Feb. 23, 2024 ❧ The GOP wants to Make Sex Dangerous Again, California's racial justice bills, and Assange faces extradition
Plus: NYPD and FBI tied to Malcolm X's murder, measles in Florida, Trump's veepstakes begins, a peace deal in Libya, a congressman wants to kill children in Gaza, and big booty sheep
What shape do you consider news to be?
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION CAMPAIGNS ON RETURNING THE “DANGER” TO SEX
One of America’s most influential conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, is campaigning to “return the danger to sex” by outlawing birth control. In a 2023 Twitter post that made the rounds this week, the group proudly posted a video of a Heritage activist saying:
“It seems to me a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and for rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and returning the consequentiality to sex.”
Beneath this, the Heritage account wrote:
“Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
This should make it clear to everyone that the right-wing opposition to Roe v. Wade had less to do with “protecting the unborn” and more to do with the regulation of women’s sexual freedom. After all, if they were truly concerned with preventing “murders” as a result of abortion, they’d presumably endeavor to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making birth control as widely available as possible. But Heritage’s opposition is not to abortion in and of itself, but to the idea that female sexuality lacks “danger” and “consequentiality” because they believe it is inherently sinful and ought to be punished.
To be clear, Heritage is far from a fringe group. They are the group behind Project 2025, the conservative policy manual that Trump plans to adopt as a blueprint should he reassume office, and the group has spent $22 million building a roster of hundreds of staffers for a prospective second Trump administration. We should not take these statements as pie-in-the-sky right-wing wish-casting. For years, people described the overturn of Roe as a white whale that Republicans would never actually catch. Then they overturned Roe.
When they say they want to make birth control illegal, we should take them at their word that they will do that if they have the political power to do it. At least one conservative Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, has said he wants to “reconsider” Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case that protects the right to birth control. If that happens, a Trump administration stuffed with Heritage flunkies could surely pass laws or executive actions that make birth control much harder to obtain.
Perhaps we should take a modicum of solace in the fact that they are branding themselves as the “Sex Should Be Dangerous” Party because it’s hard to imagine that message will resonate with many people. (If abortion hurt them in the 2022 midterms, imagine how radioactive opposing birth control—something with 90 percent approval—will be.) But the fact that mainstream conservatives are willing to say this stuff out loud with an election on the horizon should also tell us that they are dead serious and feel no need to hide it anymore. If Trump is re-elected, these people will be staffing his administration.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Lawmakers in California have introduced a new package of racial justice bills. There are 14 bills in all, intended to address what Assemblymember Mike Gipson calls “the effects of the longstanding institution of slavery” in California communities. Among them, a proposed amendment to the state Constitution would ban involuntary labor in prisons, a practice that has often been criticized as a legalized form of slavery. Another bill would allow Governor Gavin Newsom to make exceptions to California’s 1996 ban on affirmative action in public universities. A third would require Newsom to make a formal public apology to Black Californians for slavery—something he’s previously done about the genocide of Native Americans. All of this would be managed by a new government body called the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, as recommended by a committee on reparations.
Controversially, though, the package does not include cash payments as a form of reparation. The only payments being proposed are the ones introduced by state Senator Steven Bradford, which would compensate the families of people whose land was unjustly taken by eminent domain because of their race. According to the Associated Press, broader cash reparations aren’t currently being considered because of California’s budget deficit, but they may be introduced in future years. However, civil rights lawyer Areva Martin tells Reuters that she suspects the omission also “has to do with racist tropes around Black folks and our inability to handle money.” In any case, the state’s Black Caucus has made an extremely canny strategic move by introducing these measures as 14 separate bills, rather than one overarching one. Even if some aspects of the package don’t pass—and Gavin Newsom’s administration opposed the amendment to ban involuntary prison labor the last time it came up—others may. In a country that’s still riddled with racist practices and institutions, any type of racial reform would be a move in the right direction.
❧ New allegations have come out about the role of law enforcement in Malcolm X's assassination. The basic facts of the murder are well-known: in 1965, Mujahid Abdul Halim (along with multiple unidentified accomplices) shot the civil rights leader in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom, as a result of the increasingly nasty dispute between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. But a lot of people, including Malcolm’s family, don’t believe that’s the full story. In 2021, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam—each of whom had served more than 20 years in prison for the murder—were fully exonerated, Islam posthumously. And last year, Ilyasah Shabazz—Malcolm’s daughter—announced plans to sue the NYPD, FBI, and CIA, alleging that those agencies concealed important evidence relating to her father’s death.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the Shabazz family, has even suggested that U.S. law enforcement was involved in the assassination itself, saying “It’s not just about the triggermen. It’s about those who conspired with the triggermen to do this dastardly deed.” This isn’t a particularly far-fetched or conspiratorial idea. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI did have an agenda to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” civil rights leaders, including both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and FBI agents did assassinate Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton in 1969. (They tried to convince Dr. King to kill himself, too.) In 2021, the family of a former NYPD officer named Raymond Wood revealed a confession, made before Wood’s death, that his department had deliberately arrested members of Malcolm X’s security team to prevent them from protecting him. And now, two men have come forward to confirm that account, casting blame on both the FBI and NYPD. On Wednesday, Ben Crump announced that he’s received testimony from Khaleel Sultarn Sayyed, a former bodyguard for Malcolm X, who claims he was jailed under false pretenses five days before the assassination:
“I believe I was detained in this conspiracy by the NYPD ... and FBI in order to ensure Malcolm X's planned assassination would be successful,” [Sayyed] said.
Crump says he also has an affidavit from a second member of the same security detail, who similarly claims he was falsely arrested. If true, this would be a shocking revelation, showing that members of U.S. law enforcement contributed to the killing of one of the country’s most important thinkers and activists. Shocking—but given the history of violent racism and police brutality in this country, maybe not surprising.
PAST AFFAIRS
“Reflections on Malcolm X” by Nathan J. Robinson and Oren Nimni (August 2019)
Malcolm is a model of how to be sharp and committed in impossible circumstances, how to run rings around your oppressors by calmly demolishing their propaganda. Was he flawed? He’d be the first to say yes. But the short career of Malcolm X still has much to teach us about how to be smart, how to be brave, how to be good, how to be flawed—how to be a person. Very few of us will ever become as alive over a long life as Malcolm X was in such a short one, but we ought to try harder.
❧ Measles is spreading through elementary schools in Florida. But the state’s surgeon general is bucking guidelines to keep unvaccinated children safe, with six children having tested positive in Broward County. Measles is an extraordinarily dangerous and contagious disease. Around 90 percent of people who come into contact with measles will contract it. According to the CDC:
“About 1 in 5 people in the U.S. who get measles will be hospitalized
1 out of every 1,000 people with measles will develop brain swelling, which could lead to brain damage
1 to 3 out of 1,000 people with measles will die, even with the best care”
The CDC recommends that unvaccinated children stay home from school for three weeks when outbreaks are identified. But Surgeon General John Ladapo says the state will allow parents to make their own call about whether to send their unvaccinated children to school, citing the community’s “high immunity rate.” However, Florida’s rate of inoculation against measles is actually still considered too low to meet the generally accepted threshold of “herd immunity.” Measles was declared dead in 2000 after virtually everyone was inoculated against them. But in places where vaccination rates have fallen, it has cropped back up. In 2019, Kiera Butler reported in Mother Jones that:
“The percentage of kindergartners who are fully vaccinated declined from 95 percent in the 2020-2021 school year to 93 percent in 2021-2022—below pre-pandemic levels. Since schools still require routine vaccinations, more families than ever before are asking permission for their school-aged children to skip the shots, as well. Requests for exemptions increased in 41 states, and in 10 states, more than 5 percent of parents made such requests.”
VIDEO: Where does fear of vaccination come from?
One of the original anti-vaccine scare campaigns came from Dr. Andrew Wakefield who convinced the media that the vaccine for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella had a link with Autism. Though his study turned out to be totally fraudulent, his claims about the dangers of vaccines still frighten people to this day. Check out this deep dive from YouTuber Hbomberguy explaining why the persistent claim about the dangers of the measles vaccine is nonsense:
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee was recorded this week saying that he wants all Palestinian children in Gaza to be killed. Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people, the vast majority civilians, including more than 12,300 children. Ogles was confronted by an activist who told him, “I’ve seen footage of shredded children’s bodies. And that’s my taxpayer dollars going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded, “I think we should kill them all, if that makes you feel better. Hamas and the Palestinians have been attacking Israel for 20 years. It’s time to pay the piper.”
Ogles later claimed that he was only speaking about Hamas during the exchange. But that is simply not true. He responded to a question about children being bombed with “kill them all” and said that “the Palestinians” in addition to Hamas needed to “pay the piper.” Ogles made an unmistakable call for the destruction of an entire people, including children.
It’s worth pointing out that Congress has censured Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for saying “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free” — pretending that her call for freedom for a dispossessed, stateless people was “a genocidal call to violence.” Apparently, saying “kill them all” about children is not considered genocidal because Ogles has thus far not been censured. Neither has Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) who said children killed in Gaza are “not innocent,” Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) who said “we’re going to turn [Gaza] into a parking lot,” or Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who said we “are in a religious war here” and that Israel should “level the place” with no regard to the number of civilian dead. Refusal to censure this clearly genocidal rhetoric from pro-Israel congresspeople while censuring Tlaib for saying Palestinians should be free is an unambiguous statement from the US Congress as a whole: They are either indifferent to the genocide of Palestinian people or actively support it.
❧ Donald Trump has revealed some of the names on his “shortlist” of VP candidates. Trump was asked about possible running mates at a town hall in Greenville, South Carolina, where Fox News host Laura Ingraham presented him with a “shortlist” of names that have been rumored for the role. Trump played coy, refusing to single out a specific name—but he did tell Ingraham that “all of those people are good. They’re all solid,” seeming to confirm that he’s at least considering them.
Several former presidential candidates were on the list, including Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tim Scott—whose name Trump seemed to linger on, saying that “A lot of people are talking about that gentleman right over there” as he pointed to Scott onstage. For Trump, of course, either Scott or Ramaswamy would serve as a human shield against accusations of racism, allowing him to use a Presidential edition of the age-old “look, I have a nonwhite friend!” defense.
Notably, Ingraham’s list also included South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, suggesting that Trump may choose a woman to compensate for his blatant sexism instead. Whoever Trump picks, they’ll have an uphill battle trying to defend the ex-President, who seems to lose more lawsuits and criminal cases by the day. And in any case, this “shortlist” is a deliberate slight to Trump’s oldest and most loyal ally: Grimace from McDonald’s.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this week made a last-ditch effort to avoid being extradited to the United States. During a two-day hearing, London’s Royal Court of Justice heard arguments from Assange’s lawyers that extraditing him would be “flagrant denial of justice.” The Court says it will take time to consider a verdict and that the decision will not be announced until next month at the earliest. He has spent twelve years in exile, including five in jail. Under the Trump administration, he was charged with 17 counts under the Espionage Act for obtaining and disclosing classified documents revealing American war crimes against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the horrific treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, and tens of thousands of clandestine diplomatic cables that revealed many horrendous misdeeds by the US State Department. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in jail. The Biden administration continued the prosecution and asked British courts to renew his extradition just two weeks after his inauguration.
The result of this case has extraordinary implications for the rights of journalists to expose brazen abuses of power and the rights of whistleblowers. Rose Kulak of Amnesty International Australia says:
“If Julian Assange is extradited, it will establish a dangerous precedent wherein the US government could target publishers and journalists around the world for extradition and prosecution. There is a very real risk that other countries could take the US example and follow suit.”
PAST AFFAIRS
“The Persecution of Assange” by Nathan J. Robinson (December 2021)
“In news reporting about the Assange case, some of the most important facts often slip out of the discussion. Too much focus on Julian Assange as a person draws attention away from the underlying disclosures that landed him in hot water in the first place. Let us first remember that what we are talking about, when we talk about the conduct that gave rise to Assange’s prosecution, is WikiLeaks’ release of documents that the U.S. government did not want disclosed. These documents contained information vitally useful for the public to assess U.S. conduct in the Middle East, and revealed outright crimes by our government that had not been reported on before…
What Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning did was to make public information that is hugely newsworthy, and that without their actions, criminal wrongdoing by U.S. military forces would have remained unknown or unpublicized. If there is to be any chance of holding the U.S. accountable for its misuses of violent force, facts like these have to be brought to light, and if the government itself is not going to be transparent, the only option is for someone to leak the information…
Assange’s indictment under the Espionage Act poses a serious threat to liberty and sets a dangerous precedent against journalists. Assange may not be a sympathetic individual personally, but many criminal defendants are not. Those who defend Assange’s prosecution can insist Assange is “not a journalist,” but they have no satisfactory answer to the question of how the public is supposed to find out about U.S. atrocities, particularly if those atrocities are classified and anyone who discloses them is punished with a prison sentence. If Assange is successfully prosecuted, it will give the U.S. military greater license to commit horrible abuses, knowing that there is no legal way to expose them, and that anyone who tries will risk spending the rest of their lives in prison.”
❧ The Libyan transitional government has struck an important peace deal with five militia groups. As Adam Durbin reports for the BBC, the groups in question are called “the General Security Force, the Special Deterrence Force, Brigade 444, Brigade 111, and the Stability Support Authority,” and they occupy a strange position in Libyan society. They “receive public funding,” but “are not under the direct control of the Libyan government,” operating as independent military factions within the country—and especially its capital, Tripoli.
As you might imagine, this has caused problems, with the five militias sometimes coming into violent conflict with each other. In August 2023, a particularly intense clash between the Special Deterrence Force and Brigade 444 killed 55 people in Tripoli and injured 146 more. (It’s not clear whether all the casualties were military, or if civilians were also harmed; in general, it’s hard to get reliable information out of Libya these days.) Partly in response to that violence, it appears that the Libyan transitional government is finally starting to get the situation under control. In an announcement on Thursday, Interior Minister Imad Trabelsi said (per the BBC) that “lengthy negotiations” had ended with a deal for the five militias to leave Tripoli altogether, and eventually to withdraw from other cities as well, leaving “no more checkpoints and no more armed groups” to trouble ordinary Libyans.
This is definitely good news, but we should stop and consider just how Libya got into such a mess in the first place. Like with so many war-torn countries around the world, the answer is simple: United States imperialism. Since 2011, there hasn’t really been a functional Libyan government, only the “transitional” one that controls less than a third of the country. That’s because Barack Obama and his NATO allies decided to destroy the last Libyan government with a series of catastrophic airstrikes. Hillary Clinton even gloated about it, famously saying about former President Muammar Gadaffi that “We came, we saw, he died.” And it’s true, Gadaffi was a terrible dictator—but the problem is, he’s not the only one who died. A lot of civilians did too. More than ten years later, they’re still dying, as various warlords and militias fight over the ruins the United States left behind. These are the real-world consequences of U.S. politicians’ arrogance and aggression and a chilling reminder of why military intervention needs to be questioned and criticized whenever it’s proposed.
⚜ LONG READ: For the third time, the US has vetoed a resolution by the United Nations to enforce a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza. Instead, as Michel Moushabeck writes in Truthout, they are “reportedly planning a toothless alternative.”
“According to Al Jazeera, which obtained a copy of the document, the U.S. has drafted an alternative resolution that calls for a “temporary ceasefire in Gaza as soon as practical, based on the formula of all hostages being released.” It also warns Israel against storming Rafah, stating that “a major ground offensive should not proceed, under the current circumstances.” There is no date set for when this U.S. alternative resolution will be up for a Security Council vote.
The key words in this proposed draft — which would do little to relieve the Palestinians of their nightmare — are “temporary ceasefire,” “as soon as practical” and “under current circumstances.” These caveats dilute the proposal so much that it essentially gives Israel the freedom to do whatever it wants, when it wants to.
The U.S. resolution does not call for an immediate or permanent ceasefire. It will not end the 17-year suffocating Israeli-imposed blockade of Gaza; it will not remove the IDF soldiers from the territory; and it will not end the misery and hardship of the Palestinians or get them out of the tents and back into their homes — most of which have been destroyed or flattened by the relentless bombardment. It simply calls for a short respite before Israel resumes its violent aggression on civilians and offensive operations “to eliminate Hamas” as pledged by Netanyahu.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, the death toll of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 has surpassed 29,000 — over 12,345 of them children — and 71,378 wounded. The destruction includes 79,000 houses and 25,010 buildings (banks, markets, bakeries, and other businesses) and 200,000 partially damaged housing units; 30 hospitals, 99 schools and universities, and 334 partially damaged schools; 161 mosques, three churches, 140 government buildings (including the Legislative Council building, the Gaza Municipality building, the public library and theater, the cultural center, and water and electricity stations); and 195 heritage sites, some dating back to 800 BCE.”
SHEEP FACT OF THE WEEK
If you were to be asked to name an animal that stores all the fat in its body in one spot, you’d probably think of a camel, which stores nutrients in the hump atop its back. But other animals that live in arid desert climes do this too to keep the rest of their bodies cool: one of them is the fat-tailed sheep which stores fat somewhere a little different.
These sheep, also called Karakuls, originate from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian deserts and may be the oldest breed of domesticated sheep in the world. In the fifth century BC, the legendary Greek historian Herodotus described sheep in Arabia with tails that dragged across the ground which required shepherds to build little carts for them to carry them. In 1684, Another historian, Ludolf the Elder, depicted this sheep lugging its tail with a wooden cart in his ‘New History of Ethiopia.’
More modern historians have called these accounts into question (a tall tale about a tall tail, you might say) due to a lack of more recent photographic evidence, scholar John Goodridge points to other accounts from Afghanistan as recently as the 20th century to argue in painstaking detail that this tail-trolley tale is true.
But even if the trolley part of the story is untrue, fat-tailed sheep are everywhere, making up one-fourth of the global sheep population. On Twitter, the nature blogger @Kairo_Anatomika, who wrote a thread about fat-tailed sheep, laments the fact that even though fat-tailed sheep are widespread throughout the Middle East, “When you see sheep in religious art, they're never Fat-tail sheep. Instead they're always weak-ass European sheep. Entire wars have been waged over interpretations of the Bible,” they continue. “Does no one care about sheep accuracy? I mean, how could you exclude these guys?”
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.
Current Affairs is an independent left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners. We offer a beautiful bimonthly print and digital magazine, a weekly podcast, and a regular news briefing service. We are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with EIN 83-1675720. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Donations may be made through our website, via wire transfer, or by sending us a check. Email help@currentaffairs.org with any questions.