Harper's, November 2020

Mother Knows Best

From a lawsuit filed by Devin Nunes, a U.S. representative from California, against the Twitter user Devin Nunes’ Mom, whose identity is unknown. Nunes has denied the claims made by Devin Nunes’ Mom. The suit was dismissed in July.

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Defendant Devin Nunes’ Mom is a person who maintained an account on Twitter. In her endless barrage of tweets, Devin Nunes’ Mom attacked every aspect of Nunes’s character, honesty, integrity, ethics, and fitness. Devin Nunes’ Mom stated that Nunes had turned out worse than Jacob Wohl; stated that Nunes would probably join the Proud Boys “if it weren’t for that unfortunate ‘no masturbating’ rule”; called Nunes a “presidential fluffer and swamp rat”; stated that Nunes brought “shame” to his family; called Nunes a “treasonous shitbag”; accused Nunes of being part of the president’s “taint” team; accused Nunes of being a “lying piece of shit”; stated that Nunes was an “unscrupulous, craven, backstabbing charlatan and traitor”; and stated that Nunes has “herp-face.” In order to protect his reputation, Nunes requests that the court suspend Devin Nunes’ Mom. Trial by jury is demanded.

NY Times, Oct. 27, 2020
BEHIND THE CURVE
HOW TRUMP AND BOLSONARO BROKE LATIN AMERICA’S COVID-19 DEFENSES
By David D. Kirkpatrick and José María León Cabrera

The coronavirus was gathering lethal speed when President Trump met his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, on March 7 for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Bolsonaro had canceled trips that week to Italy, Poland and Hungary, and Brazil’s health minister had urged him to stay away from Florida, too.

But Mr. Bolsonaro insisted, eager to burnish his image as the “Trump of the Tropics.” His grinning aides posed at the president’s resort in green “Make Brazil Great Again” hats. Mr. Trump declared he was “not concerned at all” before walking Mr. Bolsonaro around the club shaking hands.

Twenty-two people in Mr. Bolsonaro’s delegation tested positive for the virus after returning to Brazil, yet he was not alarmed. Mr. Trump had shared a cure, Mr. Bolsonaro told advisers: a box of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, the unproven treatment that Mr. Trump was then promoting as a remedy for Covid-19.

“He said the trip was wonderful, that they had a great time, that life was normal at Mar-a-Lago, everything was cured, and that hydroxychloroquine was the medicine that was supposed to be used,” recalled the health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who was fired by Mr. Bolsonaro the next month for opposing reliance on the drug.

“From that time on, it was very hard to get him to take the science seriously.”

The Mar-a-Lago dinner, which would become infamous for spreading infection, cemented a partnership between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro rooted in a shared disregard for the virus. But even before the dinner, the two presidents had waged an ideological campaign that would undermine Latin America’s ability to respond to Covid-19.

Together, the two men, fierce opponents of Latin America’s leftists, took aim at Cuba’s great pride: the doctors it sends around the world. Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro drove 10,000 Cuban doctors and nurses out of impoverished areas of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador. Many left without being replaced only months before the pandemic arrived.

Then, the two leaders attacked the international agency most capable of fighting the virus — the Pan-American Health Organization, or PAHO — citing its involvement with the Cuban medical program. With help from Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump nearly bankrupted the agency by withholding promised funding at the height of the outbreak, to an extent not previously disclosed.

And with help from Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro has made hydroxychloroquine the centerpiece of Brazil’s pandemic response, despite a medical consensus that the drug is ineffective and even dangerous. The Food and Drug Administration warned last April against most uses of the drug to treat Covid-19. A month later, Mr. Trump announced after a phone call with Mr. Bolsonaro that the United States would send Brazil two million doses.

Weak health systems and overcrowded cities made Latin America inherently vulnerable. But by driving out doctors, blocking assistance, and pushing false cures, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro made a bad situation worse, dismantling defenses.

Now Latin America, with a third of the world’s deaths, has suffered more acutely from Covid-19 than any other region.

The two most powerful leaders in the Americas, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bolsonaro are both ardent nationalists defiant of mainstream science. Both have put economic growth and short-term politics ahead of public health warnings. Both are deeply hostile to the region’s leftist governments — especially in Cuba, a cause that helps Mr. Trump with Cuban-American voters in the swing state of Florida.

“In their zeal to get rid of the Cuban doctors, the Trump administration has punished every country in the hemisphere, and without question that has meant more Covid cases, and more Covid deaths,” said Mark L. Schneider, a former head of strategic planning for the Pan-American Health Organization who was a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “It is outrageous.”

Smaller, less powerful countries like Ecuador felt the pain. Ecuador acceded to American pressure and sent home nearly 400 Cuban health care workers shortly before the pandemic. Then the country also suffered from the Trump administration’s freeze on funding for the health organization, which hampered its ability to provide emergency supplies and technical support.

“No one from the Pan-American Health Organization was here, and we felt their absence,” said Dr. Washington Alemán, a senior infectious disease specialist and a former deputy health minister in Ecuador, who diagnosed the country’s first confirmed case of Covid-19. “The support was not like it used to be in previous years, in previous epidemics.”

Previous Republican and Democratic administrations have almost all regarded the public health of Latin America as of urgent national interest, because infectious diseases can spread easily between South and North America.

White House officials say the administration withheld payments from the health organization to demand transparency. They note that the United States helped the region in other ways, by donating tens of millions of dollars through organizations like the World Food Program, UNICEF and the Red Cross. Over the summer, Washington sent hundreds of excess ventilators directly to government health systems.

But public health experts say the Pan-American Health Organization — with offices inside every health ministry and nearly 120 years of experience tackling epidemics — was uniquely positioned to confront Covid-19. Even some critics of the Cuban program say that punishing the health agency sabotaged that effort.

“PAHO did not have the tools and they didn’t have the money,” said Dr. Mandetta, the former Brazilian health minister who worked with Mr. Bolsonaro to expel the Cubans. “PAHO couldn’t expand the way that they needed to, and in Ecuador, in Bolivia, you had people dying in their homes and bodies left outside in the streets because of the lack of assistance.”

How that happened is the story of a political battle that shifted among many fronts, from Brasília to Miami to Washington. It left scars from villages in the Amazon basin to the slums of the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil.

Bread From Heaven

Jair Bolsonaro roared into power in Brazil in October 2018, styling himself as a Trumpian populist, speaking favorably of “dictatorship,” and accusing his country’s left-leaning establishment of taking lessons from communist Cuba. He promised to expel more than 8,000 Cuban medical workers.

A predecessor had invited the Cubans five years earlier to help care for more than 60 million people, mostly in small communities in the Amazon basin, many of whom had never before seen a doctor. Academic studies reported high levels of patient satisfaction and reduced infant mortality rates. The Pan-American Health Organization oversaw the Cuban doctors in Brazil and promoted their work as a model; the Obama administration raised no objection.

For decades, Cuba has sent medical workers to fill holes in health systems in Latin America and beyond. Cuba paid the doctors as much as $900 a month compared with the $50 a month they might earn at home. But Havana charged their host governments much more — about $4,300 a month for each doctor in Brazil — and pocketed the difference. Cuba called the program humanitarian; critics, noting that Cuba limited the freedom of the doctors, called it forced labor and human trafficking.

During Mr. Bolsonaro’s fiery election campaign, a newspaper disclosed six-year-old diplomatic cables suggesting that Brazilian officials had routed payments for the program through the health organization in part to avoid a debate in the Brazilian Congress over dealing with Cuba.

Mr. Bolsonaro accused the health organization of abetting “modern-day slavery” and vowed to get rid of the doctors. Cuba recalled them even before he was sworn in.

Cleaning outside the Hospital das Clínicas in São Paulo in March, after Brazil entered a Covid-19 state of emergency. The president quickly pushed back against lockdown measures.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
Roughly 6,500 miles away, in Miami, Tony Costa saw a rare opportunity.

An 80-year-old veteran of the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion, Mr. Costa has spent decades working to topple the communist leadership in Havana. When he connected the allegations of Cuban forced labor with the Washington-based Pan-American Health Organization, he knew he had something that would captivate Congress and the White House.

“This is like bread from heaven!” he recalled thinking.

Mr. Costa soon discovered Ramona Matos Rodríguez, a Cuban doctor who had defected to Miami from a mission to Brazil, and helped her become the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit accusing the Pan-American Health Organization of forced labor and human trafficking.

In a court filing, lawyers for the organization said the allegations were “grossly inaccurate” and “bear almost no resemblance to reality.” Experts say the lawsuit is at best a long shot, but, in politics, it made an impact.

Without waiting for a court ruling, Mr. Costa, a founder of the Miami-based Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, rushed the lawsuit to the attention of powerful friends in Congress and the White House. “It is just despicable what they are doing to these poor doctors,” Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, said in an interview last month.

Citing the accusations, the State Department pressured Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador until they expelled more than a thousand Cuban medical workers last year.

But the bigger blows hit the Pan-American Health Organization.

It is often known as the regional arm of the World Health Organization, yet it is decades older and receives much more funding from member states. Public-health experts credit the agency with eradicating smallpox, polio and measles from Latin America long before they were eliminated from Africa and Asia.

The Trump administration focused intensely on the organization’s ties to Cuba, even though its involvement with the Cuban doctors had ended about a year earlier, when they left Brazil. The United States stopped paying its annual dues of $110 million, more than half the agency’s core budget. Mr. Bolsonaro’s government also froze payment of its $24 million in dues. Mr. Bolsonaro and his staff refused to comment for this article. John Ullyot, a National Security Council spokesman, defended the American funding cutoff as an important step “to demand accountability from all international health organizations that depend on American taxpayer resources.”

By the end of 2019, the agency faced a severe funding crisis. It had sharply reduced international travel, frozen hiring and steeply cut contracts for the medical consultants who do most of its hands-on work.

Within six weeks, Covid-19 began seeping into Latin America.

Bodies on the Streets

Perched on Ecuador’s southern coast, Guayaquil is a busy port city surrounded by hillsides covered in slums.

Bella Lamilla, 70, arrived from Spain on Feb. 15, to visit her nearby birthplace. But while there, she developed pneumonia.

Ecuador had no labs with the supplies or capacity to test for the coronavirus, but Ms. Lamilla’s family happened to take her to a private clinic that employs Dr. Alemán, the former deputy health minister. He used his contacts to get a sample sent to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

She became Ecuador’s first confirmed case on the night of Feb. 29. Within two weeks, every intensive care unit in the city was overwhelmed.

Doctors in Guayaquil say that more hands-on advice from the Pan-American Health Organization might have helped detect the virus much sooner, before it had penetrated the city so deeply.

Then ill-informed health ministry officials and local doctors compounded the crisis with a basic error: The ministry recommended cheap coronavirus antibody tests rather than more difficult and expensive genetic tests.

The antibody tests yielded false negatives at the point when patients were most contagious, leading them to unknowingly spread the virus.

“It was ignorance, absolutely,” said Juan Carlos Zevallos, an American-trained epidemiologist appointed in late March as health minister.

More direct support from Pan-American Health Organization consultants “could have prevented not only that mistake but many others,” Dr. Alemán said.

For many families, those mistakes meant heartbreak. In July, Patricio Carrillo, 70, visited a doctor at his local health center near Quito, the national capital. He had received a negative antibody test and was given penicillin for pharyngitis, his son recalled.

“I have nothing more than the flu,” Mr. Carrillo reassured his family in a hoarse voice message.

Days later, he was dead from Covid-19.

At the main public hospital in Guayaquil, Paola Vélez Solorzano, 38, an infectious diseases specialist, had urged administrators as early as February to prepare a 29-bed coronavirus isolation ward. She commandeered 900 disposable biohazard suits mistakenly ordered for maintenance workers.

But when the pandemic arrived, her preparations were “like nothing,” she said. So many people died that doctors had to step over bodies piled on the floor of the morgue. “Wherever you stood, it smelled like rotting flesh,” she said.

Her colleague Galo Martínez, 34, recalled gazing out the window of the intensive care unit. “All I could see was crowds of people crying out for help,” he said, shaking his head.

Without enough protective equipment, half the health ministry employees in Guayaquil fell sick, doctors said. More than 130 doctors died.

“We did not even have masks,” Dr. Zevallos, the health minister, said.

During past outbreaks, local doctors credit the Pan-American Health Organization with procuring supplies or rushing in skilled consultants to provide face-to-face technical help to laboratories and hospitals.

The agency’s officials say that this time they faced special challenges. Testing materials and protective equipment became scarce globally. By late March, shutdowns of commercial air travel made it difficult to deploy experts.

But the funding crisis caused by Mr. Trump’s freeze also loomed large, even as leaders tried to compensate by shifting resources to prioritize Covid-19 response.

Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr., the agency’s assistant director, acknowledged that the impact of the American funding freeze was “severe” but argued that its consequences were hard to assess precisely. By spring, he said, the freeze was not yet “a life-or-death situation” for the organization, and even with fuller funding the travel shutdown would have limited it to offering virtual training sessions.

But speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid angering the Trump administration, other senior officials said more money would have enabled the agency to provide more hands-on help, sooner. Regional meetings that might have discussed efforts to tackle the virus were instead consumed by the funding crisis.

“Will it close its headquarters? All these discussions took up the agenda,” said Felipe Carvalho, who follows the organization at the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders.

On the ground in Ecuador, Carmina Pinargote felt the difference. A veteran health ministry official on the northern coast, Ms. Pinargote recalled how the Pan-American Health Organization immediately sent 15 epidemiologists and technical experts after an earthquake in 2016. This year, she said, only one agency consultant arrived in her region.

“We have not seen the same intensity,” she said.

The forced departure of 400 Cuban medical workers from the country did not help, either. At the Martha de Roldós Health Center on the outskirts of Guayaquil, the director, Hugo Duarte, said two Cubans had to leave months before the pandemic.

Ecuadorean doctors would have been just as good, he said, if the health ministry had paid enough to fill the vacancies. But the loss had strained the clinic, especially when he was sickened for weeks.

“People were falling dead on the sidewalk, just outside the health center,” Dr. Duarte said.

God Is Brazilian

As the epidemic was exploding in Ecuador, Mr. Bolsonaro returned to Brazil from Mar-a-Lago. He quickly summoned Nise Yamaguchi, a São Paulo oncologist who had become a prominent champion of hydroxychloroquine.

Dr. Yamaguchi told the president that the outbreak left no time for the kind of clinical trials other doctors were waiting for.

Brazil had been known for one of the strongest public health systems in Latin America for fighting infectious diseases. But when two health ministers refused to support the drug, Mr. Bolsonaro replaced them with a loyal military officer, while Dr. Yamaguchi became his most trusted adviser.

In an interview, she said Mr. Trump’s donation of two million doses had made Brazil’s reliance on the medicine possible.

“It was very important because we had a worldwide shortage of hydroxychloroquine at the time,” Dr. Yamaguchi said.

“God is Brazilian, the cure is right here!” Mr. Bolsonaro exclaimed to supporters in late March.

Ignoring a medical consensus, Brazil’s health ministry still provides free hydroxychloroquine to anyone with Covid-19. And critics say Mr. Bolsonaro’s promotion of the drug, coupled with his refusal to wear a mask or socially distance, has undermined public health.

“People say, ‘If I become sick I can go out and get hydroxychloroquine like the president,’” said Julio Croda, an infectious disease specialist and former health ministry official. “People think they can live normal lives and they don’t need to do any prevention.”

Brazil has suffered more than 157,000 deaths from Covid-19, a total second only to the United States.

Indigenous communities in the remote Amazon basin, which lost 8,000 Cuban medical workers, have been hardest hit. Compared with other Brazilians in the Amazon basin, Indigenous people have been 10 times as likely to contract the virus, according to the Pan-American Health Organization.

The Cubans had been a critical source of health advice and treatment, often providing the only primary care for hundreds of miles, said Luiza Garnelo, a doctor and anthropologist based in Manaus for the Flocruz foundation.

Without the Cubans, she said, “there are no professionals to diagnose.”

Beltway Politics

When the pandemic hit, the Pan-American Health Organization began raising $92 million to send out infectious disease experts and critical supplies. The goal was later raised to $200 million.

Washington would ordinarily be one of the largest contributors. But the main donor agency, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is now headed by Ambassador John Barsa, a Cuban-American critic of Havana who participated in a 2019 news conference to publicize the lawsuit against the Pan-American Health Organization.

This time, the United States offered almost no new money.

By May, the Pan-American agency’s board warned in an internal report of a looming crisis.

Referring to the organization by its alternate name — the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau, or P.A.S.B. — the report said that the Trump administration’s withholding of funds was “significantly reducing the capacity of the P.A.S.B. to provide technical cooperation to its member states and entailing the release of many critical short-term staff members and contingent workers.”

At the end of the month, Mr. Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the administration temporarily froze other grants to the Pan-American agency.

USAID made one exception: It added $3.9 million in grants related to Venezuela, according to officials. That spending is part of the administration’s efforts to overturn the country’s leftist government. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also sent $900,000.)

Otherwise, the campaign against the agency only escalated. “PAHO must explain how it came to be the middleman in a scheme to exploit Cuban medical workers,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on June 10.

It took funding from Canada for the health organization to send some protective equipment to Ecuador, the first time it had done so for any country. President Lenín Moreno greeted the June 25 shipment at the airport.

Finally, under congressional pressure, the Trump administration on July 15 unblocked $65 million, staving off insolvency for the organization. Mr. Pompeo said it had agreed to an outside investigation of the Cuban doctors program, and other funds were unfrozen a short time later, after a roughly three-month suspension.

“PAHO is uniquely positioned to perform Covid-19 response in certain countries where there is no viable alternative,” a State Department official wrote on July 15 in an email informing Congressional staff of the payment.

Aftermath

Catching the virus did nothing to change either president’s outlook. Mr. Bolsonaro, 65, was infected in July and suffered only mild symptoms. He celebrated his recovery with a motorcycle ride and stands by his embrace of hydroxychloroquine.

Mr. Trump, 74, quietly stopped promoting that drug. When he was briefly hospitalized with Covid-19 earlier this month, he received other medicines. He began describing some of those as miracle cures and returned to dismissing the virus.

“People are tired of Covid,” he said this week on a campaign conference call. “People are saying: ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’”

Pan-American Health Organization officials say they have raised only $46.5 million from member states toward their $200 million goal to combat the virus.

The Trump administration continues to pressure other countries to expel Cuban doctors. An organization of Caribbean states this summer condemned the White House for threatening to “blacklist” those that refuse.

Other countries known for their sophisticated health systems have welcomed Cuban help. A group of 40 Cuban medical workers went to Turin in Italy last spring to help fight the pandemic, said Carlo Picco, who leads health services in the city.

“The Cubans were a success story for us,” he said.

NY Times, Oct. 25, 2020
The Rich in New York Confront an Unfamiliar Word: No
By Ginia Bellafante

Monday, a group of Upper West Siders who had organized against the placement of 235 homeless men in a residential hotel in their neighborhood received some unwelcome news. On the morning the men were supposed to move far downtown, a judge ruled that they could remain where they were. Relocating would be too disruptive and traumatic to people piecing their lives back together amid a pandemic.

Until that point, it seemed the antagonists had civic power on their side; self-interest was coming up ahead as it so often does. Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to get the homeless men out of the complainants’ way — removing them from the Labradoodle serenity of the West 70s, where a vocal minority was maintaining that their lives had been upended by ugliness and disorder.

The idea that it would take at least a month before the homeless men could be relocated prompted rage in a closed Facebook group, where little effort was made to conceal the most unsettling prejudices.

As one woman, a corporate executive, theorized, the men probably sought to stay in the neighborhood, not in pursuit of some stability but rather because there are “lots of stores to shoplift from” and “unmanned vestibules they can vandalize.” In fact, the overall crime rate in the neighborhood over the past month is down from the same period last year; there have been no murders, no shootings.

The anger among some of those opposed to the temporary shelter wasn’t just that they hadn’t been given what they wanted but that they didn’t get what they paid for. In this instance, they had hired an expensive lawyer, Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani, to help them get the unhoused out of view. Now in their private social media postings they wondered where he was and what he had really done for them.

Clearly his contributions were sufficient enough to ignite the fury of protesters on the other side of the debate, who defaced Mr. Mastro’s East Side townhouse this week, marking it with red paint and profanities (“Randy Mastro You Can’t Displace Us”).

The fight over sheltering exemplifies just one of the ways the pandemic has deepened the class divide, while paradoxically revealing that old-style transactionalism no longer reliably yielded the same gifts. The privileged were now playing on a game board that had changed.

This bewildered entitlement is not confined to those hoping to buy their way to a version of the Upper West Side that felt like Westchester. It was echoed by parents in New York’s private-school world, as plans for reopening were announced in August. Many schools — because of teacher resistance, building constraints and so on — were not going to be able to offer live instruction five days a week.

This infuriated many parents, who believed that their high tuition fees ought to serve as a hedge against inconvenience during a global crisis. One email I came across from a father sent to the head of his children’s school began by calling the proposed schedule “a failure” and pointing out that for $50,000 a year, his exposure, essentially, should be minimized.

An excellent article in the new issue of the Atlantic that ignited the schadenfreude of parents from Bethesda, Md., to Newton, Mass., made similar observations about the diminishing returns on a particular kind of loaded investment. In the piece, the writer, Ruth S. Barrett, outlines the shifting fortunes of wealthy and maniacal parents who immerse their children in boutique sports — squash, fencing — purely as a means of lubricating the path to the Ivy League.

For a long time, a commitment to 10,000 hours, live-in coaches and sports psychologists on speed-dial could position a child toward that goal well enough. But the coronavirus killed sports at a time when a focus on equity was already causing universities to re-evaluate the patrician leanings of their athletic programs. The course was shutting down; the dream of Dartmouth was becoming the reality of Michigan State.

During the seven months the pandemic has had us by the scruff, millions of people have been propelled into crises of joblessness, grief, fear, faith, poverty, dislocation. But even as the rich have managed to accelerate their gains in a perpetual war against fairness, the victories have become more complicated. This has become especially obvious at the level of urban policy, where the disparity is the most pronounced.

If the world were not in such chaos at the moment, the fate of a luxury condominium building on West 66th Street would have surely gained much more attention. Last month, a New York State Supreme Court judge unexpectedly overruled the city’s decision to allow the construction of what would have become the tallest building on the Upper West Side. Extell, a major developer and birther of Billionaire’s Row, had planned to fill the tower with 198 feet of empty vertical space to create more apartments on higher floors, which command more money.

But the effect of what the judge equated to “putting a frankfurter in the middle of a hamburger” was “too brazen to be called a subterfuge.’’ Instead, he wrote, “the developer simply thumbed its nose at the rules.” (A few days earlier, the same judge, Arthur F. Engoron, ordered Eric Trump to sit for a deposition in an investigation of fraud into his family’s real estate business.)

For a brief time, the homeless men housed at the Lucerne, the residential hotel on the Upper West Side where they have been permitted to stay, were to be sent to a Radisson Hotel near Wall Street. There, too, some residents balked at the prospect of their arrival. At a community meeting a few weeks ago, one woman living in a 408-unit building on Pine Street, where the condominiums were designed by Armani/Casa, said that it was “inevitable” that congregating 235 men, some with substance-abuse and mental-health issues, would “increase violent events throughout the neighborhood.”

When it was determined that the men would remain at the Lucerne after all, it looked as if the residents of the financial district had “won.’’ But as it happened, other homeless men were soon going to be coming to the Radisson. And eventually, it would be made into a permanent shelter.

NY Times, Oct. 24, 2020
How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine
Since 2016, the Falun Gong-backed newspaper has used aggressive Facebook tactics and right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.
By Kevin Roose

For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

Around the same time, The Epoch Times bet big on another powerful American institution: Facebook. The publication and its affiliates employed a novel strategy that involved creating dozens of Facebook pages, filling them with feel-good videos and viral clickbait, and using them to sell subscriptions and drive traffic back to its partisan news coverage.

In an April 2017 email to the staff obtained by The New York Times, the paper’s leadership envisioned that the Facebook strategy could help turn The Epoch Times into “the world’s largest and most authoritative media.” It could also introduce millions of people to the teachings of Falun Gong, fulfilling the group’s mission of “saving sentient beings.”

Today, The Epoch Times and its affiliates are a force in right-wing media, with tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages and an online audience that rivals those of The Daily Caller and Breitbart News, and with a similar willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right.

It also has growing influence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The president and his family have shared articles from the paper on social media, and Trump administration officials have sat for interviews with its reporters. In August, a reporter from The Epoch Times asked a question at a White House press briefing.

It is a remarkable success story for Falun Gong, which has long struggled to establish its bona fides against Beijing’s efforts to demonize it as an “evil cult,” partly because its strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration. In 2006, an Epoch Times reporter disrupted a White House visit by the Chinese president by shouting, “Evil people will die early.”

Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist and a former chairman of Breitbart, said in an interview in July that The Epoch Times’s fast growth had impressed him.

“They’ll be the top conservative news site in two years,” said Mr. Bannon, who was arrested on fraud charges in August. “They punch way above their weight, they have the readers, and they’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.”

But the organization and its affiliates have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories and downplaying their connection to Falun Gong, an investigation by The Times has found. The investigation included interviews with more than a dozen former Epoch Times employees, as well as internal documents and tax filings. Many of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, or still had family in Falun Gong.

Embracing Mr. Trump and Facebook has made The Epoch Times a partisan powerhouse. But it has also created a global-scale misinformation machine that has repeatedly pushed fringe narratives into the mainstream.

The publication has been one of the most prominent promoters of “Spygate,” a baseless conspiracy theory involving claims that Obama administration officials illegally spied on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Publications and shows linked to The Epoch Times have promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread distorted claims about voter fraud and the Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, they have promoted the unfounded theory that the coronavirus — which the publication calls the “CCP Virus,” in an attempt to link it to the Chinese Communist Party — was created as a bioweapon in a Chinese military lab.

The Epoch Times says it is independent and nonpartisan, and it rejects the suggestion that it is officially affiliated with Falun Gong.

Like Falun Gong itself, the newspaper — which publishes in dozens of countries — is decentralized and operates as a cluster of regional chapters, each organized as a separate nonprofit. It is also extraordinarily secretive. Editors at The Epoch Times turned down multiple requests for interviews, and a reporter’s unannounced visit to the outlet’s Manhattan headquarters this year was met with a threat from a lawyer.

Representatives for Li Hongzhi, the leader of Falun Gong, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did other residents of Dragon Springs, the compound in upstate New York that serves as Falun Gong’s spiritual headquarters.

Many employees and Falun Gong practitioners contacted by The Times said they were instructed not to divulge details of the outlet’s inner workings. They said they had been told that speaking negatively about The Epoch Times would be tantamount to disobeying Mr. Li, who is known by his disciples as “Master.”

The Epoch Times provided only partial answers to a long list of questions sent to its media office, and declined to answer questions about its finances and editorial strategy. In an email, which was not signed, the outlet accused The Times of “defaming and diminishing a competitor” and displaying “a subtle form of religious intimidation if not bigotry” by linking the publication to Falun Gong.

“The Epoch Times will not be intimidated and will not be silenced,” the outlet added, “and based on the number of falsehoods and inaccuracies included in the New York Times questions we will consider all legal options in response.”

Clarifying the Truth

Falun Gong, which Mr. Li introduced in China in 1992, revolves around a series of five meditation exercises and a process of moral self-improvement that is meant to lead to spiritual enlightenment. Today, the group is known for the demonstrations it holds around the world to “clarify the truth” about the Chinese Communist Party, which it accuses of torturing Falun Gong practitioners and harvesting the organs of those executed. (Tens of thousands across China were sent to labor camps in the early years of the crackdown, and the group’s presence there is now much diminished.)

More recently, Falun Gong has come under scrutiny for what some former practitioners have characterized as an extreme belief system that forbids interracial marriage, condemns homosexuality and discourages the use of modern medicine, all allegations the group denies.

When The Epoch Times got its start in 2000, the goal was to counter Chinese propaganda and cover Falun Gong’s persecution by the Chinese government. It began as a Chinese-language newspaper run out of the Georgia basement of John Tang, a graduate student and Falun Gong practitioner.

By 2004, The Epoch Times had expanded into English. One of the paper’s early hires was Genevieve Belmaker, then a 27-year-old Falun Gong practitioner with little journalism experience. Ms. Belmaker, now 43, described the early Epoch Times as a cross between a scrappy media start-up and a zealous church bulletin, with a staff composed mostly of unpaid volunteers drawn from the local Falun Gong chapters.

“The mission-driven part of it was, let’s have a media outlet that not only tells the truth about Falun Gong but about everything,” Ms. Belmaker said.

Mr. Li, Falun Gong’s founder, also saw it that way. In speeches, he referred to The Epoch Times and other Falun Gong-linked outlets — including the New Tang Dynasty TV station, or NTD — as “our media,” and said they could help publicize Falun Gong’s story and values around the world.

Two former employees recalled that the paper’s top editors had traveled to Dragon Springs to meet with Mr. Li. One employee who attended a meeting said Mr. Li had weighed in on editorial and strategic decisions, acting as a kind of shadow publisher. The Epoch Times denied these accounts, saying in a statement, “There has been no such meeting.”

The line between The Epoch Times and Falun Gong is blurry at times. Two former Epoch Times reporters said they had been asked to write flattering profiles of foreign performers being recruited into Shen Yun, the heavily advertised dance performance series that Falun Gong backs, because it would strengthen those performers’ visa applications. Another former Epoch Times reporter recalled being assigned to write critical articles about politicians including John Liu, a Taiwanese-American former New York City councilman whom the group viewed as soft on China and hostile to Falun Gong.

These articles helped Falun Gong advance its goals, but they lured few subscribers.

Matthew K. Tullar, a former sales director for The Epoch Times’s Orange County edition in New York, wrote on his LinkedIn page that his team initially “printed 800 papers each week, had no subscribers, and utilized a ‘throw it in their driveway for free’ marketing strategy.” Mr. Tullar did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Belmaker, who left the paper in 2017, described it as a bare-bones operation that was always searching for new moneymaking ventures.

“It was very short-term thinking,” she said. “We weren’t looking more than three weeks down the road.”

A Trump Pivot

By 2014, The Epoch Times was edging closer to Mr. Li’s vision of a respectable news outlet. Subscriptions were growing, the paper’s reporting was winning journalism awards, and its finances were stabilizing.

“There was all this optimism that things were going to level up,” Ms. Belmaker said.

But at a staff meeting in 2015, leadership announced that the publication was in trouble again, Ms. Belmaker recalled. Facebook had changed its algorithm for determining which articles appeared in users’ newsfeeds, and The Epoch Times’s traffic and ad revenue were suffering.

In response, the publication assigned reporters to churn out as many as five posts a day in a search for viral hits, often lowbrow fare with titles like “Grizzly Bear Does Belly Flop Into a Swimming Pool.”

As the 2016 election neared, reporters noticed that the paper’s political coverage took on a more partisan tone.

Steve Klett, who covered the 2016 campaign for the paper, said his editors had encouraged favorable coverage about Mr. Trump after he won the Republican nomination.

“They seemed to have this almost messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-Communist leader who would bring about the end of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Klett said.

After Mr. Trump’s victory, The Epoch Times hired Brendan Steinhauser, a well-connected Tea Party strategist, to help make inroads with conservatives. Mr. Steinhauser said the organization’s goal, beyond raising its profile in Washington, had been to make Falun Gong’s persecution a Trump administration priority.

“They wanted more people in Washington to be aware of how the Chinese Communist Party operates, and what it has done to spiritual and ethnic minorities,” Mr. Steinhauser said.

All In on Facebook

Behind the scenes, The Epoch Times was also developing a secret weapon: a Facebook growth strategy that would ultimately help take its message to millions.

According to emails reviewed by The Times, the Facebook plan was developed by Trung Vu, the former head of The Epoch Times’s Vietnamese edition, known as Dai Ky Nguyen, or DKN.

In Vietnam, Mr. Trung’s strategy involved filling a network of Facebook pages with viral videos and pro-Trump propaganda, some of it lifted word for word from other sites, and using automated software, or bots, to generate fake likes and shares, a former DKN employee said. Employees used fake accounts to run the pages, a practice that violated Facebook’s rules but that Mr. Trung said was necessary to protect employees from Chinese surveillance, the former employee said.

Mr. Trung did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the 2017 email sent to Epoch Times workers in America, the Vietnamese experiment was a “remarkable success” that made DKN one of the largest publishers in Vietnam.

The outlet, the email claimed, was “having a profound impact on saving sentient beings in that country.”

The Vietnamese team was asked to help Epoch Media Group — the umbrella organization for Falun Gong’s biggest U.S. media properties — set up its own Facebook empire, according to that email. That year, dozens of new Facebook pages appeared, all linked to The Epoch Times and its affiliates. Some were explicitly partisan, others positioned themselves as sources of real and unbiased news, and a few, like a humor page called “Funniest Family Moments,” were disconnected from news entirely.

Perhaps the most audacious experiment was a new right-wing politics site called America Daily.

Today, the site, which has more than a million Facebook followers, peddles far-right misinformation. It has posted anti-vaccine screeds, an article falsely claiming that Bill Gates and other elites are “directing” the Covid-19 pandemic and allegations about a “Jewish mob” that controls the world.

Emails obtained by The Times show that John Nania, a longtime Epoch Times editor, was involved in starting America Daily, along with executives from Sound of Hope, a Falun Gong-affiliated radio network. Records on Facebook show that the page is operated by the Sound of Hope Network, and a pinned post on its Facebook page contains a promotional video for Falun Gong.

In a statement, The Epoch Times said it had “no business relationship” with America Daily.

Many of the Facebook pages operated by The Epoch Times and its affiliates followed a similar trajectory. They began by posting viral videos and uplifting news articles aggregated from other sites. They grew quickly, sometimes adding hundreds of thousands of followers a week. Then, they were used to steer people to buy Epoch Times subscriptions and promote more partisan content.

Several of the pages gained significant followings “seemingly overnight,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory. Many posts were shared thousands of times but received almost no comments — a ratio, Ms. DiResta said, that is typical of pages that have been boosted by “click farms,” firms that generate fake traffic by paying people to click on certain links over and over again.

The Epoch Times denies using click farms or other illicit tactics to expand its pages. “The Epoch Times’s social media strategies were different from DKN, and used Facebook’s own promotional tools to gain an increased organic following,” the outlet said, adding that The Epoch Times cut ties with Mr. Trung in 2018.

But last year, The Epoch Times was barred from advertising on Facebook — where it had spent more than $1.5 million over seven months — after the social network announced that the outlet’s pages had evaded its transparency requirements by disguising its ad purchases.

This year, Facebook took down more than 500 pages and accounts linked to Truth Media, a network of anti-China pages that had been using fake accounts to amplify their messages. The Epoch Times denied any involvement, but Facebook’s investigators said Truth Media “showed some links to on-platform activity by Epoch Media Group and NTD.”

“We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times,” said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the social network would punish the outlet if it violated more rules in the future.

Since being barred from advertising on Facebook, The Epoch Times has moved much of its operation to YouTube, where it has spent more than $1.8 million on ads since May 2018, according to Google’s public database of political advertising.

Where the paper’s money comes from is something of a mystery. Former employees said they had been told that The Epoch Times was financed by a combination of subscriptions, ads and donations from wealthy Falun Gong practitioners. In 2018, the most recent year for which the organization’s tax returns are publicly available, The Epoch Times Association received several sizable donations, but none big enough to pay for a multimillion-dollar ad blitz.

Mr. Bannon is among those who have noticed The Epoch Times’s deep pockets. Last year, he produced a documentary about China with NTD. When he talked with the outlet about other projects, he said, money never seemed to be an issue.

“I’d give them a number,” Mr. Bannon said. “And they’d come back and say, ‘We’re good for that number.’”

‘The Moral Objective Is Gone’

The Epoch Times’s pro-Trump turn has upset some former employees, like Ms. Belmaker.

Ms. Belmaker, now a freelance writer and editor, still believes in many of Falun Gong’s teachings, she said. But she has grown disenchanted with The Epoch Times, which she sees as running contrary to Falun Gong’s core principles of truth, compassion and tolerance.

“The moral objective is gone,” she said. “They’re on the wrong side of history, and I don’t think they care.”

Recently, The Epoch Times has shifted its focus to the coronavirus. It pounced on China’s missteps in the early days of the pandemic, and its reporters wrote about misreported virus statistics and Chinese influence in the World Health Organization.

Some of these articles were true. But others pushed exaggerated or false claims, like the unproven theory that the virus was engineered in a lab as part of a Chinese biological warfare strategy.

Some of the claims were repeated in a documentary that both NTD and The Epoch Times posted on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than five million times. The documentary features the discredited virologist Judy Mikovits, who also starred in the viral “Plandemic” video, which Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms pulled this year for spreading false claims.

The Epoch Times said, “In our documentary we offered a range of evidence and viewpoints without drawing any conclusions.”

Ms. Belmaker, who still keeps a photo of Master Li on a shelf in her house, said she recoiled whenever an ad for The Epoch Times popped up on YouTube promoting some new partisan talking point.

One recent video, “Digging Beneath Narratives,” is a two-minute infomercial about China’s mishandling of the coronavirus. The ad’s host says The Epoch Times has an “underground network of sources” in China providing information about the government’s response to the virus.

It’s a plausible claim, but the video’s host makes no mention of The Epoch Times’s ties to Falun Gong, or its two-decade-long campaign against Chinese communism, saying only that the paper is “giving you an accurate picture of what’s happening in this world.”

“We tell it like it is,” he says.

Ben Smith contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.

By Sebastien Budgen.

These texts, and Guérin’s sometimes ferocious self-criticism, present us with the image of a personality deeply riven by contradictions which act as a driving force for his development. These spur him on in a headlong rush of transgressions – sexual, social (becoming a ‘class traitor’ and linking his destiny to that of the working class), national (identifying with the forces seeking to bring down the French imperial state), political (with the result that he was the black sheep in every group or sensibility in which he found himself – too radical for the SFIO, too intellectual for the revolutionary syndicalists, too Trotskyist for the pivertistes, too Pivertist for the Trotskyists, too anarchist for the Marxists, too Marxist for the anarchists…). Each contradiction propels him to a new attempted synthesis, from which he draws nourishment, but which is too unstable to last, and which creates a new series of contradictions and a new fragile synthesis.

https://salvage.zone/in-print/the-phallic-road-to-socialism/

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 09:20 AM, John Reimann wrote:

The comments in reply to my email on this article are perfect examples of the narrow thinking that is so prevalent on the left. Who ever said the slightest thing about wanting the old Republican Party back, other than the NYT editors?

Your post stated that here was the NYT Ed. Board condemning the entire Republican Party.  Well, they weren't.  And now you admit that's what the NYT editors were up to and are still clutching your lapel and shaking your forefinger like some dollar-store Lenin haranguing plastic Mensheviks. 

They were condemning the current Republican Party for not being like the good old Grand Old, in the time-honored manner of the hypocrites who gave us covert support for McCarthy on the Harvard faculty, etc., etc.   Like Biden, if he survives the Supine Court and Rabbit-Bunghole's glossolalia briefs, they will be falling all over themselves to praise some scum--some latter-day McCain or "principled" Romney--as the Way Forward.  They'll be fighting to be the first to reach out across the aisle and shake hands.

Why not?  It's the rest of us who will pay with our fingers for that handshake.  The only thing that editorial proves is that, like every sane person in the world, the NYT Editors find Trump distasteful.  Why--why--he's damaged the beautiful GOP!  That should be scant comfort to anyone on the Left.

This isn't repudiation; it's concern trolling. Nothing new or revolutionary about that.  

So the whole point of your post goes out the window--that's all.  Narrow thinking, buddy--very narrow thinking.

Unions such as the Communications Workers of America, SEIU, AFT and the UAW are looking to connect some of their core activists with local “protect the vote” groupings in key states and cities to show up to polls and fight to make sure every vote is counted.

https://organizingupgrade.com/strike-for-democracy/

Oh right. These unions have the kind of backbone we need to resist a coup. Especially the UAW...

William Robinson: "Fascism seeks to rescue capitalism from this organic crisis; that is, to violently restore capital accumulation, establish new forms of state legitimacy and suppress threats from below unencumbered by democratic constraints."

https://truthout.org/articles/to-defeat-fascism-we-must-recognize-its-a-failed-response-to-capitalist-crisis/

Suppress threats? From whom? Antifa? Black Lives Matter? The "squad" led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? The 75,000 DSA'ers whose dream it is to transform the USA into 1965-style Sweden 30 years from now? The inside-the-beltway environmental organizations that rely on corporate funding? The Marxist professors at Harvard, Yale and Princeton? CNN? MSNBC?

THIS IS NOT THE FUCKING WEIMAR REPUBLIC WITH A MAJORITY OF WORKERS BOTH VOTING FOR SOCIALIST PARTIES AND FIGHTING IN THE STREETS WITH HITLER'S GOONS. WAKE UP ALREADY.

If Trump is reelected, he will continue with his economic policies that are based on the Hoover Institution, not heavy state intervention into the economy and totalitarianism. The ideology behind Trump is not "Mein Kampf" but "Atlas Shrugged".

By George Scialabba.

In the early 1920s, profoundly disillusioned by the initial popular enthusiasm on all sides for World War I and the continued popular acquiescence in the war even after its futility and insane destructiveness became clear, Lawrence flirted with a not-very-well-defined authoritarianism in several of his novels. As a result, several generations of English and American leftists have come to the same conclusion as T. S. Eliot: Lawrence simply could not think, at any rate, about politics. I’d say the quoted passages, along with numerous others in The Bad Side of Books and the two volumes of Phoenix, suggest otherwise.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/arch-heretic

https://louisproyect.org/2007/07/08/lady-chatterley/

By George Scialabba.

In the early 1920s, profoundly disillusioned by the initial popular enthusiasm on all sides for World War I and the continued popular acquiescence in the war even after its futility and insane destructiveness became clear, Lawrence flirted with a not-very-well-defined authoritarianism in several of his novels. As a result, several generations of English and American leftists have come to the same conclusion as T. S. Eliot: Lawrence simply could not think, at any rate, about politics. I’d say the quoted passages, along with numerous others in The Bad Side of Books and the two volumes of Phoenix, suggest otherwise.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/arch-heretic

I'm omitting the photographs accompanying this piece. They can be viewed at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/world/trump-bolsonaro-coronavirus-latin-america.html.

Just to avoid misunderstandings in the future: Currently, the RCIT has sections and activists in South Korea, Pakistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Israel / Occupied Palestine, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Britain, Germany, and Austria.

https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/call-from-us-left-for-popular-action-to-close-down-the-racist-charlie-hebdo-magazine/

I find this call so deeply offensive it is hard to begin.

I am francophone, have been properly   since my early twenties, though I like to think my East End grandmother,  who was from a Huguenot family played a part. Yesterday, amongst other things, a French Algerian feminist sent me a  DM on FB on this issue. Her response could not have been more different. 

Andrew Coates. 

--
Andrew Coates

-- 
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
aktiv@...
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314

V-Party’s Illiberalism Index shows that the Republican party in the US has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years. Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary. Conversely, the Democratic party has retained a commitment to longstanding democratic standards.

https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/b6/55/b6553f85-5c5d-45ec-be63-a48a2abe3f62/briefing_paper_9.pdf