Apr. 9, 2024 ❧ Strange eclipse theories, an Australian "anti-landlord activist," and a hunger strike for Gaza
Plus the Pope's transphobia, the UAW's southern strategy, and mysterious blue creatures on the beach
FIGHTING BACK
LARRY HEBERT’S HUNGER STRIKE FOR GAZA
On March 31, Larry Hebert—a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force who has served for six years and counting—began a hunger strike on behalf of the starving people of Palestine. Bearing a large sign that reads “ACTIVE DUTY AIRMAN REFUSES TO EAT WHILE GAZA STARVES,” Hebert took up a position outside the White House on Easter Sunday and has stood there, every day from 10 AM to 3 PM, from April 1 through 6. The whole time, he’s done exactly as the sign says, consuming only water and a little juice—no more. On April 8 he moved to the House of Representatives to begin Week Two of his protest, and tells interviewers he’ll carry on as long as he’s physically able:
"I don't have a stop or an end for it right now," Hebert told Military.com in a phone interview. "I'm going to go until my body cannot go any longer or we get the cease-fire and the end of unconditional aid to Israel."
As he tells it, Hebert’s motivations are twofold. First, he’s been working as a technician at a U.S. naval station in Rota, Spain, where he’s seen firsthand the weaponry the Biden administration is currently sending to help the Israeli government massacre Palestinians:
I’m seeing all the cargo that comes through from the States and is coming overseas and going to Israel and they’re just massive, massive missiles that are going to be used on mostly civilians. So there’s a direct role there. We don’t have to send these weapons.
And secondly, Hebert says he was inspired by the example of Aaron Bushnell, his fellow Air Force member who self-immolated as an “extreme act of protest” for Gaza back in February:
“When Aaron Bushnell took his own life at the Israeli Embassy for the people of Gaza, that had a profound impact on me. I felt and resonated exactly with how he was feeling, and so that was really powerful and influential," Hebert said. "But what really infuriated me was the response afterward. Leadership within the military and within our government were just silent. There was utter silence surrounding Aaron Bushnell and what he did.”
For his part, Hebert has made himself hard to ignore. He’s joined Veterans for Peace, one of the most prominent anti-war organizations in the country, and has gone out of his way to be interviewed as much as possible, including by Task and Purpose, Common Dreams, Military.com, Democracy Now, Covert Action Magazine, and New Hampshire’s WMUR. He says that he’s heard only “one or two negative comments” during the entire protest, reflecting a significant growth in public sympathy for Palestinians, and hopes “more people will be more forthcoming about speaking out” among the U.S. military in the future. He also urges people to contact their Representatives and demand a change in the United States’ Palestine policy. If Hebert is willing to go without food for weeks, that seems like the least anyone could do.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, What’s going on with our politicians?)
❧ As a solar eclipse and an earthquake passed through the United States in the last few days, prominent Republicans floated some strange theories.
Generally speaking, human beings were supposed to outgrow “freaking out over eclipses” around the year 1543 or so, but some people in the GOP still haven’t got the message. In the week prior to Monday’s celestial event, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—always known for her unique takes—said that “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come” were evidence that “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent.” Repent for what, exactly? Greene didn’t say, but presumably the answer involves “wokeness.” (Never mind that eclipses are predictable hundreds of years in advance, and the Trump administration also featured a solar eclipse, which Trump stared directly into. Was that also a sign from God for the nation to repent?)
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani showed that he skipped geology class in high school, saying that Friday’s earthquake on the East Coast was a sign “somebody’s sending us a message” in “the communist state of New York.” This is absurd on a few levels, since New York’s two most prominent leaders—Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams—are distinctly conservative Democrats, barely to the left of Giuliani himself when he was Mayor. Blaming natural events on some kind of divine judgment is a bad sign, since it shows that Republican leaders fundamentally don’t understand science and the material world around them. Or at least, they’re pandering to an evangelical base that doesn’t. When influential politicians have the mentality of 5th-century English peasants, we’re all in trouble.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The United Auto Workers are making moves in the South. Last week, more than 5,000 workers at a Mercedes-Benz factory near Tuscaloosa, Alabama filed a formal petition to hold a union election. It’s an historic moment for both the state and the United Auto Workers, their union of choice. The Mercedes-Benz drive comes on the heels of a similar effort at a Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, where more than 30 percent of autoworkers have signed UAW cards. There’s also a third campaign going on in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where more than half the workers at a Volkswagen factory had signed union cards as of February.
Historically, the South has been tough territory for union organizers, thanks to a variety of so-called “right-to-work” laws and other adverse government policies. In Chattanooga, two previous union drives at the Volskwagen plant have failed in 2014 and 2019. But last year’s “stand-up strike” against Detroit’s Big Three automakers seems to have changed all that. In its aftermath, UAW leader Shawn Fain pledged to unionize more auto companies, creating a “Big Five or Big Six” by 2028. Targeting the South is a smart move; as labor historian Hamilton Nolan notes, the region has historically served as “a friendly acid bath that companies can dive into to dissolve any remnants of organized labor that may be clinging to them.”
But if states like Alabama and Tennessee are also unionized, that’ll no longer be possible. Aware of the threat to corporate power, right-wing politicians like Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee have started warning (threatening?) that unionizing would be “a big mistake.” But the elections draw closer every day, with Chattanooga’s scheduled for April 17-19 and Tuscaloosa’s likely to come soon after. A new and different South, where every worker has greater power over their pay and conditions of labor, is on the horizon.
❧ Lawmakers in Missouri are trying to reverse their state’s inhumane ban on food-stamp assistance for people with drug charges on their record. As Helen Webster writes for the Missouri Independent, the state’s rules about food stamps are among the harshest in the country. Put simply, they forbid anyone who’s been convicted of a drug-related felony—whether it’s for possession, distribution, or some other crime—from receiving food stamps, no matter how old the charge is. As Webster puts it, the ban “can be considered a ‘double punishment’ for these individuals who not only serve time for their crimes, but also face persisting barriers after they are released from prison.”
Beyond the obvious cruelty involved, there’s evidence that a better social safety net reduces the likelihood that someone will commit crimes again—which means that banning people from the social safety net makes it more likely. As it stands currently, the Missouri House has voted 125–33 to remove the ban, and state legislators hope they’ll be able to carry off a similar result in the Senate. Speaking to the Independent, state Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman—who’s co-sponsored legislation to remove the ban—says that “I feel very, very strongly that access to food and access to nutrition is not something that should be punitive.” There’s the understatement of the year.
❧ Indiana University’s president, provost, and vice provost will face a vote of no confidence over the school’s censorship of pro-Palestinian speakers, among other grievances. Within a week, 226 faculty members signed a petition accusing President Pamela Whitten and the current IU administration of “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.”
In November, US Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) threatened to pull the school’s funding if they “condone or tolerate” antisemitism. In a letter to the administration, in which he described pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “pro-terrorist protests,” he also made it abundantly clear that by “antisemitism,” he meant things like referring to Israelis as “occupiers” and describing its policies as “apartheid.”
This prompted a crackdown from the administration on pro-Palestinian speakers. In January, Abdulkader Sinno, a tenured political science professor who was the faculty advisor for the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, was suspended for two years over a “conduct violation” after mistakenly marking a PSC event as an academic event when reserving a room. Palestinian artist Samia Halaby also had her art installation at the school’s art museum abruptly canceled over pro-Palestine social media posts.
While much of the fervor to oust Whitten surrounds the university’s crackdown on free speech, petition organizers also point to her refusal to recognize graduate students' rights to form a union and failure to stand against the state government’s defunding of the school’s Kinsey Institute, which did pioneering work that helped to normalize homosexuality. Indiana students could surely use a leader with more of a backbone. But any administrator that takes over will have to contend with a state legislature that is hostile to academic freedom.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ An Australian “anti-landlord” activist is publishing the addresses of vacant properties, urging people to move into them. Jordie van den Berg, who goes by the name “Purplepingers” on TikTok, was previously known for running the website ShitRentals.org, where renters can post bad reviews of rental properties and warn others not to move there. The website called attention to deceptive advertising by landlords and realtors. Now, he’s using his TikTok account to call out the staggering amount of empty, but perfectly usable, housing that property owners sit on. “Are you sick of rich people hoarding empty houses during a housing crisis? ‘Cause I am,” Van den Berg says in one video.
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Housing in Australia is less affordable than it has been in decades. As of 2022, according to the University of New South Wales, more than 640,000 households are either homeless or facing “housing stress,” meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. But according to Australia’s most recent census, there are also more than 900,000 empty homes and 13 million spare bedrooms available across the country. In the absence of policy to ensure that people are adequately housed, Van den Berg urges them to take matters into their own hands: “Fun fact: Squatting in Australia is not necessarily illegal…which is the best kind of legal.” He’s technically right, assuming the landlord never comes along to kick the squatter out or have them arrested for trespassing.
It’s hard to blame anyone facing homelessness for finding shelter somewhere that would otherwise sit empty. The truly irrational thing is that societies treat the right to hold a vacant property with higher regard than the right to have a roof over your head (Americans are apparently not ready to question the absolute sanctity of property ownership: Van den Berg says “So many people threatened to call the FBI and I’m literally not in the country.”) Ultimately, we do need a more systemic approach to this problem than squatting, like taxing vacant housing.
❧ Police in the United Kingdom have arrested nearly 2,500 homeless people under an antiquated “vagrancy” law. The Vagrancy Act—formally known as “An Act for the Punishment of idle and disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds”—was passed in 1824, under the reign of King George IV. It’s a downright medieval-sounding piece of legislation, which allows police to treat “every petty chapman or pedlar wandering abroad” as an “idle and disorderly person” and take them to the “house of correction.”
As Peter Walker writes for the Guardian, the Act was first introduced “to target homeless and wounded veterans of the Napoleonic wars” who resorted to begging in the street. But astonishingly enough, it’s still on the books 200 years later, and police are still using it to criminalize homelessness itself. Thanks to a freedom-of-information request filed by the Liberal Democrat party, we now know that English and Welsh cops have made 2,412 arrests under the Vagrancy Act since 2019, 866 of them in Merseyside alone. Of that number, at least 185 people have been arrested after February 2022, when the Act was technically repealed. Effectively, it remains in force until Parliament can agree on a replacement, which may come soon.
But the new crime bill proposed by the Conservative Party isn’t much better than the Georgian-era law, since it includes provisions allowing police to arrest “nuisance” homeless people for vague, unreasonable offenses like causing “excessive noise” or “smells.” (That’s right: in the British Isles, it may soon be illegal to be stinky.) There’s plenty of vicious anti-homeless sentiment in Parliament too, including former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s repulsive claim that sleeping on the street is a “lifestyle choice.” It’s not enough to simply get rid of the worst anti-homeless laws, although that’s necessary. The United Kingdom’s greatest achievement has been guaranteeing healthcare as a right to all its people through the NHS; now, it needs to do the same with housing. Until then, British society will still have the same ugly, feudal inequalities at its core as it did in 1824.
❧ The Vatican has issued a statement officially opposing transgender rights. In a long, patronizing lecture called Dignitas Infinita, released on April 8th, the Catholic Church reaffirmed its opposition to what it calls “gender theory.” In the text, Pope Francis and his associates blast what they call “attempts[…] to introduce new rights” regarding one’s gender and sexuality, condemning any desire for “personal self-determination” as evidence of a “temptation to make oneself God.” To that end, the Vatican officially opposes any form of sex-change surgery, and insists that “all attempts to obscure reference to the ineliminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.”
The document contains a lot of other repressive nonsense too, like a renewed condemnation of practices like abortion and surrogacy. This is a disappointing move for Francis, who’s shown signs of softening the Church’s worst homophobic and transphobic tendencies recently. Back in November, for instance, the Pope said that transgender people can be baptized and become godparents, and that same-sex couples could receive formal blessings from Catholic priests (although not marry.) But it’s worth remembering that, for all the lofty claims of ineffable wisdom and compassion, the Pope is ultimately a political figure. He has maneuvers to make, and blocs of supporters to appease—including the powerful conservative wing of the Church represented by figures like his predecessor Benedict XVI, and by Cardinal Robert Sarah, who’s long been Francis’ greatest rival and led a vocal opposition to any acceptance of trans rights.
Within that structure, there’s only so much reform that can realistically be made. Meanwhile, Francis has demonstrated that he’s willing to throw the most vulnerable minorities under the bus at a moment’s notice. Apparently, the arrogance involved in dictating to everyone else what their gender can and cannot be hasn’t occurred to him—or if it has, he simply doesn’t care.
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❧ In 2022, the Antarctic experienced a world-record temperature jump of 38.5C (101.3F), recorded at the French and Italian-owned Concordia station. To put that in perspective for Americans: Imagine if, on a December day that you expected to be 35F, you went outside to find it was 135F. Assuming you survived your parka bursting into flames, this would be cause for confusion and alarm.
Needless to say, such wild fluctuations at the poles are not a good sign for the planet’s health. Especially because, according to The Guardian, in the two years since, the continent has been hit with rising numbers of “disturbing meteorological anomalies.” The Antarctic ice sheet has been pouring into the sea over the last decade, and is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the globe (Though it is still not warming as fast as the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe). Observer science editor Robin McKie writes:
A key reason for the Arctic and Antarctic to be taking disproportionate hits from global warming is because the Earth’s oceans – warmed by fossil-fuel burning – are losing their sea ice at their polar extremities. The dark waters that used to lie below the ice are being exposed and solar radiation is no longer reflected back into space. Instead, it is being absorbed by the sea, further heating the oceans there.
“Essentially, it is a vicious circle of warming oceans and melting of sea ice, though the root cause is humanity and its continuing burning of fossil fuels and its production of greenhouse gases,” said [Professor Michael Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey]. “This whole business has to be laid at our door.”
MYSTERIOUS OTHERWORLDLY ORGANISM FACT OF THE WEEK
The beaches of America’s West Coast are being inundated with blue beings!
These strange gelatinous creatures are known as Velella velella. According to The Guardian, they “are actually colonies of creatures from a class called hydrozoa that use the wind to speed along,” earning them the nickname “by-the-wind sailors.”
Over mere months, they travel absurd distances gliding across the ocean’s surface. A typical migration takes them from California to Central America, then all the way across the Pacific to Hawaii and Japan before they return. As they travel, they use their tentacles to sting and eat fish larvae or zooplankton.
The “blue tide” the velella create on American beaches happens every spring, but usually not to this extent—this year millions have been sighted across the coast. According to Julia Parrish, a marine biologist at the University of Washington, their population explodes during years when food is more plentiful.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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