Huffpo

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huffpo has some of same celeb gossip as Daily Mail tabloid 4/27/14

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AN 2 26

In his new book "To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right," author Christopher Mathias takes a look at the growth of white nationalist groups in the United States and the role that anti-fascist activists play in fighting them.

President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are declaring that antifa is a "terrorist organization"; antifa, however, is not an actual organization, but rather, a network of leftists who say their goal is to defeat fascism "by any means necessary," to borrow a phrase from Malcolm X. Many right-wing media outlets confuse antifa with Black Block Anarchists, who are a separate movement.

Mathias talked to antifa activists extensively when doing research for his book. In an excerpt republished by Talking Points Memo on February 3, the author describes a meeting between five white males in a diner in Washington State called 13 Coins; four of them were white nationalists, but the fifth was an antifa activist doing undercover research on them. And they had no idea that he wasn't at all sympathetic to their views.

During the vetting process, according to Mathias, the white nationalists would use the n-word; if someone was offended, that would expose them as a possible "infiltrator."

In the diner, according to Mathias, white nationalist "Anthony" (not his real name) "said the word loud and clear, rising above the clatter of the crowded restaurant, maybe loud enough even for their Latina waitress to hear."

"The sheer force of that word — those two syllables that, when spoken in succession from a white man's tongue, instantly invoked centuries of slavery, lynchings, and burning crosses — would make any 'anti-fascist' spy squirm in their seat, he argued," Mathias explains. "The fear of infiltrators was real. It was why national leadership encouraged members not to know each other's real names, to stick to pseudonyms. Were an infiltrator to discover anyone's actual identity, they'd be liable to lose their jobs, their scholarships, their girlfriends, be kicked out of their homes. Some might go to prison. Every member knew they stood to lose it all…. There was no hesitation. One by one, everyone at the table obliged, saying the word loud and clear."

According to Mathias, the "legacy of these anti-fascist infiltrations ran deep, sowing mistrust in the organization — everyone always on the lookout for the next mole."

"They finished eating and asked for the bill, prompting Anthony to launch into a rant about tipping," Mathias reports. "He refused to tip non-white waitresses, he said, like the waitress they had now, the one who had sweetly served them cheeseburgers and fries, and who, if she'd heard them using racial slurs, hadn't done anything about it. When it came time to pay, everyone agreed with Anthony: no tip. Satisfied with their decision and exhausted from their training, the group then walked out of 13 Coins and bid farewell to one another…. A short time later, though, one of these white men circled back to 13 Coins, parked, and walked inside."

Mathias continues, "His demeanor was different. Something gentler than before. He looked for the waitress, but she wasn't anywhere to be found, so he found the manager instead. 'Please give this to the waitress,' he told the manager, who was Black, pressing $300 into his hand. 'Please make sure she gets all of this and tell her I said sorry.' He started to leave but then stopped himself, asking the manager to pass along one more message. 'Please tell her that those guys I was with,' he said, 'please tell her those guys aren't my friends.'"

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A New Book Explores Antifa’s Spy Network | HuffPost Latest News

inside The Antifa Spy Network

Donald Trump’s fascism builds on generations of racial supremacy. A new book goes inside the secretive antifa groups fighting for freedom.

By Matt Shuham

:

|Updated Jan 30, 2026

Anti-fascists in 2018 march near the site of a makeshift memorial where Heather Heyer was killed at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the year before.

Win McNamee via Getty Images

At a diner next to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, five men took turns loudly saying a racial slur to prove they are bona fide members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization.

Sometime later, one of them returned, alone, with a $300 tip and a message for their server, a woman of color: “Those guys aren’t my friends.”

The man, “Vincent,” was one of several “antifa” spies around the country who had gone undercover in fascist groups. Over several months, he worked out, hiked and camped with a group of committed white nationalists. He joined them as they dropped propaganda banners and vandalized public artwork depicting people of color.

Months later, in the middle of a nationwide Patriot Front video call, Vincent started playing a recording of “Bella Ciao,” the Italian anti-fascist anthem. “You guys really forgot to remove the antifa spy’s access?” he taunted them.

While embedded with Patriot Front, Vincent expropriated reams of previously unknown membership data and logistical information that allowed other anti-fascists, in anonymous collectives around the country, to “dox,” or publicly identify, the group’s members. These collectives vandalized extremists’ vehicles, alerted their neighbors and employers — and, step by step, worked to shrink their influence in American public life. Similar infiltrations have hit several neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups around the country over the years.

For years, the journalist — and former longtime HuffPost reporter — Christopher Mathias chronicled these efforts, cultivating sources from antifa groups across the country, verifying the information they gathered, and publicly outing cops, teachers and members of the military who led secret double lives as neo-Nazis and white power activists. (Mathias and I reported several stories together for HuffPost, including about Donald Trump’s fascism.)

Mathias’ new book, “To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” takes readers behind the scenes of the fight to push back against the rising tide of fascism since Trump entered the political sphere over a decade ago.

Some may think the antifa movement is just about punching Nazis in the street, but as Mathias’ book explores, it’s about a lot more than that. It builds on generations of activists fighting for civil rights and pushing back against racial domination in the U.S. “To Catch A Fascist” takes a look back at this long history through today, as Trump’s second term delivers armed, masked federal agents to communities nationwide, stopping people at random because of their skin color and accents.

“Throughout history, when fascists wear masks, they do so in hopes of creating a world in which they won’t need masks at all,” Mathias told me this week. “I think it is an alarming and scary prospect to consider a world in which [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents feel comfortable not wearing masks.”

More observers than ever seem to be saying, “Yes, it’s fascism.” But Mathias and plenty of others have been saying that for a while. He spoke to HuffPost about antifa’s “fundamentally hopeful … struggle against impossible odds,” modern fascism, and what connects Minneapolis and Charlottesville, Virginia.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you think about the interplay between street-level fascist thugs committing violence and what it means for the most powerful government in history to be a fascist government?

Reporting and researching this book made me completely rethink what fascism is and the way we talk about it. So much punditry over the last 10 years, during the Trump era, has revolved around this question: “Is it fascism? Could it happen here? Is it happening here?” And there was always this impulse to suggest that, “Once we reach a certain point, it’s fascism.” Once it’s analogous to Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, then we can call it fascism.

What’s really interesting from the militant anti-fascist perspective is that there’s not a certain threshold we cross before things become fascist. Throughout American history, fascism has been a fact of life for many people.

There is a mythology we tell ourselves as Americans that we defeated fascism in World War II. And obviously, yes, the U.S. Army — my grandfather was part of that — defeated the Nazis. But the U.S. Army was also a segregated army. It was a colonial army. And when Black soldiers fighting in segregated units returned to the United States, they returned to Jim Crow and, later, mass incarceration. If you were, for example, a Black man swept up in mass incarceration, unjustly incarcerated for years and years of your life, what is the material difference between that experience and the experience of living in a fascist state the way we talk about it, in Europe? I would argue that it’s kind of negligible — that is a fascist experience.

So this is basically my way of saying, I’m glad people are calling what’s happening now fascist. And I think what is happening now is an intensification of these underlying social arrangements, these underlying dynamics of domination, and making those dynamics more and more explicit.

One of the foremost scholars of fascism, Robert Paxton, initially decided not to call Trump a fascist when he came to power in 2016. After Jan. 6, 2021, he revised that assessment and declared Trump a fascist. Obviously we’re at a point now where — there are just so many elements that point to calling Trump a fascist. I mean, he’s threatening to invade Greenland, and he has a secret police force raiding people’s homes [without warrants]. So it’s pretty blatant by this point.

A lot of your book is a corrective of the use of the term “antifa” and particularly how it’s become an all-purpose bogeyman for Trump and the right. To them, “antifa” is an “outside agitator,” but also they’re destroying their own communities. They’re “super soldiers,” but they’re also feminine, blue-haired transgender socialists. Talk about that label “antifa” and how it became so useful for propaganda on the right. Is it to create a pretext to confront racial justice activists while armed?

Totally. What’s really important context is that no one in America knew what the fuck antifa was before 2017.

And all the sudden, with Trump’s inauguration, you have Richard Spencer in Washington, D.C. And then, as the far right is emboldened and mobilized across the country — in places like Berkeley and Gainesville and Lansing and Charlottesville, where Nazis felt like they could go on the street and make their presence known — all of a sudden there are these leftists, radical leftists, sometimes wearing all black, punching these Nazis. And these videos obviously go viral, and there’s a thousand explainers in the media about who these Nazi punchers are, and they are antifa.

[After the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,] Merriam-Webster adds “antifa” to its dictionary, Oxford Dictionary short-lists “antifa” for its “word of the year.” That’s how, suddenly, the word became part of our lexicon, through this militancy. So most of the public associates antifa with just Nazi-punching. But in reality, that tactic — physical confrontation — represents a really tiny percentage of the work antifa does.

So in 2017, suddenly everyone knows who antifa is. And something really interesting happens after Charlottesville — when the right and MAGA finds itself on the defensive [because] Trump has called them “very fine people,” and it’s become obvious that this MAGA coalition includes Nazis, that these Nazis are very violent, and that they just killed someone in Charlottesville.

There is a pseudonymous pro-Trump troll called Microchip who starts a viral petition to the White House to designate antifa a domestic terror group. And Microchip gives this fascinating interview to Politico that’s incredibly frank and upfront about why he’s doing this. He knows that the White House can’t designate antifa a terror group because there’s no statute for that. That’s not the point. The point, as he puts it, is to set up antifa as a punching bag, and to distract and deflect from the right’s very real violence, and create this false equivalency where, “Yeah, we have our extremists, but look, the left has their extremists too!” Which is an absurd equivalence, of course. The far right has killed hundreds by this point over the previous couple decades, and antifa, at this point, hasn’t killed anyone.

And what happens throughout 2017, 2018, 2019 is, you have these far-right and MAGA influencers — guys like Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Andy Ngo and a lot of other people — who create conspiracy theories about antifa.

After nearly every mass shooting in America — even before America knew who the shooter was or what their motives were — they would rush to fill that information vacuum with baseless claims that the shooter was antifa. Even if later it proved that the shooter was actually a white supremacist, by that point, the waters have been muddied and people are confused.

Antifa gets blamed for natural disasters, for wildfires. There’s a rumor that antifa “super soldiers” are going to behead white parents. It’s absurd, and again, this is all to distract and deflect from the right’s escalating violence in America.

“To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” by former HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias, will be released next week.

Atria Books

[Eventually,] there’s a bit of a lull in the way the antifa bogeyman is used, but then in 2020 it’s repackaged as a response to the George Floyd uprisings. MAGA, Trump — they blame antifa for fomenting these mass, historic uprisings, which, again, is absurd. Yes, its practitioners did take part in the uprisings, but their numbers are so small that they would never have the power or organizing capacity to foment uprisings like that.

Moreover, those uprisings, as we know, were created and led by the communities that they were in, and they were Black-led uprisings. And that’s why MAGA and Trump blamed antifa for these uprisings in a big way — to distract from the very real grievance at the heart of the protest, which was for cops to stop murdering Black people.

It was also a tactic to sow division on the left — entangling the left in debates about tactics and so forth. The way they wield that label, they eventually start calling anyone they want antifa. And that’s just a way of designating someone as outside the realm of political respectability. When you do that, you are creating a pretext for that person to be targeted, either by state prosecution or by vigilante violence, which we saw a lot of in 2020.

Fast forward to 2025, Trump claims to designate antifa a domestic terror group — which, again, is an effort to label this burgeoning uprising against his agenda as outside the realm of political respectability and worth repressing.

Talk about the difference between “antifa” as a term and anti-fascist as an ideology or description.

When I say “antifa,” there is an important distinction to make. Antifa, yes, is just the shortening of the word “anti-fascist.” A lot of liberals and centrists will point to that fact as a way of saying, “Well, aren’t we all antifa?” It’s kind of a way of saying, “Antifa isn’t a real thing,” or that it doesn’t exist. But that’s not true. Antifa, as a word, refers to a very specific kind of militant radical tradition of combating the far right “by any means necessary.”

And when I talk about antifa, these are activists who practice a political tradition that believes in a few basic tenets: First, that, yes, sometimes fascists need to be confronted in the streets, sometimes violently. Fascists should be given no platform to speak or organize. That means revoking permits for them to speak in cities or parks, or de-platforming them from social media.

Another important tenet is that the state and law enforcement cannot be trusted in this fight. And that essentially means they view the government and law enforcement as inherently white institutions that will collaborate with and support fascists.

Antifa didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It emerged from preexisting networks of anarchists, socialists and communists — largely from a tradition born in the ’80s and ’90s to kick Nazis out of the punk scene, and the formations of groups like Anti-Racist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and they basically developed those tenets we talked about, those points of unity when combating the far right.

Q {You mentioned that there’s a tendency to say, “Well, I’m anti-fascist, and my grandfather was anti-fascist in World War II.” But you get into the history of anti-fascists, of doxing fascists, in the book, and the history traces back well before either of those words existed — before doxing existed, before the word fascist existed. You go back to investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. You go back to Walter White, who investigated lynchings in the early 20th century for the NAACP. You go back to Frank Schwab — the mayor of Buffalo who revealed the identities of 18,500 people who were members of the KKK in the area, posting their names at the city’s police headquarters — and the undercover detectives who infiltrated the Klan. Why was it so important to you to get into that history of very specialized resistance to racial domination?}:

So Langston Hughes made this point. “Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us,” [Hughes said in 1937, at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris.]

What I find frustrating about the discourse about fascism in America, again, is this mythology we tell ourselves that we’re the good guys who defeated the fascism. Robert Paxton, the scholar of fascism I mentioned, has described the Klan as the proto-fascist organization, right? Nazi Germany looked to Jim Crow laws in America for inspiration for its own race laws in Germany. America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.

“Throughout American history, fascism has been a fact of life for many people. ... America, in many ways, was fascist before the word fascist existed.”

• Christopher Mathias

What I found so compelling about efforts to unmask the First and Second Klans was, first, just how insanely brave that work was — people really putting their bodies on the line.

Edward Obertean, an undercover police officer who infiltrated the Klan in Buffalo, was murdered afterwards by a Klan member.

The history of white supremacy in America is marked by periods where its most ardent practitioners wore masks, and periods when they didn’t need to.

The First Klan is born to destroy Reconstruction. There’s an amazing effort to unmask them, and it’s successful in a lot of ways in destroying the Klan. But part of the reason that Klan dissolves is also because they were successful. They could trade the anonymity of the hood for the anonymity of the lynch mob.

The Second Klan, same kind of thing — an amazing effort to unmask them that goes a long way in destroying the Second Klan. But again, they were also dissolved, in a way, because they were successful. The 1924 immigration law is passed, the Johnson-Reed Act — and Johnson, the congressman, by the way, was in the Klan — and created these immigration quotas, which, incidentally, are the quotas that restrict immigration to Northern Europe, and is kind of what the modern far-right, including Stephen Miller, wants to go back to.

For me, it was really important to tell those stories, because I actually find them really inspiring. The people doing this work didn’t wait on anyone to save them. They understood that we have to save ourselves, and they didn’t always get to see the fruit of their work. The work they did would contribute to later victories.

Q {You talk a lot about antifa’s work as modern-day journalists. In my opinion, the anonymous collectives that comprise your description of antifa are some of the most skilled journalists working in the country today. That might be a surprise to readers, but to folks who have covered the “extremism” beat, they know. I mean, how many of your own stories that were published in HuffPost stemmed from that sort of work? Reading your book, it was striking to me how much projects like “Panic! In the Discord” or “Ignite The Right” sound like “The Panama Papers” — that is, collectives of journalists working together on a large project. Talk about the skill of these folks as journalists, and whether you think they get their due.}:

No, I don’t think they get their due. There is still this presiding snobbery in journalism that says you have to write for this outlet or that outlet to be considered a journalist. There’s also what I would consider an antiquated notion of objectivity around journalism that says that people doing the type of research that antifa does couldn’t possibly be journalists. I push back against that in the book and am upfront in the intro about the fact I, myself, subscribe to militant anti-fascism.

I do not think that objectivity exists or that there is a “view from nowhere” to report on masked secret police abducting my neighbors. And that is the perspective that antifa also takes. And if we are to consider journalism, first and foremost, to be in the public interest and for the public good, then I think journalism should be explicitly anti-fascist. The investigations that antifa did over the last 10 years were absolutely remarkable sometimes. I talked to one anti-fascist who read through 60,000 tweets to collect enough little morsels and clues and bread crumbs to unravel a Nazi’s identity.

You compared the leaks of Nazi chat messages to The Panama Papers, which is a really apt description. It goes grossly underappreciated that Unicorn Riot, the independent news outlet, created an absolutely remarkable database for leaked white supremacist chat messages — millions and millions of these messages that were open-source material that anti-fascist researchers across the country could mine and look through to figure out who among their neighbors is a Nazi. And that’s a remarkable story and a remarkable feat of journalism.

Talk about the source relationships that you have with anti-fascists. I take it you’ve been talking to some of these folks, unnamed sources of yours, for a decade, or at least many years. How did those source relationships develop over the years, and how have they changed you as a reporter?

It took a long time to gain the trust of anti-fascist sources. They are, understandably, wary of the press. And also, I take their trust in me very seriously, because there are fascists out there that want to harm them. So it’s important for me to protect their identities. And, of course, the state also wants to target antifa, so it adds an extra level [of concern].

But yes, I’ve been talking to so many people for upwards of a decade now. For the book, I ended up talking to about 60. What is most striking for me is that almost everyone involved in this work started doing it after personal brushes with fascists in their communities.

One anti-fascist I talked to a lot, her friend lost someone in the El Paso Walmart massacre, which inspired her to start doing this work.

One of the things that prompted me to do this book was seeing them do that work — neither for glory or acclaim — and also seeing diminishing returns when they were doing the doxes; for a while there, they were getting Nazis fired from their jobs and there was real accountability. But then, something started to shift, and occasionally there were towns where they didn’t care that they had a Nazi as a neighbor. And so I started to talk to anti-fascists about what that meant for American politics in general.

You spoke about inciting incidents for people to get involved in this work. You were at “Unite The Right” in Charlottesville in 2017. You sawDeAndre Harris being beaten. Can you talk about that as an inciting incident for a lot of journalists of the far right and the effect it had on you?

Anyone who was in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, had their lives irrevocably changed afterward. For me, it was the beginning of this long kind of reporting journey into this new, insurgent fascist movement — and then, eventually, into the anti-fascist opposition. But more generally — on a visceral, emotional level — when you see, up close, that kind of vile racism and bigotry so comfortable with itself in public, you start to realize how urgent the need is to fight back against it.

Especially in reporting this, I had a front-row seat to seeing how what we considered fringe in our politics actually wasn’t that fringe at all, and that the Republican Party was becoming the party of the Nazis that marched in Charlottesville. So, it’s just a radicalizing process. There’s no way around it.

What would you say to folks in Minneapolis today, who, I think you would argue, are looking at a different form of fascist violence, a traumatic sort of street violence, except this time it’s performed by the federal government?

I cannot stop thinking about the similarities between the uprising against ICE in Minneapolis and the uprising against all the fascists that were taking to the streets in 2017 through 2020. They’re embracing the same organic, grassroots tactics that are not dependent on law enforcement or the government, which, in Minneapolis, has kind of abandoned them. They have to do this on their own.

And they’re doing all the stuff that anti-fascists were doing to Nazis a few years ago — which was following them, monitoring them, identifying them, doxing them, pressuring businesses and hotels not to host them. They’re doing noise demonstrations outside of hotels. They are creating a social cost for being in ICE, for being part of the secret police, for being part of la migra, which is really heartening and really remarkable and really brave, and the similarities are really striking.

You talked to an ex-member of Patriot Front in the last chapter of this book, and he essentially laid out the argumentfordoxing. He explained that when people think of Patriot Front, “the first thing they think is, ‘If I join Patriot Front, I will be doxed.’” On the other hand, he noted, once unmasked, fascists sometimes dive further into those communities as a support network.

There is also the question of, what happens when the social stigma around white supremacy is gone? Given the strength of fascism in America today, given its position inside the U.S. government, if antifa 10 years ago saw what was going to happen, do you think there would have been a change in tactic? How are these tactics changing now?

There’s this debate over whether antifa was successful. Because, obviously, they destroyed all these fascist groups. But of course, now, we have a much broader mass fascist movement, MAGA. It’s an interesting question, and I don’t have a clear answer.

But what antifa does at the local level is an insurgent form of community self-defense, and it was an urgent, pressing political tactic — or style of politics — that prevented Nazis from being comfortable in specific places, the streets. And in that way, it was really successful.

But you also have to remember, antifa is an incredibly small subculture — a small phenomenon or movement. It would never have had the members to stop what is happening now. That said, like I was saying with Minneapolis, we are seeing an adaptation of militant anti-fascist tactics on a bigger scale.

I personally think that those kinds of tactics, if replicated on a big enough basis, could be really effective. And I’ll say that there’s a reason MAGA — Kristi Noem, Trump — are so scared of efforts to dox ICE agents. And that’s in part because MAGA saw what doxing did to the alt-right. And doxing, again, is dependent on leveraging a societal taboo against explicit white supremacy. And I think doxing, identifying ICE agents, for example, is an important part of creating and maintaining a taboo against being in ICE.

I think it will be important now to let people in ICE know that they are the Nazis in this movie, and that in a generation, they will be depicted as villains in the movies their kids watch. We are already seeing public opinion turning against ICE. A [YouGov poll taken the day immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis showed 19% of Republicans and 46% of American adults overall indicating support for abolishing ICE.] That is remarkable.

I quote an anti-fascist in the book saying that anti-fascism is fundamentally hopeful, that it’s a struggle against impossible odds. And I find that example of anti-fascists over the last few years, actually, very inspiring for this fascist moment that we’re in right now.

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an 10 25

A profile in The New York Times says that Shirish Dáte, a White House reporter for HuffPost who goes by the byline S.V. Dáte, "gets clobbered" when he reaches out to the Trump administrationfor comment.

"Top Trump officials, Mr. Dáte said, tend to reply with insults, often bundled with praise for their boss. Never were they more newsworthy than a recent back-and-forth that spread across the internet," the Times writes.

When Dáte asked the administration who recommended Budapest for the now-canceled meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt now infamously replied, "Your mom did," in a text message that has since gone viral.

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, texted the same reply to him moments later.

“I was kind of like, this is a serious war that’s going on that has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians in their homes,” Dáte, also the author of the 2020 book "The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism and the Rest of Us with Coronavirus", told the Times.

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“And then your response is, ‘Your mom?'” he asked.

While the Times notes that Trump and his aides "regularly bad mouth the press," they say that in a White House press room filled with hand-picked acolytes, it's different when it comes to Dáte.

"They show less restraint in their pushback against Mr. Dáte, accentuating his somewhat lonely professional existence — reporting for a progressive publication in a building increasingly populated by right-wing outlets supportive of the current administration," the Times says.

Following the "your mom" texts, Leavitttold Dáte via text that he was a “far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face.”

After reporting on a story about Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Dáte received "an expletive-laden text from Mr. Cheung chiding his physical stature and his masculinity."

“In nine years, have I ever insulted you?” Dáte responded. Cheung then wrote that Mr. Dáte was “being a moron.”

Dáte, who has covered politics for years, including in Florida, says he's never experienced anything like this.

“Things got testy at times with Jeb Bush’s staff,” Dáte said. “But never like this.”

Dáte covered Trump's legal troubles and documented the "sprawling aftermath" of Jan. 6 during the Biden administration, the Times explains.

"That was my choice,” said Dáte, who wrote an opinion piece arguing that "the media scandal of the 2024 presidential campaign related not to coverage of Mr. Biden’s age, but to 'normalizing' coverage of Mr. Trump," the Times says.

Dáte is “alarmed” by Trump "not because he’s a Republican, but rather because his actions 'are breaks from precedent and oftentimes massive shifts in how this president is operating,'" Kevin Robillard, HuffPost’s political editor, told the Times.

HuffPost's editor-in-chief thinks he knows why they go after Dáte.

“Their response to [Dáte] was ridiculous, but it doesn’t bother us,” said Whitney Snyder, HuffPost’s editor in chief. “Maybe he’s gotten under their skin.”

He's also gotten more subscribers. According to a HuffPost spokesperson, following the Leavitt "your mom" incident, "the site received 66 percent more revenue for the program than it does on a typical day, according to a spokeswoman for the site."

Dáte believes that uptick is due to many things.

“I would guess that our core audience does not like Donald Trump for a variety of reasons,” Dáte said, “and I hope my stories have informed them as to why they might oppose him.”

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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/section/media

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huffpo jan? 24

Republicans Are Panicking Over This Issue — And Experts Have A Warning

see kirk 4 annot

right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, leader of the MAGA youth groups Turning Point USA and Students for Trump and the host one of the most listened-to podcasts in the United States, encouraged his listeners this week to take up arms in preparation for an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.

“The break-ins, the looting, the murder, the rapes, the arson, it’s — by the way, this is just getting warmed up,” Kirk said Wednesday on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” echoing white supremacist talking points depicting immigrants and asylum seekers as inherently criminal. “You got 15,000 fighting-age males that are getting deployed all across the country. Native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon. It’s the new country we live in. It is ‘Mad Max.’ [President Joe] Biden is creating ‘Mad Max.’ You’re on your own.”

The day before, Tucker Carlson, who had hosted the former Fox News prime-time juggernaut “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had also suggested it was time for civilians to take matters into their own hands.

“It’s unanimous: Everyone in power, from the White House, to the hedge fund managers, to the Supreme Court of the United States, has decided to destroy the country by allowing it to be invaded,” Carlson told his 11 million followers on X (formerly Twitter). “That leaves the population to defend itself. Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”

Kirk and Carlson — both of whom have long promoted the “great replacement theory,” falsely suggesting Democrats are bringing migrants into the country to “replace” white people — were responding to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that said the federal government could remove dangerous razor wire Texas had installed along its border with Mexico.

In his response to the ruling, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released a statement Wednesday that used language eerily reminiscent of Southern states’ statements of secession ahead of the Civil War: He threatened to defy the Supreme Court decision, declaring that the “federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States.” The next day, Republican governors from 25 states issued a joint statement supporting Abbott, praising him for “stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.”

It was the latest, most dramatic escalation between Abbott and President Joe Biden over the situation at the border — an escalation experts say has corresponded with increasingly dangerous rhetoric from prominent conservatives that could encourage violent vigilantism targeting immigrants.

“It does provide a lot of license to vigilantes,” journalist Patrick Strickland, author of the book “The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands,” told HuffPost. “This is not an ‘invasion’; it’s desperate people fleeing organized crime or poverty or war or violence. It’s not the same as the organized regiments of a formal army.”

Strickland pointed to the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, when a white supremacist who wanted to stop the “Hispanic invasion” at the southern border opened fire, killing 22 people in what has been called the deadliest anti-Latino hate crime in American history. Earlier that year, Abbott had published campaign material calling on Texans to “defend” the state and to “take matters into our own hands” when it comes to immigration.

“This is not an ‘invasion’; it’s desperate people fleeing organized crime or poverty or war or violence. It’s not the same as the organized regiments of a formal army.”

• Patrick Strickland, author of "The Marauders"

Similarly, in 2018, as then-President Donald Trump, with the help of Fox News, manufactured a panic about a “migrant caravan” marching toward the southern border, another white supremacist opened fire inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The shooter, who had cited antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews hastening the replacement of white Americans by importing immigrants into the country, killed 11 worshippers.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents the El Paso area, said her “community knows better than any that there are deadly consequences to the hatred and xenophobia the far-right is promoting.”

“A reminder to them that the white supremacist who drove over 10 hours to my community on August 3, 2019 to massacre immigrants and Hispanics used the same language they continue to espouse,” Escobar told HuffPost in a statement. “The normalization of such violent rhetoric and dehumanization led to the murder of innocent people in El Paso, and I fear such hatred and unfounded fear will only perpetuate the next incident.”

Also of concern is the long, menacing history of right-wing paramilitary groups along the U.S.-Mexico border, including in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when white supremacist leaders David Duke, then a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and Louis Beam, head of the Texas Knights of the KKK, patrolled the border in search of migrants. There was another explosion of right-wing militia activity along the border when Barack Obama was president.

There remains a large coterie of paramilitary groups, often acting with the implicit, or explicit, support of elected lawmakers and law enforcement officials.

“People often think of vigilantes as operating completely separate from the state, completely removed from politics, and that’s actually not the case,” Regina Bateson, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told HuffPost. “So it’s very common that there are relationships between people involved in vigilantism and elected officials. It’s a way of pushing political agendas, sometimes trying to sort of force the state into acting where it wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Bateson said the current conservative panic about migrants crossing the border is fostering conditions that could lead to a new period of vigilantism.

First, she said, there are already “pre-existing networks” of militias along the border, and they have all the “relevant skills.” Second, vigilantism is typically carried out by “someone from a more powerful or more privileged group in society, targeting somebody who’s from a more marginalized group” — in this case, predominantly white Americans targeting Latino migrants. This more privileged group, Bateson added, will frame their actions as “defensive,” depicting their targets as a threat, even if they’re the ones “proactively carrying out ‘security patrols,’ or acting in ways that are offensive, like proactively going out and looking for people.” Finally, Stateson said, right-wing vigilantism often thrives when there’s an abundance of harsh, dehumanizing language about the target group.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to defy a Supreme Court decision that allows federal officials to remove razor wire from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Eric Gay/Associated Press

Abbott has used such language. Earlier this month, the governor boasted that “the only thing we’re not doing is shooting people” crossing the border because “the Biden administration would charge us with murder” — seemingly implying he’d condone the extrajudicial killings of asylum seekers if he and other Texans could get away with it.

And last month, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America, words that parallel language Adolf Hitler used about Jews in “Mein Kampf.”

Right-wing figures have also started to invoke the possibility of a new civil war if Biden doesn’t deal with the “invasion” at the border, as reported by Media Matters.

“My thoughts are that the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) wrote on X earlier this week.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt also indulged in fantasies of a hypothetical “force-on-force” conflict between Texas and the Biden administration during an interview this week with Newsmax.

If the Biden administration were to take over control of the Texas National Guard as a way of ending the conflict with Abbott, Stitt said, he’d understand if soldiers started to consider not obeying the president’s orders.

“I think they would be in a difficult situation: to protect their homeland or to follow what Biden’s saying,” Stitt said. “It’s very interesting. But then, you know, then you’ve got Oklahoma and Florida and Tennessee, and you got all these other states that would send our National Guard to help and to support the efforts of Gov. Abbott. Because every state is a border state.”

Matt Walsh, the popular Daily Wire host, said this week that “red-state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” adding, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn’t.”

Tim Pool, a conservative YouTuber with more than a million subscribers, described what’s happening in Texas as a “Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referring to the opening battle of the Civil War. “It does feel like it could be escalating to this federal vs. state conflict.”

Kirk also got in on the action. “So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” Kirk asked on his podcast, reading a question a listener had sent in.

===

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CIC

CIC’s Trade Associations PR Investigation in the Media

Climate Investigations Center on April 8, 2019

cic pr trade association report summarization photo

In early March 2019, the Climate Investigations Center (CIC) launched its Trade Associations and the Public Relations Industry report, which revealed the almost $1.4 billion energy and business trade associations spent over the past decade on advertising, communications, and advocacy via contracts with public relations (PR) companies.

Since the publication of the report, CIC’s Kert Davies has been interviewed by online media outlets and podcasts discussing which PR firms were contracted, the various campaigns spawned from these connections, and the impacts these campaigns have on the public and lawmakers.

HuffPost

In a HuffPost article titled Big Business Spent $1.4 Billion On PR, Advertising Over The Last Decade, Chris D’Angelo wrote about CIC’s findings on trade associations and their public relations contracts. Additionally, D’Angelo interviewed Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University who has tracked corporate spending and climate change denial groups. Regarding trade association PR contracts, Brulle says, “I don’t think you can understand the opposition to climate action unless you take this massive amount of activity into account.” Brulle called these PR campaigns the “sinews of the political operations and the cultural operations surrounding climate politics.”

Drilled Podcast

“In a lot of ways, PR firms have been sort of the linchpin of the fossil fuel industry’s plan for a long, long time.”

The true crime podcast, Drilled, hosted Davies on an episode titled, Big Oil Is Ramping Up PR Spending and Oil Production, which focused on the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and public relations firms. The episode covered both CIC’s trade association PR investigation as well as a report published by Influence Map.

Host Amy Westervelt described PR firms as being “the linchpin of the fossil fuel industry’s plan for a long, long time,” highlighting their extensive use by trade associations that represent the corporate interests of their membership. These trade associations allow member companies to push their political and anti-environmental agendas without a direct connection to their brand which might tarnish their reputation.

Westervelt highlighted trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute (API), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the US Chamber of Commerce as some of the biggest offenders.  During the interview, Davies explained that the visible PR campaigns are part of larger goals and targets that have been “agreed upon by the members of that trade association” and are a “window into their political game.” He notes that this tactic includes “very little overt climate denial” and instead is about “laying the groundwork for the campaigns that are against policies on climate change.” For instance, by “making fracking look good” people may begin to “question these policies like the Green New Deal,” Davies says.

Example of trade association advertising, this is API’s Vote4Energy campaign: “We can produce the energy America needs and protect the environment – it doesn’t have to be either/or. There’s already been a lot of progress.” Member companies of API include ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell.

The Real News Network...

huffpo

tRUMP INSISTS REPORTERS RETURN 'NOBLE' PRIZES:{ Trump launched another Twitter tirade against the media Sunday, slamming a days-old story about his lax work habits. Trump also called on reporters who wrote about Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election to return their “Noble” prizes. There are no Noble prizes for reported stories, nor are there Nobel Prizes. There are Pulitzer Prizes for journalism; there is a Nobel Prize for literature. That particular rant subsequently vanished. But hours later, Trump called his comments “sarcasm.” :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[:{HuffPost:(style="color:#2b5fef;"):}::{]}:

==

Daniel McGowan Released After Lawyers Confirm He Was Jailed For HuffPost Blog

Posted: 04/05/2013 1:02 pm EDT  |  Updated: 04/05/2013 5:25 pm EDT

UPDATE: 5:25 p.m. -- Lawyers for environmental activist Daniel McGowan said in a statement Friday afternoon that he had been returned to his halfway house in Brooklyn. They added that they had confirmed McGowan was jailed by federal marshals on Thursday for his Huffington Post blog post -- on the basis of a prison regulation that was declared unconstitutional by a judge in 2007.

Their statement read:

Daniel McGowan has been released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was taken into custody yesterday and is back at the halfway house where he has been residing since his release from prison in December. Yesterday, Daniel was given an "incident report" indicating that his Huffington Post blog post, “Court Documents Prove I Was Sent to Communication Management Units (CMU) for My Political Speech," violated a BOP regulation prohibiting inmates from "publishing under a byline." The BOP regulation in question was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 2007, and eliminated by the BOP in 2010. After we brought this to the BOP's attention, the incident report was expunged.

The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately return a request for comment.

The earlier story ...

NEW YORK -- The jailing of environmental activist Daniel McGowan is under review, a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) official said Friday morning.

McGowan, who pleaded guilty to arson linked to the Earth Liberation Front in 2006, was serving out the final months of his seven-year sentence in a Brooklyn halfway house when he was jailed by federal marshals Thursday morning, allegedly for writing a commentary on The Huffington Post critical of a harshly restricted federal prison unit in which he had spent time.

Tracy Rivers, a residential reentry manager for the BOP in New York, told HuffPost Friday morning, "We are reviewing this case to determine if the actions that were taken were appropriate."

Rivers declined to say more about why McGowan was moved to the Metropolitan Detention Center, citing privacy issues. But she noted that a determination would be made in McGowan's case by the end of Friday.

In general, Rivers said, prisoners can be punished for violating a BOP rule that prohibits giving interviews to the news media without official approval. But that rule says nothing about prisoners writing blog posts.

McGowan's wife, Jenny Synan, told HuffPost that neither he, his lawyers nor a BOP official she talked to about the case had heard of a regulation prohibiting prisoners from writing blog posts.

In a statement Thursday, McGowan's lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "If this is indeed a case of retaliation for writing an article about the BOP retaliating against his free speech while he was in prison, it is more than ironic, it is an outrage."

UPDATE: 1:25 p.m. -- Daniel McGowan may soon leave jail. His attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Rachel Meeropol, told HuffPost Friday afternoon, "We have been told by the BOP that he will be sent back to the halfway house today."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/daniel-mcgowan-jailing_n_3021613.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

The day before, on March 4,Bret Jacobson, the founder and president of Maverick Strategies and Communications, a public relations/consulting firm specializing in "opposition research," submitted a dossier onDanielle  Ivory to the firm "Quinn Thomas Public Affairs."http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/d/d5/Syn_Ivory_Dossier_and_NRC_PANNA_Tides_all.pdf  links her to soros/tides

Quinn Thomas had been hired by Syngenta CP in October 2009, as part of an expanded PR operation led by WHWG, which the watchdog group Media Transparency has called "an umbrella firm of former ghostwriters for Republican presidents and bureaucrats now at the service of anyone willing to pay.

Assessing a Reporter's "Motives"

As stated in the dossier, Quinn Thomas had sought an investigation into Ivory's history for "the purpose of assessing her motivations regarding her coverage of [a]trazine."

The dossier lists Ivory's work history as including a stint with Bill Moyers at the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (which is distinct from the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy), and a job at National Public Radio's award winning Weekend Edition. It also noted her writing for Democracy Now!, Alternet, Truthout, and HuffPo.

The dossier calls these respected organizations a "who's who of anti-employer employers."

Furthermore, wrote Jacobson, "[Ivory] has successfully used journalism to pressure an insurance company to reverse its decision not to cover a 12-year-old boy's prosthetic arm."

Aside from the purportedly unsavory nature of Ivory's past employers and her use of journalism to benefit a disabled child, he claimed the primary driver behind Ivory's atrazine reporting wasegotism.

Noting that Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman had credited Ivory as the reporter who "broke the story on the EPA's [a]trazine cover-up," Jacobson concluded that Ivory's "professional reputation and ego are tied to the effectiveness of the attack on the chemical."

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)

Home > Revealed: How Syngenta Investigated the Press and Shaped the News About its Controversial Weed-Killer Atrazine

PR Watch [1] / By Lisa Graves [2], Beau Hodai [3]

Revealed: How Syngenta Investigated the Press and Shaped the News About its Controversial Weed-Killer Atrazine

Continued from previous page

February 7, 2012  |

Documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, recently unsealed as part of a major lawsuit against Syngenta, reveal how the global chemical company's PR team investigated the press and spent millions to spin news coverage and public perceptions in the face of growing concerns about potential health risks from the widely used weed-killer "atrazine."

This story is part of a new series about this PR campaign to influence the media, potential jurors, potential plaintiffs, farmers, politicians, scientists, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the midst of reviews of the weed-killer's potential to act as an endocrine disruptor, over the past decade or so.

Dealing with Meddlesome Reporters

Two years ago, on March 2, 2010, Huffington Post Investigative Fund (HuffPo) reporter Danielle Ivory contacted Syngenta Corporation Director of Corporate Communications-North America Paul Minehart and asked, as reporters do, a few questions.

Little did she know her questions to Syngenta—which reported sales of over $11 billion that year, almost half of which, $5 billion, was profit—would provoke the creation of a secret dossier on her.

According to emails discovered by St. Louis attorney Stephen Tillery in a class action to get Syngenta to compensate local water utilities for the cost of filtering Syngenta's weed-killer out of drinking water supplies, the Syngenta team did not simply respond to her questions with the usual PR spin. (Syngenta sought to keep this information out of the public eye in that case, "Holiday Shore Sanitary District v. Syngenta Crop Protection et al.," but a trial court in Illinois rejected the company's claims and "unsealed" some emails and materials last year, making them part of the public record.)

Ivory told Minehart she had been informed by a source that a new federal class action would soon be filed against Syngenta Crop Protection Incorporated (“Syngenta CP”), a subsidiary/division of Syngenta AG (“SAG”), a global holding company located in Switzerland.

Over a dozen municipal and county operators of water districts in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, and Iowa were planning to sue Syngenta CP—whose U.S. headquarters is in Greensboro, North Carolina—and SAG for the costs associated with removing atrazine from their community’s drinking water.

Daring to Seek Answers

A few days later, on March 8, 2010, several water utilities would claim Syngenta deliberately withheld data indicating human health risks from the public, which the company denies.

The New York Times’ Charles Duhigg had reported in an August 2009 series called "Toxic Waters" on how huge spikes in atrazine concentration in drinking water were hidden from the American people and that scientists are concerned about atrazine’s potential as an endocrine disruptor to affect hormone levels. The Natural Resources Defense Council had issued a major report documenting these issues. And Ivory had written about this online for HuffPo.

According to emails obtained by CMD, in March, Ivory was seeking comment on a number of questions about the coming federal lawsuit.

She wanted to know Syngenta's response to the allegation that the company, although it had the resources to do so, was refusing to aid communities seeking to remove atrazine from their water supplies. What was Syngenta's response to water utilities that could not afford the cost of removing the weed-killer from their customers’ drinking water?

Ivory had previously reported that replacing the sand filtration system used by many water districts with carbon filters to remove atrazine were difficult for cash-strapped utilities to afford, especially after the Wall Street crash. She had noted that the conversion to carbon filtration could cost millions and that the carbon filters needed require annual replacement at a cost, for example, of over $100k for six filters.

Following several queries by Ivory, Minehart responded [4] (PDF), via email on March 5, that atrazine was safe.

He also asserted, among other things, that since 2005 no water system in the nation had an “annual” average atrazine content above the three parts-per-billion ("3 ppb") threshold set by the EPA.

Less than an hour after Minehart's email had been sent, Ivory doggedly responded:

"Paul, thanks for this. I appreciate the statement, but I noticed that Syngenta did not respond directly to any of the questions that I asked . . . ." She repeated her request for a comment on plaintiffs’ claim they could not afford to filter Atrazine from their water supplies and that Syngenta should pay for it.

Ivory wasn't going to go away.

What to Do about a Persistent Reporter?

According to court records, Minehart then fired off a very interesting internal email, seeking guidance from others on Syngenta’s team about how to further field Ivory's queries.

"Danielle is persistent: I just spoke with her. She said I did not respond to her questions!" the Minehart wrote.

The recipients of this email were Syngenta CP’s director of communications, Sherry Ford, and three other Syngenta employees.

Also included on the email delivery chain were two public relations consultants: Josh Gilder, of White House Writers Group (WHWG), and Chris Robling, of Jayne Thompson and Associates (JTA), an Illinois public relations firm, hired as part of the company’s PR strategy to deal with litigation in Illinois, among other things. WHWG had been part of Syngenta's PR team for about six months, coming on board after the New York Times story and NRDC report came out. (The litigation has opened a window on some of communications among the Syngenta PR team.)

Before that day, March 5, Ivory had been on the radar screen of the Syngenta spin team, and someone decided to do more than just react to her stories.

The day before, on March 4, Bret Jacobson, the founder and president of Maverick Strategies and Communications, a public relations/consulting firm specializing in "opposition research," submitted a dossier on Ivory to the firm “Quinn Thomas Public Affairs.”

Quinn Thomas had been hired by Syngenta CP in October 2009, as part of an expanded PR operation led by WHWG, which the watchdog group Media Transparency has called “an umbrella firm of former ghostwriters for Republican presidents and bureaucrats now at the service of anyone willing to pay.”

A “First-Strike” PR Team

Around the time of the New York Times investigation of atrazine levels and growing health concerns, according to e-mails discovered in the Holiday Shores suit, Syngenta CP had put out a request for proposals for a new PR effort.

According to the solicitation, Syngenta was seeking firms experienced with a “first strike” mentality and with managing “third party” spokespeople to carry Syngenta’s message when it did not want those messages to be seen as coming from the corporation. It also listed [5] (PDF) its top two primary audiences as “media” and “potential jurors.” (The Holiday Shores case was pending in Illinois; the Jayne Thompson firm had been hired a few years earlier and would continue to be part of Syngenta's PR operation along with the new PR team being solicited.)

WHWG responded with a $498,000 base proposal that included funding for the “grassroots mobilization” firm DDC Advocacy, which has been described as a big player in the “astroturf” world of making corporate initiatives look like they are the result of wide and deep grassroots support.

A PR Team Known for Attacking Trial Lawyers

DDC reportedly has also co-chaired an astroturfing “roundtable” with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [6], which is funded by the biggest global corporations in the world (WHWG has also spearheaded PR campaigns for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). DDC has also worked on astroturf campaigns in the cyber-world against lawyers who represent injured Americans and in support of so-called “tort reform” that would limit the rights of Americans harmed or killed through corporate neglect or greed.

WHWG’s proposal to Syngenta on atrazine also included Quinn Thomas Public Affairs, which was specifically touted for its success in “engaging” lawyers who represent American consumers and in fighting public interest groups through “aggressive third party activity.” WHWG said Quinn Thomas' tactics had succesfully slowed or reversed “activist momentum.”

"Third party activity" means using seemingly independent third parties that do not appear to be acting in concert with or at the behest of the corporation in a dispute. Aggressive, here, is undefined.

In documents uncovered through the Illinois state suit against Syngenta, a dossier on HuffPo reporter Danielle Ivory [7] (PDF) has surfaced. Ivory had contacted Syngenta on March 2nd.

The March 4, 2010 dossier was prepared quickly by “Maverick Strategies” partner Bret Jacobsen as a memo to Quinn Thomas, who was working with WHWG, part of Syngenta CP's six-month old, expanded PR efforts.

From late 2009 through 2010, according to spreadsheets discovered in the litigation, WHWG's operations resulted in payments of over $1.2 million by Syngenta for "message management" and "campaign management." Its total to date is unknown.

Assessing a Reporter's "Motives"

As stated in the dossier, Quinn Thomas had sought an investigation into Ivory's history for "the purpose of assessing her motivations regarding her coverage of [a]trazine."

The dossier lists Ivory's work history as including a stint with Bill Moyers at the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (which is distinct from the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy), and a job at National Public Radio’s award winning Weekend Edition. It also noted her writing for Democracy Now!, Alternet,Truthout, and HuffPo.

The dossier calls these respected organizations a "who's who of anti-employer employers."

Furthermore, wrote Jacobson, "[Ivory] has successfully used journalism to pressure an insurance company to reverse its decision not to cover a 12-year-old boy's prosthetic arm."

Aside from the purportedly unsavory nature of Ivory's past employers and her use of journalism to benefit a disabled child, he claimed the primary driver behind Ivory's atrazine reporting was egotism.

Noting that Democracy Now!host Amy Goodman had credited Ivory as the reporter who "broke the story on the EPA's [a]trazine cover-up," Jacobson concluded that Ivory's "professional reputation and ego are tied to the effectiveness of the attack on the chemical."

Democracy Now!: An "Anti-Employer Employer?"

Goodman had hosted Ivory to discuss her report, "EPA Fails to Inform Public about Weed Killer in Drinking Water.” Ivory had examined data from the monitoring of 150 watersheds between 2003 and 2008. That data filed with the EPA was hidden from public eyes until demands for compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disgorged it.

The water testing data indicated that the Bush Administration’s EPA had been aware of high atrazine levels in American's drinking water and had not disclosed that to the public.

Atrazine spikes in water were hidden.The Bush Administration had also entered into an agreement with Syngenta to test for atrazine in water supplies. Accordingly, Syngenta was aware that periodic spikes of atrazine concentration in water systems were occurring periodically throughout the nation. Dozens of these spikes were well over 3 ppb.

Documents revealed through litigation and compared with the public record show that Syngenta and its “third party” consultants and allies repeatedly told the public that atrazine levels were always in compliance with federal safety standard.

(The utilities in the federal suit, which are represented by the Korien Tillery law firm which also represents the water districts in the state class action, note that relying on annual averages obscures spikes in atrazine levels in community drinking water systems during the times of the year the weed-killer is applied to fields. One drinking water system in Indiana was measured to have a spike in atrazine level of 237.5 ppb, exponentially greater than 3 ppb, in a period in which the weed-killer was sprayed on cropland.)

Hiding the "Poisoning of the Well"

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) had examined data from the EPA's "Ecological Watershed Monitoring Program" and "Atrazine Monitoring Program," obtained via its FOIA litigation with the Bush Administration.

The results of this analysis were released by NRDC in August 2009 in a detailed report entitled, "Poisoning the Well: How the EPA Is Ignoring Atrazine Contamination in Surface and Drinking Water in the Central United States."

In it, Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist in NRDC's health and environment program, said “there is strong evidence that atrazine is an endocrine disrupting chemical interfering with critical reproductive hormones even at extremely low levels. This is because hormones in our bodies are active at very low levels, parts-per-billion or lower.”

Jacobson, in the dossier on Ivory, note that there were similarities between Ivory's findings and those of NRDC, although the data from different sources all showed spikes in atrazine levels in drinking water.

And, the dossier makes much of the fact that an NRDC blog congratulated Ivory on what it dubbed to be an "excellent investigative report" on the atrazine data.

Targeting the Tides Foundation

The dossier on Ivory also revealed that Maverick had given a dossier to Quinn Thomas on NRDC, the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), the Land Stewardship Project (LSP), and the Tides Foundation. That dossier was not in the documents unsealed by the court in the Holiday Shores litigation.

According to the Ivory dossier, Maverick had previously provided a more thorough report on these organizations than was summarized there. Its summary claimed that the listed environmental groups “share one very powerful, controversial funding source: The Tides Foundation, an uber-wealthy and far-left philanthropy . . . .”

The March 4, 2010 dossier goes on to channel a Glenn Beck-like tone in linking the groups to Tides and its management in a guilt-by-association manner.

The dossier on Ivory notes that the Tides Center provided funding for a 1999 report on pesticides and herbicides, including atrazine. And, it notes that the Tides' donors gave NRDC between $64,000 and $96,000 a year for three years.

The amount of funding Maverick received from Quinn Thomas or the amount Quinn Thomas received from the Syngenta contract is not known; what is known is that WHWG received over one million dollar in fees for its work on the atrazine PR efforts.

Science Under Siege

NRDC and Syngenta have a long, contentious relationship.

Due to an array of health concerns, NRDC has recommended that atrazine use be phased out and that the weed-killer be filtered out of Americans’ contaminated drinking water. Its investigations and lawsuits in the public interest have resulted in judicial decrees requiring more monitoring of water and have spurred the EPA to subject the herbicide to additional reviews by the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) -- including an EPA SAP atrazine review launched in October, 2009 -- based on emerging science and growing concerns.

The dossier on Ivory also expressed the view that NRDC’s “Poisoning the Well” report was in essence part of a conspiracy funded by Tides, which might include Ivory's work for HuffPo.

The dossier writer had also contacted HuffPo "to inquire about additional information about their funding model, sources and ties to the Tides family of organizations." Jacobson reported that he had not yet received a reply and that he did not expect further details.

As for Ivory, the dossier reported that its opposition research was based on “publicly” available information and was the best that could be prepared under the short deadline provided by Quinn Thomas.

On June 9, 2011, as part of a sworn deposition given in the Illinois suit, Syngenta’s PR rep, Sherry Ford, denied that Syngenta or anyone acting on its behalf had “investigated” anyone except one person.

That person was not Danielle Ivory, according to Ford.

Yet, the March 4, 2010, dossier on Ivory was requisitioned by Syngenta’s hired PR team following Ivory's query to Syngenta about the coming federal lawsuit. It was produced for a PR team known for its aggressive tactics. The term "investigated" was not specifically defined in the deposition or by the opposition research firm tapped by the PR team.

Syngenta Admits It Investigated Dr. Tyrone Hayes

No, the person Ford admitted had been investigated by Syngenta was not Ivory.

He's a U.C.-Berkeley scientist whose extensive studies suggest that atrazine causes sex mutations in frogs. (A detailed story of how Syngenta has attacked this scientist's reputation is reported in January’s Mother Jonesmagazine. The deposition of Syngenta's head of PR is not discussed in that story.)

Ford claimed under oath that she herself no longer has the opposition research on Dr. Hayes.

She also claimed under oath that Syngenta's expanded first-strike PR team had been assembled in late 2009 in direct response to a tip they had received from a reporter indicating that a new federal lawsuit against the company was in the offing. At the time of Ivory's e-mail exchange with Syngenta's Paul Minehart starting March 2, 2010, the company claimed it had no knowledge of any pending federal litigation or of the allegations of the plaintiffs about atrazine.

On March 5th, HuffPo ran a story about atrazine contamination in Iowa, but it was not by Ivory.

The piece by Kerry Trueman, titled “Our Toxic Waterways: Flushing Away Our Future,” discussed a new documentary called “Big River,” by Ian Cheney and Kurt Ellis whose previous piece “King Corn,” won critical acclaim. The new documentary traced how the atrazine they used to grow corn had contaminated their local creek.

Trueman noted that recent news stories had reported concerns that atrazine might chemically castrate or “feminize” male frogs, according to Dr. Hayes' research, and that the EPA had recently announced it would re-assess the weed-killer.

Searching for a Defender of Atrazine on HuffPo

In response, Syngenta CP’s Steven Goldsmith sent an email to Josh Gilder of WHWG and Mike Burita at Quinn Thomas asking an interesting question [8] (PDF).

“Is there anyone at HP [HuffPo] who we could cultivate on this issue rather than continuing to get bashed by everyone on their payroll?”

WHWG and Quinn Thomas had already been hard at work for six months on an array of tactics to advance Syngenta PR's third party strategy on atrazine.

One was to have Syngenta’s chief scientist, Dr. Mike Bushell, ghostwrite a chapter for a book challenging the idea of regulating atrazine by applying the “precautionary principle.”

This standard, which is embedded in U.S. and EU consumer law, places the burden of proof on manufacturers to establish that their products are not harmful if science points to significant risks to human health or the environment.  WHWG said [9] (PDF) it would “find someone else willing to put their name” on Syngenta’s “Ghost Author” story about atrazine and challenge the potential embrace of the precautionary principle by the Obama Administration's EPA.

The ghostwritten chapter was for a book to be published in conjunction with someone at the American Enterprise Institute [10], a DC think tank that is funded in part by large donations from corporations. It is not known whether Syngenta has funded this think tank or any of its “fellows,” directly or indirectly.

Also Needed: An Investigative Reporter to Rattle the EPA's Cages

On December 3, 2009, Syngenta’s in-house PR staff held a planning meeting to deal with the fallout from theNew York Times investigation, the agenda [11] (PDF) was to “[o]btain the services of a well know (sic) investigative reporter to probe around the EPA” and, at a minimum get advice “on what buttons to push and cages to rattle.”

As part of the effort to influence EPA’s review, another tactic was to identify long-term needs for published materials and which third parties “should be approached/retained.”

Unsealed e-mails reveal [12] (PDF) that earlier that same week WHWG had reported to Syngenta that a third party the PR team was in communication with was Jon Entine of the American Enterprise Institute. Entine is a former producer with NBC and ABC News, whose books attacked the idea of socially responsible investing and the precautionary principle (Let Them Eat Precaution).

The "Third Party" Technique in Action

While WHWG worked to cultivate new third party voices for Syngenta, some old mainstays of the company continued to defend it in the press.

For example, Elizabeth Whelan had long been on the short-list of people Syngenta's PR team considered when shopping corporate op-eds to publish under someone else's byline.

Whelan is the president of the "American Council for Science and Health" (ACSH). ACSH has been called "a receptacle for payments from pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, food and other companies who appreciate the convenience of having their grantees and former employees serve on government science panels," by Michael Jacobsen, the Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Jacobsen told the Washington Times [13] that ACSH had "stopped disclosing its donors in the 1990s, presumably out of embarrassment." ACSH's list of leaders, scientists, and co-collaborators include other names of third party advocates that pop up in the e-mails unsealed in the litigation.

ACSH had already been enlisted [14] (PDF) by the Syngenta PR team to attack the New York Times article by Charles Duhigg, “Debating How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass,” before the story was even published on August 22, 2009, and she responded [15] right away.

ACSH's Beth Whelan Defends Atrazine, Without Disclosing Big Bucks

Whelan defended atrazine in a morning appearance on MSNBC the week the story broke. She told viewers across America that the New York Times story was "bogus."

She did not tell viewers that she was the beneficiary of big donations from Syngenta.

In the MSNBC debate with Whelan, the NRDC's Jennifer Sass suggested that scientific studies indicated that atrazine had chemically castrated frogs, by disrupting their endocrine systems with even small amounts of the weed-killer, which Whelan dismissed.

When Duhigg’s New York Times article was reprised on NPR's "Fresh Air" in late October 2009, Whelan and her colleague at ACSH, Gilbert Ross, reached [16] (PDF) out to Syngenta's [17] (PDF) PR team again with their spin on atrazine, claiming:

"Mr. Duhigg's articles are replete [18] (PDF) with exaggerated risk, bias, misrepresented science and sensationalism. . . . 'Chemophobia' is in: scaring people about chemicals in our food, water and consumer products gets attention -- but it is counterproductive, distracting us from the real public health hazards we face today."

In an October 20, 2009 email [19] (PDF) from WHWG’s Josh Gilder sent a note to his colleagues on the Syngenta PR team with a framework for countering the Duhigg analysis:

"I believe Duhigg's interview on NPR represents the new line of attack on [a]trazine, and just as the other side has been getting its organizational duck in a row, they have advanced their message in a way that will require a certain amount of catching up on our part," wrote Gilder. "This advanced message is that 'new science' suggests that exposure to even infinitesimal amounts of atz, measured in ppb, at critical points in pregnancy can cause birth defects or premature birth for a few members of the population. This renders past EPA decisions less compelling, as this is 'new science.'"

WHWG recommended Syngenta enlist the aid again of allies at ACSH -- namely Ross and Whelan.

ACSH Gets "Lifeblood" Funding from “Dear Syngenta Friends”

As the e-mails uncovered in the litigation reveal, Whelan had also submitted a new financial proposal from ACSH for a special project from Syngenta. The proposal began “Dear Syngenta friends” and proposed that ACSH produce a publication on pesticide and Atrazine exposure and human health.

She was seeking $100,000 to publish and consumerize a discussion of “myths and realities” about agribusiness chemicals and health.

Her proposal concluded by noting that her request was separate from the “general operating support Syngenta has been so generously providing over the years, which we request to continue at current or increased levels. Such general operating support is the lifeblood of a small non-profit like ours, and is both deeply appreciated and much needed.”

Whelan, the president of the non-profit ASCH, is paid over $350,000 a year out of the organization’s $2 million in annual income, as of 2009. It is not clear how much "lifeblood" Syngenta pays each year as its generous contribution to ACSH budget and Whelan’s large salary.

ACSH’s published materials include a boilerplate disclaimer that it accepts grants from any source but that it is solely responsible for its research and that it “does not accept support from individual corporations for specific research projects.”

Spinning the Idea of “Chemophobia”

While aiding in attacks on Duhigg’s New York Times reporting, Whelan pushed the idea that people expressing concerns were engaged in “chemophobia,” an irrational fear of chemicals.

The e-mails contained in the court record are incomplete regarding ACSH’s project grant proposal, the total funding it has received over the years, and the subsequent funding for ACSH, WHWG, and others post-spring 2010.

Nevertheless, it is plain that Syngenta’s PR operations did not suddenly cease that spring, with the EPA’s decision on atrazine still pending along with ongoing litigation in the state and federal courts.

And just last month a long-time friend of Syngenta announced the release of a new book.

It was finalized in 2011 along with a “companion friendly” paper called “Scared to Death: How Chemophobia Threatens Public Health.” The book attacks the EPA and “harmful, unnecessary regulation” as well as the precautionary principle.

It has a chapter-long “case study” defending atrazine, just as members of the Syngenta PR team had been seeking.

The publisher? ACSH, consistent with the pitch Whelan made to Syngenta.

The book? Designed to rattle the cages at the EPA, which was on the Syngenta PR team's wishlist.

The author? John Entine, described as a highly regarded science reporter from the American Enterprise Institute, a third party Syngenta’s PR team had been cultivating.

The HuffPo contributor who wrtote about the book and its attack on critics of atrazine? It was Entine, whom Syngenta trusted.

It was not the investigated investigative HuffPo reporter, Danielle Ivory.

See more stories tagged with:

media [20],

water [21],

pr [22],

atrazine [23],

sygenta [24]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/154046/revealed%3A_how_syngenta_investigated_the_press_and_shaped_the_news_about_its_controversial_weed-killer_atrazine

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lisa-graves

[3] http://www.alternet.org/authors/beau-hodai

[4] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/9/90/Syn_email_response_to_HuffPo.pdf

[5] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/1/10/Syn_2009_PR_Request_for_Proposal.pdf

[6] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce

[7] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/d/d5/Syn_Ivory_Dossier_and_NRC_PANNA_Tides_all.pdf

[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/b8/Syn_email_Need_Someone_at_HuffPo.pdf

[9] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/1/18/Syn_email_Ghostwrite_Atrazine_Chapter_for_AEI.pdf

[10] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute

[11] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/2/26/Syn_email_plan_get_investigative_reporter_rattle_cages_at_EPA.pdf

[12] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/c/c2/Syn_email_WHWG_Roundup_memo.pdf

[13] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/apr/14/letters-to-the-editor-19-5933

[14] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/bd/Syn_email_NYT_Toxic_Waters.pdf

[15] http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.1230/news_detail.asp

[16] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/0/07/Syn_email_ACSH_financial_proposal.pdf

[17] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/0/07/Syn_email_Responding_to_NYT_Duhigg_on_NPR_Fresh_Air.pdf

[18] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/f/ff/Syn_email_Whelan_criticizes_Duhigg.pdf

[19] http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/4/42/Syn_email_Counter_Duhigg_interview.pdf

[20] http://www.alternet.org/tags/media-0

[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/water-0

[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/pr-0

[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/atrazine

[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/sygenta