Jan. 9, 2024 ❧ Florida's insane new defamation bill, COVID-19's return, and Alabama's horrid new execution method
Plus: Wage theft in dairyland, another oil exec to lead COP 29, destroying the Ivy League, Nikki Haley's surprising stance on prisoners, and crooning fish
No news is actually BAD news…there must ALWAYS be news!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
HAVE YOU CALLED SOMEONE A BIGOT IN FLORIDA? THEY’LL SEE YOU IN COURT!
Under a new bill proposed in Florida, you could be sued for calling someone a bigot… even if it’s true! Senate Bill 1780, proposed by Florida Republicans, makes it “defamation per se” to allege that someone is discriminating against another person based on “race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity”—accusing others of such bigotry can force the accuser to pay damages of at least $35,000. Usually, in defamation cases, truth is an absolute defense for those accused. If you accuse someone of launching a puppy out of a trebuchet, they won’t win their case if you can demonstrate in court that they did, in fact, launch a puppy out of a trebuchet. But Florida’s new bill makes it so that even if you accuse someone of something that is demonstrably true, they can still sue you and win. It reads as follows:
“A defendant cannot prove the truth of an allegation of discrimination with respect to sexual orientation or gender identity by citing a plaintiff’s constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs…or scientific beliefs.”
What this effectively means is that as long as someone states that they have a religious or scientific reason for espousing even the most prejudiced beliefs, they can sue anyone who criticizes them for defamation and win money. As independent journalist Erin Reed writes, if this bill law went into effect:
A person could not call, for instance, a fiercely anti-gay or anti-trans pastor transphobic. The pastor would be able to sue their accusers for $35,000 and their accusers could not use the pastor’s “religious expression or beliefs” to prove that the pastor is transphobic or homophobic. Similarly, if a shopkeeper kicks a transgender person out of a shop while citing “God’s word” or their “scientific beliefs” and the video goes viral, the shopkeeper could claim that they were acting under their “constitutionally protected religious expression or beliefs” or their “scientific beliefs.” It would bar anyone from calling that shopkeeper transphobic.
The bill applies to print, television, and online posts, meaning that journalists or even social media commenters who report on bigoted comments risk being sued. Another clause bars journalists from using anonymous sources when reporting on transphobia, homophobia, racism, and sexism, saying that such statements will be considered “presumptively false.” The bill also re-designates those whose actions are recorded on video as private figures instead of public ones, meaning they have a lower burden of proof to win a defamation case.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that if this bill were to pass, it would be the most extreme abridgment of free speech America has seen in recent memory. The bill’s sponsor, Senator Jason Brodeur (who last year also brought forth a bill that required bloggers to register with the state before criticizing politicians) has previously claimed that he is an advocate for free speech. But people with heinous views are already protected under the First Amendment, something which has been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court over and over. The tradeoff has always been that everybody else is allowed to call their views heinous.
What this bill does is give people with certain beliefs—those that happen to be shared by the state’s governor and ruling party—the right to be shielded not just from legal consequences but from any form of public criticism by taking away the free speech of those who disagree with them.
Conservatives love to ridicule the idea of “safe spaces,” where people—often of marginalized gender, racial, or religious identities—can go to talk about their experiences without having to deal with criticisms of who they are. (Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill even resulted in stickers declaring classrooms a “safe space” for LGBTQ students to be removed from school districts.) Ironically, the law Florida Republicans seek to pass here effectively makes the entire state of Florida a safe space, but only for assholes.
COVID NEVER ENDED. NOW IT’S SURGING.
Back in September 2022, Joe Biden went on 60 Minutes and confidently declared that “the pandemic is over,” referring to COVID-19. Like many things Biden has said throughout his career, it was a lie. The pandemic may have reduced in severity since its peak in 2021 and 2022, but it never actually ended—certainly not for the thousands of people who continue to catch the virus, become severely sick, and even die. Rather, the Biden government has been following a course of action first recommended by Donald Trump: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases.” In October 2022, the CDC stopped issuing daily updates on COVID case numbers. In May 2023, the agency officially declared the public health emergency over. This decision eliminated the requirement for insurance companies to cover at-home tests at no cost to the patient, and the government also stopped providing free tests through Medicare itself. All measures guaranteed to give the impression that the threat of infection was over, regardless of the reality, and accelerate the country’s “return to normal”—which really should have been Biden’s slogan all along.
Unfortunately, viruses don’t care about Democratic party politics. They just multiply, mutate, and spread—and that’s exactly what COVID has been doing. As the winter cold and flu season wears on, the JN.1 variant has surged dramatically across the United States, leading to a new wave of hospitalizations. As of January 6, JN.1 was estimated to account for 61.6 percent of COVID cases nationwide, up from 38.8 percent in the previous two-week period. In the last week of December, there were 34,798 new hospital admissions for COVID, the highest number since the previous January. The most alarming statistic, though, is the levels of viral activity detectable in wastewater. Not only is this rated as “very high” for the entire United States, but it suggests the country is now in the second-largest surge of the entire pandemic. On social media, Dr. Michael Hoerger—an assistant professor at the Tulane School of Medicine, who helps run the Pandemic Mitigation Collective—mocked President Biden’s recent boast that “when I came to office, the pandemic was raging” with the following graph:
So, it’s worth repeating: the pandemic is not over. Not even close. The decision to claim otherwise was a cynical, politically-motivated one, which is now backfiring on a grand scale. The Biden administration should never have allowed important protections like free at-home tests to expire; having done so, it needs to reinstate them. Some hospitals have already brought back mask mandates, but that should be all hospitals and emergency rooms. In the meantime, while the government ignores reality, it’s necessary to be careful. If you get a weird cough, take a test. If you feel it’s appropriate to wear a mask or carry a little bottle of hand sanitizer, don’t hesitate to do it. Someone might look at you funny, but that’s better than coughing up lung fluid in a hospital bed. And whatever you do, don’t believe everything a centrist politician tells you.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The state of Alabama is pushing forward with a hideous, unconscionable execution. Governor Kay Ivey and state officials are planning to kill Kenneth Smith, who was convicted in 1996 of committing murder for hire, by nitrogen hypoxia. In plain English, this means putting an airtight mask over his face and forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen gas, causing him to suffocate to death. It’s an untested, experimental method of killing, which anesthesiologist Joel Zivot argues is worse than lethal injection, amounting to “the gaseous canister version of a knee on the neck.” At the United Nations, four experts have warned against its use, saying that it would “result in a painful and humiliating death.” In The Appeal, Jeff Hood—who serves as a spiritual advisor for prisoners condemned to death—writes that the state has warned him he, too may die if he’s in the same room as Smith when the gas is turned on. This alone should be a strong reason to call the execution off on Eighth Amendment grounds, since it’s clearly both “unusual”—unprecedented, in fact! —and likely to be “cruel.” But the case gets worse. In the first place, Smith was only sentenced to death as a result of judicial override, which is now illegal in Alabama (and most other places.) A jury voted 11-1 that he should receive life in prison, but the judge decided to impose the death penalty anyway, overriding the will of Smith’s peers. This, too, is arguably unconstitutional, and certainly unfair. But there’s even more: the state of Alabama has already tried to execute Smith once, by lethal injection, and botched it! He’s even been interviewed by NPR about the experience:
I was strapped down, couldn't catch my breath. I was shaking like a leaf. I was absolutely alone in a room full of people, and not one of them tried to help me at all, and I was crying out for help. It was a month or so before I really started to come back to myself… I'm still carrying the trauma from the last time. I'm being treated for PTSD, and I struggle daily. So when I got this date, my level of anxiety this time was not even close to what I faced last time. Everybody is telling me that I'm going to suffer. Well, I'm absolutely terrified.
To say that this state-sanctioned killing is unjust, that it’s wrong, doesn’t begin to cover the facts. This is the embodiment of everything a society should not do. There is only one piece of good news: currently, Smith’s execution is scheduled for January 25, which means there is still time to stop it. For anyone inclined to protest this monstrous injustice, Governor Ivey’s telephone number is (334) 242-7100, while the office of Attorney General Steve Marshall can be reached at (334) 242-7300, or via this contact form. Please spread this information, and be loud about it. You may save a life.
❧ Minnesota’s Attorney General is suing Evergreen Acres, a large dairy farm, for wage theft and abuse of immigrant workers. Keith Ellison formed a special Wage Theft Unit within the Attorney General’s office soon after he took office in 2019, and now, it’s led to one of the largest lawsuits over wages and working conditions in Minnesota history. In a press release on Tuesday, Ellison announced that his office is suing Evergreen Acres for more than $3 million in stolen wages, alleging that the farm “illegally charged rent for substandard housing” and “maintained a culture of fear and violence to discourage reporting” on top of the actual theft. The suit—which can be read in full here—contains 11 separate allegations of illegal conduct at the farm, including the big one, Failure to Pay Wages. Many of the workers in question were undocumented immigrants from Mexico, and Evergreen allegedly exploited them mercilessly, demanding “12-hour shifts at least six days per week.” The lawsuit accuses owner Keith Schaefer and his daughter of “shaving 12-24 hours from employee paystubs in each two-week pay period,” and says the housing they provided on-site was often “severely infested with cockroaches,” lacked windows and toilets, and had “significant water, mildew, and microbial growth damage.” Plaintiffs also claim they were subjected to “frequent unannounced violations of their privacy” in the form of random inspections, and that any objection they raised was met with racist threats:
Employee I threatened to get a lawyer because of Schaefer’s workplace practices. Schaefer responded that if Employee I hired a lawyer, Schaefer would hire four lawyers and send his “ass back to Mexico.” Schaefer then threatened to kill Employee I, and reminded Employee I of a dog Schaefer had recently killed.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common for employers to take advantage of undocumented workers in this way, particularly in the agriculture industry. Perhaps by making a public example out of Evergreen Acres, Ellison’s office can convince other Minnesota farmers that being an abusive boss is a losing proposition. Really, though, what’s needed is an end to the absurd idea that human beings can be “illegal” just because they lack the correct paperwork, and a stronger bond between workers in the U.S. and Mexico to fight these practices wherever they crop up.
⚜ LONG READ: Following the resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, over apparent plagiarism and her refusal to commit to disciplining pro-Palestinian students, everyone is gabbing about Harvard. (At one point last week, the top four stories on The New York Times opinion page were literally all about Harvard). While granting that questions of free speech and plagiarism are worthwhile to have in progressive circles, Jon Schwarz—himself a Yale graduate—asks in The Intercept, can’t we just raze the Ivy League altogether and build something better atop the ashes?
Here’s a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017, the president went to either Harvard or Yale — or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware. Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. It’s not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy). Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.
On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society that’s calcified. You need access to America’s networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access. This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools — or anyone — could reliably measure some type of “merit.” People change all their lives, and we shouldn’t have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22. But of course Ivy League colleges don’t actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone who’s attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders…
This doesn’t mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear — a democratization of the U.S. — come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen. Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvard’s $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money. However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.
THE NEW YORK TIMES CONTINUES TO FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS
Let’s check in with the Gaza war’s greatest victims: American celebrities.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Just like in 2023, the UN’s next global climate summit will be hosted by another oil executive in another oil-rich dictatorship. 2024’s COP29 will be held in Azerbaijan—a country with $35 billion worth of projects with BP alone, and one which is currently in the process of carrying out an ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. COP29 will be headed by the nation’s Ecology Minister Mukhtar Babayev, who previously ran the state oil company. 2023’s disastrous climate summit was held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and led by Sultan al-Jaber, an oil executive who said there was “no science” behind the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Predictably, any meaningful commitment for the world to begin reducing carbon consumption was stymied by OPEC petrostates and an army of at least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists who were granted access. The result was a watered-down declaration with no enforceable goals to begin the global transition away from CO2 emissions. Scientists and activists rightly derided the conference as an embarrassment, including Dr. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA who called it a “sick joke” in an interview with Current Affairs. Though the venue will have changed from an authoritarian Middle Eastern petrostate to an authoritarian Central Asian petrostate, it’s difficult to imagine the result of this year’s conference being any different.
❧ In Libya, protestors have shut down the country’s largest oil field. The protests in question aren’t about the climate, or fossil fuels as such; instead, they were sparked by the ongoing fuel shortage in southern Libya, which has hit the Fezzan region particularly hard. Protestors from the town of Ubari have shut down the Sharara oil field, which is Libya’s largest, producing as much as 300,000 barrels a day under ordinary circumstances. They’re demanding the government repair roads and infrastructure in Fezzan, along with providing relief for the fuel crisis itself—all perfectly reasonable things to want. Unfortunately for them, there hasn’t really been a functional Libyan government since 2011, when NATO—and Barack Obama in particular—made the decision to overthrow Muammar Gadaffi and plunge the country into civil war. The periodic fuel crises are one result of NATO’s imperialist violence, and the ensuing chaos it caused; the recent catastrophic flood in Derna, which UN experts say was made far more deadly by the country’s “general state of turmoil,” is another. Still, the protestors have already made progress. On Sunday, the National Oil Corp (NOC) was forced to declare a state of force majeure, meaning that normal operations had become impossible and the company could not meet its contractual obligations. Its administrators are reportedly entering negotiations with the protestors to get the field re-opened. On Monday, Libya’s Prime Minister also called for more fuel distribution to the country’s south. The citizens of Ubari have given the world an important reminder that ordinary people can wield real power, when they simply band together and refuse to back down. They’ve proven that the fossil-fuel industry can be beaten, even in its own strongholds. As political leaders around the world give us nothing but half-measures and empty promises, their example shows another, more promising way forward.
⚜ LONG READ: As a matter of company policy, all CNN reporting out of Gaza goes through the network’s Jerusalem bureau, which is subject to censorship by the Israel Defense Forces. Israel’s military censor has reviewed CNN stories for years and keeps many critical subjects about the war effort off limits. Meanwhile, many of its stories on the current war come directly from the Israeli military and has given the network direction on what language to use in its coverage. In The Intercept, Daniel Boguslaw reports:
Whether reporting from the Middle East, the United States, or anywhere else across the globe, every CNN journalist covering Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the news organization’s bureau in Jerusalem prior to publication, under a long-standing CNN policy. While CNN says the policy is meant to ensure accuracy in reporting on a polarizing subject, it means that much of the network’s recent coverage of the war in Gaza — and its reverberations around the world — has been shaped by journalists who operate under the shadow of the country’s military censor.
Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Forces’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off-limits for news organizations to cover, and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print. As The Intercept reported last month, the military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages, and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor.
CNN’s practice of routing coverage through the Jerusalem bureau does not mean that the military censor directly reviews every story. Still, the policy stands in contrast to other major news outlets, which in the past have run sensitive stories through desks outside of Israel to avoid the pressure of the censor. On top of the official and unspoken rules for reporting from Israel, CNN recently issued directives to its staff on specific language to use and avoid when reporting on violence in the Gaza Strip. The network also hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter at the onset of the war…
One member of CNN’s staff who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal said that the internal review policy has had a demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war. “Every single Israel-Palestine-related line for reporting must seek approval from the [Jerusalem] bureau — or, when the bureau is not staffed, from a select few handpicked by the bureau and senior management — from which lines are most often edited with a very specific nuance” that favors Israeli narratives.
A shaky arrangement has long existed between the IDF censor and the domestic and foreign press, forcing journalists to frequently self-censor their reporting for fear of running afoul of prohibited subjects, losing their press credentials, and potentially being forced to offer public apologyOpens in a new tab. CNN, like other American broadcasters, has repeatedly agreed to submit footage recorded in Gaza to the military censor prior to airing it in exchange for limited access to the strip, drawing criticismOpens in a new tab from those who say the censor is providing a filtered view of events unfolding on the ground. “When you have a protocol that routes all stories through one checkpoint, you’re interested in control, and the question is who is controlling the story?” Jim Naureckas, editor of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, told The Intercept.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley says she plans to pardon Trump if he is found guilty of one of the many crimes he is accused of. This is not a surprise. Many other Republican candidates have pledged to do the same thing, having made the calculation that the only acceptable position among Republican voters is that laws do not apply to Trump and that any attempt to prosecute him is prima facie illegitimate. But Haley—always attempting to appear reasonable while having the same insane positions as her fellow partisans—did not come right out and say Trump did nothing wrong. Instead, she tried to thread the needle in a different way: “‘What’s in the best interest of the country,” she said, “is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail.” The idea that there should be a maximum age for prison inmates is a surprisingly radical stance for someone like Haley to take, but one we welcome! Surely, she’d pardon Leonard Peltier as well, right?
WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE CANCER THAT IS MENTAL HEALTH
❧ Joe Biden’s staff is apparently lecturing reporters on how to cover the 2024 election. According to an alarming new report in Semafor, the Biden campaign has been holding “a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters and editors” to the President’s campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. There, Biden’s staff is reportedly giving members of the press “background briefings on campaign strategy,” and is even showing them a “coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short.” One of the “areas” in question is Donald Trump. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, the Biden camp wants more coverage of the ex-president’s “incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail,” and less focus on his ongoing legal cases. Other items on the spreadsheet aren’t hard to guess. Last December, Biden himself complained about journalists’ coverage of the economy, which he insists is “all good,” saying they should “start reporting it the right way.” Also in December, The Hill reported that members of the administration are frustrated by what they see as a “disproportionate media focus on the polls that show Biden losing.” However, it’s not actually a reporter’s job to give the President favorable coverage and help him win reelection. If the leader of any other country started pulling journalists aside and telling them what kind of reporting they should do, we’d immediately see that tactic for what it is: shameless propagandizing. It’s unclear why any self-respecting journalist would ever join one of these trips since it just makes them look biased and borderline corrupt. For his part, Biden needs to learn a simple lesson: if you want better headlines, you have to make better decisions.
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FISH FACT OF THE DAY
Midshipman fish, found in the waterways of California, love to sing! Listen to this fella croon:
These fish got their names because their spots resemble sailor uniforms, and the droning song they use to attract mates is equally reminiscent of seafaring, sounding like a deep boat horn. Fish don’t have vocal cords, and most don’t make noise, but midshipmen are an exception. They use their “swim bladders” — gas-filled organs that keep them from sinking or floating — to produce this guttural moan.
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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