Join National SDS and progressive students around the country as we hold our 19th annual convention at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, on October 11th & 12th!
Only a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, and all sectors of our movement are under attack. Student activists are being kidnapped by ICE for protesting for Palestine; immigrants and their families are under constant threat of mass deportations; LGBTQ people are facing increasingly repressive attacks on their basic democratic rights; and Trump threatens to “unleash policing” as a counter to the movement for Black lives. Trump even has plans to completely dismantle the Department of Education, eliminating financial aid and gutting ethnic studies and other programs that tell the real history of Black, Chicano, Latino, and other oppressed people in this country.
National Students for a Democratic Society stands firmly against Trump’s racist agenda, and we’re fighting him every step of the way.
Please join us to hear speakers, attend workshops, and meet activists of all stripes! We want to learn lessons from our chapters’ and affiliates’ experiences and to turn them into a concrete plan going forward, to keep the fires of the student movement burning – against the Trump Agenda, for Palestine, for education, for our social movements, and for a college life based on equality, peace, and justice.
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Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at one of the largest prisoner exchanges in the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing nuclear talks between the United States and Iran, and trapped gold miners in South Africa.
World Brief will be off on Monday, May 26, for the U.S. holiday of Memorial Day.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at one of the largest prisoner exchanges in the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing nuclear talks between the United States and Iran, and trapped gold miners in South Africa.
World Brief will be off on Monday, May 26, for the U.S. holiday of Memorial Day.
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Bringing People Home
Russia and Ukraine swapped nearly 800 prisoners on Friday in the first part of what is expected to be the war’s largest prisoner exchange deal thus far. Each side released 390 individuals—270 soldiers and 120 civilians—with more due to be freed this weekend.
“What matters most is that Ukraine is bringing its people home,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X on Friday.
The exchange was agreed to during Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul last week, the first direct negotiations between the warring sides since the early days of the conflict. Although that meeting’s primary purpose was to hammer out a cease-fire deal, the only concrete outcome to emerge was both countries agreeing to each release 1,000 prisoners in the coming days.
The released Ukrainians were transported to a hospital in the northern Chernihiv region, while the Russian prisoners were moved to Belarus for medical and psychological treatment. Moscow is believed to have captured more than 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. More than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are also believed by Kyiv to be in Russian captivity, with rights groups accusing Moscow’s authorities of kidnapping Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied land and deporting them to Russia, where they are reportedly held without charge or trial.
According to Moscow’s Defense Ministry, the freed Russian civilians were captured inside Russia’s Kursk region during Ukraine’s monthslong counteroffensive. Zelensky, however, said the captured civilians were “Russian saboteurs and collaborators” who were arrested by Ukrainian law enforcement.
Kyiv maintains that it is ready for an immediate 30-day cease-fire. And U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed optimism that Friday’s swap could signal future progress in peace talks, writing, “This could lead to something big???” on his Truth Social account.
But Russia has refused to pause its attacks on Ukraine until the latter meets all of its conditions, which the Kremlin has said are the “root causes” of the war. These include Russian demands that Ukraine cede more of its territory, restrict the size of its military, and be barred from joining NATO. Ukrainian officials have called these conditions “non-starters.”
Russia currently controls roughly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, but it seeks full ownership of five major regions, including Crimea, which it first annexed in 2014. On Friday, Moscow claimed to have captured the northeastern settlement of Rakivka in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, and Kyiv accused Russian forces of killing at least one person and wounding eight others when targeting port infrastructure in its Odesa region.
Today’s Most Read
What We’re Following
Inconclusive nuclear talks. U.S. and Iranian negotiators convened in Rome on Friday for the fifth round of nuclear talks. According to Oman, which is acting as a mediator, limited progress has been made, and both sides will meet again, though the next date and location have not yet been decided.
“These negotiations are too complex to be resolved in just two or three meetings,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said. “I am hopeful that in the next one or two rounds—especially given the better understanding of the Islamic Republic’s positions—we can reach solutions that allow the talks to progress.”
Uranium enrichment remains the main sticking point in the negotiations, with the United States insisting that a nuclear deal must prohibit Tehran from enriching any uranium and Iran arguing that it has the right to do so for civilian purposes. Several proposals have reportedly been floated for how to resolve the issue, but none have yet been agreed to.
There is concern over “whether the [Trump] administration is ready to do the very hard work to even get a framework for a deal or whether the administration—as it is doing in the Russia-Ukraine situation—is preparing to back off and let others take whatever action they desire,” former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told FP’s Situation Report.
Gold mining accident. South African authorities on Friday rescued 79 miners trapped in an underground gold mine, but more than 180 individuals remain. The workers became trapped on Thursday, when a shaft at the Kloof gold mine, located west of Johannesburg, was damaged. None of the workers have reportedly been injured or killed.
“We are actively implementing our safety and shaft examination procedures,” the Sibanye-Stillwater mining company said in a statement. “Once these are completed, we will begin hoisting employees to surface. All 260 employees have been accounted for, are safe and have been provided with food.”
The Kloof gold mine is one of Sibanye-Stillwater’s deepest, reaching around 2 miles below the Earth’s surface. Mining accidents are not uncommon in South Africa. In January, at least 78 bodies were pulled from an unauthorized gold mine after local police cut off food and water for months to try to force those who were illegally mining to the surface. The country’s GIWUSA labor union called it the worst state-sanctioned massacre since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Vote on oil. Venezuelans will head to the polls on Sunday to vote in legislative and regional elections—the first since President Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in a disputed presidential contest last July despite credible evidence to the contrary. Opposition leaders are urging people to boycott the vote to signify distrust in the federal system; only 15.9 percent of citizens are expected to turn out, according to a nationwide poll held between April 29 and May 4.
Venezuela faces a slew of economic troubles, civil liberty crackdowns, and rising anti-government protests. Year-over-year inflation reached 172 percent in April, and the monthly minimum wage for state employees has dropped to $1.36. Many opposition leaders have fled the country to evade imprisonment. But one of the biggest sticking points of this election is the Essequibo region, an oil-rich territory that Guyana claims as its own. For the first time, Venezuela will elect representatives for a new Guayana Esequiba state in its growing bid to control the land and its critical resources.
Oil is also top of mind for Suriname, which will hold its general election on Sunday. The Latin American country is on the verge of an oil boom, with income from the country’s first offshore project set to begin production in 2028. Elected parliamentarians and the chosen president will be expected to decide what to do with the influx of funds. But opposition members are warning that the ruling government is preparing to engage in “massive fraud” that could affect the election’s results. Fraud allegations have already marred much of the campaign cycle for the ruling party.
What in the World?
On Monday, Huawei launched its first laptop computers that run a Chinese operating system. What is that system’s name?
A. Divine Dragon B. HarmonyOS C. JadeOS D. The People’s System
Odds and Ends
Norwegian retiree Johan Helberg woke up early Thursday to the sight of a large cargo ship in his backyard. NCL Salten, en route to the Norwegian town of Orkanger, ran aground on Thursday after the officer on watch reportedly fell asleep. “Big ships pass us now and then,” though they mostly keep to the fjord’s deeper waters, Helberg said. “We don’t usually see ships right outside our living room window. So this is especially strange.” No injuries or oil spills were reported, but locals must still contend with how to fix up their yards.
And the Answer Is…
B. HarmonyOS
The Chinese government has a strong interest in a purely domestic operating system due to fears that foreign models could create security vulnerabilities, FP’s James Palmer writes in China Brief.
To take the rest of FP’s weekly international news quiz, click here, or sign up to be alerted when a new one is published.
A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression — though you wouldn’t know it from Criterion’s oddly subdued promotion.
Anti-communist protesters demonstrate outside the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills, California, in December 1960. (American Stock Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images)
The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The typically bleak noirs showcased here span a range of terrifying developments for leftists working in the film industry during and after World War II. Two offer harsh critiques of fascism when it was on the rise in 1930s Europe, clearly as a form of American wartime propaganda: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Andre De Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944). Both were made by directors who had actually fled the Nazis to establish careers in Hollywood. Pervasive racism and antisemitism in the United States are examined in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), and Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950). Empty and twisted machismo is excoriated in Dmytryk’s Crossfire, Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me! (1950), and Joseph Losey’s The Big Night (1951). And America’s sick obsession with guns is portrayed in electrifying ways in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949).
Almost all the films find ways to expose the cruel perversities of capitalism and the entrenched class war waged against the working poor that drives people toward crime and violence while dividing them by class and race in America. The most forceful of the series films to do so are Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947) and Thieves Highway (1949), Endfield’s Try and Get Me!, John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1950), and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). This anti-capitalist exposé was a conscious project on the part of the many of the leftist writers and directors caught up in the blacklist.
As writer-director Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil, Body and Soul) — an unrepentant Marxist and one of the Hollywood Ten, who were among HUAC’s first targets — expressed it, “All films about crime are about capitalism because capitalism is about crime. I mean morally speaking. At least that’s what I used to think. Now I’m convinced.”
HUAC quickly targeted as “un-American” any such critical filmmaking, and those who made film noir — a rapidly forming genre not yet known by the French term, so referred to as “crime melodramas” and “tough films” in the United States — suffered the consequences of representing what was manifestly happening in their own time.
Several of the featured directors in this series, including Dassin, Losey, Endfield, and Dmytryk, finding themselves suddenly unemployed in the American film industry, “self-deported” (in the parlance of our time) to England and France to seek work there. Blacklisted writers such as Dalton Trumbo (Gun Crazy, He Ran All the Way) watched their careers wither or kept working by adopting fake names or “beard” writers willing to front for them by taking screen credit for their work.
A few films made in exile in England are included in the series: Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949), Losey’s Time Without Pity (1957), and Endfield’s Hell Drivers (1957). Dassin’s brilliant and unsparing noir Night and the City (1951) is unfortunately not included — it was the last film the director had to make to fulfill his contract at 20th Century Fox, and studio head Darryl Zanuck, knowing prominent leftist Dassin was sure to be blacklisted, rushed him to England, along with the film’s American stars Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, in order to make the film where there would be no risk of interference by the American government.
Dassin carved out a successful film career post-blacklist, mainly in France and Greece, with Rififi (1955) and Never on Sunday (1960) as his most acclaimed hits. Joseph Losey, working in England, also triumphed with The Servant (1960), the film that heralded a major director the American film industry had thrown away. It’s ironic to consider that film noir in America was catalyzed to a significant extent by the tremendous European talent arriving in Hollywood in the 1930s and early ’40s as refugees from the Nazis. Just the directors alone include Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls, all noted noir filmmakers.
By the late 1940s and ’50s, America was doing its own talent purge that benefitted European cinemas. But not everyone could gain a solid foothold in other countries, and after a period in exile, both Dmytryk and Endfield returned to America and HUAC to “name names,” identifying Communist Party members or social progressive “fellow travelers” they knew in the American film industry.
It was a notorious test of national loyalty demanded by HUAC in order to clear oneself. Both directors were allowed to make films in Hollywood again, but Dmytryk especially, a former member of the Hollywood Ten, suffered from a tainted reputation as a snitch and a sellout for the rest of his life, second in notoriety only to director Elia Kazan.
I’ve already made clear much more of the crucial context for this film series than is provided in the Criterion Channel’s brief description of it. This is included in its short “teaser trailer,” a nicely done montage of clips from the various films with the following on-screen commentary accompanying them:
Starting in 1947, artists considered “un-American” were purged from Hollywood. Some were convicted and jailed. Others fled abroad. Most could no longer work under their own names. In film noir, they found a genre to expose the dark side of the country that abandoned them.
Not to be ungrateful about any of the Criterion Channel’s typically stellar offerings, but it’s odd to find this vague framing of the film series, written in passive voice, that doesn’t identify who was doing the purging or who was getting purged. If ever a series required a short documentary featuring an interview with a noted scholar describing what issues are at stake in these films — and such documentaries are typical Criterion Channel fare — “Noir and the Blacklist” is that series.
Obviously, viewers need to know that those accused of being “un-American” were, of course, political leftists, and it was right-wing politicians and authority figures, specifically engaged in a “red witch hunt” for communists, socialists, and progressive liberal Democrats, trying to drive them out of their professions and American society in general.
This series is offered at a time when it’s grimly topical, when leftists are once again threatened with dire consequences for speaking out about what’s happening in America — such as the illegal abduction and/or deportation of immigrants, the US government’s heinous financial and military support for Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza, and the dismantling of the threadbare social safety net in this country. It’s hardly paranoia that makes one wonder why the description of this film series is so brief and nebulous.
Since the era of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist, there’s arguably never been a more perilous time to be a leftist than right now in the United States. So it’s really worth your while to watch these films, which provide a stark tutorial about what’s happened in America in the past that is rearing its ugly head again now.
Targeted by HUAC
All the films are valuable in terms of content and their significance in the appalling political context of the time. Dmytryk’s Crossfire, featuring breakout performances by Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame, is one of the many noirs that surged out in 1947, just as HUAC ramped up its investigations, generally portraying American society in terms of dark, violent, labyrinthian urban spaces where people wander, disoriented, seeking refuge anywhere they can find it. It’s also a landmark in American film history for its subject matter, the antisemitic murder of a Jewish man by a neurotic bigot in uniform, with Ryan giving an unsparing performance as the sneering psycho whose hatred is all dressed up in jingoistic patriotism and defense of American values.
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Just out of the marines himself, Ryan was a dedicated political progressive who campaigned for the role, claiming, “Nobody knows that son of a bitch better than I do.” He’d served in the same outfit as the author of the book the film is based on, Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole. Brooks was a marine representing the problems and open prejudices of his fellow marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in California during the war. The book is centered on the homophobic murder of a gay man, which was impossible to get by the censors at that time.
And the workings of the blacklist are notable in this case, because Crossfire was a B movie sleeper hit that drew astonishingly good reviews and Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay by John Paxton, Best Supporting Actor (Ryan), and Best Supporting Actress (Grahame). However, by the time of the Oscars ceremony, the shine was off Crossfire. It had been targeted by HUAC as one of the “un-American” films churned out by an industry supposedly riddled with communist subversion. Producer Adrian Scott and director Dmytryk had both been blacklisted by then. How the prominent leftist Robert Ryan escaped a similar fate, even he was never sure.
It was a bitter irony that the other landmark film dealing with antisemitism that year was a shinier, posher, more prestigious A-budget film, Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, Celeste Holm, and John Garfield. It was up for many of the same awards and won them. Crossfire was snubbed across the board.
But soon enough, Kazan and Garfield would be summoned by HUAC too.
Crossfire and Gun Crazy are both well-known noirs, but there are a few relatively unsung works of art in this series that you should see. Dassin’s Brute Force, for example, is a rightly admired, beautifully shot, tightly wound prison film that makes a desperate failed breakout attempt into an existential study of systematized human cruelty and people’s hopeless entrapment within it.
Endfield’s Try and Get Me!, originally titled The Sound of Fury, is a harrowing account of the events leading up to a lynching. Based on an actual lynching that took place in San Jose, California, in 1933 that also inspired Fritz Lang’s first American film, the proto-noir Fury (1936), Try and Get Me! is about an unemployed working-class man struggling to support his family. At a desperate point, he meets a flashy, swaggering criminal who persuades him to participate in a series of small-time robberies. These escalate to a bigger crime for one final financial windfall, the kidnapping for ransom of a rich man’s son that ends in murder.
Playing the lead, Frank Lovejoy specialized in decent working-class everyman parts and would demonstrate how poignant it is when such a man crumbles under inhuman pressure in this and another early-’50s noir, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1952). Playing the charismatic hood, Lloyd Bridges (father of actors Jeff and Beau Bridges) gave a career-best performance as the macho braggart. This was right before Bridges was blacklisted, largely for having been a founding member of the Actor’s Laboratory Theater, which was a West Coast continuation of the former Group Theater; both were considered hotbeds of communist activity. (Jules Dassin was also a founding member.) It ruined the momentum of Bridges’s film career, but he went back to HUAC as a “cooperative witness” and was then allowed to return to acting in television.
The complete and gruesome scene of the lynching couldn’t be represented in the film due to censorship. In real life, a San Jose mob of thousands dragged the men from their jail cells, beat them furiously, and hanged them from trees in the local park — all of it documented live by reporters, photographers, and newsreel filmmakers, with the express approval of California’s governor. The scenes in Try and Get Me! representing only the events leading up to the lynching, to the point of the mob violently hauling the two screaming and pleading men out of their cells, are the stuff of nightmares.
Perhaps the most obscure of these great films is He Ran All the Way (1951), based on a 1947 novel of the same name by Sam Ross but a vehicle for stage and film star John Garfield. Hugo Butler, later blacklisted, was credited as the main screenwriter, though he was also fronting for Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the original script. It’s a haunting tale of impoverished small-time hood Nick Robey (Garfield), arm-twisted into a payroll robbery by a slicker partner in crime who rats him out after the robbery goes wrong and Robey has killed a security guard. Hiding out from the cops at a public pool, Nick meets a vulnerable working-class young woman (Shelley Winters) and uses her obvious crush on him to take her family hostage so he has a place to hole up until the heat is off.
It’s an intense thriller in which everyone’s desperation, both economic and emotional, keeps rising to an unbearable point, where violence and tragic death is bound to be the result. Hauntingly shot by James Wong Howe and featuring a roiling emotional Franz Waxman score, He Ran All the Way was well reviewed but got lost in the ongoing drama of Garfield’s blacklisting.
By far the biggest star who’d ever been targeted by HUAC, Garfield was practically the poster boy for blacklistees. He checked so many of the boxes that typified those vulnerable to right-wing harassment — Jewish children of urban immigrants, active in left-wing theater groups like the Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, the Group Theater, or the Actors’ Laboratory Theater, and involved in leftist causes, whether as a member of communist or socialist parties or as a progressive liberal Democrat.
Never very political beyond donating his money generously, Garfield claimed to be a “Roosevelt Democrat,” but he was surrounded by communists. His wife Robbe was for several years a member of the communist party and remained a fierce left-wing organizer. Among his best friends from the Group Theater days was Clifford Odets — later blacklisted — who wrote the incendiary plays Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! that put the Group Theater on the map.
This made it an absurdity when Garfield claimed in his testimony before HUAC that he knew no communists in the film industry, when he probably knew every communist in the film industry. According to the 2003 biography by Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield, Robbe Garfield had held communist party meetings in their home. But Garfield’s absolute determination was to name no names while somehow saving his own film career — a virtual impossibility.
Soon it became clear that HUAC would not accept Garfield’s claims and intended to pursue perjury charges against him. Already finding himself unemployable going forward, Garfield was driven to increasingly desperate acts, such as writing articles for major publications denouncing communism. This ploy had worked for other stars trying to dodge investigations by HUAC, such as Humphrey Bogart. But Robbe Garfield was incensed at what she regarded as her husband’s craven attempts to placate the blacklisters, which broke up their long marriage.
All of this was going on behind the scenes of He Ran All the Way. According to the director John Berry, who also got blacklisted after the film came out, the movie was all about the feeling of doom, and “that was no coincidence.” At age thirty-nine, Garfield died of a stress-induced heart attack in May 1952, a month before the movie premiered.
The “Noir and the Blacklist” series could be two or three times as extensive as it is and still not cover its subject, because every film noir made in Hollywood in the main period when the genre was thriving, from roughly 1945 to 1960, was produced in circumstances of appalling political strife and persecution. A good example of such a film that isn’t included in the series is Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), a harrowing noir long recognized as being loosely based on John Garfield’s tormented life as an American film star.
What’s not generally known is that the source material for the film is the 1949 stage play which Garfield cowrote, uncredited, with his friend Clifford Odets. By that point, Odets was in a career tailspin and suffering from severe writer’s block. Garfield, ever loyal to his friends, dedicated himself to helping Odets personally and professionally.
Garfield also starred in the play, after having imbued it with aspects of his own life, including the character of a principled wife demanding more from him than he could deliver. Garfield even foretold an early death for his character, driven to the edge by his own frailties and the brutally corrupt, hypercapitalist nature of the movie business. The film makes clear that Garfield knew his own infatuation with being a Hollywood star — no matter how he felt it had demeaned his talent, no matter how his wife argued that it would mean his ultimate destruction — would bring him down in the end.
Let theater critic Brooks Atkinson offer the final words on what he regarded as the failure of the play The Big Knife as a “moral crusade” taking on Hollywood but also implying that Hollywood stood for America:
The characters in “The Big Knife” are not worth so much of Mr. Odets’ indignation on so cosmic a plain. As in a soundly motivated melodrama, they get what they deserve in the last act. There is no point in crying doom for the entire nation.
By 1949, there was every point in crying doom for the entire nation. Such a clueless reaction from the top theater critic in America shows what talented and perceptive leftists were up against then — and points forward to what we’re up against now.
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In this fiery and hilarious episode of FYPod, Tahra Hoops joins hosts Cameron Kasky and Tim Miller to take on the housing crisis, debunk deregulation dogma, and clap back at the lazy narratives blaming young people for everything. From corporate landlords to purity politics, nothing is safe.
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On November 5, 2024, the night of Donald Trump’s historic second election victory, it suddenly — and unexpectedly — looked as though he would win Pennsylvania. Of all the seven swing states Trump needed to win in this intense, closely fought race, Pennsylvania was said to be the most important, not least due to the fact that it was the birthplace of Joe Biden.
Among Kamala Harris’s senior staffers, a sickly feeling spread. It had been only four and a half months since Biden had suffered a professional catastrophe while debating Trump; the entire country witnessed a frail, mentally challenged man appearing as if he had scant knowledge of what was going on around him.
High-powered Democratic donors were the first to explode in their cell phones, followed by top party officials, often sitting alone in their living rooms, vaguely expecting something of what actually happened. This is covered for the first time in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
In Fight, these two veteran Washington, DC–based journalists portray a devastating inside-the-Beltway tale in which a small cadre of Democratic leaders — mainly Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama — basically disagree about what to do next. As Allen and Parnes put it, “The same scene played out on the screens of politicians, party operatives, and progressive pundits across the country — a widespread freakout unlike any other in American history.”
In all, it took twenty-four days for the Democratic apparatus to finally turn on an enraged Biden, forcing him to leave the race. His family and small circle of insiders insisted he had only been suffering from a cold that night. A furious First Lady Jill Biden attacked his detractors, buoyed by Hunter, the family’s scandal-plagued son, who played a leading role in bashing his father’s “enemies.”
“People close to [Biden] would never cop to the complicity of their own silence,” the authors write. To them, “it wasn’t a linear process” and Biden was not always exhibiting what could be called dementia-like symptoms. But still, his condition was disturbing, as everyone now understood. Even before his fateful debate, Biden’s ratings had significantly fallen, with the party gearing themselves up for a very tough battle.
The first decision was to coax Biden to remove himself from the running — a very difficult chore. The second decision was to choose, in some manner, a new party nominee. Harris was eventually settled upon as the replacement by his longest friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who had worked hard to develop statewide Democratic coalitions in response to what they saw as Obama’s neglect of the party faithful. Led by long-standing loyalist Donna Brazile, there was a large groundswell for Harris as Biden’s loyal vice president.
Obama — never a big Harris fan, according to the authors — wanted to stage a series of mini primaries so that the public could decide for itself. Beyond that, Obama was a big fan of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer for her intellectual heft. Pelosi, a fellow Californian, wanted another candidate — as one staffer put it, “She doesn’t like Harris.”
Clintonworld — the term widely used for the huge informal network of political staffers who have passed through Bill and Hillary’s operations over the years — effectively controlled the decision to give Harris the job. Some in other factions of the party, usually never named, complained that she had made little, if any, impact in her own presidential run, dropping out early because of mismanagement and money problems. Others pointed out her reputation for gaffes during interviews and lack of vision. “You know who did that,” said one unhappy insider, “Bill and Hillary motherfucking Clinton.”
“It had just been a couple of hours earlier when I was looking at a six-hour line of college students in fucking Altoona, PA,” said one overwrought Harris staffer. “But once it switched, man, it went down quick and hard.”
Turnout in Philadelphia was only a little bit lower than in 2020. But, as the same staffer explained, “Trump was winning more of it.” It would be slightly up in nearby Bucks County, but Trump was doing better there too. Harris had massive crowds in Philadelphia itself but was lost in nearby mostly white middle- and upper-middle-class towns after choosing to campaign with Liz Cheney, the noted Trump-basher and daughter of Iraq policy leader Dick Cheney.
Trump, incredibly cunning and playing to working-class financial problems, campaigned near Bristol, aiming at the working-class whites that Harris usually avoided. During his extensive campaigning through that state, Trump made repeated promises to bring down grocery prices and bring in new jobs, never hinting he’d be signing off on the destruction of Medicaid and social security just months later. In the end, Trump would win in Pennsylvania by 50.4 percent to 48.7 percent, as well as Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina — making up more than ninety electoral votes.
Residents of Dearborn, Michigan — home to the United States’ largest Arab community — voted Trump rather than Harris, believing his promises that he would end the war in Gaza, even though his actual plan was to collaborate closely with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and advocate the removal of Palestinians to make Gaza into a luxury resort for the rich.
But this isn’t to say that Biden hadn’t manipulated voters. Always used as for gauzy photo shoots near Independence Hall, Philadelphia had become over the years “the country’s poorest big city,” stealing that title from Detroit. A fifth of the city’s residents live in poverty, trying to make ends meet on the federally mandated $7.25 an hour. In contrast, Philadelphia’s suburbs are mostly prosperous, and along with Center City competed with legal, medical, architectural, and design peers up and down the East Coast.
Nevertheless, rusting factories — often shut down as a result of Clinton’s neoliberal 1990s trade policies — still remained for miles, despite Biden’s ongoing braggadocio about reindustrialization. In the ongoing economic malaise, many working-class men and women in Pennsylvania were in no mood for Harris’s “happy talk” campaign, totally bereft of Bernie Sanders’s important “laundry list” of political demands. With Harris, there were few specifics.
The Clintons, however, had conjured up a plan in restructuring state organizations — as the authors point out, “in large part it was designed to stop the party’s left wing from taking control” — to keep “progressive outsiders” out of the picture. And at the Democratic Convention, Harris saw to it that no pro-Palestinian voices would address her convention.
On the night of the convention, Biden was seething. His speech was pushed out of prime time to 11:30. “They were all so eager to get rid of him,” the authors surmise. “This final insult, his gold watch retirement ceremony playing out to an emptying arena and a smaller TV audience, really burned.”
During the previous few months, Biden had repeatedly reminded Harris that loyalty to him meant everything. And she had complied, never once wavering in her support. The way he put it was “no daylight, kid” — any attempt to encourage intrigue and disunity was not helpful to her campaign.
“Most voters did not see Biden’s first term as the most compelling recommendation to give him a second term,” said one staffer. When Harris was interviewed on the extremely popular show The View, she was asked what she would have done differently than Biden. She replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” creating a response that would hurt the campaign to the end.
In a very dramatic way, the ludicrous mid-August debate highlighted the difference between the two candidates. In an incredibly tense atmosphere, the general sense was that Harris “ran circles around Trump,” the authors wrote, but that he “landed serious blows that previewed his fall campaign.”
Trump countered Harris’s policy comments by calling her a “radical-left liberal” who “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” and accusing the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs, eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris laughed at these remarks but failed in adequately responding when asked whether people were financially better off than they were before Biden took office.
What her aides soon discovered was that the debate had only given her a statistically insignificant bump in national polling — less than a point in the RealClearPolitics average. She had effectively hit a ceiling that would trail her campaign until Election Day.
Only a couple of weeks before the election, Biden upended Harris’s carefully planned speech by making a bizarre call appearance that went instantly viral. Saying in a strange, disjointed way that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump] supporters,” Biden enraged many Trump voters who were instantly reminded of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mockery of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” “It was a gift,” a senior Trump aide reflected.
In a final projection of the race, Harris aides presented her numbers showing she would probably lose Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, while she seemed poised to win Michigan and Wisconsin (which never happened). And while Harris would never renounce Biden’s close relationship with the Israeli government, Trump traveled to Dearborn to convince them that he was sympathetic to the Palestinian people’s plight. He increased his share of Latino votes from 32 to 46 percent, Asian American votes from 34 to 40 percent, black women from 13 to 14 percent, and black men from 19 to 21 percent.
In the end, Fight is a profoundly unsettling microcosm of the Democratic leadership as it currently stands. Since Trump’s administration has veered so hard to the Right, there has been a noticeable shift — at least for now — toward attacking Trump’s actions in a direct manner.
It can only be hoped that this is a growing progressive fightback, and that it is not strangled at its infancy by those forces in the Democratic leadership who have been so low on ideas for much of this century so far — and proven completely incapable of providing their own responses beyond the maintenance of neoliberalism.
Great Job Anne Colamosca & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
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Does Trump Want to Be the President Who Lost Ukraine?
DONALD TRUMP HATES NOTHING more than a “loser.” To him, losing is shameful and the worst insult he can imagine. But he could end up being tagged as a loser for the way he has abandoned more than three decades of U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. He is walking away from a tougher Euro…
ICYMI: Here are links to each newsletter section so you can quickly get back to that edition you may have missed this week.
Morning Shots – Triad – Huddled Masses – Press Pass – Bulwark Goes to Hollywood – The Opposition – False Flag – The Breakdown
The Gulf of Anti-America
ON FRIDAY, AS HE RETURNED to the United States from a four-day tour of the Persian Gulf, Donald Trump berated Bruce Springsteen for criticizing him on …
How to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 Hours
How Americans Can Cease Being Rich
Kristi Noem Embarrasses Herself Again
Eli’s BBQ, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Happy Saturday! I hope if it is your last Saturday before summer, that you do something memorable that is spring-like. Don’t give into summer just yet! Plenty of time for that. I look forward to seeing those of you attending our live events in Chicago and Nashville.
If you’re in the Cincinnati area… Save the date! I will be moderating a Principles First panel on June 5 with Amy McGrath and Trey Grayson on the importance of tamping down executive overreach.
And if you’re in D.C… Save the date for June 6, as The Bulwark teams up with Crooked Media for a joint event to raise funds for Andry Hernandez Romero.
Declarations And Graduations… Declaring against declarations, plus, when your children leave childhood. New from Matt Labash.
Patriotism, True and False…Some thoughts from Jay Nordlinger on an important and somewhat slippery concept.
This New Orleans-based podcaster…reaches millions from his Uptown home. Read the Tim Miller profile in the Times-Picayune.
Trump’s image of dead ‘white farmers’…came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa (Reuters). The Shares from Your Aunt presidency.
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Great Job Jim Swift & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
We are fortunate that the three pillars of Tony Benn’s socialism — the radical democratization of politics, the Alternative Economic Strategy, and antiwar internationalism — were explored in so many of his articles and interviews, and in his speeches to Parliament, demonstrations, conferences, and picket lines. Looking around at the world today and the challenges we face, Benn’s analysis is as relevant as ever and can help guide us through the tasks that lie ahead. So the publication of The Most Dangerous Man in Britain?, a new anthology of his political writing, couldn’t be more timely.
I would recommend this book as essential reading for every socialist activist inside and outside the Labour Party and everyone interested in building a fairer, better world of peace and justice.
Tony Benn and his writings have been — and remain — a huge inspiration for me. As someone lucky enough to have known and been generously encouraged by him, I was excited to hear about the publication of this anthology. I did wonder, however, whether there would be anything in it that I hadn’t previously come across. But given that it includes some great pieces I have never read (despite my keen consumption of Benn’s books), I was right to be excited.
To have this new anthology is to have Tony Benn with us again. It makes me reflect not only on how much the Left misses him today but on what a valuable asset he would have been if we had had him with us, with his great experience and insight, between 2015 and 2019.
What this new anthology does so well, in just under three hundred pages, is to distill the key strands of Benn’s political thought through brilliantly chosen speeches, articles, and letters. Some of them have never been published in book form and have been very hard to find, despite being key to understanding Benn’s politics.
This new anthology is split into six sections: “The British State,” “The Many Faces of Democracy,” “Industry,” “Britain in the World,” “The Radical Tradition,” and “Politics After Politics.” It starts with a superb foreword by Tony Benn’s daughter, the journalist, activist, and educator Melissa Benn, who describes his political thought as a “socialist, democratic, anti-imperialist analysis.”
What is striking throughout the book is the profound depth, seriousness, and ambition of Benn’s political thought across a vast range of subjects. A few hours spent in the company of these detailed but readable writings is a refreshing tour of the fabric of socialist thought we have inherited. They are a reminder of the scale of the thinking, planning, persuasion, and organization needed to put real alternatives into practice and to avoid a world increasingly scarred by inequality, injustice, war, and the environmental crisis.
Running through the whole anthology is Benn’s unshakeable belief in democratic progress coming from pressure from below, instead of being handed down from upon high. The anthology includes “The Politician Today,” a speech he made to an international conference of political consultants in 1970, in which he powerfully articulates this conviction:
Looking back over a hundred years of British parliamentary democracy and seeing why great changes occur, I have become convinced that these were not the products of enlightened leaders but of the pressure of people from below, who have worked through the agency of political leaders, whose greatest quality may well have been their realism. We would never have had the vote in Britain for men — and certainly not for women — if it had not been demanded and conceded. We should never have had state education, the welfare state, the National Health Service or many of the other civilised developments of which we are proud if the demands of these things had not bubbled up from below. And the present vigorous campaigns against pollution, for a better quality of life and for a greater respect for ecology, were not thought up by inspired ministers or far-sighted civil servants. They came from the people and we are now conceding what they want.
Throughout the book, it is clear how this fundamental belief informed Benn’s proposed reforms to the political process, the economy, and the workplace and his vision of a more democratic international system for peace and cooperation. It also demonstrates how his ideas were shaped by his reading of British history, from the Levellers and Diggers to the Chartists, Suffragettes, and movements of the early twenty-first century, as an ongoing struggle for democratic control for the many in place of an undemocratic hoarding of power and wealth by a privileged few.
Benn said that experience is the greatest teacher. This anthology shows how his own political views were formed, and his own leftward political journey significantly shaped, by his experience of listening to and learning from constituents, trade unionists in struggle, campaigning students, and marginalized and discriminated-against groups. His belief was that real progress comes in Parliament when sufficient MPs feel the pressure to do the same kind of learning and act upon it.
The “Industry” section includes “A Ten-Year Industrial Strategy for Britain,” written in 1975 by Tony Benn, Frances Morrell, and Francis Cripps, which became known as the Alternative Economic Strategy. While the then Labour government sadly followed the neoliberal prescription of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for dealing with Britain’s economic woes in the ’70s and paved the way for Thatcherism, the Alternative Economic Strategy remains as a reminder of what could have been. As the 1975 document concludes:
It is essential that the labour movement should now adopt a strategy which meets the needs of working people by securing an extension of public ownership, industrial democracy in the organisations of work and the planning for industrial recovery so that government, managements and union representatives can jointly devise means of safeguarding existing production and plan new investment needed to restore Britain’s economy as a manufacturing nation.
As we face the challenges of the current economic situation, in which we are told that cuts to disability benefits are necessary to “balance the books” while demands for a wealth tax are still refused, there is relevance to be found in studying the Alternative Economy Strategy and the political results of rejecting it for an IMF-friendly, establishment-endorsed approach.
The anthology also superbly showcases Tony Benn’s antiwar internationalism across the decades, starting with a 1964 article for the Guardian in which he argues with passion and precision for sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. He writes with real moral force when he says,
What greater folly can be imagined in this situation than to fail to see it, or to see it and try not to notice it? Yet that is what this present government is doing, voting against apartheid at the UN [United Nations] and simultaneously supplying arms that will maintain it in force. It is just this sort of hypocrisy that reduces Britain’s influence in the world.
The power of Benn’s words on Britain’s role in the world resonates with urgency as we push for strong sanctions on Israel for its war on Gaza — sanctions to match the scale of the sanctions the government rightly imposed on Russia following its unlawful invasion of Ukraine. In a rich sweep of his contributions on international issues, the anthology includes his February 17, 1998, House of Commons speech opposing the bombing of Iraq, with its famous section in which he reflects upon his own experience in Blitz-era London and relates it to the plight of those about to suffer the same way:
Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames House. Every morning, I saw Docklands burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 News item.
The anthology finishes with a section dedicated to Benn’s political activity after standing down from Parliament in the 2001 general election, including, most notably, the text of his speech to the million-strong February 15, 2003, march against the government joining the United States’ war on Iraq. He covers an awful lot of ground in what had to be, by necessity at a demonstration with so many speakers, a very short speech. I was there that day, and it’s wonderful to now have the text of Tony’s words.
The inclusion of these two antiwar speeches showcases Benn speaking truth to power in two very different places where he was equally effective: in Parliament and at protests. Key to his politics, as this anthology shows, is the idea of socialist Labour MPs being the bridge linking progressive movements outside Parliament with determined activity inside. As he puts it in one of the pieces included, “the people we represent can only look to an advance of their interests and of the prospects of socialism if Labour MPs harness themselves to the movement outside and develop a strong partnership, which alone can infuse fresh life into Parliament as an agent of democratic change.”
In the same speech, Benn warns that the potential consequence of the exclusion of socialists from Parliament — and thereby of the bridge they provide between struggles outside and activity within — is the rise of the far right:
If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media — having tasted blood — would next demand that it expelled all its socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP [Social Democratic Party] to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and again when the Conservatives fell out favour with the public. Thus, British capitalism, it is argued, would be made safe forever, and socialism could be squeezed off the national agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed — which it will not — it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far right, as we have seen in Europe over the last fifty years.
This passage has often been quoted in recent years. But as we look at the opinion polls in this country, and see what has happened in Italy, the United States, and Germany, this warning seems as urgent as ever.
There is so much more of value and interest in this new anthology than that which can be covered in this review. But I would make mention of Benn’s September 1984 article on the 1984–85 miners’ strike, which really demonstrates the clarity with which he — unlike the leadership of Labour and some trade unions at the time — understood its totemic significance. As he put it, “when the history of the miners’ strike of 1984 comes to be written I believe it will be seen to have been much more than an ordinary dispute.” As Melissa Benn adds, “the miners’ strike of 1984–5 was for him a seminal conflict, pitting the destructive and exploitative forces of the state and capitalism against the just might of the organised industrial working classes.”
There is also a moving piece for Melody Maker in 1970 written as part of a debate with a leader of the youth movement in the United States. Its inclusion shows what a rich treasury this anthology is — including pieces that even some of those who already have great knowledge of Benn’s writings will not have come across before.
The inclusion of Tony Benn’s last speech in Parliament, after almost fifty years as a Labour MP, is very useful and thought-provoking, as is the wonderful last interview that Melissa conducted with him in 2011. In her foreword, Melissa writes that she has two distinct hopes for this anthology: first, to lay to rest some of the myths about Tony Benn and the Left in general (“that collection of clichés and half-truths, laden with the usual lazy adjectives”) and, second, to inspire a new and younger audience.
This anthology definitely succeeds in this first objective, showing the intellect, vision, and seriousness of Tony Benn’s political thinking, which represents the very best of the inheritance that my generation of Labour socialists in Britain was lucky enough to receive. And it will succeed in inspiring a new and younger audience if it is read as widely as I hope and believe it will be.
Tony Benn wrote that “from the beginning of time in the hearts of every civilisation there have always been two flames burning, the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that we can build a better world.” To date, this anthology is the best book of Benn’s writings to help fuel both of those flames in the hearts of new generations. I hope every socialist inside and outside the Labour Party and everyone who is interested in building a better world reads it.
Great Job Richard Burgon & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
Donald Trump is looking to pass his Big, Not-So-Beautiful Bill through Congress. To do it, he needs to get it past congressional Republicans. So what do Republican voters think of congressional leaders, and whether this bill is as big and beautiful as it seems? New York Times congressional reporter Annie Karni joins Sarah.
By Annie Karni:
Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress
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When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”
Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.
In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.
The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.
But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.
The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”
Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.
“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.
Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.
After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.
Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.
The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.
ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.
In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.
Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.
Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.
“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.
Great Job by Nicole Santa Cruz & the Team @ ProPublica Source link for sharing this story.
Since President Donald Trump reentered the White House, politicians have opened the floodgates on conspiracy theories and unfounded claims against public figures, ranging from a fumbled release of documents surrounding victims of financier Jeffrey Epstein to hearings about the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.
Now, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, has joined calls to free Tory Lanez, a Canadian rapper who was sentenced to prison after a 2020 altercation with rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The case itself has been scrutinized by online critics — despite Lanez’s conviction — who claimed Megan Thee Stallion’s testimony was fabricated, that powerful music executives have tried to orchestrate a “cover-up” and that the DNA evidence linking Lanez to a gun was inadmissible or flawed.
While Luna posted what she called evidence of Lanez’s innocence, Megan Thee Stallion’s team pushed back — and there’s no indication prosecutors are reopening the case. Lanez’s trial highlighted how often Black women who seek justice are doubted, by both the legal system and society. Luna’s attempt to draw attention to the case and assert that Lanez was wrongly convicted represents both a doubling down on that dynamic and an indication of how pop culture and politics combine in online spaces full of misinformation.
As a member of the Oversight Committee, the House’s powerful main investigative branch, Luna told NewsNation this week that she had come across new DNA evidence that would disprove Lanez’s involvement and Ring camera footage that shows the case as “he-said-she-said.”
After receiving a tip from Amber Rose — a media personality who has strengthened her connections with the Republican Party in the past year, including speaking at their nominating convention — Luna said she has been working with members of the California delegation, including Democrats, to urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to pardon Lanez.
“[This was] pretty egregious, the way this was handled — I think it was largely driven by headlines,” Luna told NewsNation during an interview. “Obviously, domestic violence I take very seriously, but I also take very seriously the fact that I do believe, based on the evidence that I’ve seen, that Tory’s innocent.”
Police arrested Lanez during a traffic stop on July 12, 2020, after receiving reports of gunfire from a group leaving celebrity Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home in Los Angeles. At the time, Megan Thee Stallion, whose real name is Megan Pete, was taken to the hospital for a foot injury — one she initially told police was the result of stepping on broken glass and later said was actually the result of having been shot in the foot by Lanez. The surgeon who treated Megan Thee Stallion testified to seeing gunshot wounds in her foot, as well as seeing bullet fragments on X-ray imaging.
Lanez was sentenced to 10 years in prison in August 2023 after a jury found him guilty of assault with a firearm, illegal possession and negligent discharge of the weapon. As a Canadian citizen, Lanez could also face deportation from the United States after serving his sentence. The judge had previously denied a request for a retrial.
But almost two years later, persistent theories and conspiracies, combined with doubts about evidence in the now-closed court case, continue to circulate online. Podcasters and social media users have tried to cast doubt on the fact that Megan Thee Stallion was actually shot for years, which prosecutors called a “weaponized information” campaign orchestrated by Lanez and his team. Other Black men celebrities currently facing claims of assault, abuse or trafficking — including producer Sean “Diddy” Combs, singer Chris Brown and rapper DDG — have seen similar waves of support across social media this week in the face of allegations against them.
Lanez’s case has reemerged after the artist was stabbed 14 times while in prison earlier this month.
Christine Scartz, director of the Family Justice Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law, said that while it’s good for people with influence, like lawmakers, to call attention to possible miscarriages of justice, she worries about what the attention on this case means for Megan Thee Stallion and other Black women.
“For Black women victims of violence, it’s not just a struggle for individual justice, but it’s a struggle against all these other competing priorities that people who either are not involved in the case directly or who don’t know exactly what it is they’re talking about or how the system works,” Scartz said. “You have to struggle against all these competing priorities for other people who are then going to shade you when you’re just looking for individual justice.”
Luna had never posted about his case on her official X account until May 19, when she started circulating a petition from the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety, a conservative effort run by TV host and Fox political analyst Gianno Caldwell. Attorney General Pam Bondi; Rep. Burgess Owens, a Black Utah Republican; and media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky are all on the Caldwell Institute’s board. Luna and Caldwell did not respond to requests for comment.
Luna posted that she had “compelling evidence” proving Lanez’s innocence, claiming that the singer had not received due process. She then posted a thread, tagging Newsom, listing concerns she had with the trial process, citing the First, Sixth and Fourteenth amendments. On Thursday, she posted another thread, claiming a new affidavit from a bodyguard “shatters the original narrative used to convict” Lanez.
“This guy’s an innocently incarcerated man,” Luna told a reporter Wednesday. “When the evidence was brought forward and presented to me, I was pretty baffled that he was even charged after what I saw.”
She also said she spoke with the rapper Tuesday, saying that once Lanez gets a pardon — which Luna said she is confident will happen — he will work on prison reform.
On Thursday, Megan Thee Stallion’s lawyers released a 31-page report seeking to dismantle “unsworn rumors being spread as fact,” dismissing the circulating Ring camera footage and claims about DNA evidence.
“Despite Mr. Lanez being convicted at trial by overwhelming evidence (that included his own admission of his guilt), he and his team — flanked by any ignorant person they can find — have pushed whatever misleading narrative they can,” said Alex Spiro, Megan Thee Stallion’s lawyer, who headed the report.
Great Job Marissa Martinez & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
