Sept. 22, 2023 ❧ Biden's border cruelty, Mink liberation, and Chicago's publicly-owned grocery stores
Plus, a ban on Anne Frank's diary, a feud between Canada and India, a union drive at Wells Fargo, a hoodie in Congress, and several gargantuan hogs...
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
FAMILY SEPARATION CONTINUES UNDER BIDEN
The Customs and Border Protection under President Biden continued to separate migrant children from their families this summer. According to a newly released report by Dr. Paul Wise, an independent federal court monitor who oversees conditions in migrant facilities, children as young as eight years old were taken from their parents for several days as a result of “overcrowding.” The report says:
Under this policy, children are held in pods devoted to UCs [unaccompanied children]. CBP has regularly placed older boys apprehended with their mothers in male UC holding areas. The
justification for this practice was based on the lack of available space in the family holding pods. Interviews with parents and children found that there were minimal or no opportunities for phone contact or direct interaction between parent and child. The separation of families and the lack of interaction while in custody do significant, and potentially lasting, harm to children, particularly younger children… None of the interviewed children had visited with their parents since they were separated, including children who had been separated for 4 days.
He notes that the children he interviewed “revealed significant emotional distress related to separation, including sustained crying and disorientation.”
The report goes on to detail that CBP failed to provide children with the required warm sleeping garments and sleeping mats, while lights in the “holding pods” (a very dystopian-sounding phrase) could not be dimmed. Meanwhile, children were often denied showers, and the area they were held in often failed to meet hygiene standards. In the Recommendations section, Dr. Wise frankly states in the very first sentence: “The primary recommendation is to terminate the separation of young children (children less than 16 years of age) from their parents while in CBP custody.”
A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection stated that “The situations described within the report are completely different from previous policies of separating families”—that is, the zero-tolerance policies put in place during the Trump administration, which separated more than 5,000 families as a matter of standard procedure. Given that Biden nailed Trump for the obvious moral horror of “kids in cages” throughout the 2020 campaign, it’s rather difficult to stomach the assessment that, actually, our baby jails are the NICE baby jails, not like those MEAN baby jails from before. There are around 1,000 children who still remain separated from their parents nearly three years after Biden took office. Between January 2021 and August 2022, U.S. authorities identified 372 new cases of family separation.
As Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center told The Texas Observer last year:
This administration came in really trying to distinguish themselves on immigration policy. The main pillar of distinguishing themselves was that they would not carry out family separation. They just have completely failed to actually live up to that promise to stop this—the most abusive, traumatic practice that can be carried out in immigration enforcement.
FIGHTING BACK
SOMEONE HAS BEEN FREEING THE MINKS
Last Sunday morning brought a rude awakening for Richard H. Stahl Sons, a commercial fur farm near Sunbury, Pennsylvania. At some point in the night, someone cut a large hole in the farm’s chain-link fence and released between 6,000 and 8,000 minks from their captivity. Local news stations were quick to call this person a “vandal,” glossing over the fact that the animals were supposed to be killed en masse, flayed, and made into tacky luxury goods. As Joseph Buddenberg, an activist with the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, explained in a Fox 56 interview, industrial mink farming is a truly hideous practice:
What the fur industry does to animals is egregiously cruel and violent. They cram mink into tiny, wired cages for their entire lives, and then they gas them every November. Every summer, we will see activists break in and free these animals from captivity and violent death… The past two years, we've seen over 20,000 animals liberated from fur farms in the United States.
Sure enough, the Stahl incident is just the latest in a string of mustelid jailbreaks. Back in November 2022, someone released between 25,000 and 40,000 minks from an even bigger fur farm in Van Wert, Ohio, 10,000 of whom remain at large. (The farm itself was forced to close, perhaps permanently.) The following month, another 4,000 minks were released from the Scholten farm in Wayland, Michigan. Then, in late August 2023, activists in Wisconsin released 3,000 minks from the Olsen Fur Farm; unfortunately, police and game wardens say they were able to recapture 90 percent of the escapees, but that still leaves around 300 who can live peacefully in the woods where they belong.
It’s not clear whether these are the actions of an organized group, or simply disparate people who see the most recent mink release in the news and get inspired to try their own. In some cases, the rescuers have left behind graffiti associated with the Animal Liberation Front, using slogans like “Until all cages are empty,” but since the ALF is a leaderless, anarchistic collective, that tells us very little. Following the new Pennsylvania raid, someone claiming to be the mink liberator has left a message with the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. What it lacks in capitalization, it makes up for in spirit:
dear mink murderer stahl, fur commission secretary: i saw your mink prison recently and was not impressed. you have dozens of sheds but so many are falling apart. thankfully your operation seems to have gotten smaller over the years. when will you learn that animal abuse isn’t worth it?
[...] people need to see the filthy & cramped conditions where these territorial & genetically wild animals are kept up to four in a single cage. and the joy that is possible when they experience freedom. when the cage latches were opened the mink jumped out to experience their first steps in grass and mud. i hope most have escaped to freedom and no more animals are ever imprisoned and slaughtered here again. whatever happened after i left i hope it was expensive.
Compared to that joy, of a living creature suddenly redeemed from a death sentence, who could possibly care about a little property damage? To the minks and their human friends: run fast, dodge well, and stay free!
PAST AFFAIRS
Take a look back at one of the best pieces of early Current Affairs content—the Manatee Facts Podcast, hosted by Nathan J. Robinson!
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The city of Chicago is considering publicly-owned grocery stores as a way of addressing “food deserts.” Last Wednesday, Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a press release saying that his office would “work alongside partners to [envision] what a municipally owned grocery store in Chicago could look like,” citing statistics on the lack of healthy food options in various parts of the city. In particular, the Mayor’s office says, “63.5% of residents in West Englewood and 52% of residents in East Garfield Park live more than half a mile from their nearest grocery store,” compared to less than 1 percent in the wealthier West Town area. Way back in 2017, Current Affairs argued for a government-run service like this in an article called “A Public Option for Food,” and although the policy is still in the very earliest planning stages in Chicago, it’s nice to see it move closer to becoming a reality. Meanwhile, the National Review is horrified, which is usually a sure sign that something is a good idea.
❧ Wells Fargo workers are trying to unionize. In Axios, Emily Peck has a new analysis of organizing efforts at the banking giant, which is the only large bank in the U.S. to see a significant union campaign in recent years. Currently, she writes, “about 1,000 bank employees—from call center workers to software engineers and compliance officers” are involved, with support from the Communications Workers of America. In an internal PowerPoint presentation that leaked this April, company executives expressed worries about a “new generation of employees with activist experience,” and noted a “marked increase in flyer distribution” for the CWA, listing specific workplaces where flyers had been spotted. According to Peck, “improved staffing levels and the ability to work remotely” are among the workers’ core concerns, along with a fundamental distrust of Wells Fargo after the company’s notorious fake accounts scandal:
“I was at Wells Fargo from the start. I was told to sell, sell, sell," said Trevor Brown, who's worked for the bank in Phoenix for 10 years. He filed a charge at the NLRB last week after the union flyers he was putting up were repeatedly torn down.
With labor action at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and many other national businesses over the last few years, could the financial sector itself be next?
❧ A Texas substitute teacher has been fired for assigning a 2018 graphic novel about Anne Frank to her eighth-grade class after parents complained that it was “inappropriate.” The book is adapted from the famous diary of the Jewish teenager who described her experience hiding from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam and later perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The graphic novel, adapted by Ari Folman and Illustrated by David Polonsky reportedly contains a section in which Frank discusses having her period and discusses her desire to show her breasts to and kiss a friend of the same sex (gasp!). This is tame compared to the more frequent and explicit discussions of sex also appear in the unabridged version of Frank’s original diary—which the graphic novel attempts to be faithful to.
Upon discovering that this book was shared with the class, school officials promptly sent a bone-chilling email informing parents that the teacher had been fired for showing a book that “was not approved” and that there was “an active investigation” into her. We’ve covered Republican states’ ridiculous bans on books containing discussions of race and LGBTQ relationships before. This is not the first time this adaptation of Frank’s has been challenged—Moms For Liberty, the Hitler-quoting, Holocaust remembrance-interrupting right-wing activist group, has gotten it banned in Florida schools too.
There is something just a bit too on the nose about censoring a book about the crimes of the Nazis, given their…heated…relationship with literature they found distasteful (not to mention that one of the Nazis’ first targets was a sexuality research institute that was among the first to advocate for gay and transgender rights). Anne Frank’s diary has been one of the most widely read pieces of literature about the Holocaust—and considered essential reading for middle and high schoolers—for decades. This is precisely because it comes from a perspective that they can relate to and empathize with: that of a young person who has many of the same dreams, fears, and experiences as they do—including the confusion of feeling romantic attraction for the first time. Frank was 13 years old when she began to write her diary—in other words, she could have been a classmate of the kids who were not allowed to read this book about her. If she was old enough to write about what she experienced, children of the same age are old enough to read about it.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The University of Rojava has announced an academic partnership with the sociology department of Binghamton University, in New York. Founded in July 2016, the university is one of the most important non-military institutions in the autonomous region. Like the Rojava revolution itself, its founding principles are socialist, feminist, and anti-imperialist, and the university has previously hosted international speakers like Noam Chomsky in its annual Freedom Lectures. On Tuesday, its faculty declared a more in-depth relationship with Binghamton University, promising “joint research projects in areas of mutual interest, the exchange of academic publications and reports, and the organisation of symposiums, panel discussions, and conferences” in years to come, along with “student exchanges between the two universities.” It’s an important milestone in Rojava’s effort to build a lasting civil society from the aftermath of Syria’s civil war—in which Kurdish militias were instrumental in defeating ISIS—and a repudiation of the worldview of the Turkish government, which sees the autonomous region as merely a loose collection of Kurdish terrorist groups. Increasingly becoming a respected member of the world’s academic community, Rojava is clearly far more.
For more on Rojava’s practice of decentralized democracy, check out our interview with political philosopher and author Janet Biehl!
❧ The Biden administration has approved an extensive military and economic deal with Bahrain, despite the country’s horrible human rights record. If this news causes a sense of deja vu, it’s because the U.S. recently did something very similar with Egypt. Bahrain’s track record is, if anything, even worse: just a month ago, Amnesty International condemned the country’s twelve-year imprisonment of Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, a pioneering humanitarian activist who has been “subjected to severe physical, sexual, and psychological torture” during his time in jail. A hereditary monarchy, Bahrain is one of several Arab Gulf countries to hold harsh crackdowns against homosexuality in recent years, with King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa warning that “we will not allow it in any way to prejudice our system of values and traditions.” Yet despite all this, the U.S. has committed to a legally binding agreement that, according to State Department sources, would require it to “consult and provide assistance if Bahrain faces an imminent security threat” of any kind, effectively taking its side in regional disputes. Bahrain is strategically important because it shares a border with Iran, and hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet—and so, the Biden administration has clearly decided that its grotesque human rights abuses are an afterthought, compared to its role in the pursuit of geopolitical power.
For more on this subject, read the new article in Current Affairs, “Biden Couldn’t Care Less About Human Rights” by Nathan J. Robinson, who writes:
“Maryam al-Khawaja has been trying to travel to Bahrain to protest her father’s ongoing detention. She knows that in doing so, she risks being arrested or killed. Human Rights Watch has made the simple moral point that “If Maryam al-Khawaja can have the courage to risk her life for democracy and human rights in Bahrain, the least the Biden Administration can do is show the political strength to use its leverage to call on its allied government to free its political prisoners.” But on human rights, the Biden administration has shown consistent moral cowardice. The result is that some of the worst, most abusive regimes in the world are emboldened. Want to dismember a dissident? Shoot a journalist? The U.S. will look the other way if you keep buying weapons from us and selling us oil.
This is not new. Despite much stirring rhetoric about the noble U.S. commitment to democratic values, in practice U.S. presidents have always supported hideous dictatorships when doing so was in the perceived “U.S. national interest.” Joe Biden is not unique among U.S. presidents in this respect, although he is more hypocritical than Donald Trump (who has never pretended to care about human rights). Nevertheless, Biden’s atrocious record should deeply outrage anyone who believes in the basic rights of human beings around the world. There is blood on his hands, and we have no excuse not to notice it.”
❧ Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is accusing the Indian government of ordering the assassination of an exiled Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia this June. Trudeau claims there are “credible allegations” that Indian agents were involved in the killing of Nijjar, while India denies the accusation. Each country has expelled the other’s diplomats in what is becoming an increasingly bitter international rift, but the U.S. —who views India as a critical ally against China—has hesitated to take a side.
Born in Punjab, Nijjar immigrated to Canada (home to nearly 800,000 Sikhs—who make up more than 2 percent of its population) as a young man. He was a vocal advocate for the creation of an independent state called Khalistan for India’s Sikh minority, which frequently faces discrimination from India’s Hindu government. Modi has called Canada a “safe haven for terrorists” despite Khalistan-separatist violence basically ending at the beginning of the 1990s. According to the World Sikh Organization of Canada, Nijjar “often led peaceful protests against the violation of human rights actively taking place in India and in support of Khalistan.” In The Atlantic, Daniel Block writes,
Sikh farmers played a major role in forcing Modi to withdraw his agricultural-reform bills in 2021, one of his few political defeats. The prime minister may worry that, as his Hindu-nationalist project becomes more dominant, Sikhs could throw more obstacles in its path—or rekindle a separatist insurgency. He may have decided that the time has come to wage an open battle against the religion. But if he thought that doing so would preempt calls for secession, he miscalculated: Sikh activists across the world have already responded to Nijjar’s death with protests, some of them calling for the creation of Khalistan.
A LETTER TO THE BRIEFING
In our last briefing, we covered the prospect of India changing its name to “Bharat,” a move championed by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist movement, which claims the name India is a remnant of British colonialism.
We received an email from one of our wonderful readers, Udit, who has also recommended other important stories about India and provided us with lots of valuable sources. In the email, Udit provided additional context about why Modi and his movement against the name “India” are mistaken. Udit writes:
Hi Stephen and Alex,
Firstly, I really appreciate the coverage of happenings in India. It is very encouraging to see this in Current Affairs Briefing. Secondly, I did want to send in some extra possible context regarding the change to Bharat which has caused quite a stir.” One is that our constitution already recognises both India and Bharat. Second is that Congress, BJP's opposition recently formed an alliance called... INDIA. There is absolutely no basis on India being a name given to us from colonial days. The Indus Valley Civilization has long preceded that, The Indus River got its name from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which is also where the word Hindu originated from. Even "Hindu" was never a term that was originally used by Hindus to call each other. It was actually always what people from outside called us. Like they basically meant "Indus" but added a H in it. I'm learning Polish since I work in Poland for a while and the term for Indians in it is "Hindusem" and India is "Indii", which I think is derived more from Latin.
So when they say India is a colonial name, that's just farce…because the name has predated British invasion by millennia.
It may be that the reason for this push is a lot more childish. The opposition chose INDIA so BJP chose BHARAT. Eitherways, most of us are skeptical that this might actually pass. Modi seems extremely desperate lately. Note that our most popular sport still remains Cricket, which is something we inherited from our colonial past. They won't touch that since it'll incite absolute fury from the crowd. They are also presenting a bill to reserve a third of parliament seats for women. However, this is not due until 2029 union elections and they opposed it in 2010. So, it seems like they're just pulling a lot of desperate moves to get their votebank.
The bit for renaming places is highly concerning. BJP tried to rename my home city Hyderabad to Bhagyanager. My parents, who are ardent BJP supporters and Hindus who migrated to this city from North, totally supported this. But, luckily it did not get to pass as Hyderabad has somehow been low on communal conflicts. Hopefully this nonsense stops.
Eitherways, I do hope they don't remove India from the Constitution.
Best Regards,
Udit
You, too, can write us: briefing@currentaffairs.org
CROOKS vs. SICKOS vs. THE OCCASIONAL DECENT PERSON
❧ Sarah McBride, the United States’ first openly transgender state senator, holds a commanding lead in the Delaware congressional primary. McBride took office in January 2021, representing the state’s 1st district. Before that, she’d worked as an activist for LGBTQ rights with organizations like Equality Delaware and the Human Rights Campaign, and as an intern in the Obama White House. Now, she’s hoping to replace incumbent Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, who’s resigning to run for the Senate, as Delaware’s sole U.S. Representative. McBride has downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy, saying that “ultimately, I’m not running to be a trans member of Congress,” but to bring “progress on all of the issues that matter to Delawareans of every background.” In truth, her platform has some disappointing elements—on healthcare, she’ll commit only to “supporting any measure that increases access or lower costs for healthcare,” which is rather vague, while her closest rival, fellow Democrat Eugene Young, explicitly endorses “a Medicare for All type system.” On climate, too, Young supports the Green New Deal, while McBride’s position is more nebulous, talking about “investing in sustainable energy and attracting green jobs” without specifics. Still, McBride’s presence as a voice for LGBTQ rights in Congress would be a welcome antidote to the noxious anti-trans rhetoric spewing from elected officials in the GOP, which has reached a fever pitch recently. According to recent primary polling, McBride holds a 21-point lead, and is the “go-to candidate” for 60 percent of Delaware’s female voters. If the pattern holds, we may be seeing her on the House floor sooner rather than later.
❧ The Senate is relaxing its dress code and will now allow members to enter the chamber wearing casual attire. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) loosened the rule apparently to accommodate Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who likes to show up to the chamber in a hoodie and gym shorts.
Republicans (the party that detests “elites,” remember) are almost universally up in arms about the Senate no longer being exclusively filled with special, fancy lads in tailored suits. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said the act “doesn’t respect the Senate as an institution,” while Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said, “Senator John Fetterman is emblematic of the downfall of society.” Even Joe Manchin (D-WV) couldn’t resist saying it violated the “decorum” of the hallowed seat of government.
First off, caring about how other people dress is quintessential nerd behavior and evidence that many people in government never got over the power trip they experienced when they got to be hall monitors in 4th grade. Secondly, the Senate is a ridiculous, unrepresentative institution that should be disgraced at every turn—if a hoodie and basketball shorts help to hasten its delegitimization, then we’re all for it.
That said, we at Current Affairs would also be in favor of a more stringent dress code under certain circumstances. For instance, we believe that senators should be made to wear themed attire related to whatever piece of legislation they happen to be making: Appropriations for a new naval base up for debate? All senators must dress in full sailing regalia, with the party leaders donning ceremonial admirals’ hats. Want to cut Food Stamps? You must appear on the Senate floor dressed as a ham, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. We can countenance the absurdity of this chamber’s continued existence if it means we get to look at some silly costumes.
PIG FACT OF THE WEEK
Some pigs are big as hell.
Back in 2019, farmers in China breeding obscenely large hogs to deal with a pork shortage caused by a bout of African Swine Fever. One farmer raised a pig who grew to be 1,653 pounds and took home the title “King of Pigs” in Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s Henan Province, which participants were required to be at least 1,120 pounds to enter. For reference, the average adult pig is around 300 pounds.
The King of Pigs—who is 7 feet long and 3.5 feet tall, was apparently so large that he could carry a full-grown human on his back without issue:
Despite the pork shortage, his owner said they planned to keep the pig alive “just to find out how much more it will grow.”
But the King of Pigs is but a runt compared to some others who have walked the Earth. Another Chinese pig, who died in 2004, was just shy of 2,000 pounds and named “Ton Pig.”
America, though, holds the world record for the largest pig of all time—“Big Bill,” who was born near Martin, Tennessee in 1930 and owned by farmer Walter J. Chappell. According to Weakley County Tennesee’s History website,
“Bill was not an ordinary pig, he was big but he was not fat… By the spring of 1932, at the age of two, Bill had went from weighing 400 pounds in the fall of 1931 to the weight of 1450 pounds, measuring 100 inches from tip of nose to tip of tail, standing 47 inches tall and measuring 13 inches from ankle to the hoof. A monstrous hog this size created a stir…Soon people from a far away as Knoxville were flocking the Chappell Farm to view the huge pig… Chappell took Bill to many neighboring states, exhibiting him at schools and universities, by now Chappell realized Bill was a prodigy, although no one could explain the unusual growth of the hog. Arrangements and negotiations had been made to take Bill to the Worlds Fair in Chicago during 1933, Big Bill would [surely] have caused big commotion in the pork capital of the north.”
“He was a just increasing all the time…“I think he weighed 1,500 or 1,600 pounds and kept growing,” said Walter Chappell’s son Robert. We just fed him general hog stuff, farm food. Dad got to feeding him potatoes and sorghum molasses with a little shorts in with it. He would eat a five-gallon bucket full before we turned around. That’s the way it got started…He growed into a monster. My dad went to calling him Bill, and he got so big they added Big to his name. He’d eat anything. A bunch of us boys, we’d jump up on that hog, and he’d just walk around. We’d just play with him. All of us loved him and thought the world of him.”
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.