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They have President Joe Biden on their side. But will their ideological victory be empty?
The president’s gesture of support underscored the political reality that is driving the tense negotiations on Capitol Hill: In the battle for ideological supremacy in the Democratic Party, the progressives have already won. Biden was indeed a proud moderate during his three and a half decades as a senator, but he has fallen in firmly with the progressives as president. He’s embraced the agenda championed by the likes of his former rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—tackling climate change; creating a new child-care tax credit; expanding the government’s role in health care; endorsing universal pre-K, free community college, and paid family leave—and made it his own. The moderates in the House and Senate are balking at the size and scope of Biden’s plan, and, still, the president is siding with the progressives. He used last week’s meetings to reassure lawmakers like Jayapal and to pressure centrists such as Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have opposed the $3.5 trillion price tag of the Democrats’ proposal but have yet to make a counteroffer of their own.
The progressives’ intraparty victory could wind up being an empty one in the end. With the Democrats’ slim majorities in Congress, the moderates have the votes to sink all but the relatively modest infrastructure portion of Biden’s agenda, which passed the Senate in a bipartisan vote this past summer. Embittered progressives could then reject the infrastructure bill, leaving the party with a catastrophic whiff heading into its already-uphill effort to hold Congress in next year’s midterm elections. “Most people feel that progressives have gotten rolled over and over again because they haven’t been able or willing to leverage their power,” Jayapal told me.
At minimum, the moderates are likely to scale back the much larger package that Democrats need to pass without help from Republicans. But that prospect is not as frightening to progressives as it might have been in past years. Because of their early success, the second bill is so broad that even if moderates were to cut its cost in half, Biden could still lay claim to legislative accomplishments that, when added to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted this spring, are more significant than any Democratic president of the past half century. Manchin opposes the breadth of the bill’s climate provisions, and House moderates have blocked a plan aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs. The Senate parliamentarian has nixed a proposal to include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Yet even if those measures are watered down or scrapped, what’s left in the bill would still dramatically increase federal support for child care, early education, college, and health care.
“Progressives are in the driver’s seat here,” says Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, the advocacy group that grew out of Senator Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Are we going to get everything we want? No. That’s just the reality of politics. But if you look at where we are compared to the Obama era, it’s transformational.”
The dynamic playing out under Biden is a direct result of the lessons Democrats—both elected leaders and progressive activists—learned from their experience the last time the party controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. The Democratic majorities in 2009–10 were far larger, but each of the major legislative initiatives of that era started closer to the political center as compromises designed to attract Republican votes. Democrats held back the cost of their initial stimulus package in 2009 and loaded it up with tax cuts at the expense of bigger investments in other areas such as infrastructure. They modeled the Affordable Care Act on a law that Mitt Romney signed as the GOP governor of Massachusetts. The climate bill that never passed the Senate adopted a market-based cap-and-trade program instead of a simpler carbon tax.
On all of those proposals, moderates outmaneuvered progressives without succeeding in winning over Republicans. Now progressives are driving the policy agenda, and have a Democratic president they can claim as an ally. “He was not my candidate in the election,” Jayapal, who backed Sanders in the 2020 primary, said of Biden. “But what he has laid out in this Build Back Better Plan is extremely progressive, and what he has supported as we’ve gone through is extremely progressive.” Even so, Jayapal isn’t taking any chances. As chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she has led the group in adopting a more confrontational posture toward the party leadership. Progressives in the House have threatened to vote down the Senate-approved bipartisan infrastructure bill if the broader Democratic bill does not pass first.
The most consequential move by progressives, however, might prove to be not their tactical positioning now but their success in winning—and keeping—Biden’s support for their agenda. When the president gave Jayapal a copy of his speech last week, he was demonstrating to her that he would fight for their agenda as it hangs on the edge, that their vision remains his vision. Jayapal asked him to sign it, and he did. An autographed speech is not the presidential signature that progressives ultimately want, but for the moment, it’s the best they can get.
Protestors march in front of the Capitol in Austin, Texas, to demand all votes in the general election be counted. Republicans are fully in control of the state's redistricting process. (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
Overall, this map creates 24 solid or likely Republican seats, 13 solid or likely Democratic seats and one swing seat in the Rio Grande Valley. (The state’s two new districts will be placed in the Austin and Houston metropolitan areas, as those two areas fueled much of the state’s population growth since 2010.) But this isn’t that much different than what Texas’s map currently looks like: At present, the delegation is made up of 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats.
This is still a very good map for Republicans, though, because mapmakers strengthened the GOP’s advantage in the state by making a number of potentially vulnerable seats held by Republicans much redder, with the newest Houston-area seat also drawn so that it’s favorable to Republican candidates. As the table below shows, the current map has 11 Republican incumbents in seats that were less than 20 points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric.1 But on the new map, all but one Republican-held seat would be R+20 or stronger for the GOP.
GOP incumbents are protected in Texas’s new proposed map
Change in partisan lean in Texas congressional districts held by Republicans, from the current map to the first draft plan proposed by the Texas Legislature
Given that the GOP controls the redistricting process in Texas, it might seem strange that it wasn’t more aggressive in trying to flip a seat or two held by Democrats. But population growth and demographic shifts in Texas have arguably benefited Democrats so significantly that Republican mapmakers were mostly left playing defense — concerned that some GOP incumbents might soon become vulnerable.
At the top of that list is Rep. Beth Van Duyne, the only Texas Republican defending a seat that President Biden carried in 2020. The new map lines, however, would shift Van Duyne’s district between Dallas and Fort Worth nearly 20 points to the right, meaning that she likely has far more to worry about in a primary than in a general election now after winning by only 1.3 points last November.
Three other Republican incumbents in seats that were less than R+10 also saw their districts move at least 15 points to the right. Rep. Dan Crenshaw ranks among these members, although it’s not clear which seat he may run in: About one-third of his current district is in the new 38th District, but the same is true of the new 2nd District, too, which may also be open, considering Rep. Kevin Brady of the current 8th District is retiring. Either way, Crenshaw — a rising star in the GOP — would be far safer than he is now.
Rep. Tony Gonzales of the 23rd District is the only Republican incumbent who wouldn’t end up in a seat that’s at least R+20, but his perennial battleground district would be reforged into a relative GOP stronghold: His district would be R+13 under the new lines. Like Van Duyne, Gonzalez would breathe far easier under this new map, after he only won by 4 points in 2020.
In order to make many of these seats safer for Republicans, GOP lawmakers moved more Democratic voters into seats that the GOP had previously targeted but now seem to have abandoned. For example, the seat held by Democrat Lizzie Fletcher, who unseated a Republican incumbent in 2018, would go from D+1 to D+25. Meanwhile, the Dallas-area seat represented by Democrat Colin Allred, who similarly ousted a Republican incumbent in 2018, would go from D+2 to D+25. It’s a similar story for almost every other Texas Democrat under this plan. (In some instances, Republican mapmakers also made some super-red seats a slightly paler shade, “unpacking” some GOP voters to boost Republican-held seats. For instance, Rep. Van Taylor’s 3rd District outside of Dallas shifted east to take some red turf from Rep. Pat Fallon’s 4th District.)
One of the biggest takeaways from this map is that almost every seat — Democratic or Republican — would be uncompetitive at its baseline. All but two seats would lean at least 10 points more Democratic or Republican than the country as a whole.
And it’s heavily Hispanic South Texas that holds both of those exceptions. This is a potentially important development as that region might hold opportunities for the GOP since Biden performed worse there than past Democratic presidential candidates. Most notably, the 15th District, represented by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, would become more Republican-leaning on the new map. He was already facing a difficult reelection bid, as he narrowly won his 2020 race by 3 percentage points after winning reelection by 21 points in 2018. But now under the new map, his district would go from D+2 to evenly split. Meanwhile, Rep. Henry Cuellar’s 28th District would actually become slightly bluer — it only moved from D+4 to D+7 — and could be in play in 2022. (Rep. Filemon Vela’s 34th District doesn’t fall neatly into this category because it went from D+5 to D+17, but it is the other border seat in Texas, and it seems to have gotten a little friendlier toward Democrats, although Vela won’t seek reelection.)
Another notable change under the new map is that it would result in a smaller share of districts with Hispanic majorities despite the addition of two new congressional districts. This could make the map vulnerable to a racial gerrymandering lawsuit considering Texas’s Hispanic population has driven the bulk of Texas’s population growth since 2010. According to census data, the current congressional map included 18 districts with white majorities and nine with Hispanic majorities. But the newly proposed map doesn’t give Hispanic voters any more clout: There are now 19 districts that have white majorities and still nine districts with Hispanic majorities, based on the voting age population.
This is only the first draft of Texas’s new congressional map, so it could still change before it’s passed by the GOP-controlled legislature. The Senate Redistricting Committee is expected to take up the congressional map on Thursday. But remember the GOP ultimately controls the redistricting process in Texas. That said, past congressional maps proposed by Texas lawmakers have been endlessly litigated — and it’s possible that could happen again this time around.
'If Brooklyn Nets superstar Kyrie Irving could be convinced to take the vaccine, then maybe, just maybe, the whole league could create a new kind of bubble together.' (photo: Steven Ryan/Getty Images)
Conspiracy theories in the locker room. Mask police in the arena. Superstars trying to avoid the shot. After bringing back the culture from Covid, basketball confronts its own civil war
Kyrie Irving was not present for the Brooklyn Nets pre-season media day at Barclays Center, where city law requires athletes to have at least one dose of Covid vaccination to participate in team activities.
Irving’s teammates dodged questions on Monday about what such a plan might be. San Francisco city officials removed religious and medical exemptions from their policy on Friday, emboldening the NBA’s decision to deny an application from the Golden State Warriors forward Andrew Wiggins. A league source said any comment on further applications for exemptions in New York would make too clear who had applied; the New York Knicks have said their team is 100-percent vaccinated, but the Nets, this season’s prohibitive championship favorite, have at least one elusive holdout.
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One by one, the basketball players — non-vaccinated star here, fully-inoculated veteran on mute down there, a full-on anti-vaxxer front-and-center — logged into the video conference. The annual summer meeting of the powerful NBA union had gone virtual again on August 7, and high on the agenda for the season ahead was a proposed mandate from the league office that 100 percent of players get vaccinated against Covid-19.
One response echoed from squares across the screen, according to players and an executive on the call: “Non-starter. Non-starter.”
The NBA had relied on science above all to lead the sports world through the Covid nightmare, from the league’s outbreak-driven shutdown to a pandemic-proof playoff bubble in Disney World to game after game with fans back in the stands. But after two plagued seasons of non-stop nasal swabbing, quarantining and distrust, unvaccinated players were pushing back. They made their case to the union summit: There should be testing this year, of course, just not during off-days. They’d mask up on the court and on the road, if they must. But no way would they agree to a mandatory jab. The vaccine deniers had set the agenda; the players agreed to take their demands for personal freedom to the NBA’s negotiating table.
This month, league officials caught a break: Two of America’s most progressive cities, New York and San Francisco, would require pro athletes to show proof of one Covid-19 vaccination dose to play indoors, except with an approved medical or religious exemption. Which meant that one of the NBA’s biggest stars — one known for being receptive to conspiratorial beliefs — would be under heavy pressure to get a shot. And if Brooklyn Nets superstar Kyrie Irving could be convinced to take the vaccine, then maybe, just maybe, the whole league could create a new kind of bubble together.
When asked directly about Irving’s vaccination status — or his plans to change it — multiple people familiar with his thinking declined to answer directly. But one confidant and family member floated to Rolling Stone the idea of anti-vaxx players skipping home games to dodge the New York City ordinance… or at least threatening to protest them, until the NBA changes its ways.
“There are so many other players outside of him who are opting out, I would like to think they would make a way,” says Kyrie’s aunt, Tyki Irving, who runs the seven-time All-Star’s family foundation and is one of the few people in his regular circle of advisors. “It could be like every third game. So it still gives you a full season of being interactive and being on the court, but with the limitations that they’re, of course, oppressing upon you. There can be some sort of formula where the NBA and the players can come to some sort of agreement.”
A spokeswoman for Irving declined to respond to a list of questions regarding his vaccination and playing status, and Irving did not immediately respond to a message from Rolling Stone. But as teams return to pre-season training camps next week, fifty to sixty NBA players have yet to receive a single vaccine dose, league sources tell RS. Most are considered merely reluctant skeptics. Some of the holdouts, however, amount to their own shadow roster of anti-vaxxers mounting a behind-the-scenes resistance to Covid protocols — and the truth.
Irving, who serves as a vice president on the executive committee of the players’ union, recently started following and liking Instagram posts from a conspiracy theorist who claims that “secret societies” are implanting vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for “a plan of Satan.” This Moderna microchip misinformation campaign has spread across multiple NBA locker rooms and group chats, according to several of the dozen-plus current players, Hall-of-Famers, league executives, arena workers and virologists interviewed for this story over the past week.
The league’s virus-hunters denied a religious-exemption request from a vaccine-denying player in San Francisco this weekend, lighting a powder keg on a combustible mix of race, religion, class and clubbing in a time of Covid, aimed at some of the most influential role models in America. General managers remain confident they can get superstars vaxxed by opening night. And in a concession to the Delta variant, all courtside players and personnel will be required to wear masks on arena benches and around practice facilities for the foreseeable future, Rolling Stone can reveal. According to near-final medical guidance outlined to RS on Saturday, however, unvaccinated players have forced the league to cave on nearly every other demand.
“The NBA should insist that all players and staff are vaccinated or remove them from the team,” NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tells Rolling Stone. “There is no room for players who are willing to risk the health and lives of their teammates, the staff and the fans simply because they are unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation or do the necessary research. What I find especially disingenuous about the vaccine deniers is their arrogance at disbelieving immunology and other medical experts. Yet, if their child was sick or they themselves needed emergency medical treatment, how quickly would they do exactly what those same experts told them to do?”
Jonathan Isaac is known less by the average basketball fan for his play than for being that guy who stood up with his jersey on during the national anthem in the NBA bubble, while every other player on the court took a knee in a t-shirt declaring BLACK LIVES MATTER, amid a global reckoning on race and police killings. “I’m not going to sit here and point my fingers at one group of people,” Isaac, who is Black, tells RS. “I would do it again.”
The Orlando Magic’s 23-year-old starting forward is deeply religious — and proudly unvaccinated. When NBA players started lining up for shots in March, Isaac started studying Black history and watching Donald Trump’s press conferences. He learned about antibody resistance and came to distrust Dr. Anthony Fauci. He looked out for people who might die from the vaccine, and he put faith in God.
“At the end of the day, it’s people,” Isaac says of the scientists developing vaccines, “and you can’t always put your trust completely in people.”
Isaac considers un-vaxxed players to be vilified and bullied, and he thinks “it’s an injustice” to automatically make heroes out of vaccinated celebrities. He rejects the NBA’s proposal for a vaccine mandate and social distancing for players like him during team travel: “You can play on the same court. We can touch the same ball. We can bump chests. We can do all those things on the court. And then when it comes to being on the bus, we have to be in different parts of the bus? To me, it doesn’t seem logically consistent.
“If you are vaccinated, in other places you still have to wear the mask regardless. It’s like, ‘OK, then what is the mask necessarily for?’” Isaac continues. “And if Kyrie says that from his position of his executive power in the NBPA, then kudos to him.”
Enes Kanter — the veteran center, devout Muslim and outspoken liberal — senses a creep of the religious right upon his workplace, which just happens to involve players like Isaac sweating all over him and yelling in his face: “If a guy’s not getting vaccinated because of his religion, I feel like we are in a time where the religion and science has to go to together,” he tells RS. “I’ve talked to a lot of religious guys — I’m like: ‘It saves people’s lives, so what is more important than that?’”
Kanter’s current franchise, the Boston Celtics, had multiple players unvaccinated as of Thursday, he and a teammate say. The NBA claims that 90 percent of its more than 450 players — star veterans and players trying to make rosters alike — have received at least one shot, a rate lower than the conservative NFL. League officials provide weekly data and studies to teams with un-vaxxed players, many of whom they hope will be inoculated before the regular season begins on October 19. Inside practice facilities next week, vaccinated players expect to spend time convincing skeptical players to avoid a competitive disadvantage. “If you’re a player and you’re not vaccinated and you miss a week or two weeks,” Kanter says, “it could literally change the whole season — and we’re trying to win a championship!”
Celtics forward Grant Williams comes from a family of scientists, and he got two shots in the spring. As the 22-year-old prepared to join the board of the players’ union in August, he found himself lobbying with the group to allow unvaccinated colleagues to scream from the bench without a mask on, for better team “communication.” That vaccine-denying teammates would be “encouraged” to sit away from him at team dinners — or on the other side of the locker room all year — was suddenly viewed as a concession to league management.
“Walking around them might be a hassle,” Williams says. “But no matter someone’s vaccination status, that won’t determine relationships. You’re not going to agree with someone on the same political issue, the same financial issue. Just like in life, you learn to adapt, you learn to talk to those around you. It might be a stricter stance from the league, and I understand where they’re coming from, but as a players’ association it’s our duty to fight for the players and their best interests, so we’ll do our best to counteract that.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been out here. The 74-year-old got his first Moderna shot on camera with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He appeared in an early public-service announcement for the vaccine on behalf of the NBA. And he’s been calling out anti-vax celebrities like Nicki Minaj from Twitter to his new Substack. But the league continues to have difficulty convincing current superstars to advocate for vaccines: An NBA source says league officials could still ask LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo to appear in a PSA, but would never press the faces of its business to go there. As Black Americans continue to get vaccinated at a slower rate than any other race or ethnicity measured by the CDC, Abdul-Jabbar says that players who remain silent about the vaccine are no longer legitimate role models.
“They are failing to live up to the responsibilities that come with celebrity. Athletes are under no obligation to be spokespersons for the government, but this is a matter of public health,” the Hall-of-Famer writes Rolling Stone in an e-mail. Abdul-Jabbar is especially disappointed in athletes of color: “By not encouraging their people to get the vaccine, they’re contributing to these deaths. I’m also concerned about how this perpetuates the stereotype of dumb jocks who are unable to look at verified scientific evidence and reach a rational conclusion.”
The renowned virologist Dr. David Ho, who has personally advised NBA commissioner Adam Silver on the virus since January 2020, credits the league office for providing a scientific Covid roadmap to businesses — even by contributing its testing and monitoring data to forthcoming academic papers. “Of course, a new season is coming, and new challenges remain,” Dr. Ho tells RS. “It’s disappointing that some players are still not vaccinated, for reasons that I’m not entirely clear about, and there’s more work to do, and there are a few high-profile cases. I think the league is trying — but the players, they’re supposed to do their part. There are a lot of good role models, but there are some that are holding this up.”
And yet medical memos for the 2021-2022 NBA season, sent to teams by the league office over the course of this month and obtained by Rolling Stone, indicate little ramp-up to monitor unvaccinated players. No player will be forced to undergo off-day testing, league sources confirmed, despite the NBA suggesting it in earlier guidance. Socially-distanced travel is now “suggested.” Players who aren’t fully vaxxed and seek outside labs for regular testing must get league approval, but their tests will otherwise be supervised by their teams — the kind of states-rights amalgam of governance preferred by players. A league source says NBA regulators are prepared to guard against forged vaccine cards by sweeping state databases for proof, but only if elevated to their attention.
“It requires extra vigilance in that we have a separate set of protocols for non-vaccinated players, so they’re already treated differently in terms of what’s allowed,” says David Weiss, the NBA executive who oversees player health. “The difference this year is that unvaccinated people are at even greater risk because of the Delta variant.”
After consultation with Dr. Ho, its infectious disease panel and the NFL amidst rising Delta breakthrough cases, the NBA has reversed course to mandate masks for courtside players and staff, vaxxed or not. But only personnel whose job requires them to be within 15 feet of players — security guards and bus drivers, team masseuses and stadium janitors — will be required to provide two shots’ worth of evidence.
“We will not know individuals who are not vaxxed,” admits veteran NBA referee Brian Forte. His fellow official Marc Davis, though, insists that refs feel protected between their mandated masks, vaccines, rigorous testing and a little halftime hand-washing: “It’s safer to be on the court than it is in a bus station.” One of last season’s highest-profile Covid scares involved Kyrie Irving’s teammate, the Nets superstar Kevin Durant. He was pulled out of a game — twice — when a close contact tested positive, and would end up spending six days off the court as a result. It was a bizarre moment, but a far cry from the panicked exodus from the night of March 11, 2020, when Utah Jazz star Rudy Gobert’s positive test emptied arenas for nearly a year.
“We have to be the mask police,” says one courtside employee at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, “but we’re pretty strict with the fans. And the players, they’re young, they’re healthy — not the coaches or some refs — but no shade to Kyrie. It’s his choice. I just pray that if something happens, he’ll survive it.”
NBA Covid protocols for this season include an especially lengthy warning of how much money is at stake from “exposure and corresponding interruptions” as a result of behavior off the court. The league medical office goes out of its way to point out that fully vaccinated teams can hit the club all they desire; one vaccinated player said he was frustrated with teammates coming back to next week’s training camps who “are scared to get vaxxed but you see them go out in the summertime to all the clubs and all the bars, and there’s virus everywhere.” Indeed, the final sticking points for collective bargaining revolved around player appearances at indoor sponsor and community events and “prohibitions on accessing indoor bars, clubs and lounges.”
In February, when Irving was on a two-week leave of absence precipitated by the Capitol riot and extended by the NBA punishing him for attending a maskless indoor party, vaccine doses were readily available to celebrity entourages through whisper networks; his manager told me at the time that “we all have a choice,” indicating that some members of Irving’s circle were hesitant of the vaccine. Earlier this month, Irving was forced to clarify a tweet that went viral for mysteriously declaring that My mask is off. Now take yours off. No fear.
In the big business of basketball, it’s almost expected for the superstars to skirt the rules. This May, James partied maskless with Drake, forcing the NBA to release an awkward statement that neither confirmed nor denied the vaccination status of its preeminent megastar. But on Friday, the league announced that it had denied an application for a religious exemption by the unvaccinated Golden State Warriors forward Andrew Wiggins, and that he cannot yet play in their home games in San Francisco — which, like New York City, has a vaccination requirement for all people over 12 in venues such as basketball arenas. The league was not expected to rule immediately on any more such requests, but Irving could seek his own exemption, or get vaccinated — or simply refuse to play in Brooklyn.
“He is going to try to figure that out as it comes, because it’s not religious-based, it’s moral-based,” says Irving’s aunt Tyki. “You may have to sit on the sideline, you might not have to be in the arena during this. If it’s that freaking important to get a vaccine that, hell, it’s still not preventing the Covid” — which it is — “then I’d rather them working it out that way than to say, ‘Hey, if you don’t get the vaccine, then you can’t be a part of the franchise that you fuckin’ helped build.’”
League protocols state that teams must submit a list of players and staff who aren’t vaccinated to their league testing officer — or at least confirm that a franchise is “not aware” of a vaccine denier on its roster. The Nets general manager, Sean Marks, was forced to admit at a press conference this week that Brooklyn would have “a couple people missing,” were the odds-on title favorites forced to play at home right now. “We’ve had very candid conversations,” he said. “We don’t see whether it’s a city-wide mandate, or it’s the league mandate to follow, being any sort of hindrance to us being able to put out a team.” The team would not be forced to confront New York’s one-shot athlete vaccination law until it returns from training camp in San Diego for a pre-season home game on October 8.
The Nets declined multiple requests to make a team doctor available for this story. Representatives for Durant and his fellow Nets superstar teammate, James Harden, did not respond to inquiries about whether they had yet to receive any shots. Brooklyn’s “Big Three” are scheduled to speak on Monday morning at a league-mandated pre-season media day, which Irving skipped last year because, he wrote on Instagram, the media are “pawns.” Irving’s aunt expected him to discuss vaccine hesitancy in the Black community, as well as the tragic experiments on sharecroppers in Tuskegee, while “providing just as much knowledge and research base that you necessarily don’t have to take this vaccine — some of it is fake news, some of it is fake information, some of it is Doctor False-y, you don’t really know.”
Before he returned to his day job for the 2021-2022 season, Irving made a trip last month to South Dakota. His mother was born in Standing Rock, and he’d just finished enrolling for his tribal ID when he pulled up to a schoolyard at another Sioux reservation, unannounced, for signatures and selfies — the kind that force a fan to lean in tight and pull down her mandated facemask.
Inside the school, Irving met with two high-schoolers in a conference room for close talk about Covid and kicks, while twisting a cloth mask in his hands. He took photos in a basketball gym, where all student-athletes over 12 had been required to get vaccinated for the coronavirus to play sports, and where, on this Wednesday afternoon in late August, Irving was playing by his own rules.
“Pretty much everyone had a mask on,” says the mother of one student in attendance. “Everyone but Kyrie, everywhere he went.”
The superintendent insists that Irving and students had remained as socially-distanced as possible during his visit, but on the school’s Facebook page, only fake news remained: An administrator had Photoshopped crude painstrokes over his nose and mouth, along with doctored masks on several bare-chinned students, because Irving had broken public-health protocol on government grounds.
“People seeing Kyrie on the rez,” the mother recalls, “even though we’re in a pandemic, I don’t think they stopped to be like, ‘Are you vaccinated?’ No, they’re like, ‘Damn, this is Kyrie!’ He’s one of our heroes.”
Nina Turner. (photo: Salwan Georges/Getty Images)
The former Sanders surrogate lost the Democratic primary to Shontel Brown in August.
Turner, a top surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, competed in a special election for the open seat after Rep. Marcia Fudge was nominated to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Though Turner started the race ahead by some 30 percentage points, she was eventually edged out by Brown, a local council representative and chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, a position she declined to relinquish even after announcing her candidacy. On August 3, turnout was minimal, with Brown winning 35,504 votes to Turner’s 31,202. Brown is now the overwhelming favorite over Republican Laverne Gore in the special election, slated for November 2.
Turner’s filing allows her to keep her campaign apparatus running while making a final decision on a 2022 bid, said spokesperson Angelo Greco, adding that the filing does not guarantee she will make a bid.
Last week, Turner appeared on The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed and hinted strongly at a rematch. “I got all options on the table,” Turner said.
Asked if she thought a normal election would be easier to win for her than a special, Turner said that she did. “Because, first of all, when you got 435 seats, as we are going to have in 2022, plus the Senate seats that are up, you can’t concentrate all that firepower on only one seat,” she said, a reference to the millions in outside money that rained down on her. “And when you’re making a strategic calculus, as somebody that’s looking at all the Democratic seats, they’re gonna be some Democrats running and they are not running in a safe Democratic seat who are going to need that firepower to come save them. So absolutely. The turnout would have been different; we would have more college students who rock with people like me and the progressive movement. That was missing. You would have more people who are going to come out and participate.”
Turner only began hitting Brown hard for allegations of corruption toward the end of the race, and said that in hindsight, that may have been a mistake. “The movement needs to be a little more disciplined, and we gotta be more agile. And we cannot let the lofty issues that change humanity that we’re fighting for cloud our judgment on just how negative, how hard, the corporatist Dems will come at progressives,” she said.
Turner noted that Brown will only have been in office for a short time before the next race begins, and the district lines will be redrawn as a result of redistricting. If the district becomes more working-class, Turner has a better shot, but if it incorporates more of the wealthier suburbs that leaned toward Brown, Turner will have a harder time. “The lines will be different, and also if the person takes office, they can’t take office before November. It’d [then] be the holidays. You know? And then it’s January, right? And February,” she observed.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for May 2022.
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 8, 2021. (photo: Courtney Pedroza/WP)
Ten months later, the GOP is still trying to dispute the 2020 election.
The results of the “audit” — a haphazard GOP review of ballots with no legal force behind it, done by a group called Cyber Ninjas in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix — found the vote totals virtually unchanged from the actual election results, which were certified by Arizona officials in November of last year.
That outcome isn’t a surprise: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which US elections officials said last year was “the most secure in American history.” Every recount requested by Trump and his supporters has upheld the results of the 2020 election.
While the ballot review didn’t turn up Trump’s nonexistent election fraud, the process has caused a legion of problems for Arizona elections officials, who are currently facing death threats and will now have to spend millions to replace voting machines in Maricopa County.
It also hasn’t quieted some of the most aggressive proponents of voter fraud conspiracies in Arizona, including state Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, who is now calling for a “full signature audit” in Maricopa County, and Trump himself, who used a Saturday interview with right-wing outlet One America News to push debunked claims of election fraud.
And, perhaps most worryingly, Arizona’s attempt at a recount has provided a clear roadmap for pro-Trump officials around the country — specifically, in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — to pursue their own “audits” and sow further distrust in American elections.
The Arizona recount was never credible
On the surface, the Arizona audit’s findings this week approximated Maricopa County’s actual, certified 2020 election results. The vote totals in the final report only differed by a few hundred votes out of about 2.1 million, with Biden actually picking up votes.
In the final report released Friday, however, Cyber Ninjas never explicitly says that Biden won, and the report also continues to baselessly raise the possibility of election fraud.
That, combined with the process behind the audit — partisan, slipshod, and conspiratorial — makes for a deeply concerning precedent, particularly as other states take up similar efforts.
From the start, the recount was a partisan enterprise, supported by Arizona’s Republican Senate majority. The company hired to conduct the audit — Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based security firm — had no experience conducting an election audit, and its CEO, Doug Logan, openly promoted pro-Trump election conspiracies on Twitter before deleting his account in January, according to the New York Times.
Cyber Ninjas also hired a group called Wake TSI to complete the hand count of Maricopa County ballots, adding to the chaos of the process. According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, Wake TSI has ties to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement and had previously been contracted by the pro-Trump group Defending the Republic to review the results of the election in one Pennsylvania county.
Cyber Ninja’s methods were also wildly out of line with normal audit procedures, which prioritize the security of ballots and voters’ personal information, and the group performed its review without the transparency typical for such processes, insisting to reporters and other observers that their procedures were “trade secrets.”
As Vox’s Ian Millhiser reported in May, Cyber Ninjas also pursued a long list of nonsense audit methods, including examining ballots under ultraviolet light and considering their “thickness or feel.”
Specifically, according to Millhiser:
After a state court ordered Cyber Ninjas to disclose how it is conducting this so-called audit, a subcontractor revealed that the process involves weighing ballots, examining them under a microscope, and examining the “thickness or feel” of individual ballots in order to identify “questionable ballots” that need to be examined by a “lead forensic examiner” and then “removed from the batch and sent for further analysis.”
On Friday, after the conclusion of the audit, a tweet from Maricopa County officials summed up the Cyber Ninjas effort.
“Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the official Maricopa County Twitter account noted. “Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.”
Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin are following the Arizona model
Although the Arizona audit didn’t produce the result Trump wanted — an impossible about-face from the certified results that would give him further pretense to call into question the entire 2020 election — the effort is already serving as a model for Republicans looking to promulgate election fraud conspiracies.
Specifically, as of this week, Republican legislators in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin have all embarked on a mission to implement recounts or investigations of their own, though the election is long over and certified.
On Thursday, the Texas secretary of state’s office released a statement that it would perform a review of the election results in four large counties — Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin — adding that they expect the Texas legislature to pay for the process, but failing to disclose any further details, or a reason why the audit is necessary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to conduct an audit earlier on Thursday, despite the fact that Trump won the state by a sizable margin in 2020.
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Republican legislators in the Senate’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee voted earlier this month to subpoena voters’ personal information — including addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers — in preparation for a new review of the state’s 2020 election results.
Previous election audits, judicial determinations, and both Republican and Democratic election officials have already concluded that Biden won Pennsylvania, according to NPR.
And in Wisconsin, two separate election reviews — one by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, and one by a pro-Trump former state Supreme Court justice who has espoused false election conspiracies — are also underway.
Previously, the Trump campaign paid about $3 million for a review of the votes in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee and Dane counties, falsely alleging that “15-20% of absentee ballots in Milwaukee County were tainted” by poll workers. That recount, which was completed in November 2020, found no evidence of Trump’s claims and confirmed Biden’s victory in the state.
In addition to these new audits, it’s possible that pro-Trump recount efforts in Arizona aren’t over yet either: On Friday, Trump-backed Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem tweeted out a call to conduct a recount in Arizona’s Pima County.
Arizona’s “audit” is bad news for US democracy
On the surface, the Arizona audit didn’t work out for Trump or the Arizona GOP — that is, it didn’t find the election fraud they’ve alleged exists, contrary to all evidence. On another level, however, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out Friday, Trump and company got exactly what they wanted.
“The Cyber Ninjas appear to have done exactly what they were hired to do,” Bump wrote ahead of the release of the final report. “They were not hired to recount ballots that had already been counted. They were, instead, hired to slather some semblance of authority on top of conspiracy theories. To anchor irrational assumptions about fraud to something resembling rationality.”
The problems with that are obvious — despite the complete lack of evidence, claims of voter fraud have taken root with a broad portion of the Republican electorate, election workers are facing a barrage of death threats and harassment, and a CNN/SSRS poll conducted earlier this month found that a slight majority of Americans, 56 percent, now feel that American democracy is “under attack.”
The prospect of more recounts to come in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas also means that problem isn’t likely to abate any time soon — and as the immediate calls for more “audits” by pro-Trump officials in Arizona underscore, the goal isn’t so much to confirm the accuracy of the 2020 election as to confirm a preconceived, false belief that the election was stolen from Trump.
“Though many may experience a short burst of schadenfreude at the Republicans’ failure here, the result isn’t really funny,” the Atlantic’s David Graham wrote on Friday. “All is not well that ends well. Faith in elections is essential to a functioning democracy, and Trump and his allies have sought to undercut the belief that the election system is accurate.”
Women gather to demand their rights under Taliban rule during a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan. (photo: Wali Sabawoon/AP)
"As long as real Islamic environment is not provided for all, women will not be allowed to come to universities or work. Islam first," Mohammad Ashraf Ghairat said on his official Twitter account.
Earlier on Monday, Ghairat tweeted in Pashto that the university was working on a plan to accommodate teaching female students but did not say when this plan would be completed by.
"Due to shortage of female lecturers, we are working on a plan for male lecturers to be able to teach female students from behind a curtain in the classroom. That way an Islamic environment would be created for the female students to get education," he wrote on Twitter.
His appointment as Kabul University's chancellor by the Taliban was met with a storm of criticism over his lack of credentials. Ghairat countered those assessments on Twitter, saying he saw himself "fully qualified to hold this chair."
He also laid out his vision for the institution Tuesday, saying Kabul University's aim is to become a hub for "all real Muslims around the world to gather, research and study" and to "Islamicize the modern science."
"I am here to announce that we will be welcoming pro-Muslim scholars and students to benefit from a real Islamic environment," he wrote on Twitter.
The Taliban, who ruled over Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001 but were forced from power after a US-led invasion, have historically treated women as second-class citizens, subjecting them to violence, forced marriages and a near-invisible presence in the country.
After they reclaimed the capital, Kabul, in August, the Taliban's leadership claimed that it would not enforce such draconian conditions this time in power.
But those promises have not materialized. The absence any female representatives from their newly-formed interim government and an almost overnight disappearance of women from the country's streets has led to major worries about what will happen next for half of its population.
Militants have in some instances ordered women to leave their workplaces, and when a group of women protested the announcement of the all-male government in Kabul, Taliban fighters beat them with whips and sticks.
Women have so far been allowed to continue their university education. But the Taliban has mandated the segregation of genders in classrooms and said female students, lecturers and employees must wear hijabs in accordance with the group's interpretation of Sharia law.
Greta Thunberg. (photo: Getty Images)
Exclusive: Activist says there are many fine words but the science does not lie – CO2 emissions are still rising
She quoted statements by Boris Johnson: “This is not some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging”, and Narendra Modi: “Fighting climate change calls for innovation, cooperation and willpower” but said the science did not lie.
Carbon emissions are on track to rise by 16% by 2030, according to the UN, rather than fall by half, which is the cut needed to keep global heating under the internationally agreed limit of 1.5C.
“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” she said in a speech to the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. “This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.”
The Cop26 climate summit starts in Glasgow, UK, on 31 October and all the big-polluting countries must deliver tougher pledges to cut emissions to keep the goal of 1.5C within reach.
“Of course we need constructive dialogue,” said Thunberg, whose solo climate strike in 2018 sparked a movement of millions of young climate protesters. “But they’ve now had 30 years of blah, blah, blah and where has that led us? We can still turn this around – it is entirely possible. It will take immediate, drastic annual emission reductions. But not if things go on like today. Our leaders’ intentional lack of action is a betrayal toward all present and future generations.”
Research published on Monday showed that children born today would experience many times more extreme heatwaves and other climate disasters over their lifetimes than their grandparents, even if countries fulfil their current emissions pledges.
Officials from the UN, UK and US said Cop26 would not produce the breakthrough needed to fulfil the aspirations of the Paris agreement but the broader goal of the conference – that of “keeping 1.5C alive” – was still possible.
Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate from Uganda, and hundreds of other young people from across the world are attending the Youth4Climate Summit. It is hosted by the Italian government, the UK’s partner in running Cop26.
The youth summit will consist of working groups of young people debating how to increase their participation in decision-making, their role in helping to transform energy use, nature conservation and climate adaptation, and how education can create a climate-conscious society. It builds on a youth climate summit held at the UN headquarters in New York in 2019.
Thunberg said: “They invite cherry-picked young people to meetings like this to pretend that they listen to us. But they clearly don’t listen to us. Our emissions are still rising. The science doesn’t lie.
“We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.”
Large numbers of youth climate protesters took to the streets on Friday in almost 100 countries across the world, including 100,000 in Berlin, where Thunberg spoke.
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