Jan. 17, 2024 ❧ Iowa Caucus, conservatives vs. MLK, and a horrid new homelessness case
Plus: Cuban doctors saving lives, border enforcement lets children drown, Yemen airstrikes, falconry with RFK Jr. and the venom-recycling blue angel
All of today’s news is about you, specifically, so we recommend reading ahead!
BIG STORY
IOWA CAUCUS GOES EXACTLY HOW YOU’D EXPECT
After months of trudging around state fairs and town halls, awkwardly eating burgers, the 2024 presidential candidates can breathe a sigh of relief: they no longer have to think about Iowa. The state held its Republican caucus on Monday night, despite a record-breaking cold snap that drove temperatures as low as minus 15 Fahrenheit. At a rally on Sunday, Donald Trump urged his supporters to brave the rough weather, joking that “even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it, remember.” (It wouldn’t be a Trump joke without a little streak of cruelty.) Despite this, only around 115,000 people turned out, the lowest number in at least a decade. Always wary of voter fraud, GOP volunteers at some locations collected ballots through the ultra-secure method of passing a paper grocery bag around the room.
Needless to say, Trump won. Trump was always going to win. Even the New York Times knew it, and brought out their infamous “election needle” to monitor the race for second place, since first was already in the bag. As it turns out, Ron DeSantis came away with the silver medal, winning 21.2 percent of the vote to Trump’s 51.0 percent, and netting 9 delegates. Nikki Haley won Johnson County by a single vote, ruining Trump’s chances of a perfect sweep; she got 8 delegates for her trouble. (Trump, for reference, now has 20.) Considering that Haley had the backing of the influential Koch network, and that various groups spent an estimated $37 million on her campaign in Iowa, this wasn’t exactly a resounding success. In fact, it seems like the “moderate” Republicans who were supposed to bolster Haley’s campaign are pretty much an extinct species, at least in the Midwest.
The rational decision here, for everyone not named Donald Trump, would be to simply give up and go home. Chris Christie has already done that, but surprisingly 35 people still voted for him at the Caucus. We can only assume these voters were like the Japanese soldiers who didn’t realize World War II had ended in 1945, and thought the Christie campaign was still ongoing as they marched through the sleet and snow for their New Jersey overlord. After seeing his own results (7.7 percent, 3 delegates), Vivek Ramaswamy also dropped out, but not before addressing the Iowa crowds with a huge light-up karaoke microphone. (He did not, mercifully, rap.) Meanwhile, someone named “Ryan Binkley” got 774 votes. Against all odds, it appears Mr. Binkley is a real person, and not an elaborate prank like 2015’s “Deez Nuts.”
This whole grim spectacle just drives home the point a lot of people have been making for years: that the Iowa caucus is a deeply weird, anti-democratic institution. Coming first in the electoral calendar, it sets the tone for the rest of the year, and gives undue influence to the political views of a fairly small handful of people. Iowa has a population of around 3.2 million, meaning that less than 4 percent of its citizens actually voted in the Caucus this year—something like 0.03 percent of the United States. What’s more, Iowa is one of the whitest states in the nation to begin with, making its front-runner status a question of racial injustice. We should really scrap this whole state-by-state system, mandate a single primary Election Day for all 50 states, and make it a national holiday. Then we might get something that vaguely resembles real democracy and not this long, dragged-out carnival of the monstrous and the absurd.
ELSEWHERE ON THE 2024 CAMPAIGN TRAIL…
Sadly this sweepstakes is no longer open to entries. We hope whoever won it has a good time and does not get picked up and carried away by the falcon. You can still win the chance to accompany RFK on a whale-watching trip!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
CONSERVATIVES ARE FINALLY BEING HONEST ABOUT HATING MLK
This past Monday was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, a day on which we pay tribute to one of America’s most transformative leaders. As Lily Sanchez wrote in a recent Current Affairs article on the history of King’s holiday, the vision of the slain civil rights leader contained a far more encompassing critique of US society than is typically recognized. In addition to his crusades for social equality, voting rights, and the end to segregation, King had a radical vision for society that “connected poverty, inequality, and materialism at home to militarism and injustice abroad, and he kept the focus on the poor and marginalized—both at home and abroad.”
Since his assassination in 1968, King has posthumously been morphed into a sort of apolitical totem, which people of all political persuasions attempt to claim as an ideological fellow traveler. But King actually did have a concrete set of political beliefs: He described his economic agenda as “democratic socialism” and called for a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He spent much of his life campaigning alongside labor unions for better wages and working conditions. He abhorred the Vietnam War and called America “the greatest purveyor of violence today.” He supported welfare programs to lift people out of poverty, a Universal Basic Income, and a federal jobs guarantee.
Despite all of this evidence, every year, you see tributes to King from right-wing politicians, including some who claim that if he were alive today, he’d be a Republican. Many conservative opinion-mongers, including Bill O’Reilly, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Heritage Foundation have attempted to posthumously twist the words of King to suggest that he would be on their side today. For instance, O’Reilly argued that King, an advocate of nonviolent protest, would oppose the Black Lives Matter movement (Given his many statements about police brutality throughout his life, that seems unlikely). This past MLK Day, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that King would support banning critical race theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, while Ron DeSantis invoked King in defense of his bans on “woke” books.
Last year, Brigitte Gabriel—the leader of an anti-Muslim organization called Act for America—tweeted out this laughable AI-generated image of Trump and King embracing one another to celebrate the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action (King was actually a proponent of affirmative action, writing in 1965 that “a society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”).
It’s de rigeur for Republican politicians to issue statements of praise for MLK on his birthday right before going back to gutting the Voting Rights Act and trying to dismantle the welfare programs King supported during his life. This MLK day, though, some conservatives are finally being a bit more honest about what he actually believed and admitting that if he were around today, they’d be fiercely opposed to everything he stood for. Charlie Kirk, the leader of the conservative youth movement Turning Point USA and Students For Trump announced that this year he’d be launching a week-long campaign to discredit King’s legacy. “MLK was awful,” Kirk said in a speech to a group of students. “He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe.” In a tweet on Monday, Kirk pledged to dispel the “myths” about MLK stating “While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century. Once you break the mythical sainthood of someone like MLK, black voters will realize it’s being used against them to suppress the individual, and even more will realize they are on our side.” He was joined by a chorus of other prominent conservatives, including Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh who said “We have to talk about the fact that MLK was a communist…” Jack Posobiec meanwhile derided King as a “god of the Left.”
This is actually quite a bit more honest than the impulse of older conservatives to treat King as one of their own. They acknowledge that King had radical politics (they are just incorrect about whether that was a good thing). Kirk is also correct that most of the country did revile King in his time, with self-described conservatives hating him the most. As a matter of historical discussion, it’s good to see this myth of MLK as a conservative beginning to die off because it is false. But we should worry about what it says about the trajectory of the modern conservative movement. Kirk and his fellow travelers are not just trying to correct the record on King—they have begun to make the case to roll back his legacy. As William Turton writes in Wired:
For Kirk, the shift on King wasn’t an offhand remark, but a glimpse into his broader strategy to discredit the civil rights leader and the landmark legislation most associated with King: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at America Fest. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."...Kirk argues that the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, ushered in a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He illustrated how the law has gone wrong when responding to a question from a student who said they became the subject of a Title IX investigation after posting an Instagram story mocking transgender people. Title IX, which was passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, bans schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex. King was assassinated four years prior, in 1968......“The courts have been really weak on this,” Kirk told the America Fest crowd. “Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it's the actual American Constitution.” The law is ultimately a way to “re-found the county” and “a way to get rid of the First Amendment,” according to Kirk.
Last year, in Current Affairs, Stephen Prager chronicled the rise in conservative sentiments in favor of disenfranchising large sections of the population. Those have only grown in the last year. This seems to be dovetailing with a multi-pronged assault on King’s entire legacy. And while it’s good that King may finally be widely acknowledged for his radical legacy, the fact that conservatives are starting to rail against him should make us worry about what they may be willing to do at the legislative level to roll back his legacy even more than they already have.
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to rule on whether states can ticket homeless people for using pillows and blankets while sleeping on public property without offering them shelter. The case comes after a lower court ruled against a city in Southern Oregon for a law it passed to prevent homeless encampments. Noting that the city handed out dozens of citations a year, sometimes with fines of hundreds of dollars, the Ninth Circuit ruled that to fine them for using such bare supplies to protect themselves from the elements constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated their Eighth Amendment rights. But there’s a good chance the conservative Supreme Court will reverse that finding. As homeless advocacy groups have pointed out, laws like these don’t actually make it easier for the 250,000 Americans who sleep outside on a given night to find shelter but merely make their lives harder by fining them (homeless people, famously, don’t have very much money). It will also probably lead to people dying: according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, around 700 people experiencing homelessness are killed by hypothermia each year—taking away their blankets makes that more likely. As the National Homelessness Law Center said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s announcement:
“Homelessness is growing not because cities lack ways to punish people for being poor, but because a growing number of hard-working Americans are struggling to pay rent and make ends meet. This case does not limit communities’ response to addressing homelessness. Cities remain free to use any of the many evidence-based approaches that end homelessness, like housing.”
❧ In Maine, fishing shacks are being swept away by record-high tides. If anyone still has lingering doubts about the reality of climate change, seeing small buildings literally consumed by the sea should settle the issue. That’s exactly what happened on Saturday, as three historic fishing shacks that have stood for over 100 years near Portland, Maine were washed away in a matter of minutes. The tide reached 14.57 feet that day, the highest ever recorded on the Maine coast; in Portland itself, several streets were flooded, and residents made ominous reports about city drains “bubbling up like a geyser.” In its annual report on tidal activity for 2023, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that “As sea levels continue to rise, our coastal communities will experience more frequent high tide flooding,” making disasters like these more and more common as time goes on. In other words, if the world keeps burning oil and other fossil fuels, there’ll be no need for trips to the beach. The beach will come to you.
❧ Three immigrants have drowned at the Texas border, kicking off a pointless dispute about which particular group of government thugs is to blame. Initially, the story was reported as a simple one: officers with the Texas National Guard had stopped the U.S. Border Patrol from intervening to save the lives of three people, a woman and two children, as they tried to cross the Rio Grande last Friday. The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement to that effect, saying that “Border Patrol agents were physically barred by Texas officials from entering” the area in question, Shelby Park. This would be horrific, but all too plausible, since Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been lining the Rio Grande with circular-saw blades designed to maim or even kill migrants; nothing, at this point, is beneath his government. On Sunday, though, Texas officials disputed the DHS account as “wholly inaccurate,” saying that the three people in question had already drowned by the time the Border Patrol made their request for access. The two sides have been trading blame back and forth ever since, with the Biden administration now threatening to sue Texas if it keeps blocking Border Patrol agents from the disputed area.
All of this, though, completely misses the point. Both Texas and the Biden government are eager to use these immigrants as political footballs, bickering over their precious jurisdiction, but there’s been little acknowledgment that real, priceless human lives have been lost. The people who died had names: Victerma de la Sancha Cerros, Yorlei Rubi, and Jonathan Agustín Briones de la Sancha. Jonathan was only eight years old. Their deaths weren’t simply the fault of one group of armed guards or the other, but something deeper: the idea that borders need to be policed, and immigrants monitored and controlled, in the first place. That notion leads to violence and death whenever it’s introduced—and the barbarity of Greg Abbott’s policies shouldn’t fool us for a second into thinking that the U.S. Border Patrol are somehow good guys. Members of that Patrol have been caught destroying food and water left by humanitarian groups for immigrants in the desert on multiple occasions, and that’s just one example of their many, many human rights abuses. Neither of these groups should exist in the first place, let alone be armed and militarized to the extent they are. Nobody should have to attempt a dangerous river crossing, because movement between the United States and Mexico should be free, just as movement between Germany and France is. The current arrangement values arbitrary lines on a map, and ignorant distinctions between “us” and “them,” more than human life itself. It needs to end.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Cuban doctors are once again saving lives overseas. Since its socialist revolution in 1959, Cuba has practiced what it calls “medical internationalism”—sending doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and other medical professionals on aid missions around the world, on a massive scale. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Cuba sent 1,012 doctors to Brazil alone, out of roughly 32,000 healthcare workers dispatched across five continents. Cuban doctors were instrumental in fighting cholera in Haiti in 2011, and in stopping the spread of Ebola throughout Western Africa in 2014. More recently, it’s Italy that has turned to them for help. Like many European countries, Italy has been dealing with a staffing crisis in the medical field, with more than 11,000 healthcare workers leaving their professions since 2021. The crisis has several causes, including COVID—but the slow privatization of Italy’s public health service, combined with funding cuts, has played a key role. Conditions are especially bad in the poorer, southern areas of the country, like Calabria—and it’s there that nearly 500 Cuban healthcare workers have been sent to fill the most urgent hospital vacancies. For the Guardian, journalist Angela Giuffrida visited the town of Polistena, interviewing both the Cuban professionals and their Italian colleagues:
The Cuban assistance was initially met with scepticism from the Italian health workers. “They didn’t like it,” said Francesca Liotta, the director of Santa Maria degli Ungheresi hospital. But that changed once the Cuban medics learned the Italian language and got to know their colleagues, bringing a fresh wave of energy to the hospital team. “They have the kind of enthusiasm I remember having when I started my career,” said Liotta, who is close to retiring. “I always say this: they are giving us oxygen.”
Cuba’s medical internationalism has been criticized in the past, with right-wing figures like Marco Rubio alleging that the doctors in question are coerced into serving overseas—but Asbel Díaz Fonseca, one of the surgeons working in Polistena, rejects this narrative:
“This is a total lie,” he said. “There is no obligation for us to do this. We are here because we want to be here. We also learn from the experiences. It is a two-way exchange.”
The contrast between two systems, two ways of looking at the world, couldn’t be more sharp. In capitalist countries like the United States, health is a commodity to be bought and sold, and if you can’t pay, you’re out of luck. In socialist Cuba, it’s a universal right, to be shared with the rest of the world whenever possible. It’s abundantly clear which vision is the better one.
❧ Last week, the US and UK launched airstrikes on several targets in Yemen controlled by Houthi militias. President Biden told the press the mission was a “success” in part because he didn’t “think there's any civilian casualties.” That may indeed be true, but the strikes have forced aid agencies to suspend humanitarian operations in the Gulf region, which will have a devastating impact on the civilians living through one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. After the strikes, 26 aid organizations published an open letter stating that “some humanitarian organisations have been forced to suspend operations over safety and security concerns, while others assess their ability to operate. Further escalation could result in more organizations being forced to halt their operations in areas where there are ongoing hostilities.” According to the UN, two-thirds of the Yemeni population rely on aid to survive amid a nine-year civil war that has led to mass death, displacement and famine —American funding of the Saudi military has been a major contributor to the brutality. Despite the aid groups’ warning that “escalation will only worsen the situation for vulnerable civilians and hinder the ability of aid organisations to deliver critical services,” the Biden administration launched another rash of airstrikes yesterday.
LONG READ: Global inequality has soared since 2020 according to a new Oxfam report. While the world’s five richest people doubled their wealth, more than five billion people around the world have become less wealthy and hunger has soared. In Common Dreams, Jake Johnson writes:
The finding by Oxfam International was published Monday as elites gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, a summit that—while ostensibly aimed at confronting the planet's most pressing crises—has long been seen as a symbol of global capital's stranglehold on key institutions.
Oxfam calculated that the combined wealth of the five richest billionaires on the planet grew from $405 billion in 2020 to roughly $869 billion today—a rate of $14 million an hour. During that same period, 60% of the global population got poorer, with the real wages of around 800 million workers across 52 countries falling in the face of high inflation.
Under the status quo, global poverty won't be eradicated for nearly two and a half centuries—but the world will have its first trillionaire within the next 10 years, Oxfam found….Overall, the world's billionaires have gotten $3.3 trillion richer since the start of the decade, Oxfam said, noting that their wealth grew three times faster than inflation…
Oxfam's report spotlights the "sustained and highly effective war on taxation" that powerful corporations have been waging over the past several decades—a war that has yielded a significantly lower corporate income tax rate that has allowed companies to amass vast riches and entrench their political influence.
"Corporate taxes are disproportionately borne by the richest, thus the collapse in corporate taxes in recent decades has essentially provided another tax cut for the wealthy," the report states. "It has also deprived governments around the world, but especially in the Global South, of trillions of U.S. dollars in revenue that could be used to reduce inequality and end poverty. Every tax dollar dodged is a nurse that will never be hired or a school that cannot be built."
DRAGON FACT OF THE WEEK
“Blue dragons” eat jellyfish venom and recycle it as a defensive weapon!
Of course, a “blue dragon” is not, technically speaking, a dragon. (You have to go to Komodo for that.) Instead, they’re a type of nudibranch or sea slug, also known as the “blue angel,” “blue glaucus,” or glaucus atlanticus. As their scientific name suggests, these little creatures float around the world’s oceans—especially the Atlantic—in “fleets,” using their vibrant blue color as camouflage against the waves. Like a lot of invertebrates, they’re hermaphrodites who mutually fertilize each other’s eggs.
What’s really incredible, though, is their defensive strategy. The blue glaucus has evolved to feed mainly on venomous siphonophores and jellyfish, like the notorious Portuguese Man o’ War. When they do, the larger animals’ venom cells are preserved and concentrated within the glaucus’ body. The dark blue tips on their tendrils are actually powerful stingers, made from this “borrowed” venom—so although they’re beautiful, it’s definitely not a good idea to touch one!
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Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. 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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