02 August 21
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Expert panel unpacks Trump's rhetoric: "Dangerously anti-democratic," "thoroughly corrupt," "vengeful and sadistic"
n Jan. 6, Donald Trump attempted a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of his followers attacked the U.S. Capitol with the goal of preventing the certification of the Electoral College votes, a ceremonial procedure that would formally make Joe Biden the next president of the United States.
Five people died as a result of the Capitol attack. Capitol Police and other law enforcement fought bravely before being overrun by Trump's cult members, political goons and right-wing street thugs and paramilitaries. If not for the valiant efforts of those officers that day, the halls of Congress could have been turned into a bloodbath. Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others deemed by Trump and his followers to be traitors could easily have been murdered.
Trump's attack force made no attempt to hide their faces. They carried white supremacist flags and other regalia. They assembled a gallows in the park across the street from the Capitol. They carried a Christian nationalist cross and participated in group prayers before attacking the Capitol. The MAGA flag was viewed as a substitute for the American flag, if not as something superior. These terrorists believed themselves to be "patriots" who were defending the "real America" and of course the man they viewed as its true leader.
As we saw that day, fascist movements claim a special love for the police and military but will eagerly purge them for acts of "disloyalty" to the cause.
Only 543 or so members of Trump's attack force have been arrested by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies so far. Most will not be charged with serious crimes, and very few will face felony charges that could result in substantial prison time. The coup plotters and enablers — most notably Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress — will likely never be arrested or otherwise held properly accountable.
On Tuesday, the House select committee held its first hearings on the events of Jan. 6. Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Officer Michael Fanone, Officer Daniel Hodges and Sgt. Harry Dunn shared their experiences of fighting to defend the Capitol from Trump's attack force.
They told the committee and public how they were attacked and beaten by rioters. They were clubbed, tased, crushed, blinded with pepper spray and other irritants, verbally abused (in Dunn's case, with racial slurs) and forced to confront the fear of death, overwhelmed and alone. The unifying theme in their testimony was that various kinds of fanaticism and rage, fueled by white supremacy, conspiracy theory, religious fundamentalism and cultlike devotion to Donald Trump propelled his attack force forward.
Despite the heroism of those officers and others, the coup continues. Jan. 6 was but one stop in a journey by Trump supporters, the Jim Crow Republicans, and the larger neofascist movement aimed at overthrowing multiracial democracy.
Donald Trump himself spoke at a rally in Phoenix on Saturday. He continued to threaten political violence against the Democrats and others who "stole" the 2020 election from him and his followers. The "Big Lie" was reinforced with a new conspiracy theory about "routers." Trump channeled numerous tropes of white victimology; his thousands of devoted followers basked in their collective sociopathy. The rally was clearly invigorating for Trump's broken and alienated followers, if only for a few hours. Such is Trump's power over his cult following, for whom he acts as a human intoxicant.
The mainstream media largely chose to treat Trump's rally in Phoenix as a sideshow not worthy of extensive coverage. This reflects a logic where if Trump and his neofascist movement are ignored, the danger to the country will go away. It will not. In hopes of better understanding Donald Trump's escalating threat to American democracy and the growing power of his fascist cult and movement, I asked several experts from a range of backgrounds for their thoughts on his speech in Phoenix.
Jennifer Mercieca is a professor of communication at Texas A&M, and the author of "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump."
Former President Donald Trump is America's first "pretender to the presidency." We've never had a president claim to be president when he is not. We've never had a former president insist that he won the election when he did not. His speech in Arizona was for his partisans only, it wasn't meant to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with his view of reality. It was awash in conspiracy theories. Trump's main message is "politics is war and the enemy cheats." That claim informs Trump's whole view of politics, including his election conspiracy claims. Trump's "pretender to the presidency" speech was dangerously anti-democratic.
Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist and contributing editor for The Atlantic and co-author (with E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann) of "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported."
Donald Trump has tried to overturn a legitimate presidential election ever since last November. He incited a violent and deadly insurrection at the Capitol. He has lied every day, and is a traitor to his own country. Trump's speech in Arizona took the next step by trying to get the state's Republicans to decertify their 2020 election results, another step to undermine our system and divide us further. And of course, Trump is thoroughly corrupt. He does not belong in civil society.
Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research, and the author of several books including "A Brief History of Fascist Lies." His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Guardian.
The Arizona speech made clear that Trump desires to be a fascist. He represents a return to the key elements of fascism: a style and substance steeped in political violence, a leader's cult, dictatorial aims and practices (remember the coup), a politics of hatred, religious fanaticism, militarization of politics, denial of science and totalitarian propaganda. Trump lies like a fascist. Fascists believe their lies and try to transform reality to resemble their lies. This is what Trump expected of his public in Arizona.
Dr. David Reiss is a psychiatrist, expert in mental fitness evaluations and contributor to "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump."
People are expressing the opinion that Donald Trump is deteriorating, be it emotionally and/or cognitively. I have not evaluated him, so I have neither a clinical baseline nor an acute clinical opinion. But I know what I see and what I hear. This all leads me to one conclusion: As a person and regarding any possible "diagnoses," Trump is mostly unchanged. Unhappier? Almost certainly. Angrier? Without a doubt. He also appears to be vengeful, vindictive and sadistic to a dangerous level. What is new about that?
Trump has always relied on inventing reality extemporaneously to fit his mood and to connect with his audience. He has always had an expertise in that area, such that by now it comes naturally and without planning. He has always been very "strategic" in the moment — but not much further down the road than a few minutes into the future.
CNN recently featured a headline that read "This is the most unhinged Trump rant about the 2020 election yet." Trump is lying more, but Trump is not "more unhinged." Trump has always responded to being uncomfortable with reality by inventing his own reality to meet his needs. He is more uncomfortable with objective reality since Nov. 4, so of course he is increasingly inventing different "realities" that are even less grounded in reason and reality than the ones previously.
Jean Guerrero is an investigative reporter and author of "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda." Her writing and other work has been featured by the New York Times, PBS and NPR. She is currently an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
Trump's speech was pure gasoline on the flames of white extremism. While much of it sounded like incomprehensible and presumably improvised gibberish, the speech also included the trademark pseudo-intellectualism of his former speechwriter Stephen Miller, with the latter's mastery of white supremacist talking points.
The most disturbing element was Trump's calculated and deliberately vague promise that Democrats plan to "get rid of" certain people, dog-whistling a meme that has been spreading on far-right social media called "Ten Stages of Genocide," which implies that liberals are plotting to exterminate Trump supporters. Trump began his presidency persecuting Mexicans, Muslims and Central Americans while conjuring false visions of their violence to justify that persecution, then expanded to target Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascists with the same strategy. Trump is now making it clear that if he returns to office he will be going after all liberals and encouraging his supporters to do the same.
He is inciting political persecution against his critics by promoting delusions of persecution among his armed, white supremacist, violence-loving base. It can be tempting to write off white grievance politics as a joke, but as Trump's own DHS acknowledged, it remains among the top threats to homeland security, as embodied in conspiracy theories about white genocide that Trump is openly embracing.
Trump's claim that "woke politics takes the life and joy out of everything" speaks to the fact that his happiness appears to hinge on the ability to freely scapegoat and persecute others without accountability. We can't be complacent about the threat that Donald Trump continues to represent to democracy and the American people's collective grip on reality.
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and author of "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them" and "How Propaganda Works."
Trump's speech in Arizona brilliantly structured the themes in American politics that are gradually coming into greater clarity as a fascist social and political movement centering on Trump as leader. In fascist ideology, communists are supposedly seeking to destroy the nation by opening the borders to immigrants who will dilute the majority population and give power to ethnic and sexual minorities (currently, transgender persons are the most vilified by the far right worldwide, and Trump's speech was no exception). Fascism requires minorities to vilify to create panic and fear among the dominant majority. The fascist leader represents himself as the nation's savior and only hope against these threats. In the case of the United States, fascist ideology has always taken the form of exaggerating threats to the dominant white Christian population. The fascist leader presents the options as total loyalty to him or subservience to the communist agenda. All of these fascist themes were front and center in Trump's speech.
The Democrats are supposedly controlled by communists and are letting crime and nonwhite immigration run rampant. Cities run by Democrats, such as New York and Chicago, are "worse than any war zone in the world"; "it's a crime wave the likes of which we've never seen before." The Biden administration is controlled by "the extreme left" and nepotistic and corrupt. Immigration is supposedly out of control. The themes of white supremacy are front and center here ("they're coming in from Yemen. They're coming in from all over the Middle East. They're coming in from Haiti. Large numbers are coming in from Haiti. They're coming in from all parts of Africa."). The communists with their "critical race theory" are threatening our children at their most vulnerable, in schools. And most of all, of course, there was fascist projection — the "big lie" was not that the election was stolen, it was that the election was fair.
In reality, of course, the election was fair. New York City in July had one of its lowest homicide rates in history. Violent crime is not sharply up, and certainly not high given historical trends. None of this relevant in Trump's world, where loyalty to his version of reality is the only possible way of expressing American patriotism. This is fascism in its pure ideological form.
Nurses check on a patient in the COVID ICU at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, on Wednesday. (photo: Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Getty Images)
t present, there are two big anchors to conventional-wisdom thinking on the Delta variant: that those already vaccinated remain exceedingly well protected against the new, more transmissible strain, and that those who aren’t remain exceedingly vulnerable.
But a third fact seems to me to be just as significant in assessing the COVID risks the country faces going forward: that the age skew of the disease and the age skew of vaccine penetration, taken together, mean that the country as a whole has probably had at least 90 percent of its collective mortality risk eliminated through vaccines. Death isn’t the only outcome worth worrying about, of course — being hospitalized or even ventilated is no happy outcome for anyone, and the possibility of long COVID looms over each case (though precisely how prevalent that phenomenon is remains up for debate). But for most of the course of the pandemic, cases and deaths have guided our sense of the trajectory of the disease and proceeded together almost in lockstep. Almost certainly that relationship has been severed by mass vaccination, since the overwhelming majority of the most at-risk are now very well protected.
Indeed, both in the United States and in those similarly well-vaccinated countries whose Delta waves precede ours, that is what we’ve seen. In the U.K., which has had, after India, perhaps the world’s most striking Delta wave, the infection fatality rate may have fallen as much as 20-fold from previous waves. And it appears possible, at least, that for all the public alarm about British reopening in the midst of the Delta wave, that new case numbers may already have peaked and begun to decline. If this holds up, it is likely that the country’s seven-day rolling death total during the Delta wave will peak, a few weeks from now, below 100. In January, it was over a thousand.
In Israel, the story is much the same. According to the invaluable tracker at Our World in Data, the number of new cases has climbed from a peak below ten per day in early June to more than a thousand now, toward the end of July — a tenfold increase in about six weeks. And while, again, the death totals will likely continue to grow in the weeks ahead, over the same period of time, the country’s rolling seven-day death total has climbed from about 1.5 to 1.7.
Americans fretting about our vaccination rates often point to those two countries as models, but, as with pandemic performance before the vaccines, when it comes to vaccine rollout, we may be less far behind our peers than we tell ourselves. Israel has fully vaccinated 58.4 percent of its population and about 90 percent of those over the age of 60. In England, 53 percent of its total population is fully vaccinated, and 94 percent of its over 50s. The U.S. is at 49 percent of its total population and 90 percent of its seniors.
There is surely some dampening culture-war and disinformation effect on vaccination rates here, and the gap between 49 percent and 58 percent is not insignificant — in the U.S., getting to 58 percent would mean 30 million additional vaccinations. But among the truly vulnerable elderly, the rates across this cohort of countries are quite similar. Canada looks poised to become the world leader in vaccinations, after a slow start, with 52.6 percent of the country fully protected and no signs of slowing down (though it hasn’t yet reached 90 percent of even it’s over-80 population). It may be the case that there is something of a natural social equilibrium, at least in this early stage of rollout, at about 60 percent of total population and 90 to 95 percent of the vulnerable elderly. You get almost all of the old, many of the middle-aged, and frustratingly few of the young, who face the least risk from the disease itself.
While American caseloads have been growing at alarming rates in certain parts of the country, the effects of vaccination are just as striking here. In recent weeks, amid all the alarm over Delta, the seven-day rolling average of American deaths per million has, according to Our World in Data, ticked up from a nadir of 0.66 on July 8 to 0.74 today. It was over two as recently as late May, and over ten in January. In Los Angeles, where new mask mandates are being issued and in-door dining has been temporarily suspended, new cases have grown tenfold since mid-June. The seven-day average of deaths has in fact fallen from 6.3 to 5.9, though some amount of future rise is likely, since death peaks invariably trail case peaks. An NYU modeling team recently predicted that New York City might see 900 deaths in the Delta wave; in its horrific first wave, last spring, the city recorded more than 20,000.
A different team of modelers, called the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, working with the CDC, unveiled a starker set of projections Wednesday. In their most likely scenario, NPR reports, the modelers suggested a mid-October Delta peak of 60,000 new daily cases across the country and 850 daily deaths — about one-quarter as bad as the worst previous wave last winter. In their worst-case scenario, the Delta wave would peak at 250,000 new daily cases and 4,000 deaths. Both projections for deaths seem quite implausible to me, given that each would represent an even higher case-fatality rate than we saw in January, when the country’s new daily case rate peaked at 251,000 and the rolling seven-day death total reached just 3,400. Hardly anybody in the entire country was vaccinated then; today, we’re just below 50 percent of the total population and 90 percent of the senior population, where mortality risk is so concentrated.
In the U.K. today, there are about 47,000 new cases (about one-fifth the group’s projection for an American Delta peak), and while it is the case that death totals in the coming weeks will likely grow, at the moment the country’s seven-day rolling death total is, according to Our World in Data, just 55. Even extrapolating that trajectory out for a few additional weeks, it would imply, in the American context, that a peak of 60,000 new daily cases would produce something on the order of 100 daily deaths, not 850, and a peak of 250,000 new daily cases would imply something like 500, not 4,000. The group also assumes that the Delta wave would not just continue but continuing growing until October, several months from now; the indication of caseload declines from the U.K. and elsewhere suggest that may not be the case — that the wave may indeed peak and begin to subside well before. (On top of which, mid-October is a strange time for a projected peak, given that, last year, it was around then that seasonal fall effects began to kick in, accelerating spread.)
Of course, 500 deaths is still 500 deaths — and it is worth keeping in mind that these are figures that would’ve horrified us 18 months ago, as comparatively small as that number of tragic and preventable deaths now seems, given the brutality of past waves. On Thursday, I spoke about all this with Eric Topol, the head of Scipps and a sort of one-man clearinghouse for new coronavirus data the world over. He was somewhat less sanguine about the next few months.
I wondered if it might be useful to start by laying out how I’m processing what seem to be two contrasting trends. The first is that, according to the White House, something like 90 percent of American seniors are fully vaccinated, and since we know an awful lot of middle-aged people are too, and know the vaccines are effective, we can conclude that we have dramatically reduced the country’s overall mortality risk — probably by 90 percent, maybe 95 percent. There are lots of places with plenty of unvaccinated people, and overall the rates aren’t what we’d like them to be, but even in those places, vaccinations have skewed toward the most vulnerable — at least speaking relatively.
Nevertheless, speaking in absolute terms, there are still a lot of vulnerable people, and given a worst-case scenario of pervasive spread through the vulnerable population, you could see a lot of serious illness and death. It would be much, much less than would’ve been the case if that worst-case scenario of total spread had taken place a year ago, but the total figures could still be pretty grim. And, unfortunately, Delta may just represent that worst-case scenario. What am I missing?
I think overall you’ve got it pegged, but I would modulate some of that. Right now, about 85 percent infections are with Delta. We’re not at 99, but we will be probably in a week. And then we’ll be there for several weeks. So we’re going to have a Delta wave that comes to go through just like it did India. But eventually, as the Delta wave proceeds, it will start to come down — it’s starting to come down, perhaps, in the U.K. and Netherlands, though it hasn’t started to come down yet in Israel and other places. But it doesn’t get to everybody. It didn’t get to everybody in India — it was horrific, but there’s plenty of people still that didn’t get touched there by any of the 607 lineages, which include Delta.
Why is that? Is it because of changes in social behavior in response to rapid spread? Something particular about this variant? A reflection of the dispersion of unvaccinated through the country? Or some other factor, some combination, some dynamic we don’t truly understand?
There are many reasons why Delta will die out before getting to everyone vulnerable — you have listed some like change in behavior. It’s a combination of factors. But the best evidence is from India and now Russia, without vaccines at any appreciable percent — even there, however efficient the virus is, it’s not capable of reaching everyone. Just as the 1918 flu pandemic didn’t get to everyone. These pandemic pathogens burn through a population, but they invariably leave many behind who are vulnerable, not because they had prior COVID or some genomic host insulation. I believe the U.K. is clearly heading down now, which is a quite important prognosticator for the U.S. pattern in the weeks ahead. How many weeks and what will be the peak cases (and other outcomes) is the only unknown in my mind.
So the proclamation that some have made, saying you’re going to either get a vaccine or you’re going to get COVID, the Delta version — that’s not exactly accurate. Because even though it’s really efficient, this variant, it doesn’t find everybody. It just can’t get to everybody, but it gets to a lot of people.
How many?
We’re tracking right with the U.K., if you want to look at the log charts. They got to 50,000-plus cases. And if you multiply that by five, for the population difference, we’d get to 250,000 — that’s easy extrapolation. That could be where we’re heading.
That’s nationally, you mean — 250,000 new cases per day, right?
Some states look like they’re in really bad shape — worse, if you look at the arc of increase, including hospitalizations, than at any prior point in the pandemic. That’s not great. It doesn’t look pretty. But, as you aptly pointed out, we’re blunting the deaths, and to a lesser extent blunting the hospitalizations, because the younger people, they do get to the hospital, they just don’t die, fortunately.
The age skew for hospitalizations, while dramatic, isn’t as dramatic as the age skew for mortality. I think, according to the CDC, mortality risk is 600 times as high for someone in their 80s than someone in their 20s; for hospitalization, it’s just a 15-fold increase.
Right. And in this Delta wave, the hospitalized are mostly unvaccinated younger people. The other thing I’d say is a lot of people discount long COVID, but that’s a big deal. If we do get to 200,000 cases a day, that’s a lot of long COVID.
From what I can tell, estimates of that prevalence are really all over the place — some studies suggest rates as high as 30 percent or even 50 percent of all cases, but those don’t seem to me to be very good surveys and would suggest something like 50 million Americans are dealing with a debilitating chronic condition already. Some other estimates are very, very low — considerably under one percent, even. How do you ballpark?
Ten percent. Probably it’s either high single digits or low double digits is the real deal. When you get north of that, with those surveys showing higher figures, those people are not necessarily dealing with serious symptoms for, say, a year plus — they’re getting better, or their symptoms aren’t as worrisome. They’re not as debilitated. But for the real-deal cases — the ones that can’t work, the real, significant brain fog, the ones that really are suffering — it’s probably one out of ten.
Wow.
It’s a nasty, horrible condition for some people. It doesn’t get enough respect still.
The one other point is this breakthrough-infection thing is probably worse than we have estimated. I don’t mean for death and hospitalizations, but in terms of the ability of the disease to burn through the vaccinated to make them get them infected — it’s not looking as good as we’d hoped, I think it is fair to say.
Right, though, of course, none of the vaccines were tested in clinical trials to measure their efficacy in preventing transmission. This is a bit of a side note, but I have wondered over the last few weeks what the public response would have been, and if it would’ve been different, if the initial trials had included those measurements and the first announcements about the vaccines hadn’t been 90 percent-plus efficacy against symptomatic disease but 90 percent-plus efficacy against symptomatic disease and only, say, 60 percent against transmission.
I’m really glad you brought this up, because this was a real miscue. All the trials, the end point wasn’t death or hospitalization but symptomatic disease.
Right, though we could also look at the deaths in the data.
And there were very relatively few deaths and hospitalizations in those trials, 75,000 people in the two trials, Moderna and Pfizer — there were like nine deaths in the Pfizer trial and 30 in the Moderna.
But what you’re onto is a really big deal because the vaccines are basically not living up to the trials in terms of symptomatic disease, though they are offering great protection against what the trials didn’t test — death and hospitalization. We’re getting the same 90-some percent reduction of those end points. But with Delta we’re seeing a drop-down of protection in symptomatic disease and transmission. It is being transmitted. It is getting into people who’ve been fully vaccinated.
Is it fair, given that and given the age skew of the disease and of vaccinations, that at this point, the worries of long COVID are sort of at a social level, a bigger worry for you, then, than from death itself?
Well, insofar as we’re going to be seeing a lot more long COVID, yes. But, you know, even one death …
Right, every death is terrible.
And now we’re talking about younger people dying, predominantly. These are all catastrophes, even those who don’t die — prolonged hospitalizations and all that goes along with that. So, no, I wouldn’t want to say that I’m not concerned about these other hospitalizations and deaths — we will see them. They just won’t be like the monster third wave.
How much less bad, do you think?
Hopefully, like you alluded to, one-tenth as bad, 90 percent less mortality. That would probably be the best-case scenario. But, still, those are tragedies, and Delta is already flooding the health systems in Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, just like in the beginning. And there’s study after study showing that when a local health system gets overloaded, more deaths occur. So in those unvaccinated pockets, the deaths and hospitalizations will be appreciable. That’s part of the replay — this is the movie we all never wanted to see again.
Speaking of those overloading ICUs and ERs, there’s been a lot of reporting recently about those places being now full of younger and sicker patients in the first wave. How should we think about that? Is it the simple result of a more transmissible variant — that something that moves through the population faster will yield a more compressed wave that strains hospitals just because it is moving so fast? Or is there something about Delta that has changed the virulence or age skew?
There’s two confounders here that make these stories very difficult to interpret. One is, to have something that’s hypertransmissible, you can’t look at the data in the same way — if you look at Russia or Indonesia, say, you might think, Oh my gosh, the deaths are higher than ever before in the pandemic, it must be more deadly. But the deaths could just be explained by transmissibility.
And then the other confounder is the vaccines. In the U.K., the case fatality rate was previously over 2 percent and now it’s 0.12 percent. A lot of that magnitude of reduction is because it’s younger people. So it’s very hard to say. But the way I put it is, you know, we’ve got enough problems with Delta, with its being so remarkably transmissible, and with some immune evasiveness. We don’t need to assign it another feature of being more deadly — we just don’t need to do that. We don’t have proof that it is, for starters. There’s just some dangling, minimal data out there one way or the other. But at this point it’s really not the principal issue. The principal issue is it just spreads so darn easily.
So even with the new research about the high viral loads, suggesting Delta producing 10,000 times more virus than the previous strains, your intuition is that the virulence is in the same neighborhood as the other variants, is that right? Not dramatically different?
That’s my sense. You know, it’s possible there may be, in the weeks ahead, much better data to sort through this, but it’s a very challenging thing to assert, now, because there are just too many things to try and control for. It’s not like we have a randomized trial here.
Right. And what about the effect of these outbreaks on vaccine rates? Are you hopeful that, in a perverse way, they may make people more eager or willing to get vaccinated locally?
Yeah. And finally we’ve seen some Republican leaders wake up, though, you know, months too late.
It’s like there was a memo sent out.
It sure seems like it. It really all came out in the last 48 hours. Unfortunately, by the time they did come out and say that stuff, we already had Delta penetration throughout the country. It takes six weeks minimum to get some immunity. So for them to be calling for people to go out and get vaccinated now — I mean, it’s like the FDA giving us a full approval this coming September. What good is that going to be when the wave is over?
I think we are seeing small evidence of the stage that people are getting scared in Missouri and Arkansas and are lining up to get vaccinated. But the numbers aren’t big. We’re probably at 500,000 doses a day total, and we were at 4 and a half million a day in March and April.
Other countries get a lot of credit for doing better than us with vaccines. But it doesn’t feel to me like it’s categorically better. Israel is at 60 percent of the population. The U.K, is at 53 or 54, and we’re at 48 or 49 or something like that.
Even so, the gap in fully vaccinated is profound. So if you look at Israel at 58.2 percent of the total population now, and the U.S. is 48.7 percent — that’s 10 percent of the total population. And in Israel they have a much younger population, so they can’t vaccinate their kids.
And we’re just not positioned as well. Back in June, our vaccination program just collapsed. It’s been horrible. Canada is the ultimate comparison. I mean, Canada is just chugging along. It’s going to be the top in the world pretty soon. So, no, I am disappointed.
How do you think it all plays out heading into the fall?
Looking ahead to the fall, I’m optimistic. Delta will have passed through by then — it’ll pass through by late August, or September, if it looks like India or the U.K. or Netherlands. We’ll have a rapid descent, and it’ll burn through. We’ll still have lots of COVID in this country, but it’ll be back to where it was before Delta came. It will be at a lower level. The only question is, is there something lurking that’s worse than Delta? There’s no sign of it yet, but there’s too much of this virus circulating to be confident — too many people in Indonesia and sub-Saharan Africa who are getting sick. But I hope not. I’m hoping that this is as bad as it gets. But if you talk to evolutionary biologists, they’ll tell you the variants are going to get worse.
Right, though, just to return to the beginning of the conversation, it’s still a very different-looking pandemic because of the vaccines, right? This variant is bad, future ones will be, too. There will be outbreaks and new cases and some amount of cases, including serious illnesses and death. Certain hospitals may be overwhelmed. None of this is pretty, none of this is happy. But, still, in the big picture, we’ve made so much progress from where we were six or nine months ago.
I don’t think it’s either-or. It’s both. If you emphasize that we made some progress, that’s true, but you could have made a lot more progress with more vaccinates. It’s fantastic that we’re going to see a whole lot less death, but, you know, haven’t we seen enough death already now? Haven’t we seen enough people suffering in the hospital? This nightmare we’ve had — you know, enough of this! To discount potentially hundreds of more deaths a day — it could be a thousand, it could get that high at peak — that’s a lot of people dying. We’ve never gotten it down much below 300.
I think we’ve gotten numb here. We’ve gotten numb to the point that if we had done a much better job vaccinating, like any other vaccine in our history — like polio or many others where everybody got vaccinated — we wouldn’t be dealing with nearly as many deaths, hospitalizations, or the big burden of cases and on and on. I think if you just pick the upbeat side of this, it ignores that. There is a real downside here that we can’t ignore. When you have 35-year-old people — healthy people, perfectly healthy — who wind up in the hospital and are teetering on death, when you have that, you say, God, what are we doing here? We could have prevented this.
Kevin McCarthy. (photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
OP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears pathetically desperate to become speaker of the House. That can be the only explanation for McCarthy's flip-flops on Donald Trump and now McCarthy's appalling "joke" about hitting Nancy Pelosi.
A week after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, McCarthy -- who reportedly had a telephonic shouting match with Trump during the insurrection -- declared that the former president "bears responsibility" for the riot. Just a few weeks ago McCarthy went on a pilgrimage to visit Trump at his New Jersey golf course, where he stated, "I appreciate President Trump's commitment to help House Republicans defeat Democrats and Take Back the House in 2022."
Hopefully only a small percentage of voters will chalk up McCarthy's contradictions as being politics as normal. But there's nothing normal about palling around with the man who incited the January 6 act of "domestic terrorism"-- as the FBI has classified that attack. Nor should there be anything "normal" about McCarthy's dangerous "joke" on Saturday night about hitting the woman who has the job he wants.
While giving a speech before an estimated 1,400 Republicans in Tennessee at a fundraising dinner, McCarthy expressed optimism that the GOP would recapture the House in the 2022 midterm elections and he would then become its new speaker. At the end of the speech, McCarthy was handed an oversized gavel symbolizing the one he would wield if he got the job.
McCarthy then told the crowd that if the Republicans win the House he wants everyone to come down because "I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel." After the crowd's cheers died down, he declared, "It will be hard not to hit her with it," a line which elicited big laughs from the GOP audience. McCarthy then added, "But I will bang it down."
Nothing like joking about wanting to hit a woman to get some GOP donors laughing. After all, this is the same GOP that mostly still loves Trump -- a man who himself has been accused of abuse of women (he calls his accusers "liars") and who has defended other men accused of abusive behavior.
McCarthy joking about hitting a woman is even more despicable given that he did not vote in March with his 29 fellow House Republicans to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act designed to protect women from domestic violence. McCarthy's message seems to be that it's OK to vote against laws to protect women from violence and then joke about hitting them.
It's no surprise that some House Democrats slammed the "joke." Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) tweeted to McCarthy, "Don't you think America has had enough political violence? You should never be encouraging or threatening or joking about causing violence to anyone, including the Speaker of the House." The California Democrat added, "You need to apologize for your statement, or resign."
Rep Eric Swalwell (D-California) was even more pointed, tweeting, "America has suffered enough violence around politics. @GOPLeader McCarthy is now a would-be assailant of @SpeakerPelosi. He needs to resign." (At the time of writing, a spokesperson for McCarthy had not responded to CNN's request for comment.)
Reps. Lieu and Swalwell are spot on to raise the threat of more political violence given the January 6 attack and a recent FBI warning of increased risk of domestic terrorism from right wing and white nationalist groups. Political leaders like McCarthy must be far more responsible with their rhetoric given this increased threat.
Political violence aside, McCarthy's words of "it will be hard not to hit her with it" are horribly wrong given the long epidemic of violence against women in the US. As the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) has detailed, one in three women experience violence from a partner. Worse, one in four women have suffered "severe physical violence (e.g. beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime." And as NCADV reports, each day "there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide."
Worse, violence against women alarmingly spiked over 8% during the Covid-related closures. Experts note that this number is likely low because some did not want to report domestic violence during the worst of the Covid outbreak.
In Tennessee, where McCarthy spoke Saturday night, shockingly nearly 40% of women "experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner rape and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes."
None of that seems to matter to McCarthy's focus on becoming Speaker at all costs. There are many reasons why McCarthy should never have that role, which would put him third in line in succession to be president of the United States. His vile "joke" about hitting a woman to get laughs from Republican donors may be yet another compelling reason to prevent the GOP from winning the House in 2022.
Congressional Black Caucus chair Joyce Beatty. (photo: Maddie Schroeder/Columbus Dispatch)
omen of color turned out to vote at record rates in the 2020 election, with almost nine in 10 agreeing that the stakes were too high not to vote, according to a new poll.
Why it matters: The findings in the poll, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of a group of reproductive rights organizations, appear to confirm the highly-motivated voting bloc's emerging power.
- Advocates warn that the GOP's efforts to restrict voting access, including targeting vote by mail and early voting, will disproportionately impact people of color.
By the numbers: Eight in 10 women of color voted for Biden in the 2020 election, according to the poll, which surveyed and interviewed 1,617 adult women (18+) in the U.S. who self-identify as Black or African American; of Hispanic, Latina, or Spanish-speaking background; or Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI).
- The number of Latina and AAPI first-time voters jumped at least seven points since 2018, while Black women had an outsized influence in critical swing states like Georgia, Texas and Florida.
- Nearly eight in 10 women of color voters polled reported voting early, while 52% voted by mail, ballot drop box or absentee.
- But two in five women of color voters polled faced challenges while voting last year, an increase of eight points since 2018. About 19% said they were asked to show ID at the polls, 11% saw disinformation on social media and 11% faced long voting lines.
- Despite these obstacles, nine in 10 first-time voters said they were committed to voting in the next election.
Worth noting: About 57% say they will be watching their elected officials in Congress more closely compared to previous elections.
- Women of color are more likely to vote for candidates who prioritize ending discrimination, protecting reproductive rights and ensuring access to health insurance.
- About 79% want their elected officials to understand how white supremacy impacts their lives.
- "Failure to deliver on the issues that women of color voters care about comes with electoral consequences," the report states.
The big picture: Democrats have attempted to combat the GOP's attacks with federal legislation, but Senate Republicans filibustered Democrats' sweeping voter protections bill in June.
- Nine people, including Congressional Black Caucus chair Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), were arrested in D.C. on July 15 during a voting rights demonstration led by Black women.
The bottom line: Efforts to enact restrictions "hit us hard," but women of color voters "made clear this last election that they are paying attention and won't be ignored," Marcela Howell, the president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, said in a statement.
Medical debt. (photo: ripmedicaldebt.org)
Now, a study in JAMA sheds light on just how much medical debt has been sent for collection in the United States.
Researchers used data from a randomly selected group representing 10 percent of all people with TransUnion credit reports — about 40 million individuals — between 2009 and 2020. Though the average amount of medical debt fell to $429 by 2020, 17.8 percent of people had medical bills that were past due.
There were stark regional differences in the number of people whose debt had been assigned for collection. In the Northeast, 10.8 percent of people had overdue medical bills, in contrast to 17.8 percent in the Midwest and 23.8 percent in the South. More medical debt was in collections than any other kind of debt.
The people living in areas with the lowest income levels owed the most. Those groups also experienced the greatest decline in medical debt if their states expanded Medicaid between 2009 and 2020.
Overall, those living in states that didn’t expand Medicaid had much lower drops in debt during the period than those whose states did expand the program.
The researchers estimate that there is about $140 billion in medical debt in the United States. Since the numbers reflect only care provided before the pandemic, the real figure may be much higher.
Those findings are concerning, write researchers from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in an editorial accompanying the study. They point out correlations between medical debt and lower usage of health-care resources, higher morbidity and poor mental health.
Unlike secured debt such as mortgages, they write, medical debt can force debtors into “a spiral of economic disadvantage” that can last generations.
The authors argue that medical debt, like poverty, housing status or race, should also be considered a social determinant of health.
The debt and its burdens, they write, are a reminder of how those factors “reinforce and perpetuate inequities in health and inequities in economic promise and prosperity.”
The families of Ka'a Poty 1 have been living in improvised tents in a central square in Asunción since June 16. Nighttime temperatures have at times approached 0 degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit). (photo: William Costa/Al Jazeera)
Indigenous community Ka’a Poty 1 wants land back and compensation after armed police and guards allegedly burned homes.
arta DÃaz sits among a settlement of improvised tents made from plastic sheeting in a central square of Paraguay’s capital Asunción, just meters from the National Congress building. A brightly-coloured painted scene hangs nearby depicting rural, wooden houses set on fire as a group of unbelieving people look on, reflecting what happed to her community.
“We aren’t happy here. We came because of the pressure from bad people that threw us off our land, that burned it. We aren’t free,” she told Al Jazeera.
DÃaz is the leader of Ka’a Poty 1, a community of the Ava Guaranà people – one of 19 Indigenous nations in Paraguay – who were forcibly evicted from their land in the Itakyry district in the east of the country on June 15 by a combination of armed riot police and private guards.
Since June 16, the 60 adults and 44 children have been camping in the harsh winter conditions of the city square, demanding justice and restitution of their land.
Ka’a Poty 1 are one of at least seven Indigenous communities to suffer violent evictions by state forces and armed civilians due to land ownership disputes in the past three months – prompting a large public outcry and condemnation from human rights organizations such as Survival International.
DÃaz said that the eviction saw all the community’s houses, their temple, and school burned to the ground. Practically all their possessions were stolen, their crops were destroyed, and their pets were killed before their eyes. A pregnant woman miscarried, and a 15-day-old baby was hospitalized.
“We lost everything. They didn’t even let us take the clothes from our homes”, she said.
Indigenous people form one of the most marginalized and vulnerable sectors in Paraguay, with more than 30 percent facing extreme poverty, according to 2017 official figures – far above the national average.
Milena Pereira, a lawyer assisting the community as part of a collective of Paraguayan human rights activists, the Social Platform of Human Rights, Memory and Democracy, told Al Jazeera that, alongside extreme violations of human rights during the eviction, the circumstances that led to the court order for the operation were entirely illegal, violating the constitution and international treaties guaranteeing rights of Indigenous peoples to their territories.
She said the main cause of these evictions is the existence of illegitimate deeds on communities’ land. In the case of Ka’a Poty 1’s 1364-hectare (3370-acre) territory, 12 deeds held by private individuals overlap with that of the community, which was registered by the state’s Paraguayan Indigenous Institute (INDI) in 1996.
Many illegitimate land documents in Paraguay can be traced to the 35-year right-wing dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89). The period saw 6,744,005 hectares (16,664,799 acres) of public lands, including areas corresponding to ancestral Indigenous territories, gifted to allies of the regime through an agrarian reform nominally intended for campesinos (small-scale farmers), according to Paraguay’s 2008 Truth and Justice Commission report.
The father of current president Mario Abdo BenÃtez and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza were among beneficiaries.
Campesino families, the intended beneficiaries of the agrarian reform, today also suffer from enormous difficulty accessing land and experience violent forced evictions from public land shown to be illegitimately held by private owners.
Paraguay has one of the highest inequalities of land ownership in the world, according to the World Bank, as booming GMO soy and ranching sectors, which cover enormous tracts of the country, make land Paraguay’s most valuable and coveted commodity.
The state has never taken any steps to recover the “ill-gotten land”, as it is known, or to prosecute involved parties. Moreover, unchecked corruption has allowed usurpation to continue since the establishment of democracy.
“There’s evidently a fraudulent scheme with public notaries, civil servants and registry employees partaking,” said Pereira. “There is no line of investigation by the authorities to punish those involved and stop it from continuing.”
Senator Miguel Fulgencio RodrÃguez, President of the Senate’s Indigenous Peoples Commission, told Al Jazeera that deep corruption within the legal system allows the holders of illegitimate titles to win land ownership disputes in the courts, leading to evictions.
“There’s a failure in the judiciary. The Constitution isn’t respected, the laws aren’t respected. The UN has even said that there can’t be evictions because of the pandemic, but nobody cares about that,” RodrÃguez said.
A 2020 Freedom House report concluded that due process in the Paraguayan justice system is limited by corruption and that “individuals with influence or access to money are frequently able to obtain favourable treatment.”
Pereira is convinced that this dynamic led to Ka’a Poty’s dire situation.
“Ka’a Poty is the clearest example of the repercussions of this situation of illegitimate deeds and a lack of basic mechanisms for governance of land ownership in the country,” said Pereira.
Interior Minister Arnaldo Giuzzio in an interview with Radio Nanduti defended the actions of police, saying that forces were only complying with court orders during evictions. He said that vulnerable Indigenous groups were brought to the capital by political actors who manipulated them for their own ends.
“It’s necessary to look at the causes that are creating these kinds of conflicts,” he said. “We have to modernize our legislation because the majority of Indigenous people now want to have a home.”
Eusebio Villanueva, member of the Guana people and Copresident of the Youth Network of Legal Promotors of Indigenous Peoples, said that the money of farmers in the powerful GMO soy sector – who have been involved in a vast number of recent land conflicts and evictions of Indigenous and campesino communities – is “worth far more than the documents of the INDI”.
He emphasized that land problems were far from new for Indigenous communities. A 2015 UN report found that more than half of Paraguay’s almost 500 communities were either landless or facing ownership conflicts.
In three cases involving Indigenous communities, the Inter-American Court of Human rights ruled in 2005, 2006, and 2010 that Indigenous communities have rights to their lands and ordered the Paraguayan government to pay reparations and costs. It has not fully complied, according to the Paraguayan Human Rights Coordination Group
Additionally, a 2020 Earthsight report showed that enormous land infringements from ranchers were taking place in the protected territory of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, the only Indigenous group in voluntary isolation outside the Amazon.
Beyond exclusion from the land, Villanueva said Indigenous people also endure heavily restricted access to public services.
“The state really doesn’t guarantee access to health or education,” he said. “There are communities without electricity, drinking water, let alone a nearby health centre.”
Lack of state support has also put many Indigenous languages and cultural practices greatly at risk.
An injunction that will allow the community to return to their land was granted by a judge on July 30, following street protests by the Indigenous families to demand action from judicial authorities.
The community and its supporters celebrated the news even though no date had been set for the return to their lands 350 kilometres (217 miles) away.
Marta DÃaz worries that conditions there may be more difficult than ever. While they receive support from urban organizations and individuals in Asunción, this may not reach their rural territory.
“There is only the red earth waiting for us without trees: everything was burned, everything was destroyed,” she said. “Our community had crops: banana, sugarcane, cassava, sweet potato, pineapple. It’s all been destroyed so they can plant soy. We’re going to rebuild our community – we have hope”.
With this context in mind, Pereira is part of a group pressuring legislators to pass a law to guarantee compensation for communities unlawfully expelled from their land and, importantly, ban forced evictions in Paraguay.
In the cold of the square, Elisa González, Ka’a Poty 1’s schoolteacher, said she will continue to fight for a brighter future, one she says that many of Paraguay’s Indigenous communities have been denied for generations.
“We don’t like it here; we want to return to our land,” she said, watching the barefoot children playing marbles on the ground. “I want them to be able to study too – so they can be teachers, doctors… lawyers.”
A strawberry picker uses a bandana to avoid inhaling smoke while working in the fields in Oxnard, California, during a recent wildfire season. (photo: Philip Cheung/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
tu Smith got an email from his insurance company last summer with some bad news: His premium was more than quadrupling.
Smith is the co-owner of Smith Madrone, a wine operation in the mountains near California’s Napa Valley, and he had held a wildfire insurance policy with the company for more than 30 years. Now, though, the insurer had decided Smith’s property was too risky to keep on its customer rolls at anything close to its longtime price. If Smith wanted to renew his policy, he would have to pay annual premiums of more than $55,000, up from just $12,000 the year before.
The following week, as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire began to spread in the hills east of Napa Valley, Smith scrambled to find a new insurance company. No private insurer seemed willing to issue him a policy, so at the last moment, he resorted to a state-run insurance plan that covered a portion of his property. The price was still orders of magnitude greater than what he’d grown used to: He would now have to pay $46,000 for an insurance plan that offered a fraction of the coverage his previous plan did.*
After a few weeks, with the LNU fire still burning nearby, Smith gave in and signed up for the state-run plan, but many of his neighbors in Sonoma Valley did not. Hundreds of farm owners in California have found themselves forced to go without insurance coverage this past year, from ranchers along the Central Coast, nut growers outside San Diego, and winery owners like Smith in Sonoma and Napa Valley. Nobody knows for sure how many farm owners have lost coverage, but what’s clear is that the trend has sent shock waves through California’s agricultural regions.
Insurance companies in California have taken a staggering blow from wildfires — the industry’s losses in 2017 and 2018 eclipsed its total profits from the previous 25 years — and have started to drop customers by the thousands, leaving wineries and ranches unable to find insurance for properties worth millions of dollars. The state has stepped in to provide a short-term fire insurance solution of last resort, but the crisis foreshadows a larger confrontation over so-called managed retreat in one of the country’s all-important breadbaskets.
California plays a crucial role in the food economy, producing more than 80 percent of the country’s wine and more than 80 percent of fruits like strawberries and raspberries. If a lack of fire insurance helps usher these farmers out of business, the rest of the country might pay for it at the grocery store. The decline of a farming region like Napa would also create knock-on effects for the service-sector workers who support the agricultural economy, as well as the thousands of migrant workers who pick grapes during harvest season.
Brent Burchett, the head of the San Luis Obispo Farm Bureau on the state’s central coast, said that he’s not sure how much longer his members are going to hang on.
“I think it was serious already, and then the notion that they cannot get insurance is pushing them to say, ‘I’ve got to make a decision,’” said Burchett. “If you’re packing up and moving, I would say the threat of a fire is pretty much top of mind.”
This insurance dilemma has been simmering for decades. After a rash of wildfires and earthquakes in the 2000s, the largest private insurers became more conservative about writing new policies in fire-prone areas. It wasn’t until after the historic fire seasons of 2017 and 2018, though, that regulators began to notice a rise in so-called “nonrenewals,” wherein a private insurer refuses to renew an existing customer’s insurance plan. An estimated 400,000 residential customers received nonrenewal notices in 2018 and 2019, with numbers spiking by more than 200 percent in the most vulnerable counties in California. Thousands of commercial businesses and farms have also been dropped.
Unable to secure insurance on the private market, thousands of households began turning to the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan, known as FAIR, a state-run “insurer of last resort” that provides limited and expensive fire coverage. The program had been created in the 1960s after a series of brush fires, and was designed to provide only the most basic coverage, so it excluded a farmer’s agricultural buildings, tractors, and other equipment, which together could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When insurance started dropping customers a few years ago, this gap in the state plan left many farmers with no coverage options for much of their property — a potential death sentence for their business. Farms rely on bank loans for the capital they need to expand their operations, but they can’t get bank loans without insurance. Many farmers began to worry that banks would soon cut them off.
After a lobbying push by the largest trade association of California farmers, the California state legislature passed a bill earlier this month that expanded the FAIR Plan to cover farm structures, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it a few days later. (The state insurers’ association also supported the bill.) The new insurance won’t be available until the end of the year, though, which means that many farmers will have to “go naked,” as Smith calls it, through a fire season that experts believe could be one of the worst in history.
The worst-case scenario here is as bad as can be imagined: If another wildfire like the LNU Lightning Complex strikes Smith’s part of Wine Country this summer, it could not only destroy outbuildings and drip irrigation equipment but contaminate all the local grapes with smoke as well, making them impossible to sell. Smith can count himself lucky. Because he’s enrolled in the FAIR Plan, he can expect a minimal payout if a fire destroys his operation, but some of his property is still de facto “naked.” For his neighbors, those who’ve gone without coverage altogether, any kind of fire damage would likely mean bankruptcy.
Even if farmers do make it to next year, the insurance problem isn’t going away any time soon. The FAIR plan’s coverage caps out at around $4 million, and many wineries and ranches are worth much more than that. It also doesn’t cover damage to crops (federal crop insurance typically doesn’t either). That can be painful for winery owners like Smith: The smoke from last season’s wildfires contaminated many grape vintages in Napa and Sonoma, rendering them unusable for wine.
To protect the long-term interests of California’s agriculture industry, the state government will have to cajole private insurers into offering coverage at something like the price and scale they used to, most likely by assuring them that property owners will take steps to reduce wildfire risk. The state could also try to funnel more rejected customers into the FAIR program, but that would create an ultra-expensive risk pool that might prove unsustainable.
Smith, for one, is optimistic about getting private insurers to return to the Wine Country market. He has spent thousands of dollars to clear flammable forest vegetation and create “defensible space” to buffer against blazes. If a private insurer looked at his property rather than at his ZIP Code, he says, they’d be sure to offer him a better deal.
Others in Wine Country are less optimistic about the future of the industry.
“If you’re repeatedly hit by wildfire and you’re not insured for it, then most likely you’re going out of business,” said Ryan Klobas, head of the Napa County Farm Bureau, which represents winery owners one valley over from Smith’s winery in Sonoma. Klobas estimates that around 85 percent of his 1,500 farm bureau members have received nonrenewal notices from insurers in the past few years.
Even if private insurers do offer coverage again, Klobas says, it’ll likely be too expensive for many small operations to afford — the few wineries that didn’t lose coverage last year saw their rates spike as much as fourfold overnight. “How do you keep funding an insurance policy where the rates have tripled or quadrupled?” he says. “That doesn’t make any sense. They’re essentially just sitting there waiting for something to happen, but [they] don’t have the resources to really deal with it.”
To understand why Klobas is worried, it helps to think about why an insurance company would drop customers in the first place. If an insurance company is paying out more money in claims than it is taking in from premiums, the logical solution is to raise premiums to cover the difference. When an insurance company drops thousands of customers, though, it is saying that it cannot raise prices high enough to turn a profit off those customers — saying, in other words, that their farms are impossible to insure.
“No group is working harder to understand fire risk and mitigation efficacy than insurers,” said Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, in a statement to Grist. “I’m not aware of anyone that can credibly state they understand how to stop a large fire from taking homes and businesses.”
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has extended both the length of every fire season and its geographic range, which means that each year is likely to bring new destruction to a place that isn’t ready for it. If insurers continue to lose money, some companies might withdraw from parts of California altogether. Something similar happened in the Midwest almost a century ago when private flood insurers abandoned the region following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Frazier noted that given the scale of fire risk in California, simply raising premiums might not be enough to protect insurance companies from going out of business: “An insurer also has to guard against solvency issues from over-concentration to regional fire risk and avoid taking a disproportionate share of an individual fire’s damage,” he said.
For the past two years, California has issued one-year moratoria that prohibit insurers from dropping customers in areas that saw severe fire damage that year. This has slowed the pace of displacement for those in the highest-risk regions, but it has not slowed down the pace of nonrenewals in other areas, nor does it protect homeowners after the moratorium expires. This temporary solution has only delayed a reckoning that many states will have to face: California must decide whether it should continue issuing moratoria in disaster areas or let the market take its course.
“On the one hand, we might say that people who live in these wildfire risk zones absolutely should have insurance, it’s sort of a basic ability of them to have some resilience to stay where they are, so maybe governments should step in to subsidize or require insurance companies to make it available,” said Lisa Dale, a Columbia University professor who has studied the viability of managed retreat from fire zones. “On the other hand, we could say that if insurance companies [believe] that an area is too risky to insure, then we should allow the private marketplace to reflect that risk, [because] it’s providing incentives that lead us in the right direction.”
In other parts of the country, the growing threat of sea-level rise has spurred a conversation about “managed retreat,” the coordinated withdrawal from low-lying regions and other vulnerable areas. The insurance crisis could force a similar conversation in California as residents find themselves unable to secure sufficient coverage. If growers like Smith start to go under, it will not be easy to replace them.
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