17 September 21
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One need look no further than the masked audience members to see how much has changed since Sanders last campaigned in Iowa on his two presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. The event is outdoors, socially distanced and many in the crowd are wearing face coverings—a clear reminder of the coronavirus pandemic that ground the country to a halt a year and a half ago, killing more than 600,000 Americans and millions of jobs.
For Sanders, political opportunity has come from tragedy. The pandemic pushed both the country and the Democratic Party to embrace the Vermont Senator’s career-long push for government aid programs. President Joe Biden came into the Oval Office determined to prove that, in the depths of the pandemic and after the chaotic Trump Administration, the government could be a force for good. And when Democrats narrowly reclaimed the Senate last January, Sanders took over the powerful Senate Budget Committee and became a crucial partner to passing Biden’s objectives.
That’s what brought Sanders to Iowa this time around. He reached an agreement with Biden in July for a $3.5 trillion avalanche of federal spending over the next decade that would make childcare and community college more affordable, expand Medicare and authorize a federal paid family leave program—all largely paid for by taxing the wealthy and corporations. Now, he’s trying to sell the budget bill to the public. “We can not only address these awful problems,” he tells the crowd, “but we can move this country forward in a very different and positive direction.”
After three decades in Washington, Sanders is at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of delivering a version of the policies he’s advocated for his entire career. But in order to do that, one of the Senate’s oldest progressive agitators has relied on a timeless legislative skill rarely mentioned in his campaign speeches: compromise. While Sanders initially envisioned a $6 trillion spending bill, he settled for nearly half that in order to get all members of his party on board. “This is the most consequential piece of legislation for working people since the 1930s,” Sanders says in an interview with TIME at a diner in Cedar Rapids, banging his hand on the wooden picnic table between every word for emphasis. “If you’re a progressive who has spent your entire life fighting for working people, fighting for children, fighting for the elderly, fighting for the climate, what you say is, ‘Well, it’s not all that I want.’ We’ve got to continue the fight, but we have accomplished an enormous amount.’”
Progressives watching the process say he is teaching them how to govern, a lesson that could have a longer legacy than the bill. “It’s a necessary maturation of the progressive movement to go from protest to government,” says Joseph Geevarghese, the Executive Director of Our Revolution, a political grassroots organization that grew out of Sanders’ first presidential campaign. “And that’s the process that we’re in the middle of, is learning that we can’t just be outside on the streets raising hell.”
The $3.5 trillion package is far from a done deal, and Sanders will soon face the ultimate test. Committees in the House and Senate are currently drafting language, but with moderate lawmakers in both chambers skeptical of the price tag, it’s becoming increasingly clear that progressives are unlikely to get everything they want. There are weeks of intense negotiations ahead. But if Sanders can get a version of this bill to Biden’s desk, he will have played a key role in passing the most expensive reshaping of the country’s social safety net in over half a decade—and perhaps cemented his own legacy as both firebrand and legislator.
‘A lot of heartburn’
As soon as Biden introduced his blueprint for spending on infrastructure and the “care economy” last spring, Sanders began strategizing with progressives in Congress on how to maximize their leverage.
While Sanders wanted a $6 trillion bill, he knew it was unrealistic. He sensed from both his personal relationship with Biden and the policies the President was putting forward—like two years of free community college and universal access to pre-K—that he had a better chance of getting at least some of what he wanted if he was willing to come down on the price.
Throughout the spring, Sanders huddled with the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) to come up with their five top priorities: investments in home care services and affordable housing; lower drug prices and Medicare eligibility; and creation of climate jobs. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the whip of the CPC, recalls meeting with Sanders over a dozen times. “The dollar amounts were really not the focus of the conversation, but more in regards to getting… a bill that meets the moment, and making sure that the Progressive Caucus was using its influence,” she says.
Sanders also pressured the White House: In the Oval Office in July, he pushed Biden to include hearing aids, eyeglasses, and dental coverage in the Medicare expansion, and Biden agreed. “Though it was not in the original Families Plan announced in April, Senator Sanders repeatedly pressed the President to embrace his proposal to expand Medicare coverage for dental, hearing aids, and vision,” says a senior White House aide. “He made that case passionately, strongly in the Oval, and the President gave his full backing.”
Sanders’ strategy, says one Congressional aide familiar with the dynamics of progressive wing, was to “lay out a left flank marker that would then have gravity, and pull the debate to the left.” Progressives credit Sanders with getting what they so far view as a favorable compromise. “I don’t think we would have ended up with three and a half trillion,” the aide says, “If [Sanders] hadn’t done that.”
After weeks of negotiating with both the White House and his own committee, Sanders says the $3.5 trillion number was reached thanks to “a lot of talking and a lot of heartburn.” For him, it’s a mixed bag. Ideas he had been championing for years, like a wealth tax and Medicare for All, were not in there. But other progressive wish list items, like an extension of the child tax credit and tax increases on the wealthy, were included. “All of the major provisions remain in the bill: that is the good news,” he says. “The bad news is, we are not funding them, at this point, for as long a period as I want.”
‘We’ve got to be as pragmatic as possible’
Sanders acolytes hope his leadership will pave the way for the progressive movement to become an effective governing force, crafting legislation within the system rather than protesting outside it.
In July, Our Revolution, which according to a spokesperson has over 500,000 members organized in thirty states, rebranded itself as a group of “pragmatic progressives.” Instead of rallying around big ideas like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All, they will now advocate for more incremental changes. During the August recess, they demonstrated in front of moderate lawmakers’ offices—in favor of the $3.5 trillion package. “Our job as organizers is trying to educate people, like, ‘Look, we’ve got to be as pragmatic as possible,” says Geevarghese, the group’s Executive Director. Geevarghese largely credits Sanders with paving that path for the group. “What Bernie has done I think quite artfully as a movement leader is not just throw bombs or issue critiques, but actually get our ideas to be considered seriously and then make… pretty significant progress in advancing them,” he says.
In the coming weeks, that progress could slow. The committees tasked with drafting the components of the legislation have been working furiously to present a complete version for Congress to pass by the end of September at the earliest. Democrats are trying to pass it through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which they can do along party lines. But with such small margins in the House and Senate, and no support from Republicans, there is no room for any defections, and the moderate wing of the party is gearing up for a challenge. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has already said the price tag will be a problem. “I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs,” he wrote in a September 2nd op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. One Democratic strategist familiar with Senate dynamics predicts that, despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s vow that the chamber is moving “full speed ahead” with $3.5 trillion, it may actually have the support of an estimated 30 Senators. “Manchin is just the one sort of taking the arrows right now,” says the strategist. “I would bet a lot of money that the deal comes closer to $2-2.4 trillion [instead of] $3.5 trillion.”
All of that signals more compromise ahead for the progressive wing. The House Ways and Means Committee, for example, which is drafting the Medicare portion of the bill, voted on September 10 to expand hearing, vision and dental benefits under Medicare, but the latter would not be provided until 2028, which is later than Sanders wanted. And even that vote did not get unanimous Democratic support: Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida voted against these measures, claiming that the party has not provided an adequate explanation for the cost or funding of these programs. “If you don’t compromise, the bill’s not going to pass, and if the bill doesn’t pass, nothing gets done,” says one Congressional aide associated with the moderate wing of the Democratic party. “You can disagree with Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema all day, but if they say, ‘I will not vote for XYZ, you can’t just ignore that, because the reality is this is going to be a politically tough vote, whether you’re in a tough state or a tough district.”
This will test Sanders’ ability to keep progressive support behind the package as patience frays with continually lowering the cost to appease moderates. Progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement, who want at least $10 trillion, have already deemed the current version inadequate. Members of the CPC are also signaling they’re unwilling to go further. “For us, it’s been really clear that that is the floor, not the ceiling, and that [$3.5 trillion] is considered a compromise by a lot of us,” says Rep. Omar.
Some of the voters Sanders was speaking to in Iowa—many decked out in Bernie campaign gear—seem disappointed, too. “I think this time they need to stand their ground,” an Iowan sporting a Bernie Sanders pin who identified himself as Flavio Hidalgo says after the Cedar Rapids rally. “We should push, not compromise, because that’s what the Democrats usually do, and then we don’t get anything. You get watered down things.” Sanders assures another voter in Cedar Rapids who asks if he would support a lower price tag that there will still be a $3.5 trillion package at the end of the day. “I’ve already compromised,” he said.
The million dollar question—or perhaps the $3.5 trillion question—is where Sanders draws his red line. If the moderates stand their ground and the only way to get these priorities into law is on a smaller scale than he wants, will his pragmatic legislative side prevail over the progressive rabble-rouser? So far, he’s not showing his cards. “If there’s a bill that doesn’t do very much, absolutely I’m prepared to vote no,” he says. “But when you have a bill, yes it does not go anywhere near as far as I would like to go, but it is very very consequential, I’m proud to be supporting it.”
Security fencing around the U.S. Capitol building. (photo: Getty)
The September 18 event is prompting officials to raise fencing again around the Capitol. Extremism experts are skeptical.
“Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election,” Trump said, invoking his oft-repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden. “In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!”
Trump’s statement tosses fuel on a combustible situation. A Monday statement from the US Capitol Police warning about “concerning online chatter about a demonstration planned for September 18” already raised worries that Saturday’s Justice for J6 rally could spiral out of control and result in violent scenes reminiscent of January 6. But extremism experts are skeptical.
Jared Holt, a domestic extremism researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote recently on his website that online chatter indicates the event is likely to be a bust.
“I am highly skeptical that [right-wing extremists] would appear in any kind of significant numbers without at least some kind of indication of that appearing in the communities they so often frequent,” Holt wrote. Reached this week via Twitter direct message, Holt said he still isn’t seeing indications September 18 will amount to much. In fact, he is seeing members of far-right groups warning that the event is likely to be swarming with informants.
Holt’s assessment is backed up by Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who told Talking Points memo he’s “not witnessed anything that would indicate large numbers of far-right demonstrators, or Proud Boys in particular, will attend this event.”
But Capitol Police’s warning and decision to mobilize extra law enforcement resources illustrates how much of a concern Trump-inspired extremism remains nine months after the insurrection — as well as how focused law enforcement is on preventing another January 6 from happening.
It’s also indicative of how wrapped up a significant faction of Trump supporters continue to be in false beliefs about the election being stolen from the former president.
What September 18 is about, briefly explained
The September 18 event, which is being organized by a right-wing fundraiser and former minor Trump campaign official named Matt Braynard under the guise of his Look Ahead America nonprofit, is ostensibly meant to draw attention to the plight of the more than 560 people arrested in connection with the January 6 insurrection. But at its core, it’s about sustaining former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him.
An examination of the numbers actually indicates that January 6 defendants are getting off comparatively light. The Guardian reported in May that at least 70 percent of the people arrested in connection with the insurrection were sent home pending trial, compared to a typical rate of 25 percent for federal defendants. Talking Points Memo added this week that “only a few dozen” people remain behind bars in connection with the insurrection.
Of those convicted, their sentences so far have ranged from probation to a maximum of eight months in jail. The insurrection left 150 officers injured and five people dead.
Braynard, however, has gone as far as to tell BuzzFeed that the plight of the January 6 defendants is “the modern civil rights struggle of our time.”
In addition to advocating for the J6 defendants, Braynard has also been a leading voice in the Trumpist effort to make a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt was shot and killed on January 6 by a Capitol officer Lt. Michael Byrd as she tried to lead a mob through a glass pane that represented the last barricade between rioters and the government officials.
CNN, citing a law enforcement intelligence report, recently reported that online chatter about the September 18 event started increasing last month after Byrd revealed his identity in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. And as Ben Collins of NBC notes, some of that chatter has threatened more violence against law enforcement officers.
The two focuses serve the same goal. As Holt explained to Vox, what’s really going on here is a “desire to rewrite the history of the January 6 Capitol riot into a story of government over-reaction and political persecution.”
Braynard recently told Steve Bannon as much, saying “this is really about fighting the narrative about what actually happened on January 6.”
September 18 will be very different than January 6 in security prep
Capitol Police is determined not to allow a repeat of January 6, when, for reasons that remain somewhat unclear, the force was caught unprepared by pro-Trump protesters and quickly overwhelmed, leading to scenes of chaotic violence in and around the Capitol. Temporary fencing is being reinstalled around the Capitol, all available officers will be on duty on September 18, and Capitol Police have reportedly asked the Department of Defense for National Guard support should it be needed.
These preparations, combined with law enforcement’s effort to prosecute the January 6 insurrectionists and monitor far-right groups in order to prevent future insurrectionists, appear to be having an impact.
As Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny report for NBC, “users in extreme far-right Facebook groups and extremist forums such as TheDonald and 4chan, which previously hosted pictures of users streaming into Washington hotel rooms and even maps of the Capitol tunnel system in the days before the Jan. 6 riot, are largely steering users away” from the September 18 event over concerns it’ll be “a setup for a ‘false flag’ event or ‘honeypot,’ in which they’ll be entrapped and coerced to commit violence by federal agents.” That reporting is echoed by Holt, who writes that far-right groups are “scared shitless” to attempt another January 6 and told Vox they’re focused on agitating at the local level.
“Many are instead ... applying that political energy into local and regional scenes,” Holt said.
Still, about 700 people are expected to attend the event, and while none may end up being Republican members of Congress, the false idea that Trump had the election stolen from him — and that therefore the January 6 insurrectionists were fighting for a righteous cause — continues to be central to mainstream GOP politics.
So while the September 18 Justice for J6 event may not turn on to be another January 6, it highlights how central antipathy to free and fair elections has become on the American right — as well as how deeply invested Trump’s most fervent supporters, including Trump himself, are in the idea that the insurrectionists’ cause was fundamentally just.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. (photo: AP)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis kicked off her investigation with a splash earlier this year, when she fired off a round of letters to Georgia officials asking them to preserve documents related to Trump just a month after she took office.
Since then, her investigation into Trump's efforts to upend Georgia's 2020 presidential election results has been more discreet as she juggles the early stages of the Trump probe with an avalanche of backlogged cases and rising violence in the Atlanta area.
"What I can tell you is that the Trump investigation is ongoing. As a district attorney, I do not have the right to look the other way on any crime that may have happened in my jurisdiction," Willis told reporters this week. "We have a team of lawyers that is dedicated to that, but my No. 1 priority is to make sure that we keep violent offenders off the street."
Investigators are plowing ahead as Trump continues to weigh his political future and wade into Peach State politics with a Georgia rally set for late September.
Trump -- still burned by his 2020 defeat and feeling betrayed by local officials who refused to help him overturn the 2020 election results -- has rolled out a number of endorsements in Georgia.
Among them: Rep. Jody Hice, who is trying to unseat Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and state Sen. Burt Jones, who is running for the open lieutenant governor seat. Both Raffensperger and outgoing Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan stood up to Trump's attempts to overturn the election. Both of Trump's picks to replace them are Republicans who have embraced Trump's false claims of election fraud.
While the Fulton County investigation still appears to be in its early stages, investigators so far have obtained documents from the Georgia Secretary of State's office and interviewed a handful of its staff, spoken to other Georgia election officials about how elections are conducted and initiated conversations with congressional committees that could obtain information relevant to the Georgia probe, according to people familiar with the investigation.
If Willis is able to gain access to information from congressional committees, it could provide a mountain of documents relevant to her investigation and possibly help her avoid lengthy court fights if she were to seek similar information on her own.
Willis's probe spans not only the former President's activities, but also a call between Sen. Lindsey Graham and Raffensperger, Rudy Giuliani's false allegations of election fraud before Georgia legislators and the surprise departure of Byung "BJay" Pak from his role as US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
A key area of focus has been the Georgia Secretary of State's office, after Trump called officials there following the 2020 election and pressed them to help to investigate his allegations of fraud in the hopes of overturning results showing Joe Biden won the state in November.
In one call, Trump pressed Raffensperger to "find" the more than 11,000 votes needed for Trump to win the state. In another call, Trump urged a top investigator in the Secretary of State's office to uncover fraud in Fulton County, telling her, "When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised."
Audio recordings of both of those calls have already emerged, and Willis's office has been poring over those along with other documents and records from the Secretary of State's office, according to people familiar with the matter.
Investigators have also interviewed a handful of staffers in Raffensperger's office, including general counsel Ryan Germany, press secretary Ari Schaffer, chief operating officer Gabriel Sterling and external affairs director Sam Teasley, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
In an indication that the investigation remains in its early stages, investigators have not yet spoken with a handful of high-profile officials in Georgia -- including Raffensperger, Duncan and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp -- who received document preservation requests back in February, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Those requests, which were the first indication Willis was investigating Trump, asked officials to retain records relevant to the administration of the 2020 general election as well as any attempts to influence officials who carried out the election.
The letters said Willis was investigating potential crimes, including "solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration."
The Georgia officials have not been accused of wrongdoing and the letters noted that they were not expected to be targets of the investigation.
In the meantime, investigators have spoken to local election officials as they build the groundwork for a potential case against Trump.
Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron said he was among the election officials who spoke to investigators from the district attorney's office. He provided them with phone messages and emails documenting the threats his office received surrounding the election, but he said their primary interest was in election procedures.
"That was specifically about how an election runs to help them with their investigation," so they can build a case to potentially present before a grand jury, Barron told CNN.
Jan. 6 investigations could offer 'relevant' details
As congressional investigators dig into to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and the events leading up to that day, they are poised to potentially uncover a trove of information that could prove pertinent to Willis's investigation.
"Clearly, any information she gets could be and would be helpful," said Michael J. Moore, a former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. "I can't imagine that she would want this case to be languishing in an investigative state for a long period of time, so she may be hoping that she gets some backup from the congressional committees."
The select committee investigating January 6 has already asked the National Archives for a range of documents, including any records of White House communications with Georgia officials such as Raffensperger, Kemp and Frances Watson, the Secretary of State investigator whom Trump phoned, from Election Day through January 20, 2021. The document request also covers communications with Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Giuliani and other attorneys who participated in Trump's call to Raffensperger.
The committee has also asked the Justice Department for communications involving Pak -- who has already testified to a congressional panel that he resigned because he heard Trump was thinking of firing him -- and Bobby Christine, the prosecutor Trump tapped to replace Pak.
Asked whether she hopes to strike a formal cooperation with congressional committees investigating the insurrection, Willis's face broke into a smile. "Oh, I hope so," she told reporters Wednesday. "It is certainly information that my office needs to see."
The congressional committees are likely to get information that's "extremely relevant" to Willis's investigation and staff-level conversations have already begun between the district attorney's office and congressional committees, a person familiar with the matter said.
Those conversations still appear to be in the early stages, as another source familiar with the matter said there has been no active coordination so far between Fulton County investigators and the select committee investigating January 6.
A painstaking pace
The Trump investigation in Georgia has proceeded at a measured pace, in part because Willis, who took office in January, is trying to pull off a balancing act between investigating a former president and addressing local issues in Fulton County.
"I know there's pressure on her to get that moving," Joshua Morrison, an attorney who previously worked for Willis in the district attorney's office before she took over the top job, said of the Trump investigation. "But she's not the type of person to slow down an investigation or speed it up just for political expediency."
In the meantime, Willis's probe has effectively superseded a separate investigation the Georgia Secretary of State's office was conducting into Trump's two calls to officials in that office, Raffensperger and Watson. A person familiar with that investigation said it has been deferred while Willis's investigation is still active.
Dominating Willis's schedule has been a double whammy of backlogged cases and rising violent crime.
She has said her office faced a logjam of some 11,000 cases, partly because of court closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, but also from office mismanagement Willis blames on her predecessor. She has also had to grapple with a surge in shootings and homicides in the Atlanta region, including high-profile cases like the metro Atlanta spa shooter, in which Willis intends to seek the death penalty.
"I'm here begging you for help," Willis told the Fulton County Board of Commissioners this week. "I'm drowning. I need help."
Willis's predecessor Paul Howard declined to comment.
It was her second appearance before the board in recent months to request additional funds and personnel.
"They're overwhelmed," Morrison said. "Like she told the county commission a few weeks ago, it's manpower and money that are necessary to fight crime and also handle Trump."
Willis has already brought on a handful of experts whose experience could prove useful to her Trump investigation, but a person familiar with the matter said they were still in the process of "gearing up" and adding staff to help with that investigation.
Moore, the former US attorney, said it will continue to be a tricky balancing act for Willis to serve her constituents while investigating Trump.
"I can't imagine that a local DA with the amount of sort of home issues that she faces on a daily basis wants to get bogged down in this case," Moore said. "At the end of the day, I mean her duties are of course to prosecute crimes, they're not necessarily to embed yourself in the history books."
For Willis's part, she has insisted she'll treat the Trump investigation like any other -- parsing the facts against the law to see what, if any, charges they yield.
"I know that people find that case to be interesting because it was a former sitting president. And that has some historic value. For me, it's not interesting," Willis told WABE, the Atlanta-area NPR radio station, last week. "We will put the facts that are learned -- literally, cause I'm old school -- up on a wall, what those facts are. We will put the statutes that we believe those facts could or could not touch. We will see if the elements of a crime are met. If they are, I will present a case to the grand jury. If they're not, then we won't do it."
Occupy Wall Street protesters. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Protesters took over Zuccotti Park 10 years ago today. The movement’s biggest legacy may be the 10-year crackdown that followed
Trump’s political career had a kind of origin story in Occupy Wall Street, which began in Zuccotti Park 10 years ago today. In early 2012, his eventual campaign chief and White House adviser Steve Bannon was directing a take-down film on the movement, featuring blogger and provocateur Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart suddenly died during production and Bannon took control of Breitbart’s company, which he turned into the “platform of the alt-right” that would help land Trump in the presidency. For Bannon, as with Trump on his call with the governors, Occupy revealed an enemy that required conservatives to take off their gloves, dispense with civility, and fight for their version of civilization.
The reactionary response happened worldwide. Occupy Wall Street was part of a global movement in 2011 that spread from Tunisia and Egypt, across the Middle East, and through southern Europe. It took until autumn for what began as the Arab Spring to arrive in lower Manhattan. “In New York, we’re still the baby movement in the world,” I heard organizer Marina Sitrin tell an audience at an anarchist social center in Athens, Greece, at the time. From there it ricocheted even further, in cities and towns throughout the United States, and from London and New Zealand to Nigeria.
Wherever it appeared, the 2011 movement had in common two things: the tactic of occupying public spaces for days and weeks at a time, and the goal of unseating unjust accretions of power. Taken together, that time, space, and rebellion led to another common feature: radical experiments with what a truly accountable democracy might look like. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and buoyed by the rise of the internet, democracy was due for a reboot.
I am not sure there was as much cohesion to the opposition these uprisings faced, from Bannon’s media blitz to Bashar al-Assad’s airstrikes. On the 10-year anniversary of Occupy, though, it is the opposition that haunts me most. I wrote a whole book trying to figure out whether Occupy Wall Street was a success or failure. But 10 years on, I think the question is a distraction. Looming over anything protesters did, now, is the enormity of the crackdown that followed.
In 2011, before they were war-zones, Yemen, Libya, and Syria had nonviolent protests against intransigent regimes. The regimes struck back brutally. These nightmares began with outbreaks of hope. That hope was intolerable. Millions of people have been displaced, and hundreds of thousands killed, as a result.
In Europe, protesters did what many U.S. pundits told Occupy to do: Get into the system, elect politicians. Protest-aligned parties took national power in Greece and Spain. But the central European banks clung harder to austerity policies that put housing and decent work out of reach for a generation of young people. This wasn’t as bloody as the crackdowns in the Arab world, but it had perverse effects. When the politics of providing for people who had been deprived became untenable, right-wing movements arose to blame the symptoms of austerity policies on refugees arriving from the Syrian crackdown.
In the United States, well, we eventually got President Trump, the inconvenienced owner of the building at 40 Wall Street. (I recall the drugstore on its bottom floor being a popular escape route from police.) He came to power mimicking some of Occupy’s messaging about economic injustice and the power of the political elite, but with a different answer: decrying immigrants, denying climate change, and “I alone can fix it.” Once in office, his policies gave handouts to the rich. His rhetoric deepened the divisions among the “99 percent” and eroded democratic norms once easy to take for granted.
The right-wing reaction to Occupy and its related movements has been so all-consuming that it’s hard to remember the feeling of 2011, when it seemed like a deeper kind of democracy was on the rise. Protesters everywhere tried out radical forms of self-governance in their camps, inspired by the texture of online networks. Rather than making demands of politicians, they debated how to make politicians obsolete. Whatever ideology any individual held, together they were anarchists, in the sense of trying to root out hierarchy wherever it appeared. Egyptian Google employee Wael Ghonim created the Facebook page that brought thousands to the streets in Cairo, but he refused the mantle of leadership, calling the movement “leaderless.” A document passed by Occupy Wall Street’s consensus-based mass assembly described its participants as “autonomous political beings” who were “engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.”
When celebrities visited Occupy Wall Street to offer support, debates broke out about whether they should be allowed to speak or have any special treatment. Occupiers challenged each other to “check your privilege,” to become ever more vigilant to how inequalities of power and wealth distort the practice of equality.
There was a time when the open-source website for the Occupy Wall Street assembly was a beautiful machine, publishing up-to-the-minute news and discussion and proposals — a glimpse of politics moving with the speed and interactivity of the internet. If technology can aggregate people’s input instantly, why should we need a government designed for the time of horse and buggy?
Approximations of Occupy’s organizational details would appear on the news, recounted by perplexed reporters. For a while, the old protest chant, often repeated then, seemed true: “The whole world is watching.” Occupiers would talk with a straight face about the number of days or weeks it would be until a revolution came, like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia earlier that year.
The movements of 2011 put a lot of trust in social media and viral messaging, whose strength couldn’t outlast the raw, old-fashioned kinds of power they were up against. Before long in Egypt — and perhaps now Tunisia — the democratic revolution turned into a new dictatorship. Authoritarians have taken power from Brazil to Belarus, while deepening their hold in China and Russia. On January 6th, the United States saw an attempted coup on behalf of a billionaire, the landlord of a Wall Street office tower who represents capitalist decadence like no other. Wealth inequality, it goes without saying, has only grown worse.
Now a decade older, many of those same activists are on the defensive, trying to protect what remnants of 18th century democracy we have left. Veterans of Occupy are campaigning for candidates and making policy demands, attempting to secure a more humane republicanism. They have helped organize a surge of economic populism, as well as calls for climate justice, defunding police, and canceling student debt. They learned from Occupy’s early failure to center racial justice and embraced Black Lives Matter. Onetime protesters have helped lead a revival of the solidarity economy, trying to inscribe democracy into daily economic life. They have backed the candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some hold positions of relative power; others are still living on the street. Some have developed software, like Pol.is, Action Network, and Loomio, that continue democratic experiments from Occupy in code. But when police destroyed the occupations, they buried the most radical features of what the anthropologist-organizer David Graeber called “the democracy project.”
Perhaps the protests were too utopian, not pragmatic enough, and had some things backward. But I am not interested in fixating on what the young and impatient Occupiers should have done instead. There is no simple formula for what makes social movements effective, for how to back up their numbers and networks with the power to make lasting change. But too often the focus has been on what the 2011 activists did or didn’t do, rather than the reaction they awakened. Too rarely do we mourn all the hopeful visions forgotten when a phalanx of police comes to restore order.
The fact is that when a global, unarmed movement called for a democracy worthy of the 21st century, the response from those in power was no, with all the cruelty they thought they could afford. The crackdown isn’t even over. Wars that began in 2011 are still raging in Syria and Yemen, and elected authoritarians are still consolidating power. Trump’s “favorite dictator,” Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has made the crackdown a way of life. They are not done.
Democracy must be rediscovered in every generation or it withers. It must evolve with what people long for. In the early planning meetings for Occupy Wall Street, I witnessed organizers shift from making a mere demand of the system to making a space for that rediscovery to begin. I was there the night their insurgent village was torn down. That place was far from perfect, but the condition of democracy in the years since only shows how much we needed the rowdy experiments happening there.
The reaction against the movements of 2011 has demonstrated how dangerous real democracy can seem to those who gain from its decline. The consequences are everywhere around us. So much of the mess of the world right now happened because, for some, the noise of democracy was unbearable. In the decade to come, that noise needs to grow louder.
Charlie Kirk speaks with attendees at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Gage Skidmore)
Turning Point USA’s list gains fresh attention after it expands and some notice it disproportionately names academics of color
Then, in June 2020, she wrote an article about the George Floyd protests, addressing the role of riots in social change, and noting: “Freedom through violence is a privilege possessed only by whites.”
That piece, published in the Atlantic, and Carter Jackson’s appearance on the magazine’s podcast, was enough to land her on the Professor Watchlist, an online list of academics curated by the rightwing Turning Point USA (TPUSA) group, a powerful supporter of Donald Trump and his Republican party allies.
Whether through the list, which has gained fresh attention this week after it was expanded and gained a slick new website, or the article, or the podcast, or a combination of the three, Carter Jackson soon had received plenty of obscene messages.
“There’s a folder that I keep called ‘hate mail’ in my email and I’ve gotten a lot of those: ‘I hope you die’ messages, just crazy, horrible things,” Carter Jackson, author of the book Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, said.
She also received postcards at her office at the Wellesley campus, in Massachusetts. One bore an image that seemed to be inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Carter Jackson, said. Written on the other side was something less artistic.
“It was like: ‘You crazy bitch, I hope you die,’ yada yada yada,” she said.
The list first launched in 2016, as an online catalog of nearly 200 college professors who Turning Point USA had deemed to be pushing “leftist propaganda in the classroom”. This month several academics noticed that the website had been given a slick makeover, with Oleg Urminsky, a professor at the University of Chicago, counting 182 scholars who had been newly added to the list.
The website allows users to search for professors or universities, and offers detailed bios of the academics that Turning Point adjudges to have radical views. According to its website, the Professor Watchlist is “a carefully aggregated list”.
“We only publish profiles on incidents that have been reported and published via a credible source,” the website says, although those sources include the rightwing Daily Caller website and Campus Reform, a news website funded by a conservative group.
Turning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk, a talkshow host and conservative activist who has become a prominent source of Covid-19 misinformation and election fraud conspiracies, did not respond to a number of questions about the watchlist.
The group was a key promoter of the 6 January gathering in Washington DC that spilled out into a violent insurrection, offering bus rides and free accommodation, while Kirk himself said he had organized more than 80 buses “full of patriots to DC to fight for this president”.
That backdrop lends a menacing air.
“Sometimes I think a lot of these extremists are all bark and no bite, but at the same time January 6 was very real, and I am hyper-aware there are people who are not above using violence, resorting to violence, in ways that are terrifying,” Carter Jackson said.
“I don’t let it influence everything I do, because I can’t just function in a state of paranoia. But at the same time, I am very much aware of it.”
On Twitter some noticed that the Turning Point list seemed to disproportionately name academics of color compared with white professors. “Only 7.3% of Harvard faculty are black; yet 5 of the 7 professors featured on the ‘Professor Watch List’ for Harvard are black,” Stephen Latham wrote.
Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Stanford, who found out he had been named to the watchlist in early September, said the watchlist was “a shameful attempt to harass faculty into silence, especially faculty of color and those who belong to other historically marginalized groups”.
Jefferson’s bio on the Professor Watchlist is unusually long. Among Jefferson’s “radical” ideas, according to the list, is his assertion that “white Americans and conservatives” led the storming of the US Capitol “because of their inability to accept the election results”.
“Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist is an outfit meant to intimidate faculty who express beliefs that frustrate the status quo and who threaten the maintenance of existing power structures in the United States,” Jefferson said in an email.
“This tactic simply won’t work on me – not even a little bit. I will not be silent in the face of attacks on American democracy that make a mockery of this country’s ideals, nor will I stop speaking honestly and clearly about what is at the root of so much that ails us: many white Americans’ commitment to white supremacy in all its baseless glory.
“Yes, it was this commitment to white supremacy that led many to storm the US Capitol on January 6 and it is this commitment to white supremacy that forms the basis of attacks on core features of democracy, including the right to vote. It is also a commitment to white supremacy that inspires those who run TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist to target scholars like me who believe that the truth is still worth telling.”
Carter Jackson is similarly defiant. She has received far more supportive messages than the hateful ones, and said she will “never stop doing the work”.
“You go back to the 20s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, there’s always been people that will try to malign academics or journalists or activists – people that are trying to speak truth to power,” she said.
“Something about this makes me feel even more empowered. Oftentimes with academics you write something, either a book or an article, and it falls into this void in which no one’s paying attention.”
She added: “This lets me know that people are paying attention, and if anything I think it draws more people to my work than would have looked at it otherwise.”
U.S. Olympic gymnasts Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols during a Senate Judiciary hearing about the FBI handling of the Larry Nassar investigation of sexual abuse of Olympic gymnasts. (photo: Saul Loeb/Reuters)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Some of gymnastics’ biggest stars offered scathing testimony Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s failure to stop serial sexual abuser, USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Lawyers say in the time between when the FBI was first told of Nassar’s crimes and his 2016 arrest, Nassar abused another 120 people. FBI Director Christopher Wray apologized to the gymnasts in the Senate hearing. Last week, the FBI fired an agent involved in the investigation into Nassar. Both the gymnasts and senators on the Judiciary Committee called out Justice Department leadership for failing to appear at Wednesday’s hearing. Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to testify next month.
This is the testimony of Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, who is widely considered to be the greatest gymnast of all time.
SIMONE BILES: Over the course of my gymnastics career, I have won 25 World Championship medals and seven Olympic medals for Team USA. That record means so much to me, and I am proud of my representation of this nation through gymnastics.
I am also a survivor of sexual abuse. And I believe without a doubt that the circumstances that led to my abuse and allowed it to continue, are directly the result of the fact that the organizations created by Congress to oversee and protect me as an athlete — USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee — failed to do their jobs.
Nelson Mandela once said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” It is the power of that statement that compels and empowers me to be here in front of you today. I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse. To be clear — sorry.
SEN. DICK DURBIN: Take your time.
SIMONE BILES: To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and [perpetuated] his abuse.
USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge. In May of 2015, Rhonda Faehn, the former head of the USA Gymnastics Women’s Program, was told by my friend and teammate, Maggie Nichols, that she suspected I, too, was a victim. I didn’t understand the magnitude of what all was happening until The Indianapolis Star published its article in the fall of 2016 entitled “Former USA Gymnastics doctor accused of abuse.” Yet, while I was a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic team, neither USAG, USOPC, nor the FBI ever contacted me or my parents. While others had been informed and investigations were ongoing, I had been left to wonder why I was not told until after the Rio Games.
This is the largest case of sexual abuse in the history of American sport. And although there has been a fully independent investigation of the FBI’s handling of the case, neither USAG nor USOPC have ever been made the subject of the same level of scrutiny. These are the entities entrusted with the protection of our sport and our athletes, and yet it feels like questions of responsibility and organizational failures remain unanswered. As you pursue the answers to those questions, I ask that your work be guided by the same question that Rachael Denhollander and many others have asked: “How much is a little girl worth?”
I sit before you today to raise my voice so that no little girl must endure what I, the athletes at this table and the countless others who needlessly suffered under Nassar’s guise of medical treatment, which we continue to endure today. We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at FBI, USAG or the USOPC did what was necessary to protect us. We have been failed, and we deserve answers.
Nassar is where he belongs, but those who enabled him deserve to be held accountable. If they are not, I am convinced that this will continue to happen to others across Olympic sports. In reviewing the OIG’s report, it truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us and went out of its way to help protect USAG and USOPC. A message needs to be sent: If you allow a predator to harm children, the consequences will be swift and severe. Enough is enough.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday about the FBI’s failure to stop serial sexual abuser, USA Gymnastics doctor, now imprisoned, Larry Nassar. Biles mentioned Rachael Denhollander, who, in 2016, was the first gymnast to publicly speak out against Nassar. On Thursday, Rachael Denhollander spoke to Democracy Now!
RACHAEL DENHOLLANDER: I am so proud of the athletes who testified and the light that they’re shedding in these dark spaces. But to see over and over and over again the depth of systemic failure and just the incredible damage that was done to them and to all of the survivors who came after they reported, when that didn’t need to happen, is a very heavy burden to bear.
And I think something we need to be asking as we’re watching this unfold is: What are we not seeing? Because the reality is, most survivors of sexual assault who report will tell you that this is a story that they could tell, too. It is very difficult to get law enforcement to take reports of sexual assault seriously, to pursue the case with diligence, to prosecute it to the fullest extent of the law. And we need to start looking at what we saw yesterday and ask what we’re not seeing. What happens to the survivors who don’t have an army of 500 women? What happens to the survivors who don’t have Olympians headlining their case and raising the profile of the gross negligence and the corruption that’s taking place in our system? …
In 15 months, the FBI did absolutely nothing, except allow over a hundred little girls to continue being abused. … So we need to be looking at what has to change in this case, but it’s not just a problem with this case. We’ve got to start asking: What’s got to change in the system, so that survivors that we don’t see aren’t going through what these women went through, and have a justice system that they can truly rely on? Those are hard questions, but they’ve got to be asked. And these words are cheap if they’re not followed by action.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Rachael Denhollander, the first gymnast to speak out publicly against Larry Nassar.
For more, we’re joined by Mark Alesia, who Denhollander first contacted in 2016, when he was part of the investigative team at The Indianapolis Star. She told him, quote, “I am willing to do anything you need. I want this to end.” Mark’s team then broke the story about Dr. Nassar’s abuse. He is now director of university communications at Indiana State University.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Mark. We talked to you just after Nassar’s trial and sentencing, that remarkable moment when one woman, one gymnast after another stood up and talked about how he had wrecked their lives, but talked about surviving. Now we have the top gymnasts, some of the most famous women in the world, like Simone Biles, testifying before the Senate. They specifically focused on the FBI. Tell us this story from the beginning. You were there. How is it that the FBI dropped the ball so completely? And are we going to see criminal charges against FBI agents?
MARK ALESIA: Well, I don’t know if we’re going to see those charges, but I think it was Senator Leahy who said there are a whole lot of people who ought to be in jail after this.
What happened was, the FBI did not take the gymnasts’ complaints seriously. They didn’t — offices in different cities didn’t communicate with each other. And there were conflicts of interest. There was an FBI agent who was talking to the president of USAG, Steve Penny, about getting a job with the U.S. Olympic Committee, and that they were so chummy that in one of the emails, Steve Penny told the FBI agent that he would like to, quote, “body slam the reporters” — myself, Marisa and Tim. That’s Steve Penny. And, by the way, he’s one of the people who isn’t in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about why Indianapolis is so important. You mentioned the U.S. Olympic Committee. Talk about who first came forward to the FBI and what happened to that complaint.
MARK ALESIA: That would have been, I believe, McKayla Maroney, very early on. She wasn’t taken seriously. I think she testified that the agent said, “That’s it?” And then —
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go — I want to go to the Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney testifying before the Senate Wednesday.
McKAYLA MARONEY: This was very clear, cookie cutter pedophilia and abuse. And this is important, because I told the FBI all of this, and they chose to falsify my report and to not only minimize my abuse, but silence me yet again. I thought, given the severity of the situation, that they would act quickly for the sake of protecting other girls. But instead, it took them 14 months to report anything, when Larry Nassar, in my opinion, should have been in jail that day. The FBI, USOC and USAG sat idly by as dozens of girls and women continued to be molested by Larry Nassar.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Mark Alesia, talk about how you got involved, the tip, how you ended up going down to Louisville to interview Rachael Denhollander.
MARK ALESIA: My teammates and I, Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tim Evans at The Indianapolis Star, we did a story. The first one was right on the eve of the Rio Olympics in 2016. And after that story came out, we received an email from Rachael saying, “I wasn’t abused by a coach, but this was a doctor. And if you’re interested, I will speak out, and I will speak out by name.” I drove down to Louisville, and I interviewed Rachael. She came off as intelligent, sincere, passionate, utterly credible. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Then a lawyer and a mother of three.
MARK ALESIA: And a lawyer and a mother of four now, I believe. And, yes, everything.
And what really, I think, bothers me — well, it angers me; it doesn’t just bother me. It’s five years after that. It’s five years after that, and those women had to show up in front of a congressional committee and bare their soul again to make people understand what happened. These survivors, five years later, they are still looking for answers. They are still looking for justice. And that’s outrageous.
And there’s another piece to this, too. The survivors also have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get Michigan State University to release 6,000 pages of documents from an investigation into Nassar that they are withholding because of attorney-client privilege.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is amazing. Michigan State, the president has had to resign, but he wasn’t criminally charged. That’s where the, you know, U.S. Olympic Committee’s doctor, Nassar, worked, at Michigan State. And he abused these girls, these young women, for decades.
MARK ALESIA: Right. And it’s also important to understand that for about maybe 10 or 15 years earlier, adults — or, gymnasts had come forward to adults to complain about Nassar, but it always went nowhere. That included one situation with a law enforcement department. It included a Michigan State coach, a gymnastics coach. It included people who couldn’t possibly believe that that great, wonderful Larry Nassar could do such a thing. Adults had failed these children at every level. This is just an absolute tragedy. And again, it is outrageous that five years later it’s still going on, with so many unanswered questions and so many people who were responsible for allowing Nassar to continue going without being held accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the three-time Olympic gold medal gymnast, two-time Olympic team captain, Aly Raisman, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday.
ALY RAISMAN: It is unrealistic to think we can grasp the full extent of culpability without understanding how and why USAG and USOPC chose to ignore abuse for decades and why the interplay among these three organizations led the FBI to willingly disregard our reports of abuse. Without knowing who knew what when, we cannot identify all enablers or determine whether they are still in positions of power. We just can’t fix a problem we don’t understand. And we can’t understand the problem unless and until we have all of the facts. If we don’t do all we can to get these facts, the problems we are here to address will persist, and we are deluding ourselves if we think other children can be spared the institutionalized tolerance and normalization of abuse that I and so many others had to endure.
AMY GOODMAN: That is three-time Olympic gold medal gymnast, two-time Olympic team captain, Aly Raisman, who has really been the forceful leader of this movement to bring Nassar down, but not only him, because, as Simone Biles says, the whole system is broken.
But, interestingly, the attorney general, Merrick Garland did not appear, though the head of the Justice Department was asked to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Apparently, he’s going to appear in October. Christopher Wray did, the head of the FBI, and apologized, though he said he wasn’t there at the time. He said it was abhorrent, what had taken place. What do you make of this, Mark?
MARK ALESIA: Well, I just — again, I feel so badly for the survivors. I believe it was Aly Raisman who said it’s going to take her months just to get over the experience of testifying before the committee. But I’m sure she felt she had a duty to do that. And I would hope that the people at the very top of our judicial system will recognize their duty to these women, who have represented our country so well on an international stage.
But, you know, I think it’s also important — Rachael Denhollander, kind of typically for her, she can cut straight to the crux of an issue, but she’s not just looking at abuse in gymnastics. She is talking about the ordeal of women who report sexual assaults and what they go through in all walks of life.
AMY GOODMAN: Especially, I mean, you’re talking about gold medalists, world-renowned women; if they are not taken seriously, what is everyone else supposed to think? The last point, Mark Alesia, and it’s one you made with us right after the trial, is that these women came forward — it’s not like they run track, where it’s very clear who wins first, second and third. The whole sport is judged by committees. And that’s where they were incredibly brave in coming forward, because when you rock the boat, these committees don’t have to take your scores, your speeds; they can decide if you’re a troublemaker or not, and ice you out.
MARK ALESIA: Right. And I think by the time a lot of the people who had testified at the Nassar sentencing, they were probably done or close to done with their gymnastics careers. But that’s certainly just sort of one factor in a system where people are sort of groomed to be pleasers and, as you said, not to rock the boat, certainly not with their coach.
AMY GOODMAN: And you could extend that coach to the workplace. You could extend it certainly to communities, to places of religious worship, and beyond. Well, this may well just be the beginning. We’ll see where this Senate Judiciary Committee goes. Mark Alesia, we want to thank you so much, reporter with the investigative team at The Indianapolis Star which broke the story in 2016 about Dr. Nassar’s sexual abuse of gymnasts. His team helped to expose USA Gymnastics’ failure to report allegations of sexual abuse by coaches and authorities. Now he is no longer with The Indianapolis Star.
Coming up, as Congress debates a $3.5 trillion bill to expand the nation’s social safety net and to increase taxes on the rich, we look back at Occupy Wall Street, which began 10 years ago today. Stay with us.
Researchers, including Scott Stephens (left), hope to identify which sequoia groves are most at risk from extreme fires in the hope of making them more fire-resistant. (photo: Lauren Sommer/NPR)
"That is what we would call a real giant sequoia monarch," she says. "It's massive."
At 40 feet in diameter, the tree easily meets the definition of a monarch, the name given to the largest sequoias. It's likely more than 1,500 years old.
Still, that's as old as this tree will get. The trunk is pitch black, the char reaching almost all the way to the top. Not a single green branch is visible.
"It's 100% dead," Bernal says. "There's no living foliage on it all."
The scorched carcasses of eight other giants surround this one in the Alder Creek grove. A fire science research assistant at UC Berkeley, Bernal is here with a team cataloguing the destruction.
It's not easy to kill a giant sequoia. They can live more than 3,000 years and withstand repeated wildfires and droughts over the centuries.
Now, with humans changing both the climate and the landscape surrounding the trees, these giants face dangers they might not survive.
Last year, the Castle Fire burned through the Sierra Nevada, fueled by hot, dry conditions and overgrown forests. Based on early estimates, as many as 10,600 large sequoias were killed — up to 14% of the entire population.
"This is unprecedented to see so many of these large old-growth trees dead, and I think it's a travesty," says Scott Stephens, fire scientist at UC Berkeley, as he surveys the damage. "This is pure disaster."
With extreme fires increasing on a hotter planet, scientists are urgently trying to save the sequoias that remain. Researchers from federal agencies and universities are teaming up to find the sequoia groves at highest risk. The hope is to make them more fire-resistant by reducing the dense, overgrown vegetation around them, before the next wildfire hits.
But one year later, the sequoia groves are again under threat. At the time of publication, wildfires burning in Sequoia National Park are within a mile of a grove with thousands of sequoias. Firefighters are battling to contain the blazes.
"It's hard to see these trees that have lived hundreds to potentially thousands of years just die," Bernal says, "because it's just not a normal thing for them."
Sequoias need fire, but fires are changing
Giant sequoias only grow in isolated pockets, tucked in the mountains of California. Losing even a few groves spells significant loss to the entire population.
Sequoias are one of the most fire-adapted trees on the planet. With tough, foot-thick bark, they're insulated from the heat. They tower above the rest of the forest and the bottom of the tree is bare, without low branches that might be ignited by trees burning around it.
Old-growth sequoias weathered the low-intensity wildfires that were once the norm in the Sierra Nevada. Fires regularly spread along the forest floor, either ignited by lightning or set by Native American tribes who used burns to shape the landscape and cultivate food and materials.
With the arrival of white settlers, fire began to disappear from these forests. Tribes were forcibly removed from lands they once maintained, and federal firefighting agencies mounted a campaign of fire suppression, extinguishing blazes as quickly as possible.
That meant forests grew denser over the last century. Now, the built-up vegetation has become a tinder box, fueling hotter, more extreme fires, like the Castle Fire, that kill vast swaths of trees.
"These trees have been here 1500 years, so how many fires have they withstood: 80?" Stephens says. "And then one fire comes in 2020 and suddenly they're gone."
The Castle Fire's fierce heat was also fueled by the changing climate. In 2012, when a drought hit California, hotter temperatures amplified the toll it took on Sierra Nevada forests. While the largest sequoias could handle it, other kinds of conifers around them succumbed. Millions of trees were killed.
"The extra warmth that came with the drought pushed it into a whole new terrain," says Nate Stephenson, an emeritus scientist with the US Geological Survey. "That's what really helped kill a lot of trees, and they became fuel for fires."
During his four decades of studying sequoias, Stephenson had rarely seen an old-growth sequoia die. When the first images emerged after the Castle Fire hit, he wasn't prepared.
"That's when I couldn't help it," he says. "I don't cry often, but I cried when I saw the photos. Because I love these trees."
Few seedlings sprout from the ash
The soil is still powdery black in the Alder Creek sequoia grove a year later. The UC Berkeley team is scanning it for signs of hope: a spot of green.
"Two tiny sequoias here growing from the regeneration from the fire," Stephens says, finding 2-inch-tall seedlings, impossibly tiny compared to what they could become.
The lifecycle of a sequoia hinges on wildfire, which is the trigger for releasing its seeds. The blast of heat opens the cones, sending a shower of seeds to the forest floor, which get established quickly on the newly cleared ground.
In some groves, researchers are finding hundreds of seedlings where the Castle Fire burned with low-intensity, the kind of fire sequoias are accustomed to.
But in the Alder Creek grove, where the fire burned with ferocious heat, the team only finds a dozen seedlings the entire afternoon. Other groves look similarly bare.
Even under normal conditions, around 98% of sequoia seedlings die in their first year. This year could be even tougher with extreme drought gripping the landscape.
"I am very concerned that some areas will not have sequoias," says Christy Brigham, head of resource management and science for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. "All the adults are killed and there will not be enough seedlings to repopulate."
That's leading land managers to consider planting new sequoias, so the scorched groves don't disappear entirely. But in a changing climate, it's not a simple question. As temperatures rise, young trees planted today face surviving in a vastly different future. The most suitable habitat for sequoias could move somewhere else.
"That is one of the gifts of giant sequoias — is that they force us to think in deep time," says Brigham. "It forces us to confront the challenge of climate change."
Rush to save remaining sequoias
Federal land managers say that given the millennia-length timeframe, planting new sequoias is a back-up plan at this point. The more pressing need is saving the trees that are left.
A coalition of the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, universities, tribes and nonprofits is banding together to identify the groves most at risk. This summer, the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition has been rapidly assessing conditions on the ground.
"We just saw what one wildfire did," Brigham says. "Can we find the places, do the plans, and get the funding and put the people on the ground fast enough to prevent loss like this in the future?"
Brigham estimates around 40% of the sequoia groves on national park land alone are at risk of severe wildfires, because the surrounding forests haven't burned in decades. Other groves at risk are found on Forest Service or private land.
Sequoia National Park has used controlled burns, also known as prescribed fire, since the 1960s to prevent forests from becoming overgrown. But Brigham says burning continues to be a challenge.
In the spring, when cooler conditions are better for controlled burning, projects are limited because of the threatened pacific fisher. The slender, mink-like animal was listed as endangered in 2020, and its habitat is protected during the spring denning season.
But burning in the summer can be tough because of air quality concerns, extremely dry vegetation or lack of personnel, since they're generally fighting wildfires.
"There are all these constraints on prescribed fire that we can't control," Brigham says. "As it gets hotter and drier, that window is smaller and smaller."
Brigham says she's hopeful that land managers can move quickly over the next year to prioritize the sequoia groves that need help the most. With extreme fires increasingly common, time is running short.
"It is not too late," says Brigham. "We can do better. People love these trees. So I just hope we can take that love and translate it into immediate action to protect the groves and long term action to limit climate change and its impacts."
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