘ anti-Semitism ’ — was the first thing that came up when you Googled me , ” Awad said .
“ I became really anxious about the blacklist after that and was scared if they ’ d reject my immigration status at some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the reason.
” Nothing on Awad ’ s profile , which includes accusations of supporting the Palestinian-led movement to boycott , divest from , and sanction Israel and “ demonizing Israel , ” indicates that she has ever engaged in illegal activity or even espoused views that could be considered violent , extremist , or anti-Semitic .
( The same holds for the several other people The Intercept spoke to for this story who had Canary Mission profiles . )
Yet the site uses an astounding guilt-by-association logic that attempts to tie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be removed from the list , individuals have to submit to a process with Canary Mission , whereby they write a testimonial apologizing for and disowning their previous activism .
A number of these anonymous testimonies are included on the site on a page listing so-called ex-Canaries .
The Intercept viewed an email chain showing the negotiation of one such confessional with Canary Mission site administrators , in which the prospective ex-Canary was forced to go back and delete several years of “ anti-Israel ” social media posts before submitting a genuflecting statement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never engage in pro-Palestinian activism again .
Despite her concerns about being blacklisted , Awad has not taken up this unsettling offer .
Her Canary Mission profile remains online .
In addition to its effects on her , the fear of blacklisting , she said , has had a significant impact in silencing the speech of those around her .
“ The Canary Mission blacklist has been very powerful in silencing people and making them think free speech is not their right , ” she said .
“ It instills a powerful sense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re always left wondering if it ’ s going to be the reason a job doesn ’ t call back , a landlord declines you , or you have trouble going through airport security.
” has faced years of difficulty thanks to his profile on Canary Mission ’ s website .
In large part , these problems have emerged because of a moral imperative he had felt to become an activist .
During family visits to the occupied Palestinian territories in his youth , Farah developed an emotional attachment to the cause of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends and family living under Israeli military occupation .
“ My grandparents passed away in Gaza , and I was not able to go back and see them beforehand because of the Israeli blockade , ” Farah told me .
“ That had a big impact on me emotionally as a young man , as did seeing how painful life was for people living in Palestine during family visits.
” Feeling a duty to speak out for them , he became involved in campus activism related to Israel-Palestine as a university student in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the notorious Canary Mission blacklist .
Farah is now listed on a site with a profile that attempts to connect him to terrorist groups , anti-Semitism , and violence — effectively “ canceling ” him and encouraging others to do so as well .
The listing and other attacks on his character caused him serious problems as a student .
But even after his graduation , it has continued to dog him in his professional career as a therapist .
On numerous occasions , Farah has had regulatory applications related to his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about allegations made in his Canary Mission profile that he supported terrorism .
This summer , the same week the now-famous Harper ’ s letter was issued , Farah was informed that his application for licensing from the College of Registered Psychotherapy of Ontario had been held up after his presence on the Canary Mission blacklist was discovered during a Google search .
After intervention from an organization called the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network , which issued a letter on Farah ’ s behalf stating that he had been “ the victim of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to blacklisting persons with whom it does not agree.
” After that intervention , Farah ’ s licensing application was pushed through .
As a well-connected activist able to draw on a network of supporters , he considers himself one of the lucky ones .
But the anxiety that future problems related to his blacklisting may come up always lingers .
“ There ’ s a fear , every time that there ’ s a delay processing something , every time that something is flagged in connection to my name , this listing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my mind , ” he said .
As someone who has personally felt the cold fear that comes from being targeted for their political speech , Farah said that he also feels genuine sympathy for those from different backgrounds , like the signatories of the Harper ’ s letter , now expressing similar sentiments .
Yet , as he noted , for years , and up to the present day , he and others have been viciously “ canceled ” without benefiting from an outcry by liberal civil society on their behalf .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ language many of the Harper ’ s letter ’ s signatories object to — like the invocation of “ safe spaces ” at the expense of freewheeling and open debate — have also been used against advocates of Palestine .
“ There have been cases where arguments that were used to shut down right-wing campus speech were then used by pro-Israel advocates to shut down speech on Palestine , ” Farah told me , adding that pro-Israel campus organizations had often claimed to university administrators that they “ felt unsafe ” due to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campus .
“ I agreed with the letter , ” Farah told me of the Harper ’ s missive , “ and had this view for many years , since I saw and experienced censorship and reprisal against Palestinian rights advocacy.
” He just wishes some of the intellectuals behind the free-speech push might also take a look at the chilling threats to free speech that ordinary people like him have faced for years .

This July, a group of over 150 artists and intellectuals issued a public letter in Harper’s Magazine warning of what they called a growing atmosphere of coerced ideological conformity in the U.S. Decrying an “intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism,” the letter went on to add that “restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”
One of the people who found themselves agreeing with these noble sentiments was Hammam Farah. A Palestinian Canadian born in the Gaza Strip and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Canada, Farah spent years studying to become licensed as a therapist in Toronto. The letter resonated with him because he has had very intimate experience with what it feels like to have one’s free speech stifled: attacks on his student pro-Palestinian activism have dogged Farah into adulthood, leading to recurring problems in his professional life.
“When it comes to Palestinians standing up for our own rights, it’s very difficult. Our free speech and freedom of expression has been attacked over and over.”
“People are against cancel culture, and that’s great. I’m also very against it,” Farah said. “But the most outrageous cases of people getting canceled are Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with us. When it comes to Palestinians standing up for our own rights, it’s very difficult. Our free speech and freedom of expression has been attacked over and over.”
Amid the heated debate about free speech and censorship in the United States, the attacks against pro-Palestine activism stand as a less remarked upon yet much more ruthless type of silencing. Few of the high-profile public intellectuals who have staked claims on the militantly free speech side of the national debate have highlighted the incredible degree of suppression on speech supportive of Palestinian rights — particularly among ordinary people lacking access to elite platforms. It’s a blind spot not lost on people like Farah, who have experienced blacklists and other forms of suppression firsthand.
“We have to be consistent,” he said. “We have to recognize that there is a clear double standard here. And that is not right.”
Firings and censorship relating to the Israel-Palestine conflict long ago became common in both academia and politics. Just this month, a prominent academic, Valentina Azarova, had a job offer rescinded by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law after a major donor reportedly “expressed concerns in private over Azarova’s past work on the issue of Israel’s human rights abuses in Palestine.”
Instead of taking up a defense of pro-Palestine speech, the debate among journalists and intellectuals has mostly focused on their own discomfort as a class. Yet, when it comes to this blind spot, the suppression of free speech targeting ordinary people has been fierce: threats to immigration status, personal lives, careers, restrictions on foreign travel, and more. And, unlike high-profile public figures able to call on magazines and newspapers for support when they feel silenced, Farah and other ordinary people targeted for their speech generally lack the ability to get their stories told. Lacking powerful platforms, they generally suffer their “cancellations” in mute anonymity.
“It’s the first thing that comes up when you Google my name, the claim that I’m a terrorist supporter and an extremist,” said A.H., a former activist working on Palestinian issues, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of suffering further consequences from speaking out.
Speaking nervously by phone, A.H. told me she had been peripherally involved in pro-Palestinian activism, including commenting online and attending protests. Her relatively low-level involvement in the cause had still gotten her listed on Canary Mission, a site maintained by anonymous pro-Israel activists to track activists, scholars, and students supportive of Palestinian nationalism. Canary Mission is difficult to describe as anything other than a blacklist. As with Farah and others, A.H.’s profile on the site became the most prominent online trace of her life. It had taken a toll not just on her career but on her personal life and mental health.
While some conservatives warn that a “soft-totalitarianism” of progressive intolerance is growing in the U.S., when it comes to Israel-Palestine, full-blown authoritarian coercion, like the blacklisting carried out by Canary Mission, is already well entrenched.
Even after ceasing all of her pro-Palestinian activism — no longer so much as posting on social media about the Middle East conflict, for instance — A.H. remains haunted by her place on the list.
“I’m afraid to apply for a new job or even update my LinkedIn to show where I’m working now,” she said. “Sometimes I meet people and then later they just disappear. I’m always left wondering if it’s because of what they saw when they searched my name online.”
“At first we can kind of joked about being listed on Canary Mission as a good way to see who you can date or be friends with by describing them as having good politics,” said Sumaya Awad, a former student activist at Columbia University. Awad, too, is listed on the Canary Mission site. She has also been involved in attempts to push back against it, including by helping found the website Against Canary Mission to raise awareness about the blacklist.
Though the site’s operators remain cloaked in anonymity, previous investigations into Canary Mission have pointed to a network of wealthy backers, including Israeli American real estate investor Adam Milstein. Unlike the version of “cancel culture” presently being debated by U.S. intellectuals, the version supported by Canary Mission is more dangerous for influencing government actions. The site is believed to be employed by Israeli government authorities for intelligence-gathering purposes. Chillingly, for the question of free speech in America, the blacklist has reportedly also been used by the FBI to question individuals over their activism. (Canary Mission did not respond to a request for comment.)
The percolation of Canary Mission’s content into official files is a massive cause of concern for those listed on its pages. Awad, a Palestinian from Jordan who lives in the U.S., worries that her immigration status puts her at particular risk from the type of blacklisting practiced by the site. Like many other Palestinians, being listed on the site can allow the Israeli military, which controls access to the Palestinian Territories, to physically bar entry to the territories — even for innocuous reasons like family visits. In 2018, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported that Israeli authorities had internally cited Canary Mission profiles when making the decision to reject people for entry into Israel and, by extension, the Palestinian territories.
In Awad’s case, the concerns aren’t only centered on Israeli-controlled borders: She has also become concerned about the potential impact of being blacklisted even on her own ongoing U.S. immigration process. For many people from minority backgrounds already harshly scrutinized by law enforcement, or who do not have U.S. citizenship, inclusion on the blacklist can be a terrifying threat to their ability to live in the United States.
“Later on, when I was applying for immigration, I noticed that this page about me on Canary Mission — using these scare-words that had nothing to do with me like ‘terrorist-sympathizer’, ‘Hamas,’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ — was the first thing that came up when you Googled me,” Awad said. “I became really anxious about the blacklist after that and was scared if they’d reject my immigration status at some point without even telling me that that was the reason.”
Nothing on Awad’s profile, which includes accusations of supporting the Palestinian-led movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel and “demonizing Israel,” indicates that she has ever engaged in illegal activity or even espoused views that could be considered violent, extremist, or anti-Semitic. (The same holds for the several other people The Intercept spoke to for this story who had Canary Mission profiles.) Yet the site uses an astounding guilt-by-association logic that attempts to tie her to international terrorist groups.
To be removed from the list, individuals have to submit to a process with Canary Mission, whereby they write a testimonial apologizing for and disowning their previous activism. A number of these anonymous testimonies are included on the site on a page listing so-called ex-Canaries. The Intercept viewed an email chain showing the negotiation of one such confessional with Canary Mission site administrators, in which the prospective ex-Canary was forced to go back and delete several years of “anti-Israel” social media posts before submitting a genuflecting statement disowning their former views and promising to never engage in pro-Palestinian activism again.
Despite her concerns about being blacklisted, Awad has not taken up this unsettling offer. Her Canary Mission profile remains online.
“The Canary Mission blacklist has been very powerful in silencing people and making them think free speech is not their right. It instills a powerful sense of fear and paranoia.”
In addition to its effects on her, the fear of blacklisting, she said, has had a significant impact in silencing the speech of those around her.
“The Canary Mission blacklist has been very powerful in silencing people and making them think free speech is not their right,” she said. “It instills a powerful sense of fear and paranoia: You’re always left wondering if it’s going to be the reason a job doesn’t call back, a landlord declines you, or you have trouble going through airport security.”
Hammam Farah has faced years of difficulty thanks to his profile on Canary Mission’s website. In large part, these problems have emerged because of a moral imperative he had felt to become an activist.
During family visits to the occupied Palestinian territories in his youth, Farah developed an emotional attachment to the cause of Palestinian nationalism after witnessing the suffering of friends and family living under Israeli military occupation. “My grandparents passed away in Gaza, and I was not able to go back and see them beforehand because of the Israeli blockade,” Farah told me. “That had a big impact on me emotionally as a young man, as did seeing how painful life was for people living in Palestine during family visits.”
Feeling a duty to speak out for them, he became involved in campus activism related to Israel-Palestine as a university student in Toronto. That was what landed him on the notorious Canary Mission blacklist. Farah is now listed on a site with a profile that attempts to connect him to terrorist groups, anti-Semitism, and violence — effectively “canceling” him and encouraging others to do so as well.
The listing and other attacks on his character caused him serious problems as a student. But even after his graduation, it has continued to dog him in his professional career as a therapist. On numerous occasions, Farah has had regulatory applications related to his work delayed or prospective patients raise concerns about allegations made in his Canary Mission profile that he supported terrorism.
This summer, the same week the now-famous Harper’s letter was issued, Farah was informed that his application for licensing from the College of Registered Psychotherapy of Ontario had been held up after his presence on the Canary Mission blacklist was discovered during a Google search. After he reached out for support, an organization called the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network, issued a letter on Farah’s behalf stating that he had been “the victim of malicious targeting by a political organization devoted to blacklisting persons with whom it does not agree.”
“There’s a fear, every time that there’s a delay processing something, every time that something is flagged in connection to my name, this listing is the first thing that comes to my mind.”
After that intervention, Farah’s licensing application was pushed through. As a well-connected activist able to draw on a network of supporters, he considers himself one of the lucky ones. But the anxiety that future problems related to his blacklisting may come up always lingers. “There’s a fear, every time that there’s a delay processing something, every time that something is flagged in connection to my name, this listing is the first thing that comes to my mind,” he said.
As someone who has personally felt the cold fear that comes from being targeted for their political speech, Farah said that he also feels genuine sympathy for those from different backgrounds, like the signatories of the Harper’s letter, now expressing similar sentiments. Yet, as he noted, for years, and up to the present day, he and others have been viciously “canceled” without benefiting from an outcry by liberal civil society on their behalf.
Farah added that the same sort of language many of the Harper’s letter’s signatories object to — like the invocation of “safe spaces” at the expense of freewheeling and open debate — have also been used against advocates of Palestine. “There have been cases where arguments that were used to shut down right-wing campus speech were then used by pro-Israel advocates to shut down speech on Palestine,” Farah told me, adding that pro-Israel campus organizations had often claimed to university administrators that they “felt unsafe” due to the work of Palestinian activist organizations on campus.
“I agreed with the letter,” Farah told me of the Harper’s missive, “and had this view for many years, since I saw and experienced censorship and reprisal against Palestinian rights advocacy.” He just wishes some of the intellectuals behind the free-speech push might also take a look at the chilling threats to free speech that ordinary people like him have faced for years.


theintercept--2020-10-04--Why Are Democrats Praying for the Speedy Recovery of a "Fascist Dictator"?

to the death of a tyrant — whether by revolutionary violence or natural causes — is not one of grief and sadness but joyous celebration .
It is not hard to understand why : when a nation and its oppressed citizenry are finally liberated from the suffocating , savage grip of fascist dictatorship , they feel joy for themselves , their families and the future of their nation .
That is the same reason people have always hoped for , or work toward , the death of despots : they want to rid themselves of those who impose tyranny on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the summary execution of their despised dictator Nicolae Ceausescu , “ residents t [ ook ] to the streets to celebrate the downfall of the dictator.
” In 2006 , “ many Chileans celebrated the death of dictator Augusto Pinochet , ” as “ a cacophony of horns sounded as hundreds of thousands took to streets and plazas across the country when it was announced the man who ruled ruthlessly for 17 years had died at age 91 , a week after suffering a heart attack.
” “ Cuban dictator Fidel Castro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” read a 2016 South Florida Sun-Sentinel op-ed by a Cuban-American who appeared to genuinely believe that Castro was a vicious dictator , and thus expressed the natural , normal reaction of someone who believes a country has been freed from the grip of a despot .
So typical is this reaction to the death of a leader perceived as a dictator that history is replete with countless similar examples over many decades and across the world .
Yet in the U.S. , a radically different dynamic is playing out .
Over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the months heading into the 2020 election , it has become extremely common for prominent Democrats and their media allies to refer to President Trump as a dictator , a fascist , a tyrant hellbent on destroying U.S. democracy , a genocidal racist , and even a Nazi .
And yet , the overwhelming reaction in those mainstream precincts to the news that the fascist dictator has contracted a potentially lethal virus is to hope and pray that he makes a speedy recovery whereby he can resume his democracy-destroying , genocidal , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of last year , as CNN put it , “ two powerful House Democrats invoked Adolf Hitler ’ s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in , with both saying Donald Trump ’ s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy.
” One of the Democratic lawmakers who explicitly invoked Nazism and Hitler as the proper prism to understand Trump ’ s rule was House Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina .
Just two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CNN and warned that Trump was preparing to hold despotic power even if he loses , pronouncing : “ I feel very strongly that he is Mussolini , Putin is Hitler.
” Yet when Clyburn learned this week that our modern-day Hitler who is on the precipice of ending democracy had contracted a fatal virus , he did not celebrate but instead , for some reason , lamented the news , wishing “ the First Family a speedy and complete recovery.
” Why would you possibly wish a speedy recovery — rather than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe is a Hitler-like perpetrator of genocide whose recovery would enable fascism to continue ?
That seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive .
MSNBC star Rachel Maddow began invoking Nazism and Hitler in connection with Trump as early as 2016 , when Politico reported that , once Trump secured the GOP nomination , the on-air personality “ has been reading up lately on Adolf Hitler ’ s rise to power in Germany , the MSNBC anchor told Rolling Stone , because that ’ s where she thinks the United States could be headed.
” Maddow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manically obsessed with the claim that Trump has such a corrupt relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin that it is the Kremlin , thanks to Trump , which secretly runs the U.S. and is using that power to plot harm to large numbers of Americans by , for instance , seizing the power to cut off their heat in the dead of winter .
Maddow was explicitly linking Trump to classic fascism as early as 2015 .
Yet upon learning that the fascist , Kremlin-controlled , Nazi-like dictator had become ill , Maddow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fellow liberals pray earnestly for his recovery .
She first posted an extremely effusive tweet : “ God bless the president and the first lady .
If you pray , please pray for their speedy and complete recovery… ” Presumably in response to widespread liberal confusion and criticisms — wait , you spent four years telling us he ’ s a fascist racist Nazi-like despot and now you insist that we pray for his health ?
— Maddow devoted a segment on her show in which , with great passion and emotion , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s COVID diagnosis with the same compassion and through the same prism as if a friend who smokes cigarettes learned she had lung cancer : These sentiments were not unique to Maddow .
Indeed , that all decent people should hope and pray for Trump ’ s speedy recovery was the virtually unanimous consensus of leading Democratic Party figures , expressed by Barack Obama , Kamala Harris , Pete Buttigieg , Hillary Clinton , Bill Clinton , Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders .
“ Jane and I wish the President and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” said the Vermont Senator .
How is this messaging — we hope the racist fascist genocidal Nazi-like dictator gets well soon and returns to work ?
— not creating extreme cognitive dissonance among those who believed that they actually were sincere in their maximalist denunciations and invocations of fascism and Nazism regarding Trump ?
Shouldn ’ t liberals not just be confused but overtly disgusted at their leaders who want Trump to survive and return in full health to imposing fascism and genocide on Americans ?
Here , for instance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left-wing political operative — the Democratic Socialist of America ’ s Jack Califano , who served as the 2020 Sanders Campaign ’ s Deputy Distributed Organizing Director — to Maddow ’ s segment urging that all good liberals pray for Trump ’ s recovery and avoid wishing ill on their fellow human being : That reaction makes logical sense on its own terms .
If one really does believe that Trump is a “ genocidal Nazi ” — a Hitler-equivalent fascist dictator engaged in the deliberate mass slaughter of a particular ethnic or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it would be not just irrational but madness and moral bankruptcy to hope that the Nazi genocidal fascist makes a speedy recovery and returns to work .
But that ’ s exactly what virtually every prominent Democratic Party leader is doing .
Is Califano regretful about having worked for the presidential campaign of someone who sends warm wishes to a genocidal Nazi ?
There are a few potential explanations that may account for this extremely unusual and confounding behavior of praying for , rather than against , the well-being of a fascist dictator @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be hoping for Trump ’ s well-being for political purposes while secretly hoping that he suffers and dies .
Or perhaps national Democratic politicians have ascended to a state of spiritual elevation rarely seen in modern political history , in which they are capable of praying for even those they most dislike , including ones they believe are imposing fascism on their nation ?
Or perhaps , maybe more likely , Democratic leaders do not really believe the things they have spent four years saying about Trump and , like George W. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are applying such labels of historic evil to him for political advantage but still see him as one of them , whom they intend to rehabilitate and honor once he is out of power .
Whatever else is true , their behavior upon hearing that someone they claim to regard as a genocidal racist fascist tyrant has contracted a fatal virus is extremely unusual when compared to how people throughout history react when learning of similar news .
It is worth interrogating what accounts for such a baffling dynamic .

The typical reaction to the death of a tyrant — whether by revolutionary violence or natural causes — is not one of grief and sadness but joyous celebration. It is not hard to understand why: when a nation and its oppressed citizenry are finally liberated from the suffocating, savage grip of fascist dictatorship, they feel joy for themselves, their families and the future of their nation. That is the same reason people have always hoped for, or work toward, the death of despots: they want to rid themselves of those who impose tyranny on them.
When Romanians learned in 1989 of the summary execution of their despised dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, “residents t[ook] to the streets to celebrate the downfall of the dictator.” In 2006, “many Chileans celebrated the death of dictator Augusto Pinochet,” as “a cacophony of horns sounded as hundreds of thousands took to streets and plazas across the country when it was announced the man who ruled ruthlessly for 17 years had died at age 91, a week after suffering a heart attack.” “Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is dead, so celebrate we will,” read a 2016 South Florida Sun-Sentinel op-ed by a Cuban-American who appeared to genuinely believe that Castro was a vicious dictator, and thus expressed the natural, normal reaction of someone who believes a country has been freed from the grip of a despot. So typical is this reaction to the death of a leader perceived as a dictator that history is replete with countless similar examples over many decades and across the world.
Yet in the U.S., a radically different dynamic is playing out. Over the past several years, but particularly in the months heading into the 2020 election, it has become extremely common for prominent Democrats and their media allies to refer to President Trump as a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant hellbent on destroying U.S. democracy, a genocidal racist, and even a Nazi. And yet, the overwhelming reaction in those mainstream precincts to the news that the fascist dictator has contracted a potentially lethal virus is to hope and pray that he makes a speedy recovery whereby he can resume his democracy-destroying, genocidal, tyrannical, fascist rule.
In March of last year, as CNN put it, “two powerful House Democrats invoked Adolf Hitler’s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in, with both saying Donald Trump’s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy.” One of the Democratic lawmakers who explicitly invoked Nazism and Hitler as the proper prism to understand Trump’s rule was House Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina. Just two months ago, Clyburn went back on CNN and warned that Trump was preparing to hold despotic power even if he loses, pronouncing: “I feel very strongly that he is Mussolini, Putin is Hitler.”
Yet when Clyburn learned this week that our modern-day Hitler who is on the precipice of ending democracy had contracted a fatal virus, he did not celebrate but instead, for some reason, lamented the news, wishing “the First Family a speedy and complete recovery.” Why would you possibly wish a speedy recovery — rather than a quick demise — to someone you believe is a Hitler-like perpetrator of genocide whose recovery would enable fascism to continue? That seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive.
MSNBC star Rachel Maddow began invoking Nazism and Hitler in connection with Trump as early as 2016, when Politico reported that, once Trump secured the GOP nomination, the on-air personality “has been reading up lately on Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the MSNBC anchor told Rolling Stone, because that’s where she thinks the United States could be headed.” Maddow has notoriously spent the last four years manically obsessed with the claim that Trump has such a corrupt relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin that it is the Kremlin, thanks to Trump, which secretly runs the U.S. and is using that power to plot harm to large numbers of Americans by, for instance, seizing the power to cut off their heat in the dead of winter. Maddow was explicitly linking Trump to classic fascism as early as 2015.
Yet upon learning that the fascist, Kremlin-controlled, Nazi-like dictator had become ill, Maddow launched a one-woman crusade demanding that her fellow liberals pray earnestly for his recovery. She first posted an extremely effusive tweet: “God bless the president and the first lady. If you pray, please pray for their speedy and complete recovery…” Presumably in response to widespread liberal confusion and criticisms — wait, you spent four years telling us he’s a fascist racist Nazi-like despot and now you insist that we pray for his health? — Maddow devoted a segment on her show in which, with great passion and emotion, she urged her viewers to react to Trump’s COVID diagnosis with the same compassion and through the same prism as if a friend who smokes cigarettes learned she had lung cancer:
https://twitter.com/Ibrahimpols/status/1312208186187759617
These sentiments were not unique to Maddow. Indeed, that all decent people should hope and pray for Trump’s speedy recovery was the virtually unanimous consensus of leading Democratic Party figures, expressed by Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. “Jane and I wish the President and First Lady a full and speedy recovery,” said the Vermont Senator.
How is this messaging — we hope the racist fascist genocidal Nazi-like dictator gets well soon and returns to work? — not creating extreme cognitive dissonance among those who believed that they actually were sincere in their maximalist denunciations and invocations of fascism and Nazism regarding Trump? Shouldn’t liberals not just be confused but overtly disgusted at their leaders who want Trump to survive and return in full health to imposing fascism and genocide on Americans?
Here, for instance, is the fairly representative reaction of a left-wing political operative — the Democratic Socialist of America’s Jack Califano, who served as the 2020 Sanders Campaign’s Deputy Distributed Organizing Director — to Maddow’s segment urging that all good liberals pray for Trump’s recovery and avoid wishing ill on their fellow human being:
That reaction makes logical sense on its own terms. If one really does believe that Trump is a “genocidal Nazi” — a Hitler-equivalent fascist dictator engaged in the deliberate mass slaughter of a particular ethnic or religious group (genocide) — then it would be not just irrational but madness and moral bankruptcy to hope that the Nazi genocidal fascist makes a speedy recovery and returns to work. But that’s exactly what virtually every prominent Democratic Party leader is doing. Is Califano regretful about having worked for the presidential campaign of someone who sends warm wishes to a genocidal Nazi?
There are a few potential explanations that may account for this extremely unusual and confounding behavior of praying for, rather than against, the well-being of a fascist dictator. Perhaps Democratic leaders are simply pretending to be hoping for Trump’s well-being for political purposes while secretly hoping that he suffers and dies. Or perhaps national Democratic politicians have ascended to a state of spiritual elevation rarely seen in modern political history, in which they are capable of praying for even those they most dislike, including ones they believe are imposing fascism on their nation? Or perhaps, maybe more likely, Democratic leaders do not really believe the things they have spent four years saying about Trump and, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before him, are applying such labels of historic evil to him for political advantage but still see him as one of them, whom they intend to rehabilitate and honor once he is out of power.
Whatever else is true, their behavior upon hearing that someone they claim to regard as a genocidal racist fascist tyrant has contracted a fatal virus is extremely unusual when compared to how people throughout history react when learning of similar news. It is worth interrogating what accounts for such a baffling dynamic.


theintercept--2020-10-05--100,000 Ballot Requests Were Invalidated in Iowa After Courts Sided With Trump Campaign

It may all hinge , however , on an absentee ballot snafu affecting tens of thousands of voters that the party is scrambling to rectify .
In 2018 , Democrats won three of Iowa ’ s four congressional districts , picked up five seats in the state House , and lost the governor ’ s race by less than 3 points .
The state has only trended more Democratic since , giving the party real hope that its six electoral votes could wind up in the camp of Joe Biden and that its Senate seat , now held by Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Theresa Greenfield .
In July , the top elections officials in Linn and Johnson counties went ahead and began mailing out absentee-ballot request forms with some voter information already filled in , like names and dates of birth .
Crucially , voters need to know their voter ID number .
Most don ’ t , and Linn County Auditor Joel Miller had the state ’ s vendor fill it in for them .
Republicans protested , and courts sided with the GOP , saying that Miller ’ s decision to proceed with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate .
More than 100,000 absentee ballot requests have already been invalidated in several Iowa counties .
In late August , judges ordered two Iowa counties to invalidate at least 64,000 ballot requests , siding with a challenge brought by President Donald Trump ’ s reelection campaign and the GOP , which have been filing similar lawsuits nationwide .
About 50,000 voters in Linn County and at least 14,000 in Woodbury will be informed that their absentee-ballot requests won ’ t count and that anyone who still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will have to send in a new form in order to receive their ballot .
In a separate case in Johnson County , home to the University of Iowa , more than 92,000 ballot request forms were voided .
Miller told Bleeding Heartland , a blog covering Iowa politics , that his research indicated that neither the secretary of state nor the legislature had the authority to stop his mailing ; Miller was simply “ trying to make it easy for people to vote while reducing their exposure to others in a pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic Party , along with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee , are suing Pate for issuing a directive saying that county auditors could only distribute blank absentee-ballot request forms to voters .
Democrats argue that using these prefilled request forms , which included some personal information and voter identification numbers to make the process as easy as possible , was “ entirely lawful under the Iowa Code and the Iowa Constitution.
” No hearing has yet been set .
Then , early last week , a fourth judge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Party , upholding a recent law making absentee voting harder in Iowa .
The law , which was pushed by Republican state lawmakers this summer , complicates and slows down procedures for processing absentee-ballot requests , making it needlessly difficult for county auditors trying to get voters their ballots in time .
The opinion released last Monday was in response to a lawsuit filed by the League of Latin American Citizens of Iowa and Majority Forward , which asked the court to stop the enforcement of HF 2643 , an appropriations bill that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to directly contact a voter within 24 hours of receiving a ballot request with missing information .
Instead of using information that ’ s readily available in the voter registration database to correct incomplete forms , election officials will be expected to contact the voter by phone , email , or letter to get them to provide the information .
Democratic Party officials are scrambling to make contact with the voters who think they have an absentee ballot on the way , concerned that whatever communication the county sends them won ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an expensive proposition but not impossible .
The three Iowa counties hit with the Republican suit are tasked with tracking down all the voters who aren ’ t aware that their absentee-ballot request was rejected , and walking them through the process again — with just a few days until absentee ballots start getting mailed out .
Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls said Democrats are concerned with the changes happening so close to the presidential election , which was a “ proactive decision ” by the Trump campaign to “ create this confusion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disproportionately … Democratic.
” He noted that the counties encompass primarily urban areas , more densely populated areas that have been concerned about the spread of the coronavirus .
J.D .
Scholten , who ’ s competing in a tightening race against Republican state Sen. Randy Feenstra in the state ’ s 4th Congressional District , a deep-red district he nearly flipped in 2018 , said the Woodbury County Democrats have already hired someone to track down the ballot requests .
shifting politics are the result of a number of structural factors , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some not .
His trade war with China has hit Iowa hog farmers and soybean growers directly , though its political effect is balanced by public support for confronting China ’ s trade practices .
Perhaps more damaging has been the plummet of corn prices .
In 2012 , prices hit $ 8 a bushel , but by 2014 , they had fallen to less than $ 4 .
As the pandemic hit , prices fell further , approaching $ 3 a bushel this past spring .
They ’ ve since rallied , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the collapse led to the shuttering of many of the state ’ s ethanol plants .
Iowa has outsized political power as a result of hosting the first-in-the-nation caucuses — in which Biden finished fourth — and used that political clout to shape the country ’ s ethanol policy , requiring retail gasoline sellers to mix their product with corn-based ethanol , creating a market for the crop .
That , in turn , has reshaped Iowa ’ s economy , which now devotes a significant amount of its acreage to growing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ With the plants shut down , farmers have little recourse , creating misery and economic disruption .
That misery comes on top of the derecho that ripped through the state in August , devastating 14 million acres of farmland , some 40 percent of the state ’ s output .
With 140-mile-per-hour winds , the storm was highly unusual .
Whether it was fueled by climate change is hotly debated , but extreme weather events and economic destruction tend to do political damage to incumbents .
The state has also seen more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 90,000 cases .
According to the secretary of state ’ s office , absentee-ballot requests in Iowa are nearly five times higher than they were in 2016 , and Democrats have requested twice as many ballots as Republicans have as of last week .
Over 1.6 million Iowans voted in the 2016 presidential election and in typical election years , about 40 percent of votes are cast with an absentee ballot .
“ Is Iowa going to be the deciding factor in the presidential race ?
” Wahls said .
“ That ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we decide the balance of power in the Senate ?
Theresa Greenfield could quite possibly be the difference between a Democratic majority or not , and that ’ s a big deal.
” Biden and Trump are neck and neck in Iowa , according to polling averages , while recent surveys show Greenfield holds a slim lead over her Republican opponent , making the race one of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats .
One head-turning poll from this week found her up 12 points .
In battleground states across the country , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with GOP officials and groups , has mounted legal challenges to try to make it harder to vote , attacking a range of local and state voting policies with varying degrees of success in states like Pennsylvania , North Carolina , Nevada , Iowa , and more .

In 2018, Democrats won three of Iowa’s four congressional districts, picked up five seats in the state House, and lost the governor’s race by less than 3 points. The state has only trended more Democratic since, giving the party real hope that its six electoral votes could wind up in the camp of Joe Biden and that its Senate seat, now held by Republican Joni Ernst, could flip to Democrat Theresa Greenfield.
It may all hinge, however, on an absentee ballot snafu affecting tens of thousands of voters that the party is scrambling to rectify.
In July, the top elections officials in Linn and Johnson counties went ahead and began mailing out absentee-ballot request forms with some voter information already filled in, like names and dates of birth. Crucially, voters need to know their voter ID number. Most don’t, and Linn County Auditor Joel Miller had the state’s vendor fill it in for them. Republicans protested, and courts sided with the GOP, saying that Miller’s decision to proceed with the mailing violated a “clear directive” from Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate.
More than 100,000 absentee ballot requests have already been invalidated in several Iowa counties. In late August, judges ordered two Iowa counties to invalidate at least 64,000 ballot requests, siding with a challenge brought by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and the GOP, which have been filing similar lawsuits nationwide. About 50,000 voters in Linn County and at least 14,000 in Woodbury will be informed that their absentee-ballot requests won’t count and that anyone who still wants to vote by mail in November will have to send in a new form in order to receive their ballot. In a separate case in Johnson County, home to the University of Iowa, more than 92,000 ballot request forms were voided.
Miller told Bleeding Heartland, a blog covering Iowa politics, that his research indicated that neither the secretary of state nor the legislature had the authority to stop his mailing; Miller was simply “trying to make it easy for people to vote while reducing their exposure to others in a pandemic,” he said. The Iowa Democratic Party, along with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are suing Pate for issuing a directive saying that county auditors could only distribute blank absentee-ballot request forms to voters. Democrats argue that using these prefilled request forms, which included some personal information and voter identification numbers to make the process as easy as possible, was “entirely lawful under the Iowa Code and the Iowa Constitution.” No hearing has yet been set.
Then, early last week, a fourth judge sided with the Trump campaign and Republican Party, upholding a recent law making absentee voting harder in Iowa. The law, which was pushed by Republican state lawmakers this summer, complicates and slows down procedures for processing absentee-ballot requests, making it needlessly difficult for county auditors trying to get voters their ballots in time.
The opinion released last Monday was in response to a lawsuit filed by the League of Latin American Citizens of Iowa and Majority Forward, which asked the court to stop the enforcement of HF 2643, an appropriations bill that included a last-minute provision requiring county auditors to directly contact a voter within 24 hours of receiving a ballot request with missing information. Instead of using information that’s readily available in the voter registration database to correct incomplete forms, election officials will be expected to contact the voter by phone, email, or letter to get them to provide the information.
Democratic Party officials are scrambling to make contact with the voters who think they have an absentee ballot on the way, concerned that whatever communication the county sends them won’t get through. Reaching each person is an expensive proposition but not impossible.
The three Iowa counties hit with the Republican suit are tasked with tracking down all the voters who aren’t aware that their absentee-ballot request was rejected, and walking them through the process again — with just a few days until absentee ballots start getting mailed out. Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls said Democrats are concerned with the changes happening so close to the presidential election, which was a “proactive decision” by the Trump campaign to “create this confusion among voters who they knew would be disproportionately … Democratic.” He noted that the counties encompass primarily urban areas, more densely populated areas that have been concerned about the spread of the coronavirus.
J.D. Scholten, who’s competing in a tightening race against Republican state Sen. Randy Feenstra in the state’s 4th Congressional District, a deep-red district he nearly flipped in 2018, said the Woodbury County Democrats have already hired someone to track down the ballot requests.
The state’s shifting politics are the result of a number of structural factors, some within the control of Trump and some not. His trade war with China has hit Iowa hog farmers and soybean growers directly, though its political effect is balanced by public support for confronting China’s trade practices. Perhaps more damaging has been the plummet of corn prices. In 2012, prices hit $8 a bushel, but by 2014, they had fallen to less than $4. As the pandemic hit, prices fell further, approaching $3 a bushel this past spring. They’ve since rallied, recovering some losses, but the volatility and the collapse led to the shuttering of many of the state’s ethanol plants. Iowa has outsized political power as a result of hosting the first-in-the-nation caucuses — in which Biden finished fourth — and used that political clout to shape the country’s ethanol policy, requiring retail gasoline sellers to mix their product with corn-based ethanol, creating a market for the crop. That, in turn, has reshaped Iowa’s economy, which now devotes a significant amount of its acreage to growing corn designed specifically for producing ethanol. With the plants shut down, farmers have little recourse, creating misery and economic disruption.
That misery comes on top of the derecho that ripped through the state in August, devastating 14 million acres of farmland, some 40 percent of the state’s output. With 140-mile-per-hour winds, the storm was highly unusual. Whether it was fueled by climate change is hotly debated, but extreme weather events and economic destruction tend to do political damage to incumbents. The state has also seen more than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19 and more than 90,000 cases.
According to the secretary of state’s office, absentee-ballot requests in Iowa are nearly five times higher than they were in 2016, and Democrats have requested twice as many ballots as Republicans have as of last week. Over 1.6 million Iowans voted in the 2016 presidential election and in typical election years, about 40 percent of votes are cast with an absentee ballot.
“Is Iowa going to be the deciding factor in the presidential race?” Wahls said. “That’s not necessarily unlikely. But could we decide the balance of power in the Senate? Theresa Greenfield could quite possibly be the difference between a Democratic majority or not, and that’s a big deal.”
Biden and Trump are neck and neck in Iowa, according to polling averages, while recent surveys show Greenfield holds a slim lead over her Republican opponent, making the race one of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats. One head-turning poll from this week found her up 12 points.
In battleground states across the country, Trump’s reelection campaign, along with GOP officials and groups, has mounted legal challenges to try to make it harder to vote, attacking a range of local and state voting policies with varying degrees of success in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa, and more.