May 10, 2024 ❧ Fighting bathroom police with memes, Bernie vs. medical debt, and the Saudis authorize killing for NEOM
Plus: A dystopian Apple commercial, cops in far-right militias, Vivek's embarrassing encounter with Ann Coulter, and whale phonics
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FIGHTING BACK
In Utah, the bathroom gender police get overloaded with memes
Like many conservative-leaning states, Utah has been going through a contrived and deeply silly moral panic about which kinds of people can use which toilets. This January, Governor Spencer Cox signed a law forcing anyone who visits a public school or a government building to use the restroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate, regardless of their current gender identity. To enforce this creepy law (seriously, why are Republicans thinking so much about other people’s bathroom habits?), the state set up an online snitching form where transphobic Utahns can report any case of Toilet Crime they happen to encounter.
It didn’t go well for them. Utah’s state auditor John Dougall, who’s been tasked with checking on the online reports, is visibly frustrated with the absurd nature of the job, saying last week that “No auditor goes into auditing so they can be the bathroom monitors.” And as it turns out, virtually all of the 10,000 submissions the form received so far have been a troll. Some have named Dougall himself as the witness to the alleged incident, while others have included pictures of screaming cats, adult actor Barry Wood, anime memes, the script for The Bee Movie, and so on.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Back in February, we told you about a similar case where a transphobic reporting site started by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita got inundated with gibberish, including the memorable “trans Godzilla” meme. There was also a reporting form about trans healthcare in Missouri (where one user submitted a fake report in character as Breaking Bad’s Walter White), and another in Virginia in 2022, which seems to have been the first of its kind.
It’s always amusing when these efforts fall flat on their face, but it’s serious too. Reporting people to the police (or the state auditor) simply for not conforming to gender norms is an attempt to have the state commit violence and harassment against them, pure and simple. That kind of thing needs to be opposed wherever it pops up, and the meme-senders are doing an important service to keep trans and nonbinary people safe. It’s also easy to do. The internet has a lot of inane drivel on it, ready to be copy-and-pasted into a state website, and software like ChatGPT can generate absurd “reports” about public restrooms with the push of a button. Today, why not take ten minutes and tell the government of Utah that you saw the Mario Brothers pop out of a toilet in their fine state? After all, they asked for it.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. THE OCCASIONAL DECENT PERSON (or, “What’s going with our politicians?”)
❧ Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to cancel all medical debt in the United States. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) are also on board as co-sponsors. Called the Medical Debt Cancellation Act, the proposed legislation would create a grant program from the Department of Health and Human Services to wipe out the roughly $220 billion in healthcare-related debt currently held by U.S. patients. It would also amend the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to ban agencies from trying to collect on existing medical debt, and prevent credit-reporting firms like Experian from taking medical debt into consideration when calculating people’s credit scores. This is an ambitious set of proposals, and given the current political makeup of the U.S. Congress—especially the Republican-controlled House of Representatives—it’s doubtful if the Act could actually pass.
Still, as The Guardian points out, the general concept of canceling medical debt is a popular one. Even 56 percent of Republicans supported the government providing “some relief” to people with medical debt in a 2022 YouGov poll, though it’s a little unclear what they mean by “some.” On a smaller scale, the state of Connecticut recently announced a $6.5 million program that will cancel medical debt for around 250,000 people. So clearly it can be done. What’s more, most of the arguments that have been leveled against canceling student debt—like that the debt-holder chose to take out a loan and should be responsible for paying it back, or that cancellation would only benefit certain kinds of people while ignoring others—are completely null and void when it comes to medical debt, which can strike anyone without warning. Like most of the policies Sanders has endorsed in his long career, relieving Americans from the burden of medical debt is just good sense, and he makes the case in clear terms:
This is the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world. People in our country should not be going bankrupt because they got cancer and could not afford to pay their medical bills,” Sanders said. “No one in America should face financial ruin because of the outrageous cost of an unexpected medical emergency or a hospital stay. The time has come to cancel all medical debt and guarantee health care to all as a human right, not a privilege.
It’s worth remembering, too, that the United States spends a lot more money on much worse things, like the estimated $2 trillion cost of the F-35 fighter jet program. Compared to that, $220 billion to completely eliminate healthcare debt is a bargain.
❧ Recent Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy hosted the notoriously racist right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on his TRUTH podcast…and you’ll never guess what happened. Despite saying she agreed with him “more than most other candidates,” Coulter told Ramaswamy, “I still would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian.” Ramaswamy did not push back against this statement from Coulter, instead letting her prattle on for about an hour about, among other things, how America’s “core national identity” is that of the “WASP” (short for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) with little interruption or disagreement. After Coulter’s blatantly racist comment made the rounds online, Ramaswamy praised her, saying, “I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour.”
Ramaswamy’s sycophancy is difficult to stomach. He would have been well within his right to say, “Screw you, Ann, I’m just as much of an American as you are!” But it’s easy to understand why he didn’t. During his campaign, he clearly tried to carve out a constituency among America’s most fervent Christian nationalist culture warriors. Presumably, calling anyone racist, even when they are obviously so, would just get him labeled “woke” by that crowd — a label he’s defined himself in furious opposition to.
So the only remaining choice is to allow himself to be denigrated and even denigrate his own background, which he also does frequently: One of his major campaign slogans was “God is real” (Though Vivek practices Hinduism, a polytheistic religion) and he frequently quoted the Bible. And during one of the first debates, he introduced himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name,” as if he assumed he needed an icebreaker to assure his potential voters that he wasn’t some subversive foreigner. He seems to think that putting up with someone blatantly describing him as less American because of his race is the price he needs to pay to fit in, too. Which is depressing.
To be clear, we don’t need to feel bad for Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s clearly fine with forgoing self-respect to climb the ranks of the Republican Party, and nobody who wants to do that deserves much sympathy. But it’s still sad that anyone who isn’t white and Christian feels the need to prostrate themselves in this way.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The Chicago Police Department refuses to discipline nine cops for their membership in the far-right Oath Keepers group. The Oath Keepers are an anti-government militia with thousands of members, some of whom participated in both the January 6th riot and the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Back in 2021, their membership rolls leaked, revealing the names of hundreds of cops, members of the military, and even people in elected office who had joined the group. In Chicago, that number included 27 police officers, nine of whom are still on active duty. As listed by the Chicago Sun-Times, the names of those nine are:
Sgt. Michael Nowacki; Detective Anthony Keany; and Officers Phillip Singto, Alberto Retamozo, Matthew Bracken, Bienvenido Acevedo, Dennis Mack, Alexander Kim and John Nicezyporuk.
Although the Oath Keepers officially claim to be non-racist, several of these cops have disturbing incidents in their track record, including occasions when Nicezyporuk was accused of using anti-Black racial slurs during traffic stops and a documented case where Sergeant Nowacki replied to a charity email by saying he had “no desire to help inner city poor people.”
After the release of an investigative series called “Extremism in the Ranks” from WBEZ and The Sun-Times, Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling promised “stringent” efforts to remove “members amongst our department who are filled with bias or members of hate groups,” saying that “we will not tolerate it.” But as usual with cops, it turns out that was a lie. Last Thursday, the Chicago PD announced that it had concluded its investigation into the nine officers in question, and had discovered that “the allegations were not sustained,” meaning all of the Oath Keepers on the force would keep their jobs. However, as PBS affiliate WTTW reports, the allegedly “thorough” investigation was based mainly on interviews with the accused cops themselves, lasting an average of 29 minutes. Unsurprisingly, they denied any wrongdoing, and the department appears to be taking them at their word.
Incidents like this are exactly where the phrase ACAB, “All Cops Are Bastards,” comes from. Even if an individual cop doesn't engage in hateful conduct themselves, they definitely know about one who does, and in nine cases out of ten the entire police department will conspire to protect that cop. You can be a card-carrying member of a right-wing militia that wants “armed revolution,” and the wall of silence will still shield you. And they wonder why people don’t trust or respect them.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I think this country was built on gangs, you know. I think this country still is run on gangs. Republicans, Democrats, the police department, the FBI, the CIA — those are gangs, you know what I mean? The correctional officers. I had a correctional officer tell me straight up, ‘We're the biggest gang in New York State.’”
❧ In other ludicrous police news, the Miami Beach Police Department now has a Rolls-Royce. For the Miami New Times, Naomi Feinstein paints the picture:
Imagine, you are driving on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, and all of a sudden, you hear a siren and see police lights in your rear-view mirror. You pull over to the side of the road, and the officer orders you out of your car after finding you forgot to renew your driver's license.
It's not long before you realize you are not getting in the back of a typical police cruiser. You're being detained in the luxurious confines of the Miami Beach Police Department's new Rolls-Royce. This is called getting arrested in style.
According to Feinstein, the car in question is technically owned by a local dealership called Braman Motors, and lent to the police “as a promotional vehicle for the department's recruitment team.” Of course, this relationship cuts both ways, as the car has large “BRAMAN MIAMI” stickers on its front and rear fenders—so the cops are advertising the dealership too, every time they drive it. It’s a tacky, ostentatious display of naked commercialism, even by Florida standards. But it’s also oddly appropriate. After all, people rich enough to own a Rolls-Royce are exactly who police forces around the world exist to serve, and at least there’s no illusion that it’s the public interest at work here.
❧ A Tennessee-based janitorial company has been caught using child labor to clean slaughterhouses. The Fayette Janitorial Service will have to pay $649,000 after the Department of Labor found that it employed at least 24 children —some as young as 13 — to clean facilities for Triumph Foods in Iowa and Perdue in Virginia, in what it called an “egregious violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.” According to the press release, “Minors were used to clean dangerous kill floor equipment such as head splitters, jaw pullers, meat bandsaws, and neck clippers,” and that one 14-year-old “suffered severe injuries.”
Jessica Looman, Wage and Hour Division Administrator for the Department of Labor, says:
Federal laws were established decades ago to prevent employers from profiting from the employment of children in dangerous jobs, yet we continue to find employers exploiting children. As we’ve unfortunately seen in this case, employers’ violations of federal child labor laws have real consequences on children’s lives. Our actions to stop these violations will help ensure that more children are not hurt in the future.
The past year has seen soaring rates of child labor law violations. During the 2022-2023 Fiscal Year, the Labor Department found 5,792 minors working in violation of child labor laws, an 88 percent increase since 2019. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute finds that 31 states have introduced legislation to roll back child labor protections, since 2021 and 14 have enacted them.
⚜ LONG READ: This week, Apple released an extraordinarily tone-deaf commercial in which artistic tools, like a grand piano, cans of paint, sculptures, and arcade machines, are violently crushed by a gigantic hydraulic press to form the new iPad Pro.
The commercial was meant to convey how the iPad can be used for many artistic pursuits. But instead, artists saw a reminder of how tech is undermining and replacing human creativity. In The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto explains the visceral reaction:
The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything that’s a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab.
Astoundingly, this is meant to sell a product. “Buy the thing that’s destroying everything you love,” says Apple. This is quite a change from the famous “1984” ad, where Apple styled itself as smashing boring conformity. Sure, the new ad is tone-deaf — after all, Apple rose to prominence by aligning itself with creative types. But it also takes an embarrassingly narrow view of technology. Imagine being such a rube that you believe that the only good technology is new technology.
That view of technology is fundamentally disrespectful. We are surrounded by stuff that’s meant to endure. Technology, in a much broader sense, is innately hopeful. It’s a bright golden thread between our past and our future.
Language is the most basic technology, the one that lets us build everything else. Writing down our thoughts meant we could begin to access lifetimes of experience. The Pythagorean theorem was so significant when it was first discovered that a cult formed around it; I learned it in sixth grade because it was foundational for a lot of things we created later. These foundations — language, math — made possible a chain of events that allowed Apple to exist.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Israel has begun its invasion of Rafah, which UNICEF officials describe as “a city of children, who have nowhere safe to go in Gaza.” A majority of Gaza’s population—an estimated 1.3 million people— is sheltering in Rafah, in an area smaller than the Istanbul Airport. Israel previously declared it one of the only “safe zones” in the Strip and most other parts of the Strip lie in ruin. Now, as Israel has moved into the area, dozens have already been killed according to Gaza Health officials. According to a description from The Washington Post:
The city’s largest hospital was shuttered two days ago, in a panic, after Israel ordered 100,000 Palestinians in southeastern Gaza to evacuate. Small clinics that accommodated hundreds of people a week closed as well, with staff members forced to flee the violence.
Bodies lay where they fell, in the “red zone” that the few ambulances available could not reach because of Israeli bombardment, a Palestinian Red Crescent spokeswoman said Tuesday. Border crossings remained closed Thursday, stranding critically ill patients waiting to be evacuated to Egypt and preventing international doctors and badly needed medical supplies from getting in.
Israel’s military operations in Rafah this week have overwhelmed health-care workers, who were already struggling to treat displaced Palestinians suffering from malnourishment, explosive injuries and an array of diseases, which doctors say are spreading rapidly through the city’s filthy and overcrowded tent camps.
International appeals against the invasion— including from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned of an "epic humanitarian disaster"—have fallen on deaf ears. Israel has sealed off the two main entries into South Gaza, leaving more than 2 million people essentially trapped. Aid has not entered the strip for the last three days, which the U.N. says is “completely crippling humanitarian operations” as Gaza faces a “full-blown famine” according to the World Food Program. Pressure from the U.S. remains one of the few things that could actually stop this invasion, but instead the Biden administration continues to make excuses to provide Israel with weapons even while acknowledging that it has used those weapons to violate international law.
❧ Saudi Arabia has forcibly evicted thousands of people to construct a futuristic city called “Neom,” in the middle of the desert, near the Red Sea coast. These forced evictions are all part of a massive construction project that began in 2017, when Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman announced his dream to create what is essentially a Saudi Silicon Valley with Jetsons characteristics. According to The Wall Street Journal, MBS imagined “Neom” (a portmanteau of the Greek word for “new” and the Arabic word for “future”), as a place for those with the “world’s greatest minds and best talents” to flock.
The Crown Prince has promised that Neom will have everything from flying cars, to robot maids, to genetic modifications to increase human strength, to an artificial moon. According to documents from the board creating Neom, it will have “cameras, drones, and facial-recognition technology…to track everyone at all times,” making it a place “where we can watch everything.” The project is estimated to cost at least $500 billion and is backed by dozens of Western companies. Its centerpiece “The Line,” a vertically stacked, glass-covered megalopolis that will tower 500 meters into the air—taller than the Empire State Building—and stretch more than 170 km, while only being about 200 meters wide, just over the length of two American football fields. The Saudis claim that Neom will run entirely on renewable energy and that “People's health and wellbeing will be prioritized over transportation and infrastructure, unlike traditional cities.”
But apparently the health and wellbeing of the people who currently inhabit the land do not factor into that calculation. The place where Neom is under construction is home to the Huwaitat tribe, which has lived there for generations. According to Colonel Rabih Alenezi, an ex-intelligence official who spoke with the BBC, authorities were “told to kill” if necessary to get people off the land back in 2020. And at least one person who protested the evictions, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was subsequently shot. The BBC also describes several other villages that have been demolished while “Homes, schools, and hospitals have been wiped off the map.” At least 6,000 people have been forcibly moved (and the UK-based human rights organization ALQST estimates the number is higher). Dozens have been arrested for resisting and at least three have been condemned to death.
MBS touts Neom as an embodiment of human progress, but it’s instead symbolic of all that is inflexible and hierarchical about Saudi Arabia, one of the most obscenely unequal societies on the planet. It’s fabulously wealthy on account of its vast oil reserves, but most of that wealth lines the pockets of the royal family while 20 percent of the population lives in dire poverty and almost all of the labor is done by non-citizen guest workers in virtual slave conditions. Neom is not a place intended for ordinary people: it is a playground for a small stratum of the global elite to live in luxury while the rest are meant to toil.
PAST AFFAIRS
In 2019, Nathan J. Robinson wrote, “Neom May Be Our Future”:
We need an anti-NEOM: future cities that aren’t conjured up by homicidal dictators, but reflect the aspirations and imaginations of ordinary people working together to fulfill their dreams. The philosophy of NEOM is the one that guides so much of our present economic development, and its glittering temptations have to be resisted. The future city will be a beautiful oasis, prosperous, and sophisticated, but it must be nothing like NEOM.
⚜ LONG READ: The UK government has begun rounding up asylum seekers to deport them to Rwanda. In an op-ed for Jacobin, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describes it as a “repulsive stunt” that demonstrates a “descent into full-blown barbarism”:
These are people who have escaped war and persecution; it is heartbreaking that their arrival has coincided with this government’s deranged descent into full-blown barbarism. Despite repeated warnings that it is in breach of international law, the government is hell-bent on pursuing its Rwanda plan no matter the scale of human misery it will unleash. Sacrificing people’s dignity for a few votes, this latest move represents the last gasps of a dying government, determined to solidify its legacy as one that made the lives of vulnerable people even harder.
The Conservative Party, however, does not have a monopoly on human cruelty. Right across Europe, governments of all stripes have upheld a violent system of barbed wire, gunboats, and demonization. Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, recently decided to restrict welfare for asylum seekers and accelerate deportations. A month later, President Emmanuel Macron’s party followed suit in France. Earlier this year, Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis bragged that they had “succeeded in managing migration through a tough but fair migration policy” — a tough but fair policy that resulted in the death of more than five hundred people, including one hundred children, when a boat sank off the Greek coast last year.
In the past decade, more than twenty-nine thousand people have either died or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean. Each had a name, a face, and a story. Each life was a miracle to those that loved and depended on them — and each death a stain on the collective conscience of those who have criminalized human beings just trying to survive. Politicians across Europe know that their hard-line immigration policies will not stop people making the treacherous journey across the Channel. That’s not the point. Their intention is to whip up hatred, division, and fear.
To many in our political class, mass death at sea is simply the price of grown-up “pragmatism.” Conservative and social democratic governments alike tell us this the only way to stave off the rise of the far right: the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, Vox in Spain, and the Swedish Democrats, to name a few. However, governments that embrace anti-migrant rhetoric do not neutralize the far right — they only legitimize and embolden it…
We must be prepared to stand up for everybody’s human rights, no matter who is curtailing them. The global humanitarian crisis will not be fixed by deporting refugees more cheaply, particularly if British foreign policy remains one of endless war, a leading source of displacement. Instead, it will further entrench a system that sees migrants as problems to be managed, not human beings to be cared for. Anti-migrant rhetoric has infected global politics for decades. Without a principled fight back, it may well infect global politics for decades to come.
WHALE FACT OF THE WEEK
This week, scientists got a step closer to decoding the mysteries of whale language. A new paper from Nature Communications explains that sperm whales use a “phonetic alphabet,” conveyed through rapid series of clicks known as “codas.” According to Smithsonian Magazine:
Each coda consists of between three and 40 clicks. In addition to changing the number of clicks they make in quick succession, whales often speed up or slow down the tempo of each coda—researchers call this “rubato.” Sometimes, they add an extra “click” at the end of a coda, which scientists call “ornamentation.” … On their own, these codas may simply be meaningless sounds. But when combined, they could add up to something akin to syllables, words or even sentences.
The next step is figuring out what each coda actually means, if anything at all. To do this, scientists need to continue observing whales and associate certain sounds with specific behaviors.
Sperm whales are an endangered species as a result of two centuries of whaling and more recently due to climate change. And scientists hope that by learning more about what they are saying, they can better learn how to protect them from harm. Perhaps our leaders would be more receptive to doing something about climate change if a large, bellowing sperm whale told them to get their act together.
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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