Oct. 20, 2023 ❧ The Epoch Times takes over, child labor at Tyson, and shocking polls on Israel-Palestine...
Plus Scholastic helps states ban books, Japan bans the Moonies, anti-vax dogs, Flaco the owl and more!
STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
EPOCH TIMES NOW THE FOURTH-LARGEST U.S. NEWSPAPER?
According to recent reporting by NBC’s Brandon Zadrozny, The Epoch Times—a conspiracy-minded right-wing newspaper known for its promotion of climate-change denial, strange theories about COVID-19, and unwavering support for Donald Trump—has increased its revenue by a whopping 685 percent in just two years, taking in $121 million in 2021. It now claims the fourth-largest subscription count of any U.S. newspaper, and while Epoch Times statistics aren’t audited by the agencies who usually track such things, it’s plausible. Of that $121 million figure, $76 million was from paying subscribers alone. (You can examine the tax documents here.)
It helps, of course, to have the backing of a shady religious group. Before wading into U.S. politics, The Epoch Times was created as a Chinese-language newsletter by practitioners of Falun Gong—a secretive, cult-like religious movement that believes itself to be in a “supernatural war against communism” and has long been banned in China. Many Falun Gong members work for The Epoch Times for free or basically for free, as a recent episode of the TrueAnon podcast discussed. According to Steve Klett, a journalist who briefly worked for the paper, writers were required to produce “up to five news stories a day in an effort to meet a quota of 100,000 page views” and submit them to Falun Gong-practicing editors, who strictly censored certain topics, including any mention of the word “gay” in stories about the Pulse nightclub shooting.
(Falun Gong also bankrolls the deeply strange Shen Yun dance troupe, which portrays an idyllic “China before communism” being menaced by a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx. Yes, really.)
It’s not clear how much funding The Epoch Times receives from Falun Gong itself, since religious organizations are tax-exempt, but the answer is likely to be “a lot.” In turn, The Epoch Times has spent millions of dollars on unorthodox promotional tactics, like buying huge lists of addresses and mailing their paper to people who hadn’t asked for it. They have very slick YouTube ads and even offer free digital subscriptions to all college students. They’re also prolific email spammers, racking up over 200 complaints on the Better Business Bureau website. It’s all part of Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi’s directive to the newspaper’s staff, given at a conference in 2010: “become regular media.”
Obviously, it’s alarming to have a far-right propaganda sheet circulating this widely. People undoubtedly vote based on things they read in The Epoch Times, and that can lead nowhere good. But the whole situation is only possible because of the steady decline of local news outlets and the fundamental conflict between journalism as a public service and the profit motive. If there were high-quality local papers in every town, some of them publicly owned and funded, there would be little room for an Epoch Times. Instead, for-profit news outlets cut as many staff as possible to save money and make it expensive and annoying to access their reporting. As our editor-in-chief puts it, the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free—and in that climate, the worst kind of pseudo-news can flourish.
FIGHTING BACK
WORKERS STAND UP TO TYSON FOODS
A crowd of angry workers marched on the Tyson corporate headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, this Monday, demanding an end to the company’s use of child labor and dangerous working conditions. Forming a multilingual coalition, members of both the Food Chain Workers Alliance and Venceremos, a local nonprofit group that works to “protect the fundamental human rights of poultry workers,” joined in the protest, carrying banners with the slogans “SLOW DOWN THE LINE, KEEP WORKERS IN MIND” and “ALTO AL TRABAJO INFANTIL” (or “Stop Child Labor.”)
The butchering and meat-packing industries have long been a hotbed of workplace abuse, and Tyson Foods is notorious even among its peers. In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld a class-action lawsuit against the company for refusing to pay overtime wages, and that was one of Tyson’s milder crimes. According to an open letter by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, it has also increased the speed of its assembly lines to “life-threatening and unsustainable” levels, pushing for more and more “birds per minute” from an already-exhausted workforce. Worst of all, Tyson is deeply implicated in the return of child labor in America, especially taking advantage of underaged immigrant workers. Venceremos founder Magaly Licolli, who helped to organize Monday’s protest, told Reuters that she personally met “two teenage boys from Guatemala” who had been hired to round up chickens at a Tyson plant and were initially not paid at all. When this sort of thing happens, the company’s defense is always that a contractor is to blame, rather than Tyson itself. But they’ve never released information on how contractors are supposed to be held accountable and have actively resisted calls for a human-rights inquiry into their practices. Clearly, the executives who profit from all this suffering—Tyson reported a net revenue of $3.2 billion in 2021, and raised its CEO’s salary by 33 percent, to a little more than $12 million—have no intention of changing until they’re forced to. Only working-class rebellion, of the kind on display at Monday’s march, can do the job.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Pro-Palestinian activists at Harvard have been targeted with threats and harassment. A campus vigil for the victims of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza—which, according to Palestinian health officials, have killed close to 3,800 people—had to be postponed last Tuesday after members of the university’s student-run Palestine Solidarity Committee received threats of violence (and a group of CEOs attempted to have its members doxxed). The event instead took place on Wednesday night, with anonymous pre-recorded statements in place of the planned speakers. As Rebecca Cadenhead reports for the Nation, one such statement indicted Harvard itself because:
“We have to stand here and deal with attacks right here in our community,” one Palestinian said, after reading a series of final goodbye messages from friends in Gaza. “They distract us from the genocide taking place in Palestine right now. This is a vigil. We are here to mourn the loss of innocent human life. The fact that our mourning had to be postponed because this campus did not afford us the safety nor the space to grieve together reflects the larger sentiment of the administration distancing itself from us.
It’s distressing, to say the least, that anti-Palestinian sentiment has reached such a fever pitch that someone would actually threaten a group of grieving college students. It’s repugnant. But there’s also reason for hope—because unscrupulous people wouldn’t go to such great lengths to suppress the voices of Palestinians and their allies around the world if those voices didn’t have the power to change things.
❧ Scholastic, one of America’s largest publishers of children’s books, is now allowing schools to exclude books that feature LGBTQ characters and people of color from its annual Book Fairs. Scholastic has grouped these titles in a collection titled “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” and has given school districts the option to exclude the entire set from book sales. Scholastic has said that it was necessary to do this because:
“[T]here is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools – mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country…these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.”
According to Judd Legum in Popular Information (who has been doing yeoman’s work covering the school book-banning movement around the country), some of the titles in this collection include a book about the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis, a children’s biography of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and a book called All Are Welcome which encourages the acceptance of same-sex couples. As Legum points out, “pending” legislation is not actually in effect, so there’s no reason for Scholastic to give any school such an easy way to ban diverse books. In the words of one librarian, this is tantamount to giving every school a “bigot button” that they can press regardless of whether the law requires it.
❧ The anti-vaccine movement is not just for humans anymore. According to The Wall Street Journal, veterinarians report increasing numbers of dog owners refusing to get shots for their canine companions. They cited a new study in the journal Vaccine which found that “Almost 40% of dog owners believe that canine vaccines are unsafe, more than 20% believe these vaccines are ineffective and 30% consider them to be medically unnecessary.” Additionally, nearly 37 percent say that Dog Vaccines could cause Dog Autism (which is apparently a real thing, though like with Human Autism, it is not caused by vaccines). Vets are now worried that this could lead to an uptick in illnesses like rabies. “Before the 1960s, the majority of rabies cases were found in domestic animals, especially dogs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Widespread vaccination changed that. Today, 90% of reported cases are found in wildlife,” the Journal reports. The American Veterinary Medical Association says that vaccines are very important to your pet’s health. But if there happens to be an anti-vax dog in your life whose medical freedom you wish to support, here are some great gift ideas!
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ India’s Supreme Court has declined to legalize gay marriage in the world’s most populous country. It ruled that the court does not have lawmaking authority and that India’s Parliament has the lawmaking authority to grant equality to same-sex couples. The Court has ruled on gay rights before—in 2018, it struck down a colonial-era law that criminalized gay sex. Acceptance of gay people has increased dramatically since the 2018 ruling decriminalized homosexuality—according to a June poll, a majority of Indian adults (53 percent) favored same-sex marriage, a dramatic increase from 2014, when just 15 percent said they supported it. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s conservative BJP Party led the charge against the recognition of gay couples, and the Court ultimately sided with them. Along with other judges, the Court’s chief justice expressed sympathy for its country’s sexual minorities in the latest ruling, saying “The right to choose one’s partner and the right to recognition of that union” should be observed. But ultimately, they decided to prioritize institutional rigidity over justice.
❧ In Poland, the opposition has scored an electoral win. We recently reported on the high stakes in Poland’s parliamentary elections, which pitted former Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his center-right Civic Coalition (KO) against the increasingly autocratic Law and Justice (or PiS) party, which has been in power since 2015. At the time, some concerns continued far-right rule could lead to the end of Polish democracy itself. Happily, this gloomy vision has been prevented, at least for now. While the Civic Coalition didn’t win outright, taking just 30.7 percent of the vote, it can form a government by allying itself with other minority parties, allowing the opposition movement as a whole to oust the Law and Justice party.
More importantly, an anti-immigrant referendum has been thwarted. The PiS government had placed several yes-or-no questions on the ballot, all of them couched in extremely biased language; the most inflammatory asked whether voters “support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy.” Forced, imposed, illegal; scary words for an allegedly neutral forum. In the run-up to the election itself, PiS also spread xenophobic propaganda through the state-owned mail service, calling the arrival of new immigrants an “invasion.” Meanwhile, prominent opposition figures, including former electoral commission leader Wojciech Hermeliński, urged voters to boycott the ballot question entirely, calling it “shocking…primitive, crude.” If less than 50 percent of the Polish public gave an answer of any kind, the referendum would be considered invalid—and that’s exactly what happened on the 15th, when the ballot questions got only 40 percent participation. More than the parliamentary results themselves, it’s a striking repudiation of this particular brand of anti-immigrant fearmongering.
❧ 2023 has seen a record number of days with temperatures 1.5C higher than pre-industrial levels, long considered to be the threshold at which climate change would become irreversible. Around 86 days have been over the mark, which was passed for the first time in 2015. “The fact that we are reaching this 1.5C anomaly daily, and for a longer number of days, is concerning,” Dr. Melissa Lazenby, from the University of Sussex told the BBC. It indicates that climate change is not only happening, but that the globe is warming at a faster rate than scientists initially predicted when they set 1.5C as a benchmark at the Paris Cimate Accords in 2015. We have seen the effects of this—as this summer also had a record number of natural disasters that exceeded $1 million in damage. And despite re-entering the Paris Convention, the Biden administration has fallen far short of meeting its targets while refusing to take many of the active measures, like declaring a climate emergency, that would allow for the green energy transition to take place.
❧ Japan has moved to dissolve the controversial Unification Church. It’s only the third time the Japanese government has attempted to disband a religious organization via court order. The first was the notorious Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was responsible for deadly sarin gas attacks in Tokyo in 1995, and the second was a temple that operated a fraudulent exorcism-for-hire business. (One offense seems much worse than the other.) The Unification Church, by contrast, became embroiled in an international scandal after former Japanese president Shinzo Abe was assassinated last year by a man who was outraged at his alleged connections with the group. The killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, claimed that his mother had been bankrupted by the Church’s demands for excessive donations and that the group wielded inappropriate political influence among Japan’s elite. It’s not the first time the Church—sometimes referred to as the “Moonies,” after founder Sun Myung Moon—has come under fire. In the early 1980s, the Daily Mail accused it of brainwashing and kidnapping its members and successfully defended itself from a libel suit over the claims. This is, however, a rare instance of a country having its former head of state assassinated, and then apparently deciding that the assassin had a point.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ The GOP has decided to use China as its key talking point to undermine the UAW. The auto strike has been an awkward subject for Republicans since polls show that 76 percent of Americans sympathize with it, and only 23 percent side with the Big Three manufacturers. Now, though, politicians like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance have come up with a strategy. As Jeff Schuhrke and Sarah Lazare report for In These Times, they’re trying to convince UAW members that their real enemy is not their bosses, but China. The union should “use their leverage and force the President to stop subsidizing an industry that benefits Communist China,” writes Vance, referring to the importation of parts for electric cars, while Hawley has said that UAW members “deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the US auto industry and making China rich.” It’s a rather desperate attempt to transform a clear-cut class conflict into one between nations and deflect blame away from Detroit CEOs. Fortunately, the workers don’t seem to be falling for it. In his remarks on the picket line last September, UAW president Shawn Fain explicitly called out nationalist narratives as bogus, saying “Today, the enemy isn’t some foreign country miles away. It’s right here in our own area. It’s corporate greed.”
UNDER THE HOOD
⚜ After a surge in 2021 in the aftermath of the pandemic, violent crime dropped significantly in 2022 according to newly released FBI data. But the majority of Americans believe that crime has never been worse. On the Popular Information Substack, Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby discuss how the media and politicians have helped create a “zombie crime wave.”
The October 6, 2023 edition of Fox News' Hannity covered the “ongoing crime wave” that is “wreaking havoc across America” as a result of “the left's radical policies.” Guest host Pete Hegseth declared that violent crime was “crushing cities and American lives." Two days earlier, on October 4, Fox News host Martha MacCollum declared that Americans “feel outraged and unsafe.” MacCollum played a clip of an unidentified man saying, “crime is out of control in every city in America.” Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy appeared on Fox News on October 2 and laid out a plan to combat “the violent crime wave across this country.” (Ramaswamy wants to keep more people confined to psychiatric institutions.) NBC News reported in March 2023 that “violent crime is up nationwide and in major cities,” without citing a source. In a Wall Street Journal column published in October 2022, former Attorney General Bill Barr (R) claimed that Democrats “unleashed a crime wave and diminished our sense of safety on the streets.”
But is there a crime wave in America? Without a doubt, people believe that crime continues to surge. A Gallup poll found that 78% of Americans believe that there was more crime in 2022 than in 2021. (Only 13% believed it declined.)
In 2022, homicides were down 6.1%, according to FBI data. The nation’s murder rate, the data shows, was 6.3 per 100,000 people. This figure is below 2020 levels, but slightly higher than 2019. Still, since 1991, the rate of murder has dropped 36%. Nationwide, the FBI reports that the violent crime rate, including homicide, dropped “an estimated 1.7%” in 2022 compared to the year before. The rate of violent crime is the lowest it has been since 2014, and is nearly half of what it was in 1991 and 1992….
Property crime, meanwhile, has gone up, which may be contributing to an inflated sense that all crime is up, even when it’s declining. Meanwhile, little attention is given to the growing problem of wage theft.
According to Axios, the videos show people how to “break windows and remove parts of the steering column cover, then start the vehicle with a screwdriver, or a plugin from a USB device.” The viral videos take advantage of Hyundai Motors’ decision “not to install a theft prevention mechanism called an immobilizer in certain makes and models” of Kias and Hyundais since model year 2011. The craze developed into a “Kia Challenge,” which involves creating social media content about successful car thefts.
According to Asher’s newsletter Jeff-alytics, even with the increase in property crimes in 2022, the property crime rate is still much lower than it has been in recent history. According to Asher, “the property crime rate in the US has fallen an astounding 61 percent since 1991 even accounting for the somewhat sizable increase in 2022.” As a whole, while property crime garners headlines, wage theft is a large problem.
The FBI’s 2022 numbers, which were collected from 13,293 law enforcement across the United States, only address violent crime and property crime. This means that the data does not reflect white-collar offenses like wage theft. And while property crime tends to grab headlines, wage theft is an even larger problem. “Property crimes accounted for roughly $30 billion in economic losses in 2019; in contrast, a 2014 estimate by the Economic Policy Institute found that wage theft cost workers nearly $50 billion every year,” The Appeal notes.
⚜ Why are so many scientific studies being retracted? In Mother Jones, Jackie Flynn Morgensen writes:
It’s been a hell of a year for science scandals. In July, Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a prominent neuroscientist, announced he would step down after an investigation, prompted by reporting by the Stanford Daily, found that members of his lab had manipulated data or engaged in “deficient scientific practices” in five academic papers on which he’d been the principal author. A month beforehand, internet sleuths publicly accused Harvard professor Francesca Gino—a behavioral scientist studying, among other things, dishonesty—of fraudulently altering data in several papers. (Gino has denied allegations of misconduct.) And the month before, Nobel Prize–winner Gregg Semenza, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, had his seventh paper retracted for “multiple image irregularities.”
Those are just the high-profile examples. Last year, more than 5,000 papers were retracted, with just as many projected for 2023, according to Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that hosts a database for academic retractions. In 2002, that number was less than 150. Over the last two decades, even as the overall number of studies published has risen dramatically, the rate of retraction has actually eclipsed the rate of publication…
In the digital age, whistleblowers have better technology to investigate and expose misconduct. “We have better tools and greater awareness,” says Daniel Kulp, chair of the UK-based Committee on Publication Ethics. “There are in some sense more people looking with that critical mindset.”...
…Experts say there should probably be more retractions: A 2009 meta-analysis of 18 surveys of scientists, for instance, found that about 2 percent of respondents admitted to having “fabricated, falsified, or modified data or results at least once,” the authors write, with slightly more than 33 percent admitting to “other questionable research practices.” Surveys like these have led the Retraction Watch team to estimate that 1 out of 50 papers ought to be retracted on ethical grounds or for error. Currently, less than 1 out of 1,000 get removed.
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
Flaco remains at large!
It’s been nine months since the Eurasian Eagle-Owl escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and all attempts to recapture him have ended in defeat. Instead, Flaco has become a beloved Manhattan celebrity, feasting on the local rat population and attracting crowds of bird-watchers with his magnificent plumage. The New York Times has tried to anthropomorphize him, comparing his cage at the zoo to a human’s tiny apartment, but this misses the point. Flaco is just Flaco, and he lives life on his own terms.
For our New York readers, Slate has a helpful guide on how to practice proper “owl-iquette,” if you happen to find yourself in Flaco’s neighborhood.
(PHOTO: Manhattan Bird Alert, via Twitter)
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. Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.