Washington D.C.—Today, the religious equality watchdog organization American Atheists condemned Congress’s failure to include necessary constitutional protections in the $484 billion aid bill passed by the House of Representatives. As a result, the additional $310 billion injected into the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program can unconstitutionally fund religious worship.
“Congress must include these First Amendment protections in any future stimulus bills, particularly after the Small Business Administration weakened its own regulations, allowing the original $350 billion in stimulus money to fund religious worship,” said Alison Gill, Vice President for Legal and Policy at American Atheists.
Longstanding SBA regulations had prevented “businesses principally engaged in teaching, instructing, counselling or indoctrinating religion or religious beliefs, whether in a religious or secular setting” from receiving business or economic disaster loans. However, with its guidance on the Paycheck Protection Program from the CARES Act, SBA suddenly indicated in early April that it would “decline to enforce these subsections.”
“If the SBA won’t do its job and protect the Constitution, Congress must finally step in,” said Nick Fish, President of American Atheists. “Congress is rushing to replenish Paycheck Protection Program funds after countless businesses were unable to access these loans to preserve jobs. What we don’t know is how many well-heeled mega churches were able to secure government money to pay their pastors’ salary, while small businesses were left out in the cold.”
“Thousands and thousands of our supporters have warned Congress that these stimulus bills fail to adequately protect the constitutional separation of religion and government,” said Gill. “Accountability, transparency, and adherence to the Constitution are critical, especially in the face of a crisis.”
CLICK ABOVE to DONATESoheil Arabi. Photo: Nano GoleSorkh
If lockdown has deepened our empathy with the predicament of inmates in our jails, it has also released innovative means of protest on behalf of political prisoners locked up in brutal conditions. On 14th April, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain organised a self-declared first: a three-hour online protest, live-streamed on Facebook, mixing music, poetry and an array of international speakers, in support of Soheil Arabi.
Arabi is an atheist, activist and blogger. He’s in an Iranian prison, in bad shape both emotionally and physically. His crime? Blasphemy: writing insulting Facebook posts about the prophet Muhammad, the Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials. Arabi was arrested in December 2013 and sentenced to death for blasphemy. In July 2015, upon appeal, his death sentence was reduced to seven and a half years in prison and two years of religious studies to cure him of his atheism. In addition to physical problems caused by various hunger strikes, Arabi has been tortured, resulting in blunt trauma to his testicles and a broken nose, amongst other injuries.
Refusing to be silenced, he was later sentenced to an additional three years in prison, exile and a fine on charges of “propaganda against the state” and “insulting the sacred and the supreme leader” because of his open letters highlighting inhumane prison conditions of political prisoners in Iran. As if to rub the mullahs’ noses in it, he signs letters as Soheil Arabi, Atheist.
Iran, Pakistan and Yemen are the three worst countries in regard to the implementation of blasphemy law, often used to harass religious and ethnic minorities. (See my interview with Saif ul-Malook, the lawyer who represented Asia Bibi. A Christian woman, Bibi spent nine years in prison on confected charges of blasphemy, many of those on death row, before the sentence was commuted to life.) According to The Freedom of Thought report 2019, blasphemy laws exist in 69 countries and is punishable by death in six.
We don’t know the number of prisoners sentenced to death for blasphemy in Iran. Figures are hard to come by. A 2018 Amnesty report put the number of individuals executed at over 253, while 18 were convicted of moharebeh (enmity against God) and 14 of “spreading corruption on earth”, vague terms for blasphemy much in vogue in Iran. Any criticism of the state can be deemed a religious offence and has proven a handy mechanism for controlling dissent.
Arabi resumed his hunger strike on April 4 in protest at the Iranian regime’s denial of medical care, inhuman prison conditions and the denial of leave for prisoners during the coronavirus pandemic. In a bid to stop the spread of the virus, more than 85,000 prisoners were released on temporary leave, including the more well-known political prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian citizen imprisoned for allegedly “plotting to topple the Iranian government”. In his letter to the Greater Tehran Penitentiary announcing his hunger strike, Arabi asks, “And I have been imprisoned for telling the truth. Those who had embezzled money were granted prison leave and are now at large. Armed robbers are now at large. What is the danger of a journalist?”
Atheism is a red rag to religion in a way that religion rarely is to atheism – unless we are talking about authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union. It’s a point that is often eclipsed in liberal democracies where freedom of belief often trumps the freedom not to believe. Of course, in countries like Iran, neither freedom exists.
Wealthy conservative groups create smoke-and-mirrors scheme to foster anti-lockdown protests
CLICK ABOVE to DONATEAnti-distancing protesters at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, last week.
Last week, national news outlets carried coverage of a small but disruptive protest at the Michigan state Capitol of stay-at-home orders instituted by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The protesters called it “Operation Gridlock,” shutting down traffic for miles in the heart of Lansing by clogging the city’s main arteries with a string of parked cars. The crowd, including armed members of the Michigan Liberty Militia, eschewed social distancing orders, brandished a smattering of Confederate flags, and temporarily blocked the entrance to the Capitol.
But despite all the hype and attention, those protesters represented a minuscule minority of the population. New polling this week showed that more than 81% of Michigan residents support continuing social distancing measures for at least one to two months, with fully 58% saying they support practicing social distancing “as long as is required.”
The polling reinforces two investigative pieces in TheNew York Times and TheWashington Postthat found there was nothing even remotely organic about the anti-distancing protests popping up in states mostly run by Democratic governors like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, California, and Virginia, though some efforts have also targeted Republican-led states like Ohio, Missouri, and Texas. The Times calls the demonstrations the product of an “informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House,” that are driving turnout at the protests, filing suits against the orders, and funding polling designed to kneecap the rationale for the stay-at-home orders.
One state that’s seen a nexus of that effort is Wisconsin, where a small cadre of fewer than 100 protesters converged on the state Capitol and the Republican-led legislature sued state health officials over “Safer at Home” that were recently extended through most of May.
The well-funded conservative groups helping to fan the flames of discontent include some Obama-era creations like Freedom Works and the Tea Party Patriots. But, as the Times writes, “also involved are a law firm led partly by former Trump White House officials, a network of state-based conservative policy groups, and an ad hoc coalition of conservative leaders known as Save Our Country that has advised the White House on strategies for a tiered reopening of the economy.”
The protest in Michigan, in fact, had strong ties to the Trump administration. It was mainly organized by the Michigan Conservative coalition, which also operates under the name Michigan Trump Republicans, according to The Guardian. Additionally, it was promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group with strong ties to Trump-appointed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
It’s little wonder that Trump shot of a series of tweets last week stoking insurrections by encouraging the protesters to “LIBERATE” themselves. Sowing division in the country is an age-old Trump strategy at this point, and the protests give his efforts to reopen the economy the appearance of aligning with popular sentiment.
But similar to the Michigan poll, national polling has reflected that by and large, risk-averse Americans are far more worried about opening too fast than too slow. In fact, a fringe element of just 14% of the public supports the protesters over the efforts of their governors.
New polling:@MorningConsult: 76% say social distancing should continue; 14% say it should stop@Reuters: 72% say people should stay home until health officials say it's safe@NavigatorSurvey: 62% worried social distancing will end too soon; 26% worried it will go on too long
Not to mention the fact that these protests could end up in dangerous standoffs between the activists and local law enforcement officials. If violence does break out, that is 100% the product of Trump and his conservative allies fomenting discontent.
“Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” the researchers wrote in the working paper.
The two hosts diverged greatly on the issue in February. While Hannity expressed optimism that “zero people in the United States have died from the coronavirus,” Carlson warned viewers that the virus could kill 1 million people across the country.
The researchers commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 Fox News viewers, which found that Carlson’s viewers were more likely to change their behavior earlier than Hannity’s viewers.
“We find that Hannity’s viewers on average changed their behavior in response to the coronavirus five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior three days earlier than other Fox News viewers,” the paper said.
The researchers then compared the death rate in counties that favored either host, finding “approximately 30% more COVID-19 cases” in areas that preferred Hannity than those that watched Carlson.
“Already by mid-March, we see a statistically significant difference — that there are greater case loads in places that favor Hannity over Tucker,” researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott told The Chicago Tribune. “Then weeks later, we see a similar trajectory increase for deaths.”
After Hannity’s “shift in tone,” however, “the diverging trajectories . . . began to revert,” the study said.
The researchers argued that their findings were consistent with “misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.”
The attempts by certain Fox News opinion hosts to downplay the virus early in the outbreak came in stark contrast to steps the network’s executives and owners took to protect themselves against the virus.
“The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity’s coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but down right factually wrong,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement. “As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story. The ‘study’ almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Hannity likewise defended his coverage of the virus in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month, arguing that his January interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, showed that his viewers were getting accurate information.
“Go to my web site, and you’ll see irrefutable evidence that I have taken this seriously way before most in the media did. I warned in January that it was dangerous because it was highly contagious, but some people were asymptomatic, so it would spread quickly,” he said, though he also argued months later that the flu was “much more dangerous” than the new coronavirus and compared the associated death rate to the murder rate in Chicago.
Hannity’s comments came in response to a letter from 74 journalism professors to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and CEO Lachlan Murdoch calling on the network to stop spreading “misinformation” about the virus.
“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers — and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” the letter said. “. . . Inexcusably, Fox News has violated elementary canons of journalism. In so doing, it has contributed to the spread of a grave pandemic. Urgently, therefore, in the name of both good journalism and public health, we call upon you to help protect the lives of all Americans — including your elderly viewers — by ensuring that the information you deliver is based on scientific facts.”
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Democratic leaders don’t typically borrow from the playbook of GOP politics, but in light of last weekend’s “engineered protests,” I think they should make an exception.
The Postreported Sunday far-right militias, led by three brothers, have used Facebook to organize “anti-quarantine protests” at state capitols around the country. Tens of thousands have joined their Facebook group, giving the impression that a “populist libertarianism” sentiment is emerging more than opinion surveys would suggest.
This activity is being amplified by the president, who appeared last week on Twitter to encourage armed resistance to state-based initiatives aimed at containing the novel coronavirus pandemic with orders to stay home. The “protests” were in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and others swing states Donald Trump needs to win reelection.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
Meanwhile, the Pew Center, which is the gold standard for measuring public opinion, released a new survey in which 66 percent of Americans fear their state governments will lift restrictions “too quickly.” Sixty-five percent said “Trump’s initial response” to the COVID-19 pandemic was “too slow.” Moreover, 73 percent said the worst is yet to come. (Implicit is the widespread doubt of Washington’s ability to face the challenge.)
Someone here represents America’s majority view, and it’s not the people ginning up outrage on social media and make-believing revolution for the benefit of television cameras on the steps of state capitol buildings. Indeed, the majority view isn’t getting the attention it deserves, because the majority is doing what it believes must be done in times of severe crisis: working together, as a nation, to combat a collective peril.
The majority view, in other words, is silent. That’s why I think Democratic leaders should invoke Richard Nixon. In 1969, he coined the term “silent majority” to claim a mandate from “middle Americans” who did not demonstrate in huge numbers against his prosecution of the Vietnam War but instead supported his wartime policies.
To be sure, “silent majority” is what fascists have said for decades when they need to contravene a rapidly changing view on, say, an overseas war going south. “Silent majority” is what a literal minority invokes to smash a literal majority in the face. Even so, Nixon’s words should resonate right now when 41,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19. “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society,” Nixon said. Individuals can’t be truly free. In the collective, however, can be found the meaning of freedom.
In this sense, the protesters have it backwards. They believe (or pretend to believe; more on that in a moment) that government coercion is the opposite of individual freedom. Stay-at-home orders infringe their liberty. If they want to risk getting sick—or dying—that’s their right. No government has the authority to tell them otherwise.
This thinking ignores the fact that one person’s right to liberty ends with another person’s right to security, and that all governments are charged with balancing all of those rights for everyone’s sake. (Whether a government is striking the right balance is usually reflected by the majority view.) For this reason, coercion is not the opposite of freedom during a pandemic. Coercion, at least for now, is in the service of freedom. Only when everyone is acting in everyone else’s interest can this crisis be overcome.
They say they stand for individual liberty. What they really stand for is disloyalty, disunion and death.
But let’s not give these people too much credit, shall we? As the Post reported, “protest” organizers were not acting in good faith. They were pretending to believe what they say they believe. Organizers knew unwitting participants (some of whom no doubt were acting in good faith) would get sick, or die, before spreading the disease. Death, even their own, is an acceptable consequence of meeting their political goals.
These “protest” organizers call themselves “patriots.” Fair enough. Equally fair, however, is calling them insurgents, or even domestic terrorists, willing to commit suicide by way of infecting themselves and others to destabilize public trust as well as the political union of these United States. They say they stand for liberty. They really stand for disloyalty, disunion and death. Americans invoking patriotism but disobeying stay-at-home orders do so with the moral justification of a suicide bomber.
If “protesters” risked harm to themselves only, it might be appropriate to characterize them as a kind of “death cult.” (It might be funny, in a grim way, to joke about “culling the herd.”) But these people do not only put themselves as risk. The World Health Organization warned today the pandemic has yet to peak. “Protesters,” therefore, threaten us all. As Nixon said: “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.”
You are the real “silent majority.”
Don’t forget it.
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During a sermon at Louisiana’s Life Tabernacle Church this Sunday, Pastor Tony Spell screamed into this microphone calling on his parishioners to “repent,” then climbed up onto the church pulpit and spun around in circles.
“Everyone of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, [indiscernible] the remission of your sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost!” Spell declared while standing atop the pulpit. A video of the sermon was posted to the Facebook page for Central City News.
Spell has made headlines for refusing to shutter his Baton Rouge-based Life Tabernacle Church in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, saying that he believes truly devoted Christians won’t mind dying from COVID-19.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel last week, Spell launched the #PastorSpellStimulusChallenge, where he called on Christians to donate their coronavirus relief checks to various church initiatives.
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A number of American religious leaders have endangered their flock by holding services – and by claiming the virus can be defeated by faith in God
Rodney Howard-Browne repeatedly refused to call off services despite orders on social distancing. On Monday, he was arrested. Photograph: Rodney Howard-Browne/Facebook
Last Sunday in Tampa, Florida, the Pentecostal pastor and conspiracy theorist Rodney Howard-Browne conducted two services for full houses at his River church.
The closely packed audience spent hours together taking in hymns and Howard-Browne’s extended sermon, even as the state implemented quarantine for New Yorkers, and projections estimated that Florida’s coronavirus death toll would rise into the thousands.
But Howard-Browne is just one of the most prominent religious leaders on the Christian right who are endangering their flocks and the rest of America by claiming the virus is a hoax, or that it can only be defeated by supernatural means, rather than solid healthcare policy.
In the same sermon, he claimed the public health response to the virus was part of a plot involving the Rockefeller Foundation and World Health Organization, whose goals were forced vaccinations and mass murder.
Howard-Browne has repeatedly refused to call off services in the interests of social distancing. In fact, in recent weeks he has insisted that his congregants embrace and shake hands, exhorting them that they were “revivalists, not pansies”.
On Monday, he was finally arrested for violating Florida’s rules on social distancing.
There are other American religious leaders and preachers who are in equally deep denial about the potentially deadly virus which will almost certainly infect a significant proportion of evangelicals, along with all other Americans.
Roy Moore, a pastor, former Alabama supreme court judge and failed Trump-backed Alabama Senate candidate who lost amid allegations of sexual misconduct with underage girls, told Facebook followers he would write a letter to his fellow pastors on what he called their “duty to continue church assemblies, even in the midst of these trying times”.
Moore added: “Our faith requires it, our duty demands it, and no law or government can prohibit it.”
Kenneth Copeland, a Texas-based “prosperity gospel” preacher who once defended his ownership of three private jets on the grounds that commercial flights would require him to “get in a long tube with a bunch of demons”, told viewers of his Victory Channel in early March that coronavirus was a “weak” strain of the flu, and that fearing the pandemic was a sin.
“Fear is a spiritual force. Fear is not OK. It is sin. It is a magnet for sickness and disease … You are giving the devil a pathway to your body,” Copeland said.
He also criticized pastors who had suspended in-person services and moved to online streaming.
Self-described prophet Lance Walnau wrote in a blogpost that “this virus will touch just a fraction of the population”, adding that it was less dangerous than seasonal flu.
He turned to conspiracy theory for an explanation of the public health response and associated media coverage. “The left wants the economy distressed because crisis improves their chances of taking office,” Walnau wrote.
He then counseled readers to ignore the information being published by media outlets.
“There is a spirit on media that will exaggerate this virus so badly that you will need to insulate your head in order to keep yourself free from paranoia,” Walnau wrote.
In the rightwing Catholic-aligned religious journal First Things, meanwhile, editor RR Reno castigated the widespread closure of Catholic churches and the suspension of public masses in Rome.
Reno wrote: “It is imperative that Christian leaders not succumb to the contagious panic, which is a weapon of the enemy to enslave us to our fears.”
From Montana, Chuck Baldwin – a pastor, former politician and purveyor of conspiracy theories about “Zionist influence” in the media – left the question of whether the virus was a hoax open in an online sermon.
But he added: “If it’s not a hoax, the virus is being used as a completely exaggerated, super-hyped, super-inflated psychological ops campaign against the American people – a coordinated full-court press of intimidation and fear-mongering by government, the mass media and the CDC.”
That message was dutifully amplified by the Idaho state representative Heather Scott on her Facebook page.
Others on the Christian right acknowledge the reality of the virus, but proffer supernatural causes or remedies.
In a blogpost last week, Ralph Drollinger, who has led Bible study for Trump cabinet members, suggested the virus was an instrument of divine judgment, and appeared to blame LGBTQ people. Drollinger later claimed that this was a misinterpretation.
Many of these preachers believe Christians shouldn’t be controlled by a ‘spirit of fear’ André Gagne
Another would-be prophet, Jeremiah Johnson, claimed last week to have had a prophetic dream in which God had spoken to him.
In a baseball stadium where Trump, at bat, outwitted a demonic pitcher, Johnson said God had told him: “The enemy has intended to strike out Donald Trump at a very critical hour in history. But behold, supernatural help is on the way, for I will slow down the advancement of the enemy and allow him to knock this out of the park.”
André Gagne, an associate professor of theological studies at Concordia University, and a researcher of the Christian right, recently published on the phenomenon of coronavirus denialism among evangelicals. Asked why evangelical leaders are committed to taking such a risk in denying the reality of the infection, or even assisting its spread, Gagne said it was rooted in their theology.
“Many of these preachers believe Christians shouldn’t be controlled by a ‘spirit of fear’,” Gagne said. “They often quote biblical texts which promise God’s healing and protection to those who have faith. They are confident that God is in control; that this is part of his overall plan before a great end-times spiritual revival.”
He said: “There are those who also understand this in terms of ‘spiritual warfare’, and that Jesus gave Christians authority over every demon and sickness. And if a Christian dies, no worries: he or she will ‘be with the Lord’.”
Meanwhile, even where they disagree about the virus, religious leaders have found common ground on one subject: the importance of fundraising.
While Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain has now recommended social distancing to her audience, she and Kenneth Copeland both encouraged their listeners to keep the donations rolling into their churches.
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A retired Harvard psychiatry professor described President Donald Trump as “essentially a predator” and a “successful sociopath.”
Lance M. Dodes, MD, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is yet another mental health expert to call into question the president’s state of mind
“His focus on his personal benefit at any cost is why he’s a successful sociopath,” Dodes told Salon, adding that he can “see Donald for who he really is.”
“It’s very hard to get this across to the public, because every time people talk about him, they start out with the unspoken unconscious assumption that he’s basically like the rest of us,” Dodes told Salon.
“But in order to explain and predict Trump’s behavior, you have to begin with awareness that he is essentially a predator.
“Once you keep in mind that Trump lacks a conscience and lacks empathy, he becomes very easy to follow. Unlike normal people, who are complex, he’s basically running on a very simple and very disordered program.”Related Stories
Last week, John M. Talmadge, MD, a physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s “mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms.”
“Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms,” Talmadge, who was commenting in a personal capacity, wrote.
“He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications.
“This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.”
It followed a tweet by Trump in which the president claimed he would “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)” if Turkey did anything that “I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.”
“Am I the only psychologist who finds this claim and this threat truly alarming? Wouldn’t these normally trigger a mental health hold? Right and Left must set aside politics and agree that there is a serious problem here,” Gilbert wrote on Twitter.
Lee wrote in a piece for The Conversation that Trump displayed “psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness.”
In a recent article for The Atlantic, George Conway, an attorney and former Republican who is married to senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, detailed at length the evidence that Trump is mentally unfit to hold his office.
“Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires,” Conway wrote.
“The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust… Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.”Related Stories
As the impeachment process against Trump rolled on, a letter to Congress signed by 250 medical professionals led by Bandy Lee warned lawmakers to take into consideration the president’s mental state.
The letter stated that Trump “has the pattern of fragile sense of self and is prone to blame and attack others when threatened” and has “shown himself willing to encourage violence against his perceived enemies.”
“The unfolding of an impeachment inquiry raises the specter of President Trump feeling threatened in ways he never has before,” the letter said.
“This sense of threat is likely to lead to an exacerbation of his attacks on perceived enemies and to increased encouragement of violence against them. This encouragement may lead to violent actions by others, such as we have seen over the last couple of years but highly exacerbated.”
US President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition at the McCormick Place Convention Center October 28, 2019, in Chicago, Illinois. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
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Renowned conservationist and activist Dr Jane Goodall is hoping the coronavirus pandemic will be a wake-up call, warning the crisis is a result of human disregard for nature and animals
Dr Jane Goodall, marking 60 years of field research and discovering that chimpanzees make and use tools, says animal habitat loss and intensive farming are part of the viruses jumping species
She says as forests disappear, animals come in closer contact with each other and humans
Dr Goodall equates the human disregard for nature as also the root cause of climate change
Dr Goodall said we should have known a pandemic-like coronavirus was coming because other viruses, such as SARS and HIV, also jumped the species barrier from animals.
But Dr Goodall said the loss of animal habitats and intensive farming are part of the problem, making it easier for viruses to spread from one animal to another and then to humans.
“We have to learn to think differently about how we interact with the natural world,” she said.
“And one of the problems is that as more and more forests have disappeared, so animals themselves have come in closer contact with each other.
Various species of bats are reservoirs for viral diseases such as coronaviruses and Hendra. iStockphoto: CraigRJD
“Most of these viruses that jumped to us have come through an intermediary. So there’s a reservoir host like a bat and in [the case of COVID-19] it’s thought to have jumped into a pangolin and then into us.”
Not just wet markets
Dr Andrew Peters, an associate professor in wildlife health and pathology at Charles Sturt University, backs Dr Goodall’s assertions that human interference with animal habitats is a concern when it comes to diseases.
“There’s going to be intense focus on the wet markets in China as a focus for human spill-over of viruses from wildlife, and that’s rightfully so,”
“But the thing we mustn’t lose sight of is there are a whole lot of other things we do in the natural environment that can lead to these kinds of spill-overs occurring.
“In Australia we’ve seen a number of emerging infectious diseases, including Hendra virus, which is obviously a very well known and deadly virus that infects horses and humans from bats.
“The causes of that are thought to be deforestation on the coastal plain of Australia and the pressure that puts on bat populations as they move down to the coast in winter.”
Dr Peters said humans need to reconsider their relationship with the natural world, and the impact we’re having on animals.
“The majority of human new emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife,” he said.
This is the first known instance of a tiger contracting the new coronavirus.
“We at the Jane Goodall Institute are taking very, very drastic measures to try and protect the chimpanzees in our two sanctuaries in Africa and the wild chimps which is, of course, much harder,” she said.
‘Treating climate change like a pandemic’
Dr Goodall said it is the same disregard shown by humans towards nature that is also the root cause of climate change.
“The way we have treated the planet with our reckless burning of fossil fuel and coal mines — you know all about that in Australia, and how it is heating up the planet,” Dr Goodall said.
“You have certainly suffered from the terrible fires and that’s because the planet is getting hotter and drier, the droughts are getting longer, and it’s all we have done to the natural world.”
She said the global community should have been treating climate change long ago as if it was a pandemic “because it’s actually far more devastating in terms of loss of life and people being driven from countries simply because the habitat is so inhospitable”.
“So why haven’t we been? Why haven’t we been treating climate change as the disaster it is?” Dr Goodall said.
“You only have to look around at some of the political leaders in different countries to understand why. Because people don’t want to think about making the changes necessary because it would impact their success in business.”
But Dr Goodall said there is reason to hope with the way leaders and communities are working together to fight coronavirus — evidence of what humanity is capable of.
“Maybe it has taken something like this COVID-19 to wake us up and realise you can’t eat money,” she said.
“If we go on destroying nature in this way, go on disrespecting the other beings whom we share this planet, it’s a downward trajectory.
“So hopefully this [coronavirus response], which is affecting the whole world, will give us the jolt we seem to need to start behaving and thinking in a different way”.
A new documentary Jane Goodall: The Hope, based on Dr Goodall’s long career, will be released April 22 by National Geographic to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
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The president’s firing of the intelligence watchdog who validated the Ukraine whistle-blower complaint is his latest threat to the rule of law.
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By Noah Bookbinder
Mr. Bookbinder is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, on Capitol Hill last fall.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
When President Trump announced late on Friday that he would fire the government watchdog who told Congress about the Ukraine whistle-blower complaint, which ultimately led to his impeachment, it touched off one of the most acute threats yet to our democracy. But it didn’t even make the front page of most papers.
That’s understandable. Thousands of Americans are dying every day from the terrifying coronavirus pandemic. People are worried about their own safety and that of their families, as well as about their jobs and livelihood. Questions abound about how the crisis got to this point, whether the Trump administration took appropriate steps to address it and what steps are needed to minimize the devastation going forward; there is little bandwidth for anything else.
But we can’t afford to ignore the anti-democratic steps the president is taking while the American people are appropriately preoccupied with this outbreak. If we don’t respond to these outrageous abuses now, the damage may be done by the time anyone is the wiser.
The worst of the president’s latest round of steps to undermine checks and balances came not just in this time of crisis, but on a Friday night, the classic black hole for sweeping problematic actions in Washington under the rug.
First, the president announced that he would be firing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. Mr. Trump said in a required letter to Congress that he no longer had “the fullest confidence” in Atkinson; there was not even an effort to disguise the fact that what caused the president to lose that confidence was Atkinson following the law and allowing the truth to come out about Mr. Trump’s lawless attempt to pressure a foreign power to announce politically helpful investigations. Mr. Atkinson will be fired 30 days after the letter went to Congress, the soonest he can be under law, but the president undercut even that law by putting Mr. Atkinson on immediate administrative leave.
Michael Horowitz, the respected inspector general of the Department of Justice and chairman of a council that coordinates inspectors general, went out on a limb to vouch for Mr. Atkinson, praising his integrity and his handling of the Ukraine whistle-blower complaint. Mr. Horowitz is right, and his affirmation that the inspector general community “will continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight” is heartening.
But President Trump’s further action makes that claim questionable at best. The president compounded the Atkinson announcement on Friday night with his intention to nominate White House lawyer Brian Miller to be special inspector general for pandemic recovery, a key position for oversight of the just-passed $2 trillion coronavirus relief package, which is ripe for fraud and corruption without aggressive review. The position demands ironclad independence, particularly with the risk that the president’s company, relatives, customers and donors could seek to benefit from the stimulus package. Mr. Miller, who served for nearly 10 years as inspector general at the General Services Administration, but more recently played a role in the White House’s response to the impeachment inquiry, is precisely the wrong person to ensure independence. A former senior Senate staff member praised Miller’s “loyalty to the administration” in explaining why he’ll make a good choice, even though loyalty is the exact opposite of what is needed.
The one-two punch of Mr. Atkinson and Mr. Miller is, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg of the president’s dangerous attacks on the independence of inspectors general. Mr. Trump will likely fire additional inspectors general because he and his allies view them as “deep state” operatives who undermine him. Indeed, the president seems to view any independence within the government and certainly any checks on him as intolerable disloyalty; that notion, of course, runs counter to our entire system of checks and balances.
Friday night’s actions came at the end of a week of scary departures from democratic practices. Reporting indicates that more and more power has gone to the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, whose coronavirus “shadow task force” of government allies and private sector connections may run afoul of federal law. Mr. Kushner is meanwhile also reportedly playing a significant role in the Trump re-election campaign from the White House, which may also violate federal law. Nepotism and disregard for the law have characterized this administration from day one, but the volume and brazenness of these anti-democratic tendencies is increasing.
Indeed, earlier Friday, the government changed its description on a federal website of the strategic national stockpile to correspond to Mr. Kushner’s description of it as being for the benefit of the federal government, not the states. Also last week, the Navy fired a captain who blew the whistle on the scope of a Covid-19 outbreak on his ship, another example of apparent payback for truthtelling, and the president reportedly wants to have his own signature on stimulus checks to Americans, which may also run afoul of law. All of these autocratic steps come on top of the president’s February purges of officials who testified in the impeachment trial and attempts to meddle in the sentencing of friends and allies convicted of crimes.
Here’s why this matters: times of crisis are when democracies are in the gravest danger of crumbling. We are seeing that play out in the world right now. Hungary, which has watched its hard won post-Cold War democratic reforms slipping away for some time, this week saw its Parliament give Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom Mr. Trump has praised, unlimited authority, effectively turning the country into a dictatorship. Dictators around the world are using the pandemic to tighten their control.
We’re not there yet. But the president’s attempts to rid the government of those who would provide appropriate oversight and accountability for abuses and speak truth to power, to put in place loyalists who will look out for him rather than providing independent checks, and to empower relatives and disregard laws sets us on a dangerous trajectory. Firing inspectors general and replacing them with loyalists is a serious threat to our democracy. The American people must register our outrage; Congress must investigate the firings aggressively and rigorously vet nominees. If we ignore the erosion of checks and balances because we are preoccupied with more immediate concerns, we may find that our democracy — when we need the institutions of this country the most — is disappearing. Just ask Hungary.
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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, still hasn’t issued a statewide stay-at-home order, putting the entire state in further jeopardy as COVID-19 destroys lives.
“The power of prayer and faith in God is something that has guided so many of us in good times and bad,” said Gov. Reynolds. “We have all been impacted by COVID-19. Some of us have lost a loved one and others know those who are sick. Whether you are a nurse on the frontlines of fighting the pandemic, a grocery store worker at the register, or the truck driver delivering a shipment, or someone laid off at home, this has been a challenging and stressful time. Let us join together and pray for our neighbors, communities and state.”
WHEREAS, our nation and world are suffering from a pandemic which has profoundly affected the well-being and livelihoods of millions of Americans; and
WHEREAS, this health emergency has created fear and anxiety in the minds of thousands of fellow Iowans during this uncertain time; and
WHEREAS, our nation’s motto is “In God We Trust”, with America being founded upon Biblical Judeo-Christian principles and values; and
WHEREAS, God’s word teaches us to “Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying”; and
WHEREAS, throughout our history Iowans have found peace, strength, and unity through prayer to God in humbly asking for His strength during times of difficulty; and
WHEREAS, prayer provides peace that surpasses all understanding and wisdom in times of crisis and conflict, turning us to God for His comfort and blessed assurance; and
WHEREAS, God’s unconditional love by sending His Son, Jesus, to be Savior of the world is remembered and celebrated by Christians during Holy Week of Easter each year:
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Kim Reynolds, Governor of the State of Iowa, do hereby proclaim Maundy Thursday, April 9, 2020 as a
DAY OF PRAYER
in the State of Iowa and encourage all Iowans to unite in prayer and ask God to comfort and bless all severely impacted; to protect medical care workers, first responders and all who are serving during this crisis; to grant wisdom, courage and strength to our local, state and national leaders; and give us all the hands and hearts to be generous with our time, skills, and resources to serve our neighbors within and alongside the many churches, non-profits, businesses, and other organizations providing relief.
There we go. A proclamation telling Jews, Muslims, and atheists to suck it. All while Reynolds refuses to do the one thing in her power that can actually minimize virus risk: requiring everyone to stay indoors excepts for essential services.
Jerry Falwell, Jr. reopened Liberty University this week despite the obvious risk that posed to students and faculty members. He lied about who defended his decision. And now we’re finding out the consequences of his negligence and recklessness.
According to Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr., the doctor in charge of Liberty’s student health service, “nearly a dozen” students have symptoms of COVID-19. And of the 1,900 students said to have returned to campus, more than 800 have returned home… or to off-campus housing, where they are once again in cramped quarters. All of that is a recipe for disaster considering all the traveling and lack of distance those students must have had. The New York Times reports:
“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Mr. Falwell said in an interview on Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
…
“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”
The man doesn’t give a damn about his students. It’s a wonder any parent would trust him to educate their kids.
This goes far beyond the typical criticism people have of Liberty, that it’s too political, too right-wing, too controlling. This is just criminal now.
Jerry Falwell Jr. is also a notorious homophobic evangelical right winger. Claims allege he may have been secretly involved with his pool boy Giancarlo Granda and Michael Cohen may have helped cover it up.
Christian activist groups have also demanded a criminal probe of Jerry Falwell Jr. The Liberty University president has ‘hijacked the Gospel’ to enrich himself, Faithful America contends.
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US attorney Brian Moran stands next to a poster that was mailed earlier in the year to the home of Chris Ingalls, an investigative reporter with KING-TV in Seattle, during a news conference on 26 February. Photograph: Ted S Warren/AP
Members of Atomwaffen Division charged with federal crimes in recent weeks, including harassing journalists and activists
A sweep of arrests of a neo-Nazi group in the US has dealt a major blow to an organization associated with at least five murders and raised questions as to whether the extreme far-right movement the group is at the center of has been largely undone by pressure from law enforcement, journalists and anti-fascist activists.
Five senior members of Atomwaffen Division (AWD) have been charged with federal crimes in the past weeks, including former leaders and a man who was concurrently a member of the similar neo-Nazi terror group the Base. The recent charges involve members in four states in connection with two separate criminal cases.
In Virginia, a Texas man, John Denton, 26, was charged over an alleged “swatting” conspiracy – a practice involving making false reports about a targets address in the hope police will stage an armed raid on the address.
Denton – reported by ProPublica in 2018 as “involved in nearly every aspect of the organization” as its leader – is known inside Atomwaffen by the alias “Rape”. He allegedly coordinated swatting attacks in 2018 and 2019 on journalists, Old Dominion University, and a historically black church.
Four more members were charged with conspiracy to threaten journalists and people associated with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in Washington state.
One of those arrested, Taylor Parker-Dipeppe, 20, was a former Florida chapter co-leader under the alias “Azazel”. Recent social media materials given to the Guardian by Australian anti-fascist group the White Rose Society show a muscular, bearded young man with fresh neo-Nazi tattoos.
Two more of those charged lived in Washington. Kaleb Cole, 24, alias “Khimaere”, who was the Washington chapter leader, and Cameron Shea, 24, alias “Krokodil”,have long histories in the neo-Nazi movement.
Cole is described in court documents as a former co-leader of the group. He had guns seized last October under Washington’s so-called “red flag” laws. He and another Washington Atomwaffen member and close associate, Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh, 23, were apprehended in November by Texas police, who found several firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and marijuana in their vehicle.
Bruce-Umbaugh was charged with and pleaded guilty to possessing weapons together with a controlled substance.
Cole visited eastern Europe with Bruce-Umbaugh in 2018, and the two made pilgrimages to sites associated with Nazism, posing for photographs with an Atomwaffen flag at the Auschwitz death camp. In 2019, he was detained for 42 days under Canada’s anti-terror laws and banned from the country.
Shea was described in court documents as a “high-level member and primary recruiter” for the group. Information obtained from confidential sources by the Guardian shows he was also a member of the like-minded group the Base for several months in late 2018.
A fourth arrestee, Johnny Garcia, was known in the movement as “Roman”.
According to court documents, the men allegedly cooperated in specifically targeting journalists with lurid violent threats, bearing slogans like “These people have names and addresses”, and “You have been visited by your local Nazis”. The plan was in response to reports on the group in late 2018 in outlets including the Seattle Times.
The men have been charged with conspiracy, stalking, and postal offenses.
Already, six members of Atomwaffen have been convicted since 2018 on charges including firearms offenses, planning terrorist attacks, hate crimes, and murder.
Not all charged members may stand trial. Devon Arthurs, accused of killing two other members of Atomwaffen, remains involuntarily in Florida state hospital. Nicholas Giampa, accused of killing his former girlfriend’s parents, has yet to stand trial. Initially he was unable to stand trial because of the effects of a self-inflicted gunshot wound
Atomwaffen was the first of a number of Neo-Nazi groups which emerged from 2015 and later that embraced a so-called “accelerationist” ideology, which preaches that western society is corrupt and violent acts sowing chaos will speed up its downfall and allow a white supremacist state to be built in its place.
They drew increasingly on the writings of the American neo-Nazi James Mason. Mason prescribed violent terrorism and a leaderless cellular structure, and praised the convicted murderer Charles Manson.
Mason became an advisor to Atomwaffen, and has appeared in propaganda videos made by the group
Mason became an advisor to Atomwaffen, and has appeared in propaganda videos made by the group.
Accelerationist groups also embraced a distinctive aesthetic which took in half-balaclava skull masks, bold and gruesome graphic design, and slickly edited propaganda videos, frequently depicting armed training camps.
All of those groups have now been subjected to significant legal consequences after their activities, their internal communications, and their identities were repeatedly exposed by antifascist researchers and investigative journalists.
The FBI appeared to be accelerating its efforts to crack down on the groups even before director Christopher Wray defined white supremacist extremists as a “national threat priority” which was “on the same footing” as Isis in early February. There have been at least 13 arrests of members of such groups since last October.
The better part of Atomwaffen’s leadership structure is now awaiting trial. Eight members of the Base have been arrested, and the identity of their leader exposed. Smaller groups, like Feuerkrieg Division, have now publicly called a halt to recruiting.
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An ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Bnei Brak, which Israel has now declared a restricted zone. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters
It wasn’t a typical police operation. Two Israeli officers were to go undercover, although not posing as drug dealers or arms traffickers. For this particular assignment, they were to disguise themselves as ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Their mission on Friday was to bust an illegal gathering in a synagogue. People were praying together, a practice that is now against the law in the era of the coronavirus. Once the officers got inside to confirm the crowd, more units barged in and dispersed people.
Forces left the area, according to police, but: “An hour later, it was reported that people had returned again.” At that point, officers handed out fines amounting to nearly £4,000.
The operation in the county’s north was one small part of a sometimes fruitless nationwide effort to impose Covid-19 restrictions on a deeply religious and often cut-off community that has been slow, or even opposed, to change their way of life.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israeli soldiers deliver food to residents in Bnei Brak. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters
Officials fear the result has been an explosion of cases in neighbourhoods populated with the minority, which makes up more than 12% of Israel’s nine million citizens.
In the most extreme case, an entire city, Bnei Brak, has been surrounded with barricades. Israel’s cabinet declared the city a “restricted zone” last week, sending in 1,000 police officers who blocked residents from leaving except under special circumstances. The army has also be deployed to deliver food to the elderly.
One medical expert estimated up to 38% of Bnei Brak’s roughly 200,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox inhabitants could be infected, significantly higher than the national average.
Many Israeli ultra-Orthodox live in poor, often congested areas with large families where infections can spread rapidly. Some religious leaders have refused to order their people to stay inside long after the rest of the country was locking down.
When a population are told the Torah will protect them there is no motivation to comply with orders Jessica Apple, Haaretz
Chaim Kanievsky, an influential rabbi, had initially refused to close packed synagogues and religious seminaries, where hundreds of boys and men gather daily. “The Torah protects and saves,” the 92-year-old said. Only in late March did the rabbi relent, calling for lone prayer.
There have also been several anecdotal reports that ultra-Orthodox communities in other countries, including the UK, are suffering an above-average infection rate.
In Israel, the outbreaks have deepened entrenched grievances between secular and religious populations that have festered since the state’s founding.
Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, known in Hebrew as Haredim, or “God-fearers”, occupy a unique role, with laws allowing them to avoid military draft and live off stipends while they study religion, leading to secular resentment.
Jewish leaders fear ultra-Orthodox Jews have missed isolation message
Many abhor Israel’s interference in their traditions. Some are vehemently anti-Zionist, rejecting the country whose Jewish majority is mostly secular, which has frustrated government coronavirus efforts when public trust and obedience are vital.
Attempts by police to enforce quarantine restrictions in religious neighbourhoods of Jerusalem have led to sometimes violent standoffs. Paramedics have been hit with rocks.
“When a population that regards its religious leaders as infallible are told that the Torah will protect them and that the secular law enforcement agencies are Nazis and anti-Semites, there is no motivation to comply with orders,” wrote Jessica Apple in the progressive local Haaretz newspaper; her article also called for ultra-Orthodox jews to wear face masks.
Now the cabinet is discussing using the Bnei Brak lockdown as a model for other outbreaks, and local media have cited an unnamed health official as saying more ultra-Orthodox areas could also be sealed off.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish burial society workers with a coronavirus victim outside the Shamgar funeral house in Jerusalem. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemite who used to take part in anti-government demonstrations, said some rabbis took a “long time to internalise the severity of the situation … and they truly believe that studying Torah is more important than anything else.”
However, he said the government was also slow to communicate with more radical parts of the community, many of whom have no internet, television, radio, smartphones or even newspapers and usually get news from posters stuck to noticeboards.
Meshi-Zahav, who runs a volunteer emergency medicine group that has been helping coordinate the Covid-19 response, has written posters on the rules. Still, he added: “It is not our job, it should be the Ministry of Health’s responsibility.”
He said he was concerned about growing anger. “In normal times, there are discussions on this, but now the seculars are saying, ‘you are infecting us’. This is terrible, there is a lot of antisemitism around the world, and now the seculars are doing this?”
“There are things they say that are correct, but to accuse a whole community? To generalise? Some people are using the situation to attack the Haredim.”
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man kisses the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City Marko Djurica/ File Photo
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A supporter of President Trump waves a flag in Los Angeles. Photograph: Marcio José Sánchez/AP
On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president’s public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media.
In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.”
Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans: all are exposed. Yet Trump appears incapable of emoting anything that comes close to heart-felt concern. Or just providing straight answers.
Rather, he is acting like Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America: repeatedly letting governors know the burden of shoring up their sick, their doctors and their people falls on their shoulders first. The national government? It’s the world’s greatest backstop.
Remember when the Republican party freaked out about Barack Obama and the US “leading from behind” abroad? Remember the howls that evoked from GOP leaders? Those days are gone. Welcome to what Martin O’Malley, a Democratic former governor of Maryland, calls the “Darwinian approach to federalism”.
There is nothing like populism marinated in wholesale contempt for the populace
Trump is telling NFL owners he wants the season to start on time. He is disregarding Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice on wearing facemasks in public. And he is touting untested coronavirus cures live on national TV.
Think Trump University on steroids, only this time we all stand to be the victims.
When Dr Anthony Fauci says there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims surrounding hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, pay attention. The fact Jared Kushner is on the case is hardly reassuring. He’s the guy who thought firing James Comey was win-win politics and promised Middle East peace in our time.
While all this is going on, the Wisconsin Republican party is giving America a taste of the campaign to come in the fall. Right now, the Badger State GOP is fighting in the US supreme court efforts to extend mail-in voting for this Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
In other words, voters will be forced to choose between foregoing their rights and risking their lives. Democracy shouldn’t work that way.
Back in the day, Republicans looked upon absentee voting as a valuable adjunct, a key piece in the party’s election day arsenal. Not anymore. Instead it is a dreaded foe, a fact readily admitted by Trump on Fox & Friends this week. If the US were to adopt mail-in voting, said the president, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.
For good measure, Trump later declared from the White House: “I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting.”
For the record, Trump voted by mail in 2018. In March, the Palm Beach Post reported that he had requested a mail-in vote for the Florida Republican primary.
There is nothing like populism marinated in wholesale contempt for the populace. In case Trump and the Republicans forgot, “We the People” are the constitution’s first three words.
If you can leave your soldiers to suffer then no American is truly safe
Sadly, once again we are reminded that Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s masterpiece, Gladiator, is the movie for this presidency and its tumultuous times. In one scene, a senator, Gracchus, attempts to confront Commodus, the emperor, about a plague spreading through Rome. The emperor declines, threatens the senator and muses about disbanding the Senate.
On Thursday, Trump forced the removal of Captain Brett Crozier from his command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, for having the temerity to plead his sailors’ case as more than 100 of them tested positive for coronavirus.
Hours after dismissing Crozier, Trump sacked Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, for simply doing his job. Trump’s Ukraine call was never perfect, however many times he says it was.
Whether Trump wins reelection is an open question. For now, the economy is cratering and the coronavirus death toll has exploded. Not a promising combination. Herbert Hoover faced a depression, not a plague. Trump may contend with both.
According to Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and the man who sent Charlie Kushner, Jared’s father, to prison, November will be a referendum on Trump. Joe Biden is nearly irrelevant.
For the moment, Trump holds a commanding lead among Republicans. Seven months from now, we will learn if party loyalty is enough to secure a second term.
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Messiah Will Come by Passover, Says Israel Health Minister
“I am sure Messiah will come by Passover and save us the same way God saved us during the Exodus”
Via Israel Today Staff
Flash90
Israel Health Ministry Yaakov Litzman has been criticized for what many call his unprofessional handling of the coronavirus crisis. But in a recent interview, he suggested that while he takes the situation seriously, he’s waiting on a more divine brand of deliverance.
One of the early sticking points in the current unity coalition negotiations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and rival Benny Gantz was the latter’s insistence that someone other than Litzman serve as Minister of Health in the next government.
Litzman insisted that his United Torah Judaism faction and its seven seats would remain in the coalition only if he retaied his current post, and Gantz on Sunday reportedly acquiesced.
That sorely disappointed health care professionals in Israel. Earlier in the day, Channel 12 News reported that the heads of hospital departments across the country had petitioned Netanyahu to install a Minister of Health with an actual medical background.
Earlier this month, Litzman was asked in an interview with Chamal News if the current restrictions on the Israeli population will last until after the Passover holiday, set to begin the evening of April 8, next Wednesday.
Israel’s Minister of Health responded:
“God forbid! We are praying and hoping that Messiah will arrive before Passover as it is a time of our redemption. I am sure that the Messiah will come by Passover and save us the same way God saved us during the Exodus and we were freed. The Moshiach will come and save us all.”
[Yaakov Litzman is also the depraved the pervert that perverted the course of justice and pressured employees in his department to prevent extradition of sex abuser Malka Leifer to face 74 counts of child sex abuse in Australia. Police recommended that Litzman be indicted for bribery, fraud, witness tampering and breach of trust.]
What role is religion playing in the spread of COVID-19?
According to officials in Sacramento County, California, roughly a third of all coronavirus cases are tied to a religious organization — a church holding services even when social distancing guidelines are in effect.
Speaking Wednesday morning, Beilenson said more than 100 of the county’s 314 cases of coronavirus infections are connected to church groups.
That includes 24 infections spread among one church whose congregants have continued to hold in-person fellowship meetings during the growing pandemic. Beilenson declined to name the church.
Oh, name the church. Please name it. People need to know which place to avoid.
It’s not just California. France has seen the same problem. Their epidemic actually stemmed from one evangelical group in particular, according to their health minister Olivier Véran:
“The tipping point was the evangelical gathering in Mulhouse,” Véran told France’s Journal du Dimanche newspaper. “The epidemic spread across the country from the gathering.”
When the five-day prayer meeting at the evangelical church — known as Christian Open Door — began Feb. 17, France only had 12 confirmed cases of covid-19, with none of those in Alsace, the region where Mulhouse is located.
A Strasbourg-based nurse who was in the audience was identified as the source of an outbreak among fellow nurses in local hospitals, infecting approximately 250 people, according to [head of the Regional Health Agency Christophe] Lannelongue.
While responsible people (including religious ones) take great care, at great personal inconvenience, to avoid or keep our distance from each other, far too many churchgoers wrongly believe that the rules don’t apply to them — or that their faith grants them automatic immunity from the virus. Their negligence is hurting all of us.
It’s not just one megalomaniacal megachurch pastor. You don’t get numbers like these without hundreds of pastors refusing to listen to experts. If government mandates aren’t convincing these churches to close, then other Christians need to be more forceful in their rhetoric. If you attend or know someone who goes to these churches, cut them off. Walk away. Publicly denounce what they’re doing. Keep doing it.
How many people have to suffer or die until these pastors realize they’re leading death cults?
Religious swindlers are killing Americans. The pattern of religious anti-science zealots, spreading COVID-19 is a worldwide phenomenon.
Scientific research suggests that prayer has the power to calm the mind, increase resistance to temptation and make people happier.One thing prayer can’t do, however, is stop the coronavirus. So far, two members of one Sacramento church have died from COVID-19.
Four other members of the church are infected. It’s important to note that these infections took place before Gov. Gavin Newsom and local officials issued stay-in-place orders on March 19. In Sacramento County, 71 members of the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church near Rancho Cordova have tested positive for the coronavirus.
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Jared Kushner in March. He made his debut at the White House coronavirus briefing on Thursday. Credit…Pool photo by Evan Vucci
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.
According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)
Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”
Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.
Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday.
This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.
Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.
His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.
“Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat,” reported The Times. It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co-founded by Kushner’s brother — which Kushner once owned a stake in — tried to build such a site, before the project was “suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.”)
The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed. Politico reported that Kushner, “alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government,” including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency; a senior official described them to The Times as “a ‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government.”
Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”
Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As The Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.
On Thursday, Governor Cuomo said that New York would run out of ventilators in six days. Perhaps Kushner’s projections were incorrect. “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” Cuomo said. “Assume you are on your own in life.” If not in life, certainly in this administration.
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As you can see from the New York Times’examination of travel patterns in the United States, there has been a wide and largely regional disparity across the country in terms of who was quick to self-isolate and who wasn’t. Most of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Upper Midwest, and the West Coast had issued stay-at-home orders by March 27. Other states that were proactive include New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisiana. The urban areas in Texas tried to be proactive even as their state government opposed them. The South, as a whole, did not instruct people to stay at home and the result is that their travel patterns remained normal, or close to normal.
This is going to matter later.
The inconsistencies in policies—and in when they are imposed—may create new problems, even for places that set limits weeks ago.
“Let’s assume that we flatten the curve, that we push transmission down in the Bay Area and we walk away with 1 percent immunity,” said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. “Then, people visit from regions that have not sheltered in place, and we have another run of cases. This is going to happen.”
There’s a tradeoff to self-quarantining. People don’t get infected with COVID-19, so people don’t survive the infection and get immunity. The isolated communities are nearly as vulnerable to a new outbreak as they were before all this began. It’s worth doing anyway for a variety of reasons, including that it limits how many people are flooding our unprepared and undersupplied hospitals, and that it buys time for researchers to find effective treatments and develop a vaccine. Hopefully, getting COVID-19 in the fall or winter will be more survivable than getting it now.
But areas that were slow or still refuse to isolate and limit travel have spiked their own infection rates and spread the virus far and wide. They’ll have a higher level of immunity but that’s not going to be helpful to the rest of the country.
Looking at the charts, there seems to be more going on than just whether or not a given state government asked people to shelter in place. Outside of the South, people seem to have complied with this even in the absence of official guidance. Meanwhile, with the exception of parts of Louisiana and South Florida, the states of the former Confederacy all look the same regardless of what their governors set as policy. Something cultural explains why Southerners didn’t heed the advice they were hearing in the media, and it’s not just support for Trump. He has plenty of support in the prairies states and Mountain West, and they did significantly reduce their travel. The pattern is visible even in a blue state like Virginia and a purple one like North Carolina, both of which have Democratic governors.
Whether religiosity explains it, or a probably related skepticism toward scientific expert advice, or maybe something to do with their car culture, I don’t know. But their slowness to respond to this outbreak has undermined the effectiveness of the efforts of the areas that did respond. And, because of the nature of this disease, we’re all going to be paying for that for the foreseeable future.
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The Age of Blasphemy 
