An Amazon robotics innovation hub in shown in Westborough, Massachusetts on November 10, 2022. 

(Photo: Joseph Prezios/AFP via Getty Images)

“Unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda,” one organizer said.

OLIVIA ROSANE

Sep 23, 2024 (CommonDreams.org)

Big Tech, Big Oil, and private equity firms are among the leading companies that profit from controlling media and technology, accelerating the climate crisis, privatizing public goods and services, and violating human and workers’ rights, the International Trade Union Confederation revealed on Monday.

The ITUC has labeled seven major companies as “corporate underminers of democracy” that lobby against government attempts to hold them accountable and are headed by super-rich individuals who fund right-wing political movements and leaders.

“This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda,” Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC, toldThe Guardian. “We know as trade unionists that unless we’re organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda.”

https://x.com/ituc/status/1838186605955219658?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1838186605955219658%7Ctwgr%5E5ca8db819711176c39c71d87d0bd0557bfb6d7c8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F7-corporations-undermining-democracy

The “corporate underminers of democracy” are:

1. Amazon.com, Inc.
2. Blackstone Group
3. ExxonMobil
4. Glencore
5. Meta
6. Tesla
7. The Vanguard Group

ITUC chose the seven companies based on preexisting reporting and research, as well as talks with allied groups like the Council of Global Unions and the Reactionary International Research Consortium. The seven companies were “emblematic” of a broader trend, and the confederation said it would continue to add “market-leading” companies to the list.

“While these seven corporations are among the most egregious underminers of democracy, they are hardly alone,” ITUC said. “Whether state-owned enterprises in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia; private sector military contractors; or regulation-busting tech startups, the ITUC and its partners will continue to identify and track corporate underminers of democracy and their links to the far-right.”

Amazon topped the list due to its “union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centers, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level,” ITUC wrote.

In the U.S., for example, Amazon has responded to attempts to hold it accountable for labor violations by challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. While its founder Jeff Bezos voices liberal opinions, Amazon’s political donations have advanced the right by challenging women’s rights and antitrust efforts.

“There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs.”

Blackstone is the world’s largest private equity firm and private real-estate owner whose CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, has given to right-wing politicians including former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. It funds fossil fuel projects and the destruction of the Amazon and profited from speculating on the housing market after the 2008 financial crash.

The United Nations special papporteur on housing said the company used “its significant resources and political leverage to undermine domestic laws and policies that would in fact improve access to adequate housing.”

ExxonMobil made the list largely for its history of funding climate denial and its ongoing lobbying against needed environmental regulations.

“Perhaps the greatest example of Exxon’s disinterest in democratic deliberation was its corporate commitment of nearly four decades to conceal from the public its own internal evidence that climate change was real, accelerating, and driven by fossil fuel use while simultaneously financing far-right think tanks in the U.S. and Europe to inject climate scepticism and denialism into the public discourse,” ITUC wrote.

Glencore is the world’s largest commodities trader and the largest mining company when judged by revenue. Several civil society and Indigenous rights groups have launched campaigns against it over its anti-democratic policies. It has allegedly funded right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia and anti-protest vigilantes in Peru.

“The company’s undermining of democracy is not in dispute, as it has in recent years pled guilty to committing bribery, corruption, and market manipulation in countries as varied as Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Sudan,” ITUC said.

As the world’s largest social media company, Meta’s platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have roughly as many users as everyone expected to vote in 2024 worldwide—almost 4 billion. Yet there are concerns about what its impact on those elections will be, as right-wing groups from the U.S. to Germany to India have used Facebook to recruit new members and target marginalized groups.

“Meta continues to aid right-wing political interests in weaponizing its algorithms to spread hate-filled propaganda around the world,” ITUC wrote. “Increasingly, it has been engaged in dodging national regulation through the deployment of targeted lobbying campaigns.”

Tesla made the list for its “belligerent” anti-union stance, as well as the vocal anti-worker and right-wing politics of its CEO, Elon Musk. Of Musk, ITUC observed:

As owner of the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter), he responded to one user’s allegations about a coup in Bolivia–a country with lithium reserves considered highly valuable for electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla–by saying, “We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!” He has committed to donating $45 million per month to a political action committee to support the reelection campaign of Donald Trump, and sought to build close relationships with other far-right leaders, including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi. Musk has also re-platformed and clearly expressed his support of white nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ accounts since taking ownership of X.

No. 7 on the list is The Vanguard Group, an institutional investor that funds many of the other companies on the list, including with billions in the stock held by workers’ retirement plans.

“Effectively, Vanguard uses the deferred wages of workers to lend capital to the self-same companies complicit in undermining democracy at work and in societies globally,” ITUC wrote.

ITUC is exposing these companies in part to advance its agenda for a “New Social Contract” that would ensure “a world where the economy serves humanity, rights are protected, and the planet is preserved for future generations.”

It and other workers’ organizations plan to push this agenda at international gatherings like the U.N. General Assembly and Summit of the Future in New York this week as well as the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan in November. Yet part of advancing this agenda means raising awareness about the opposition.

“There is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs. It pushes a competing vision for the world that maintains inequalities and impunity for bad-faith actors, finances far-right political operatives, and values private profit over public and planetary good,” ITUC wrote. “That force is corporate power.”

However, Brogan told The Guardian that labor groups, when organized across borders, could fight back.

“Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized,” Brogan said.

To that end, ITUC is gathering signatures for a petition for a global treaty holding corporate power in check.

https://x.com/ituc/status/1838216822912364839?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1838216822912364839%7Ctwgr%5E5ca8db819711176c39c71d87d0bd0557bfb6d7c8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F7-corporations-undermining-democracy

“For international institutions like the United Nations to reflect the democratic will of workers, they must be willing to hold these corporate underminers of democracy accountable,” the petition reads. “That is why we are calling on you to support a robust binding international treaty on business and human rights, one that addresses the impact of transnational corporations on the human rights of millions of working people.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

OLIVIA ROSANE

Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Maya Marchel Hoff

USA TODAY (usatoday.com)

(This story was updated because an earlier version included an inaccuracy.)

Voter registration is breaking records as Election Day approaches, particularly among young people, many of whom are first-time voters.

On Tuesday’s National Voter Registration Day more than 150,000 people registered through Vote.org, the most the organization has ever seen on that day. The organization registered 279,400 voters in all of last year.

Last week, 337,826 people visited a link posted on Instagram by pop star Taylor Swift that directed them to their state’s voter registration site.

Although Swift noted that she would be voting for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, people don’t have to declare a party affiliation when they register and neither vote.org nor Swift tracked registrations by party. Vote.org has previously told USA TODAY that about 80% of people they register turn out in the next election.

Sign-up for Your Vote: Text with the USA TODAY elections team.

A huge percentage of the newly registered voters are young people, many voting for the first time.

According to Vote.org, voters under 35 made up 81% of Tuesday’s registrations, with the biggest spike among 18-year-olds. On this year’s National Voter Registration Day, 11% of those registered were 18, which is 53% higher than on the same day four years ago.

“We’re really seeing a surge in 18-year-olds registering to vote.” Vote.org CEO Andrea Hailey said. “We know that we can onboard the next generation of voters into our democracy if we can get people to register and get out to these elections.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, is also trying to make it easier for people to register to vote.

After years of lobbying, she announced Friday that those filing out applications for health insurance through the HealthCare.Gov website would be offered an option to receive information on voter registration.

“The health of our democracy depends on Americans registering and exercising their right to vote,” Warren said in a statement. Many people looking for coverage through the website have low-wage jobs that don’t offer insurance or are just coming off of their parents’ insurance at age 26.

“I’ve pushed for the government to use every tool to make it easier to register, particularly for younger and lower-income individuals, and this update is an important action by the Biden-Harris administration to protect the right to vote for all Americans,” Warren said.

Others are finding creative ways to register young voters, including Ezra Gershanok, whose New York City apartment subletting company, Ohana, is reaching younger people in a way that catches their attention: funny memes.

He and others at the company have been passing out flyers with election-related jokes and a QR code that leads to a voter registration site.

His hope, he said, is to get young people new to the region ‒ precisely his company’s demographic ‒ to register to vote. “This past month, our website traffic hit 40,000 people per month, and a lot of them are these young people that are fresh out of college taking their first job in New York, or in this demographic of folks that don’t often register to vote,” he said. “So we were like, ‘could we make an impact in this election by just getting our own users to register to vote?'”

They hit 445 registrations this week and hope to register 10,000 young people by election day.

“I don’t think this would resonate with people in their 40s or 50s, but it definitely resonates with young people,” Gershanok said.

To register to vote, go to Vote.gov, vote.org, or your state or local election offices.

By Janet Kobren

Item#1

Middle Nation Content Talks: Blame-shifting [Length: 1:37:42]

Host: Middle Nation

September 22, 2024

[Note from JK: Must listen to at least the first 45 minutes of this conversation. The second half is worth listening to as well. Also see this related 4-minute podcast, an argument against evolution by Shahid Bolsen. Food for thought.]

Item#2

Genocidal Intentions Lead To Genocidal Acts & Possibly Nuking Lebanon

By Lisa Savage/Lisa’s Substack

September 22, 2024

[Note from JK: LS shares my experience about keeping up with the news lately, but well worth reading the entire post.]

Item#3

Fascists Won WWII

Hear Me Out

By Lisa Savage/Lisa’s Substack

September 23, 2024

Item#4

Hezbollah UNLEASHES on IDF, Israel Devastates Lebanon: WAR Next? w/ Ghadi Francis & Lowkey [Length: 1:09:13]

Host: Danny Haiphong

September 23, 2024

Item#5

LEBANON GENOCIDE: 1,300+ Killed & Wounded Including Children, Syrian Refugees | IRAN WARNS | Live [Length: 1:25:14]

Host: Mahmood OD | محمود عودة

September 23, 2024

Item#6

“BREAKING: Lebanon hit with massive bomb, one of the largest Israel has ever sent.

“Developing.

“Shockwave felt many many miles away..”

X post by Douglas Macgregor @DougAMacgregor

September 21, 2024

[Note from JK: Video of the explosion embedded inside the post (excerpted from Lisa Savage’s post in Item#2 above).]

Item#7

Israel Unleashes Hell On South Lebanon With Giant Mystery Bomb As War Escalates

By Tyler Durden/ZeroHedge

September 21, 2024

[Note from JK: Article excerpted from Lisa Savage’s post in Item#2 above).]

Item#8

“Israel dropped this bomb on Lebanon—imagine the scale of the other explosives and their devastating impact on the children of Gaza. #Lebanon #Gaza“

X post by Global Eyes Watch @GlobalEyesWatch

September 21, 2024

[Note from JK: Video of the explosions embedded inside the post (excerpted from Lisa Savage’s post in Item#2 above).]

Item#9

Hizbullah DECLARES | Israel: Lebanon Will CEASE TO EXIST | Iraqi Resistance STRIKES & STUNS THEM [Length: 20:50]

Host: Mahmood OD | محمود عودة

September 22, 2024

Item#10

Alastair Crooke : Israel’s War Without Limits. [Length: 32:46]

Host: Judge Napolitano – Judging Freedom

September 23, 2024

Item#11

Larry C. Johnson: Israel on the Brink – Russia Obliterating Ukraine’s Forces! [Length: 40:32]

Host: Nima R. Alkhorshid/Dialogue Works 

September 23, 2024

Item#12

Scott Ritter: Israel will be WIPED OUT in Hezbollah War, IDF & Netanyahu Crushed [Length: 24:36]

Host: Danny Haiphong

September 22, 2024

Item#13

Lowkey on Lebanon [Length: 19:41]

Host: Crispin Flintoff/The Crispin Flintoff Show

September 22, 2024

[Note from JK: Lowkey in his usual brilliance.]

Item#14

Laith Marouf – Israeli Pager Explosion Attacks in Lebanon; Hezbollah Massive Destruction in N Israel [Length: 49:48]

Host: Activist News Network

September 22, 2024

Item#15

The Most Evil Thing I Have Ever Seen – with Ret. Marine Jim Webb [Length: 53:41]

Co-Hosts: Katie Halper and Aaron Maté/Useful Idiots

September 20, 2024

Program:

00:00 Intro

01:11 Congress calls Israel’s civilian terrorist attack “innovative”

18:23 Jim Webb interview

19:30 Biden calls of long-range missiles

23:06 Zelensky’s strategy

28:13 Victoria Nuland’s accidental truth

33:06 Do the Ukrainians target civilian areas?

34:46 The Kursk invasion was a TRAP

39:19 The Monty Python Warplan

41:38 West blames Zelensky for everything

43:50 Are the neoliberals losing?

48:26 Ukraine’s forced conscriptions

50:21 Who started the war?

Item#16

Ben Norton: Lebanon attack, Israel, US elections. John Mearsheimer, China, Venezuela & Bangladesh [Length: 2:09:05]

Host: Jyotishman Mudiar/India & Global Left

September 22, 2024

[Note from JK: BN criticizes John Mearsheimer on his China policy.]

Item#17

INTERVIEW: Oprah and ‘the craziest interview of my life’: Nick Cruse [Length: 14:01]

Host: George Galloway/MOATS

September 22, 2024

Item#18

To Be An Authentic Person Is To Stare Deeply Into The Face Of Uncomfortable Truths

It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.

By Caitlin Johnstone

September 23, 2024

Item#19

Israel Hates Truth

Israel keeps attacking Al Jazeera, assassinating journalists and bombing press offices for the same reason the mafia kills witnesses.

By Caitlin Johnstone

September 22, 202

Item#20

The Failure of Neoliberal Economics — Radhika Desai ICSS 20240915 [Length: 2:14:42]

Host: ICSS Marxist

September 15, 2024

Item#21

Europe Prepares For Hot War With Russia, US Readies For Hot War With China

No one is more dangerous than warmongers who believe they can win an unwinnable war.

By Caitlin Johnstone

September 21, 2024

Item#22

Are toddlers running America’s war machine? Duh, yeah

By Jane Stillwater/Jane Stillwater’s Web Log

September 19, 2024

~ Janet

• By Adam Shanks | Examiner staff writer
• Sep 20, 2024 Updated Sep 21, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)

As San Francisco’s election season began to heat up in June, I wrote a column in this fine newspaper urging readers to tune into at least one debate.

My reasoning was that while mayoral debates should not be the only factor weighed by voters, they do offer a great way to see the differences between candidates at least in terms of comportment, if not in the finer details of policy proposals.

The five prominent candidates for San Francisco mayor shared the stage for a debate hosted by KQED and The San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday. So three months after I wrote that column and a handful of debates later, was I right?

I’ll let the reader decide. But I do think there were some trends that emerged in the debates that are worth highlighting.

The Nov. 5 election features Mayor London Breed, who is attempting to secure a second full term in office, fending off challenges from Supervisor Ahsha Safai, anti-poverty nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin.

London Breed’s presence is her present

Thursday’s debate was not actually the last one before Election Day, but it is set to be the final one to feature all five of the candidates, as of this writing. Breed has declined to participate in a Sept. 25 debate hosted by The San Francisco Standard and KGO-TV.

Her reluctance to take the debate stage has become a pattern called out by her opponents. Breed also didn’t attend a Sept. 11 debate hosted by The Examiner and its media partners.

The back-to-back debates, one with Breed and one without her, offered an interesting contrast.

Breed’s defense has been that she’s too busy running The City to participate in debate after debate, and that they’ve offered diminishing returns to voters. But in her absence, opponents still readily attacked her record and fitness to be mayor. In the Sept. 11 debate, such attacks were met with silence. On Thursday, she was there to offer a rebuttal.

With Breed there, for example, she answered Farrell’s repeated allegations that she has failed to adequately address public safety and things were better when he was in office in 2018

“I don’t know why we’re still listening to Mark Farrell talk about what he’s done, the same thing over and over again. The fact is, crime is at its lowest level that it’s been in 10 years,” Breed said.

Breed going positive

Breed has never been hesitant to decry The City’s problems, famously lamenting the “bulls— that has destroyed our city” in 2021. But with her opponents focused on everything in San Francisco that’s going wrong — and why she’s to blame for it — Breed has changed course.

She has consistently tried to portray San Francisco as a city that, thanks to her battle-tested leadership, has weathered unprecedented challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and is in the nascent stages of a profound rebound.

On Thursday, she even tried to ride the wave of enthusiasm generated by Democratic presidential nominee and Bay Area native Kamala Harris by borrowing the catchphrase “we’re not going back.”

Mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin hits different

Peskin has spent much of his adult life behind a microphone talking politics. Normally able to abruptly pull a Mark Twain-like quote out of thin air, he is relatively stifled and scripted on the debate stage. It was true in the first debate, and it was still true Thursday.

I’m not sure if it was conscious change or just a man meeting the moment, but Peskin appeared a bit more reserved, more polished and carefully on-message during the mayoral debates than he is while talking on the fly about city policy during a supervisors’ meeting.

It’s unclear what impact the approach has had on his candidacy, if any, because most polls show him continually stuck in fourth place behind the three leading candidates (Breed, Farrell and Lurie), all of whom are part of The City’s moderate political contingent.

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As the only candidate in the race considered a true progressive by San Francisco’s political definition, Peskin’s main goal is to contrast himself with the other candidates — which he feels he has done.

The attacker gets attacked

Lurie’s rise in the polls has drawn him more attention from his opponents as fog season has turned into ballot season. On some level, it’s a blessing to be attacked, which shows he’s perceived a legitimate threat. Candidates are now ready to pounce on Lurie, but barely offer Safai a mention.

Lurie’s opponents have repeatedly pointed out his inexperience, with Breed doing so brutally Thursday and calling him “one of the most dangerous people on this stage, so we definitely should be scared.”

“He has absolutely zero experience,” Breed said.

Lurie appeared to me to be a bit more flustered this round, which might be reflective of his clear status as a frontrunner. But when on message, he was obviously effective at articulating his platform. Lurie has tried to use their own attacks against them, by repeatedly noting that he’s the only candidate who hasn’t spent time in City Hall. It’s a tactic he has stuck to since launching his campaign last year.

“If you’re watching at home, you see what the City Hall insiders are doing, they’re circling the wagons, they are so scared of somebody coming from outside this broken system,” Lurie said.

Ahsha Safai tries to stand out

Safai is really trying to stand out by offering balance of policy wins, personal story, future plans, and criticism of Breed, who he accused of “gaslighting” San Franciscans. It’s a message that places him squarely in the middle of San Francisco’s political spectrum without an obvious base of support he can rely on, aside from backing from organized labor.

He’s mostly stuck with the same message, and he appears stuck in the polls.

Farrell locks in on voter discontent

Candidates were asked hard questions Thursday, so they mostly answered the ones they wished they had gotten. For example, when asked about his previous positions on housing policy, Peskin quickly veered into a scripted answer — he could be seen reading from his notes — that focused on his efforts to rein in corruption.

The moderators pressed Farrell on his controversial campaign fundraising tactics, nearly — nearly — forcing him off his San-Francisco-is-broken message.

“There is no mayor that has overseen a steeper decline in our city’s history than London Breed,” Farrell said.

There was talk in recent weeks of him potentially swinging to a more positive message as voters’ views of The City have begun to improve.

He didn’t.

Instead, he claimed that crime is at “record” highs in San Francisco, which Breed quickly refuted and police data of reported crimes does not support. But Farrell is banking on voters trusting their gut.

“If you believe those stats, I got a bridge to sell ya,” Farrell said. “The reality is here in San Francisco, Mayor Breed has overseen an incredible decline in our city government.”

Editor’s note: This story was corrected Sept. 20 to reflect that it was Safai who accused Breed of gaslighting San Franciscans.

Curtis Guy Yarvin
Yarvin in 2023
Born	1973 (age 50–51)
Nationality	American
Other names	Mencius Moldbug
Education	Brown University (BA)University of California, Berkeley
Spouse	Jennifer Kollmer (died 2021)
School	Neo-Monarchism Neo-Reactionism Dark Enlightenment Anti-Egalitarianism Anti-Democracy Anti-Liberalism Neocameralism
Website	Unqualified Reservations – his old blog Gray Mirror – his new blog

Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).^[1][2][3][4]

In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his later Substack page called Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment^[5] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.^[6] Yarvin has been described as a “neo-reactionary” and “neo-monarchist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.^[7][8][9]

In 2002, Yarvin began work on a personal software project that eventually became the Urbit networked computing platform. In 2013, he co-founded the company Tlon to oversee the Urbit project and helped lead it until 2019.^[10]

Biography

Early life and education

Curtis Guy Yarvin^[11] was born in 1973 to an educated, liberal, secular family.^[12] His grandparents on his father’s side were Jewish American and communists. His father, Herbert Yarvin, worked for the US government as a foreign service officer,^[13] and his mother was a Protestant from Westchester County.^[14] In 1985, he returned to the US and entered Johns Hopkins‘ longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. He graduated from Brown University in 1992, then was a graduate student of a computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley, before dropping out after a year and a half to join a tech company.^[15][14]

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of Silicon Valley.^[15] Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin’s mindset.^[16]

Yarvin’s pen name, Mencius Moldbug, is a combination of the classical name “Mencius” and a play on “goldbug.”^[13]

Urbit

In 2002, Yarvin founded the Urbit computer platform as a decentralized network of personal servers. In 2013 he co-founded the San Francisco-based company Tlön Corp to build out Urbit further with funding from Peter Thiel‘s venture capital arm, the Founders Fund.^[17][18] In 2016, Yarvin was invited to present on the functional programming aspects of Urbit at LambdaConf 2016, which resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two sub-conferences, and several sponsors.^[19][20] Yarvin left Tlön in January 2019, but retains some intellectual and financial involvement in the development of Urbit.^[10]

Neo-reactionary blogging

Yarvin’s reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe‘s 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Yarvin’s first break with democracy. Another influence was James Burnham, who asserted that real politics occurred through the actions of elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric.^[21] In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin’s anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama‘s election as US president later that year reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.^[22]

In 2007, Yarvin began the blog Unqualified Reservations to promote his political vision.^[23] In an early blog post, he adapted a phrase from the movie The Matrix, repurposing “red pill” to mean a shattering of progressive illusions.^[14] He largely stopped updating his blog in 2013, when he began to focus on Urbit; in April 2016 he announced that Unqualified Reservations had “completed its mission”.^[24]

As of 2022, Yarvin blogs his views on Substack under the page name Gray Mirror.^[25]

Views

Dark Enlightenment

Main article: Dark Enlightenment

Yarvin believes that real political power in the United States is held by something he calls “the Cathedral”, an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press.^[26] According to him, a so-called “Brahmin” social class dominates American society, preaching progressive values to the masses. Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment (sometimes abbreviated to “NRx”) movement assert that the Cathedral’s commitment to equality and justice erodes social order.^[27] Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a “hard reset” or a “rebooting”, not a series of gradual political reforms.^[28] Instead of activism, he advocates passivism, claiming that progressivism would fail without right-wing opposition.^[29] According to him, NRx adherents should rather design “new architectures of exit” than engage in ineffective political activism.^[30]

Yarvin argues for a “neo-cameralist” philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s cameralism.^[31] In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.^[28] The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.^[28] Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.^[27]

Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused.^[27] According to scholar Joshua Tait, “Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics.”^[32] He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, and private use of drugs, and has written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, “he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery”.^[28] Tait describes Yarvin’s writing as contradictory, saying: “He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. He is irreligious and socially liberal on many issues but angrily anti-progressive. He presents himself as a thinker in search of truth but admits to lying to his readers, saturating his arguments with jokes and irony. These tensions indicate broader fissures among the online Right.”^[15]

Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Yarvin gave a talk about “rebooting” the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym “RAGE”, which he defined as “Retire All Government Employees”. He described what he felt were flaws in the accepted “World War II mythology” alluding to the idea that Hitler‘s invasions were acts of self-defense. He argued these discrepancies were pushed by America’s “ruling communists”, who invented political correctness as an “extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists”. “If Americans want to change their government,” he said, “they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”^[33]

In the inaugural article published on Unqualified Reservations in 2007, entitled a formalist manifesto, Yarvin called his concept of aligning property rights with political power “formalism”, that is the formal recognition of realities of the existing power, which should eventually be replaced in his views by a new ideology that rejects progressive doctrines transmitted by the Cathedral.^[32][34] Yarvin’s first use of the term “neoreactionary” to describe his project occurred in 2008.^[35][36] His ideas have also been described by Dylan Matthews of Vox as “neo-monarchist”.^[8]

Yarvin’s ideas have been influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and the public discourses of prominent investors like Peter Thiel have echoed Yarvin’s project of seceding from the US to establish tech-CEO dictatorships.^[37][38] Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work.^[39]

According to Tait, “Moldbug’s relationship with the investor-entrepreneur Thiel is his most important connection.”^[38] Thiel was an investor in Yarvin’s startup Tlon and gave $100,000 to Tlon’s co-founder John Burnham in 2011.^[40][38] In 2016, Yarvin privately asserted to Milo Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel” and that he had watched the 2016 US election at Thiel’s house.^[41] In his writings, Yarvin has pointed to a 2009 essay written by Thiel, in which the latter declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy‘ into an oxymoron.”^[42]

Investor Balaji Srinivasan has also echoed Yarvin’s ideas of techno-corporate cameralism. He advocated in a 2013 speech a “society run by Silicon Valley […] an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology.”^[43][38]

Alt-right

Yarvin has been described as part of the alt-right by journalists and commentators.^[31][44][9] Journalist Mike Wendling has called Yarvin “the alt-right’s favorite philosophy instructor”.^[45][31] Tait describes Unqualified Reservations as a “‘highbrow’ predecessor and later companion to the transgressive anti-‘politically correct‘ metapolitics of nebulous online communities like 4chan and /pol/.”^[38] Yarvin has publicly distanced himself from the alt-right. In a private message, Yarvin counseled Milo Yiannopoulos, then a reporter at Breitbart News, to deal with neo-Nazis “the way some perfectly tailored high-communist NYT reporter handles a herd of greasy anarchist hippies. Patronizing contempt. Your heart is in the right place, young lady, now get a shower and shave those pits.”^[46]

Writing in Vanity Fair, James Pogue said of Yarvin, “Some of Yarvin’s writing from (his blog Unqualified Reservations) is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed, like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldn’t do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norway’s ‘communist’ government. He argued that Nelson Mandela, once head of the military wing of the African National Congress, had endorsed terror tactics and political murder against opponents, and said anyone who claimed ‘St. Mandela’ was more innocent than Breivik might have “a mother you’d like to fuck.'”^[47]

In Commonweal, Matt McManus said of Yarvin, “He comes across as a kind of third-rate authoritarian David Foster Wallace, combining post-postmodern bookish eclecticism with a yearning to communicate with and influence young disaffected white men. His writings are full of dubious historical claims usually mixed with thinly veiled bigotry and a powdery kind of middle-class snobbery.”^[48]

Yarvin came to public attention in February 2017 when Politico magazine reported that Steve Bannon, who served as White House Chief Strategist under U.S. President Donald Trump, read Yarvin’s blog and that Yarvin “has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary.”^[49] The story was picked up by other magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, The Independent, and Mother Jones.^[31][50][51] Yarvin denied to Vox that he was in contact with Bannon in any way,^[8] though he jokingly told The Atlantic that his White House contact was the Twitter user Bronze Age Pervert.^[31] Yarvin later gave a copy of Bronze Age Pervert’s book Bronze Age Mindset to Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump administration.^[52][53]

Views on race

Yarvin has alleged that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons. He has been described as a modern-day supporter of slavery, a description he disputes.^[54][19] He has claimed that some races are more suited to slavery than others.^[19] In a post that linked approvingly to Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor, he wrote: “It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.”^[31][55] In 2009, he wrote that since US civil rights programs were “applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber”, the result was “absolute human garbage.”^[56]

Yarvin disputes accusations of racism,^[54] and in his essays, “Why I am not a White Nationalist” and “Why I am not an Anti-Semite,” he offered a somewhat sympathetic analysis of those ideologies before ultimately rejecting them.^[14] He has also described the use of IQ tests to determine superiority as “creepy”.^[19]

Personal life

Yarvin was married to Jennifer Kollmer, who died in 2021.^[57] He was briefly engaged to writer Lydia Laurenson, with whom he has one child.^[47][58][59]

He is an atheist.^[13]

By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez Published Sep. 16, 2024 • SFStandard.com

Mayor London Breed is a perennial gold medalist in the most important event for any City Hall political athlete: scandal hurdles.

When former public works director Mohammed Nuru was arrested by the FBI in 2020 for taking bribes, San Franciscans didn’t bat an eyelash. No matter that Nuru was Breed’s former paramour, who paid to fix her broken-down jalopy.

After all, Covid struck just weeks after Nuru’s impropriety surfaced, recasting the mayor as a life-saving hero.

One hurdle jumped.

Later that same year, the FBI arrested former Public Utilities Commission General Manager Harlan Kelly. The bribery accusations also implicated his wife, former City Administrator Naomi Kelly.

The story was much the same: They were longtime Breed confidants. In any given week, Kelly may have pocketed those bribes on a Monday and met with Breed to talk city matters on a Tuesday.

Breed sailed with the grace of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone far above any critiques.

This time she may not be so lucky. Fast-forward to 2024, and Breed is running for reelection. Last week’s latest City Hall scandal gives her opponents ample chance to raise those hurdles higher than she can soar.

An investigation by The Standard revealed that Sheryl Davis, head of the Human Rights Commission, approved $1.5 million in contracts with a local nonprofit, Collective Impact, run by a man she has a close personal relationship with; the two shared a home address and a car. Rules require her to disclose such a relationship, though she allegedly has done no such thing.

The San Francisco Chronicle also raised questions about Davis’ financial dealings through the commission. Davis was subsequently placed on administrative leave on Thursday and resigned Friday.

Former political consultant David Latterman, who worked on campaigns for state Sen. Scott Wiener, said Breed may face especially intense scrutiny because she has more direct ties to Davis’ program than she did to Nuru’s department in 2020.

“Harlan’s a grown-up and made his own decisions. Mohammed is a grown-up and made his own decisions. The connection was never there,” Latterman said.

This time, however, Davis awarded the questionable contracts under the Dream Keeper Initiative, and that was Breed’s project.

She conceived of it. She championed it. And now, she may own its political pitfalls.

Already, her mayoral opponents have seized on the moment. On Thursday, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin called for an investigation into Davis’ conduct. Mayoral candidate and former Supervisor Mark Farrell called for a federal investigation into the mayor’s role in the Dream Keeper Initiative. He also challenged the mayor to fire Davis.

Hammering on ethics allegations may ultimately benefit Peskin’s and Farrell’s campaigns. Yet that may be a perilous political path.

Latterman warned that the scrutiny may cause voters to look into Farrell’s own alleged ethical lapses — including questionable campaign donations from Recology, a trash company with its own unscrupulous role in Nuru’s scandal — or into the skeletons in Peskin’s closet.

Already, another candidate, nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie, has started to point fingers at Farrell for alleged questionable ethics related to Recology. He seized on recent scandals to buttress his campaign’s narrative of the disruptor seeking to dethrone crooked City Hall insiders.

Lurie has the largest campaign war chest, which could easily up its spending, spreading its message of Lurie as an incorruptible force for change.

However, Latterman argued, voters may tune out altogether if Breed’s competitors push too hard. And that, perversely, could benefit the mayor.

“Clearly this is a hand, but how do you want to play it?” Latterman said. “If they drag it into the mud and things get ugly, that favors an incumbent. People get tired of it, they get less interested.”

For now, Breed is playing defense.

Reporters from The Standard caught up with her at a Financial District political event. Standing under the soft light of opulent chandeliers in the Julia Morgan Ballroom, reporters asked if she knew about Davis’ relationship with the man she awarded $1.5 million in contracts to.

“Not right now, not right now,” Breed said.

The reporters pressed.

“No means no,” she said.

Absent Breed’s explanations, her opponents will fill in the blanks for voters. The story they tell may make her campaign fall flat on its face. Or, maybe, the hurdling champion will soar again.

Reporter Gabe Greschler contributed to this story.

Sep 19, 2024

1,010,256 views • Sep 19, 2024BlackRock and other asset managers are profiting off of every aspect of your life. It’s not a conspiracy — it’s an open restructuring of society. —– More Perfect Union’s mission is to build power for working people. Here’s what that means: We report on the real struggles and challenges of the working class from a working-class perspective, and we attempt to connect those problems to potential solutions. We report on the abuses and wrongdoing of corporate power, and we seek to hold accountable the ultra-rich who have too much power over America’s political and economic systems. Thank you to Benjamin Braun and Adrienne Buller for their reporting on BlackRock and research support. Additional reading from them:

(Recommended by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

The Avenue of the Giants is surrounded by Humboldt Redwoods State Park–which has the largest remaining stand of old-growth redwoods in the world–in Humboldt County, California.

 (Photo: Kirt Edblom/flickr/cc)

“The Forest Service should listen to the public and finalize policies that truly safeguard our oldest forests,” a coalition of environmental organizations advised.

BRETT WILKINS

Sep 21, 2024 (CommonDreams.org)

Green groups on Friday pointed to the more than 1 million public comments urging the U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging in urging the Biden administration to increase what critics say are inadequate protections for mature trees in a proposed federal amendment.

The Forest Service (USFS)—a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture—received massive input during four rounds of public comment on the National Old-Growth Amendment Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

The USFS’ proposed national old-growth amendment follows a 2022 executive order by President Joe Biden that directed the agency to draft policies to protect mature trees in national forests, which are imperiled by but also play a critical role in fighting fossil fuel-driven climate change.

“The national old-growth amendment should be a transformative policy that positions the United States as an international leader in harnessing nature to confront the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis.”

Climate campaigners panned Biden’s order as “grossly inadequate.” Since the executive order, the Biden administration has allocated $50 million for old-growth forest conservation under the Inflation Reduction Act, which the president signed in August 2022.

In June, USFS announced a draft environmental impact statement for a proposed amendment to Biden’s directive. Environmentalists called the draft a “step forward” while urging the administration to do more to protect mature forests.

“Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of people have called for an end to logging old-growth and urged that our mature forests also be protected. The Forest Service should listen to the public and finalize policies that truly safeguard our oldest forests,” a coalition of green groups including the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), Earthjustice, Environment America Research and Policy Center, National Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians said in a joint statement.

https://x.com/CenterForBioDiv/status/1837254170543309206?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837254170543309206%7Ctwgr%5Ebdbd6ef859fa16a07482804f26c84b2aabd1e874%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fold-growth-forests-amendment

“As the Forest Service reads the comments it has received over the last 90 days, it will find a common theme. The old-growth policy proposed in June fails to meet the central mission of the executive order—it does not protect old-growth trees from logging and allows projects that would log old-growth forests out of existence through numerous loopholes. The policy also does nothing to protect mature forests, which are needed to increase the abundance and distribution of old-growth trees and forests.”

As CBD explained:

Mature and old-growth forests are carbon storage powerhouses. With thicker protective bark and higher canopies than younger trees, mature and old-growth trees are more resilient to wildfire. They also provide critical wildlife habitat, filter clean drinking water for communities, provide countless outdoor recreation opportunities, and capture the imaginations of Americans young and old.

Federal forest management prioritizes timber production and routinely sidesteps science to turn big, old trees into lumber and wood chips. Logging releases a significant amount of stored carbon, which can take centuries to be recaptured. It also eliminates older trees’ ability to sequester additional carbon and damages the other ecosystem services and biodiversity values these forests provide. Many older stands and trees have no enduring protection, and hundreds of thousands of acres in national forests are at risk of being logged.

“The national old-growth amendment should be a transformative policy that positions the United States as an international leader in harnessing nature to confront the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis,” the groups’ statement asserted. “We hope to see the nationwide old-growth amendment strengthened so it can become a centerpiece of our nation’s climate and conservation legacies.”

In a separate statement, Environment America public lands campaign director Ellen Montgomery said that “the Forest Service should listen to the more than a million people who have commented over the last two years, urging it to end logging of old-growth trees.”

“The response from the public to our on-the-ground efforts to build support for a strong national old-growth amendment has shown that people want to see older trees protected,” she continued. “These trees and forests are home to wildlife that we love from birds to bears. They are our allies to fight back against climate change, and all we have to do is make sure they stay upright.”

“We hope the Forest Service recognizes the truth that the public knows: old-growth trees are worth more standing,” Montgomery added.

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Two boys take part in a Georgia high school walkout demonstration demanding state leaders “protect kids, not guns” on September 20, 2024.

 (Photo: March for Our Lives/Facebook)

Organizer March for Our Lives said the statewide walkouts “speak to the urgency and frustration young people feel after yet another shooting has been met with only ‘thoughts and prayers.'”

BRETT WILKINS

Sep 20, 2024 (CommonDreams.org)

Joined by educators, parents, and gun control advocates, thousands of Georgia students on Friday staged a classroom walkout organized by the youth-led March for Our Lives “to demand a future free from gun violence” following the September 4 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, the deadliest such event in the state’s history.

March for Our Lives (MFOL)—which was founded in the wake of the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—said that Friday’s walkouts “speak to the urgency and frustration young people feel after yet another shooting has been met with only ‘thoughts and prayers.'”

Two Apalachee students—Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both age 14—and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie were shot dead by a 14-year-old armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. Nine others were wounded in the attack.

The shooter was arrested and charged with four counts of murder. His father, Colin Gray, was also arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children for purchasing the gun used in the shooting and giving it to his son.

“Across Georgia, Republican leaders—like those who control the majority on the Cobb Board of Education and both chambers of the Georgia General Assembly—refuse to take commonsense action to protect our communities and our lives from preventable gun violence,” MFOL said.

https://x.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/1837167913817542960?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837167913817542960%7Ctwgr%5E344e56aba6f5229f49c605567e0b190dc55cf04a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fmarch-for-our-lives-georgia

The group continued:

We will never allow our elected officials to forget the senseless act of violence that could have been prevented at Apalachee High School. We will honor the lives of Cristina Irimie, Christian Angulo, Mason Schermerhorn, and Richard Aspinwall with action. Everyone has the fundamental right to feel safe in our schools and our communities, and we will continue to fight until that freedom is a reality for all.

Guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens in our country, and far too many educators and students go to school with the daily fear that their community could be next. This failure is a choice that our leaders are making for us. Today, we join organizers and students from over 30 high schools all across Georgia in calling on Gov. Brian Kemp, Lieutenant Gov. Burt Jones, and the Georgia General Assembly to commit their support for the passage of the Pediatric Health Safe Storage Act at the start of the 2025 legislative session.

“The Georgia General Assembly and Gov. Brian Kemp, the sad truth is that they have made us feel less safe,” said Saif Hasan, a senior at Lambert High School and county organizing deputy director at the Georgia Youth Justice Coalitionwholed hundreds of students in a walkout on Friday.

“This weekend, we’re going to be out knocking doors in Suwanee, Roswell, and East Cobb to help elect new leaders who will build the future we deserve,” Hasan added. “We’re going to be out talking to Georgians about safe storage to make sure kids my age are never scared to go to school.”

Apalachee High School junior Sasha Contreras said during a Friday walkout rally in Gwinnett that “I wasn’t going to speak today but seeing and hearing everyone’s courage in showing up today and taking action made me realize that my voice was important.”

“There is nothing being done to prevent such a tragedy from occurring again. As a student that has [Advanced Placement] exams at the end of the school year as well as leadership positions, I understand the importance of going back to school,” Contreras added. “However, many of my peers including myself feel anxious about returning with no preventative measures in place.”

March for Our Lives director of organizing Gaby Salazar said that “we are so proud to support this student-led action, but heartbroken that we keep having to walk out of our classes again and again to get our leaders to listen to us.”

“Guns kill more kids than any other cause in the state of Georgia,” Salazar added. “More than cancer, more than car accidents. Even though a sweeping majority of Americans support commonsense gun laws, we know it’s an uphill battle to convince state lawmakers to value our lives over the gun lobby’s money. But young people in Georgia will not stop fighting until gun violence is a relic of the past.”

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Al Jazeera Ramallah bureau chief Walid al-Omari broadcasts as Israeli troops raid and shut down the network’s operations on September 22, 2021.

 (Photo: Al Jazeera screen grab)

“Why would Israel shut Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah?” asked one human rights defender. “Because it has been the center of Al Jazeera’s reporting on Israeli repression—the apartheid—in the occupied West Bank.”

BRETT WILKINS

Sep 22, 2024 (CommonDreams.org)

Press freedom advocates accused Israel of “trying to erase the truth” after heavily armed soldiers raided Al Jazeera‘s bureau in the West Bank of Palestine early Sunday morning and ordered the outlet—which has been the world’s sole media window on the Gaza genocide—to shut down for 45 days.

Al Jazeera—which is owned by the Qatari government—said Israel Defense Forces troops stormed its bureau in Ramallah, the capital of the illegally occupied West Bank, at 3:00 am Sunday during a live broadcast. IDF troops confiscated documents and equipment and took the microphone from the hand of bureau chief Walid al-Omari as he reported on the raid.

The network—which was ordered to cease operations for 45 days—said the soldiers tore down a poster of Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Palestinian-American Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot dead by Israeli troops in May 2022 while covering an IDF raid on the Jenin refugee camp.

“This is part of a larger campaign against the Palestinian outlets and media in general aimed at erasing the truth,” al-Omari said in an interview with Al Araby Al Jadeed. “We’ve been under increasing incitement since the beginning of the war.”

https://x.com/AJEnglish/status/1837861912219934725?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837861912219934725%7Ctwgr%5E962986711f138e28b4f0a07fbf3b13f8b4736bb5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fal-jazeera-west-bank

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned the shutdown as an “arbitrary military decision” and “a new aggression against journalistic work and media outlets.”

Israel’s Foreign Press Association said it is “deeply troubled by this escalation, which threatens press freedom, and urges the Israeli government to reconsider these actions,” adding that “restricting foreign reporters and closing news channels signals a shift away from democratic values.”

The IDF acknowledged the raid later Sunday, claiming without evidence that Al Jazeera‘s Ramallah bureau was “being used to incite terror [and] to support terrorist activities.”

Sunday’s raid followed a May raid and shutdown of Al Jazeera‘s Jerusalem bureau, which is believed to be the first such action against a foreign media outlet operating in Israel.

https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1837826142058729822?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837826142058729822%7Ctwgr%5E962986711f138e28b4f0a07fbf3b13f8b4736bb5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fal-jazeera-west-bank

Responding to the raid, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said that the group “is deeply alarmed by Israel’s closure of Al Jazeera‘s office in the occupied West Bank, just months after it shuttered Al Jazeera‘s operations in Israel after deeming it a threat to national security.”

Al Jazeera is the only international news network providing nonstop on-the-ground coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Its reporters work under constant risk to life and limb, as more than 100 media professionals, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7. CPJ and others say have decried what they say are deliberate attacks on media workers and their families.

In December, Israeli troops killedAl Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa as he reported on the war in southern Gaza, an attack that also injured the network’sGaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in a separate IDF strike.

Previous independent probes—including investigations of Abu Akleh’s killing—have confirmed that Israel has deliberately targeted journalists.

Last May, CPJ published Deadly Pattern, an investigation that found the IDF killed at least 20 journalists over the past 22 years with impunity. While some of the slain journalists have been foreigners—including Italian Associated Press reporter Simone Camilli and British cameraman and filmmaker James Miller—the vast majority of victims have been Palestinian.

Israeli forces have also attacked newsrooms in every major assault on Gaza, including in May 2021 when the 11-story al-Jalaa Tower, which housed offices of Al Jazeera, The Associated Press, and other media outlets, was destroyed in an airstrike.

U.S. investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out Sunday that Al Jazeera has also been targeted by American forces during the so-called War on Terror. He noted that U.S. forces “bombed its facilities, killed its Baghdad correspondent, and locked a cameraman in Guantánamo.”

“Israel has repeated this pattern,” Scahill added. “All journalists must condemn these violent assaults on freedom of the press.”

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Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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