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Freedom finds a way.

Senate passes Ukraine, Israel aid bill after months-long debate

The $95 billion foreign aid bill now heads to the president’s desk

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill on Tuesday, delivering billions of dollars in weapons and support to key U.S. allies Ukraine and Israel despite some opposition from both parties’ bases. The legislation, which passed by a 79-18 vote, had seemed all but dead for several months due to opposition in the GOP-led House.

President Biden said in a statement he would sign the bill into law as soon as it crosses his desk on Wednesday, and send aid to Ukraine this week. The funds help him deliver on his promise to the nation’s NATO allies to continue to aid Ukraine as it enters its third year fending off Russia’s invasion.

Passage of the legislation marks the first significant new tranche of aid passed by the U.S. Congress to the beleaguered nation in more than a year, as some Republicans aligned more with former president Trump’s “America First” foreign policy waged a fierce battle against it. They ultimately lost out when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) decided to put the $61 billion in Ukraine aid on the floor last Saturday, citing his belief that Russia posed a serious threat.

“Today the Senate sends a unified message to the entire world,” Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the floor on Tuesday. "America will always defend democracy in its hour of need.”

Nine Republican senators flipped their votes to support the legislation on Tuesday after voting against an earlier version of the aid in February.

The legislation also sends $26 billion in funds for Israel and humanitarian aid for Gaza and other places, at a time when some congressional Democrats are calling for further aid to Israel to come with conditions.

Just three senators who caucus with Democrats opposed the aid package as progressives continue to decry the mounting civilian casualties in Gaza. University protests are growing and becoming more volatile, and the State Department released a report saying the human rights situation has significantly deteriorated in the region because of the conflict.

“Israel does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, which is exactly what it is doing,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.

Sanders and other Democrats, including Schumer, have criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza that’s left more than 34,000 Palestinians dead and much of the region’s housing and civilian infrastructure destroyed. Famine is spreading, humanitarian aid officials and USAID administrator Samantha Power said this month.

The Senate measure also would force TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company to sell off the social media site or face a ban, as well as allocating $8 billion for Taiwan, other IndoPacific allies and countering China. A portion of the $61 billion in Ukraine funds are given via a loan to Ukraine that the U.S. president may forgive beginning in 2026.

The Ukraine funds come at a key juncture for the country in its war with Russia, as Ukrainian forces, running low on ammunition, have begun to cede frontline towns to Russia. The Pentagon has warned for months that a U.S. failure to arm Ukraine would prove catastrophic, and potentially spur Russian military advancement into other neighboring countries.

“So much of the hesitation and shortsightedness that has delayed this moment is premised on sheer fiction,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Tuesday. “Make no mistake: delay in providing Ukraine the weapons to defend itself has strained the prospects of defeating Russian aggression.”

The months of congressional inaction may also have dealt long-lasting damage to America’s reputation and alliances, officials and analysts say.

“The perception of the reliability of the United States is severely damaged,” said Kurt Volker, who served as a liaison to Ukraine under the Trump administration. “That has ripple effects.” NATO member states may be more doubtful that the U.S. would uphold its commitment to mutual defense as a member of the alliance, he said.

The Senate passed a version of the aid bill in February, following months-long negotiations to come up with a GOP-demanded bipartisan border deal linked to the aid that fell apart after Trump announced his opposition. The effort divided Senate Republicans at the time, and only 22 of them voted for it. But on Tuesday, 31 Republicans voted to advance the measure, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) a longtime hawk who flipped his vote from February.

At a celebratory news conference after a key procedural vote succeeded, McConnell said he believed the vote showed Republicans rejected an isolationist worldview that he said was promoted by ex-Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, whom he mocked for recently interviewing Russian Leader Vladimir Putin.

“I think we’ve turned a corner on the isolationist movement,” McConnell said.

In February, Trump said at a rally that he’d encourage Russia to do "whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that is not spending a sufficient amount of money on its own defense.

“I think it’s an insult to the American people the idea that, again, we’re going to send another 60 billion to secure the borders of another country,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), who voted against the bill.

The aid package has been long awaited by the White House, which requested the current version of the funds in October, shortly after Israel came under attack by Hamas in the Oct. 7 assault that left about 1,200 Israelis dead.

Schumer and McConnell were largely united in pushing for Ukraine aid, despite fierce House GOP opposition that hung over Johnson as he weighed his decision. The speaker may yet lose his job over the Ukraine aid vote due to lingering anger on his right flank, but Trump has so far praised him and cautioned against ejecting Johnson.

“McConnell and I locked arms on this, we were shoulder to shoulder the whole way through,” Schumer said of the Senate’s efforts in an interview. The two men strategized on how to convince Johnson to let the House vote on their measure, and made a pact not to separate Israel aid from Ukraine funds, he said.

The bill prohibits any U.S. aid funds from going to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — the organization that distributes most of the food, medicine and basic services to Palestinians in Gaza and across the Middle East — operating in Gaza and the West Bank following Israeli allegations that a dozen of its employees were involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. An independent review of the latter claim commissioned by the United Nations found no evidence to support it.

The bill prohibits any of the bill’s humanitarian funds from going to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the organization that distributes most of the food, medicine and basic services to Palestinians in Gaza and across the Middle East. That ban follows allegations that a dozen of UNRWA’s employees were involved in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and that the agency has been widely infiltrated by Hamas. An independent review of the latter claim commissioned by the United Nations found no evidence to support it.

Polling suggests Democrats are deeply divided about Israel’s approach to the war, but Democratic senators largely stuck together in approving the aid package on Tuesday. Some Democrats cited Iran’s recent strike on Israel as a development they believed would make clear to voters the need for the aid.

“The notion that we ought to help Israel defend itself I think also is a little more obvious to people than it might have been in February,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). The senator added that he believes Israel has allowed more humanitarian aid into the strip in recent weeks, following a deadly Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen aid workers.

Others cited the impracticality of trying to put conditions on the aid, saying such action is more effective coming from the president.

“The more I have looked into the mechanics of what would it actually mean to try to condition aid in response to a specific event at a specific time — it was always going to require cooperation and partnership from the executive,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “Because aid that we approve or vote for now will not arrive for months or years.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who traveled to the Capitol in December to ask for more support, thanked Congress for their actions ahead of the Senate vote. “We are glad that the United States remains with Ukraine, that it remains our main powerful ally,” Zelensky wrote on social media.

As the Senate considered the aid package Tuesday, Ukrainian lawmakers hoisted the American flag in Ukraine’s parliament.

“This critical legislation will make our nation and world more secure as we support our friends who are defending themselves against terrorists like Hamas and tyrants like Putin,” Biden said in a statement.

And now we can ponder what this might portend for the Putin's Boot-Licker Caucus.

Freedoms

The Four Freedoms

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Worship

Freedom from Want

Freedom from Fear

Pushback

Mahsa Amini at 22 years old

Yeah - she's like really dangerous,

what with her insistence on

making her own decisions and all.

Assholes

People will be free. Even if we vote ourselves into bondage, there's always a kernel of dissent - a small group who won't knuckle under - who won't be fooled, and who will eventually bring the others around.

When the size of that kernel is potentially half of your population, you'd best be paying attention.

I'll say it again: Women will save us from ourselves - if we can figure out how to get the fuck outa their way.

The story of Iran’s Mahsa Amini uprising told through its most iconic images

It was a movement that began with the death of a young Iranian woman from a small Kurdish town. Over the next year, it spread on social media and captured the attention of the world.

This is the story of Iran’s uprising through its most memorable images.

1 Mahsa Amini’s death

On Sept. 13, 2022, Mahsa Amini was visiting her brother in Tehran just days before her 23rd birthday when she was stopped and taken away by the country’s infamous “morality police,” for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women.

View this post on Instagram

Within hours, Amini lay in a coma in a hospital bed, with Iranian police claiming that she had suffered a heart attack. Her family said she was beaten. The image of her shared on social media shook the country.

Three days later, she died.

2 Removing the headscarf

The protests began on Sept. 16, the day Amini died, with crowds gathering outside the Tehran hospital where she spent her final days.

As she was laid to rest in her hometown of Saqqez the following day, women took off their headscarves in protest. They chanted “woman, life, freedom” — a slogan that would soon be heard across the country.

پرچم مازنی‌ها ✌️👏
ساری، ۲۹ شهریور؛ مراسم روسری‌سوزان!#مهسا_امینی #مهساامینی pic.twitter.com/b2sAPJGIyV

— Pouria Zeraati (@pouriazeraati) September 20, 2022

translated:
Mazniha's flag ✌️👏
in Sari, 29 September; Burning scarf ceremony!
#Mehsa_Amini #MehsaAmini 

Some women took off their headscarves, waving them in the air or setting them on fire. Others cut their hair in public, openly defying the morality police.

کرمان، میدان آزادی#مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/wk535lhtr9

— Kayhan (@cosmos196196) September 20, 2022

translated:
Kerman, Azadi Square

3 Targeting images of Khamenei

Images of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are everywhere in Iran, a symbol of his unquestioned authority.

As anger rose, protesters tore down posters and burned billboards featuring his face. “Death to Khamenei” became a rallying cry.

Burning Khamenei's billboard in Yazd with a Molotov cocktail. One way to show how much he is hated inside Iran.
#MahsaAmini #مهسا_امینی #IranRevoIution pic.twitter.com/0Kv85GIo4k

— Omid Memarian (@Omid_M) November 8, 2022

4 Rising up in universities

Universities became hubs of protest as young people became leaders of the movement. Campuses were raided by security forces. The government cut off the internet. Some students were detained or forced to abandon their studies.

When Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, visited one university in an attempt to calm protests, he was greeted by angry students yelling “get lost.”

Students at Al-Zahra University—an all female uni in Iran—shout in protest upon President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit:

“Death to the oppressor, whether it is a king or a [supreme] leader”pic.twitter.com/PyoCPQIgr8

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 8, 2022

In one clip, a group of young women can be seen singing the song “Baraye,” which became an anthem giving voice to protesters’ grievances and received a Grammy award for Best Song for Social Change.

5 Remembering Amini

In late October thousands of people made their way to Amini’s grave to mark the 40th day after her death — known as a “chehellom,” an especially important moment in the Iranian Shiite funerary tradition.

A photo of a young woman standing on a car without a headscarf became an iconic image.

6 Taking the protest to sports

Acts of protest weren’t confined to Iran. A number of Iranian athletes appeared to support the uprising on the world stage. Climber Elnaz Rekabi took part in a competition in South Korea without wearing a headscarf — mandatory for all women representing the country abroad.

Concerns for Rekabi’s welfare grew after a stilted message posted on her Instagram account claimed she was unintentionally not wearing a headscarf. She later returned home to crowds of supporters.

In November, members of Iran’s men’s soccer team at the World Cup refused to sing the national anthem during their first match against England, widely interpreted as a gesture of solidarity with the protesters back home.

Sardar Azmoun, a forward on the team, has been the most vocal champion of the uprising. “I don’t care if I’m sacked,” Azmoun wrote in a since-deleted post on Instagram last September. “Shame on you for killing people so easily. Viva Iranian women.” He later issued an apology on Instagram.

When the team was eliminated from the competition, protesters at home erupted in celebration over what they viewed as a symbolic defeat for the Islamic Republic.

سنندج شادی مردم پس از باخت تیم فوتبال جمهوری‌اسلامی.#مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/uCn7FWZ1E0

— +۱۵۰۰تصویر (@1500tasvir) November 30, 2022

translated:
People's happiness in Sanandaj after the defeat of the football team of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

7 Showing global solidarity

در مراسم خاکسپاری جواد حیدری، از کشته‌شدگان اعتراضات به قتل #مهسا_امینی، خواهر او موهایش را بر مزار برادرش کوتاه میکند. pic.twitter.com/g3lg4fUsqq

— +۱۵۰۰تصویر (@1500tasvir) September 25, 2022

translated:
At the funeral of Javad Heydari, one of the victims of the murder protests #مهسا_امینی , his sister cuts her hair at her brother's grave.

As the death toll rose during protests, a video shared on social media showed a woman cutting her hair over the grave of her brother, Javad Heydari, who was killed during the demonstrations. The gesture is found in ancient Persian literature as a sign of protest, anger or grief.

Women around the world, from members of the Iranian diaspora to politicians and celebrities, cut their hair in solidarity.

And BTW - "morality police"? How in the blue-eyed buck naked fuck does that make sense to somebody?

A Status Report

Dictionary

 

free·dom

noun
➡︎ the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.

"we do have some freedom of choice"

➡︎ absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.

"he was a champion of Irish freedom"

➡︎ the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

"the shark thrashed its way to freedom"

Opinion

Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other

In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure.

For months, anti-Putin protests had surged through the streets of Moscow and other cities following fraudulent parliamentary elections the previous December. Mr. Putin, who was about to be sworn in for a third term as president, harbored a fear of “color” revolutions — the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine — as well as other popular revolts like the 2010-2012 Arab Spring, in which four dictators were overthrown. Until his inauguration in May, Russian authorities had tolerated the demonstrations. But when street protests broke out again, some marred by violence, the police moved in aggressively and hundreds were arrested.

On July 20, Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines.

The law crippled these groups, the backbone of a nascent civil society that had blossomed in the 1990s in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Such organizations are the heartbeat of a healthy democracy, providing an independent and autonomous channel for people to voice their desires and aspirations. One of the first groups to be targeted was Memorial, founded during Mikhail Gorbachev’s years of reform to protect the historical record of Soviet repressions and to defend human rights in the current day. Mr. Putin was determined to squelch it and others like it.

Soon, similar laws began to crop up around the world. In the following years, at least 60 nations passed or drafted laws designed to restrict NGOs, and 96 carried out other policies curtailing them, imposing cumbersome registration requirements, intrusive monitoring, harassment and shutdowns. The wave of repressive measures offers a revealing look at the titanic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. In the past decade, dictators have forged transnational bonds, sharing methods, copying tactics and learning from one another. They are finding new ways to quash free speech and independent journalism, eradicate NGOs, silence dissent and suffocate criticism.

In previous editorials in this series, we examined how young people who posted freely on social media were wrongly imprisoned by authoritarian regimes. We also described how Russia created and exploited disinformation about biological weapons. This editorial looks at how autocracies are reinforcing themselves by swapping methods and tactics.

The dictators want most of all to survive. They are succeeding.

A cascade of restrictions

The Russian “foreign agent” law hung an albatross around the neck of NGOs and, later, independent journalists and bloggers — anyone who received any money from abroad, even payment for a single freelance article. All were required to post a label on their published material identifying it as the work of a “foreign agent,” which in Russia has traditionally been associated with spying. When many organizations refused to oblige, the law was amended so the Justice Ministry could put them in the registry without their consent. Then in 2015, Russia added a new law designating any organization “undesirable” if the government deemed it a threat to national security — effectively a ban. One of the organizations so labeled was the Open Society Foundations established by financier George Soros, which had been, among other things, a lifeline of personal subsidies for Russian scientists in the lean years after the Soviet collapse.

Azerbaijan was the first among former Soviet republics to copy Russia’s 2012 law in 2013 and 2014. Then came Tajikistan in 2014 and Kazakhstan in 2015 with legislation directly limiting foreign funding to NGOs or sharply increasing bureaucratic burdens on them. The laws were largely borrowed from Russia. The cascade of laws has been documented in the Civic Freedom Monitor of the International Center for Not-for-profit Law.

Egypt also put NGOs in the crosshairs. In 2013, the courts convicted 43 NGO workers, including Americans, Egyptians and Europeans, many in absentia, on charges of operating without required government approval. The notorious criminal prosecution, Case 173, dragged on for years. Although the 43 were later acquitted in a retrial, the harassment continues. Under President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, Egyptian authorities have frozen the assets of human rights activists, banned them from traveling abroad and regularly called them in for questioning on suspicions of “foreign funding.” This included Hossam Bahgat, founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of Egypt’s most well-known rights organizations. Egypt replaced a draconian 2017 law on NGOs with a new one in 2019 but retained many harsh restrictions. The new law banned activities under vaguely worded terms such as any “political” work or any activity that undermines “national security.”

Cambodia, ruled by strongman Hun Sen for decades, in 2015 imposed a law under which NGOs can be disbanded if their activities “jeopardize peace, stability, and public order or harm the national security, culture and traditions of Cambodian society.” Uganda, which has an active community of NGOs, imposed a restrictive law in 2016; the groups have faced suspensions, freezing of accounts, denial of funding and restrictions on freedom of expression, association and assembly. In Nicaragua, the dictatorship led by former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega adopted a “foreign agent” law in 2020 and a law restricting NGOs in 2022. It has canceled the legal registration of more than 950 civil society organizations since 2018.

China, which originally permitted NGOs to exist in a legal gray zone, took a harder line after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. A new NGO law went into effect in 2017, increasing state control over foreign and domestic funding to civil society groups. While Russia operated with blacklists, China created a whitelist, rewarding some NGOs whose interests it approved, as it sought to punish those in sensitive areas such as media, human rights and religion. Lu Jun, co-founder of one of the early successful NGOs, the Beijing Yirenping Center, which fought discrimination, recalled the ways in which the state turned against his group. For seven years, it was allowed to grow. But then, he recalled, “Between 2014 and 2019, in four separate crackdowns, nine of my colleagues were jailed and five of our offices were repeatedly searched until they were shut down.”

A secret school — or ‘mad scientists’?

How did so many countries come to do the same thing in the same decade? The answers are difficult to find — dictatorships are shrouded in secrecy. But Stephen G.F. Hall, a professor at the University of Bath, in Britain, uncovered evidence that the dictators copy, share and learn from one another. His new book, “The Authoritarian International,” looks at how this works.

According to Mr. Hall, authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish. “Protest is like a run on the bank,” Mr. Hall told us. “The protesters only have to get it right once.” For autocracies, protest and dissent are an existential threat.

“They’ve all seen what happens to autocrats generally — the Gaddafi moment, being dragged through the streets and beaten to death with a lead pipe. … They seem to know that if one country becomes democratic in a region, the rest will almost certainly follow. … And the best way to ensure that survival is to learn, to cooperate and to share best practices because you constantly have to stay one step ahead.”

Mr. Hall says much “authoritarian learning” is indirect, diffused through like-minded networks and emulation. When he began his research, he thought he might find an actual school of dictatorship, with Mr. Putin or other despots as “either star pupils or teachers telling other autocrats how to establish best survival practices.” But Mr. Hall did not find contemporary evidence of such a school. “I think it is primarily a case of trial and error,” he said, with the dictators more like “mad scientists” who run experiments and then share the results. which are passed around in the shadows, through security services and old-boy networks.

And there are traces of collaboration. According to Mr. Hall, Russia has frequently looked to Belarus as a proving ground and source of authoritarian methods. In 2002, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko created the Belarusian Republican Youth Union, a pro-regime, patriotic organization that could take control of the streets in Minsk in the event of an attempted color revolution. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Kremlin quickly created its own groups of “patriotic youths.” Years later, when Mr. Lukashenko was facing massive protests after stealing the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Putin came to his rescue. For instance, when Belarusian television workers quit their jobs in protest of the election fraud, Mr. Putin sent in Russians to keep the broadcasts going. (For Russia, the help is also driven by security concerns, given Belarus’s proximity to NATO.) Belarus also cooperates with China, which has long provided it with facial recognition technology. China’s telecommunications giant Huawei set up research centers in Belarus and brought Belarusian students to China for training.

Some authoritarian learning has its origin in history books. Magnus Fiskesjö, a professor at Cornell University, has shown how China in the past decade or so has brought back show trials, with staged, coerced confessions, borrowing both from the Mao era and reaching back to Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. The extrajudicial show trials have been used against journalists, bloggers, academics, lawyers and entertainers, among others. The forced confessions go a step further than just silencing dissent; they are used to “shape reality” and create a more “predictably obedient society.”

The digital censors

In the world of authoritarian tactics, Russia and China are the center of gravity. They share know-how for policing the internet and generate sheaves of propaganda and disinformation, sometimes broadcasting identical sets of lies at the same time. Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi declared a “no limits” partnership in February 2022, but closer cooperation to squelch free speech on the internet was already well underway.

A glimpse of how it works was provided recently in a trove of internal documents, emails and audio recordings disclosed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an April 5 report by Daniil Belovodyev, Andrei Soshnikov and Reid Standish. The materials depict Russia and China working closely to help each other more tightly control the internet in two high-level meetings in 2017 and 2019.

The first meeting, on July 4, 2017, was a two-hour session in Moscow between Ren Xianling, who was then-deputy minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, and Aleksandr Zharov, then-head of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency that censors the internet. According to the documents and other materials, the Russians wanted expertise from China about “mechanisms for permitting and controlling” mass media, online media and “individual bloggers,” as well as China’s experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services and virtual private networks. The Russians asked to send a delegation to China to study its vast domestic surveillance system and the “Great Firewall” that blocks unwanted overseas information. The Chinese visitors were particularly interested in methods used by the Russian agency to control the media coverage of public protest. The Chinese visitors’ questions were prompted by public demonstrations just a few months before, organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Mr. Zharov reportedly responded that the Kremlin wasn’t worried because the protests were small-scale and Mr. Putin’s public support was at a “very high level.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in March. (Washington Post illustration; Alexey Maishev/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images)
The discussion came just as Russia was looking at how to install more sophisticated controls over the internet. The government attempted in 2018 to block the popular messaging platform Telegram but failed to do so. In May 2019, Mr. Putin signed new legislation requiring that Russian companies install more intrusive controls, and also envisioning the creation of an entirely isolated Russian internet. Outside researchers have found that the new controls gave the Kremlin “fine-grained information control” over internet traffic.

In July 2019, the Russian and Chinese teams met again in Moscow, according to the RFE/RL report. Mr. Zharov asked the Chinese for advice about how to deal with platforms that successfully evade Russia’s blocking. The failure with Telegram was brought up as an example. The Russians also asked the Chinese how they used artificial intelligence to identify and block “prohibited content.” RFE/RL disclosed this year that Roskomnadzor has been using sophisticated techniques to track Russians online, searching for posts that insult Mr. Putin or call for protests.

Then in October 2019, on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in China, Russia and China signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of “forbidden information.” In December 2019, China sent requests to Russia, in three separate letters, with censorship requests to block articles and sites, such as the Epoch Times, a newspaper with ties to the Falun Gong movement that is persecuted in China, and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China’s firewall inside the country.

The dictators have clung to power

Of course, the United States and other democracies also cooperate and spend billions of dollars annually promoting the values of open societies and rule of law around the world. Like the dictators, the democracies share tactics and methods with one another. But there is one important difference: Diffusion of democracy appeals to — and relies upon — individuals and free thinking, while autocrats pursue their own survival by suffocating individual voices.

The latest Freedom in the World report shows a decline in freedom for the 17th year in a row. Many autocrats are proving resilient. In the nearly 11 years since Mr. Putin signed the “foreign agent” law, most of the world’s leading dictators have held on. Rarely have they been toppled by popular protests. They are building new means of repression along with the old. In China, tech companies have invented an electronic surveillance system that can automatically recognize a protest banner and demonstrators’ faces — and alert the police.

In Russia, Mr. Putin is unrestrained. The “foreign agent” and “undesirable” laws were revised again in 2022, making them significantly more draconian. While the earlier version singled out those who received money from abroad, now a “foreign agent” can be anyone who receives any kind of support from overseas or comes “under foreign influence in other forms.” New names are added every Friday to the registry compiled by the Justice Ministry.

As of June 16, the registry listed 621 groups and people.

“Authoritarian regimes are much more brazen than before,” said William J. Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and author of “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” published in 2012. “They are not sitting still.”

At the same time, autocracies are racked with challenges and setbacks. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might yet doom his rule. In China, Mr. Xi demands obedience, but protesters defy him, as they did last winter over “zero covid” restrictions. And one example of successful protest came recently in Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream party advanced yet another “foreign agent” bill to require any organization receiving more than 20 percent of its funds from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence.” But the bill was widely criticized, and after mass protests around the Parliament building in March, it was dropped.

All who believe in democracy must find new ways to advance it. This is especially important now, when democracy has lost luster around the globe.

Democracy’s greatest strength is openness. It should be harnessed to tell the truth loudly and widely.

It's Elon's Twitter Now

There's a sewer-y part of practically everything. That doesn't mean you should seek it out, and live in it. Although, on the intertoobz at least, that's exactly what some folks are wont to do.

(pay wall)

A BASELESS CONSPIRACY theory about the assault of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi trended on Twitter Monday morning after being boosted all weekend by prominent conservatives and even new Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Hashtags including “PelosiGayLover,” “PelosiSmollett,” “PelosiGate,” and “Listen to the 911” appeared in the trending bar amid the proliferation of false claims about the attack and mockery of Pelosi. Several prominent right-wing figures pushed the false idea that both the attacker and Pelosi were in their underwear at the time of the assault, and that Pelosi knew his attacker and that they were actually lovers because Pelosi had referred to him as a “friend” while attempting to tip off 911 dispatchers as to his situation.

San Francisco police have debunked claims that both men were in their underwear and that Pelosi knew the attacker. The attacker, David DePape, 42, broke into the Pelosi home early Friday morning, allegedly shouting “Where’s Nancy?” before ultimately attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Pelosi underwent “successful surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands,” and according to a statement from the speaker’s office, “doctors expect a full recovery.”

Musk on Sunday tweeted (and later deleted) a story from right-wing rag The Santa Monica Observer claiming Paul Pelosi was not the victim of a break in, but that the attack was part of a domestic dispute with a male prostitute. It has been widely noted that the Observer has a history of publishing false claims, including that Hillary Clinton had died and been replaced with a body double. Musk later made fun of The New York Times for reporting that the tweet was based on a claim from a regular source of misinformation.

Former first son Donald Trump Jr. mocked the attack on Instagram and Twitter later on Sunday, posting a meme depicting a pair of underwear and a hammer with the text, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” Jr. captioned the post “OMG. The internet remains undefeated.”

Trump Jr. on Monday morning tweeted out a photo of a hammer in a holster, captioned “open carry in San Francisco”

Sitting politicians have also been mocking the attack. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) tweeted, then deleted, an image mocking Speaker Pelosi, captioning the tweet, “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”

Researchers have found that while DePape did hold anti-establishment ideologies, his online activity indicated a longstanding pattern of extremist beliefs, including QAnon conspiracies, Holocaust denail, false voter fraud claims, and screeds against trans people and “groomers.”

On Fox News, the hosts of Fox & Friends alluded to the conspiracy on air. “Something, something doesn’t make sense,” said host Pete Hegseth, adding that it “doesn’t add up.” Larry Elder, the former California gubernatorial candidate and frequent Fox News guest, mocked the attack at an event Sunday night, saying that between the DUI conviction and the assault Pelosi was “was hammered twice in six months.”

 

Professional conspiracy theorists beat the disinformation drum on Twitter all weekend. Dinsesh D’Souza began publishing an alternate version of events on social media virtually immediately after the attack happened. Former Trump administration hand Sebastian Gorka published what is allegedly a partial clip of the conversation between 911 dispatchers sending someone to Pelosi’s home, captioning the video “The Paul Pelosi 911 Lie…” (The clip does not feature Paul Pelosi himself speaking to officers.) Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich claimed news outlets are “hiding facts from the public,” suggesting that a break in at the Pelosi home was implausible and baselessly alluding to a connection between the attack and Paul Pelosi’s recent DUI case.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has thrown the future of enforcement of anti-disinformation policies into chaos. Massive layoffs are expected at the social media company, and over the weekend Musk tweeted that he had not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies, but reports indicated that instances of racist and hateful abuse on the platform skyrocketed in the immediate aftermath of Musk’s takeover.

On Monday morning, Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt defended Musk tweeting a conspiracy theory about Pelosi’s attack, labeling it a “free speech” issue.

I haven't decided yet whether to stay with Twitter and lurk, so I can keep an eye on it, or bail and try to find something else. 

So far, I've seen a lot more weird shit, but that could be me engaging with the crazies more than I have done (mostly Blue Check Crazies) so maybe the algorithm is slanted in their direction.

I have noticed though that I've lost a couple of hundred followers, which may be the beginnings of "Twexit".

I don't know. Interesting times.

That's Pretty Fucked up Right There

"The Morality Police" - is there any construct of government more ridiculous than "Morality Police"?

Take a hard look at what the GOP has been peddling the last 40 years, and then tell me there's a big difference between what they want to do, and what the god-knobbers in Iran are doing right now.

(pay wall)

‘Bloody Friday’: Witnesses describe the deadliest crackdown in Iran protests

The shooting started in Zahedan before Friday prayers had ended.

Thousands of worshipers had gathered on Sept. 30 in the Great Mosalla of Zahedan, a large open-air space in the southeastern Iranian city, when a handful of young men broke away and began chanting slogans at a nearby police station. One man, 28, said his 18-year-old brother was among them. He spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The young man followed his brother, pushing his way through the crowd, and stumbled on a shocking scene: Police and plainclothes security agents were firing at the protesters from the rooftop of the police station and other buildings. Security forces also began firing into the Mosalla, where people were still praying.

“They were shooting a lot, and this way and that way, I saw people get shot and fall,” the young man said in a telephone interview from Zahedan. “Many people were shot, and they were crawling on the ground toward buses or other cars to hide behind them. I just wanted to find my brother and get out.”

What happened that day — already known in Iran as “Bloody Friday” — is by far the deadliest government crackdown against protesters since demonstrations began sweeping the country nearly a month ago. Internet service has been cut or severely disrupted in the region over the past two weeks, along with the cellular network, making it difficult to piece together how the violence unfolded. The Post interviewed two witnesses to the Sept. 30 crackdown, including the young man, who described security forces using deadly and indiscriminate force against peaceful demonstrators.

The Post could not independently confirm their accounts, but their stories were corroborated by local activists and lined up with the findings of rights groups.

The Friday protest in Zahedan had been announced on social media earlier that week, in solidarity with the uprising that has gripped the nation since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in the custody of the “morality police” on Sept. 16. But the protesters, many of them ethnic Baluch — a minority group that lives mostly in southeast Iran and across the border in Pakistan — had local motivations as well.

They were infuriated by reports that a 15-year-old girl had been raped in police custody in the city of Chabahar in early September. This Baluch girl was their Amini, another young woman who they believed had been abused by state security forces. The crowd that day was chanting “Death to the dictator” and “The rapist must be punished” when security forces opened fire.

The 28-year-old man frantically dialed his brother’s phone and eventually found him behind a white Peugeot. They ducked down and made their way out of the area, positioning themselves between a line of cars and a border wall of the Mosalla. The brothers had run only a short distance when they saw a mutual friend, whom they beckoned to escape with them. Then gunshots rang out again.

“[Our friend] was shot twice in the back, only two or three meters away from me,” the young man said in an exhausted voice. “One of the bullets hit near his heart. He was martyred right there.”

“From the evidence we’ve gathered, what happened at Mosalla was a massacre,” said Mansoureh Mills, an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, which has counted at least 66 people killed that afternoon. Other human rights groups put the death toll even higher.

“The killing of children and people who were praying … I can’t see how it could be called anything else,” Mills said.

The Iranian government ramped up its use of force against protesters after an order issued by the country’s highest military body on Sept. 21 to “severely confront troublemakers and anti-revolutionaries,” according to a leaked document obtained by Amnesty and reviewed by The Post.

The security forces appear to be enforcing this broad order with an even heavier hand in ethnic-minority areas such as Baluchistan, as well as Kurdistan in western Iran, where Amini was from and where the protests started.

The Baluch, like the Kurds, have long been neglected by the Iranian government. The area where most of them live, Sistan and Baluchistan province, is among the poorest in the country. The Baluch and the Kurds are also predominantly Sunni communities in a country ruled by a theocratic Shiite government.

The state’s response in these areas “has been particularly brutal,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. He warned that the government crackdown “was further exacerbating the risk of continued turmoil.”

After the initial shooting around the police station, security forces also fired on crowds gathered around the Makki Mosque, a short distance from the Mosalla. Bullets riddled the front of the mosque and tear-gas canisters were fired into the prayer space, activists said, including the women’s section, where mothers were sheltering with their children.

By this time, the young man and his brother had gathered a group of protesters to carry their friend’s body to the Makki Mosque. A helicopter circled overhead, the young man told The Post, and gunmen inside periodically fired into the crowd. They were “shooting from above, and we had to go inside the mosque,” the man recalled.

Many of the dead and wounded had been taken into the mosque by midafternoon; protesters threw rocks at security forces to keep them away, witnesses said. So many people were wounded that there was a shortage of blood at local hospitals, activists reported.

A 60-year-old man who lives in the Shirabad neighborhood in north Zahedan received news that his 25-year-old son had been fatally shot, and that his body was at the mosque. The man made his way there with great difficulty, asking others to help carry his son’s body home.

“When we wanted to take my son’s body out, two people were shot in front of me right at the door of the Makki Mosque. One was shot in the head and the other was shot in the chest,” the father said in a telephone interview from Zahedan, sharing his story on the condition of anonymity. “We waited until sunset before we could leave.”

State media announced that three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also killed that day. Among them was Col. Hamid Reza Hashemi, a deputy intelligence commander for the Guard Corps in Sistan and Baluchistan, according to the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency.

The government has sought to blame the violence on Jaish al-Adl, a local militant group, but the group has denied any role in the protests, and the activists and witnesses interviewed by The Post say they did not see any armed protesters in the crowd. In a statement the day after the attacks, the commander of the Guard Corps, Gen. Hossein Salami, vowed revenge for the security personnel who had been killed.

“Salami’s statement is a threat against the people,” said Abdollah Aref, director of the Baluch Activists Campaign, an advocacy group based in Britain. “What they’re saying is if you come out into the street, then we’ll shoot you and kill you.”

The young man and his brother made it home safely that Friday, but violence followed them. As protests continued in their neighborhood over the next several days, security forces responded with deadly force.

“They would wear local Baluchi clothes so they wouldn’t be recognized and people wouldn’t think they’re linked to the government,” the man said. “They would come in civilian cars and civilian clothes, shoot people, and leave.” 

A Universal Thread

Some themes are held in common by practically every human on this planet.

Aleksei Navalny explains why we need to rid ourselves of people like Vladimir Putin, billionaire zealots, and pretty much every Republican office-holder here in USAmerica Inc.

Mr Navalny, if you please:

Translating the translation:

Fuck off and leave people alone.

Let's try that for a while.

Cuz this other shit -

the shit you've been pullin' -

that shit ain't workin'.

Russia Will Be Free

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Vladimir Kara-Murza from jail: Russia will be free. I’ve never been so sure.

Editor’s note: On Monday, Russian human rights activist and Post contributing columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza gave an interview in Moscow to CNN in which he harshly criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A few hours later, he was picked up by police and summarily sentenced to 15 days in jail on a charge of disobeying law enforcement. Kara-Murza sent this column to The Post through his lawyer.

Sofia Kalistratova, the legendary Moscow lawyer who defended dissidents in the “anti-Soviet” trials of the 1960s and 1970s, told her charges: “Everyone else may cross the street on a red light, but you must always cross on green.” She knew that her clients couldn’t give the authorities the slightest excuse to accuse them of breaking the law.

I have always tried to follow this principle. True, my lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, says that if this advice worked in the ’60s, it definitely doesn’t work now: “They’ll just go ahead and write that you crossed the street on purple. And then they’ll accuse you of inventing a nonexistent light and maliciously crossing on it.”

Vadim was right, and almost literally. When I returned home on Monday evening and began to park my car, five or six police officers of the Second Special Regiment of Moscow’s Main Internal Affairs Directorate, who had been waiting at the entrance, rushed at me, hustled me into their minibus, took away my phone and drove me to the Khamovniki police station.

According to the police report filed later, when I caught sight of the waiting officers, I “changed the trajectory of my movement,” “accelerated my pace” and offered them “active resistance.”

And yet there was one true statement that made it into the verdict of the Khamovniki district court in Moscow during my subsequent trial: It noted that the court’s decision took “data on the personality of V.V. Kara-Murza” into account. Everyone who participated in the process, including Judge Diana Mishchenko and the Interior Ministry officers who brought me to the court, understood that the only reason for my arrest was my political and, above all, antiwar position.

In fact, no one hid it. When the officers of the Khamovniki Police Department, who brought me to Special Detention Center No. 2 in Khoroshevo-Mnevniki to serve out my sentence, rang the doorbell, they said: “Here’s a political for you. They should have called you from headquarters.”

There are many “politicals” — people targeted for political reasons — doing time in Russia right now. Even in the Khamovniki police station, where I spent the first day after my detention in a stone box measuring 2-by-3 meters, I met two young women in neighboring cells who had been picked up for writing antiwar graffiti. Among the inmates in the special detention center are a young man and woman who had staged a protest in response to the murders in Bucha, Ukraine. There are also students of the Higher School of Economics who were detained for an antiwar demonstration. And these are only those whom I myself saw in two days in two places in Moscow.

When you are told that no one protests against the war in Russia, don’t believe it. Hundreds of people who took part in such protests are imprisoned in police stations and special detention facilities. The police grab them immediately and take them away. And there are no more media outlets in Russia that can talk about it.

Yet the attitude toward “politicals” is good — both among the prison staff and the inmates. In this sense, nothing has changed since the dissidents of the 1970s. I wrote this phrase and thought, So we’re walking in the same circle. We never managed to break out of it in the short window of opportunity in the ’90s. But we’ll get out one day, for sure. There will be another window of opportunity — and this time we need to use it correctly. There will be a dawn. The night, as you know, is darkest just before the light.

As Boris Nemtsov liked to say: “We can do it.” Russia will be free. I’ve never been so sure of it as I am today.