The order will effectively interpret Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, to trigger a federal law penalizing colleges and universities deemed to be shirking their responsibility to foster an open climate for minority students, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the matter before the announcement. In signing the order, Mr. Trump will use his executive power to take action where Congress has not, essentially replicating bipartisan legislation that has stalled on Capitol Hill for years. Prominent Democrats have joined Republicans in promoting such a policy change at a time of rising tension on campuses over anti-Semitism as well as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions or B.D.S. movement against Israel.

Democratic congressional leaders have unveiled articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, a historic move set in motion by a whistleblower complaint warning the president was using the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in a US election.Democrats outlined two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The charges were announced by House judiciary chair Jerry Nadler, flanked by speaker Nancy Pelosi, intelligence chair Adam Schiff and other members of the Democratic leadership.Nadler said: “Today in service to our duty to the constitution and to our country the House committee on the judiciary is introducing two articles of impeachment, charging the president of the United States, Donald J Trump, with committing high crimes and misdemeanors.”The articles were unveiled after almost three months of investigation of alleged wrongdoing by Trump, who is accused of withholding military aid and an Oval Office meeting from Ukraine in exchange for investigations into the former vice-president Joe Biden, his political rival, and a baseless conspiracy theory which says Ukraine intervened in the US election in 2016.Trump has denied any misconduct. After the announcement he tweeted the phrase “witch hunt” in capital letters.Democrats had weighed as many as four articles, including an obstruction of justice charge relating to Trump’s conduct during special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.While the impeachment articles focus on Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine scheme, Nadler said, the articles went to a “pattern” of presidential behavior.According to the text of the first article, Trump “used the powers of the presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process. He thus ignored and injured the interests of the Nation.“President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.”The second article states that “in the history of the Republic, no president has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry or sought to obstruct and impede so comprehensively the ability of the House of Representatives to investigate” his behaviour.Explaining the charges, Nadler said: “A president who places himself above accountability, above the American people and above Congress’s power of impeachment … is a president who sees himself as above the law.“We must be clear no one not even the president is above the law.”The House judiciary committee will vote on the articles, followed by the full House. As Democrats control the lower chamber, a trial in the Senate is likely to follow in January. Republicans are in control there, making Trump’s conviction and removal unlikely.Representative Eliot Engel, the chair of one of the committees to investigate Trump, said Democrats had chosen not to include articles explicitly relating to the Mueller material.“It was a matter of a judgment being made,” Engel told CNN. “Prevailing feeling was we were better off with two, because the obstruction of justice brought in a whole bunch of things and it was a mixed bag of tricks.“The consensus was we were better off standing with two rock solidly and not spread ourselves too thin.”On Twitter, former US attorney Barb McQuade said Democrats were “wise to frame articles of impeachment as abuse of office rather than violation of criminal statute”.“That’s the difference between impeachment and criminal prosecution,” she tweeted.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi walked into a conference room with gold-trimmed mirrors and wood paneling just after 9am. She was trailed by the six committee chairs who have led investigations into Trump since the party took the House nearly a year ago.Schiff said the House was moved reluctantly to action by the risk of allowing Trump’s alleged abuses to go unchecked.“If allowed to stand it would decimate Congress’ ability to conduct oversight of this president or any in the future,” he said.Replying to critics who urged Democrats to wait until they could obtain testimony and documents from witnesses the White House has blocked, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton, Schiff said the slow pace of court appeals made that option nonviable and warned: “The integrity of our next election is at risk.”“The argument ‘Why don’t you just wait?’ amounts to this: ‘Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not just let him cheat one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time? That is what that argument amounts to.’”Trump has betrayed the public trust, Nadler said.“When he betrays that trust and puts himself before country he endangers the constitution, he endangers our democracy and he endangers our country.“We do not take this action lightly but we have taken an oath to defend the constitution and unlike President Trump, we understand that our duty first and foremost is to protect the constitution and to protect the interests of the American people,” said Nadler. “That is why we must take this solemn step today.”When Schiff finished speaking, the Democratic leaders filed out of the room in the same way they entered it, solemnly and without answering questions. Topics Donald Trump US politics Trump impeachment inquiry House of Representatives Ukraine US Congress US Senate news

Joe Biden is not Barack Obama, and many Black men are tired of the comparisons.After four years of racist rhetoric, Donald Trump is now 57 percentage points down with Black voters, according to FiveThirtyEight—which is bad, yes, but is a 15-point improvement from where he ended up in 2016.Why would Black men, who are often the target of unarmed police shootings, unemployment, and systemic inequality in America, back a president who is a racist and who wants more racist so-called law-and-order policies? To try and answer that question, I went to the epicenter of Black male refuge: a mainstay West Philadelphia barbershop on a busy Saturday.When Black turnout in Philadelphia declined in 2016 without Barack Obama on the ticket, it helped Trump edge past Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania—and the Biden campaign has been giving the city a lot of attention to keep that history from repeating itself. But that’s been hard to do with the coronavirus and a summer of protests. And, the men in the shop said, Biden and his party haven’t been helping themselves by taking Black voters, and Black men in particular, for granted.“I can’t keep giving these Democrats my vote, what have I gotten?” a middle-aged accountant said. “I’m leaning toward Trump because we need to let them know that our votes can’t be taken for granted.”This was one of the few Black male Trump supporters I’ve come across in Philly, a man I’ve seen at the shop for years and not one who’d ever come across like the extreme conservative Trump supporters—Candace Owens, Diamond and Silk, or Rob Smith—most often represented in the press.Several men agreed with his sentiment, but disagreed that voting for Trump was the solution. Instead, they were apathetic or hostile to voting at all. They hate how the Biden campaign has spoken to them. The consensus was that the campaign seems to only appeal to “suit-and-tie negroes with Ivy League degrees,” as one man put it. Another older man, a union member, then called me out as a late-twenties graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, saying “they’re trying to get votes from young bucks like you.”I’d felt that when Barack Obama made a rare visit to the campaign trail last week, as the Biden campaign held a private Black male voter gathering in North Philly limited to 20 participants. I was a part of the press pool for that event and was excited to see Obama engage with this often neglected voter base but was quite disappointed when I realized that most of the guests invited were elected officials, ward leaders, and campaign surrogates who I’d already seen on the campaign trail. This felt like a missed opportunity given that the real undecided Black male voters were outside of that rec center waiting to get just a glimpse of the man.“They only seem interested in the Black women in our community and not the rest of us,” a millennial who just graduated from law school complained. “I’m voting for Biden because my wife will kill me if I don’t. But damn, do they even see us?”There was an echo of resentment about the rise of Black women within the Democratic Party. Most of the men weren’t fans of Kamala Harris, and several questioned her Blackness (yes, someone mentioned her marriage to a white man and how she named the very deceased Tupac as her favorite rapper alive.) Older and younger men dissected Harris’s controversial criminal justice background, with several seeming to feel that her ascension was somehow a threat to them.“If more women like Kamala get in the White House, they will never value the Black man,” a neighborhood youth coach shouted out. “They want women like her to lock us up and keep us down.”Some of the men in the room did question elements of the misogynoir and veiled sexism that was being conveyed during this conversation but a common theme in the discussion was the level of contempt they had for Harris being a heartbeat away from the presidency and a feeling of neglect from the Democratic Party on addressing Black male issues specifically. This sentiment seemed to align with a rise of Black men, specifically in hip-hop, noting how they feel more engaged with the Trump campaign than Biden’s. Ice Cube’s infamous platinum plan came up, and many of the men said the rapper turned movie maker had messed up the optics but didn’t deserve the harsh criticism he’d come in for.“Woke folks on social media don’t understand how politics works,” a retired SEPTA bus driver argued. “Cube should have had more people involved, but I don’t fault him for at least talking to Trump about it. Democrats are always trying to make us beg for something; we gotta want more for our damn ourselves.”That sentiment matches with the tone-deaf remarks Jared Kushner made on Monday about how Black people must “want to be successful” in order for the president’s policies to help them. “One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they’re complaining about,” the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser said on Fox & Friends. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”In the barbershop that weekend, Trump’s campaign messaging about being rugged, outspoken, and self-made seemed enticing to many of the men gathered there in a conversation where the comparisons between Trump and Biden could fairly be categorized as old-school “locker room talk.”There were Black men there who related to Trump, an old white guy, because they, too, have aspirations of wealth and hate political correctness. And with the alternative to Trump being another old white man who they believe is responsible for mass incarceration, they don’t seem to see much difference between the candidates.It’s awfully late for Biden to improve his campaign message now but if he is our next president, he needs to immediately work to fix this, and to get past the idea—which he’s played into several times on the campaign trail—that Black men are taken for granted by the Democratic party, no matter how suspicious they may be of it. While Trump is clearly not anything better, to say the least, the fact that some Black male voters can’t distinguish between the two of them seems like a real failure of the Biden campaign and an ominous sign about how a Biden presidency could go.

If Joe Biden wins in November, advocates who have spent the last four years suing President Donald Trump over his immigration policy are ready to hold the Democratic nominee accountable for his campaign promises. Biden is positioning himself as former President Barack Obama’s natural successor, including on immigration policy. But he has sworn he won’t merely revert to the Obama-era status quo if elected.“I was very proud to serve Barack, but even he acknowledges we can’t go back to what it was,” the former vice president said in June, pledging to send an immigration reform bill to Congress on day one of his presidency. “We have to go back and build back better. And so I have a program that is significantly different and builds upon where we left off and tries to undo the damage Trump has done.”Immigration isn’t the only policy area in which Biden has made big progressive promises. But compared to health care or climate change, presidents have broad legal authority over immigration policy — as Trump has demonstrated by singlehandedly and fundamentally reshaping the immigration system during his first term, typically through executive action. Merely undoing these changes will be a tall order if Biden claims victory in November. Advocates want to know how Biden plans to reign in the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, which have become vessels of Trump’s nativist policies, and what he would do would respond if he faces a surge of migration at the southern border.The pandemic could change the political calculus on immigration, which is no longer one of voters’ top priorities. In an era of mass unemployment, it might be difficult for Biden to advocate for policies vastly expanding immigration, as his immigration plan promises, when Americans fear they will be passed over for job opportunities, even though research shows that immigrants have essentially no effect on the unemployment rate.But there are policy changes that Biden could undertake unilaterally and immediately upon assuming office: He could reverse some of Trump’s signature immigration policies, including the travel ban and his pandemic-related restrictions on legal immigration, and begin the immense task of reforming the immigration agencies by installing new leadership and revising their enforcement priorities. Here are the top immigration priorities Biden would be under pressure to address during his first days in office:Trump has primarily pursued his agenda via executive fiat, meaning that Biden could easily reverse at least some policies as soon as he assumes office. Biden has also suggested that he would roll back the restrictions Trump recently imposed on foreign workers and immigrants applying for green cards. He has not yet said whether he would rescind Trump’s pandemic-related policies at the border that allow him to rapidly return asylum seekers to Mexico. (The Biden campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)Other Trump-era regulations may be more difficult to roll back. That includes Trump’s so-called public charge rule, which imposes a wealth test on immigrants applying to enter the US, extend their visa, or convert their temporary immigration status into a green card. The rule represents one of Trump’s harshest blows to legal immigration yet and has had the effect of deterring immigrants from seeking out much-needed public services amid the pandemic. But Biden can’t afford to rush through the process of repealing the complex, 217-page rule; he will likely have to use executive action to initially limit the effect of the rule before formally repealing it or else risk losing challenges in the courts, David Bier, a policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, said. “A hasty repeal could get hung up in the courts,” he said. “As much as the immigrant advocacy community has used the courts to their advantage, the opposite will be the case [under a Biden administration]. Especially with many Trump judges on the courts, it will be hard to find a favorable ear.” Unlike more progressive candidates in the primaries, Biden has said that he would reform the existing federal immigration agencies — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its component agencies, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — rather than defunding them or dismantling them and building something new in their place. That will be a difficult task given just how fundamentally Trump has altered these agencies to do his bidding on immigration.Leadership crises have plagued the DHS, which has been without a Senate-confirmed secretary since April 2019, and a government watchdog recently finding that the appointments of two top officials were invalid. USCIS, which is in the middle of a budget crisis of Trump’s making that could hamstring its ability to process immigration applications, has changed its mission statement to make clear that it no longer deigned to serve immigrants, but rather the American people. Since Trump took office, there have been growing reports of abuses in ICE detention, including sexual assault, inadequate medical care, and retaliatory use of solitary confinement. CBP officers in military-style gear have been used to quash protests in Portland and to aid ICE in conducting routine immigration arrests in other sanctuary cities.There have also been shifts at other agencies that preside over immigration issues: Trump’s US Attorneys General have increasingly sought to politicize immigration court proceedings. And there has been a mass exodus of career officials at agencies including the State Department, which oversees consulates that process visas worldwide and refugee resettlement. Reversing these trends in the executive branch will not happen overnight. But it needs to be a priority, Rep. Joaquin Castro, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), said. “I think the number one thing that he’s got to do right away is to appoint a cabinet secretary at DHS, the head of the Border Patrol, the head of USCIS and the head of ICE,” he said. “He’s got to appoint true reformers who are willing to clean house.”But on top of that, Carlos Guevara, associate director for immigration initiatives at the advocacy group UnidosUS, said that Biden also needs to review the next layer of political appointees, such as the officials running the DHS policy shop or the general counsel’s office. “Those decisions will make a big difference,” he said. Biden has proposed some ways that he would try to change the culture at the immigration agencies. He would focus on deporting only immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety — a designation that relies largely on the discretion of individual immigration officers. He would also improve accountability for immigration agencies like CBP and ICE. (His plan isn’t specific about what this accountability would look like.) He calls for ending for-profit detention centers, which have been sites of some of the most egregious abuses of immigrants in recent years. And he would work towards making the immigration courts more independent from the DOJ. The United States’ refugee program once was considered by some as a global model of how a powerful country should support the world’s most vulnerable people. But under Trump, America is now accepting fewer refugees than ever: 18,000 this year, the fewest in history and down from a cap of 110,000 when he took office. The refugee program has historically flourished under Republican presidents. Even in previous Republican administrations seeking to curtail immigration, no one has ever set the cap on refugee admissions as low as Trump has. Former President George W. Bush briefly cut the number of refugees admitted after the 9/11 attacks, but even then, the limit was set at 70,000. But Trump’s message has been clear: The US is no longer the same safe haven it once was.Biden will attempt to reverse that stance, promising to take in up to 125,000 refugees in the year after he takes office and increase admissions “commensurate with our responsibility, our values and the unprecedented global need.” But it will also take time to build up the institutions that have served refugee populations once again. The Trump administration restricted organizations that resettle under 100 refugees annually from obtaining federal funding. And according to a June 2019 report by Refugee Council USA, refugee resettlement agencies have had to suspend 51 programs in 41 offices across 23 states because the US is accepting so few refugees. Biden has vowed to invoke his executive authority to fully restore the program, which is overwhelmingly popular among both Republicans and Democrats, as well as send a bill to Congress that would codify permanent protections for DACA beneficiaries known as “DREAMers” on day one of his presidency. There is one such Democrat-led bill that the House already passed last June: the “Dream and Promise Act,” which offers a pathway to citizenship for about 2.5 million DREAMers and other immigrants with temporary legal status (the original DREAM Act was narrower, covering about 1.5 million people). The bill hasn’t gotten any traction in the current Republican-led Senate, which failed to reach a compromise on DACA legislation during open debate last year, but that could change if Biden is elected and if Democrats seize control of the chamber. That bill also would extend protections to beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict, and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), another form of deportation relief that primarily covers Liberians. About 400,000 citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti have been able to live and work in the US with TPS, but Trump tried to terminate their status, among nationals of other countries, starting in November 2017 against the advice of senior State Department officials. He argued that conditions in those countries have improved enough that their citizens can now safely return.Biden has said that he won’t allow immigrants with TPS and DED status to be returned to countries where they are unsafe and that those who have lived in the US for a long time and laid roots will be offered a path to citizenship through legislative reform. Developing a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants is a priority for the Democratic Party as a whole. But it would likely have to be part of a broader immigration reform bill, which could prove difficult to pass, if history is any indication. And any immigration-related legislation will likely have to compete for attention among a Biden administration’s other priorities, including responding to the pandemic. Immigration has been the subject of partisan gridlock in Congress for decades. The last time legislators passed a major immigration reform bill was in 1986, and their most recent attempt to pass a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013 failed in the then-Republican-led House, despite passing in the Senate. But widespread opposition to the punitive policies that have defined Trump’s tenure — including separations of migrant families at the border and his attempts to end DACA — may create a window for long-sought reform under a Biden administration.Biden says he would work with Congress on a more comprehensive bill that would, among other provisions, create a path to citizenship for the roughly 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants currently living in the US. Guevara said that, for now, his organization is focused on making sure that Biden follows through on that promise early on in his tenure — especially now that that immigration has been eclipsed by voters’ other priorities, not least of all the US’s response to the pandemic. “We can debate the policy nuances, but we have to have the political will conversation first,” Guevara said. It’s possible that the pandemic might make Biden more risk-averse about prioritizing immigration amid the pandemic. But Guevara said that there are elements of immigration reform that very clearly tie into Biden’s pandemic response, including the fact that many unauthorized immigrants are essential workers who have been largely overlooked by the Covid-19 relief bills passed in Congress and have limited access to health care. Castro said he hopes that a would-be Biden administration would pass such a bill within the first six months of his administration. But in the meantime, the CHC is separately working on their own reform proposal — the centerpiece of which is similarly a path to citizenship — that they plan to deliver to Biden and discuss if he takes office. Biden has also proposed provisions that would ensure fair wages for temporary workers and give them and their employers more flexibility; prevent companies from hiring high-skilled foreign workers over qualified US applicants; support family-based immigration; preserve a visa lottery program for citizens of countries with low levels of immigration; increase the number of employment-based visas; create a new visa program that would allow cities to petition for more immigrants; increase the number of visas for domestic violence victims; and better protect unauthorized immigrants who report labor violations. But some lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), have argued that a piecemeal approach to reform is more likely to be successful. The House has experimented with that somewhat under Trump, passing bills reforming visas for agricultural workers and the current system by which green cards are allocated. But both of those proposals have failed to gain traction in the current Republican-led Senate. Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

Nigel Farage has been condemned by the UK’s main Jewish groups and MPs for repeatedly using language and themes associated with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, something for which he has been previously criticised.The Board of Deputies of British Jews said Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to “trade in dog whistles”.The Brexit party leader, who has been criticised for agreeing to interviews with openly antisemitic US media personalities, was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism.Much of Farage’s most recent use of such themes has been connected to the Black Lives Matter protests, and his belief that dissenting voices are being silenced.In a tweeted video message this month, Farage said the UK faced “cultural Marxism”, a term originating in a conspiracy theory based on a supposed plot against national governments, which is closely linked to the far right and antisemitism.In the same message, Farage said companies who pulled TV adverts from rightwing TV shows were being pressured by “Soros-funded organisations”. George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and campaigner, is a regular target for antisemitic conspiracy theories. Farage had made the same claim about Soros three days earlier in an interview with the far-right news website Breitbart.In a recent opinion piece for the Newsweek website, Farage talked about “unelected globalists shaping the public’s lives based on secret recommendations from the big banks”. Goldman Sachs was the only bank he mentioned by name, echoing another common theme from far-right antisemitism.Writing in a separate Newsweek column, Farage said Black Lives Matter was made up of radical socialists trying to destroy nationalism, “oftentimes funded by globalists”, another term linked to such ideas.Amanda Bowman, vice-president of the Board of Deputies, said: “If Nigel Farage continues to trade in dog whistles and tropes about George Soros and Goldman Sachs, his decline into obscurity will continue apace. Mr Farage would do well to remember that this proud country has always rejected this sort of prejudice and fought wars to defeat it.”The Community Security Trust, a charity that works for the safety of Jewish people in the UK, said in a statement: “This is not the first time that Nigel Farage has used language that evokes antisemitic conspiracy codewords, but the deeper problem is that this search for scapegoats will keep requiring new enemies and new excuses, moving the national debate into more polarising and dangerous places.”Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who co-chairs the all-party group on antisemitism, said Farage’s tendency of “simplifying everything into a grand conspiracy theory” risked spilling into racism.“These conspiracy theories have real world and dangerous consequences and are without question antisemitic,” he said. “So now he is being put on notice. Farage needs to cut it out before he causes further harm by providing further fuel to racist antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories.”Labour MP Catherine McKinnell, the group’s other co-chair, said Farage was “like a bad salesman, peddling distrust and fear that someone is out to get us”.She said: “Talk of shadow cabals, Soros conspiracies and other nonsense has repeatedly been proven to find its roots in anti-Jewish racism. His choice of language, which echoes some of that circulating amongst the far-right online, is worrying and getting worse.”Farage’s representatives and the Brexit party were contacted for comment. A spokesman for Farage has condemned previous criticism of his language by Jewish groups and others as “pathetic” and “a manufactured story”.Farage has previously aired beliefs associated with antisemitism in a series of interviews with the far-right US conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones, and has called Soros “the biggest danger to the entire western world”.He outlined similar themes in an interview with Revelation TV, a tiny UK evangelical Christian TV channel. He was also interviewed at least six times by Rick Wiles, a far-right, antisemitic US pastor who subsequently used his web radio show to claim Donald Trump’s impeachment was a “Jew coup”.Farage remains leader of the Brexit party, which has largely halted its activities since December’s general election, although it could re-emerge if Boris Johnson extends the Brexit transition period.His parallel career as a media personality suffered a blow this month when he lost his show on radio station LBC. Farage has recently sought to establish himself as a web-based media commentator, making videos about the arrival of migrants in boats across the Channel.Farage’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s not just former Vice President Joe Biden. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And Mayor Pete. In New Hampshire, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ latest threat may come from another direction entirely: an emerging “outsider” tier. In 2016, Sanders swept the first-in-the-nation primary against Hillary Clinton by a large majority, due in part to his popularity with young and independent voters alike. Now, as he maintains a narrow lead in the current top tier, it’s two lower-polling contenders that could poke holes in the powerful coalition Sanders once relied on: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang.At first glance, Gabbard, the Hawaii Democrat who’s long and famously sparred with party figures, and Yang, the firebrand entrepreneur from New York, don’t appear to pose an immediate threat to Sanders, who earns 19 percent of support. Together, they barely crack half of that. And in the momentum primary, the early state energy has been with Buttigieg, the millennial South Bend mayor, and Warren, who hails from the state next door.

“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other extremist groups. Are you willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say they need to stand down and not to add to the violence in these cities as we saw in Kenosha and in Portland?” Wallace asked. “Sure, I’m willing to do that,” Trump first replied, with Wallace asking him to do it, before Trump turned the discussion away from white supremacists and shifted blame. “But I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” Trump then spoke directly to a noted hate organization: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody has to do something about antifa and the Left.” Holy shit. Trump refuses to condemn white supremacist groups. pic.twitter.com/FFSrvA1tcQ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2020 As Vox’s Jane Coaston reported, the Proud Boys are a “strange amalgamation of a men’s rights organization, a fight club and what some may see as a hate group — one that loves Donald Trump, hates Muslims (and Jews and trans people), but permits nonwhite membership.” The Proud Boys have become known for their violence and their “tactical defensive arm” where members attend protests and incite violence in order to defend the right wing. Just last weekend, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in Portland in anticipation that the Proud Boys, who had organized a rally in the city, would clash with Black Lives Matter protesters. And the Proud Boys were watching the debate. One Proud Boys leader, Joe Biggs, wrote on the social media platform Parler, “Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy,” according to the Daily Beast. Proud Boys national chair Enrique Tarrio, who organized the recent Portland event, wrote “I will stand down sir!!! Standing by sir. So Proud of my guys right now.” The Proud Boys are ecstatic tonight about getting mentioned in the debate tonight."Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy," writes one prominent Proud Boy. pic.twitter.com/hYA7yQVAOn— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) September 30, 2020 The debate wasn’t the first time Trump declined to condemn white supremacists. In 2017, after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the removal of Confederate statues — and after a white supremacist rammed their vehicle into a group of counterprotesters, killing one — Trump blamed people on both sides, and refused to condemn the white nationalists behind much of the violence and chaos. When white supremacists made plans to gather for a second Unite the Right event a year later in 2018, at Lafayette Square just outside the White House, Trump did not take the opportunity to directly denounce white nationalists. Instead, he vaguely tweeted, “The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!”As former Vice President Biden noted during the debate, “This is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racist hatred.” By explicitly calling on the Proud Boys, Trump proved tonight was no different. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

When Gordon Sondland walked into the congressional impeachment hearing shortly after 9am, reports were circulating that the Trump administration and the Republican party was going to throw him under the bus for his part the Ukraine scandal, painting him as a hotelier turned diplomat who went rogue.The question was whether Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, would take the fall. In his eagerness to please the president, had he coordinated a parallel Ukraine policy to convince the Ukrainians to investigate Trump’s political opponent, Joe Biden?But Trump and his allies were in for a shock. Any doubt about Sondland’s true intentions evaporated with his opening statement.Sondland insisted he had been operating “at the express direction of the president of the United States”. In case there was any residual ambiguity, he added: “So we followed the president’s orders.” Then Sondland produced documentary evidence that Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, was kept informed about the shakedown scheme to hold back Ukrainian aid in return for investigations.Far from allowing himself to be thrown under the bus, Sondland signaled he was prepared, if necessary, to shove everyone around him into the middle of the road. His statement went on to implicate Vice-President Mike Pence, the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the national security adviser, John Bolton, and Bolton’s top Russia aide, Tim Morrison. “Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland said, twice.By 10am, it was clear they were going to need a bigger bus.Sitting in front of an impeachment inquiry, revising his testimony for the third time, his polished bald head glistening in the light of a congressional chandelier, is presumably not what Gordon Sondland had pictured when he donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration celebration nearly three years ago.He had backed other Republicans in the 2016 primaries and even denied the Trump campaign use of one of his hotels. So after Trump’s shock win, Sondland was eager to get back on the right side of history. A million bucks got him the ambassador job in Brussels, where he reportedly boasted he had come to “destroy the European Union”, and quickly got to work upgrading the ambassador’s residence. The $1m in state department funds that he spent included $400,000 for a kitchen and $30,000 for a sound system.In Brussels, Sondland made a lot of his personal connection with the president, and arrived in Kyiv in spring making it clear to other diplomats he was there to do Trump’s bidding. In October, Trump signaled his continued backing by going on Twitter to describe his ambassador as “a really good man and great American”.But since Sondland has decided to testify, Trump’s memory of him has faded dramatically. “I hardly know the gentleman,” he said earlier this month.On Wednesday, after Sondland’s unambiguous opening statement implicating the president in the strong-arming of Ukrainian government, Trump went out on the White House south lawn to underline the tenuous nature of their acquaintance, lest there be any doubt.“I don’t know him very well. I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. He seems like a nice guy, though,” Trump said.At pretty much exactly the same time on Capitol Hill, Sondland was giving a far warmer assessment of his familiarity with Trump. He confirmed the testimony of other witnesses that he had called Trump from a Kyiv restaurant on 26 July (as other US diplomats leaned in to hear, and waiters came and went) telling the president that Zelenskiy “loves your ass”.Asked about the accuracy of the exchange, Sondland said: “It sounds like something I would say. That’s how President Trump and I communicate. A lot of four-letter words. Or three-letter words, in this case.”He went on to say that talking to the president was so commonplace it was hard for him to recall the details of particular conversations.More importantly, Sondland did not dispute another witness’s account of the phone call, which described Trump as interrogating Sondland about whether the Ukrainians were going to carry out the required investigations, and Sondland assuring the president that his Ukrainian counterpart would “do anything you ask of him”.The demeanor of the Republicans on the House intelligence committee grew grimmer with every passing hour of Sondland’s testimony. Their own interrogation of the ambassador only seemed to make things worse.The Republican counsel, Stephen Castor, focused on a Sondland conversation with Trump in September in which the president insisted he wanted nothing from Ukraine, there was no “quid pro quo”.“You believed the president, right?” Castor asked.“I’m not going to characterize whether I believed or didn’t believe,” Sondland said.From his pained expression, Castor was clearly aware that he had broken the trial lawyer’s maxim: never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.He phrased his questions in several different ways, but Sondland was adamant that the quid pro quo that Ukraine was offered in Trump’s name had started off clear, and became clearer as the summer went on. In the leaden phrase suggested by the committee chair, Adam Schiff, it was a “continuum of insidiousness”. If there is ever a bad movie made about Sondland’s journey from hospitality king of the north-west coast to four-letter-word Trump confidant to impeachment witness, that would make a perfect title. Topics Trump impeachment inquiry Donald Trump Ukraine Europe US foreign policy Mike Pompeo Rudy Giuliani features

Pauline Binam, a 30-year-old former detainee at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, had been in custody for about two years when she started having irregular menstrual bleeding. She feared that confinement was taking its toll on her body. Binam, who came to the US from Cameroon when she was 2 years old, was being held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center while awaiting deportation. According to her attorney, Van Huynh, she consulted with medical staff at the facility who told her that the condition could be treated by a minor surgical procedure in which a doctor dilates the cervix and scrapes off the lining of the uterus. Instead, the doctor informed her that he had also removed one of her fallopian tubes and that she could expect to have difficulty conceiving if she wanted to have more children. Binam is now at the center of a congressional inquiry into allegations of a pattern of nonconsensual gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, performed on detainees at Irwin in recent years. ICE ordered her deported on Wednesday morning, but she narrowly avoided deportation only after two Congress members got involved in her case.“I’m often not surprised by things in the world of immigration nowadays,” Huynh said. “I was shocked and appalled, hearing Nurse [Dawn] Wooten confirming what Pauline had been telling me all through 2019.”Before her procedure in August 2019, Binam gave verbal consent, indicating that she understood the course of treatment. But she was not given the opportunity to consent to the much more invasive and life-altering surgery she received while under anesthesia. She later expressed to a psychiatrist that she was “bothered” that she had one of her fallopian tubes removed when she was expecting a different procedure, according to medical records from August 2019, which Huynh shared with Vox. “She was adamant that she did not give consent for them to do anything to her fallopian tubes,” Huynh said. “Had she been informed of what was being done with regard to her fallopian tubes, she would have been able to respond fairly to that.”To this day, Binam, who has a US-citizen daughter, doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to conceive again, or whether it was medically necessary that her fallopian tube be removed. Wooten, a nurse at the facility, was the first to raise concerns about the hysterectomies, which were performed by a gynecologist described as “the uterus collector” in a whistleblower complaint filed Monday.Multiple attorneys have since come forward alleging that their clients had been subjected to hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, vice chair of the House immigration subcommittee, said that, based on conversations with three of those attorneys, it appears that at least 17 detainees had such procedures.Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist associated with Coffee Regional Medical Center and Irwin County Hospital in Georgia, allegedly performed at least some of the gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that were described in the whistleblower complaint and by the detainees’ attorneys. (His attorney has “vigorously” denied the allegations.)It’s not clear whether he alone performed the procedure on Binam or cooperated with other doctors, but he is listed as the “ordering” doctor on a pathology report relating to her surgery. The House Committee on Homeland Security is investigating the allegations in the complaint, and more than 170 members of Congress have called for a separate investigation from the Homeland Security inspector general’s office. Testimony from Binam and other detainees at Irwin will likely be critical to those inquiries.Binam came to the US when she was 2 years old from Cameroon. She might have been eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, which has allowed more than 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children to live and work in the country legally, if it weren’t for a shoplifting conviction from when she was 17. She paid a resulting fine without understanding the consequences: She was essentially admitting guilt to the charges against her. A couple of years later, she was charged with larceny in a separate case from the first shoplifting incident and was offered a plea deal. She took the deal, again admitting her guilt, which qualified as a second strike on her record. Immigration officials consequently launched deportation proceedings against her and detained her at Irwin starting in October 2017. Though a mother of a US citizen who had lived in the US for decades would typically be able to apply for deportation relief, Binam’s conviction and plea deal made her ineligible. In immigration court, she claimed that she feared returning to Cameroon, a place that she has never called home, and where there is ongoing conflict between the state and anglophone separatists. She was nevertheless ordered deported in an immigration court ruling that she is now appealing before the 11th Circuit.Even though her appeal is still pending, ICE could have deported her at any moment. But it was only on Wednesday — in the wake of the whistleblower complaint’s publication and after Huynh sought an emergency pause on her deportation, identifying her as a victim of a nonconsensual gynecological procedure — that ICE finally tried to put her on a 9:30 am deportation flight out of Chicago. “We were just shocked to find out that — just as we were learning about all these things that were coming out from Nurse Wooten — they wanted to put her on a flight and try to deport her as soon as possible,” Huynh said. A petition that garnered more than 1,800 signatures overnight also sought to halt her deportation. But it wasn’t until Jayapal and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) intervened that she was finally pulled off the plane at the last moment and sent to another immigration detention center, the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas. “There’s so much about immigration detention that takes away from a person’s life,” Huynh said. “It robbed her and her future because of what we’re learning today.” Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats formally announced their articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday morning. Flanked by the committee chairs who led the inquiry, Pelosi said the House would move to impeach Trump on two counts: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.“Today, in service to our duty to the Constitution and to our country, the House Committee on the Judiciary is introducing two articles of impeachment, charging the president of the U.S., Donald J. Trump, with committing high crimes and misdemeanors,” said House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY). The introduction of articles effectively concludes the impeachment inquiry that began in September to investigate the extent of Trump’s pressure campaign to get Ukraine to do him political favors. It sets the parameters for a full vote in the House on impeachment next week—and a trial in the Senate in January.After their press conference on Tuesday morning, the Judiciary panel released the text of the articles of impeachment to the public, which lays out their case over nine pages. “President Trump used the powers of the presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process,” the articles read. He “thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”After describing the White House’s stonewalling of Democrats’ request for documents and testimony, the articles posit that “this abuse of office served to cover up the president’s own repeated misconduct and to seize and control the power of impeachment.”Abuse of power is the first article of impeachment that appears, and it’s been the most talked about by Democrats. In recent hearings in the Judiciary Committee, they have laid out the case Trump abused the authority of his office by leveraging his power to compel Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into the Biden family and theories about Ukrainian election interference to help Hillary Clinton. Democrats argue that because Trump’s conduct involves the election and a foreign power it is a textbook example of what the Founders imagined for impeachment.House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) addressed that argument during his brief remarks Tuesday. “Now, some would argue, why don’t you just wait? Why don’t you just wait until you get these witnesses the White House refuses to produce? Why don’t you just wait until you get the documents the White House refuses to turn over,” Schiff said, before noting it took eight months to get a ruling to show White House counsel Don McGahn did not have the “absolute right to defy Congress.”Schiff said that argument amounted to saying, “Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election?”“The president’s misconduct goes to the heart of whether we can conduct a free and fair election in 2020,” he said. “It is bad enough for a candidate to invite foreign interference in our political process, but it is far more corrosive for a president to do so and to abuse his power to make it so.” Trump responded in a tweet: “Nadler just said that I ‘pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 Election.’ Ridiculous, and he knows that is not true. Both the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said, many times, that there ‘WAS NO PRESSURE.’ Nadler and the Dems know this, but refuse to acknowledge!”Throughout the process, Democrats had argued Trump was effectively impeaching himself by obstructing Congress’ investigatory process. In the Ukraine matter, the White House ignored Democrats’ subpoenas for documents and testimony, preventing them from filling in key gaps in the investigation. Key figures from former Energy Secretary Rick Perry to Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney were blocked from testifying, while the State Department sat on thousands of pages of documents—which they were once planning to hand over—that could have fleshed out the events described by the witnesses who did testify. The article on obstruction of Congress, then, was hardly a surprise. The most revealing bit of news from the articles’ rollout was their omission of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and its findings that Trump probably obstructed justice. The only allusion to Mueller was a statement that Trump’s actions on Ukraine were “consistent with President Trump’s previous invitations of foreign interference in United States elections.”All week, Democrats’ hints to a “pattern” of behavior exhibited by the president seemed to indicate that the findings in Mueller’s report had at minimum informed what is ultimately voted on in the House Judiciary Committee later this week.

“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other extremist groups. Are you willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and say they need to stand down and not to add to the violence in these cities as we saw in Kenosha and in Portland?” Wallace asked. “Sure, I’m willing to do that,” Trump first replied, with Wallace asking him to do it, before Trump turned the discussion away from white supremacists and shifted blame. “But I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” Trump then spoke directly to a noted hate organization: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody has to do something about antifa and the Left.” Holy shit. Trump refuses to condemn white supremacist groups. pic.twitter.com/FFSrvA1tcQ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2020 As Vox’s Jane Coaston reported, the Proud Boys are a “strange amalgamation of a men’s rights organization, a fight club and what some may see as a hate group — one that loves Donald Trump, hates Muslims (and Jews and trans people), but permits nonwhite membership.” The Proud Boys have become known for their violence and their “tactical defensive arm” where members attend protests and incite violence in order to defend the right wing. Just last weekend, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in Portland in anticipation that the Proud Boys, who had organized a rally in the city, would clash with Black Lives Matter protesters. And the Proud Boys were watching the debate. One Proud Boys leader, Joe Biggs, wrote on the social media platform Parler, “Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy,” according to the Daily Beast. Proud Boys national chair Enrique Tarrio, who organized the recent Portland event, wrote “I will stand down sir!!! Standing by sir. So Proud of my guys right now.” The Proud Boys are ecstatic tonight about getting mentioned in the debate tonight."Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy," writes one prominent Proud Boy. pic.twitter.com/hYA7yQVAOn— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) September 30, 2020 The debate wasn’t the first time Trump declined to condemn white supremacists. In 2017, after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the removal of Confederate statues — and after a white supremacist rammed their vehicle into a group of counterprotesters, killing one — Trump blamed people on both sides, and refused to condemn the white nationalists behind much of the violence and chaos. When white supremacists made plans to gather for a second Unite the Right event a year later in 2018, at Lafayette Square just outside the White House, Trump did not take the opportunity to directly denounce white nationalists. Instead, he vaguely tweeted, “The riots in Charlottesville a year ago resulted in senseless death and division. We must come together as a nation. I condemn all types of racism and acts of violence. Peace to ALL Americans!”As former Vice President Biden noted during the debate, “This is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racist hatred.” By explicitly calling on the Proud Boys, Trump proved tonight was no different. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

closeVideo<br>Ambassador Gordon Sondland testifies.The Donald Trump mega-donor who was awarded with an ambassadorship stepped into the impeachment spotlight Wednesday and said the president basically did what Democrats are accusing him of doing.Gordon Sondland, who had already changed his testimony once, delivered a torrent of words, but none more important than these: “Was there a quid pro quo?...The answer is yes.”What’s more, the ambassador who was once cast as a pro-Trump witness provided a road map to the Ukraine mess, made clear many top officials were involved, and said it was done at the “express direction” of the president. “Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”It was undoubtedly the most important day of the House impeachment hearings, as no one could say that Sondland had no firsthand knowledge. He was in the thick of it.Sondland was no John Dean, warning of a cancer on the presidency, as he described himself as a reluctant participant in a scheme whose gravity only gradually dawned on him. He was doing the best he could in a difficult situation to shake loose the military aid to Ukraine.He was the missing puzzle piece, a Seattle hotel owner who found himself at the center of a national melodrama. He didn’t quite flip as a witness, but he certainly did a pirouette.Sondland confirmed that the president told him Ukraine “tried to take him down” in 2016. He said he and his colleagues “weren’t happy” when Trump said they had to work with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine.He said Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney and Rick Perry were kept briefed, citing an email that they were copied on six days before Trump had the famous call with Ukrainian president Zelensky. In that message, Sondland explained that he “just talked to Zelensky” and got him to commit to the “fully transparent investigation” that Trump wanted.In case there was any ambiguity, Sondland said they all understood what Trump wanted in exchange for the call and a possible meeting with Ukraine’s president. “Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky. Mr. Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma.” The latter is the Ukrainian company that gave Hunter Biden a lucrative job.Sondland did say Trump never directly told him a Zelensky meeting was conditioned on a Ukrainian announcement of investigations, but that Rudy did—and for the ambassador, it was “two plus two equals four.”Trump, for his part, seized on one part of Sondland’s testimony to say “it is all over.”The president challenged the “fake news” to report that he told the ambassador late in the game that “I want nothing, want no quid pro quo, tell Zelensky to do the right thing.”The pundits, on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, said Sondland’s account was damaging to Trump and his top aides. Even Ken Starr on Fox said “it doesn’t look good for the president, substantively,” although Trump “may have covered himself” by not giving explicit instructions. But it may not be true, as MSNBC co-anchor and Trump-basher Nicolle Wallace put it, that “Gordon Sondland’s testimony today changed everything.”In a normal political environment, Sondland’s testimony would be considered a bombshell. But the country is utterly polarized between those who believe Trump is the victim of a partisan witch hunt and those who believe he extorted a foreign country to go after a political rival. Once again, I think few minds will be changed by these hearings, which dragged on for nearly 12 hours Tuesday. And as with other witnesses, Sondland’s turnaround was blunted by the fact that much of what he had to say had already been leaked or released to the press.Whether the president’s dealings with Ukraine rise to the level of an impeachable offense, or removal from office, is a whole different question. But Sondland’s emerging account clearly made it harder for Republicans to argue that there’s nothing to see here.Ranking Republican Devin Nunes ignored the testimony and changed the subject, bringing up allegations that Democrats obtained dirt on the 2016 Trump campaign. But Sondland, who wasn’t in government then, said he knew nothing about it.GOP counsel Steve Castor grabbed the one lifeline Sondland had left him: “Did the president ever tell you personally about any preconditions for anything?”The witness said no, but when “the president says talk to my personal attorney,” and Giuliani made demands, he and others assumed it was on Trump’s behalf.Sondland, who says he never takes notes, got peppered with questions about not having records to back up his recollection.Jim Jordan later yelled at Sondland because in the end the quid pro quo didn’t come off and demanded to know why he didn’t put the “no quid pro quo” Trump assertion in his opening statement. (Sondland said he’d already included it in previous testimony.)Another Republican, Mike Turner, bellowed that Sondland had delivered “made-up testimony” because Trump never explicitly told him there was a scheme involving a quid pro quo.Adam Schiff countered that Republicans seem to be saying there’s no evidence unless the president explicitly confessed to Sondland. Keep in mind that Mulvaney had also told reporters (part of the presser was played at the hearing) there was a quid pro quo and "get over it"--before trying to walk it back.The high-decibel rebuttals from the GOP could not drown out the fact that Gordon Sondland’s appearance was, to put it mildly, not helpful to the president.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler announced that Democrats were going forward with charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.Late Tuesday morning, Democrats released the proposed articles.Earlier, Nadler said Trump had "violated his oath to the American people.""Later this week, the Judiciary Committee will meet to consider these articles of impeachment and to make a recommendation to the full House of Representatives," Nadler said.He was flanked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic committee chairs, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff."The president's continuing abuse of power has left us no choice," Schiff said, going into details behind the charges. "To do nothing would make ourselves complicit in the president's abuse of his high office, the public trust, and our national security.""The evidence of the president's misconduct is overwhelming and uncontested," Schiff said with regard to the president's actions on Ukraine. "And how could it not be when the president's own words on July 25th—'I would like you to do us a favor, though'—lays so bare his intentions."Schiff said Trump had solicited a foreign nation to publicly announce that investigations into his political opponent, and by doing so, had undermined U.S. national security."When the president got caught he committed his second impeachable act," Schiff said, referring to obstruction of Congress."If allowed to stand it would decimate Congress' ability to conduct oversight of this president or any in the future, leaving this president and those who follow free to be as corrupt ... as they would like," he said."Why not let him cheat in one more election. Why not let him cheat just one more time?" Schiff asked rhetorically, responding to critics who say Democrats are moving too fast.He said Democrats had to move quickly in order to protect the 2020 election and could not wait for court challenges to congressional subpoenas to play out.Pelosi began the announcement by calling it a "solemn" occasion similar to when all members of Congress take an oath to protect the Constitution.As if to reinforce that, she and her fellow Democrats walked out of the room silently without taking questions.The House Judiciary Committee announced that it would start taking up the articles for debate and approval on Wednesday.With Democrats about to make their announcement, Trump tweeted Tuesday morning it is "sheer Political Madness" to impeach him because of his results as president.After the announcement, Trump tweeted at Nadler and once again called the Democrats' investigation and impeachment drive a "witchhunt.""Today, in a baseless and partisan attempt to undermine a sitting President, Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats announced the pre-determined outcome of their sham impeachment – something they have been seeking since before President Trump was inaugurated," White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.“House Democrats have long wanted to overturn the votes of 63 million Americans. They have determined that they must impeach President Trump because they cannot legitimately defeat him at the ballot box," she said.Judiciary Committee Democrats huddled before the morning announcement.Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., told reporters he thinks “the mix of articles will be the consensus of the committee.” Democrats had debated whether to include an article based on the Mueller investigation and Trump's stonewalling congressional effort to follow up on that.“I think so long as the articles reflect the evidence we collected and demonstrate that the president abused the power of his office by soliciting a foreign actor to interfere American presidential election that is at the heart of it this. This betrayal of the national interest using the enormous power of his office for personal advantage political gain, and for the public good,” he said.Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said she thinks “the most important thing is how do we hold the president accountable for his abuse of power, his obstruction of Congress, and the pattern of conduct.”Judiciary Committee staff worked late into the night Monday over Chinese food to finish preparing the charges against the president, which Democrats are expected to take to the floor for a vote as soon as next week, ahead of the Christmas recess.On Monday, in closing arguments, Democratic lawmakers called attorneys from the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees to present evidence from the Democrats' Ukraine investigation and to argue that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to launch investigations that could benefit him politically, specifically against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.Republican lawyers from the same House panels argued against the Democrats' impeachment efforts and defended the president's actions at the center of the impeachment inquiry.Nadler concluded the nearly 10-hour hearing with a summation of the arguments: "The fact are clear. The danger to our democracy is clear and our duty is clear.""President Trump violated his oath to the American people and placed his own private interests ahead of our national security, and constitutes a threat to our election and government," Nadler continued. "Such conduct is impeachable."

The top US diplomat in Ukraine just told lawmakers that President Donald Trump wanted hundreds of millions in military aid to the Eastern European country held up until it agreed to investigate Joe Biden’s family and another conspiracy theory related to Democrats.In other words, there was a quid pro quo — one that could eventually lead to Trump’s impeachment in the House and even more trouble with the Senate.William Taylor, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, testified in front of three House committees on Tuesday as part of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry. He’s the latest in a parade of current and former US officials who’ve testified in the past few weeks about whether or not Trump withheld around $400 million in military aid to Ukraine for his own political and personal gain.According to Taylor, that’s exactly what the president did. This is by far the most damning account of Trump’s conduct yet in the impeachment inquiry. The ambassador reportedly said that Trump made the aid contingent on the new Ukrainian government publicly announcing it would reopen an anti-corruption probe into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, once sat on the board of. Taylor said Trump also wanted Kyiv to investigate a long-debunked 2016 election conspiracy theory: that a Democratic National Committee server was whisked away to Ukraine to hide the fact that the country interfered in that vote, not Russia.It’s not out of the ordinary for the US to dangle incentives to get what it wants from another country. The problem, as Taylor’s testimony makes clear, is that Trump used his power to get Ukraine to help his reelection efforts by hurting his political rival.It doesn’t get much more corrupt than that.The diplomat’s full testimony has been released, and it looks very bad for the president.Taylor described for lawmakers a series of conversations he had with other Trump administration officials this year about Ukraine policy. In one instance, Taylor outlined what happened on September 1 call with Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU who Trump tasked with helping run point on Ukraine policy.“During that phone call, Amb. Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,” Taylor wrote in his opening statement on Tuesday.He continued: Amb. Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Amb. Sondland said, “everything” was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance.“He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations,” Taylor added.In effect, Taylor told Congress that, in his understanding, if Ukraine wanted anything out of Trump — including a long-desired meeting and much-needed military aid to fend of a Russian invasion — Kyiv had to state unequivocally that it would look into the Bidens.The drama was always likely going to head in this direction. A White House-released call summary last month showed Trump asking Zelensky on July 25 for a “favor” right before bringing up the DNC server and the Bidens. Sondland’s own testimony to the inquiry last week similarly made it clear that Trump wasn’t willing to meet with Zelensky until he committed to a Burisma probe. And acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told reporters last week that the administration held up the Ukraine money to compel the Ukrainians to open an inquiry into the supposed long-lost DNC server. Mulvaney later tried to walk his comments back, but it did nothing to diminish what he said on camera, in the White House briefing room, and in front of reporters.But what we have now — as clear as day — is a respected career diplomat saying unequivocally that Trump demanded Ukraine to publicly state it would investigate the Biden-connected gas company before getting what it wanted from America.That is a quid pro quo that goes right up to the very top. You can read Taylor’s full opening statement here. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. And that kind of work takes resources. Even after the economy recovers, advertising alone will never be enough to support it. If you have already made a contribution to Vox, thank you. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

A star witness at the impeachment inquiry has delivered a devastating blow to Donald Trump, testifying about the existence of a quid pro quo with Ukraine and insisting: “We followed the president’s orders.”Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, stunned Washington with bombshell evidence that blew a hole in the White House’s defences, implicated numerous senior officials and left the US president facing probable impeachment.Before a rapt congressional committee and a TV audience of millions, Sondland told how Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sought to condition an Oval Office meeting with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in exchange for politically motivated investigations of Trump’s rivals.“I know that members of this committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a ‘quid pro quo?’” the ambassador said. “As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes.”Sondland, a wealthy hotelier and Trump donor, has been described as one of the so-called “three amigos” the administration used to bypass usual state department channels to Ukraine. He had been billed as the witness who most alarmed officials at the White House – fears that rapidly proved to be well founded.Wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red patterned tie, Sondland took his seat in a cavernous, ornate committee room on Capitol Hill just after 9am and offered the most explosive testimony of the inquiry so far.He asserted that an Oval Office meeting with Trump was dependent on Ukraine announcing investigations into Burisma, a gas company linked to the son of former vice-president Joe Biden, and a widely discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine planted evidence on a server of the Democratic party to show Russia interfered in the 2016 election.“Mr Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelenskiy,” Sondland said. “Mr Giuliani demanded that Ukraine make a public statement announcing investigations of the 2016 election/DNC server and Burisma. Mr Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”Sondland acknowledged he never heard directly from Trump that the security assistance hinged on an announcement of investigations, adding that the conclusion was his “own personal guess”. But by early September, he added, “it was abundantly clear to everyone that there was a link”.And he concluded the optics of Zelenskiy announcing investigations were more important than them actually taking place. “He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.”The 19-page opening statement was a potential death blow to Trump’s fight against impeachment, demolishing talking points made by House Republicans and conservative media. The president himself, however, attempted to downplay its significance, noting that Sondland testified about a conversation in which Trump had denied to him there was a quid pro quo.“I said to the ambassador in response, I want nothing,” Trump told reporters, reading from notes scrawled with a Sharpie in big capital letters before boarding the Marine One helicopter at the White House. “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelenskiy, President Zelenskiy to do the right thing.”Trump’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House would put him on trial in the Senate, but a Republican majority there seems likely to acquit him and keep him in office.Sondland’s evidence also raises questions over the future of Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who pushed hard for the investigations in Ukraine despite having no official diplomatic role. Giuliani, who had business interests of his own in Ukraine, has refused to testify or hand over documents to the impeachment investigation despite a subpoena.Trump told him to “talk with Rudy” about Ukraine, Sondland recalled, and he reluctantly agreed, even though it did not seem appropriate to go through the president’s personal lawyer.“We did not want to work with Mr Giuliani. Simply put, we played the hand we were dealt … So we followed the president’s orders.”The Brussels-based ambassador, who has no previous foreign policy experience, defended his own conduct and said he acted in good faith. He also said he was always opposed to the suspension of aid to Ukraine because of the country’s need to fight against Russian aggression.Sondland adamantly denied involvement in “some irregular or rogue diplomacy” that departed from White House policy, claiming that he kept state department and national security council officials informed of his activities.“Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland told the hearing. “It was no secret.”This included the vice-president, Mike Pence, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. There was a swift response from Pence’s office. Marc Short, his chief of staff, said: “The vice-president never had a conversation with Gordon Sondland about investigating the Bidens, Burisma or the conditional release of financial aid to Ukraine based upon potential investigations.”Morgan Ortagus, a state department spokesperson, denied that Sondland ever told Pompeo he believed Trump was linking Ukraine aid to investigations of political opponents.Sondland also testified about a phone call he had with Trump from a restaurant in Kyiv. Previous witnesses have testified they overheard Trump asking, “So he’s going to do the investigation?” and Sondland replying, “He’s going to do it” because Zelenskiy will “do anything you ask him to”.On Wednesday, Sondland told the committee: “While I cannot remember the precise details – again, the White House has not allowed me to see any readouts of that call – the July 26 call did not strike me as significant at the time.“Actually, I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations … However, I have no recollection of discussing Vice-President Biden or his son on that call or after the call ended.”Asked by Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman whether he told Trump that Zelenskiy “loves your ass”, as has been relayed to the inquiry, Sondland replied in a moment of levity: “Sounds like something I would say. That’s how President Trump and I communicate. A lot of four-letter words. In this case a three-letter.”Sondland appeared relaxed despite the high stakes, cracking jokes at various moments. Told that another witness called him “the Gordon problem”, Sondland shot back: “That’s what my wife calls me.”But there was tense moments too. Sondland had already changed his closed-door testimony to admit the existence of a quid pro quo. When he told Congressman Sean Maloney of New York that he resented his tone, Maloney snapped back: “We appreciate your candor, but let’s be really clear what it took to get it out of you.”Despite the onslaught, Republicans stood firm in defence of Trump. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, dismissed “supposed bombshells” in Sondland’s testimony and repeated his complaint that Democrats refuse to call Biden’s son, Hunter, as a witness. “In their mania to attack the president, no conspiracy theory is too outlandish for the Democrats,” he said.But their coordinated effort did little to stem the bleeding. Democrat Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, told Sondland, who looked restlessly around the room: “This is a seminal moment in our investigation and the evidence you have brought forward is deeply significant and troubling.”George Conway, a lawyer and Trump critic married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, drew comparison with a crucial figure in the Watergate hearings that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation. “This is a John Dean moment,” he wrote. “It will live forever in American political history.” Topics Trump impeachment inquiry Donald Trump news

Illustration by Sara Andreasson for HuffPostThis story is part of Pain in America, a nine-part series looking at some of the underlying causes of the opioid addiction crisis and how we treat pain.The story we’ve been telling about the opioid overdose crisis in the United States, says civil rights lawyer Kate Nicholson, is a tidy narrative: Big Pharma pushed potent narcotic painkillers, doctors overprescribed them, people got addicted, and many ended up dead in the street. “It’s a lovely story with an evil villain and duped doctors and innocent victims,” she says. But the truth isn’t so simple. Nicholson lived with chronic pain for a decade and a half after suffering nerve damage from surgery. It didn’t happen right away, but came on suddenly a year later. She was 30, sitting in her Washington, D.C., office, when a searing pain shot through her back. The pain spread, and it stayed. She spent three years in agony, unable to sit, barely able to stand, using a walker to get around. She was often bedridden. She resisted her doctors’ suggestions to take prescription narcotics. It was the late 1990s. OxyContin had recently come on the market, prescriptions were on the rise, and Nicholson worried about the risk of addiction. But after exhausting all other options, she started on methadone and oxycodone. They worked. Seventeen years later, when the opioid overdose crisis captured the nation’s attention, she found herself fighting to get the pills she needed to function. Since 2016, two-thirds of states have passed laws that limit how much of an opioid painkiller doctors can prescribe, and how many days they can prescribe them for. Hospitals, insurers and pharmacy chains imposed maximum dosage and duration rules, and drug enforcement has targeted doctors deemed as overprescribers, without a clear definition of what that actually constitutes. Doctors, often wary of oversight, are swiftly reining in prescriptions. “Suddenly everyone wanted to fix this problem,” says Nicholson. “There was just this rush of regulation and simplistic, one-size-fits-all approaches to a condition that’s so broad and so varied.” That approach has left many people who rely on opioids for pain management, and the people who treat them, with fewer options. It also ignores what drove so much prescribing in the first place, and why opioids are so widely used: They are the most effective drugs currently available for treating many kinds of pain. And the reason that’s true is because we still don’t truly understand the science of pain.People have treated pain with opioids for millennia. Scholars say 8,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablets may have been the first prescriptions for opium, from poppies. Its use has been documented all over the world, from ancient Greece to China and the New World. Opium was known for creating a feeling of euphoria, which made it an attractive sedative and pain reliever. In the early 1800s, a German scientist first isolated the active ingredient in opium to make morphine. By the turn of the century, addiction to morphine and opium reached epidemic levels in the United States. Meanwhile, back in Germany, the new pharmaceutical arm of the chemical company Bayer was developing an opioid drug that was believed to be more potent than morphine and less addictive. They named it heroin. Today there are around two dozen forms of opioid analgesics, also known as narcotic analgesics, including morphine, oxycodone (used in brand-name medications such as OxyContin, Percodan and Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin) and hydromorphone (Dilaudid).The wide-ranging actions of opioids in the body are what make them so effective, so alluring and so dangerous. Opioids work as analgesics by binding to particular types of receptors in certain nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain, interrupting pain signals. They also activate circuits in parts of the brain involved in pleasure and reward, which both elicits a high and gives them their addictive potential. Acting on parts of the brain stem and other areas involved in respiration, they can slow breathing, which is often the cause of fatal overdoses.Opioids, including prescription painkillers, were involved in 46,802 overdose deaths in 2018 — more than two-thirds of all fatal drug overdoses in the U.S. that year. But most people who die from an overdose involving an opioid didn’t get the drug from a doctor. Opioid prescription rates fell 28% from their peak in 2012 to 2017 amid a push for policies to reduce use and doctors tapering patients off long-term regimens. Opioid overdose deaths more than doubled over that same period. The increase in deaths was propelled in large part by the proliferation of cheap, powerful, illegally produced synthetic opioids like fentanyl. And recent studies have found that cutting off prescriptions to opioids is one reason some people suffering with pain have sought to self-medicate with illicit drugs, putting them in danger of overdose. Fentanyl deaths doubled every year from 2013 to 2016, when it overtook heroin as the top drug involved in fatal overdoses. With all the risks that come with opioids, why do we keep using them? Because they work, and because science hasn’t found anything nearly as effective for so many different kinds of pain. “We use ‘pain’ as one word, but I think it reflects a panoply of different disorders,” says David Julius, chair of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, who has spent decades trying to understand how humans perceive pain.Pain can be recovery from a broken ankle or a pulled wisdom tooth. It can be migraines, or backaches, or the burning of chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, or debilitating sickle cell episodes. Pain can be in muscles, bones, nerves. Pain has long been treated with a very limited arsenal of drugs that don’t precisely distinguish between one type of pain and another. The biggest reason is that scientists don’t yet understand all the mechanisms that cause pain, Julius says. “You got to understand how things work before you can fix them. Otherwise you’re taking potshots in the dark.”The path of pain starts with sensory neurons that activate in response to a stimulus. From there, the neural signal travels to the spinal cord and up into the brain. It’s a chain that gets more complicated the further up you go, and there are mysteries at every step that scientists are still trying to unravel. Julius’ work focuses on the first step: what is happening on a cellular level when you feel pain. In the late 1990s, he figured out that the reason we get a burning sensation from chili peppers — or, more specifically, the capsaicin that gives them their kick — is that they activate receptors in nerve cells that also respond to painfully high heat. Julius’ lab also discovered the so-called wasabi receptor, which responds to both its pungent namesake and inflammation in the body. Researchers have since discovered dozens of these markers, but there could be hundreds more, each with the potential to help develop more targeted pain medications. And those are just the receptors involved in how sensory nerves at the periphery respond when you sprain your ankle or touch a hot stove. That kind of pain is protective; it’s what tells you to stop running or move your hand away. We understand even less about how or why pain can persist for months or years after injured tissue has healed. This chronic pain can limit a person’s ability to function, to work, to take care of their family. And because the neural pathways in the brain that process pain overlap with ones associated with mood and emotion, it can trigger anxiety and depression, which can in turn make chronic pain feel even worse.“Those are the patients that are the most difficult to treat and the ones that really need to have new medicines discovered,” says Frank Porreca, a professor of pharmacology and anesthesiology at the University of Arizona who studies pain and the effects of opioids on the brain. For patients suffering acute and cancer pain, opioids have long been among “our most important drugs,” he says. A few decades ago, doctors started extending the same treatments to people with chronic pain, fueling the rise in opioid prescriptions. It’s a tricky proposition. While some people may get relief from the medications, there is no good data showing that they’re safe and effective when used long term. What is known, however, is that the longer a person is on opioids, the more likely they are to become addicted. Whether the benefits of opioids outweigh the risks for such patients is a murky question for doctors to answer.“The choices physicians can make are limited,” Porreca says.In many ways, the opioid overdose epidemic is a story of good intentions gone wrong. There are bad guys, to be sure. Unscrupulous pharma execs spouting unfounded claims and paying doctors to push their drugs. Unethical doctors running pill mills and flooding the streets with prescription narcotics. Dealers distributing lethally strong fentanyl. But broad assumptions that paint opioids as bad and prescribers as shills obscure legitimate efforts to ease people’s suffering and ignore how hard that is to do. “There’s a constant blurring of Purdue products and opioids in general, including cheap generic oral morphine, which costs pennies and from which no one is making a fortune,” laments Daniel Wolfe, who directs harm reduction programming at Open Society Foundations. “We work in so many countries where there is no pain relief whatsoever, including oral morphine. A terrible thing about the Purdue scandal is that it casts a pall over an entire category of medications.”The explosion in opioid prescriptions and the overdose epidemic that resulted came from a confluence of interwoven agendas, some more noble than others.In the 1980s and ’90s, pain management specialists felt that many people were being undertreated for pain. “Unlike ‘vital signs,’ pain isn’t displayed in a prominent place on the chart or at the bedside or nursing station,” wrote Mitchell Max, then president of the American Pain Society, in a 1990 editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The APS began to encourage doctors and nurses to routinely monitor pain like they would the four vital signs — blood pressure, pulse, breathing rate and temperature — and not to be afraid to treat with opioids as well as nonopioid analgesics, a well established combination for patients with cancer or acute pain following injury or surgery. It also suggested that hospitals hold formal reviews to ensure that patients were satisfied with how well their doctors addressed their pain. Opioid prescriptions were already on the rise at that point. Doctors were giving them to patients with chronic, noncancer pain, propelled in part by the belief that they came with a low risk of addiction. That belief, which would persist for decades, was based largely on badly misinterpreted information, most notably a scant, one-paragraph letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 reporting less than 1% addiction rates among patients with no history of addiction being treated with narcotic painkillers while hospitalized. “The acceleration in the use of opioids for chronic pain that happened in the ’80s and ’90s was not based on strong science,” says Rosemary Polomano, professor of pain practice at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. By the early 2000s, the notion of pain as “the fifth vital sign” caught on, as influential organizations like the Veterans Health Administration and The Joint Commission, which certifies and writes standards for health care practices, started using it. The Joint Commission’s standards encouraged hospitals to have patients rate their pain on a 10-point scale to give clinicians quantitative information on which to base treatment decisions.But unlike blood pressure or temperature, pain is not an objective measure. “You can ask a patient, ‘How much pain do you have?’” says Porreca. “But there’s no blood test. You can’t measure pain.” Because pain is subjective (and subject to mood), such ratings aren’t totally reliable measurements. Still, doctors used the ratings to routinely assess their patients’ pain, and hospitals used them to routinely assess their doctors’ performances in pursuit of better marks for patient satisfaction. Worries started to grow in the medical community that the edict to treat pain more vigorously would lead to overuse of opioids. Concerned its message was being taken more literally and applied more broadly than intended, The Joint Commission removed references to the fifth vital sign from its standards within three years, but the notion had already taken hold. “Rather than seeing the phrase as an analogy to draw attention to the need for improved assessment ... some organizations interpreted this to mean that pain needed to be assessed every time vital signs were taken,” one commission executive explained recently in a JAMA op-ed. “There were also signs that some clinicians had become overzealous in treating pain.”The increased focus on treating pain came at a perfect time for Purdue, which had begun aggressively marketing its new long-acting opioid, OxyContin, in 1996. The company’s army of sales reps claimed it was effective for many types of non-cancer-related pain with a lower likelihood of abuse and addiction than similar drugs already on the market. Sales of OxyContin ballooned to $1.5 billion by 2002. Five years later, Purdue pleaded guilty to intentionally misbranding the drug as less addictive. The company paid $600 million in fines. Opioid sales overall had quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, as did the number of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids.Knee-jerk adherence to new standards inflated the use of opioid pain medicines that helped create the overdose crisis. Current attempts to solve the problem are repeating old mistakes in reverse. New regulations focus on limiting doctors’ ability to prescribe opioids, which can result in undertreatment of pain, the very thing clinicians were trying to avoid 30 years ago. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released opioid prescribing guidelines to help primary care doctors safely and effectively treat patients with chronic pain. The guidelines included a dozen detailed recommendations for assessing a patient’s needs and appropriate interventions to try. Practitioners, hospitals, insurers and state governments seized on the CDC guidelines, often interpreting dosage recommendations as hard and fast limits for prescribing, and working them into practice standards, reimbursement strategies and laws. That was not, the authors clarified last year, the agency’s intention. While these efforts were “laudable,” they wrote, “unfortunately, some policies and practices purportedly derived from the guideline have in fact been inconsistent with, and often go beyond, its recommendations.”Doctors, fearing that prescribing above those thresholds could result in malpractice lawsuits, having their medical licenses revoked, or arrest, began reducing or stopping their patients’ opioid prescriptions, even for those who’d had long-term success on the medications and were not addicted. “Now the pendulum is swinging a little too far away from opioids for any circumstances, and that’s just not correct,” says Porreca. “There are patients that should be treated with opioids for their pain. That should not be overlooked.”Kate Nicholson had tried everything her doctors could think of before she started taking opioid medications for her chronic pain: steroids, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, nerve blocks, infusions, catheters in her spine and surgery. Nothing helped.“Once all of those things had been tried,” Nicholson tells HuffPost, “my doctors sat me down and said, ‘We are going to take a different approach. We have put you through painful procedure after painful procedure. We have an oath to do no harm — we want to put you on opioids.’”She started a regimen of daily methadone, plus oxycodone for breakthrough pain, which she stayed on for 17 years.The drugs allowed her to get back to work, though she was still limited in her ability to sit, stand or walk. She once argued a federal case while reclining in a folding lawn chair. In 2014, she moved from Washington, D.C., to Boulder, Colorado, for fresh air and a slower pace. There, she came face to face with the problem of doctors afraid to prescribe opioid pain medications. A well respected local physician had been arrested in a Drug Enforcement Administration sting for allegedly overprescribing oxycodone. The medical community was shaken.“I was already going down [in dosage] on the opioids,” Nicholson recalls. “I went to the doctor and she said, ‘I won’t prescribe opioids to you anymore and you won’t find anyone in town who will either.’ And in fact, I couldn’t find anyone.” She flew back to D.C. and got her doctors there to put her on a plan to taper off the medications safely. Thanks to the careful long-term care of her treatment team at Johns Hopkins and new surgical techniques — accessible because she had good health insurance and the money to buy plane tickets — her pain ultimately subsided. Most don’t have the resources Nicholson did. That’s why, for the last few years, she has been working as an advocate, trying to ensure that people who need opioids to function don’t lose their medications in the response to the overdose crisis.Some states have imposed limits on how much of an opioid medication will be covered under Medicaid, putting low-income Americans with chronic pain at risk of losing their medication. Last year, Oregon’s health authority was forced to walk back a controversially stringent policy requiring doctors to taper their Medicaid patients off opioids. The federal agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid was also pressured to change a proposal that would have put a lock on prescriptions of 90 morphine milligram equivalents or above. “Marketing and overprescribing played a role in creating the crisis, but now that you have created tens of thousands of people who need this medication, you can’t just turn off the tap and say, ‘Sorry we made a mistake,’ and think people won’t suffer intensely or turn to illegal sources,” says Wolfe. “‘Do no harm’ seems to have been lost from the equation.”While the role opioids should play in pain management is still in question, it’s become clear that doctors need better science, smarter standards and new, less-addictive treatment options. There’s a strong effort to find alternatives. The National Institutes of Health’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term program, or HEAL, committed $945 million last year to 400 research projects aimed at reducing and treating opioid use disorder and improving pain management, particularly for chronic pain. That includes studies to identify the proper use of opioids for particular conditions and patient populations, as well as the work of researchers such as David Julius at UCSF to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain. But drug development takes time. In the meantime, policies — at hospitals, insurers, and at the state and federal levels — need to incentivize the use of alternative therapies, and treatments that employ multiple classes of pain medication to reduce reliance on opioid drugs. There are also efforts to improve how prescribing guidelines are written to help doctors — especially general practitioners, as well as pharmacists and nurse practitioners — make better-informed decisions based on the best available science when treating people with a range of medical needs and risk factors for addiction or substance use disorder.“We don’t have all these other ways of treating pain that are accessible and evidence based,” said Nicholson. “We made a lot of mistakes that we need to correct. But we need to do it well.”Need help with substance use disorder or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.

Pete Buttigieg appears to be, at the final count, the winner of the 2020 Iowa caucuses. But the story isn’t quite over yet. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has said it will ask the Iowa Democratic Party to recanvass some of the vote.Regardless, after a glitch-filled and laborious counting of votes, a narrow victory in earned delegates is a vital validation for the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s presidential campaign, which was initially treated as more of a curiosity than a serious bid for the White House a year ago. It has certainly shaken up the race, giving Buttigieg an opening to make a serious run for the nomination — and he has been surging in the polls in New Hampshire ahead of that state’s primary on Tuesday. The question is where the race goes from here. Because these are the results Democrats have, and now the primary contest will move on.As the New York Times reported last week, the results in Iowa initially appeared to be “riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws.” It looked bad:According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.The Times did point out that the effects did not appear to be biased toward any candidate, making it more likely they were simply unintentional mistakes. The overall effect on the results therefore might have been small. On Sunday night, the Iowa Democratic Party released its final count, with some alterations made after political observers noticed apparent errors, and Buttigieg kept his edge.But that likely won’t satisfy many, as Vox’s Riley Beggin reported: The review that concluded Sunday was requested by the Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders campaigns over concerns of inconsistencies between the reported results and official records. It did not involve recounting any results. According to emails reviewed by the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel, an Iowa Democratic Party lawyer said the party could not change the voting records tallied on caucus worksheets even if blatant mistakes were found in the review, because doing so would violate election law. The lawyer said the only way to correct mistakes — other than those made in the reporting of the worksheets — would be a formal recount. The deadline for the campaigns to challenge those results doesn’t come until 1 pm on Monday. The Sanders campaign said on Sunday night that it would ask for a recanvass for some of the results. NEW: The @BernieSanders campaign plans to ask for a recanvass of some Iowa precincts before the Monday 1 pm deadline, @fshakir tells @ryanobles— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) February 10, 2020 It was a messy end to a process that always seemed more likely to yield messy results.Iowa released its results based on “state delegate equivalents” — that is, after the initial vote on caucus night and then a second vote limited to only candidates who got 15 percent of the first vote, each precinct tallied how many delegates would go to each candidate. Those county-level delegates are then translated into “state delegate equivalents” — how many delegates each candidate will have at the Iowa state convention later that year. By that admittedly rather convoluted metric, Buttigieg narrowly beat Sanders at the caucuses.Buttigieg may have gotten the most state delegate equivalents, but Sanders earned the most votes on the initial vote at the caucuses across the state, in both the first and second round. His campaign will try to lean on that win in the “popular vote” to build momentum heading into New Hampshire, the next state on the primary calendar, where Sanders has been consistently leading in the polls. Buttigieg’s edge in state delegates is largely a reflection of his geographic spread: He was winning 60 counties to Sanders’s 18 as of Wednesday night. Because the state delegate math is based at the county level, that proved to be a big advantage for Buttigieg. Political forecasters thought he needed to win Iowa to have any chance at the nomination. He’s done that, but once the New Hampshire primary is over this week, the electoral terrain will become more diverse and therefore more challenging to the young white millennial ex-mayor.Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts took third place. Political forecasters thought she needed at least a top-three finish to remain viable, and Warren cleared that threshold. New Hampshire will be critical for her. Former Vice President Joe Biden came in back in fourth place, a very disappointing finish for the national polling leader, who may have been at a disadvantage in the ground game that is so important for caucuses.Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren, and Biden will all win delegates for the Democratic National Convention in July, when the party’s presidential nominee will be anointed. The Iowa Democratic Party said Buttigieg would receive 14 national delegates, Sanders would get 12, Warren eight, and Biden six. Remember, nearly 4,000 delegates will be awarded over the next few months and a candidate needs half of them to win the nomination. There’s a long way to go.Amy Klobuchar, the senator from neighboring Minnesota, finished with more than 12 percent of the state delegate equivalents and she will win one DNC delegate, according to the state party.If you want the full retelling of the technical problems for these caucuses — which went undeclared for five days before, in the end, no winner was declared — read this story from Vox’s Emily Stewart. In brief, Iowa tested out a new app for precincts to report its results, and it’s been a disaster:Part of the problem was the new app to report results, made by a tech company called Shadow and backed by a Democratic dark money group named Acronym, wasn’t working as intended. Many precinct chairs reported problems downloading and using the apps, and while the Iowa Democratic Party had backup systems in place, including a hotline for reporting results and a paper trail, a lot of those didn’t work seamlessly, either. New rules around results reporting have exposed a multitude of errors in precinct tallies and recordings.It wasn’t just the app, though. The Democratic Party insisted on implementing new rules for the caucuses (Iowa and Nevada are the only early states that still have them), which may not have been translated well to the caucus-goers or captains. Untangling the inconsistencies took the party days before fully reporting the results. New Hampshire will hold its first-in-the-nation primary, without any of the wonky caucus mechanics, on Tuesday. Will you help keep Vox free for all? Millions of people rely on Vox to understand how the policy decisions made in Washington, from health care to unemployment to housing, could impact their lives. 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ASSOCIATED PRESS As Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) was out on the campaign trail, one of her supporters went under the needle to show her love of the presidential candidate. Jaedyn Brockway, a first-year student at Iowa State University, told HuffPost on Saturday that the idea was spurred by her encounter with Harris at the Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines, where nearly all of the crowded field of 2020 Democrats appeared last month. Brockway, a Harris campaign volunteer, was meeting the candidate for the first time when she took the opportunity to speak to her about gun violence, which concerned her both in high school and now at college. “She heard me out and she made me feel like I wasn’t alone,” Brockway said. “In that interaction I was crying hardcore and she was like, ‘It’s a sign of strength to show emotion.’” From that moment on, Brockway said she realized, “That’s smart. It is.” “I should never feel ashamed of crying over something that matters so much to me.” In a call to action on gun control, Harris shared a video of their conversation on Twitter. "I just don't want to die." Leaders in Congress who fail to have the courage to act on gun violence are traumatizing an entire generation of students. pic.twitter.com/JMWrg9SSKD— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 23, 2019 During a subsequent stop at a Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America event, Brockway asked Harris to jot down the phrase on a slip of paper. “She wrote it down and then I called every tattoo shop in Ames to see who could take a walk-in,” Brockway said. Within an hour, it was on her arm. Last week, when Harris returned to Des Moines, Brockway showed off her new ink, announcing to the candidate, “I got you tattooed!” “Oh, dear Lord,” Harris said. “Oh, my God. You did! That’s my handwriting! Honored you took my words to heart (and arm), @jaedyn01_ ♥️ pic.twitter.com/44J6nOgCu4— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) October 18, 2019 — j (@jaedyn01_) October 8, 2019 “I wasn’t nervous ― it was more just like a surreal moment,” Brockway said of the big reveal. “I got to show my idol.” Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

It's Thursday, Nov. 20, 2019. Let's start here.1. Sondland's spotlightThe Ukrainian president would get a meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump if he opened investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, according to Sondland, who noted that it was his "presumption" that nearly $400 million in military aid would be withheld as well, although he said Trump never told him directly that it would be.ABC News Chief Legal Analyst Dan Abrams goes through Sondland's testimony on "Start Here" and questions whether Democrats were able to make their case in the impeachment inquiry to the public."I don't think there's any question that the Democrats have demonstrated that the president was demanding investigations in exchange for a White House visit, in exchange for aid, but that doesn't necessarily mean he gets impeached and removed from office," he says.2. Democrats debateThe impeachment inquiry was top of mind for Democrats at the Democratic debate in Atlanta last night, but all eyes were also on South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg after his recent surge in the polls in Iowa.ABC News Deputy Political Director MaryAlice Parks has highlights from the debate on today's podcast."Start Here," ABC News' flagship podcast, offers a straightforward look at the day's top stories in 20 minutes. Listen for free every weekday on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn or the ABC News app. Follow @StartHereABC on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for exclusive content and show updates.Elsewhere:'Saddened, disturbed and angered': A food worker at a Texas elementary school has been arrested after allegedly placing a small hidden camera inside a boy’s bathroom.'Really proud': As Apple broke ground at its newest facility, in Texas, CEO Tim Cook said the company was proud to make its "most powerful computer ever" in the U.S., and opened up about having the president's ear and navigating business in China amid political tripwires and an ongoing trade war.'Unconscious and not breathing': A Washington State University student died four hours before fellow fraternity members first called 911 to report that he was unresponsive, investigators revealed Wednesday.'False statements': Former "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett has filed a counter lawsuit against the city of Chicago, claiming that authorities "maliciously" prosecuted him after he claimed he was attacked by two masked assailants in January.From our friends at FiveThirtyEight:'What went down in the fifth Democratic debate': One thing was certain though: Democratic candidates seemed less willing to see how far they could push each other to the left on big policy ideas. Some of the lower-tier candidates like Klobuchar and Booker managed to deliver strong performances this evening, as well. Tonight could prove pivotal for Booker’s future in the race, too, as he’s still a long shot to qualify for the Dec. 19 debate.Doff your cap:Thanksgiving is a little more than a week away but some residents in Wisconsin have been watching one star turkey for weeks.That's because a bird has been walking from home to home, keeping in step, with the postal worker who delivers the mail to the neighborhood on Tacoma Drive in Waukesha County."OK, seriously. This turkey has been stalking the mail truck throughout the entire neighborhood," resident Sherry Michaels said in a video she posted to Facebook on Monday. "Oh my God. ... This is so funny.""I can't say he's annoying. It's Thanksgiving," the mailman said. "Too close to his holiday."

White Supremacy’s Gateway to the American Mind Amazon’s self-publishing arm gives extremists and neo-Nazis banned from other platforms unprecedented access to a mass audience. Alex Merto Story by Ava Kofman, Moira Weigel, and Francis Tseng This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica.“Give me, a white man, a reason to live,” a user posted to the anonymous message board 4chan in the summer of 2017. “Should I get a hobby. What interests can I pursue to save myself from total despair. How do you go on living.”A fellow user had a suggestion: “Please write a concise book of only factual indisputable information exposing the Jews,” focusing on “their selling of our high tech secrets to China/Russia” and “their long track record of pedophilia and perversion etc.” The man seeking advice was intrigued. “And who would publish it and who would put it in their bookstores that would make it worth the trouble,” he asked.The answer came a few minutes later. “Self-publish to Amazon,” his interlocutor replied.“Kindle will publish anything,” a third user chimed in.They were basically right. It takes just a couple of minutes to upload one’s work to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon’s self-publishing arm; the ebook then shows up in the world’s largest bookstore within half a day, typically with minimal oversight. Since its founding more than a decade ago, KDP has democratized the publishing industry and earned praise for giving authors shut out of traditional channels the chance to reach an audience that would have been previously unimaginable.It has also afforded the same opportunity to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, an investigation by ProPublica and The Atlantic has found. Releases include Anschluss: The Politics of Vesica Piscis, a polemic that praises the “grossly underappreciated” massacre of 77 people by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011, and The White Rabbit Handbook, a manifesto linked to an Illinois-based militia group facing federal hate-crime charges for firebombing a mosque. (Amazon removed the latter last week following questions from ProPublica). About 200 of the 1,500 books recommended by the Colchester Collection, an online reading room run by and for white nationalists, were self-published through Amazon. And new KDP acolytes are born every day: Members of fringe groups on 4chan, Discord, and Telegram regularly tout the platform’s convenience, according to our analysis of thousands of conversations on those message boards. There are “literally zero hoops,” one user in 4chan’s /pol/ forum told another in 2015. “Just sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing and publish away. It’s shocking how simple it is, actually.” Even Breivik, at the start of the 1,500-page manifesto that accompanied his terrorist attack, suggested that his followers use KDP’s paperback service, among others, to publicize his message.That these books are widely available on Amazon does not seem to be an accident, but the inevitable consequence of the company’s business strategy. Interviews with more than two dozen former Amazon employees suggest that the company’s drive for market share and philosophical aversion to gatekeepers have incubated an anything-goes approach to content: Virtually no idea is too inflammatory, and no author is off-limits. As major social networks and other publishing platforms have worked to slowly ban extremists, Amazon has emerged as their safe space, a haven from which they can spread their message into mainstream American culture with little more than a few clicks.“There is a lot of extremist content on Amazon,” says J. M. Berger, who studies such works as a fellow with the European Union–funded VOX-Pol research network. “The platform has gone largely overlooked because, understandably, we think of books differently than other content. But these products are for sale and they’re being algorithmically pushed.” We tested the recommendations for many far-right texts and discovered several that could lead users down a hate-filled rabbit hole, where the suggested books reinforce a white-nationalist worldview. For ebooks that retail from $2.99 and $9.99, authors keep 70 percent of the profits and Amazon takes the rest. (Amazon doesn’t break out revenue for book sales or its self-publishing arm).“As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “That includes books that some may find objectionable, though we have policies governing which books can be listed for sale. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove products that do not adhere to our guidelines. We also promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised.”The growing influence of social networks on political life has prompted a national debate about what should stay up on these platforms, what should come down, who’s to blame, and who decides. Following the deadly far-right violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and PayPal cracked down on the activities of white supremacists and hate groups on their platforms. In recent years, Amazon has barred several high-profile white-supremacist authors, including the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, from its bookstore. It does occasionally pull extremist books from KDP, sometimes months or years after publication, and often in secret, without providing any explanation to authors or readers. But these removals appear to be the exception. KDP’s terse policies do not address hate speech, racism, or incitements to violence, though Amazon reserves the right to remove any items from its store, including “content that disappoints our customers” or fails to “provide an enjoyable reading experience.” By and large, Amazon, which in the United States controls about half of the market for all books and close to 90 percent for ebooks, has become a gateway for white supremacists to reach the American reading public.The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Billy Roper “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism”; Roper calls himself “the most widely read living fiction author in the white-nationalist movement.” For several decades, he has led some of the white-nationalist movement’s most hard-core factions, and today he runs the Shield Wall Network, a group attempting to build a whites-only ethno-state in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, where he lives. (The group made headlines last year for organizing a protest of a Holocaust-remembrance event, at which they shouted the slogan “6 million more.”)Roper is also a prolific author. Since 2014, he has uploaded 17 books of fiction and nonfiction to Amazon’s self-publishing platform. His best-known work is the Hasten the Day trilogy, which takes place in the years after the United States has balkanized into multiple warring ethno-states—an outcome Roper considers inevitable. “I was trying to find a fictional way of expressing my political ideas,” Roper told us, “because a lot of people find fiction more palatable than nonfiction when it comes to accepting an idea that they’re not otherwise comfortable with.” For those who fail to grasp the trilogy’s political message, racist quotations from Thomas Jefferson and David Duke are interspersed throughout the text. In The Balk, an essay collection self-published in 2015, Roper asks readers to imagine themselves in the world he depicts in his fiction. “If your cousin showed up with his Mexican girlfriend and their half-Mexican kids in the middle of a race war and wanted refuge, that could put you automatically on a whole different side,” he writes, advising that “the best way to accomplish discrimination is through prejudice, beforehand. Be prejudiced, and discriminate.”In a phone interview in February, Roper said he has had his accounts suspended on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and VK, a Russian alternative to Facebook—but not Amazon. Having his books on the platform, he said, grants him legitimacy and attracts new audiences. “My existence there has been beneficial in reaching people with my message and growing my organization,” he said. “People can go to Amazon—which is mainstream and acceptable; there’s nothing radical about that—order a book, and in the privacy of their own home they can read the book without ever having to visit a white-nationalist website.”Roper is also active on Goodreads, the Amazon-owned social network for readers, where he frequently posts about giveaways, pitches his novels to book clubs, and tries to spark discussion of “pro-white” books—a popular recruiting tactic, according to Berger, the VOX-Pol researcher. Among the topics discussed in Roper’s “European American Reading Group” is whether it’s useful to read books by “jews and the opposition.”Before the internet, Roper’s reach would have likely been limited by bookstores’ shelf space and curatorial judgement. But in today’s world of digital abundance, far-right authors have enjoyed a newfound visibility. Gary Lauck, the leader of NSDAP/AO, an American neo-Nazi party, used to rely on snail mail to smuggle neo-Nazi propaganda into Germany and other European countries where it’s been banned. Today, several works published by his organization’s press are available to anyone in the U.S. and Europe on Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited, a program that offers books to readers for a subscription fee. KDP has also revived an older white-nationalist canon. Many works by historical Nazis and anti-Semites, no longer held by copyright and long out of print, have been reprinted through KDP. Members of far right chat rooms often link to them.Though books now compete with viral videos, memes, and podcasts in the rapidly expanding universe of white-nationalist cultural production, they still play an important role. Roper himself was inspired by The Turner Diaries, which depicts in gruesome detail the genocide of nonwhite people across the world. It was published in 1978 under a pseudonym by William Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance, then regarded as the most dangerous neo-Nazi group in the U.S. As of early April, it still ranked among the top 65,000 books sold on Amazon.Jeff Bezos founded Amazon with the dream of selling people whatever they wanted, when they wanted it. This wasn’t yet possible in 1994. So he started out with books, according to Brad Stone’s 2013 history of Amazon, The Everything Store. Bezos is an avid reader, especially of science fiction, but his decision was driven less by literary passion than by business acumen. Books were easy to ship yet endlessly variable. “If [Bezos] couldn’t build a true everything store right away,” Stone wrote, “he could capture its essence—unlimited selection—in at least one important product category.”From the start, Bezos was determined that nothing should interfere with the company’s relentless quest for scale. He instilled in employees an almost dogmatic rejection of gatekeepers—those intrusive editors and critics who stand between authors and readers, deciding what the public should or shouldn’t consume. “We want to make every book available—the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Bezos explained in a 1998 speech. “And when you’re doing that, you actually have an obligation—if you’re going to make the shopping environment actually conducive to shopping—to sort of let truth loose.”Even in those early days, though, he encountered pushback. In the late ’90s, a former Amazon employee told us, a rabbi wrote in to complain about the company selling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century anti-Semitic text alleging a Jewish plan for world domination. “Jeff said, ‘Who are we to decide? There’s a comments section and people will comment on the fact that this is beneath them,’” the employee recalled, noting that Bezos was disgusted by such content but concerned about acting as a censor. (Bezos did not respond to a request for comment.)Ex-Amazonians who worked in the books and video divisions said that the same rationale guided the company’s decision to stock Mein Kampf and the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl. (Many former and current employees, citing nondisclosure agreements, spoke with us anonymously.) But this desire to avoid gatekeeping occasionally conflicted with another corporate goal: to keep the site family-friendly. “We were always told that Bezos never wanted a customer to open something on their computer screen that they’d be embarrassed by at work,” a former employee said. When the store’s video division launched, Bezos decided not to sell hard-core-porn titles—one of the company’s earliest efforts at moderation. If customers typed in a search term such as XXX, they would be redirected to soft-core productions from Playboy and Penthouse instead.Amazon soon realized that it didn’t need to depend on publishers to control the supply of books; it could just as well print them itself. In 2005, the company purchased BookSurge, a pioneer of print-on-demand technology, for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2000, BookSurge shared Amazon’s populist philosophy: Its mission was to help anyone tell a story, free from the friction and costs of intermediaries. “We published everything from children’s books to erotic novels to people with fringe political views and photo books that would include adult content as well,” says Rick Jones, who directed operations for BookSurge from its beginning and stayed on after the acquistion until 2014. “It wasn’t our job to judge whether something was right or wrong. Our whole goal was to let the market and the people decide what’s of value.” Content review was anathema to this mission. Nothing was rejected, the BookSurge co-founder Jeff Schwaner told us, except when a text file didn’t meet the formatting specifications.After the purchase, Amazon renamed the company CreateSpace and ramped up its paperback output. It soon launched what’s now known as Kindle Direct Publishing to produce self-published ebooks for its new Kindle e-reader and burgeoning ebook store. (In 2018, Amazon merged CreateSpace into KDP, which now encompasses both the ebook and paperback self-publishing operations.) As the number of books expanded from a few thousand each year to tens of thousands to millions, so did Amazon’s legal risk. “It was just a mess of unregulated content, and no one was in charge of it,” one former Kindle employee remembers of this period. “It was a free-for-all. It was the Wild, Wild West.” To comb through the chaos, Amazon assembled teams to screen for copyright violations that might elicit lawsuits threatening its bottom line. According to former employees, the company’s priority—making as much content as possible available to its customers—meant that essentially everything legal was permitted.That began to change in 2010, when The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure appeared in the Kindle store. An employee on the content-evaluation team, given only a few minutes to check the self-published book for blatant copyright violations, assumed that it was a bizarre joke. He did not have the time to read it, he told us in an interview. If he had, he would have noticed that it described how to approach children and included erotic stories about positive sexual experiences between children and adults. Unsurprisingly, a PR fracas ensued. Amazon removed the book in response to the outcry—then reinstated it, and then removed it again in response to further outcry. The company introduced additional guidelines for sexual content, yet the process was still largely ad hoc, according to the former content reviewer, with decisions made by “a lot of business folks and software engineers” lacking subject-matter expertise. One debate concerned dalliances between relatives in 19th-century novels.As copyright review has become more and more automated, Amazon’s moderators have spent more time evaluating other criteria for “content appropriateness.” Still, several employees noted that the prepublication review process continues to focus more on illegal or indecent content than on hateful, derogatory, or defamatory speech. Authors uploading paperbacks are asked to self-report whether their content is “mature.” If the answer is yes, teams stationed in time zones across the globe quickly check the cover, title, and keywords for obscenities, sometimes evaluating up to 100 books an hour. “It’s a pretty destructive job,” said a former Amazonian who worked on Kindle’s policy team. “You’re seeing stuff you don’t want to see.”Amazon describes KDP as a printing service, not a publisher or social network. But Amazon’s role is by no means passive. Its recommendation algorithm uses your purchasing, browsing, and reading histories to steer you to the books you are most likely to buy, as opposed to what critics have championed or what publishers think you should read. “It actually drives me crazy when I hear Amazon’s rhetoric about getting rid of the gatekeepers, because all they’ve done is replace 1,000 small gatekeepers with one big gatekeeper,” says Shel Kaphan, who helped found Amazon and later served as its chief technology officer until 1999. “They use different criteria, but it’s no more noble than other people’s criteria. In a lot of ways, I’d prefer editorial decisions over a strategy of ‘What makes me the most money today?’”Alex MertoWhen we tested the recommendations for several of the books discussed in far-right chat rooms, we found that many of Amazon’s suggestions reinforced and amplified the given book’s political ideology. For instance, the first six recommendations for Fascism for the Million—and the subsequent associated recommendations —consist exclusively of defenses of fascism, even for users for whom Amazon has stored no browsing history. (The book, inspired by the remarks of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was published by a far-right press last year.) What’s more, we found that recommendations for far-right books often overlap with and refer back to one another, creating a sort of echo chamber. Curious readers can easily click through several different clusters of books espousing anti-Semitism, nativism, Nazism, and white nationalism without encountering a text from an opposing point of view. The search algorithm also groups radical texts together. If shoppers search for the white-nationalist cult classic Siege, by James Mason, the third and fourth results shown are for works by Julius Evola, the far-right Italian ideologue cited in a 2014 lecture by Steve Bannon.Because of her research into far-right groups, Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, frequently encounters these polarized bubbles while browsing Amazon. “Amazon is pushing readers further down the road to a process of online radicalization, and it doesn’t need to do that,” she told us.For certain books, Amazon showed us not only what customers also bought but what’s “frequently bought together”—although it appears to have recently disabled the feature.When we browsed a revisionist account of the Auschwitz concentration camp in February, for instance, Amazon suggested combining it with compilations from primary sources: Goebbels on the Jews and Hitler on the Jews. Even after users buy a book and log out, Amazon keeps pushing similar books by sending promotional emails. When we purchased The Balk, Roper’s book of political essays, Amazon followed up to suggest other works of his, along with a self-published pamphlet by another far-right author that describes “the conspiracy to flood Europe with aliens.”Like other savvy authors, some white supremacists go beyond Amazon’s automated assistance to boost sales. One technique is to “category squat”—that is, classify one’s books in low-traffic or obscure categories such as “Ancient Greek History” to game their rankings. As a commentator on the 4chan /pol/ forum explained to someone interested in self-publishing on KDP, “If you pick a good niche and the book is good and you understand their search algorithm you can make a lot of money.” Jewish Privilege, by the anti-Semitic commentator E. Michael Jones, is ranked as the tenth most popular book in “LGBT Political Issues,” despite being about the alleged evils of Jewish people.Other authors manipulate their ratings by making their self-published books temporarily free so that readers can “purchase” them and leave a positive review. “ALL of my books are available for FREE in e-book form this week in exchange for an honest review on Amazon later,” Roper posted in 2017 on the neo-Nazi message board Stormfront. As a result of this behind-the-scenes lobbying, Berger says, far-right texts often seem to have better reviews than other kinds of books, which may affect how frequently Amazon recommends them. The first installment of Roper’s trilogy has 70 reviews and a rating of four out of five stars. Roper even gave the book a five-star review on Goodreads: “I liked it so much that I’m currently working on the sequel!”Amazon appears to take action against far-right texts primarily in response to high-profile complaints. Former Amazon employees have characterized the company’s moves as “reactive.” They say the company’s aversion to policing its bookstore is both philosophical (who are we to judge?) and pragmatic (no automated system could accurately screen the millions of texts uploaded each year at scale).Nevertheless, Amazon has begun to make some of the hard decisions it had previously avoided. In recent years, it has taken down hundreds of works of Holocaust denial, including a large portion of the catalog of Castle Hill Publishers, a revisionist press. In 2019, it banned several books by Greg Johnson and his white-nationalist publishing house, Counter-Currents. It has also removed works by the alt-right influencer known as Roosh and the Islamophobic author Tommy Robinson, both of whom had self-published through KDP. And in March, following decades of campaigns by Jewish organizations, the retailer blocked editions of Mein Kampf sold by third-party merchants or reprinted through KDP; the book can still be purchased directly through Amazon.When the retailer decides to drop a publisher or remove a book, it offers no explanation, no appeals process, and little to no warning. “Amazon will be as ambiguous as possible, and when they terminate or suspend accounts, they will essentially imply, You know what you did and shame on you,” says Dale L. Roberts, who hosts a popular YouTube channel about the self-publishing business. Its notice to authors is “very generic copy and paste.”This opacity makes it difficult for authors and readers to know how and why these decisions are made. For instance, while books such as Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto have been removed from the site, self-published manifestos such as The Declaration of White Independence and Foundations of the 21st Century: The Philosophy of White Nationalism remain for sale. We also came across nearly a dozen Holocaust-skeptic books still available on Amazon, including some for sale in Germany, where such texts can be illegal. In response to our questions, Amazon took three of them down. It declined to share information about the number of books it’s taken down, its internal policies, or how it enforces them.Amazon’s ambiguous guidelines are not without reason. Given the company’s prominence in the marketplace, overly broad content restrictions might threaten literary expression as a whole. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for instance, was a fascist, an anti-Semite, and a Holocaust denier; he also wrote Journey to the End of the Night, which is among the most acclaimed works of French fiction. “Even if a book contains hate speech, it may be that it’s quoting other people’s hate speech or has other social, historical, or literary merit,” says Eric Goldman, a leading First Amendment and content-moderation expert. It would be misguided to apply to a book-length essay or novel the same policies that attempt to govern tweets and Facebook posts, he adds.Hate speech is also notoriously difficult to define. “There’s still nothing like consensus about what extremism even is in general, let alone when you get down to what’s considered to be a controversial and difficult decision about the whole of a book,” Berger says. “Even I, who’ve studied elements of this, would be hesitant to say that there’s any easy recipe to decide what stays and what goes.”Smaller self-publishing companies say they have taken a more proactive stance. Lulu, Smashwords, and Kobo all explicitly prohibit authors from self-publishing discriminatory or hateful content through their platforms. Representatives from each company spoke with us about navigating the tension between free expression and fomenting hate. “We don’t enjoy acting as a gatekeeper,” Mark Coker, the Smashwords founder and CEO, said. “We don’t enjoy serving as arbiter of what’s acceptable and what’s not. But it’s a responsibility we have to take on.”Lulu and Smashwords have banned Roper from using their platforms in recent years. (Roper has not uploaded his works to Kobo.) When Smashwords terminated Roper’s account, a representative explained that it was because his work was “advocating hateful, discriminatory or racist views or actions toward others,” according to emails shared with us by Smashwords.Even KDP has taken a second look at Roper’s work. Last year, it removed two of the 17 books he’s self-published on the platform, both compilations of nonfiction essays and blog posts, stating simply that the books were “in violation of our content guidelines.” To Roper, this choice seemed arbitrary and misguided, especially because one of the titles taken down, The Ethnostate, includes a full reprinting of his book The Balk, which is still available for purchase. As he sees it, the two prohibited books are the least provocative of his writings. “My novels describe war and violence and bloodshed and death, and even, in a couple of the books, genocide—literal racial genocide—in no uncertain terms,” Roper said. But based on its choices, he said, Amazon seems to find his essays more offensive “than me literally typing out 1,000 pages describing races torturing and murdering one another until one or the other become extinct.”In the past two weeks, as more Americans have sheltered in place to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, Roper said he’s seen a spike in his Amazon sales. He wonders whether it’s because his vision of impending social collapse has begun to resonate with more readers. Or perhaps, he said, “people got bored with Netflix.” Ava Kofmanis a technology reporter at ProPublica. Connect Twitter Moira Weigelis a writer and a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. She is the author ofLabor of Love: The Invention of Dating. Francis Tsengis lead independent researcher at the Jain Family Institute.