Dies at 93

Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman Supreme Court justice, dies at 93

She was a pivotal figure during her 24 years on the court.

By PUJA MURGAI and DAVID COHEN

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice, died Friday morning in Phoenix, Arizona. She was 93.

It was announced in October 2018 that she had been diagnosed with dementia. In a letter, she wrote: “As this condition has progressed, I am no longer able to participate in public life.”

Throughout her 24-year term on the bench, O’Connor voted on some of the most contentious issues the court has faced, including affirmative action and abortion. One of her most influential roles was in the 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore, as she joined justices Anthony Kennedy, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in a decision that led to George W. Bush’s 2000 election win.

In 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her role in transforming the American judiciary, paving the way for women to join what had been a men’s only club. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have also joined the nation’s highest court since she was appointed in 1981.

“A judge and Arizona legislator, cancer survivor, child of the Texas plains, Sandra Day O’Connor is like the pilgrim in the poem she sometimes quotes, who has forged a new trail and built a bridge behind her for all young women to follow,” President Barack Obama said at the ceremony when she was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, recognizing O’Connor for both her journey to the Supreme Court and the role she played throughout her tenure.

O’Connor, raised in eastern Arizona, said she had wanted to be a rancher as an adult, but she left her family’s enormous cattle ranch, which was 22 miles from the nearest school, to live in El Paso with her grandmother from kindergarten through 12th grade. She graduated high school at 16 and attended Stanford, where she earned both her bachelor’s in economics and her law degree.

Her job search was far less successful, though, as she was turned away from one potential employer after another. “I called at least 40 … firms asking for an interview, and not one of them would give me an interview. I was a woman, and they said, ‘We don’t hire women,’” she told NPR in a March 2013 interview. “That was a shock to me. It was a total shock. It shouldn’t have been. I should have known better. I should have followed what was going on, but I hadn’t.”

O’Connor was offered one job: legal secretary.

She turned instead to the public sector, serving as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, Calif. in 1952. From 1954 to 1957, O’Connor worked as a civilian attorney in Germany, where her husband was serving in the Army. After returning to the U.S., she worked at a private practice in Arizona for two years. She was named assistant attorney general for the state in 1965, and in 1969, she was appointed to the Arizona Senate, serving three terms. She became the first female majority leader in the United States for the Arizona Senate in 1973.

Her perseverance paid off when she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan with unanimous confirmation from the Senate, replacing Justice Potter Stewart, who retired to spend more time with his grandchildren.

“I felt a special responsibility … as the first woman [in the Supreme Court]. I could either do an adequate job so it would be possible for other women to be appointed without [people] saying, ‘Oh, see, a woman can’t do it, so it became very important that I perform in a way that wouldn’t provide some reason or cause not to have more women in the future, ’” she told NPR.

Not even cancer could stand in her way, the best example of O’Connor’s tenacity. She underwent a mastectomy in October 1988 for a malignancy discovered at an early stage. In a statement from court spokeswoman Tori House, O’Connor said, “The prognosis is for total recovery. I do not anticipate missing any oral arguments.”

A moderate conservative, O’Connor was labeled a swing voter by many, as she often cast the deciding vote in high-profile cases. When it came to abortion, O’Connor started out as an opponent of it, but tended to side with liberal justices later in her tenure. In her first major abortion case in 1983, she had dissented when the majority voted to strike down an Ohio ordinance that prohibited a doctor from performing an abortion on a minor under 15 without the consent of a parent or a court order. “The state interest in potential human life is extant throughout pregnancy,” she wrote in a dissent that pleased anti-abortion activists.

However, in 1992, O’Connor cast the decisive vote to uphold the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had made abortion legal nationwide. She broke with the conservative members of the court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in the case, which solidified the foundation on which Roe was built on while also expanded the authority to regulate it.

In that case, she and Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter emphasized the importance of precedent: “The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decisions on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not as compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make.“

In 2003, she was the decisive vote in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case that affirmed the right of colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions. That same year, she was part of a 5-4 majority in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld most of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Still, O’Connor rejected the notion that she was a swing voter. “I don’t like that term. … I don’t think any justice — and I hope I was not one — would swing back and forth and just try to make decisions not based on legal principles but on where you thought the direction should go,” she said during her interview on NPR.

O’Connor stepped down in January 2006 to take care of her husband, who had Alzheimer’s, and was succeeded by Samuel Alito.

O’Connor had a lasting impact on the court itself, which hadn’t been designed for women to serve on the bench. The first women’s bathroom was designated near the courtroom after she was appointed. “We had to find something in the way of a restroom that was near the courtroom that I would be able to use. … I think I just borrowed one there that kind of became the one that I could use,” she said.

The court’s Ladies Dining Room, which had been used for spouses of the justices, was renamed the Dorothy Cornell Rehnquist Dining Room after Rehnquist’s wife. “Suddenly you have a justice who is a woman, and her spouse is a man. Are you going to continue to call that room the Ladies Dining Room?” historian Jim O’Hara was quoted in “From Supreme Court: A C-Span Book Featuring the Justices in Their Own Words.”

After leaving the court, O’Connor launched iCivics in 2006, a website to help children understand the political process through games that teach them about the three branches of government, campaigning and polling voters, paving the way for future political leaders.

“I cannot know how she would have fared as a legal secretary,” Obama said when she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “but she made a mighty fine justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

Steal ’em

Hey, Greece! You want your marbles back? Steal ’em

Coming soon to a movie theater near you, The Great Elgin Marbles Caper.

BY PAUL DALLISON

What’s all the fuss about the Elgin Marbles? You can’t even play actual marbles with them!

The governments in Athens and London have spent the week sniping at each other over the Elgin Marbles — Greece of course would prefer that we call them Parthenon Sculptures, but that sounds a little too much like a mid-1970s prog rock band — after British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canceled a meeting with his counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a decision Athens dubbed “unprecedented” and “disrespectful.”

Anyway, if Greece really does want the marbles back, it’s going about it all wrong. Don’t rely on diplomacy, that never works (as a reminder, the EU’s top diplomat is Josep “Take foot, put foot squarely in mouth, speak” Borrell), just steal them!

I’m not sure that theft from the British Museum is even classed as a crime (POLITICO’s lawyers would like me to point out that theft of any kind is a crime and that my suggested defense for stealing from the British Museum — irony — has no basis in the law).

But it’s not as if theft from the British Museum hasn’t happened before. Back in September, the museum launched a website and email hotline requesting help that might lead to the recovery of 2,000 artifacts with a net value of millions of pounds believed to have been stolen from its collections. Police released a list of suspects in their hunt for the thefts: the entire world.

Alas, so far I have had no response from Hollywood bigwigs to my suggestion for the next blockbuster movie: The Great Elgin Marbles Caper, an homage to the wonderful Ealing comedies of the 1940s and 50s in which the prime minister of Greece (played by Joaquin Phoenix — I know he’s not Greek but he’s not French either and just played Napoleon), frustrated at his attempts to bring back the Elgin Marbles, gets a job as a security guard at the British Museum in an attempt to steal his country’s prized possession and return it to its rightful place, on the Acropolis. To be fair to the Brits in this whole saga, the British Museum is lovely and has nice places to eat such as the Great Court Restaurant, while the Parthenon needs some renovations. It doesn’t even have a roof!!!

But, and here’s the twist — this bit’s for you, the head of Paramount Pictures — the Greek PM makes a big mistake by discussing his plan with the clumsy, oafish owner of a local café (played by Boris Johnson — look, we can fine tune the casting later). He tips off the British authorities and the prime minister (Thandiwe Newton) orders a crack team to painstakingly create a replica of the Elgin Marbles for the Greeks to steal.

Then comes the next twist — back off, M. Night Shyamalan! — when the Brits discover the replica was so good that they accidentally gave the original to the Greeks and kept the fake version in London.

The ending’s not finished yet but it will either be everyone involved having a good old laugh at the ludicrousness of the situation, or there’s a massive war with loads of bloodshed!

Stolen Parthenon sculptures

Greek PM moves to smooth over UK marbles row, as King Charles raises eyebrows

After week of fury, Kyriakos Mitsotakis offers Rishi Sunak an olive branch.

BY NEKTARIA STAMOULI

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis moved Friday to smooth over his relationship with the U.K. after a furious row with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over the Parthenon sculptures.

“I certainly want to leave this unfortunate incident behind me, but it always takes two to tango,” Mitsotakis said in an interview with Bloomberg Television while in Dubai for the COP28 climate summit.

Sunak was scheduled to meet Mitsotakis on Tuesday, but the British leader abruptly called off the talks late Monday after Mitsotakis gave an interview to the BBC in which he insisted upon the return of the Parthenon Marbles, the ancient sculptures that Britain’s Lord Elgin removed from Greece in the 19th century.

“In the spirit of long-standing good relations our two countries have, which I surely intend to preserve, I don’t have much to add,” Mitsotakis said, adding that he hasn’t spoken to Sunak since the incident.

The frenzy over the unprecedented diplomatic row continues to titillate the Greek media, which noted that King Charles III appeared to take a stand for Greece by choosing to wear a tie bearing the Greek flag.

King Charles III wore the tie and a blue and white pocket square while in Dubai, where he had a brief meeting with Sunak.

Earlier this week, one Greek newspaper didn’t mince any words.

“Fuck you bastard!” screamed the front page of tabloid “Eleftheri Ora” at Sunak earlier this week.

Blows up two railway connections

Ukraine blows up two railway connections between Russia and China

Kyiv’s saboteurs strike deep in enemy territory, with Russian media reporting that authorities are investigating it as a terror attack.

BY VERONIKA MELKOZEROVA

Ukraine’s security service blew up railway connections linking Russia to China, in a clandestine strike carried out deep into enemy territory, with pro-Kremlin media reporting that investigators have opened a criminal case into a “terrorist attack.”

The SBU set off several explosions inside the Severomuysky tunnel of the Baikal-Amur highway in Buryatia, located some 6,000 kilometers east of Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the operation told POLITICO.

“This is the only serious railway connection between the Russian Federation and China. And currently, this route, which Russia uses, including for military supplies, is paralyzed,” the official said.

Four explosive devices went off while a cargo train was moving inside the tunnel. “Now the (Russian) Federal Security Service is working on the spot, the railway workers are unsuccessfully trying to minimize the consequences of the SBU special operation,” the Ukrainian official added.

Later, another train was blown up in the same area on a bypass route, pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Baza reported. 

Four carriages burned out, and two more were damaged by fire. According to preliminary data, aviation fuel on the second cargo train was spilled over an area of 150 square meters. The same senior Ukrainian official with direct knowledge of the matter said the SBU was also behind the second railroad incident.

The first cargo train exploded directly in the Severomuysky tunnel.

To continue transportation, the Russians began to use the detour route through the so-called Devil’s Bridge — a 35-meter high viaduct structure, which is part of the Trans-Siberian Railway. At that point, SBU saboteurs struck again.

“When the train was passing over this 35-meter high bridge, the explosive devices embedded in it went off,” the same official added.

Ukraine’s security service has not publicly confirmed the attack. Russia has also so far not confirmed the sabotage.

“On the Itikit — Okusykan stretch in Buryatia, while driving through the tunnel, the locomotive crew of the cargo train noticed smoke from one of the diesel fuel tanks. The train was stopped, and two fire extinguishing trains were sent from nearby towns to help. The movement of trains was not interrupted, it was organized along a bypass section with a slight increase in travel time,” Russia’s state railroad company RZHD said in a statement on Thursday.

 “Russian special services should get used to the fact that our people are everywhere. Even in distant Buryatia,” the Ukrainian official warned.

Santos

Speaker Mike Johnson set to oppose expelling Santos

It’s not clear that there are enough votes to meet the two-thirds threshold needed to eject the indicted New York Republican on Friday.

OLIVIA BEAVERS

Speaker Mike Johnson will vote on Friday to oppose the expulsion of George Santos, signaling that the House GOP’s leaders will swing against the bipartisan push to boot the indicted New York Republican.

While Johnson and his leadership team are not formally whipping against the latest expulsion push, describing it as a vote of conscience, other House Republicans on the fence are certain to take cues from the GOP leader. It’s not clear that there are enough votes to meet the two-thirds threshold needed to eject Santos.

Johnson's planned vote, confirmed by a spokesperson for the Louisiana Republican, emerged about an hour before the House is slated to vote on ousting Santos. That vote follows a damning Ethics Committee report that identified multiple improper actions by the first-term New Yorker, who's nationally infamous for fabricating major elements of his background while campaigning.

Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) had previously said he opposes removing Santos before a conviction at a trial on wire fraud and other counts that's set to start next year. House Republicans are increasingly under the impression that Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) will also oppose Santos' expulsion as well, though she has yet to say where she lands publicly.

Santos, who is facing a 23-count federal indictment, appeared like he was a goner at the beginning of the week. Nearly 90 House Republicans planned to link arms with House Democrats to remove him, according to an internal POLITICO whip count. Nearly all House Democrats are expected to support booting Santos.

House Democrats have pitched their own Santos expulsion measure, but the GOP proposal of choice on the matter is led by Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.).

Initial momentum for Guest's resolution is rapidly fading, however, as some Republicans warn about the danger of setting a precedent that blesses expulsion a member before a criminal conviction. While some GOP members say they now oppose evicting Santos, others are now back on the fence.

Either way, senior House Republicans predict the vote will be exceedingly close. If Santos’ critics succeed, it would thin the already small majority House Republicans have struggled to control.

If the expulsion fail, it is certain to squash the long-running effort to remove him by Santos' biggest critics in the House GOP — fellow New York Republicans — who have sought to politically distance themselves by leading the vote to expel.

Porn and poop in his suit jacket,

Newsom camp: Hannity, DeSantis cheated. They dispute the charges.

The messy prime time event outside Atlanta between Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis didn’t end when the Fox News cameras stopped. Newsom’s team says DeSantis and Fox broke several rules.

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

So much for that Newsom-Hannity bromance.

Thursday’s raucous debate is giving way to bitter disappointment with and outright hostility toward Fox News and its host from the California Democrat’s camp.

Before Ron DeSantis could unveil his “poop map,” Gov. Gavin Newsom team’s frustration with Sean Hannity and his crew centered on his promises to them that he would be a fair moderator, only to repeatedly sandbag the governor and give the entire affair a 2-on-1 dynamic — as they saw it.

“The debate was rigged, and Newsom still won,” Newsom adviser Sean Clegg said.

Newsom himself told people as the debate ended that he’d had fun — sharing that feeling on X where he added that he could have kept going for longer.

But the grievances from Newsom’s team inside the venue were just the start of the mass finger-pointing that followed the 95-minute melee late Thursday in the suburbs of Atlanta. Other alleged violations — of rules both written and understood — involve Ron DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor.

A DeSantis aide said California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom was the one who stepped in and ended the debate on her husband’s behalf after Hannity invited the two governors to go deeper into overtime. A second person on the ground confirmed that. An aide to Newsom who was in the room pushed back, saying both sides expressed a desire to go home after 95 minutes of TV mayhem.

“Ron didn’t want to do the debate anymore, either. Everyone shook hands and left,” said the Newsom aide, who was granted anonymity to relay closed-door exchanges.

DeSantis’ team said he would have wanted to continue debating, however, for as long as two hours — maybe even three hours.

More distrust and accusations were spilling out from the event. Hannity told Newsom staffers that both sides agreed not to bring props or graphics with them on stage — just a pen and pad of paper, they said. DeSantis’ camp says that wasn’t their understanding of the network’s rules, and DeSantis brandished allegedly lewd content permissible in California in a segment about book bans at schools.

The other document DeSantis flashed to great fanfare was a map of Newsom’s hometown of San Francisco covered in brown splotches that the Florida governor said represented places where human feces were found on the city’s streets.

“He carried around porn and poop in his suit jacket,” the Newsom aide said.

A Fox News spokesperson said “the word ‘props’ was never discussed ahead of the debate, not one time. The final agreement simply stated that neither side (Newsom or DeSantis) can use multimedia production. That was an issue about whether each side wanted to do a short production on what makes their individual states great at the start of the debate.”

Newsom’s staff said there also was a rule that Fox and Hannity wouldn’t use multimedia during the debate. They contend that was confirmed to them by Fox producers in the pre-debate walk-through a few hours before the event started. Hannity proceeded to show several graphics on screen — mostly unfavorable statistics about crime and other issues plaguing California. When confronted about the apparent bait-and-switch, a Fox producer shot back that, technically, the entire stage could be classified as multimedia, the Newsom aide said.

The Fox News spokesperson pointed out that Hannity was clear about his plans to use “full screens” and mentioned it numerous times ahead of the debate. On the day of the debate, the Fox spokesperson said, Newsom’s team specifically asked that no video sound bites be used, which was a last-minute request that was accommodated ahead of the debate.

The Florida governor’s staff said it was the Democrats who didn’t follow rules. A DeSantis aide accused Newsom staff of leaving the greenroom, another purported violation, another person said.

DeSantis staffers then decided to venture out, too.

Newsom’s side tells it differently. In their recounting, several of DeSantis’ aides ahead of the first commercial break — roughly 20 minutes into the debate — lined up near the bathroom. This included Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, who serves as a key political advisor to her husband. Ron DeSantis went over and was seen conversing with his wife. That would be another alleged violation of the rules, they said, that sought to prevent the candidates from getting advice in the middle of the debate.

“She was ready to coach him when his fake bathroom break happened,” the Newsom aide said. “Our guy never left the podium once. He didn’t take a bathroom break. We didn’t have any interaction with him the whole debate. He knew the rules and followed them.”

DeSantis is one matter. And post-debate spin is a time-honored tradition of political campaigns.

But there was a personal nature to Newsom’s issues with Hannity because of the way the conservative cable host claimed to be approaching his role and the lengths he had gone over several months to assuage their concerns.

As POLITICO previously reported, Hannity took on much of the negotiating with both Newsom and DeSantis staff given the debate’s importance to him. Newsom had predicted a 2-on-1 dynamic; a point that annoyed Hannity, who publicly and privately pledged fairness. “He needs to get over it,” Hannity said in an interview in the run-up to his debate.

Newsom still had some doubts about Hannity, but the host gave news media interviews where he said he would treat the governors as equals and expressed a genuine fondness for Newsom. The goodwill didn’t last. At one point after the debate, a Newsom adviser pulled a Fox staffer aside and took issue with the way the network conducted itself, said a witness of that exchange, who was granted anonymity to describe the confrontation.

Then there was a final fracas involving Hannity’s teleprompter. Newsom’s team went on record to air the complaint.

Newsom spokesperson Nathan Click said there was a teleprompter in DeSantis’ sight line — stage left — that revealed upcoming topics mid-debate. Newsom apparently didn’t notice it until much later in the evening.

“They promised during the walkthrough it would not be visible,” Click said. “Newsom himself saw it from the stage deep into the debate. A live cheat sheet. Newsom won this debate with both hands tied behind his back.”

The Fox spokesperson denied this, saying neither candidate was able to see any of the debate questions, either before or during the debate.

Transformed

AOC says her 'life has completely transformed' since Pelosi exited leadership role

By Alec Regimbal

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says her life in Congress has been “completely transformed” for the better since California Rep. Nancy Pelosi vacated her House leadership role, according to the Guardian’s summation of a new book by Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s D.C. bureau chief.

Grim is the author of the forthcoming “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” It details the rise of several young, progressive lawmakers in Congress, including Ocasio-Cortez (known colloquially as AOC). The Guardian, which obtained a copy of the book, covered some of its revelations, which include several anecdotes about the relationship between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez. 

In short, the two did not get along, and Ocasio-Cortez told Grim that she believed her “misery” in Congress was due to a grudge held against her by Pelosi and the entire Democratic Party House leadership team. After Pelosi stepped down from her leadership role at the turn of the year, though, Ocasio-Cortez told Grim, “My life has completely transformed. It’s crazy. And it’s that that made me realize it was kind of just [Pelosi] the whole time.”

The two reportedly butted heads over climate change and immigration policy, as well as provisions in a massive infrastructure package that Congress passed in 2021. While such disagreements are common, even among members of the same party, Ocasio-Cortez reportedly told Grim that Pelosi was often condescending toward her — especially about her age. “The amount of times she told me that stupid ‘I have protest signs older than you in my basement’ s—t. Like yeah but mine don’t collect dust,” Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected at age 29, wrote to Grim in a text.

Ocasio-Cortez also reportedly told Grim that Pelosi grew furious with her on a “rare call” between the two when AOC pointed out that no one had asked her how her upstart campaign managed to win the 2018 race against longtime incumbent Joe Crowley, who had the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). She told Grim: “I told her DCCC campaign vendors sucked, and that it was strange that after I beat Crowley not a single person bothered to ask how I beat him. … She got so mad at me.”

After Republicans took back control of the House in last year’s general elections, Pelosi decided to abdicate her role in House leadership. New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries took her place, and Ocasio-Cortez told Grim that, at the time, she believed “things would get worse.” In the year or so since then, her experience has actually improved. 

“Senior members talk to me, [committee] chairs are nice to me, people want to work together,” she told Grim. “I’m shocked. I couldn’t even get floor time before.”

Telegram

How Telegram Became the Center of the Internet

The encrypted messaging app collapses distance, offering unparalleled access to war and conflict.

ALI BRELAND

Every so often, the spiritual center of the internet shifts, as the locus where online culture is shaped and incubated before rippling out into the wider world cycles to a new home.

Today, that shift is happening again, with Telegram taking the main stage. In recent years, the messaging app and digital platform has recurringly become the place for the rawest, most direct coverage of massive international crises, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now with Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent month-long massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

The app lets users opt-in to encrypted messaging, which helps explain why high-profile and dangerous movements and events have been organized there, including the January 6th storming of the US Capitol. The far-right and neo-Nazis have used Telegram to plan and recruit both in the US and abroad; this fall, organizing and communication on the platform reportedly sparked antisemitic violence against Jewish people in Dagestan, Russia, and may have played a part in exacerbating Azerbaijani violence against Armenians.

With 800 million accounts, Telegram ranks towards the bottom of the top ten social media platforms in users. But its influence exceeds this position. “Nearly all conflict visuals are now just downstream from Telegram, the same way news on Facebook/Instagram used to be collected from Twitter,” tweeted New York Times visual investigations journalist Aric Toler on October 11, as new images from the October 7 attack and Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza poured on to the broader internet after first appearing on the platform. (Toler, in his prior job at Bellingcat, helped pioneer open source intelligence reporting.)

Everyday people also find the app indispensable. Darren Loucaides, who has written extensively about Telegram, chronicled in a piece for Wired how during the heat of the October 7 attacks, in the earliest moments, when Israeli media and the government hadn’t shared much information, Telegram was the only source giving civilians insight.

That speed is a big part of the app’s appeal. Journalists need to verify the information they publish, which is a process that can slow down their stories. Telegram users are held to no such code, and can immediately post whatever they come across. Telegram also doesn’t censor gruesome images or depictions of violence that are common in conflicts, but that might not make it past the filters of Meta or other major social media companies. And almost no one is banned from Telegram, which not only makes it a ripe venue for influence operations, but gives groups barred on other social media a place to communicate—including Hamas, whose own posts in the earliest hours of the October 7 attacks were one of the main sources of information about what was happening in Israel. In repressive regimes like Russia, where almost every other form of social media is subject to state control, the app can also be a rare place to freely share and find information, making it indispensable to dissidents or anyone not completely in line with the state. 

Telegram’s ascent has been long but steady. Pavel Durov, a programmer and entrepreneur, launched the company in 2013 after being ousted from VK, the Russian Facebook competitor he co-founded. Telegram spent years as a moderately popular messaging app and platform, but gained momentum in 2021 after users of WhatsApp fled following privacy policy updates, wrongly believing they would have to fork over more personal data to keep using the Facebook-owned messaging service. Downloads for Telegram spiked in what Durov then proudly proclaimed might be “the largest digital migration in human history.” 

Telegram has become widely adopted beyond the political fringes.

In the US, some of the first significant digital mobilizing efforts on Telegram may have been conducted by the far-right, who had been hopping from platform to platform after major tech companies cracked down on them following 2017’s Charlottesville rally. A hodgepodge of conservative anti-vaxxers, QAnoners, JFK-will-return cultists, eco-fascists, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis mingled on the app, recruiting and organizing different actions, from, as mentioned, planning aspects of January 6, to inundating hospitals with calls objecting to certain covid treatments. A similar dynamic unfolded in Europe, where the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a Berlin-based non-profit, documented how Telegram has become the preeminent platform for the far-right in Germany, Austria, and Sweden.

But Telegram has become widely adopted beyond the political fringes, especially in countries with repressive surveillance regimes, and has emerged as a hub of information on international conflicts. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the app has proven a vital source of information for residents of both countries—so invaluable that Russian activists who may have been arrested after police infiltrated the app keep using it after being released, as Loucaides has also documented. Since Hamas’ attacks on Israel, research from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found Telegram channels related to Hamas accrued hundreds of thousands of new followers.

“It was a window into all these parts of the world,” says Ben Ditto, a cultural analyst and visual artist who often mines Telegram for content for his own social media accounts. They include a Telegram channel Ditto created five years ago, after what he saw as onerous moderation by Instagram repeatedly left his content downranked. As Russia invaded Ukraine, he realized how much of that war could be seen on Telegram. He discovered Ukranian far-right and anarchist group chats where he could directly observe conversations and see content that was posted almost immediately after being filmed on the ground. “It’s an amazing way of being closer to the source than anything else,” Ditto explains.

“Fake stuff will show up on Telegram maybe more regularly, however, that’s just life.”

Telegram’s raw, unfiltered nature makes it ripe for manipulation and potential influence campaigns. During the October 7 attacks, Hamas used the channel to quickly disseminate footage foregrounding military acts by their fighters, waging a narrative campaign designed to spread fear in Israel on a platform notorious for leaving almost anything aside from the baldly illegal—like child abuse content—alone. While Ditto has found Igor Girkin’s and Wagner PMC’s Telegram channels to be useful sources on what’s happening inside Russia, he says the former Russian FSB officer and private Russian military group’s posts need to be read with skepticism since they are likely to engage in propaganda and influence campaigns.

To a lot of people who use Telegram, the trade-off between the lack of moderation and the breadth of what’s available is worth it. Jake Hanrahan, the founder of Popular Front, a multimedia publication and conflict footage aggregator, told me over Telegram that in his view the platform is “one of the single most important services online right now.”

“Due to the lack of monitoring fake stuff will show up on Telegram maybe more regularly, however, that’s just life,” he said. “It’s very dangerous to look to someone like Mark Zuckerberg to do your due diligence for you, which is basically what the censorship issues on Instagram boils down to.”

Meta does take guidance from governments when blocking groups from its products. These moderation decisions are often in line with the Western political consensus, with the Taliban, for example, remaining banned despite it being the governing body of Afghanistan.

“[Meta] is regularly censoring reporting that shows how brutal the IDF are in their current mission to flatten Gaza,” Hanrahan says. “Meta had been doing this for years though. Every conflict, they pick a side that’s allowed and everyone who doesn’t fall in line has to suffer the consequences of shadow bans or having your page removed.”

Since October 7, Meta users posting pro-Palestine messages have reported being censored on Instagram and Facebook—as have users of ByteDance’s TikTok—prompting a complaint from civil society groups. Asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a company page on the ongoing conflict where the company writes there is “no truth to the suggestion that we are deliberately suppressing voice.” But a human rights review commissioned by the company after a 2021 outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine found that Palestinian users had suffered “over-enforcement” that impinged on “freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination.”

Hanrahan says that he had dealt with the downsides of Meta moderation directly. Roughly three years ago, Popular Front was frequently posting on Instagram about Turkish attacks on the Kurdish area of Afrin in Syria; Hanrahan recalls the publication’s account was removed from the service four times in a month. “Eventually someone at Meta privately reached out to me and told me a Turkish ultranationalist who works there was purposely banning our account. I can’t confirm this was true, but he told me he’d put a note on the account to stop the arbitrary bans and said he withdrew that guy’s access,” Hanrahan said.

A Meta spokesperson did not address what happened to Popular Front’s acccount, but claimed in an emailed statement that the company’s content moderation is not supposed to work this way. “Our policies are designed to give people a voice while keeping them safe on our platforms, and we apply these policies regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs,” the spokesperson wrote.

The platform allows distant people to bear witness to military horrors.

Hanrahan estimates that 20 percent of the conflict footage Popular Front aggregates onto its social media channels (including Telegram) comes from Telegram. Other conflict footage aggregators and investigators, like the New York Times’ Toler, also draw significantly from the platform. 

As Telegram’s popularity has grown, the physics and rules of its platform have shifted overall patterns of how people receive information—and far beyond the aggregators and journalists who make professional use of the service. Because Telegram posts are almost never moderated, it’s solely on the user to determine the veracity of information. Many everyday users don’t, allowing the platform to become a recurring dissemination point for the spread of disinformation.

Telegram has also allowed many distant people to bear witness to the horrors of military invasions and massacres. While Instagram Stories are usually banal updates on people’s day to day lives, users are likelier to post on weightier subjects during social upheaval and local, national, and international conflict. Today, many of the visuals of Gaza being spread on Stories are downstream of Telegram, where, before being posted to Instagram, users had the chance to modify them to have a better chance against the site’s moderation policies.

As Israel has banned foreign journalists from reporting from Gaza and as has killed over 40 journalists there, Telegram provides a means of distribution for journalistically valuable content, including the perspectives of people in Gaza largely cut off from the world. It also gives a rare, direct view into the true ramifications of what’s happening, by transmiting gruesome images of the victims of Israeli missiles that might not have made it past the policies of larger social media platforms.

In “Looking At War,” her Iraq War-era essay exploring the power and limits of conflict photography, Susan Sontag explored how viewers can be left unaffected by images of wartime atrocities: “Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react.”

That might have held true in the early days of the US’s Global War on Terror. But writing in 2002, she couldn’t have anticipated a world where the public could see images and videos posted directly by people being bombed.

“I think the treatment of Palestinians over the last 75 years has been easier to hide,” Ditto told me. Because of platforms like Telegram, he noted, “you cannot deny what’s been happening anymore—and that’s created a cultural shift.”

Bloody Legacy

Dead at 100, Henry Kissinger Leaves Behind a Bloody Legacy

From Argentina to East Timor, his actions led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

DAVID CORN

Do not speak ill of the dead. That’s an honorable admonition. But what of the truth? When a person dies, should he be remembered accurately? That question is acutely posed by the demise of Henry Kissinger. The veteran diplomat passed away on Wednesday at the age of 100, leaving behind a long legacy that includes such highs as the opening to China, as well as foul deeds that resulted in mayhem and death—thousands and thousands of deaths. His obituaries will be filled with hosannas from the foreign policy establishment that hailed him as the wisest of wise men. Unfortunately, those who were slaughtered in part due to his global gamesmanship are not able to comment on his contribution to international affairs.

Earlier this year, ahead of his centennial birthday, I published an assessment of his career. I noted, “Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.” I provided a break-down of these episodes. Is it an appropriate moment to revisit Kissinger’s dark past? We can only imagine what the dead would say. Here’s the roll call.

Cambodia: In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

Bangladesh: In 1970, a political party advocating autonomy for East Pakistan won legislative elections. The military dictator ruling Pakistan, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, arrested the leader of that party and ordered his army to crush the Bengalis. At the time, Yahya, a US ally, was helping Kissinger and Nixon establish ties with China, and they didn’t want to get in his way. The top US diplomat in East Pakistan sent in a cable detailing and decrying the atrocities committed by Yahya’s troops and reported they were committing “genocide.” Yet Nixon and Kissinger declined to criticize Yahya or take action to end the barbarous assault. (This became known as “the tilt” toward Pakistan.) Kissinger and Nixon turned a blind eye to—arguably, they tacitly approved—Pakistan’s genocidal slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus.

Chile: Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. This included Kissinger supervising clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile and triggering a military coup. This scheming yielded the assassination of Chile’s commander-in-chief of the Army. Eventually, a military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, and implemented a dictatorship. Following the coup, Kissinger backed Pinochet to the hilt. During a private conversation with the Chilean tyrant in 1976, he told Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”

East Timor: In December 1975, President Suharto of Indonesia was contemplating an invasion of East Timor, which had recently been a Portuguese colony and was moving toward independence. On December 6, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, en route from a visit to Beijing, stopped in Jakarta to meet with Suharto, who headed the nation’s military regime. Suharto signaled he intended to send troops into East Timor and integrate the territory into Indonesia. Ford and Kissinger did not object. Ford told Suharto, “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” Kissinger added, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” He pointed out that Suharto would be wise to wait until Ford and Kissinger returned to the United States, where they “would be able to influence the reaction in America.” The invasion began the next day. Here was a “green light” from Kissinger (and Ford). Suharto’s brutal invasion of East Timor resulted in 200,000 deaths.

Argentina: In March 1976, a neofascist military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón and launched what would be called the Dirty War, torturing, disappearing, and killing political opponents it branded as terrorists. Once again, Kissinger provided a “green light,” this time to a campaign of terror and murder. He did so during a private meeting in June 1976 with the junta’s foreign minister, Cesar Augusto Guzzetti. At that sit-down, according to a memo obtained in 2004 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization, Guzzetti told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” In other words, go ahead with your savage crusade against the leftists. The Dirty War would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Throughout his career in government and politics, Kissinger was an unprincipled schemer who engaged in multiple acts of skullduggery. During the 1968 presidential campaign, while he advised the Johnson administration’s team at the Paris peace talks, which were aimed at ending the Vietnam War, he underhandedly passed information on the talks to Nixon’s camp, which was plotting to sabotage the negotiations, out of fear that success at the talks would boost the prospects of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s opponent in the race. After the secret bombing in Cambodia was revealed by the New York Times, Kissinger, acting at Nixon’s request, urged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap his own aides and journalists to discover who was leaking. This operation failed to uncover who had outed the covert bombing, but, as historian Garrett Graff noted in his recent book, Watergate: A New History, this effort seeded “the administration’s taste for spying on its enemies—real or imagined.” 

In 1976, Kissinger was briefed on Operation Condor, a secret program created by the intelligence services of the military dictatorships of South America to assassinate their political foes inside and outside their countries. He then blocked a State Department effort to warn these military juntas not to proceed with international assassinations. As the National Security Archive points out in a dossier it released this week on various Kissinger controversies, “Five days later, Condor’s boldest and most infamous terrorist attack took place in downtown Washington D.C. when a car-bomb, planted by Pinochet’s agents, killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague, Ronni Moffitt.”

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands were drenched in blood. 

Kissinger was routinely lambasted by his critics as a “war criminal,” though has never been held accountable for his misdeeds. He made millions as a consultant, author, and commentator in the decades since he left government. I once heard of a Manhattan cocktail reception where he scoffed at the “war criminal” label and referred to it almost as a badge of honor. (“Bill Clinton does not have the spine to be a war criminal,” he joshed.) Kissinger expressed few, if any, regrets about the cruel and deadly results of his moves on the global chessboard. When Ted Koppel in an interview this year gently nudged him about the secret bombing in Cambodia, Kissinger took enormous umbrage and shot back: “This program you’re doing because I’m going to be 100 years old. And you are picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago? You have to know it was a necessary step.” As for those who still protest him for that and other acts, he huffed, “Now the younger generation feels if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think.”

There were no apologies from Kissinger. But the rest of us will owe history—and the thousands dead because of his diplomatic scheming—an apology, if we do not consider the man in full. Whatever his accomplishments, his legacy includes an enormous pile of corpses. 

Case in Texas

Why a Case in Texas on Abortion Exceptions Is a Big Deal

Lawyers in a landmark lawsuit argue that when it comes to the Texas abortion ban’s exception for the life of a pregnant person “no one knows what it means and the state won’t tell us.” 

KATIE HERCHENROEDER

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of Texas heard arguments in a suit brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights challenging the state’s abortion ban—the case could have ripple effects across the country as state courts wrestle with exceptions to abortion bans after the fall of Roe.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, representing 20 patients and two doctors, is asking the court to reconsider the medical exception language that currently exists in Texas’s abortion ban. The state’s law calls for “reasonable medical judgment” and permits abortion if the patient could die or if they’re at “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” The lawsuit argues this language is too vague and dangerous for pregnant people and providers. 

The organization has brought similar suits in Tennessee, Idaho, and Oklahoma. But the Texas one marks the first time that directly impacted pregnant people have sued their state over a post-Roe law. 

These challenges are drawing attention to the thin exceptions that have accompanied abortion-restrictive laws. Often referred to as “life of the mother” exceptions, they act as vague asterisks that tend to leave patients and providers confused, resulting in a diminished standard of care for pregnant people. 

“While there is technically a medical exception to the bans,” Molly Duane, the senior attorney for the plaintiffs, said in the arguments this week, “no one knows what it means and the state won’t tell us.” 

This past August, a district court judge ruled that the state’s near-total abortion ban could not be enforced in pregnancies with certain levels of complications, including those with lethal fetal diagnoses. Texas’ supreme court justices, all of whom are Republican, are deciding whether or not they will side with the state or uphold the lower court’s ruling. The latter would signal that challenges to unclear medical exceptions may work in the future.

Decisions about life-saving healthcare have become increasingly complex and uncertain since Roe was overturned—and even before then in Texas.  The state’s six-week abortion ban dates back to 2021 and set a nationwide example for how to criminalize providers. The OB-GYNs in the Texas case have said that the state’s exception has led to “widespread confusion among the medical community” that left them and their colleagues unable to do their jobs well. And if providers misinterpret exceptions and perform abortions that do not fall under the rules, the stakes are high; medical professionals risk prison time, fines, and the potential loss of their licenses.

It’s unclear how much clarity the justices’ decision, which Duane expects this summer, will provide for pregnant people and medical teams across the state. Until then, more plaintiffs are coming forward to ask where their pregnancy story fits into the law. 

Many of the plaintiffs bringing these cases across the country, including in Texas, wanted these pregnancies. Some long-dreamt of being parents only to face devastation when hearing of fetal anomalies or health complications during a regular check-up. The appointments in question usually take place after 18 weeks of pregnancy and abortion bans’ week-based cut-offs are often before that time. These circumstances leave pregnant people and their families with little time to mourn before figuring out how to move forward. 

The women suing the state of Texas had to make these tough decisions, and quickly. Some left the state for abortion care, while others gave birth to babies who only lived for seconds. Others were told to wait until they were in graver danger before the hospital staff would provide care. 

“Politicians in Texas are prohibiting healthcare that they don’t understand,” Lauren Miller, one of the original plaintiffs said at a news conference this spring. “They could do something. But they’re not. And it’s killing us.”