The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership by Siva Vaidhyanathan

 In blocking the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris, Jeff Bezos is not acting cowardly so much as slyly

 

Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.

The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.

Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.

 

Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.

While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.

 

That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.

Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.

Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.

Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.

 

Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.

In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.

One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.

The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.

Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.

Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.

So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.

Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.

Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.

So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.

Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.

Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.

Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

Feds see uptick in online chatter among extremists preparing for ‘civil war by Betsy Woodruff Swan

 A Department of Homeland Security report says the discussions are tied to the 2024 election and concerns about immigration.

 U.S. intelligence authorities are seeing a rise in online discussions among domestic extremists about preparations for what they imagine to be an imminent civil war, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.

The discussions — which largely take place in anonymous, unmoderated online forums — are linked to the 2024 election and concerns about immigration.

 “Some domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are reacting to the 2024 election season and prominent policy issues by engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war, raising the risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” the report from the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis says.

The report, dated Sept. 6, 2024, reflects widely held concerns that violence could mar the election. It was obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a pro-transparency nonprofit, and was first reported by Wired. DHS regularly circulates intelligence reports like this one to state and local law enforcement agencies.

After President Joe Biden won the election four years ago, a mob of former President Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to derail the transfer of power. And in the years since, many public officials and election workers have faced sustained harassment and threats.

At least five people who promoted the idea of imminent civil war this year now face criminal charges, according to the report. Four are accused of making violent threats or preparing for violence. The fifth is charged with murdering and beheading his father, a retired federal employee, to try to “save America from traitors” in a purported war between the government and the citizens.

The DHS report said that “perceptions of election fraud” could trigger violence, as could fears of mass migration and crimes committed by non-U.S. citizens. One internet user said a hypothetical executive order granting citizenship to migrants would justify murder, according to the report.

“Biden does that executive order, we shoot all democrat officials,” the user wrote. “And the supporting federal agents.”

While warning of the potential for violence, the report said large-scale action by extremists is unlikely because of law enforcement infiltration of online groups and the convictions of prominent organizers of the Jan. 6 attack.

But the document also says extremists are increasingly using encrypted channels to limit the feds’ visibility into their communications.

A DHS spokesperson said the department urges state and local law enforcement to “to remain vigilant” to possible threats.

DHS is far from alone in warning about election-season violence. Law enforcement agencies around the country have been scrambling to develop polling-site safety plans with local election administrators. And the Justice Department has put in place a task force to prosecute people who threaten election workers.

The counties that may try not to certify the 2024 election by Norman Eisen, Norm Eisen Norman Eisen Senior Fellow - Governance Studies Samara Angel, and Clare Boone

 

One of the many strategies that could be used to confuse and delay the results of the 2024 election is the refusal to certify elections, particularly at the county level. We have already seen this tried in places like Cochise County, Arizona in 2022 and Washoe County, Nevada in 2024, and similar efforts seem to be percolating now in counties across the nation. It failed in those places and elsewhere but may be tried again in November. Counting the votes is a ministerial duty and not one that involves discretion by county election officials as we explained in the first essay in this series. Nonetheless, the election subversion movement has seized on this strategy as a vehicle to attempt to sabotage results or confidence in them, to sow chaos or simply to vent spleen.

In this essay, we examine the 50 counties across the seven swing states that pose the highest risk of attempting non-certification in November, however futile. In Section I we provide a table grouping them in four categories based on the degree of risk of attempted non-certification: high concern (Tier 1), medium concern (Tier 2), concern (Tier 3), and worth watching (Tier 4). In Section II, we offer a more detailed discussion of the 15 high- and medium- concern counties. In Section III, we offer state-by-state maps visualizing the location of these counties.

To rank risk, we primarily considered county-by-county factors, including whether there is a recent history of non-certification, whether the county election officials currently on the board have a record of voting against certification, and whether these officials form the majority of the county election body.¹

We also took into account state-level developments that directly impact the county-level process. For example, Michigan counties were weighted relatively lower risk than those in other states following Senate Bill 529, which went into effect on February 13, 2024. It clarifies that certification is a ministerial, clerical, and nondiscretionary duty. It also states that the board must canvass all votes. Georgia counties, on the other hand, were weighted relatively higher risk due to a recent slew of proposed changes by the State Election Board which could undermine the certification process—a number of which are now facing litigation challenges (and have been struck down, though appeals are expected).

For an overview of the county certification process in general, see the first essay in this series. In this essay, we ordered counties in the chart within each category alphabetically; given the degree of uncertainty associated with predicted future events, rankings within each category are uncertain. Links to each county board’s website are included.

 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-counties-that-may-try-not-to-certify-the-2024-election/

 

During the American Revolution, Brits weren’t just facing off against white Protestant Christians − US patriots are diverse and have been since Day 1 by Adam Jortner

 

In 1770, Barnard Gratz of Philadelphia wrote to a friend complaining about a recent speech by King George III. Gratz, an American patriot, wrote that the speech “was such narishkeit” that it was “not worth the postage.”

Narishkeit is Yiddish for “nonsense.”

Gratz was one of hundreds of Jews who joined the American Revolution as soldiers and leaders: Gershom Seixas led his synagogue out of New York when the British invaded and led what was probably the first Jewish prayer group in Connecticut. Solomon Bush earned the rank of lieutenant colonel in the American army; at the time, no Jew in Europe could serve as a military officer. At the battle of Beaufort, one of the patriot militias was nicknamed “the Jew Company” because 28 of its 40 members were Jewish.

Yet belief persists that the American Revolution was somehow a Christian event – and that the country it created is therefore a Christian nation. This is a position usually defended with vague statements about what the Founding Fathers wanted. The general idea is that back in the day, everyone was Christian and so, of course, the founding was Christian. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution refer to a “Christian nation” or a church. They don’t even mention Jesus Christ.

 

But as a historian, I didn’t want to get caught up in these kinds of arguments. I wanted to know something about the people who actually did the fighting in the war.

What I discovered is that when it came to fighting Britain, there were plenty of Jewish patriots signing up. America’s revolutionaries were not a uniform bunch of Christian white guys. The Revolution was a religiously diverse place, from Jews and religious skeptics to Catholics and Christian dissenters. And that matters for how the U.S. defines itself and its freedom today.

Jews join the cause

When the war started in 1775, the roughly 2,500 Jews in the Colonies did not have religious freedom. British law allowed them to practice, but they were classified as “residents” rather than subjects. They could live there, but they had no say in the laws under which they lived. For the most part, only property-owning Protestant men could elect or be elected to their legislature. Jews were simply not considered people the way Protestant Christians were.

So when the break with Britain arrived, American Jews flocked to the standard of liberty. Here at last was a chance to become citizens.

 

Under British rule, anyone who exercised political authority had to take an oath affirming their Christian faith. The pro-independence groups and militias that sprung up amid the war had no such rules. Mordecai Sheftall, who lived in Georgia, was one of the few people there who had pledged to resist the Coercive Acts: Britain’s efforts to blockade Boston and place Massachusetts under military rule after the Boston Tea Party. When the war broke out, Sheftall became chairman of Georgia’s de facto government, in defiance of British rule.

Jewish residents took up arms for independence, too. A South Carolina writer praised American Jews fighting for liberty, saying they were “as staunch as any other citizens of this state.” One signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, believed “the Jews in all the states” were patriots. So did royalist Gov. James Wright of Georgia. When the British seized Savannah, Wright banned Jews from the province, calling them “violent rebels and persecutors of the King’s loyal subjects.”

When the war ended, Philadelphia hosted a parade and all the clergy of the city were invited, including Jewish leaders. There was even a kosher table set out for them after the celebration.

‘Second-status’ Christians

Nor were Jews the only marginalized group to join the cause. Roman Catholics also signed up. Like Jews, Catholics were barred under the British from serving in public office. As a Catholic, Charles Carroll could not have served in the royal government of Maryland, but he went on to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

 

The Baptists of Virginia were also held in second-class status. The Colony’s state church did not recognize the Baptists, and they had to pay fines for preaching and even for holding Baptist weddings without state sanction. Virginia Baptists promised their support to the Revolution only if Virginia would offer them religious freedom. The Virginia Legislature complained but suspended its state church to build whatever support it could find. Virginia Baptists joined the fight in droves.

Baptists, Catholics and Jews were not put off by any of the Revolution’s radical deists: a mostly unorganized group of religious thinkers who believed in God and reason, but not revelation or miracles. Their ranks included military officer Ethan Allen of Vermont, who later wrote a book denying the divinity of the Bible. The Revolution did not ask its members how they prayed.

The urge for liberty spread beyond questions of religious differences. Although George Washington did not originally want to enlist Black men in the army, he realized the Revolution was doomed without them, and thousands of Black Americans joined the cause in the hope that liberty would mean the end of slavery. Women such as Deborah Sampson wore men’s clothing to take up arms against the British. The revolutionaries even had a Muslim ally in the form of Hyder Ali and his armies. The Muslim ruler of the kingdom of Mysore, in southern India, Ali fought with France against Britain in the 1780s, and American revolutionaries named a ship after him.

 

Here from the start

In recent years, violence and anger have risen against minority groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans. Part of the false rhetoric about these groups has been that they are “new”: that they appeared after America was created and are not really part of the American experiment. In fact, they were here from the beginning. They also fought for the Revolution. Their patriotism is as old as anyone else’s.

Not only were the people who founded the nation not all Christian, but after independence was secured, religious freedom actually increased.

States with synagogues all lost the Christian requirement for public office by 1792. Virginia created full religious freedom in 1786. And Washington wrote, “It is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest offices that are known in the United States.”

Calls for a Christian nation are historically false. They are not a reversion to something old; they are something new. Religious diversity in America, and the freedom of different religions to be full Americans? That’s old. As old as the Revolution.

'I said to myself, dirt doesn't burn': The people rebuilding their homes with earth by Nick Aspinwall

 

These people are rebuilding homes lost to wildfires in the western US – only this time they are using a material that they hope won't burn.

Melanie Glover's back window opens to a sweeping view of the Rocky Mountains. When she rebuilt her home in summer 2024, she wanted to keep this view.

On 30 December 2021, rapidly moving winds had carried hot flames across these plains to her neighbourhood in the Denver suburb of Superior, Colorado, destroying her home and nearly 1,000 others. Her husband, Matteo Rebeschini, and children were trapped in the front foyer for 30 minutes as their house burned, before escaping unharmed once the fire passed.

The fire brought trauma that lasts to this day, but Glover and Rebeschini were determined to rebuild. So they did – only this time, they used earth blocks.

"We want to be able to feel safe," says Glover. "We wanted to build a house so that if something like this happens again, we have time."

 

Upon exposure to heat, the blocks hardened and turned to red clay, similar to baking pottery in a kiln. More than just showing the earth blocks can withstand fire, the tests – which have been presented as a peer-reviewed conference paper but are not yet published in a journal – therefore indicate they strengthen after exposure. They perform just as well in dry climates, Barbato says, while in wet weather, they even improve, as the material hardens making it tougher for water to penetrate.

"Even if your house burns down, if the walls stay up, they are safe to be reused," he says.

At present, however, no houses made with these blocks have yet been put to the test with a fire, although a test has been conducted on a single wall.

But while it is early days for the research on earth bricks, some real-life examples do appear to indicate these houses could be capable of withstanding fire more than other buildings. When the Bobcat Fire swept through Littlerock, California in 2020, for example, the land around Stevie Love's earth home, built in 2008, was blackened by fire for miles around, but her home survived.

A few years earlier, a fire crew prepared for another wildfire to potentially cross the hills behind their home. "They described our house as a 'stand alone'," Love says, meaning that if a fire came, its adobe walls and steel roof would protect it. "They said the fast-moving fire would just blow by our house."

 

And in 2016, in the Manzano Mountains of New Mexico, the Dog Head Fire burned through 18,000 acres (7,280 hectares) and destroyed 12 homes – but an old adobe church standing alongside them was left intact.

For Glover, an avid gardener, her inspiration to build from earth came from her garden.

After the 2021 fire, she returned to her property and found flowerpots that had melted, leaving several unharmed piles of dirt behind. "I said to myself, dirt doesn't burn," she recalls. "We should build a house of dirt."

Glover, who is from Northern Ireland, and her Italian husband were both used to earth and brick structures with thick walls from their home countries. "It didn't scare me," she says. "Whereas having a conventional stick-built American house scared me."

 

Not long after the fire, Glover drove past a billboard advertising Colorado Earth, a Brighton, Colorado company making compressed earth blocks called EcoBlox from waste material sourced from a local quarry.

Lisa Morey, the founder and owner of Colorado Earth, has been building with earth blocks since 2000, when she came across the work of earth builder Vince Ogletree while studying architectural design in New Zealand.

The company's earth blocks are made by mixing dirt with limestone and water, then using a hydraulic press to compress them into solid blocks that are ready to use once they dry. Unlike bricks, they're made without being heated, dramatically reducing the embodied carbon used to produce each block, Morey says.

"[An EcoBlox wall is] an unfired structural masonry wall that's made from local materials," Morey says. "It's resistant to mould, fire and bullets. And bugs don't like them."

Barbato's work has also indicated that earth homes could lead to substantially fewer emissions if they do burn in wildfires, with another peer-reviewed conference paper finding earth block building results in 58% fewer emissions than light-frame wood buildings.

 

Tiny beads of perlite, a lightweight volcanic glass used for insulation, blow into Morey's hair as she walks around a construction site in the Denver suburb of Longmont when I visit in late September 2024. Here, a family is rebuilding a farm complex that was destroyed in a fire several years ago.

Melanie MacKinnon says she and her husband had already been thinking of rebuilding when the fire happened. "When we moved here, we had a plan for the farm," she says. "After the fire, we realised that the farm has a plan for us."

MacKinnon grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico where adobe buildings are commonplace. "I know what it's like to live inside of that," she said. "We don't need air conditioning. It's fire resistant because it's not made out of timber."

The earth homes being constructed by Morey have additional features that prevent wildfires, designed to increase the odds a rapidly moving fire will pass without finding something to catch onto and ignite.

 Glover's completed home, for example, has thick, high-efficiency windows that, in a worst-case scenario, would take hours for fire to penetrate. There's a total absence of protruding roof vents, which can give flaming embers an avenue to get inside. Instead, there's a centralised ventilation system that can be closed in minutes when experiencing strong winds. "Fire's not going to get into the gaps," she says. "It's completely sealed."

 

These add to what already feels like an envelope of protection from the elements. "My clients who live in these homes, they say that there could be an Armageddon going on outside and they wouldn't know," Morey says.

Glover says windy days still bring traumatic memories of the fire that destroyed her previous home and took the lives of several pets. For weeks after the fire, she would lie awake imagining the destruction. "It was just flames, flames, flames. It's horrible," she says. "It's your home. It's like your sanctuary."

As she speaks, an impromptu windstorm sends strong gusts through her backyard, lashing her balcony and metal flower beds. But inside her living room, it barely makes a sound.

 

"That would be a lot more intense in a normal house, just so you know," Glover says.

Glover knows that the house is not infallible. "I have never said that this house is fireproof," she says. "The blocks are fireproof. But… I can't live in a house without windows and [a] roof. And I've done the very best I possibly can."

There is still an uphill battle for more earth homes to be built throughout the United States, where fast-paced construction with environmentally unfriendly materials is normalised.

Several of Glover's neighbours considered building earth homes after the 2021 fire. But they ultimately opted against it, spooked by the challenges of closely managing a project seen as eccentric by most builders.

 

Earthen homes have a deep history throughout the world, from pit cave dwellings in northern China to the mud homes of Sana'a, Yemen. Indigenous communities in the south-western US states of Colorado and New Mexico used adobe, or "mud brick" in Spanish, to build earthen homes for thousands of years, using their thick walls to keep homes cool during hot summers and retain the sun's heat during cold winters.

While earthen construction has been largely neglected by US builders for decades, the material has an increasingly relevant use in modern times. As climate change increases the risk of wildfires through the western US, homeowners like Glover are beginning to turn to it for a new reason: as a strategy to protect themselves from fire.

Their intuition is backed up by early research, which has found earthen homes could show extraordinary promise in resisting wildfires – and could even strengthen after exposure.

"Properly done and more historically done, an adobe house has a better chance of surviving a wildfire," says Quentin Wilson, a former volunteer firefighter and a board member of Adobe in Action, a non-profit based in Santa Fe, New Mexico which promotes building with earth.

 

That said, traditional adobe homes in New Mexico are hardly fireproof – they generally use protruding wooden beams called vigas, which can easily catch fire.

But when adobe homes are constructed with the threat of fire in mind, builders can eliminate things like exposed wood and air vents, often adding earthen beams or in some cases large planks of wood that don't protrude from the house. "There's really nothing there that will ignite", says Wilson. "These are pretty much absolutely fireproof, flameproof materials."

In 2021, Michele Barbato, co-director of the Climate Adaptation Research Center at the University of California, Davis, and his students did a series of tests on compressed earth blocks, made at his testing area using soil mixed with water and chemical stabilisers. The researchers took a blowtorch to a compressed earth block at nearly 1,900C (3,452F), far hotter than an average wildfire. They also put a block in a 1,200C (2,192F) furnace.

 

A statue of Jefferson Davis, second from left, is on display in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill in Washington. A slaveholder, Davis represented Mississippi in the Senate and House before the American Civil War. AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File Many wealthy members of Congress are descendants of rich slaveholders − new study demonstrates the enduring legacy of slavery

Neil K R Sehgal & Ashwini Sehgal 

 

The legacy of slavery in America remains a divisive issue, with sharp political divides.

Some argue that slavery still contributes to modern economic inequalities. Others believe its effects have largely faded.

One way to measure the legacy of slavery is to determine whether the disproportionate riches of slaveholders have been passed down to their present-day descendants.

Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. Doing so requires unearthing data for a large number of people on slaveholder ancestry, current wealth and other factors such as age and education. 

 

But in a new study, we tackled this challenge by focusing on one of the few groups of Americans for whom such information exists: members of Congress. We found that legislators who are descendants of slaveholders are significantly wealthier than members of Congress without slaveholder ancestry.

How slavery made the South rich

In 1860, one year before the Civil War, the market value of U.S. slaves was larger than that of all American railroads and factories.

At the time of emancipation in 1863, the estimated value of all enslaved people was roughly US$13 trillion in today’s dollars. The lower Mississippi Valley had more millionaires, all of them slaveholders, than anywhere else in the country.

Some post-Civil War historians have argued that emancipation permanently devastated slave-owning families.

More recently, however, historians discovered that, while the South fell behind the North economically immediately following emancipation, many elite slaveholders recovered financially within one or two generations.

They accomplished this by replacing slavery with sharecropping – a kind of indentured servitude that trapped Black farm workers in debt to white landowners – and enacting discriminatory Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. 

 

100 descendants of slaveholders

Using genealogist-verified historical data and financial data from annual congressional disclosures, we examined members of the 117th Congress, which was in session from January 2021 to January 2023.

Of its 535 members, 100 were descendants of slaveholders, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Legislators whose ancestors were large slaveholders – defined in our study as owning 16 or more slaves– have a current median net worth five times larger than their peers whose ancestors were not slaveholders: $5.6 million vs. $1.1 million. These results remained largely the same after accounting for age, race and education.

Wealth creates many privileges – the means to start a business or pursue higher education. And intergenerational wealth transfers can allow these advantages to persist across generations.

Because members of Congress are a highly select group, our results may not apply to all Americans. However, the findings align with other studies on the transfers of wealth and privilege across generations in the U.S. and Europe.

Wealth, these studies find, often stays within rich families across multiple generations. Mechanisms for holding onto wealth include low estate taxes and access to elite social networks and schools. Easy entry into powerful jobs and political influence also play a part.

Privilege with power

But members of Congress do not just inherit wealth and advantages.

They shape the lives of all Americans. They decide how to allocate federal funds, set tax rates and create regulations.

This power is significant. And for those whose families benefited from slavery, it can perpetuate economic policies that maintain wealth inequality.

Beyond inherited wealth, the legacy of slavery endures in policies enacted by those in power – by legislators who may be less likely to prioritize reforms that challenge the status quo.

COVID-19 relief legislation, for example, helped reduce child poverty by more than 70% while bringing racial inequalities in child poverty to historic lows. Congress failed to renew the program in 2022, plunging 5 million more children into poverty, most of them Black and Latino.

The economic deprivation still experienced by Black Americans is the flip side of the privilege enjoyed by slaveowners’ descendants. The median household wealth of white Americans today is six times higher than that of Black Americans – $285,000 versus $45,000.

Meanwhile, federal agencies that enforce antidiscrimination laws remain underfunded. This limits their ability to address racial disparities

 

The path forward

As the enduring economic disparities rooted in slavery become clearer, a growing number of states and municipalities are weighing some form of practical and financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people.

Yet surveys show that most Americans oppose such reparations for slavery. Similarly, Congress has debated slavery reparations many times but never passed a bill.

There are, however, other ways to improve opportunities for historically disadvantaged populations that could gain bipartisan backing.

A majority of Americans, both conservatives and liberal, support increased funding for environmental hazard screening, which assesses the potential impact of a proposed project. They also favor limits on rent increases, better public school funding and raising taxes on the wealthy.

These measures would help dismantle the structural barriers that perpetuate economic disparities. And the role of Congress here is central.

Members of Congress do not bear personal responsibility for their ancestors’ actions. But they have an opportunity to address both the legacies of past injustices and today’s inequalities.

By doing so, they can help create a future where ancestral history does not determine economic destiny.

A Pennsylvania town is thriving with Haitian immigrants – and is the latest target of Republican hate BY Stephen Starr

 Despite a revitalization, Donald Trump wrongfully claimed Charleroi is ‘virtually bankrupt’ with ‘massive crime’

 

There is one thing about her community that makes Kristin Hopkins-Calcek prouder than anything: her city is now one of the few boroughs in Pennsylvania with a growing population.

“We haven’t invested in our borough for a long time,” says the Charleroi council president, “and now we are finally able to do that – it’s because we have a need to.”

Surrounded by retired power plants, railway lines and steel mills, Charleroi in south-west Pennsylvania was once the epitome of Rust belt America. For decades, factories here and in the surrounding area closed and people moved away, its population falling by about 60%.

But in recent years, immigrants have descended on the town of 4,200 people, drawn by well-paying jobs and cheap housing. According to the 2020 census, for the first time in a century, more people chose to make this quiet community on the banks of the Monongahela River their home rather than flee it.

 

The first jobs Rodny Michel could find when he arrived in Charleroi four years ago were line work at a food-preparation company and, later, similarly grueling work at an Amazon factory in a nearby town. Today, as the native of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, sees his community grow in Charleroi, his work day involves turning an empty, dated store on Fallowfield Avenue into a Caribbean restaurant that will serve the town’s growing immigrant community.

“Sometimes I work for 12 hours a day,” he says from inside the Global Food Mart, a Caribbean grocery store where shoppers play arcade games and sift through boxes of tropical fruit.

“It will be the first for our community and I’m proud of that.”

But while locals such as Michel and Hopkins-Calcek see Charleroi as being in the midst of a revitalization, others have tried putting the town’s immigrant communities to political use. It is something that has thrust this tiny community into the national spotlight of America’s bitterly fought and divisive 2024 election.

Last month, Donald Trump wrongfully claimed Charleroi was “virtually bankrupt” and experiencing “massive crime” due to the presence of immigrants, in an attempt to turn immigration into his keystone election platform.

Like Springfield in neighboring Ohio, where bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches followed Trump’s false claims of immigrants eating people’s pets, Charleroi has attracted rightwing YouTubers and KKK groups posting recruitment pamphlets on local Facebook groups.

The former president’s comments have also found support among locals.

“When Covid was here, people were losing their jobs, but these folks were allowed in [to America]. That tells me there was something going on there,” says John Horner, who works part time as a watch fixer on Fallowfield Avenue, where craft stores, empty shopfronts and thrift stores displaying Maga shirts are interspaced with grocery stores catering to the local Caribbean community.

“On a personal level, I am concerned about folks coming across the border. I wasn’t OK with that.”

Overall, Horner says, he has “mixed emotions” about people fleeing war and poverty being accommodated in the US.

“They open up their own stores and they buy off their own people. A lot of them aren’t here because of war, they’re here because of connections – they heard from others [about Charleroi],” he says.

All this is happening at a time of significant uncertainty for Charleroi.

Local media has reported that federal investigators believe a staffing agency has been hiring undocumented immigrants in and around Charleroi, and paying them in cash.

Last month, it emerged that a glass factory in Charleroi that employs about 300 people will move its operations 170 miles (274km) west to Ohio, sending shockwaves through the community. The town’s poverty rate is 25%, more than twice that of Pennsylvania as a whole.

That has allowed Trump to make inroads locally. More than 60% of voters in Charleroi’s Washington county backed Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Nationally, immigration has become a central campaign issue in recent months, despite a major fall in the number of immigrant encounters recorded by the US border patrol at the US’s southern border. In August, the number of encounters – 58,038 – was a fraction of its height during the Trump administration, when it reached 132,856 in May 2019. Just 46 of the people encountered at the border last August were Haitian nationals.

Studies show that Haitians and other people legally in the US on temporary protected status (TPS) have played an important role in the country’s critical infrastructure. Analysis of federal government data by the Center for American Progress, a progressive thinktank, found that more than 131,000 immigrants on TPS worked in essential occupations such as healthcare and food processing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But back in Charleroi, local leaders have moved quickly to help the growing immigrant population.

 

In 2022, a Neighborhood Partnership Program paid for in part by local companies that depend on immigrant labor was set up to provide services that help integrate immigrant communities.

Two years ago, Charleroi established a community liaison officer position, filled by a Haitian national, to help enroll immigrants in English-language classes, register children at schools and set up health-testing sites at a local library, among other measures. As well as the sizeable Haitian community, the borough is home to more than a thousand immigrants from Liberia, Jamaica and elsewhere.

“Our business owners in town are overjoyed with the influx of foot traffic and the revitalization of our downtown,” says Hopkins-Calcek. “It’s been a long time since there has been any investment in Charleroi.”

In his time in Charleroi, Michel says that he’s never been subjected to negative interactions and that he and other immigrants see the efforts local authorities are making.

“In Haiti, the government don’t take care of the people like they do here,” he says.

Horner admits that despite his misgivings about what he hears about happening thousands of miles away at the US-Mexico border, Haitian immigrants have been a positive for the town.

“They come in here a lot looking for cheaper clothes and other stuff,” he says.

“As a businessperson, [immigrants] are good for business. Capitalism is a good thing. I have no problem. I have no complaints.”

Trump's restless week on the trail ends with a rally riff about Arnold Palmer's manhood Stephen Fowler

 

Former President Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a "sh** vice president" and implied golfer Arnold Palmer was well-endowed during a rambling Saturday rally in Pennsylvania that capped off a tumultuous week on the campaign trail.

Speaking in Latrobe, Penn., where Palmer was born, Trump delivered a lengthy monologue about the late golfer's life story and praised him as "all man," including an off-color joke about Palmer's anatomy.

"Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women — and I love women," Trump said. "But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, 'Oh my God, that's unbelievable.'"

 

In the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, Trump's rally speeches largely mirror the same trajectory as earlier in the year — meandering missives that paint a dire picture of an America governed by Democrats and overrun by migrants, touting a tariff-driven economic plan that's light on details, and aggressively railing against his political opponents — especially Democrats like Harris.

After an extended riff mocking Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Trump said Harris was more "radical left crazy" than Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"So you have to tell Kamala Harris that you've had enough, that you just can't take it anymore, we can't stand you, you're a sh** vice president," Trump told a roaring crowd. "The worst. You're the worst vice president. Kamala, you're fired! Get the hell out of here!"

Trump then asked the crowd how they liked the flyover his campaign plane did before landing and encouraged them to vote.

 

It was an unusually energetic rally for the former president, who has looked and sounded tired of late while doing multiple events and interviews a day across multiple swing states.

Harris' campaign has made a pointed attempt to highlight Trump's energy levels as part of a closing message that argues the 78-year-old does not have the stamina or fitness to lead the country.

"He is only focused on himself, and now he's ducking debates and canceling interviews because of exhaustion," Harris said at a rally in Atlanta Saturday night. "And when he does answer a question or speak at a rally, have you noticed he tends to go off script and ramble and generally for the life of him cannot finish a thought?"

 

Trump had a rough week with only a few of them left in the election

With less than 17 days until the final votes will be cast in the election, Trump's campaign blitz hit several bumps this past week.

Monday, a town hall in Oaks, Pa., was interrupted by two medical incidents in the hot, crowded room. After the second call for a medic, Trump opted to stop the question-and-answer session and instead played music for more than half an hour, swaying along to his favorite songs on stage while the crowd watched.

Tuesday, he sat for a contentious interview with Bloomberg News, taped a Fox News town hall focused on women's issues and then delivered remarks in suburban Atlanta, where he sounded a somber note about potentially losing the election.

 

"If you don't win win win, we've all had a good time, but it's not going to matter, right?" he asked. "Sadly, because what we've done is amazing: Three nominations in a row, what we've done. We've got to win. If we don't win, it's like was all —it was all for not very much. We can't, can't let that happen."

Wednesday, Trump's Fox town hall with an all-women audience aired, where he called himself the "father of IVF" and said Alabama Sen. Katie Britt (a "fantastically attractive person") had to explain to him what in vitro fertilization was before he supported it.

He also participated in a Univision town hall with Latino voters where he doubled down on false claims about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio and called the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt a "day of love."

 

At a Catholic charity dinner known for jokes in New York Thursday, Trump's remarks largely focused on Harris, who didn't attend. At his Friday rally in Michigan, the microphone stopped working a few minutes into his speech, as he began to talk about tariffs.

Trump paced the stage silently for about 20 minutes until audio was restored, while the screens behind him eventually said "TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES" and "COMPLICATED BUSINESS."

"If it goes off again, I'll sue their a** off," Trump half-joked about the production company.

 Trump has another rally Sunday night in Pennsylvania and a full week of events in key states coming up. More than 13 million people have already voted in the presidential election, with a little over two more weeks of voting left.

 

Coastal cities have a hidden vulnerability to storm-surge and tidal flooding − entirely caused by humans by Philip M. Orton Stefan Talke

 

Centuries ago, estuaries around the world were teeming with birds and turbulent with schools of fish, their marshlands and endless tracts of channels melting into the gray-blue horizon.

Fast-forward to today, and in estuaries such as New York Harbor, San Francisco Bay and Miami’s Biscayne Bay – areas where rivers meet the sea – 80% to 90% of this habitat has been built over.

The result has been the environmental collapse of estuary habitats and the loss of buffer zones that helped protect cities from storm surge and sea-level rise. But the damage isn’t just what’s visible on land.

Below the surface of many of the remaining waterways, another form of urbanization has been slowly increasing the vulnerability of coastlines to extreme storms and sea-level rise: Vast dredging and engineering projects have more than doubled the depths of shipping channels since the 19th century. 

 

Some of these oceanic highways enable huge container ships, with drafts of 50 feet below the waterline and lengths of nearly a quarter mile, to glide into formerly shallow areas. An example is New Jersey’s Newark Bay, which was as little as 10 feet (3 meters) deep in the 1840s but is 50 feet (15 meters) deep today.

A consequence of dredging deep channels is that water also enters and exits the estuaries more easily with each tide or storm. In these dredged channels, the natural resistance to flow created by a rough and shallow channel bottom is reduced. With less friction, that can lead to larger high tides and storm surge.

As coastal engineers and oceanographers, we study coastal ocean physics and storm surge. There are solutions to the problems “estuary urbanization” is causing, if people are willing to accept some trade-offs.

An unintended side effect of dredging

The effects of dredging are most visible in the daily tides, which have grown larger over the past century in many estuaries and aggravated nuisance flooding in many cities, as our research shows.

Tide range – the average variation between high and low tide – has doubled in multiple estuaries and changed significantly in others. As a result, high-tide levels are often rising faster than sea-level rise, worsening its consequences.

The most common culprit for these larger tides is estuary urbanization.

For example, in Miami, where the tide range has almost doubled, a major contributor is the construction and dredging of a nearly 50-foot-deep (15 meter), 500-foot-wide (150 meter) harbor entrance channel beginning in the early 20th century.

In New York City, some neighborhoods in southern Queens see 15 minor tidal floods per year today. Computer modeling shows that these floods are caused in about equal measure by sea-level rise and landscape alterations, including dredging and wetland reclamation projects that fill in wetlands to build industrial sites, airports and neighborhoods. 

 

Evidence and computer modeling show that any hurricane storm surge affecting parts of New York City, Jacksonville, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Southeast Florida and Southwest Louisiana, among other locations, will likely produce higher water levels due to estuary urbanization, potentially causing more damage in unprotected regions.

These costs have gone largely unnoticed, since changes have occurred gradually over the past 150 years. But as sea-level rise and turbo-charged storms increase flooding frequency and severity, the problem is becoming more visible.

Building solutions to the flooding problem

In response to rising sea levels, a different form of estuary urbanization is attracting new attention as a possible solution.

Gated storm-surge barriers or tide gates are being built across estuaries or their inlets so they can be closed off during storm-surge events. Some examples include barriers for New Orleans; London; Venice, Italy; and the Netherlands. Such barriers are increasingly being proposed alongside levee systems for coastal protection of urbanized estuary shorelines.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently recommended surge barriers for 11 additional estuaries, including near Miami, Jamaica Bay in Queens and Galveston, Texas.

Surge barriers are not long-term solutions to flooding driven by sea-level rise, and their negative impacts remain poorly understood.

 

Natural solutions

Wetlands and mangroves have also emerged as a popular nature-based solution.

Communities and government funding have focused on attempts to restore or create new wetlands as buffers in shoreline areas. But this solution is ineffective for flood protection in most harbor cities, such as New York, due to the lack of available space.

A storm surge crossing over a mile of marsh can be reduced by several inches, depending on the site’s characteristics. But typical urban estuary waterfronts have only tens of feet of open space to work with, if that much. In a narrow space, the best that vegetation can do is reduce wave action, which often isn’t the the most pressing problem for cities on estuaries that are typically sheltered from wind-driven storm waves.

As a result, engineered wetlands, while attractive, may be ineffective, especially if trends in ship sizes and estuarine urbanization continues.

Better ways to put nature back to work

Our research reveals an opportunity for scientists, engineers and broader society to think bigger – to consider a more comprehensive reshaping and restoration of the natural features of estuaries that once mitigated or absorbed flooding.

Possible solutions include halting the maintenance dredging of underutilized shipping channels, gradually retreating from vulnerable – and now often waterlogged – landfill industrial sites and neighborhoods, and restoring these larger expanses to wetlands.

These approaches can sharply reduce flooding and provide years of protection against sea-level rise. Restoration to historical channel and wetland configurations, however, is rarely given serious consideration in coastal storm risk management studies because of the perceived economic cost, but also because the cumulative effect of deeper channel depths is often unrecognized.

Renaturing urbanized estuaries in these ways could be paired with buyout programs to also reclaim the floodplain, reducing risk in more sustainable ways. Or it could be paired with seawalls to protect existing neighborhoods in a more ecologically beneficial way. These approaches should be considered as alternatives to further urbanizing our cities’ few remaining natural areas – their estuaries.

Christopher Columbus may have been a Spanish Jew by Miguel Macias

 

SEVILLE, Spain — Conventional history states Christopher Columbus was from Genoa, Italy, but he may have been, in fact, a Sephardic Jew from the eastern Iberian Peninsula, according to a new documentary by Spain’s national broadcaster that also rekindles questions of religious persecution and the treatment of Indigenous communities.

Broadcast by Spanish national public network RTVE on Oct. 12, the day of Spain’s national holiday marking the arrival of Columbus’ expedition to the Americas, Colón ADN, su verdadero origen, or “Columbus’ DNA, his true origin,” follows forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente as he studies multiple hypotheses regarding the origin of the famed explorer and contrasts the information with scientific and historical evidence.

 

The documentary concludes that the most plausible theory is one maintained by a Catalan architect who has dedicated many years trying to demonstrate that Cristóbal Colón — Columbus’ name in Spanish — was a Jewish man from the region of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Spain.

Some in the scientific community, however, have expressed skepticism about the methods and scientific rigor that Lorente employs, and highlight the fact that Lorente’s findings have not been presented for peer review yet.

Columbus’ origins come into question

Few things about Christopher Columbus can be stated as facts. Legend has it that at a party with noble Spaniards he demonstrated the possibility of the impossible by making an egg stand on its tip. There is a trick, of course: he flattened the edge of the egg without breaking it.

But there are some details that have not been questioned by most people through the years. Like the fact that Columbus came from Genoa, in Italy. That he persuaded Spain’s Catholic monarchs to sponsor an impossible voyage to the Indies traveling west instead of east from Spain.

Lorente, a forensic medical expert at the University of Granada, has researched Columbus’ origin for the past 22 years. In the documentary, he considers a number of theories about the origin of Columbus, examining them against DNA evidence and historical records.

 

Finally, Lorente arrives at the garden of Francesc Albardaner, a Catalan architect who authored the book La catalanitat de Colom. According to Albardaner, Columbus was a Sephardic Jew, part of the that Jewish diaspora associated with the Iberian Peninsula. Columbus would have followed Jewish traditions and customs, although in the public sphere he acted as Christian. He was born into a family of silk weavers from the Spanish city of Valencia, where there was a long tradition within the Jewish community of silk weavers.

But in order to determine Columbus’ ancestry, Lorente has to overcome a first hurdle, to shed light on the question of where the true remains of the sailor are.

 

Columbus’ disputed resting place

The mausoleum of Christopher Columbus here in Seville features four bronze heralds representing the four Spanish kingdoms before they came under a single rule, in 1469. On the heralds’ shoulders, a massive tomb that the Catholic Church and local authorities assure contains the remains of Columbus.

But Columbus’ resting place has been in dispute for centuries. The Columbus Lighthouse is a huge mausoleum monument to the explorer located in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. The monument was inaugurated in 1992 and, according to Dominican authorities, Columbus’ remains are inside the mausoleum.

There seems to be agreement among historians about the fact that the remains of Columbus, who died in Spain in 1506, were at one point taken back to Hispaniola, the Caribbean island containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But that's where historical agreement ends. Some claim the remains of Columbus made their way back to Spain, while others say the wrong bones were taken from Santo Domingo, and therefore Columbus remains in the Dominican Republic.

In Columbus’ DNA, his true origin, Lorente uses DNA from Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, and distant cousin Diego Colón to verify that the few bones that were housed at the Cathedral of Seville are indeed the true remains of the sailor.

 

Lorente’s conclusion is unequivocal: Christopher Columbus was of Jewish descent. That led to a process of deduction based on historical evidence. The documentary states that during Columbus’ time there were only an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Jewish people living on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, there were about 200,000 Jewish people living in what is now Spain, an estimate that may be low, since tens of thousands of Jewish people had converted to Catholicism over the previous century, victims of constant persecution.

Also in the documentary, Albardaner, the Catalan architect, says Genoa had expelled its Jewish population in the 12th century. There were virtually no Jewish people living in Genoa in the times of Columbus, who lived from 1451 to 1506, and Jewish people doing business were only allowed to enter the city for three days at a time.

If the DNA evidence studied by Lorente suggests Columbus was a Jewish man, then it becomes highly improbable that he was from Genoa, according to Albardaner.

 

Why would Columbus lie about his heritage?

On Oct. 19, 1469, a young couple was married in Valladolid, Spain. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand II, the Catholic monarchs, came to be known for a number of historical achievements, such as unifying the kingdoms that now comprise Spain, or the so-called reconquista (reconquering) of Al-Andalus, the vast region of southern Spain that had been under Muslim control for centuries. But during the Catholic monarchs’ rule the Spanish Inquisition also acquired unprecedented powers. A judicial institution linked to the Roman Catholic Church, the Inquisition sought to identify heretics and order Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism, using brutal methods.

But Muslims were not the only people living in the Iberian Peninsula that the Catholic monarchs seemed to want to get rid of. In 1492 the monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, which ordered the expulsion of Jewish people, seeking to eliminate their influence on Spain's large population of converts, and to make sure its members did not revert to Judaism. The monarchs ordered the remaining Jews to convert or face expulsion from Spain.

 

Devin Naar, Sephardic studies program chair at the University of Washington, told the BBC's Newshour that escaping persecution in the times of the Catholic monarchs and the Spanish Inquisition was not as easy as simply converting to Catholicism:

“What the Spanish Inquisition did was that it targeted, not Jews as Jews and not Muslims as Muslims, but rather initially and specifically those who were of Jewish or Muslim origin, but who had converted to Catholicism. And there was the perception that they had continued to practice Judaism on one hand or Islam on the other hand in secret. The Inquisition used a variety of different means to try to coerce confessions. It used all of the different medieval tools that we might think about, including burning at the stake,” Naar said.

So Columbus may have been hiding his Sephardic origins to avoid stigmatization, persecution, or even death.

Naar adds that the claim that Columbus was of Spanish-Jewish origin or converso origin — conversos is what the Spanish called Jewish converts to Catholicism and their descendants — has been around for more than 100 years.

Disagreement from the scientific community

The release of the documentary on RTVE has sparked criticisms from the scientific community. Most notably, a recent article published by the Spanish newspaper El País has several experts questioning the process Lorente used to reach his conclusions.

"I don't understand how data that the scientific community has not yet endorsed is presented to society, which puts the data itself and the hypotheses proposed at risk," Antonio Alonso, a geneticist and former director of Spain’s National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences is quoted as saying.

Rodrigo Barquera, an expert in archaeogenetics at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told El País he was surprised that Lorente’s findings had been shared without prior scrutiny from others in the scientific community.

 

Even the DNA angle is questioned by Antonio Salas, who directs the Population Genetics in Biomedicine group at the Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela, telling El País: “The documentary promised to focus on DNA analysis. However, the genetic information it offers is very limited.”

Lorente, in response, told El País that the documentary is a film, not a scientific publication, and he promises scientific findings will be presented in the near future.

The evolving role of Columbus in history

Columbus’ actions, once regarded as accomplishments, have become a symbol to many as a starting point for a history of abuse. To others, Columbus, 1492, and what came after, are still worth celebrating.

To this day, Spain marks Oct. 12 as a national holiday, also widely known as Hispanic Heritage Day, to commemorate the arrival of Columbus’ expedition in the Americas. And to this day, Spain’s popular culture has not been able to shake up the use of the controversial term “Descubrimiento de América” (the discovery of America) to refer to that moment in history.

In Latin America and to many U.S.-based Latinos and Native Americans, the so-called “discovery of the Americas” was only the beginning of a cruel history of extermination, subjugation and colonization of its native people and lands. This continues to play a role in international diplomacy. Just last month, the recently elected first woman president of Mexico did not invite the Spanish king to her inauguration as part of an ongoing spat between the two countries over the history of Spanish colonization. Spain’s current government, led by the progressive Socialist Party, said that Mexico’s decision was unacceptable.

 The United States has recognized Columbus Day as a federal holiday since 1934, when President Roosevelt designated the standing. For many in the Italian American community, the presumed fact that Columbus was originally from Italy has been a reason for pride and celebration. In 2022, however, President Biden issued a proclamation on Indigenous Peoples Day, and both are observed on the second Monday of October, but most government websites continue to list “Columbus Day” as the federal holiday the nation celebrated this week.

 Spain did take measures to remediate the harm done to Sephardic Jews. In 2015 the Spanish Parliament approved an act granting Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews with Spanish origins. Spain has not provided reparations to descendants of Spanish Muslims who once lived in the Iberian Peninsula.

Amid hurricanes, the chemtrail conspiracy theory has its moment in the sun By Donie O'Sullivan

 

Decades-old and long-debunked myths about so-called chemtrails have become a central part of a wild conspiracy theory that falsely asserts the US government used non-existent weather manipulation technology to create the devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The conspiracy theory is being promoted by right-wing influencers online, some with millions of followers, who have a long track record of echoing false claims about the last presidential election. The hurricanes, some of these influencers baselessly claim, were deliberately steered toward Trump-supporting communities – part of a plot to “steal” next month’s election from former President Donald Trump.

As myths about Milton and Helene spread, interest in chemtrails increased too on Google search and social media. Chemtrail conspiracy theorists falsely believe condensation trails (known as contrails) left behind by aircraft in the sky are full of toxic chemicals spread by the government to control the weather or control people’s minds.

In reality, scientists say contrails appear when water vapor condenses and freezes around the exhaust from an aircraft.

Despite the lack of evidence to support it, the so-called chemtrail conspiracy theory has endured for decades. Climate and weather scientists are all too familiar with the myth, and because of it are sometimes targeted and accused of being part of a nefarious government plot – much like the theories about Milton and Helene.

One weather lab at Harvard University received so many messages, some “abusive and threatening,” about chemtrails through the years it published a fact sheet on its website debunking the conspiracy theory.

“We have not seen any credible evidence that chemtrails exist. If we did see any evidence that governments were endangering their own citizens in the manner alleged in the chemtrails conspiracy, we would be eager to expose and stop any such activities,” the post on the lab’s website reads.

 

The conspiracy theory’s staying power is due in part to a small but committed group of pseudoscientists who have made it their life’s work to promote and try to prove the myth true. While their influence is usually confined to fringe blogs and other online sources, the myth occasionally rears its head and penetrates the mainstream.

“We are going to stop this crime,” Trump surrogate and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted in response to a video promoting the myth in August.

In April, Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill banning the release of airborne chemicals that critics described as “nonsense” and inspired by the myth.

But the virality the conspiracy theory has achieved online in the last couple of weeks has never been seen before and is a cause for concern, climate and weather experts tell CNN.

“This has been around for a long time in different forms,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles said.  “But what I think is different is the intensity and the breadth of it. This used to be something that would be rather fringe, something that would pop up on niche forums of the internet or in the comments section somewhere.”

“It didn’t have an audience of tens to hundreds of millions, if not more than that, as it has in recent weeks,” he said, adding, “I think that really speaks to the ease with which misinformation and these conspiracy theories now spread on different social media platforms.”

Embraced by election deniers

Self-described “experts” who have long spread baseless claims about weather manipulation have found a home on right-wing podcasts and online shows in recent days.

“Treason Alert: The Biden-Harris Admin Have Been In Control of Hurricanes Helene and Milton Using Pentagon Weather Weapons,” read a Thursday morning headline on InfoWars, the website run by disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

“I am seeing explosive awakening to this the in the last few years and it is really at a crescendo now everywhere. People on the street, family, dominating social media, videos with hundreds of millions of views just all over the place talking about this,” Jones said on his online  show Wednesday, celebrating the conspiracy theory’s current virality.

Some of the promotion of the conspiracy theory has taken on a distinctively antisemitic tone. Stew Peters, who has almost 700,000 followers on X, falsely asserted on his online show Tuesday that Jewish people were responsible for non-existent technology they falsely assert is steering hurricanes. 

 

“They’re possessing the technology to destroy the United States in so many ways to extend the octopus tentacles into every fabric of our society,” Peters said in a video that showed Jewish members of government and an illustration of a blue octopus expanding its tentacles – the image has its roots in Nazi-era antisemitic propaganda.

Peters previously promoted the unhinged conspiracy theory that ballots were flown from Asia as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election from President Trump. It formed part of a myth that metastasized and resulted in a group named the “Cyber Ninjas” looking for traces of bamboo in ballot paper during their infamous sham audit of the 2020 election in Arizona.

Republican and 2020 election denier Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been widely mocked for spreading the conspiracy theory that deadly wildfires in California in 2018 were ignited by space lasers, possibly controlled by the Rothschild investment bank. The Rothschilds are frequent targets of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Greene has posted repeatedly over the last week claims the government is controlling the weather – even leaning into her previous absurd claims about lasers – sharing a 2013 news report in which a physicist discussed lab experiments studying how lasers could be used to try to change the weather.

Importantly, the physicist explained the many limitations of the experiment and how science had a long way to go. 

 

The limitations, says weather and climate experts who spoke to CNN, are what the conspiracy theorists are ignoring. Cloud seeding, for instance, is a technology that spreads tiny particles in the atmosphere with the aim to create clouds and generate more rain in areas that are very dry. But it has many limitations and can be inconsistent, Katja Friedrich, professor of atmospheric and oceanic at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CNN.

Friedrich suggested the conspiracy theories blaming weather manipulation for the devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton is a way to distract from the real effects of climate change.

Joshua Horton, a solar geoengineering policy researcher at Harvard University, said while these kinds of conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, the “MAGAification”of them, as he described it, is what is driving their virality just weeks before a historic presidential election.

“I kind of hate to use this term but it is kind of like a perfect storm,” he said, “it’s political conditions, conspiracy theorizing, real world events, it seems to all the culminating in this moment.”