October 25, 2024 ❧ A worrying poll on immigration, the BRICS summit ends, and California votes on prison slavery

Plus: Tucker Carlson says something creepy, the Boeing strike continues, and oarfish are basically sea serpents

Chat, is news real?

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

❧ A horrifying new poll reported by Axios seems to reveal that roughly half of Americans would support putting undocumented immigrants in concentration camps. When asked whether they’d support “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military,” 47 percent of respondents—who were split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents—answered that they’d either “favor” or “strongly favor” it. The poll comes as Donald Trump has threatened to conduct potentially the largest “mass deportation” operation in human history—one that he promises will be a “bloody story.” Nearly 4 out of 5 Republicans said they’d support the camps, while nearly a quarter of Democrats said the same. In the same survey, a third of respondents—including 61 percent of Republicans—said they agreed with Trump’s nakedly fascist statement that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.

There is no way to spin this. It is simply a horrifying reality check about how successful anti-immigrant fearmongering has become. And it shows that no society, no matter how enlightened it may purport to be, is immune from the allure of fascism. This is the first time that the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducted the poll in September, has posed this question in a survey, so it’s hard to get a sense of whether these sentiments have grown or if they’ve always been this bad. But given the anti-immigrant shift shown in other polls over a longer period of time, it seems clear that the public has shifted in a much more hateful direction towards immigrants in the last few years.

Obviously, Republicans are most immediately to blame for this. They’ve been the ones spreading vicious libels about immigrants eating people’s pets, and making up surges of “migrant crime” that don’t actually exist. They’re the ones who have been saying that immigrants are “not humans, they're animals,” and described their entry into the country as an “invasion.” But Democrats have helped to enable them by adopting most of their framing and policy around immigration—uncritically agreeing with their false assertions that migrants are bringing drugs and crime into the country and promising to deal with it.

The Democrats’ message this year is not that a Trumpist approach to immigration is wrong either morally or factually, but that they will carry it out in a more effective way. Case in point: earlier this week during a CNN town hall, Kamala Harris was asked about why she is now campaigning to pass a bipartisan bill that would have funded the construction of a border wall—something she used to call “a medieval vanity project.” In response, she chided Trump not for wanting to build a big dumb wall, but for not building enough of it:

Let’s talk about Donald Trump and that border wall. *nervous laugh* So remember Donald Trump said ‘Mexico would pay for it’? Come on. They didn’t. How much of that wall did he build? I think the last number was about two percent, and then when it came time for him to do a photo-op, you know where he did it? At the part of the wall that President Obama built…I pledge that I am going to bring forward that bi-partisan bill [with border wall funding]. 

For the most part, Democrats have totally given up on attempting to make an affirmative case for immigration. We’ve already written about how this has given Republicans license to go even further into explicit xenophobia and fascism. But these latest polls seem to suggest that the bipartisan framing of immigrants as a criminal nuisance has had a downstream effect on voters’ perceptions. We, of course, shouldn’t let the voters off the hook for this either. As much as we may be squeamish about admitting it, there are millions of people in this country who would gleefully cheer the worst crimes against humanity being done to those they deem lesser. Many of them cannot be persuaded, only kept from ever wielding power. It is the responsibility of those of us who still have our humanity intact to do what we can to protect the people they hope to victimize, because lord knows our political leaders won’t.

In other news…

• In other worrying news, General Mark Milley—who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump—says that the ex-president is “fascist to the core.” His evaluation echoes that of John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who says that Trump once told him “Hitler did some good things.” Responding to these disturbing accounts from Trump’s inner circle, Kamala Harris said during a Wednesday town hall that she, too, considers Trump “fascist.” It’s not like this is exactly surprising, as Trump has been promising to deport millions of immigrants and ranting about “bad genes” and the “enemy from within” for quite a while now. Still, it’s chilling to see it laid out in black and white. (Associated Press)
  
  
• Top congressional Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), are spending millions of dollars on a last-minute ad campaign against independent labor leader Dan Osborn, who’s running for the Senate in Nebraska. Despite this, Osborn is still within one point of incumbent Senator Deb Fischer in the polls. (Fox News)

He may actually pull this off. (Image: KETV Omaha)

• [CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT] There’s been another accusation of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump, this time from a former professional model who says Trump groped her during a visit she took to Trump Tower with Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s press secretary has denied the allegation, calling it “unequivocally false” and suggesting it was “contrived by the Harris campaign.” (The Guardian)
  
  
• Not beating the “weird” allegations, Tucker Carlson gave a skin-crawling speech in which he compared Donald Trump returning to the presidency to a father coming home to spank his misbehaving child: “When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl’. ‘You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’” (The Independent)

Is it possible to sexually harass an entire country? Because that’s basically

what Tucker did. (Photo: Reuters, via the Independent)

• Liberal megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations has been shelling out money to lots of tiny political magazines lately (Not Current Affairs). Most of them—like the New York Review of Books, the Baffler, Dissent, and Jewish Currents—have an independent left or liberal bent. But one of the recipients is quite strange: Compact Magazine, which has a reputation for being an idiosyncratic mishmash vaguely populist right and left-wing contrarians (or “heterodox thinkers,” as they’d probably prefer to be called), but is clearly much more closely aligned with the reactionary “New Right” —including seed funders J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. (Vanity Fair)
  
  
• Speaking of oligarchs, a new Wall Street Journal exclusive reveals that Elon Musk has been in “regular contact” with Vladimir Putin since 2022, discussing “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions” with the Russian leader. NASA administrator Bill Nelson has called for an investigation into the relationship between the two. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around skipping like a dipshit”

— Tim Walz

AROUND THE STATES

❧ There are a lot of important ballot measures happening around the country this election day about loads of different issues. But some of the most important votes are happening in California and Nevada, where citizens will have the opportunity to vote to abolish slavery. Wait, come again? Yes, slavery is still explicitly legal under the constitutions of California, Nevada, and 14 other states for people in prison, as the 13th Amendment includes a carveout for “involuntary servitude” as “punishment for crime.” Many other states do not explicitly permit prison slavery but also have no measure formally abolishing it. 

The Bureau of Justice Statistics found in 2022 that 76 percent of American prison inmates have been forced to work or face additional punishments, such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. That work is for little or no pay, as prisoners are excluded from federal minimum wage laws and lack basic safety regulations or the right to unionize. While the majority of people in prison cannot afford basic necessities, many of the world’s biggest companies—including ones you are probably familiar with—have used this cheap source of labor to reap billions of dollars.

A map showing where prison slavery is legal: States in green explicitly allow it in their constitution, states in purple explicitly outlaw it, and states in gray have no mention of slavery in their constitutions. (Map: Wikimedia Commons)

California and Nevada are the latest slave states to hold public referenda to end the practice of involuntary servitude. Colorado became the first to do so in 2018 (though prisoners there say it’s still happening), followed by Utah and Nebraska in 2020. In 2022 four states—Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont—voted for measures to abolish the practice. 

California tried to pass an anti-slavery measure in 2022, but it was rejected in the state Senate due to a requirement that prisoners—who make an average of 74 cents an hour currently—be paid California’s $16 minimum wage, which opponents said would cost the state too much money. Instead of the apparently audacious proposal that prisoners be paid the same as any other worker, the new measure merely says that nobody in prison can be forced to work, but can take on jobs on a volunteer basis. Nevada likewise introduced legislation to allow its prison laborers to make the $10.50 an hour minimum wage last year, which failed to pass. Its ballot measure would likewise ban involuntary servitude but says nothing about prisoner wages, which can be as low as 35 cents an hour. It’s certainly better that nobody would be forced to work if these measures passed. But given that prisoners are required to pay for their own housing and other necessities, they still wouldn’t really have the choice but to take their meager pay. That hardly sounds like freedom.

In other news…

• The roughly 33,000 aerospace workers who’ve been on strike against Boeing since September have just rejected a proposed contract, which would have given them a 35 percent raise (close to the 40 percent they asked for) but not provided pensions. They’re sticking with the slogan “No Pensions, No Planes,” and plan to continue the strike as long as it takes. (Labor Notes)
  
  
• Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry unleashed state police on the homeless citizens of New Orleans this week, conducting a so-called “sweep” that forced them to relocate from the downtown area where they’d taken shelter. It’s all part of a PR effort to put the city’s “best foot forward” before an upcoming Taylor Swift concert, in this case by making sure the attendees—who’ve spent more than $1,000 per ticket on average—don’t have to see any poor people. (NBC)
  
  
• Protesters against the genocide in Gaza occupied the administration building at the University of Minnesota on Monday, leading to 11 arrests. They renamed the building “Halimy Hall” after the Palestinian TikTok vlogger Medo Halimy, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in August. (ABC)

(Image: Watchmerisempls via Instagram)

• FanDuel and DraftKings have spent more than $36 million backing Amendment 2 in Missouri, a ballot measure that, if passed, would legalize sports betting. The “Yes” campaign are promising that the tax revenue raised from legalized gambling would go toward funding Missouri schools (its teachers have the lowest salaries in the country). However, there’s no actual guarantee in the amendment that any money would actually go towards education. (The Lever)
  
  
• Just 18 months into her tenure, Oakland’s progressive mayor Sheng Thao is facing a recall effort led by a group of tech and crypto billionaires and a wealthy hedge fund manager. (The Guardian)

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ The BRICS summit just wrapped up in Kazan, Russia. The acronym “BRICS” is already outdated, as the international alliance now consists of ten countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. But “BRICSIEEUS” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. (Some institutions, like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have started using “BRICS+,” which might stick.) As the BBC breaks down, the group has been around since 2006, when it was just “BRIC,” and it aims to create a “greater voice and representation” for developing countries and the Global South on the world stage. It also criticizes institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for being dominated by the economic interests of the U.S. and other wealthy countries, which they are, and seeks to create alternatives. It’s been described as an alternative to NATO in a more “multipolar” world order, and while that’s an oversimplification, it’s more or less accurate. 

The gang’s all here. (Image: Office of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia via Twitter)

The group is about to get even bigger, too. On the final day of the Kazan summit, the existing BRICS members voted to add 13 more countries in the near future: Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. There were originally plans for Argentina to join too, but President Javier Milei scuttled those when he came to power last year. Meanwhile, Brazil vetoed Venezuela’s application for membership because of its still-disputed election results. 

In terms of policy, the most consequential thing that came from this summit are the plans for a “multi-currency system” in international trade. Journalist Ben Norton has a great deep dive on this at Geopolitical Economy, but the gist is that many of the BRICS nations want to make trade deals in their own national currencies rather than the U.S. dollar, and thus weaken the dominance of the United States over the world financial system. (For more on how the dollar’s status as the default currency for world trade has served as an instrument of U.S. power, check out this Current Affairs interview with Saleha Mohsin, author of the book Paper Soldiers.) This aspect of BRICS is especially relevant for Russia, which has been hit with heavy economic sanctions by the U.S. ever since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

As Norton writes, it’s been widely speculated that BRICS will “establish an alternative messaging infrastructure to circumvent the SWIFT system of interbank communication,” which is one of the key methods of enforcing international sanctions. If this happens, it would lead to a mixed bag of outcomes. It could be beneficial for countries like Cuba, which have suffered for decades under the sanctions regime, but it could also empower figures like Putin to commit human rights abuses without fear of repercussions. However, there’s an argument that sanctions are fundamentally illegitimate since they collectively punish the entire population of a country for the actions of leaders like Putin, and in that sense, a disruption to the current order could be a good thing. 

In other news…

• Israel threatened to bomb the al-Sahel hospital in Beirut and forced its patients and staff to evacuate, claiming that its basement was being used by Hezbollah militants to stash “hundreds of millions of dollars in paper currency and gold.” But when reporters from the Associated Press, Sky News, and the BBC were invited there by hospital staff and allowed to walk around freely, they found nothing of the sort. This is far from the first time that Israel has used ridiculous pretexts to justify bombing a hospital—most famously, they destroyed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza last year after claiming it was the site of a sprawling Hamas command center, which it wasn’t. However, since Israel has sealed Gaza off from foreign journalists—it’s not a sovereign nation like Lebanon—nobody was able to prove that they were lying until it was much too late.
  
  
• In just the first week in October, more than 25,000 Sudanese refugees crossed the border into neighboring Chad, a record for a single week in 2024. Chad is currently hosting nearly 700,000 refugees from Sudan, which is in the midst of a civil war where both sides are accused of war crimes and tens of millions of people face food insecurity. The conditions in these camps are squalid, as Chad is one of the poorest countries in Africa. However, despite an appeal from the United Nations to raise $1.5 billion globally to help Sudanese refugees, the world has only provided 27 percent of the funding. (The Guardian)
  
  
• Kenya’s President William Ruto is embroiled in new controversies over his government’s dealings with the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani. Earlier this month, Ruto signed a $740 million dollar deal with Adani Energy Solutions to build power lines across Kenya, but the Kenyan high court has suspended the public-private partnership after allegations that local Kenyan contractors weren’t considered. Ruto also wants to give the Adani Group a 30-year lease to operate the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, together with a lucrative tax holiday that critics say would “make Adani the winner and Kenyans the loser in this fiasco.” (Bloomberg)

Shady “public-private partnerships” are a worldwide phenomenon, apparently.

• According to a new United Nations report on climate progress, there has essentially been none over the past year. In fact, global greenhouse emissions reached record highs over the past year and are not on track to decrease for the next decade. While horrifying, this result isn’t really a surprise given that the last COP 28 global climate summit was an unserious disaster led by a fossil fuel executive. (New York Times)
  
  
• In a scheme that would have made George Santos proud, a man in Gujarat, India has been arrested for running an elaborate fake court, pretending to be a judge, and ruling in favor of whoever paid him during land disputes. This is pretty funny, but it’s worth remembering that the U.S. Supreme Court is only marginally more “real” than this “fake” Indian one. (India Today)

Order in the court, here comes the judge! (Image: India TV)

FISH FACT OF THE WEEK

Oarfish are basically just sea serpents.

You’ve probably never seen an oarfish in person, and that’s not surprising. They’re pretty rare, and they live deep in the ocean—as much as 3,280 feet down, in what’s known as the mesopelagic zone, where sunlight never comes. Typically, the only time humans do encounter them is when they wash up on beaches—or else when they send research cameras down to meet them face-to-face. 

Because they’re so unusual, there are a variety of myths and legends about the oarfish. In Japan they’re known as Ryūgū-No-Tsukai, or “messengers from the sea god’s palace,” and some people believe their appearance is an omen that an earthquake will soon come. That could actually be true, as the shifting of tectonic plates and volcanic activity could drive oarfish out of their usual depths to the surface. Otherwise, some scholars believe their impressive size—as much as 36 feet long!—and their snakelike appearance is behind numerous sea-serpent sightings over the years.

U.S. Navy Seals holding a large oarfish that washed up near San Diego in 1996. 

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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