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Two sources are communicating with House investigators and detailed a stunning series of allegations to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office
Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.
The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified.
“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”
For the sake of clarity, we will refer to one of the sources as a rally organizer and the other as a planner. Rolling Stone has confirmed that both sources were involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6. Trump spoke at that rally and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Some members of the audience at the Ellipse began walking the mile and a half to the Capitol as Trump gave his speech. The barricades were stormed minutes before the former president concluded his remarks.
These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.
Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the organizer.
And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar.
“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.
The rally planner describes the pardon as being offered while “encouraging” the staging of protests against the election. While the organizer says they did not get involved in planning the rallies solely due to the pardon, they were upset that it ultimately did not materialize.
“I would have done it either way with or without the pardon,” the organizer says. “I do truly believe in this country, but to use something like that and put that out on the table when someone is so desperate, it’s really not good business.”
Gosar’s office did not respond to requests for comment on this story. Rolling Stone has separately obtained documentary evidence that both sources were in contact with Gosar and Boebert on Jan. 6. We are not describing the nature of that evidence to preserve their anonymity. The House select committee investigating the attack also has interest in Gosar’s office. Gosar’s chief of staff, Thomas Van Flein, was among the people who were named in the committee’s “sweeping” requests to executive-branch agencies seeking documents and communications from within the Trump administration. Both sources claim Van Flein was personally involved in the conversations about the “blanket pardon” and other discussions about pro-Trump efforts to dispute the election. Van Flein did not respond to a request for comment.
These specific members of Congress were involved in the pro-Trump activism around the election and the electoral certification on Jan. 6. Both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the “Wild Protest,” which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
Nick Dyer, who is Greene’s communications director, said she was solely involved in planning to object to the electoral certification on the House floor. Spokespeople for the other members of Congress, who the sources describe as involved in the planning for protests, did not respond to requests for comment.
“Congresswoman Greene and her staff were focused on the Congressional election objection on the House floor and had nothing to do with planning of any protest,” Dyer wrote in an email to Rolling Stone.
Dyer further compared Greene’s efforts to dispute certification of Biden’s victory with similar objections certain Democrats lodged against Trump’s first election.
“She objected just like Democrats who have objected to Republican presidential victories over the years,” wrote Dyer. “Just like in 2017, when Jim McGovern, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, and Maxine Waters tried to prevent President Trump’s election win from being certified.”
Dyer also suggested the public is far more concerned with issues occurring under President Joe Biden than they are with what happened in January.
“No one cares about Jan. 6 when gas prices are skyrocketing, grocery store shelves are empty, unemployment is skyrocketing, businesses are going bankrupt, our border is being invaded, children are forced to wear masks, vaccine mandates are getting workers fired, and 13 members of our military are murdered by the Taliban and Americans are left stranded in Afghanistan,” Dyer wrote.
In another indication members of Congress may have been involved in planning the protests against the election, Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Wild Protest,” declared in a since-deleted livestream broadcast that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped him formulate the strategy for that event.
“I was the person who came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and Congressman Andy Biggs,” Alexander said at the time. “We four schemed up on putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting so that — who we couldn’t lobby — we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside.”
Alexander led Stop the Steal, which was one of the main groups promoting efforts to dispute Trump’s loss. In December, he organized a Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, where Gosar was one the main speakers. At that demonstration, Alexander referred to Gosar as “my captain” and declared “one of the other heroes has been Congressman Andy Biggs.”
Alexander did not respond to requests for comment. The rally planner, who accused Alexander of ratcheting up the potential for violence that day while taking advantage of funds from donors and others who helped finance the events, confirmed that he was in contact with those three members of Congress.
“He just couldn’t help himself but go on his live and just talk about everything that he did and who he talked to,” the planner says of Alexander. “So, he, like, really told on himself.”
While it was already clear members of Congress played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day, the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts. The sources plan to share that information with congressional investigators right away. While both sources say their communications with the House’s Jan. 6 committee thus far have been informal, they are expecting to testify publicly.
“I have no problem openly testifying,” the planner says.
A representative for the committee declined to comment. In the past month, the committee has issued subpoenas to top Trump allies, government agencies, and activists who were involved in the planning of events and rallies that took place on that day and in the prior weeks. Multiple sources familiar with the committee’s investigation have confirmed to Rolling Stone that, thus far, it seems to be heavily focused on the financing for the Ellipse rally and similar previous events.
Both of the sources made clear that they still believe in Trump’s agenda. They also have questions about how his election loss occurred. The two sources say they do not necessarily believe there were issues with the actual vote count. However, they are concerned that Democrats gained an unfair advantage in the race due to perceived social media censorship of Trump allies and the voting rules that were implemented as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Democrats used tactics to disrupt their political opposition in ways that frankly were completely unacceptable,” the organizer says.
Despite their remaining affinity for Trump and their questions about the vote, both sources say they were motivated to come forward because of their concerns about how the pro-Trump protests against the election ultimately resulted in the violent attack on the Capitol. Of course, with their other legal issues and the House investigation, both of these sources have clear motivation to cooperate with investigators and turn on their former allies. And both of their accounts paint them in a decidedly favorable light compared with their former allies.
“The reason I’m talking to the committee and the reason it’s so important is that — despite Republicans refusing to participate … this commission’s all we got as far as being able to uncover the truth about what happened at the Capitol that day,” the organizer says. “It’s clear that a lot of bad actors set out to cause chaos. … They made us all look like shit.”
And Trump, they admit, was one of those bad actors. A representative for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
“The breaking point for me [on Jan. 6 was when] Trump starts talking about walking to the Capitol,” the organizer says. “I was like. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ ”
“I do kind of feel abandoned by Trump,” says the planner. “I’m actually pretty pissed about it and I’m pissed at him.”
The organizer offers an even more succinct assessment when asked what they would say to Trump.
“What the fuck?” the organizer says.
The two potential witnesses plan to present to the committee allegations about how these demonstrations were funded and to detail communications between organizers and the White House. According to both sources, members of Trump’s administration and former members of his campaign team were involved in the planning. Both describe Katrina Pierson, who worked for Trump’s campaign in 2016 and 2020, as a key liaison between the organizers of protests against the election and the White House.
“Katrina was like our go-to girl,” the organizer says. “She was like our primary advocate.”
Pierson spoke at the Ellipse rally on Jan. 6. She did not respond to requests for comment.
Both sources also describe Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as someone who played a major role in the conversations surrounding the protests on Jan. 6. Among other things, they both say concerns were raised to Meadows about Alexander’s protest at the Capitol and the potential that it could spark violence. Meadows was subpoenaed by the committee last month as part of a group of four people “with close ties to the former President who were working in or had communications with the White House on or in the days leading up to the January 6th insurrection.”
“Meadows was 100 percent made aware of what was going on,” says the organizer. “He’s also like a regular figure in these really tiny groups of national organizers.”
A separate third source, who has also communicated with the committee and was involved in the Ellipse rally, says Kylie Kremer, one of the key organizers at that event, boasted that she was going to meet with Meadows at the White House ahead of the rally. The committee has been provided with that information. Kremer did not respond to a request for comment.
Both the organizer and the planner say Alexander initially agreed he would not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol and that the Ellipse would be the only major demonstration. When Alexander seemed to be ignoring that arrangement, both claim worries were brought to Meadows.
“Despite making a deal … they plowed forward with their own thing at the Capitol on Jan.y 6 anyway,” the organizer says of Alexander and his allies. “We ended up escalating that to everybody we could, including Meadows.”
A representative for Meadows did not respond to requests for comment.
Along with making plans for Jan. 6, the sources say, the members of Congress who were involved solicited supposed proof of election fraud from them. Challenging electoral certification requires the support of a member of the Senate. While more than a hundred Republican members of the House ultimately objected to the Electoral College count that formalized Trump’s loss, only a handful of senators backed the effort. According to the sources, the members of Congress and their staff advised them to hold rallies in specific states. The organizer says locations were chosen to put “pressure” on key senators that “we considered to be persuadable.”
“We had also been coordinating with some of our congressional contacts on, like, what would be presented after the individual objections, and our expectation was that that was the day the storm was going to arrive,” the organizer says, adding, “It was supposed to be the best evidence that they had been secretly gathering. … Everyone was going to stay at the Ellipse throughout the congressional thing.”
Heading into Jan. 6, both sources say, the plan they had discussed with other organizers, Trump allies, and members of Congress was a rally that would solely take place at the Ellipse, where speakers — including the former president — would present “evidence” about issues with the election. This demonstration would take place in conjunction with objections that were being made by Trump allies during the certification on the House floor that day.
“It was in a variety of calls, some with Gosar and Gosar’s team, some with Marjorie Taylor Greene and her team … Mo Brooks,” the organizer says.
“The Capitol was never in play,” insists the planner.
A senior staffer for a Republican member of Congress, who was also granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation, similarly says they believed the events would only involve supporting objections on the House floor. The staffer says their member was engaged in planning that was “specifically and fully above board.”
“A whole host of people let this go a totally different way,” the senior Republican staffer says. “They fucked it up for a lot of people who were planning to present evidence on the House floor. We were pissed off at everything that happened .”
The two sources claim there were early concerns about Alexander’s event. They had seen him with members of the paramilitary groups 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP) and the Oath Keepers in his entourage at prior pro-Trump rallies. Alexander was filmed with a reputed member of 1AP at his side at a November Stop the Steal event that took place in Georgia. The two sources also claim to have been concerned about drawing people to the area directly adjacent to the Capitol on Jan. 6, given the anger among Trump supporters about the electoral certification that was underway that day.
“They knew that they weren’t there to sing “Kumbaya” and, like, put up a peace sign,” the planner says. “These frickin’ people were angry.”
Nguyen Quoc Duc Vuong, center, was sentenced by a Vietnamese court on July 7, 2020, to eight years in prison for live-streaming videos "humiliating" the country's leaders on social media. (photo: Vietnam News Agency/AFP/Getty Images)
The SEC has been asked to probe whether his iron fisted management style, described in newly released documents and by insiders, led to disastrous outcomes.
In America, the tech CEO is a champion of free speech, reluctant to remove even malicious and misleading content from the platform. But in Vietnam, upholding the free speech rights of people who question government leaders could have come with a significant cost in a country where the social network earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2018 estimate by Amnesty International.
So Zuckerberg personally decided that Facebook would comply with Hanoi’s demands, according to three people familiar with the decision, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal company discussions. Ahead of Vietnam’s party congress in January, Facebook significantly increased censorship of “anti-state” posts, giving the government near-total control over the platform, according to local activists and free speech advocates.
Zuckerberg’s role in the Vietnam decision, which has not been previously reported, exemplifies his relentless determination to ensure Facebook’s dominance, sometimes at the expense of his stated values, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees. That ethos has come under fire in a series of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.
While it’s unclear whether the SEC will take the case or pursue action against the CEO personally, the allegations made by the whistleblower represent arguably the most profound challenge to Zuckerberg’s leadership of the most powerful social media company on Earth. Experts said the SEC — which has the power to seek depositions, fine him and even remove him as chairman — is likely to dig more deeply into what he knew and when. Though his direct perspective is rarely reflected in the documents, the people who worked with him say his fingerprints are everywhere in them.
In particular, Zuckerberg made countless decisions and remarks that demonstrated a hard-line devotion to free speech. Even in Vietnam, the company says that the choice to censor is justified “to ensure our services remain available for millions of people who rely on them every day,” according to a statement provided to The Post.
Haugen references Zuckerberg’s public statements at least 20 times in her SEC complaints, asserting that the CEO’s singular power and unique level of control over Facebook mean he bears ultimate responsibility for a litany of societal harms. Her documents appear to contradict the CEO on a host of issues, including the platform’s impact on children’s mental health, whether its algorithms contribute to polarization and how much hate speech it detects around the world.
For example, Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds — but internal documents show that its researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of hate speech on Facebook. In March, Zuckerberg told Congress that it was “not at all clear” that social networks polarize people, when Facebook’s own researchers had repeatedly found that they do.
The documents — disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel — were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.
In her congressional testimony, Haugen repeatedly accused Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good, an allegation echoed in interviews with the former employees.
“The specter of Zuckerberg looms in everything the company does,” said Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships and marketing who left in 2020 after coming to believe that the platform was polarizing society. “It is entirely driven by him.”
Facebook is drawing a bipartisan backlash from Congress, but the SEC could deliver a tougher blow
A Facebook spokeswoman, Dani Lever, denied that decisions made by Zuckerberg “cause harm,” saying the claim was based on “selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context.”
“We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible,” she said. “Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues, and we don’t make these decisions inside a vacuum — we rely on the input of our teams, as well as external subject matter experts to navigate them. But drawing these societal lines is always better left to elected leaders which is why we’ve spent many years advocating for Congress to pass updated Internet regulations.”
Facebook has previously fought efforts to hold Zuckerberg personally accountable. In 2019, as the company was facing a record-breaking $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations related to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that abused profile data from tens of millions of Facebook users, Facebook negotiated to protect Zuckerberg from direct liability. Internal Facebook briefing materials revealed the tech giant was willing to abandon settlement talks and duke it out in court if the agency insisted on pursuing the CEO.
The current chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler, has said he wants to go much harder on white-collar crime. Experts said Gensler is potentially likely to weigh the Haugen complaint as he looks toward a new era of corporate accountability.
Zuckerberg “has to be the driver of these decisions,” said Sean McKessy, the first chief of the SEC’s whistleblower office, now representing whistleblowers in private practice at Phillips & Cohen. “This is not a typical public company with checks and balances. This is not a democracy, it’s an authoritarian state. … And although the SEC doesn’t have the strongest track record of holding individuals accountable, I certainly could see this case as being a poster child for doing so.”
Zuckerberg, who is 37, founded Facebook 17 years ago in his college dorm room, envisioning a new way for classmates to connect with one another. Today, Facebook has become a conglomerate encompassing WhatsApp, Instagram and a hardware business. Zuckerberg is chairman of the board and controls 58 percent of the company’s voting shares, rendering his power virtually unchecked internally at the company and by the board.
An ownership structure that gives a single leader a lock on the board’s decision-making is “unprecedented at a company of this scale,” said Marc Goldstein, head of U.S. research for the proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. “Facebook at this point is by far the largest company to have all this power concentrated in one person’s hands.”
Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with metrics, growth and neutralizing competitive threats, according to numerous people who have worked with him. The company’s use of “growth-hacking” tactics, such as tagging people in photos and buying lists of email addresses, was key to achieving its remarkable size — 3.51 billion monthly users, nearly half the planet. In Facebook’s early years, Zuckerberg set annual targets for the number of users the company wanted to gain. In 2014, he ordered teams at Facebook to grow “time spent,” or each user’s minutes spent on the service, by 10 percent a year, according to the documents and interviews.
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In 2018, Zuckerberg defined a new metric that became his “north star,” according to a former executive. That metric was MSI — “meaningful social interactions” — named because the company wanted to emphasize the idea that engagement was more valuable than time spent passively scrolling through videos or other content. For example, the company’s algorithm would now weight posts that got a large number of comments as more “meaningful” than likes, and would use that information to inject the comment-filled posts into the news feeds of many more people who were not friends with the original poster, the documents said.
Even as the company has grown into a large conglomerate, Zuckerberg has maintained a reputation as a hands-on manager who goes deep on product and policy decisions, particularly when they involve critical trade-offs between preserving speech and protecting users from harm — or between safety and growth.
Politically, he has developed hard-line positions on free speech, announcing that he would allow politicians to lie in ads and at one time defending the rights of Holocaust denialists. He has publicly stated that he made the final call in the company’s most sensitive content decisions to date, including allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post during the George Floyd protests to stay up, despite objections from thousands of employees.
And his capacity for micromanagement is vast: He personally chose the colors and layout of the company’s “I got vaccinated” frames for user profile pictures, according to two of the people.
But the former employees who spoke with The Post said his influence goes far beyond what he has stated publicly, and is most felt in countless lesser-known decisions that shaped Facebook’s products to match Zuckerberg’s values — sometimes, critics say, at the expense of the personal safety of billions of users.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook built a “voting information center” that promoted factual information about how to register to vote or sign up to be a poll worker. Teams at WhatsApp wanted to create a version of it in Spanish, pushing the information proactively through a chat bot or embedded link to millions of marginalized voters who communicate regularly through WhatsApp. But Zuckerberg raised objections to the idea, saying it was not “politically neutral,” or could make the company appear partisan, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, as well as documents reviewed by The Post.
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Ultimately, the company implemented a whittled-down version: a partnership with outside groups that allowed WhatsApp users to text a chat bot if they saw potential misinformation or to text a bot built by the organization Vote.org to get voting info.
When considering whether to permit increased censorship in Vietnam, one former employee said, Zuckerberg’s line in the free speech sand seemed to be constantly shifting. Warned that catering to a repressive regime could harm Facebook’s global reputation, according to one of the people, Zuckerberg argued that going offline entirely in Vietnam would cause even greater harm to free speech in the country.
After Zuckerberg agreed to increase censorship of anti-government posts, Facebook’s transparency report shows that more than 2,200 posts by Vietnamese users were blocked between July and December 2020, compared with 834 in the previous six months. Pro-democracy and environmental groups, meanwhile, have become a target of government-led mass reporting campaigns, the documents and interviews show, landing people in jail for even mildly critical posts.
In April 2020, Zuckerberg appeared to shoot down or express reservations about researchers’ proposals to cut down on hate speech, nudity, graphic violence and misinformation, according to one of the documents. The pandemic was in its early days and coronavirus-related misinformation was spreading. The researchers proposed a limit to boosting content the news-feed algorithm predicts will be reshared, because serial “reshares” tended to correlate with misinformation. Early tests showed limiting this could reduce coronavirus-related misinformation by up to 38 percent, according to the document.
“Mark doesn’t think we could go broad,” said Anna Stepanov, the director giving the readout from the Zuckerberg meeting, about the CEO’s response to the proposal to change the algorithm. “We wouldn’t launch if there was a material trade-off with MSI.”
Zuckerberg was a bit more open to a proposal to allow algorithms to be slightly less precise in what the software deemed to be hate speech, nudity and other banned categories — enabling it to delete a broader array of “probable violating content” and potentially reducing such harmful material by as much as 17 percent. But he only supported it as a “break the glass” measure, to be used in emergency situations such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, the documents said. Account demotions — which would have preemptively limited accounts that algorithms predicted were most likely to promote misinformation or hate — were off the table.
Facebook’s Lever says “probable violating” proposals were not break the glass measures and the company did implement them across categories such as graphic violence, nudity and porn, and hostile speech. Later, it also implemented the algorithm change fully for political and health categories that are in place today.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the document’s existence.
The document that finally reached Zuckerberg was carefully tailored to address objections that researchers anticipated he would raise. For each of the nine suggestions that made their way up the chain, the data scientists added one row to list how the proposals would affect three areas he was known to care about: free speech, how Facebook is viewed publicly and how the algorithm change might affect MSI.
One former employee involved in that proposal process said those who worked on it were deflated by Zuckerberg’s response. The researchers had gone back and forth with leadership for months on it, changing it many times to address concerns about clamping down on free speech.
Zuckerberg, said a former executive, “is extremely inquisitive about anything that impacts how content gets ranked in the feed — because that’s the secret sauce, that’s the way this whole thing keeps spinning and working and making profits.”
“People felt, it was Mark’s thing, so he needs it to be successful. It needs to work,” the person added.
Frances Haugen wasn't the first whistleblower at Facebook
In 2019, those in the company’s civic integrity division, a roughly 200-person team that focused on how to mitigate harms caused by the platform, began to hear that Zuckerberg himself was becoming very worried about “false positives” — or legitimate speech being taken down by mistake. They were soon asked to justify their work by providing estimates of how many “false positives” any integrity-related project was producing, according to one of the people.
“Our very existence is fundamentally opposed to the goals of the company, the goals of Mark Zuckerberg,” said another person who quit. “And it made it so we had to justify our existence when other teams didn’t.”
“Founder-CEOs have superpowers that allow them to do courageous things. Mark has done that time and again,” Samidh Chakrabarti, the former head of the company’s civic integrity unit, who quit recently, tweeted this month. “But the trust deficit is real and the FB family may now better prosper under distributed leadership.”
Even as Facebook is facing perhaps its most existential crisis to date over the whistleblower documents, lately Zuckerberg’s attention has been elsewhere, focused on a push toward virtual-reality hardware in what former executives said was an attempt to distance himself from the problems of the core Facebook, known internally as the Big Blue app. The company is reportedly even considering changing its name to align better with his vision of a virtual-reality-driven “metaverse.” Facebook has said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
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The former employees said it was also not surprising that the document trove contains so few references to Zuckerberg’s thoughts. He has become more isolated in recent years, in the face of mounting scandals and leaks (Facebook disputes his isolation). He primarily communicates decisions through a small inner circle, known as the Small Team, and a slightly bigger group of company leaders known as M-Team, or Mark’s team. Information that gets to him is also tightly controlled, as well as information about him.
Even criticizing Zuckerberg personally can come with costs. An engineer who spoke with The Post, and whose story was reflected in the documents, says he was fired in 2020 after penning an open letter to Zuckerberg on the company’s chat system, accusing the CEO of responsibility for protecting conservatives whose accounts had been escalated for misinformation.
One document, a 2020 proposal that indicates it was sent to Zuckerberg for review — over whether to hide like counts on Instagram and Facebook — strongly suggests that Zuckerberg was directly aware of some of the research into harmful effects of the service. It included internal research from 2018 that found that 37 percent of teenagers said one reason that they stopped posting content was because wanting to get enough like counts caused them “stress or anxiety.”
(The like-hiding study, named Project Daisy, was also reported by the Journal. In 2021, the company ultimately did offer an option to hide likes on Instagram, but not on Facebook. Facebook says it didn’t implement Project Daisy because a test showed mixed results for people’s well-being and that the 2018 study used in the presentation “cannot be used to show that Instagram causes harm because the survey wasn’t designed to test that, nor does the data show it.”)
Over the summer, executives in Facebook’s Washington office heard that Zuckerberg was angry about President Biden charge that coronavirus misinformation on Facebook was “killing people.” Zuckerberg felt Biden had unfairly targeted the company and wanted to fight back, according to people who heard a key Zuckerberg adviser, Facebook Vice President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg, express the CEO’s viewpoint.
Zuckerberg is married to a physician, runs a foundation focused on health issues and had hoped that Facebook’s ability to help people during the pandemic would be legacy-making. Instead, the plan was going south.
In July, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, wrote a blog post noting that Facebook had missed its own vaccine goals, and asserting that Facebook wasn’t to blame for the large number of Americans who refused to get vaccinated.
Though Biden later backed off his comment, some former executives saw Facebook’s attack on the White House as unnecessary self-sabotage, an example of the company exercising poor judgment in an effort to please Zuckerberg.
But complaints about the brash action were met with a familiar response, three people said: It was meant to please the “audience of one.”
'Trump and his sidekick, former majority leader Mitch McConnell, did all they could to entrench an actively conservative judiciary.' (photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA)
In just one term, Trump was able to appoint 33% of US supreme court justices and 30% of US appellate judges. They’ll serve for life
The expansion of executive power, and the diminishment of legislative power due to partisan gridlock, is a well-known story. Governing by executive order has become the new normal. But it is the stealthy and steady rise of the power of the judicial branch that has caught many Americans off-guard.
Federal judges have life tenure. Once they are appointed they remain in office until they retire or die. The president appoints every federal judge and these appointments have very long-term consequences. A look at Trump’s record of appointments reveals a relentless commitment to cementing his peculiar and idiosyncratic ideology. In short, he and his sidekick, former majority leader Mitch McConnell, did all they could to entrench an actively conservative judiciary.
The numbers tell a clear story. There are a total of 816 active federal judges comprising the supreme court, the 13 appellate courts, and 91 district courts. In just one term Trump was able to appoint 28% of those judges due to past and continuing vacancies. Most importantly, he appointed 33% of America’s nine supreme court justices and 30% of the appellate judges. The vast majority of his appointments were white males – not one of his 54 appellate judges is Black. But what really stands out is the age of his appointees. The average age of his appellate judges was 47 (five years younger than those selected by President Obama). Six of those were in their 30s, and 20 were under 45. By contrast, of the 55 appellate judges picked by Obama – in eight years, not four – none were in their 30s and only six were younger than 45.
Trump’s judicial appointments will shape American jurisprudence for decades to come. The Federal Judicial Center has found that this age disparity means that Trump judges will serve 270 more years than Obama’s judges, and they will decide thousands more cases. Moreover, the average tenure for a supreme court justice has increased from 15 years in the early 1970s to 27 years in more recent years, due in large part to the younger age of the Justices at the date of appointment.
The Trump legacy of judicial appointments is most apparent in the recent behavior of the supreme court. A new term has been coined – the shadow docket – which refers to the sudden uptick in emergency requests filed by the government. In the 16 years preceding the Trump presidency only eight such requests were filed, and, of those, only four were granted. By contrast, during Trump’s four-year term, 41 such applications were made, of which 24 were granted – a 70% success rate that supported Trump’s policies. These cases are heard without full briefing, without oral argument, and often result in a single-sentence order as opposed to a full reasoned opinion.
One such decision overturned, by a 5-4 order, a Wisconsin trial court order allowing an extension for the receipt of absentee ballots. The last-minute supreme court decision issued the day before the election caused chaos and confusion. A second example of how the now safely pro-Trump court supported his policies involved his administration’s rule prohibiting migrants from seeking asylum in the US before seeking it in the countries through which they had travelled. The lower court suspended enforcement of this unprecedented rule, but the supreme court allowed the ban to take effect immediately even as the case proceeded through the lower courts. Another particularly disturbing example involved four death penalty cases where a lower court halted four executions because the use of pentobarbital to kill the prisoners would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In a 5-4 ruling, issued after 2am, the stay was overturned and at least one of the executions carried out – the first federal prisoner to be executed in 17 years.
Most recently, in yet another emergency appeal, the supreme court by a 5-4 margin, refused to block the newly enacted Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, allowing that rule to be enforced for the foreseeable future. This emergency request was brought by abortion providers after the very conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, to which Trump had appointed six judges, stopped the trial court from holding a hearing as to whether the new law could take immediate effect. A month later a trial judge blocked the law from taking effect and the fifth circuit promptly reversed. The Department of Justice is now appealing that decision to the supreme court.
In each of these cases, the supreme court deprived the affected parties of a chance to be fully heard and often deprived the appellate courts of the chance to review the ruling of the trial courts. This unprecedented haste, and acquiescence to the importuning of the executive branch, gave the appearance that the supreme court was no longer an independent and co-equal branch of government but rather a partner of the Trump-led executive branch.
Many Americans now question the court’s integrity and are jumping on the bandwagon of seeking supreme court reform. Proposals for reform include imposing term limits on supreme court justices to ensure that no one justice or group of justices controls the outcome of cases for decades to come. It is noteworthy that the three justices Trump appointed were 48, 49 and 53 at the time they joined the court, guaranteeing decades of influence by those justices. A variation on this proposal would require mandatory retirement by all federal judges at the age of 70 or 75.
Another more controversial proposal is to expand the court. This proposal is, in part, a response to the widespread belief that two of President Obama’s appointments were stolen. The first was the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia. Obama’s nominee to fill that seat was stonewalled by Republicans for 10 months, purportedly due to the proximity to the upcoming presidential election, while the second was the record-breaking speedy confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before a presidential election.
Other proposals include reform of the shadow docket by requiring briefing, argument, and a reasoned opinion on all emergency matters; imposing a code of conduct and ethics on supreme court justices similar to that binding lower court judges; requiring a 6-3 super-majority before finding a federal statute unconstitutional; and requiring that Congress consider any presidential nomination within a fixed period of time – perhaps 45 days after nomination.
The growing support for some or all of these reforms by many non-partisan organizations, academics, and Democratic politicians, is a response to the discontent created by Trump’s unprecedented manipulation of the appointment process for federal judges, designed to ensure that his politics and policies will control the lives of future generations. Trump’s brazen capture of the supreme court, engineered with the help of the Republican Senate majority, requires a bold response. If reform efforts fail, which is likely given the arcane Senate rules, Trump will have succeeded in entrenching his regressive, if not destructive, political agenda. This may be good for Trump’s legacy but it is surely bad for the country.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe greets supporters in Charlottesville in October. The Virginia governor election, pitting McAuliffe against Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, is November 2. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
These elections often — but don’t always — go against the president’s party. Democrats hope to defy the trend.
That hasn’t traditionally stopped pundits from drawing big, broad lessons about what election results in Virginia or New Jersey might mean for national politics. The 2005 Democratic wins sent “a powerful message that President Bush’s political standing has fallen,” wrote the New York Times. The 2009 races were a “test” for Obama and the Democratic candidates’ defeats were “humiliating” and “an unmistakable rebuke,” per Politico.
In both years, these outcomes were indeed followed by a rough midterm performance for the president’s party. Yet relatively few people in these states tended to say they’re voting to rebuke the president. For instance, in 2009, exit polls showed voters in Virginia and New Jersey continued to strongly support President Obama, even though they voted for Republicans for governor. And the candidates themselves generally don’t shape their messaging around the incumbent president.
The overall pattern, though, is tough to miss: The incumbent president’s party has, in recent decades, almost always lost these Virginia and New Jersey races.
Of the 16 governor’s elections in these two states from 1989 until now, the incumbent president’s party has lost 15. (The sole exception was Virginia’s 2013 governor’s election, which current Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe won during Barack Obama’s second term.) That fits with the general trend in which the president’s party does poorly in midterms.
Still, within the overall trend of backlash, there’s a fair amount of variation in just how badly they perform and how these individual races turn out. And it’s always possible that this time will be different. This time around, Democrats hope to defy the trend, and polls show they might.
But we shouldn’t necessarily get carried away with what that outcome might mean. It’s not that the Virginia and New Jersey races are irrelevant to how next year will go. It’s that each is just one part of a larger picture — with a year remaining in which the political situation could change.
Polls show a tight race in Virginia and a bigger Democratic lead in New Jersey
The Virginia contest is the closer one in the polls. The state’s former governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a longtime close ally of the Clinton family, is running for another term in the office against Republican Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy former private equity executive. (Because Virginia governors can’t serve consecutive terms, the current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, can’t run again.)
Virginia has a history of close governor’s races, but the state has gotten increasingly blue on the presidential level, with Biden beating Trump there by 10 percentage points. Polls show a tight race, with a slight edge for McAuliffe on average.
In New Jersey, incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is running for a second term against former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R). Nationally, New Jersey has been a safe state for Democrats since the 1990s, but Republican Chris Christie recently managed to win two terms before being dragged down by scandal. On average, polls have shown Murphy with a bigger lead, but there have been a few suggesting a close contest.
On the surface, governor’s races tend to be about how things are going in the state. But they can be affected by broader national trends — pandemic policies and the economy are looming large in both of these races. They can also play into national media narratives — Youngkin is attacking the purported use of “critical race theory” in schools. Meanwhile, McAuliffe is trying to tie Youngkin to Donald Trump, and Murphy is trying to do the same to Ciattarelli.
Are Virginia and New Jersey bellwethers?
Though Virginia and New Jersey have tended to swing back and forth between the parties for governor, they’ve done much less of that on the presidential level. Virginia was a solidly Republican state in presidential contests from 1968 to 2004 but has gotten bluer ever since. New Jersey, meanwhile, has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate from 1992 onward.
Still, the results do fit the general pattern of midterm backlash that’s long been common in US politics. The president’s party almost always loses seats in the House of Representatives (they did so in 17 of the 19 midterms since World War II). And that party tends to suffer in governor’s races too — they lost governor’s seats on net in 16 of 19 midterms in that same span. For whatever reason, when a president’s party is in office, voters seem more likely to give the other party’s candidates a shot in the midterms.
In that sense, the Virginia and New Jersey results seem to qualify as “early midterms.” But that doesn’t mean they will predict the midterm results the following year. One or two contests don’t have such totemic power. The two most unusual recent midterms — 1998 and 2002 — were essentially draws for the president’s party, which qualifies as an unusually good result for them. They weren’t really predicted by the Virginia and New Jersey races one year prior, which followed the typical pattern.
But sometimes commentators’ takes do happen to be right. After Tim Kaine kept the Virginia governor’s office in Democrats’ hands in 2005, Democrats really did continue to gain in the state — they won Virginia Senate races there in 2006 and 2008, and Obama became the first Democratic presidential-candidate to win there since LBJ. Republican Bob McDonnell’s win in the 2009 governor’s race, though, did not presage a durable return of the state to the Republican fold, since Democrats have won every statewide contest there since.
Another complication is that voter behavior in state races has become increasingly nationalized, with ticket-splitting on the decline and national-level partisanship becoming more determinative of who voters support on down-ballot races. This trend is clearest in federal politics: In 2000, there were 30 senators representing states the other party’s presidential candidate won, and now there are six.
Governor’s races have not become quite as nationalized as that, but they have become more likely to match the presidential result. After the 2002 elections, there were 20 governors representing states the opposing party’s presidential candidate won. Now, there are 10. (Four are Democrats, and six are Republicans.)
Currently, Virginia and New Jersey are considered solidly Democratic states on the presidential level. Both were willing to elect Republicans as governor not too long ago. But if more voters are sticking with their presidential party no matter what, Republicans will have a far tougher time winning statewide — which means any limited usefulness these two states might have had as bellwethers may have declined.
That’s not to say this November’s results will tell us nothing about the national political situation. It’s fair to say that, if Republican wins materialize in these increasingly blue states, that’s not a great sign for Democrats. A close outcome will be tougher to interpret. If Terry McAuliffe wins by 2 percentage points in Virginia, is that bad for Democrats considering it’s now a blue state? Or is it what we’d expect, since that’s about how much McAuliffe won by the last time he ran, in 2013?
When trying to discern what will happen next year, it’s important to look at the whole picture rather than over-extrapolating about one or two races. For instance, there was, unusually, another high-profile governor’s race this year already: California’s recall election. There, Gov. Gavin Newsom got the exact same share of the vote that he did in 2018. Since 2018 was a strong year for Democrats, California was a good result for the party. There are also more ominous signs for Democrats, though, such as President Biden’s declining approval rating.
The news in the following year could get better for them (if the pandemic and economic situations improve) — or worse. Virginia and New Jersey will be interesting data points, but the full story hasn’t been told yet.
Mark and DeAnne Stidham, founders of multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe. (photo: Amazon/Jacobin)
Pyramid schemes aren’t a corruption of capitalism — they’re a microcosm of how the class system arbitrarily creates winners and losers while falsely promising opportunity for all.
In retrospect, I don’t think the actual nature of the gig (such as even existed) was ever really made clear. From what I gathered at the time, attendees were shown a series of peppy, Tim and Eric–esque videos featuring would-be salt-of-the-earth types who had supposedly transformed their lives overnight using the One Weird Trick bequeathed to them by whatever shady LLC was hosting the affair. (My friend, to their credit, left after ten or fifteen minutes.) Were I a betting man, though, I’d put all my chips down on saying this was a multilevel marketing (MLM) scheme of one kind or another — perhaps a notch or two away from being downright illegal, but doubtless powered by a mix of sleaze, credulity, and human desperation.
I’ve had MLMs on the brain since I watched the recent documentary LuLaRich, which chronicles the rise and (at least partial) fall of LuLaRoe: a company that successfully ensnared tens of thousands of Americans by peddling a seductive tale of economic independence and personal empowerment. On a basic level, there’s nothing to particularly distinguish LuLaRoe from other schemes leveraging the same rhetoric and business model. In this case, the schtick was mainly directed at women, who were sold on the prospect of selling custom apparel from home and making big bucks while doing it.
The wee wrinkle, of course, was that the hustle-and-grind, rags-to-riches narrative projected by the company’s surreally weird cofounders DeAnne and Mark Stidham was quite literally unattainable for the vast majority of those involved. This wasn’t, as adherents to that narrative would insist, for lack of sacrifice or effort. Many of LuLaRoe’s victims worked themselves to the bone and went badly into debt, only to find the money they’d invested to have the privilege of selling its products yield a negative rate of return. (It’s unclear how often this happened, but LuLaRich also reveals that the company actually advised some women to monetize their breast milk for capital.) In 2016, by which point LuLaRoe’s sales had ballooned by 600 percent to roughly $1 billion, 70 percent of representatives made no money whatsoever from its coveted recruitment bonuses, while a minuscule 0.1 percent at the top took in the equivalent of a lavish down payment every month.
This is more or less the industry standard, by design. Distributors for AdvoCare, a somewhat rare example of a multilevel marketing company officially declared a pyramid scheme by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), mostly made zilch that very same year — with 72 percent earning nothing and 18 percent making $250 dollars or less. An income disclosure statement from Young Living, whose game is selling essential oils, meanwhile, shows that nearly nine in ten distributors based in the United States earned an average of four dollars in 2018. Much the same is true of skincare company Rodan and Fields, where roughly 67 percent of sellers boasted a median income of $227 in 2019, and Color Street, where over half of sales representatives raked in monthly profits below twelve dollars in 2018. According to research from the Consumer Awareness Institute, 99 percent of people recruited to participate in multilevel marketing schemes don’t just fail to turn a profit; they actively lose money.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pandemic has been something of a boom time for the industry, with a majority of multilevel marketing companies who responded to a recent survey reporting increased revenue in 2020 and attributing it to COVID-19. According to data from the rather unfortunately named DSA, the official trade association for MLMs (DSA, in this case, stands for “Direct Selling Association”), the recession of 2007–9 saw the ranks of those involved swell by several million — a fact that tells you just about all you need to know about the bottomless reserve of economic ruin and human misery from which the MLM business model conscripts the majority of its recruits. According to the DSA’s own numbers, nearly three-quarters of MLM participants are women, while one in five are Hispanic: two demographics statistically more likely to be poor and/or lacking financial independence.
Officially, of course, a multilevel marketing company is distinct from an actual pyramid scheme. But, as longtime MLM critic Robert FitzPatrick argues, the boundary between “legitimate” multilevel marketing and straightforward fraud is porous at best. As per FitzPatrick, the US government defines the legal variety as “a type of enterprise in which participants can earn money from their own retail sales and from commission overrides based on the retail sales of other participants they recruit in a genealogical chain.” The problem, as he observes, is that the FTC has never actually identified a single MLM company that meets such a definition. “Since,” FitzPatrick writes, “no one in MLM actually does gain or could gain sustainable profit from retailing, no one also gains income from retail sales of those recruited. The legitimate, retail-based MLM is as real as a Unicorn.”
In truth, it’s hard to think of a better microcosm for capitalism than multilevel marketing, or a more apt depiction of why its foundational mythology is so obviously a fraud. In the world of MLMs, all of us are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. With sufficient effort and the application of vigorous work ethic, anyone and everyone can be their own boss while spreading the good word far and wide so that others can rise too. According to MLM’s oleaginous prosperity gospel, sales reps get to help others by selling useful products and enriching themselves, engaging in a perfect symbiosis of enlightened self-interest. Those who lose money or complain are, by extension, either lazy or otherwise personally defective.
It’s transparently bunk, as even a rudimentary analysis of the MLM business model quickly reveals. As FitzPatrick explains:
The main fraud of multi-level marketing is in plain sight. It is the model of the “endless chain” of recruits, misnamed as “salespeople, associates, distributors, coaches,” etc. How could any sales organization have an “unlimited” number of sellers operating in the same areas? How could a sales chain extend to “infinity”? The MLM model actually is two-lies-in-one. First, obviously, as the number of participants increases, the chance to recruit a large downline diminishes for those at the end of the chain. The “opportunity” is not “unlimited.” It is finite and diminishing. The thousands at the bottom of the pyramid cannot possibly enroll as many recruits as those few at the top already have. . . . Second . . . the recruiting chain pay-plan requires each participant to enroll a number of recruits before profit is possible. Therefore, a ratio of “winners” to “losers” is baked in right from the start.
Of course, in a capitalist marketplace a distinction can be drawn between a legitimate commercial transaction and outright fraud. If you sell me lumber because I’m trying to build a barn, there are certain conditions under which both of us may benefit. But if I sell you a vial of olive oil by claiming it will cure blindness, you’ve clearly been had. Though many rich people simply inherited or stumbled upon their wealth, a handful of individuals have successfully risen from rags to riches by way of intelligence, grit, or some combination of both.
The problem is that, under capitalism, this archetypal story of personal success will always be unreachable to the vast majority regardless of their work ethic or talent. Markets are not ultimately even terrains of competing entrepreneurs where rewards are distributed based on hard work and social value. By design, they are quite literally pyramids in which a small few at the top dominate the vast majority at the bottom — a fact that is no less the case when the purchase or sale of goods and labor occurs free of outright deception or fraud. The system isn’t built such that everyone can become a boss, owner, or entrepreneur, and plenty will spend their working lives toiling mainly to enrich someone else.
This simple and elementary truth has always been hiding in plain sight — though, for most of us caught in capitalism’s proverbial airport motel conference room, it’s liable to be drowned out by the sleaze merchants peddling their phony prophecies from atop the dais.
A merchant counts Turkish lira banknotes at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, March 29, 2019. (photo: Murad Sezer/Reuters)
On Saturday, Erdogan said he had ordered the envoys be declared 'persona non grata' for seeking philanthropist Osman Kavala's release from prison.
By Sunday evening, there was no sign that the foreign ministry had yet carried out the instruction, which would open the deepest rift with the West in Erdogan's 19 years in power.
The diplomatic crisis coincides with investor worries about the Turkish lira's fall to a record low after the central bank, under pressure from Erdogan to stimulate the economy, unexpectedly slashed interest rates by 200 points last week.
The lira hit a fresh all-time low in early Asian trade, weakening 1.6% to 9.75 per dollar in a move that bankers attributed to Erdogan's comments. It has lost almost a quarter of its value so far this year.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition CHP, said Erdogan was "rapidly dragging the country to a precipice".
"The reason for these moves is not to protect national interests but to create artificial reasons for the ruining of the economy," he said on Twitter.
'SEEN THIS FILM BEFORE'
Kavala, a contributor to numerous civil society groups, has been in prison for four years, charged with financing nationwide protests in 2013 and with involvement in a failed coup in 2016. He denies the charges and has remained in detention while his trial continues.
"We've seen this film before," said opposition IYI Party deputy leader Yavuz Agiralioglu. "Return at once to our real agenda and the fundamental problem of this country - the economic crisis."
Erdogan said the envoys had failed to respect Turkey's judiciary and had no right to demand Kavala's release.
Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Istanbul-based think tank Edam and a former Turkish diplomat, said Erdogan's timing was incongruous as Turkey was seeking to recalibrate its foreign policy away from episodes of tension in recent years.
"I still hope that Ankara will not go through with this," he tweeted, describing the move as unprecedented among NATO allies. "The foreign policy establishment is working hard to find a more acceptable formula. But time running out."
Erdogan has not always acted on threats.
In 2018, he said Turkey would boycott U.S. electronic goods in a dispute with Washington. Sales were unaffected. Last year, he called on Turks to boycott French goods over what he said was President Emmanuel Macron's "anti-Islam" agenda, but did not follow through.
CABINET MEETING
One diplomatic source said a decision could be taken at Monday's cabinet meeting and that de-escalation was still possible. Erdogan has said he will meet U.S. President Joe Biden at next weekend's G20 summit in Rome.
Erdogan has dominated Turkish politics for two decades but support for his ruling alliance has eroded ahead of elections scheduled for 2023, partly because of high inflation.
While the International Monetary Fund projects economic growth of 9% this year, inflation is more than double that, and the lira has fallen 50% against the dollar since Erdogan's last election victory in 2018.
Emre Peker, from the London-based consultancy Eurasia Group, said the threat of expulsions at a time of economic difficulties was "at best ill-considered, and at worst a foolish gambit to bolster Erdogan's plummeting popularity".
"Erdogan has to project power for domestic political reasons," he said.
In a joint statement on Oct. 18, the ambassadors of Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and the United States called for a just and speedy resolution to Kavala's case, and for his "urgent release".
The European Court of Human Rights called for Kavala's immediate release two years ago, saying there was no reasonable suspicion that he had committed an offence.
Soner Cagaptay from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy tweeted: "Erdogan believes he can win the next Turkish elections by blaming the West for attacking Turkey -- notwithstanding the sorry state of the country's economy."
Drone footage showing forest wood being used in garment factories supplying Western brands. (photo: Thomas Cristofoletti/Royal Holloway)
A recently released report reveals the environmental destruction that fast fashion is wreaking in the developing world, and the Western brands responsible.
The footage pans out to show a vast expanse of timber piled high in a plot on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, serving as a mass graveyard for felled trees set to be transported to an adjacent factory.
Without context, it’s a bleak but unremarkable scene of developing world industry—one that usually wouldn’t earn a second glance. But the significance of the images, captured in July, aren’t lost on Laurie Parsons.
The researcher from Royal Holloway, University of London told VICE World News they show, for the first time, trees logged from Cambodian forest being illegally used as fuel in a garment factory supplying major Western brands.
“In terms of the wood burning, it was known in Cambodia and people have been talking about it, but no one has ever put a figure on it and no one has ever got actual proper footage of it,” said Parsons, who specializes in human geography.
The footage, seen by reporters last week, was shot as part of a research project by Parsons exposing the environmental destruction being wrought by supply chains in the developing world producing goods for UK consumers. The damning final report offers the best estimate yet of the amount of woodland being destroyed as Cambodian factories meet an insatiable demand for fast fashion in the West.
Through unpublished data provided exclusively to VICE World News, also directly implicated are several major Western brands—German discount retailer Lidl is the worst offender among them, in a top ten featuring household names Gap Inc, Levi Strauss and Ralph Lauren—as Parsons’ research draws a direct line between them and the environmental destruction committed by their Cambodian suppliers.
“Brands continue to say zero deforestation and zero waste to landfill, and yet many of the factories they use are burning huge amounts of forest wood,” said Parsons, who led the 18-month research project, Disaster Trade: The Hidden Footprint of UK Production Overseas, published on Oct. 13.
“One in three factories in Cambodia now burns forest wood, and those are just the ones that admit it.”
Unlike counterparts like air travel, the global garment industry’s role as a major polluter is often overlooked by consumers. But recent years have seen it described as “the world’s second most polluting industry”, after only oil, while according to the World Bank, it’s responsible for more carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
The key issue, said Parsons, is the environmental destruction hidden in hard-to-trace overseas supply chains, and that although Western nations strictly regulate domestically, overseas it’s like “the wild west”.
“Out of border, out of mind.”
The UK, the focus of Parsons’ research, provides a stark example of this. While domestic environmental legislation is robust, once abroad that “all goes out the window” said Parsons as the country leaves a devastating carbon footprint across the globe.
“The majority of the emissions in countries like the UK are produced overseas,” he said. “Out of border, out of mind.”
Cambodia is one country to which the UK has outsourced carbon emissions through garment production. The Southeast Asian nation produces more than 40,000 tons of clothing for the UK market each year, a figure that despite its vastness only accounts for 4 percent of Britain’s fast-fashion demand.
To produce this, Parsons found that at least 31 percent of the 558 factories represented by the Garment Manufacturers Association of Cambodia (GMAC) are guilty of illegally burning forest wood—an estimate he said is most certainly far below the true total. Parsons’ findings showed at least 592 tons of forest wood burned by the Cambodian garment industry on a daily basis to produce steam for production purposes, or some 205,130 tons each year.
This practice only adds to Cambodia’s rampant deforestation rates, some of the world’s highest in recent decades. The country lost roughly 24 percent of tree cover between 2001 and 2018, an area equivalent to the size of Israel, eroding wildlife habitats and resulting in once-ubiquitous animals like the Indochinese tiger becoming functionally extinct within its borders.
What’s more, according to Parsons, some 15 percent of factories admitted to burning their own garment waste for fuel, something he said emits “the blackest, thickest smoke you can imagine.”
“There’s a lot of plastic and acrylic in this stuff and it goes up in flames like a kind of fire lighter,” he explained. “I’ve stood around these things as they’re burning with a PM10 meter to measure the atmosphere of the pollution, and it’s literally off the scale.”
The practice contributes to mounting environmental degradation and pollution in Cambodia, encroaching upon the daily lives of nearby residents.
“It’s a massive problem, it’s something that people in the local area are frequently complaining about,” Parsons said. “It’s hugely unhealthy and coats all of their homes and interiors. They have to leave the area when the factory is doing that.”
Dennis Arnold, a geographical political economist at the University of Amsterdam, was not surprised by the findings. He said they demonstrate that the “deleterious consequences of global trade continue to be offshore to poorer countries.”
“These countries are not only stuck at the bottom of the global division of labor in terms of economic development, but they are also suffering the worst forms of environmental degradation,” he said.
When asked by VICE World News about the accusations, Kaing Monika, GMAC deputy secretary general, said that while some isolated incidents of forest wood or garment burning may occur, it didn’t happen at any meaningful scale among its members.
“When people see the wood, they assume it comes from the forest, or from a protected area, which is not the case,” he said, adding that these were likely unproductive rubber trees being burned. “Wood from a protected area is mainly high value wood, it would not be used for burning just to produce just steam.”
But for those close to the industry in Cambodia, there is little to dispute in Parsons’ findings. For one insider, who works on environmental issues for a Western brand but requested not to be named due to the issue’s sensitivity, the “challenges of improving transparency around biomass has been known for a while.”
“The issue is that only a few brands have environmental teams in Cambodia,” they told VICE World News.
But scrutiny over supply chains isn’t currently happening among the vast majority of Western brands sourcing from Cambodian factories, with Parsons claiming that they are choosing to exercise “wilful ignorance.”
In an extensive list of 40 fashion brands—compiled as part of Parsons’ research, but unpublished and provided to VICE World News—virtually all those operating in the country were implicated in the problem to greater or lesser degrees. Drawing from the most recent public information available on the Open Apparel Registry, the rankings consider the number of factories used by a brand in which garment and forest wood burning is known to occur, while also accounting for the tonnage of wood known to be burned in those factories.
Featuring in the top five worst offenders over the past three years are the likes of Tu, C&A, Next and Bestseller, while the top ten includes major names Gap Inc, H&M, Levi Strauss and Ralph Lauren. But topping the table in terms of the number of offending factories it sources from, as well as the total tonnage of forest wood burned by those factories, is German discount retailer Lidl.
Primarily known for its discount supermarkets, Lidl’s place atop a clothing list is a surprise entry. But the retailer has made forays into ultra-cheap fashion lines in the UK since 2014, with an initial range including a leather jacket for £14.99 ($17.50) and jeans for £6.99. More recently, the brand has found immense success marketing Lidl own-brand clothing to a young, fashion-conscious audience. Just last month, British press reported £12.99 Lidl trainers selling on some auction sites for £1,000 as lines sold out nationwide.
For Parsons, though emphasizing that “this is by no means a problem unique to Lidl,” he stated that currently available data shows that they “appear to be the worst offenders.” He speculated that the combination of their inexperience in fast fashion and ultra low-cost model could explain this.
“It could be either inexperience, or a desire to keep costs as low as possible. In either case, being clear outliers in terms of the environmental degradation in your supply chain is not a good place to be,” he said, pointing to the company's sustainability strategies, which claim a commitment to issues of climate change and deforestation.
“The consistency of Lidl’s involvement in some of Cambodia’s worst offending factories indicates that they are not prioritising sustainability in their manufacturing processes and/or that they are not conducting due diligence of the factories they subcontract to manufacture goods.”
Gap Inc, Ralph Lauren and Next did not immediately respond to VICE World News’ requests for comment. C&A and H&M declined to comment, while Levi Strauss and Bestseller said they would look into the suppliers implicated. Tu said it no longer works with two of the factories implicated, and would be “urgently investigating” a third. A Lidl spokesperson said they take their “social and environmental responsibilities very seriously” and were conducting an investigation into the matter.
But while Parsons’ research offers the best understanding yet of the scale of the issue in Cambodia, and the links between offending factories and Western brands clearer than ever, the crucial next step is changing the situation.
Some brands are making strides to improve oversight in their supply chains. While implicated in Parsons’ findings, he said that Swedish brand H&M appears to be making moves in the right direction as it has assigned someone, based in Cambodia, to oversee environmental sustainability across the Mekong region in recent years. Puma has an equivalent based in Vietnam, also covering Cambodia.
But Katherine Brickell, a professor of human geography and colleague of Parsons’ at Royal Holloway, said these findings should be a wakeup call for consumers, while also calling for greater repercussions for brands.
“Brands need to be held more accountable for this—they need to fully understand their supply chain and live up to environmental commitments they are making in practice,” she told VICE World News.
“The research shows how fast fashion’s model is broken. Consumers in the UK are not just buying a T-shirt they might wear one season, they are also buying into environmental destruction that has a much longer impact.”
For his part, Parsons sees opportunity at the COP26 climate change summit of international leaders being held in Glasgow, Scotland in early November. He said that he will be “bringing as many copies of the report” as he can carry to the event, with his message a simple one for all those in power willing to listen.
“It’s important to emphasise these issues as they contrast so sharply with the high-flowing rhetoric around environmental protection that we know we’re going to hear at COP26,” he said, highlighting the lack of an effective international system of accountability.
“What we’re actually doing underneath all this high-flowing rhetoric is essentially moving problems outside of our purview of regulation. Just moving problems into the dark.”
But fundamentally, fashion is an industry that listens to consumer demands like few else. Parsons said that the first step in Western consumers demanding change is knowledge that the issues around environmental destruction in their supply chains even exist.
“Fashion has had a bit of tension on it in recent years and still, despite that, these issues are still mostly completely invisible,” said Parsons. “People have no idea.”
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