Gatekeeping Blackness is the New Birtherism

“Kamala isn’t black” is the latest lie dividing black folks (and uniting those seeking to discredit her). I take personal offense at this particular insult as the American-born descendant of black Jamaican parents. While efforts to gatekeep black immigrants (and their descendants) out of blackness are not new, the speed with which the normally fractious and divided Democratic Party united behind Kamala Harris as their new presidential nominee after Biden dropped out has given them new fuel.

Whether they brand themselves American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), the most militant among them have decided to make common cause with Donald Trump (and his allies) and years of trafficking in xenophobic rhetoric directed against black and brown immigrants. Even the internet-infamous Curtis Scoon, who has made a career of pathologizing black folks for social media clicks had something to say that I agree with to those folks:

Curtis Scoon being right for once

A friend of mine told me that Scoon has Grenadian heritage, which probably explains the pointed nature of his rhetoric against ADOS & FBA. Speaking of Grenada, one interesting thing I learned from the limited series podcast The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop was about Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s speech to a predominantly black audience at Hunter College in New York City mere months before he and key members of his government were murdered and overthrown by a coup d’etat. Below is a short clip from the speech:

3 minutes, 38 seconds of Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, speaking to an audience at Hunter College, in New York City in 1983

Political views aside, one thing that is clear from this brief clip is that Bishop’s concept of blackness was an inclusive not an exclusive one. If the raucous response of his black American audience is any indication, they were very much onboard with what he was saying. Bishop gave another speech in D.C. the same year to the Sixth Annual Dinner of TransAfrica. The full text of his remarks are quite enlightening to read this many years later. He notes the Caribbean heritage of a number distinguished black Americans–but puts their black Americanness in the forefront. A few of the names I will touch on later in this piece are all people whom ADOS/FBA would gatekeep out of blackness. To continue briefly with Grenada and its American connections, it is very important to talk about Louise Little. She is known as the mother of Malcolm X (so by the logic of ADOS/FBA he’s not black), but only when researching this piece did I learn that she was first introduced to Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Montreal by her uncle.

Garveyism is a flavor of black nationalism named for Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the U.S. UNIA was the black nationalist organization he founded. His separatist views were at odds with the pro-integration aims of the NAACP (and Colin Grant’s biography of Garvey suggests that he and W.E.B. DuBois hated each other), but UNIA’s presence grew enough to span 25 U.S. states (and attract the unwanted attention of J. Edgar Hoover). Garvey was inspired by Booker T. Washington, and was among the people Washington corresponded with via letters. Garvey wanted to found a school in Jamaica like Tuskegee but Washington died months before Garvey would come to the U.S. to discuss his plans. During and after his 52 years of life, his ideas would influence black nationalism, the black power movement, and Pan-Africanism, the ideas which ultimately inspired Malcolm X in similar ways to his parents. Garvey’s concept of blackness too was inclusive rather than exclusive. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Kwame Ture (previously known as Stokely Carmichael) would raise the mantle of black power. Ture hailed from Trinidad, so by ADOS/FBA logic, John Lewis’ successor as chair of SNCC was not black.

Garvey was far from the only West Indian to contribute to blackness in America in the early 20th century. Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro, a key work heralding the Harlem Renaissance, contained numerous works by black authors from Jamaica (Claude McKay and Wilfrid A. Domingo), British Guiana (Eric Waldron), and Puerto Rico (Arturo Schomburg). Nearly one in four members of Harlem’s black residents were foreign-born in the 1920s. Looking back into the 19th century and the Civil War, we find that the black volunteers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment hailed not only from states in the Union and slave states, but from the Caribbean and Canada as well.

Contrary to the narrow and exclusive concept of blackness that ADOS/FBA advocates, black student groups protested apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, many years before the likes of Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jeff Flake were fighting movements to boycott, divest, and sanction it (and after William F. Buckley, the intellectual father of the modern right, turned from advocating for apartheid domestically to advocating for it overseas). ADOS/FBA’s narrow and exclusive concept of blackness continues to be ignored by law enforcement in this country. Amadou Diallo (killed by plainclothes NYPD officers) was a student from Guinea. Botham Jean (murdered by his neighbor, police officer Amber Guyger) was from St. Lucia. I suspect more research would confirm that black immigrants are at just as much from police violence as black folks with solely American heritage.

Many first-generation immigrants (like my parents) have long since become citizens–and lived in the United States far longer than they ever did in their country of origin. Harry Belafonte was born in New York City, but his parents came from Jamaica. Colin Powell had both Jamaican parents and a New York City birthplace in common Belafonte. Many children of first-generation immigrants (like me) have black American wives and children. The late General Powell’s wife Alma (who passed away late last month) was originally from Alabama. My wife and in-laws hail from Columbus, Ohio, with a lineage that stretches back to Tennessee and Mississippi. Among their relatives is a now-deceased Tuskegee Airman who lived in Kansas.

Regardless of the desires and efforts of those in this country who wish to define blackness as something small and exclusive to those whose heritage is solely the United States, the history and the present of this country makes blackness a little larger. Having a heritage that includes a Caribbean island or a birthplace on the African continent does not make us any less black. Donald J. Trump and his father wouldn’t rent his apartments to us either. The anti-black racism to which too many in the United States still cling, negatively impacts every black person in this country–regardless of their heritage. Xenophobia against immigrants who look like you doesn’t improve anyone’s life.

For the better and professional version of this argument, read Adam Serwer’s piece titled What Trump’s Kamala Harris Smear Reveals.

Reaping the Whirlwind

For they sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; It yields no grain. Should it yield, strangers would swallow it up.

Hosea 8:7

The first part of this verse came to my mind rather quickly as it became clear that what happened at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday was a failed assassination attempt. It needs to be said that Trump and his allies have flooded our politics with both rhetorical and real violence for many years. Because memories and attention spans among regular citizens (and unfortunately journalists too) are quite short, it is important to push back against the continuing attempts of those on the political right to cast themselves as victims.

This ABC News piece from May 2020 catalogued no less than 54 criminal cases where those who threatened and/or perpetrated violence against people used Trump as their rationale for it, or used his name in their threats. A post I wrote 2 1/2 years ago drew connections between the January 6th insurrection and our response to the 9/11 attacks, but Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that day certainly incited the violence and deaths that would happen later. On June 16, 2015, Trump said the now-infamous, xenophobic words about who Mexico was sending. While looking for the source material for this, I came across the abstract of an undergraduate honors thesis exploring the impact of Trump’s presidency on Latinx teens which cited those same words. These examples barely even scratch the surface of how far Trump’s particularly malign influence has spread. As Trump’s legal troubles have grown (along with those of January 6th insurrectionists), threats against judges and their families have spiked to exceedingly high levels.

North Carolina lieutenant governor and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is one of the better and most recent examples of a politician Trump has endorsed who traffics in the same rhetorical violence he does. Robinson reportedly said the following from the pulpit of The Lake Church on June 30:

“Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

NC Newsline story by Rob Schofield, published July 5, 2024

An even more grim example of the endorsement of violence far too common among candidates and elected officials in the GOP comes from Texas governor Greg Abbott. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry for the murder of Garrett Foster, a U.S. Air Force veteran participating in a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality. Despite evidence that Perry planned to murder a protestor, despite a jury finding Perry guilty on the basis of that and other evidence, and despite being sentenced to 25 years for his crime, he served barely a year in prison before receiving a full pardon from the governor. The pardon will restore Perry’s right to own and use firearms. Perry is a US Army veteran who the Army removed from its ranks via a dishonorable discharge after his murder conviction.

In the years after Black Lives Matters protests spread worldwide in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, Republican legislators have sponsored and even successfully enacted into law, measures protecting drivers who injure or kill protestors with their vehicles. Jack Galle is a Louisiana Republican who recently sponsored legislation to limit the liability of drivers if they harm people illegally blocking a road or highway. Kevin Stitt, the GOP governor of Oklahoma, signed legislation in 2021 granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally injure or kill protestors. The same legislation makes penalties against demonstrators who block public roads more severe. Below is a reminder of what these GOP lawmakers are endorsing:

James Fields drivingg through a crowd of counterprotestors of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.

The picture above was taken by Ryan Kelly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it. In 2017, a man deliberately drove his Dodge Charger into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA. He murdered Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. These are the protests of which then-President Trump said “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” What precipitated the rally and the counterprotests was the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on horseback from a park that formerly bore his name. It was the latest in the series of removals of Confederate monuments and memorials that began in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at the Charleston, SC church affectionately known as Mother Emanuel by yet another white supremacist.

Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric against Mexicans could certainly have been taken as encouragement by the mass shooter who murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Beyond the recent state-endorsed anti-migrant measures of questionable legality, such as buoys on the Rio Grande with razors and razor wire strung across private property without the permission of landowners, Texas and Arizona have decades-long histories of vigilantes operating at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to impersonate government agents, to hunt, detain, and even kill migrants. Trump’s xenophobia (and that of the political far right more broadly) should also be considered in connection with his championing of birtherism conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. Trump predictably turned to the birtherism playbook again to undermine Nikki Haley’s candidacy.

The ABC News piece I linked earlier makes plain the common threads between the perpetrators of Trump-inspired violence and the victims of it this way:

The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 54 cases are mostly white men–as young as teenagers and as old as 75–while the victims largely represent an array of minority groups–African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and gay men.

ABC News story written by Mike Levine, May 30, 2020

Both in this country’s history and in its present, the venom of violent rhetoric far more often than not infects those who go on to enact real violence against others. Black folks in particular, as well as their allies, have often been at the receiving end of political violence and terrorism. Often that violence has been aided and abetted by law enforcement, from the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, to the Orangeburg Massacre, and many lynchings, bombings, and other acts of terrorism in between. Trump has joined Alabama Governor George C. Wallace in a rare example of a political figure reaping a small measure of the violent rhetoric he has sown for many years.

In the wake of violence turning on someone who stoked such rhetoric for years, we are predictably hearing calls to turn down heated rhetoric from anti-woke publications like The Free Press, from House speaker Mike Johnson (who could be found earlier this spring spreading disinformation re: students protesting the war in Gaza and arguably inciting violence against protestors), and others in the GOP. When it comes to the political right however, we are talking about the same group of people responsible for what you see below:

Democratic elected officials condemning the violence and wishing Trump a full recovery were easy to find, including President Biden, former president Obama, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Former speaker Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked by a man with a hammer by a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory (which Trump has embraced and amplified for years). It is very easy to find video of Trump telling jokes about Paul Pelosi being assaulted, and his audience laughing along with him.

Others can and will draw false equivalences between political violence from the ideological left and right. I won’t waste time doing that. The political registration of the would-be assassin (Republican) and his $15 financial donation (Democrat) are far less relevant than his easy access to a dangerous weapon (courtesy of his father) and reports that he was bullied as a child. We have seen incels with guns engage in mass shootings before, with women as their primary victims. It should be noted that both the increasingly broad availability guns, and in the places they can be carried, and in laws that reduce or eliminate the liability of those who shoot and kill others if they claim self-defense are largely championed by the GOP.

Not only is the predominant source of the threat of political violence and terrorism abundantly clear, that has been the case for years. The GOP has actively opposed efforts to give the federal government tools to combat domestic terrorism going back to the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. The GOP destroyed the careers of those in the DHS who warned of an increase in right-wing extremism in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. The GOP’s deliberate destruction of the federal government’s ability to provide intelligence and act as a resource for local law enforcement led directly to Charlottesville PD having no federal support with which to counter the white supremacist and neo-Nazi elements that descended on their city in 2017, and to the Oath Keepers being able to grow unchecked into a group whose members would man a stack formation which would ultimately breach the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection.

It should go without saying that political violence is bad for the United States. Even a small country like Jamaica has been beset by political violence for decades. Political violence ought to be condemned, and I add my small voice to the chorus who condemn it today in good faith. But we ought not accept unchallenged such calls to turn down heated rhetoric from the very same people who turned the rhetorical temperature up in the first place. We can and should condemn political violence at the same time we call out hypocrisy.

The Real Problem with Biden’s Bad Debate

The response to President Biden’s subpar debate performance against Donald Trump creates an opportunity to talk about the poor choices black voters in particular face in seemingly every election in the United States. I’m talking about the reaction to the debate rather than the debate itself because I didn’t watch it. Debates are not the same as governing, and what the Biden administration has accomplished legislatively (rather than just through executive orders) is more than enough to merit a second term. The immediate aftermath of the debate was filled with panic, both in my social media feeds and among friends I talk to regularly. The chattering class at the New York Times ran to fill their opinion columns with calls for Biden to resign (calls they very notably did not make when Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records). What I most noticed about every single panicked replacement plan I saw posed in social media is that they all involved stepping over Kamala Harris, the current Vice President of the United States who also happens to be a black woman (as well as southern Asian, on her mother’s side).

When you call out liberals on this, you tend to get responses that look like this one:

This is utter horseshit because if Michelle Obama was running you wouldn’t hear any of this. And you know it, but for some reason the people making your argument want to ignore it.

— Underachiever (@whiskeyblackout.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:31 PM

Aside from the obvious virtue signaling, they tell you who has no clue, memory, or care of the way the actual Michelle Obama was treated while she was First Lady. I called it out as wishful thinking at the time, and while the original poster had very little to say in response, another person on Bluesky provided this helpful reminder of how both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were once regarded:

The history of the Democratic Party taking black voters, our issues, and candidates from our communities for granted is not exactly a short one. As such, the idea among many hair-on-fire panickers about Biden’s poor debate performance that they should simply replace Biden (and his vice president) with someone else that can beat Trump is not surprising. One proposed replacement, Pete Buttigieg (currently secretary of transportation), ran for president before and had his candidacy fail in large part because of a lack of connection to and interest in black voters and our issues. I haven’t looked deeply at other prospective replacements regarding their connections to and interest in engaging black voters (in addition to other demographics), but the small percentage of black voters they represent suggests that they haven’t had to care about black voters to win elections. The speed with which the powers-that-be in the party suggested that Biden be cast aside after the bad debate suggests to me a desire to no longer be beholden to black voters (and our interests) in the way Biden quite clearly is because his primary campaign was on life support before South Carolina and Jim Clyburn’s intervention and now he is president.

Seth Moulton might be the best current representatives of the middle of a Democratic Party for whom the existence of black voters is an hindrance to his goal of having the party change its focus by “talk about [Biden’s] bipartisan wins, like the infrastructure bill”. Particularly when the GOP marches in lockstep behind the convicted felon who currently leads them, the insistence of Moulton’s fellow “centrists” on bipartisanship dooms good policy to defeat. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented the child tax credit from being expanded, erasing the gains made in the reduction of child poverty–which helped everyone while it was in place, including black folks.

According to Moulton, his party colleagues have “lost the middle” due to Biden’s push for student-loan debt relief and “identity politics”. When I looked up the demographics of the congressional district Seth Moulton represents, it turns out to be not only one of the whitest congressional districts in the country, but also rather well-off financially on average. It’s quite revealing of a so-called centrist to point to “identity politics” as why the Democrats have supposedly lost the middle in an environment where the Supreme Court has made affirmative action in higher-education illegal and conservative school boards in so-called red states are busily banning books by and about black people. Despite not treating black people as a constituency to be respected, the Seth Moultons of the Democratic Party will be the first ones to turn around and blame us when his party loses elections they think they should win.

This isn’t to suggest that the Biden administration has been an unambiguous plus for the black community either. While he did choose Kamala Harris as his vice president and nominated Ketanji Brown-Jackson to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court, along with passing economic recovery legislation that helped reduce unemployment among black people to the lowest level on record, he hasn’t succeeded in reviving the Voting Rights Act from its nearly-dead state (thanks to judicial overreach from the conservative activists who sit on the Supreme Court). Biden has also been relentless pro-police, despite decreasing rates of violent crime, and despite the disproportionate impact of police violence on black communities. And that’s before you get to the prior years of his political career which included mishandling the hearings which would ultimately result in Clarence Thomas being elevated to the Supreme Court, co-sponsoring a crime bill that paved the way for decades of mass incarceration of black folks, and legislation that stripped student borrowers of bankruptcy protections–which would ultimately be shown to disproportionately impact black borrowers.

The “indifference, unless it’s an election year” approach of national Democrats is obvious enough that the GOP has made it part of their pitch to black voters. But a GOP approach that veers between the cartoonish (such as Trump’s continuing insistence on the appeal of his mugshot to black voters), the insulting (literally anything Vivek Ramaswamy says), the dishonest (Tim Scott pretending that systemic racism doesn’t exist), and voter suppression manages to be even worse. Any messages they might try to put forward about values, or fiscal responsibility, or entrepreneurship are largely undermined by Trump’s corrupt business dealings, nepotism on behalf of his incompetent children, and his unconvincing attempts to even pay lip service to the idea of Christianity mattering even a little bit to him personally. But in the debate where Biden performed poorly, Trump may have managed to hit a new low even for him by warning both during the debate and a recent campaign rally that migrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” from Americans.

Predictably, we took “black jobs” and ran with it for fun on Black Twitter #BlackJobs, to flip Trump’s nasty xenophobia into a way to highlight the variety of different work we do in this country. Sadly, given the disrespect I’ve observed and personally experienced online directed at black immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens or who have parents from abroad, there is definitely a small segment of black Americans Trump will succeed in attracting to his camp with xenophobia. Nor will I rule out the possibility of xenophobia succeeding in attracting a small number of Hispanic Americans. But the press is so focused on Biden’s poor debate performance that they’ve almost entirely missed and failed to even comment on why this particular remark by Trump is revealing and important. Quinta Jurecic touches on why political media’s handling of this might be inadequate:

it feels like the whiteness of big political media spaces right now is having a big effect on how people are thinking about the debate. eg I have seen relatively little discussion of trump's "black jobs" comment, which immediately exploded on black twitter

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 9:45 AM

Adam Serwer’s reply provides necessary context as well:

Both the “black jobs” remark and using palestinian as a slur are hopefully clarifying as to actual Trump’s ideology and worldview, in contrast with the imaginary trump some people have built up in their heads as the memory of his administration has receded

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Beyond nobody in the GOP even thinking to push back on the xenophobia of these remarks by Trump, having developed a very strong muscle memory for surrender during his reign of the party, it is necessary to take certain “never Trump” Republicans to task as well. Whether they recognize it or acknowledge it or not, the GOP we see today is one that to a man (and virtually all of them are men) that they helped create. On their watch, the GOP changed into a party that embraced the vision of Pat Buchanan and rejected the “kinder, gentler” conservatism of George W. Bush which despite the many flaws of his presidency (both foreign and domestic) managed to appeal to enough voters to win the popular vote in 2004, including between 40 and 44% of Hispanics. So while they have predictably joined the chorus of panic that would push Biden out in favor of some mythical moderate candidate who would appeal to enough of the electorate to beat Donald Trump, they are operating from the same Seth Moulton perspective that sees black voters and our issues as a inconvenience. They may oppose Donald Trump, but their views of black voters don’t appear to be much more sophisticated than his.

So these are the choices of black voters–a Democratic Party that takes our votes and interests for granted, or a GOP who would rather suppress our votes and divide them than compete for them. Black voters ceased to be the largest minority group in the United States years ago, and both parties appear far more interested in pursuing Hispanic-American and Asian-American votes than black votes.

How to Protest a War Machine: Thoughts on Campus Protests

In recent days, we have seen many university leaders of various titles (president, chancellor, etc) resort to calling the police on their own students and faculty to break up encampments set up by students to protest their schools financial ties to Israel in the wake of the continuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Various social media sites are filled with video of police in riot gear breaking up these encampments and engaging in violent takedowns of unarmed students and faculty. We’ve even seen still photos of police snipers on the roof of student unions at Indiana University and The Ohio State University. Each and every university leader who has taken this step has failed in their role:

  • By not actually addressing the antisemitism problem, and the real concerns Jewish students have for their physical safety
  • By inviting government interference in the exercise of free speech, and penalizing the exercise of it
  • By adding police willing and able to use deadly force to an already-volatile situation, they increased the danger to everyone on campus

Using government power to quell dissent is not a new mistake. It was used during protests against the war in Vietnam, which ultimately resulted in dead students on the campus of Kent State University.

Responses to the shooting deaths of students by National Guardsmen

This particular clip is notable because of how casually people not just accept, but even approve of what happened to 19 and 20-year-old students. Finding similar sentiments is not difficult, as the same man who called for military force against people protesting George Floyd’s murder by the police in 2020 was joined by Josh Hawley (the cowardly Jan 6th insurrection inciter) in his call to send National Guard troops to Columbia University. These two senators in particular very much want a re-enactment of what happened at Kent State.

Four years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and 2 years before National Guardsmen would kill those Kent State students), police would open fire on unarmed students of South Carolina State University (an HBCU) protesting the whites-only policy of a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Three students were killed, 28 wounded in the Orangeburg Massacre. To add insult to injury, the few policemen actually brought to trial for their actions were all acquitted. Cleveland Sellers–one of the shooting victims–was falsely convicted of rioting at the bowling alley and served jail time. Inaccurate press coverage and the shift of attention to the Tet Offensive resulted in this massacre nearly being lost to memory.

In the midst of the pandemic, we saw protests of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police spread around the country and overseas. The police responded with arrests and violence, not just against protestors but against journalists covering the protests. Ali Velshi was shot with a rubber bullet by police on live television during his coverage of the protests.

It is no coincidence that government power is employed once again against people dissenting on behalf of an oppressed or marginalized group. It is easy to notice when actual antisemitic & white supremacist groups like Patriot Front–itself an offshoot of another white supremacist group called Vanguard America–march under police protection in Charleston, West Virginia, or when a neo-Nazi group like Blood Tribe marches in Nashville. The stark differences in when (and against whom) government power is used undermines the idea that concern about antisemitism is the main reason. Accusations of antisemitism leveled against university presidents by congressional Republicans are just a convenient tool in the arsenal of those who want to bend higher education to their viewpoint.

As indicated in the April 25th edition of The Daily podcast, Minouche Shafik (president of Columbia University) only dodged the Elise Stefanik-led hit job that would push Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Liz Magill (University of Pennsylvania) out of leadership because of a previous conflict. Having seen her peers fail in front of Congress, Shafik did not hesitate to offer congressional Republicans everything they demanded–only to be exposed as not having the degree of control she claimed when Columbia students set up their protest encampment. The calls for her resignation she thought she would escape by selling out her faculty and the student body have come nonetheless.

That such calls would be led by a man so unequal to his current role as Speaker of the House (and whose grip on that office perhaps even more tenuous than that of Dr. Shafik’s on hers) speaks volumes about the power of culture war in this country to empower the incompetent to such a degree.

Dr. Shafik’s actions in particular make a few things clear:

  1. Calling the police on her students and faculty is not intended to solve an actual antisemitism problem–but to demonstrate control.
  2. The primary audience for this demonstration of control is congressional Republicans.
  3. The goal of demonstrating control is to preserve her job.

The University of Southern California ended up in a similar place via a different route that might be an even more blatant betrayal of the ideas of free speech and academic freedom. They cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement speech due to alleged security concerns. It seems far more likely that the university bowed to internal and external pressure from groups advocating on behalf of Israel expressing concerns about Asna Tabassum’s social media activity. The USC Shoah Foundation, with whom Tabassum worked with as part of her minor in “resistance to genocide”, has distanced itself from her, via the words of a spokesperson. But her academic advisor, Wolf Gruner, backed her to the hilt in this open letter to university president Carol Folt. The cancellation of Tabassum’s speech has since snowballed into the cancellation of its main stage commencement ceremony. As of today, even the smaller ceremonies individual colleges were set to have may be at risk with two scheduled speakers, C Pam Zhang and Safiya Noble pulling out in protest of the cancellation of the valedictorian’s speech and calling LAPD on campus.

One unexpected bright spot in this season of failing to live up to ideals is the DC Police Department, who rejected the request of George Washington University leaders to clear an on-campus encampment of a small number of protestors. HBCUs have not shown up in any news I’ve seen regarding protests of the war, and beyond calls for peace there are numerous reasons for relative silence from leaders of those institutions. While my wife and I are nearly a decade away from higher education decisions for our twins, how a university’s leadership chose to treat students and faculty in this moment will factor significantly into my decisions regarding where to send them. If the recent past teaches us anything, it is that those who stood up for the marginalized and oppressed in the face of government power stood on the right side of history.

Migrating My WordPress Database from a Lightsail Instance to a Standalone Database

Last year, I moved this blog off of a EC2 instance running a too-old version of PHP to a Lightsail instance. I had to restart that instance in order to retrieve the images associated with all the prior posts so they looked exactly as they did before, but the end result was the same blog at a lower monthly cost. Since then, I installed and configured the WP Offload Media Lite plug-in to push all those images to an S3 bucket. Today I decided to move the WordPress database off the Lightsail instance to a standalone database.

Accomplishing this move required cobbling together instructions from Bitnami and AWS (and filling in any gaps with educated guesses). Here are the steps I took to get everything moved over, in the order I took them.

  1. Export the application database from the Lightsail instance. As of this writing, the Bitnami WordPress image still keeps database credentials in a bitnami_credentials file, so using that with the mysqldump command generated the file I would need to import to the new database (backup.sql).
  2. Download backup.sql to my local machine. Connecting to my Lightsail instance with sftp and my SSH key followed by “get backup.sql” pulled the file down.
  3. Download MySQL Workbench. Looking at these import instructions, I realized I didn’t have it installed.
  4. Create a Lightsail database. On the advice of co-workers who also do this with their side projects, I used us-east-2 as the region to setup in. I specified the database name to match the one in the backup.sql file to make things easier later when it was time to update wp_config.php.
  5. Enable data import mode. By default, data import mode is disabled and public mode is disabled. So I turned on data import mode and was puzzled for a second when I couldn’t connect to the database in order to import from backup.sql.
  6. Enable public mode. With public mode disabled, and my backup.sql file (and tools to import it) not already available in a us-east-2 hosted instance or other resource, I couldn’t load the backup data. Once I enabled public mode, I was able to use MySQL Workbench to connect and upload the data.
  7. Disable public mode.
  8. Update wp_config.php to use new database credentials.

To confirm that the post you’re reading now was written to the new database, I turned on the general query log functionality on the database instance to ensure that the server was writing to it. Having confirmed that, I turned off the general query log.

The additional cost of a standalone Lightsail database is worth it for the week’s worth of database backups you get with zero additional effort. Migrating to a newer WordPress instance in the future should be easier as well, now that both the database and media for the site are off-instance. The next step I need to take is upgrading from the lite version of WP Offload Media to the full one. This should offload all the media so I can safely remove it locally.

“I have no time for foolishness.”

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Toni Morrison

This is the quote that came to mind as I watched a clip of CNN’s Dana Bash asking the governor of my state, Wes Moore, about Republicans blaming diversity policies for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Governor Moore’s response to Bash’s initial question was the right one in my view, because he dismissed the Republican assertions as foolishness and talked about closure and comfort for the families of those killed in the accident, safety for first responders, re-opening the channel and port, and rebuilding the bridge. Bash persisted in asking the governor about the “DEI mayor” insult against Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott by someone from the blue check brigade on Twitter. Governor Moore’s response was similarly focused on Baltimore’s recovery from the accident, which he ended by saying “I’m focused on what matters right now.”

Unlike the poor journalism which animated my earlier complaint against the press coverage of the disaster (which leaves the racism of critics as subtext), Dana Bash’s line of questioning directly aids and abets racists and their critique by foregrounding it and asking the governor of the state to respond to it as if it is legitimate. There is of course no actual evidence that DEI had anything to do with a ship the size and the weight of a skyscraper plowing into the bridge and destroying it. So why would Dana Bash waste air time elevating the ignorant nonsense of GOP pols spewing racism on Twitter? My guess is that CNN wanted to appear “balanced”, but they failed at that in addition to wasting the governor’s time and that of their viewers. What does a Utah state representative have to say that could possibly be relevant to the issue at hand? As it turned out, absolutely nothing. What does a former member of the Florida House of Representatives have to say that could be relevant? Again, absolutely nothing. Remember–six people died as a result of this accident. As of this writing, some of the dead still have not been recovered. A key driver of economic vitality for the city and the state is now at risk. Dana Bash (and/or her producers) still chose to waste nearly two minutes of airtime on racist, conspiratorial nonsense from the fever swamps of Twitter.

Journalism isn’t economics, but opportunity cost is a useful lens through which to view the time spent on foolishness. The entire interview was just over seven minutes long, and most of the questions were good, prompting useful responses from Governor Moore. But about 20% of the interview time was taken up by GOP nonsense from Twitter. That’s time which could have been spent asking about potential future changes in policies and procedures for handling large cargo ships in the future. It could have been used to ask about the victims of the accident, who merited only a brief mention from Bash at the end of the interview. It could have been used for a deeper dive into the local economic impacts of the accident on the Port of Baltimore, and on the people who work there. Many port workers live in Dundalk, MD, a place that differs quite a bit demographically from what racists on Twitter seem to think.

Joy Reid’s interview with Mayor Scott, even while calling out the conspiracy theories around the accident as ridiculous, did surface the very same tweets from the fever swamp as Dana Bash did. Mayor Scott took the opportunity to respond to the racist assertions from Twitter, which is his right. But a large part of me wishes that he had followed the governor’s example and left the foolishness of the right-wing fever swamps to Black Twitter. Because if there’s anything Black Twitter does well, it’s turn insults on their head. Since DEI is the new n-word, here is a small sampling of what’s been done with it:

In my view, journalism continues to let social media be their assignment editor and set the agenda. Whether would-be centrists like CNN or NPR, or overtly left-leaning MSNBC, Twitter still figures far too prominently in their coverage and in their questions. Particularly when the owner of Twitter has made it his mission to platform Nazis and personally amplify the most offensive and extreme right-wing thoughts, integrating the worst output of such a platform into news coverage cannot help but make the news product worse, and less useful to us as citizens. Difficult as it is to find conservative perspectives on issues that are actually useful, the press needs to make the effort. Racist positions are not owed airtime simply because they are “the other side”. In researching this post, I found Ed O’Keefe of CBS’ Face the Nation did the same thing Dana Bash did when he interviewed Mayor Scott. Here’s a quote of O’Keefe’s question:

I’ve got to ask you one of the wilder things is some conservative critics blamed the bridge collapse on diversity, equity and inclusion policies in Maryland. Diversity, equity inclusion, better known as DEI to a lot of people. They called you, some critics, “the DEI mayor.” What did you make of that when you heard it?

Ed O’Keefe interviewing Mayor Brandon Scott on Face the Nation, March 31, 2024

To steal a line from President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, “Let me stop you right there.” No, Ed O’Keefe, you don’t have to ask the mayor of Baltimore about conspiratorial nonsense from aspiring governors and congressmen from Utah and Florida just because they happen to be Republican. Not only do they not represent Baltimore, they would probably be lucky to be able to find the city on a map. They don’t have relevant expertise in shipping or ports or bridge-building or disaster response. Don’t be the journalist who makes a conversation worse by bringing voices to it that have nothing to add beyond ignorance and racism.

Now Sharing to the Fediverse, My Threads Account

When I checked in on my Threads account recently, I saw that the Fediverse sharing feature was available and turned it on.

As you can see above, I’ve added my Threads account in the last available metadata entry on my primary Fediverse account. In testing the new link before publishing this post, I found that Ivory desktop and mobile clients appear to rewrite the link to @genxjamerican (which doesn’t work). Clicking the Open in Browser button that comes up after the first failed site visit gives you another rewritten URL, https://www.threads.net/user/genxjamerican#. (which also doesn’t work). When I visit my profile in a browser however (at https://hachyderm.io/@genxjamerican), clicking the Threads link takes me directly to the profile as expected.

A search for my handle in the Ivory desktop client now shows my Threads account and my Mastodon account. Only time will tell whether or not the anti-Meta fedi pact I posted about last year has a meaningful impact on the growth of Threads in the fediverse. Meta could just as easily sabotage its own growth through strategic errors. One of the fediverse’s most consistent advocates and contributors, Dr. Jorge Caballero, makes a persuasive argument that paying for “good” Threads posts is one such mistake.

I haven’t really set up anything to cross-post the same content to multiple social media accounts beyond what Jetpack Social supports. My blog posts are automatically posted to Tumblr and to my Mastodon account. I might change that just to see how different the levels of engagement are. IFTTT is probably where I should look first, having set up a bunch of automations there in the past. So far, when it comes to sharing posts from this blog, followers on Mastodon engage far more often with them than in any other social media network where I have a presence.

Blaming the Victim: The Shoddy Press Coverage of the Dali Destroying the Francis Scott Key Bridge

I’ve noticed a nasty trend in the way the press is covering the recent destruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge when a freighter named the Dali crashed into it. The most recent example I’ve seen of this trend is this Politico story, titled “Outmoded bridge design likely contributed to catastrophic loss in Baltimore”. The lede continues to blame the victim this way:

The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday after a collision with a massive container ship could have been mitigated with simple “fenders” that have been standard issues on new bridges since the 1990s.

Outmoded bridge design likely contributed to catastrophic loss in Baltimore, Politico, March 27, 2024

The way the author writes this, you’d think the bridge jumped in front of the ship like a defender trying to draw a charge during a basketball game. Apparently, designers of the bridge in the 1970s were supposed to anticipate that freighters going in and out of that harbor would quadruple in size over the subsequent half century. Later on in the story, they quote an attorney in Florida who defended a freighter captain whose ship hit the Sunshine Skyway Bridge during a storm, resulting in the deaths of 35 people.

If you look at the Baltimore bridge pictures, you’ll see the piers are unprotected,” Yerrid said in an interview. “That occurred in 1980, our horrific accident. So what I’m saying is, they didn’t learn. And for 44 years–I’m not saying they should have rebuilt their whole bridge, but they certainly should have taken safety measures.”

Outmoded bridge design likely contributed to catastrophic loss in Baltimore, Politico, March 27, 2024

Nowhere in the entire Politico piece is there any accountability placed on the people responsible navigating the ship. Not a single question posed about the wisdom of a ship that size (which launched in late 2014) having just one propeller and rudder. This USA Today piece smartly questions the practice of not requiring tug escorts for such large ships. It even mentions the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the oil tanker-caused ecological disaster that resulted in double-hulled construction being mandated for all such ships in the future.

Most of the radio coverage I’ve heard focuses far more on the collapse of the bridge than on the massive ship which caused it. But a bit of searching yielded this foreign press story, which talks not only about the Dali’s previous crash at the Port of Antwerp, but about previous sanctions from the Australian government against the owner of the ship, Grace Ocean.

Overall, the coverage of this disaster reminded me a lot of how survivors of Hurricane Katrina were called refugees in and by the press. The implication that these people didn’t belong here couldn’t have been more obvious. Nor was it a coincidence that the vast majority of those dead and displaced by the storm were poor and black. Social media has been predictably filled with derisive commentary from so-called conservatives about the black governor of the state, Wes Moore, not wearing a suit during a 3 am press conference responding to the disaster. They’ve called Brandon Scott a “DEI” mayor, ignoring the fact that he was elected by a majority of the citizens of Baltimore in 2020. Right-wing pundits have blamed everything from COVID to border policy for the bridge collapsing–nevermind the fact that any bridge hit by something the size and weight of a skyscraper was going to fall down. Nearly 20 years after Katrina, the sort of implicit bias we saw in mainstream news coverage of that disaster seems no less prevalent today.

Grand Opening, Grand Closing

Ronna McDaniel’s tenure as an NBC contributor has ended far more quickly than expected. Depending on which source you choose, it was either 4 days (per Fortune Magazine) or 5 days (per Rolling Stone). It would be easy to make jokes about her short tenure in the job (compared to Anthony Scaramucci or Liz Truss for example), but the truth is that she never should have been offered a role in the first place. She isn’t the first former RNC chair NBC has hired. Michael Steele remains a political analyst today for MSNBC, in addition to hosting his own podcast and other endeavors. But unlike Michael Steele, Ronna McDaniel is an election denier (or was, until a $300,000/year contract from NBC meant acknowledging the truth). Here’s what vice-chair of the House’s January 6 committee Liz Cheney had to say about McDaniel:

Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.

Liz Cheney: controversial NBC hire Ronna McDaniel enabled Trump ‘depravity’, The Guardian, March 25, 2024

Per the NPR article reporting McDaniel being dropped by NBC, she was still calling the 2020 election–an election where the GOP made a net gain of 14 seats in the House of Representatives–a rigged election in a summer 2023 interview with Chris Wallace on CNN. Ronna McDaniel led the RNC in actively undermining the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and in attacking the legitimacy of the press.

The internal email sent by NBC chairman Cesar Conde (and presumably leaked to NPR) contains both a classic non-apology apology and a fake accountability line:

I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” Conde added. While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility for it.

Former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel dropped as NBC contributor following outcry, NPR, March 26, 2024

If those lines are representative of content and tone of the rest of that email, that’s not even close to enough of an apology for exercising such poor judgment. Conde chose to hire someone who as chair of RNC, led it to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the January 6 committee. Regardless of her spin on the matter in the Chris Wallace interview, the RNC under McDaniel’s leadership characterized the actions of rioters on January 6, 2021 as “legitimate political discourse”. Conde chose to hire the woman who said the following about his employees:

Ronna McDaniel in her role as RNC chair insulting people she would later call colleagues for a grand total of two weeks before being dropped by NBC

A leadership culture that couldn’t see the problem with hiring someone like Ronna McDaniel probably has a lot in common with the now-former leaders of Boeing, who presided over a culture which prioritized profit over safety to such an extent that a door plug blew out. Conde and everyone else who agreed to hire that election-denier should be shown the door in the same way.

Note: I updated this after initially publishing it to reflect McDaniel’s actual tenure as an NBC News contributor.

How the U.S. Waged a Global Campaign Against Baby Formula Regulation

The following story was originally published by ProPublica, written and photographed by the contributors listed below.  I’ve been donating to ProPublica for a number of years and encourage those who read this blog to do so as well.  ProPublica can be followed on social media at BlueSky (@propublica.bsky.social), Mastodon (@ProPublica), and on Twitter (@propublica)


by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, photography by June Watsamon Tri-yasakda, special to ProPublica

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

LOPBURI, Thailand — When Gustun Aunlamai arrived at school at age 4, he was so overweight that his teacher worried he’d have trouble breathing during naptime. His arms and legs were thick. His mouth peeked out from two ballooning cheeks. He moved slowly.

Throughout his toddler years, Gustun had regularly asked his parents to refill his bottle with his favorite “milk” — a type of formula made especially for kids his age. And they were happy to oblige. Sumet Aunlamai and Jintana Suksiri, who lived in a rural province north of Bangkok, had carefully chosen the brand.

Like other Thai parents, they’d been bombarded by formula advertising on television, online and in grocery stores, where a rainbow of boxes and canisters of powdered toddler milk featured teddy bears in graduation caps and giveaways like toys or diapers. It cost far more than cow’s milk but promised to make Gustun stronger and smarter.

What Jintana didn’t know, as Gustun chugged the formula and his weight neared 70 pounds, was that her son’s choice drink had sparked an international feud.

In 2017, Thai health experts tried to stop aggressive advertising for all formula — including that made for toddlers. Officials feared company promotions could mislead parents and even persuade mothers to forgo breastfeeding, depriving their children of the vital health benefits that come with it. At the time, Thailand’s breastfeeding rate was already among the lowest in the world.

But the $47 billion formula industry fought back, enlisting the help of a rich and powerful ally: the United States government.

Over 15 months, U.S. trade officials worked closely with formula makers to wage a diplomatic and political pressure campaign to weaken Thailand’s proposed ban on formula marketing, a ProPublica investigation found.

U.S. officials delivered a letter to Bangkok asking pointed questions, including whether the legislation was “more trade restrictive than necessary.” They also lodged criticisms in a bilateral trade meeting with Thai authorities and on the floor of the World Trade Organization, where such complaints can lead to costly legal battles.

Thai officials argued the new regulation would protect mothers and babies. In the end, though, the Thai government backed down. It banned advertising for infant formula but allowed companies to market formula for toddlers like Gustun — one of the industry’s most profitable and dubious products. The final law also slashed penalties for violators.

“Our law is really weak and enforcement is really weak,” said Dr. Siriwat Tiptaradol, who championed the proposed ban as a former adviser to Thailand’s health minister, in an interview in Bangkok. “I was upset and disappointed.”

The U.S. endeavor in Thailand was part of a decadeslong, global effort to protect the United States’ significant formula production and export business. ProPublica reviewed thousands of pages of emails and memos by U.S. officials, letters to foreign ministries, correspondence from industry groups and academic research. We also interviewed health experts and government leaders in nearly two dozen countries, including former U.S. officials.

Together, the reporting shows the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of multinational baby formula companies, such as Mead Johnson and Abbott, while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard the health of their youngest children.

Just last March, at a meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany, U.S. officials opposed a reference to formula advertising bans in a new international food standard for toddler milk. The move came after industry lobbying.

At the center of many efforts was the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which advises the president on trade policy. Emails show its staff in regular contact with formula makers and their industry groups through meetings, calls and position papers — which the industry used to hammer its objections to regulations around the world. “Mead Johnson and other infant formula producers have been very vocal, expressing concerns to the Thai and U.S. governments about what they feel is the imminent passage of this measure,” U.S. officials wrote in 2016 as Thailand considered its formula marketing ban.

Officials with the USTR and other trade-focused agencies, including those within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then echoed those positions in communications with other countries or in international forums like the WTO, the documents showed.

“The U.S. is highly influential,” said Dr. Robert Boyle, a doctor at Imperial College London who has researched international formula use.

In many places, the lobbying appeared to succeed. Hong Kong, for example, watered down some of its formula regulations after objections from U.S. trade officials, who said in a draft letter that the rules “could result in significant commercial loss for U.S. companies.” And a proposal in Indonesia stalled after questions from the U.S. at the WTO.

Notably, such advocacy has not only hindered local attempts to stop formula marketing that critics say is misleading or even predatory, but it has also undermined the work of U.S. foreign aid and health officials, who have long supported breastfeeding across the globe. They call it “one of the highest returns on investment of any development activity” because of its well-documented benefits for babies’ health and cognitive growth.

“I think it is shocking,” said Jane Badham, an independent nutrition consultant and expert in child feeding who works internationally. “One doesn’t realize how much this kind of interference is happening.”

The meddling broke into public view in 2018, when officials from the Trump administration were accused of threatening to withhold military aid from Ecuador if the country didn’t drop its proposed resolution in support of breastfeeding at the World Health Organization; the U.S. ambassador later denied making threats. But ProPublica’s investigation found that the scope of the interference far exceeded that incident and continues today under the Biden administration. In fact, Ecuador and Thailand were just two stops on a worldwide crusade against regulation that has spanned Republican and Democratic presidential administrations and touched more than a dozen countries, including South Africa, Guatemala and Kenya, as well as Southeast Asian nations such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Neither Abbott nor Mead Johnson responded to requests for interviews or to detailed questions from ProPublica. The latter’s parent company, Reckitt, also did not respond to our request for comment.

USTR officials declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to written questions, an agency spokesperson said in a statement that under President Joe Biden, the trade agency has emphasized respecting the role of foreign governments in deciding the appropriate regulatory approach, including with respect to infant formula. USTR has been committed “to making sure our trade policy works for people — not blindly advancing the will of corporations,” the statement said.

That has meant moving the office “away from the formerly standard view that too often deemed legitimate regulatory initiatives as trade barriers,” the spokesperson said, adding that the move has “enervated” corporate players who have been used to “getting their way at USTR for decades.”

The spokesperson, however, declined to provide examples of the new approach in relation to formula. She also declined to respond to questions about government documents that show the trade office under Biden working with other federal agencies to pursue the same playbook on formula as prior administrations.

In 2021, for example, officials complained to Filipino trade authorities about stricter formula marketing rules they considered “overkill,” and expressed fears about regulatory “spillover” elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In Kenya, they sought to strike a provision in a proposed formula advertising ban after an industry group sent USTR a paper seeking its deletion.

Public health officials are increasingly raising concerns about toddler milk, especially as companies deploy advertising for products using bold — and, critics say, often unsupported — health claims.

In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a new report warning about the marketing for toddler formula. “Products that are advertised as ‘follow-up formulas,’ ‘weaning formulas’ or ‘toddler milks and formulas’ are misleadingly promoted as a necessary part of a healthy child’s diet,” said Dr. George Fuchs III, a lead author of the study. The drinks are worse than infant formula for babies under 1 year, he said, and “offer no benefit over much less expensive cow’s milk in most children older than age 12 months.”

Unlike infant formula, toddler milks are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Nutrition experts have warned about hefty doses of sweeteners and sodium in some brands.

The Infant Nutrition Council of America, a formula industry group, defended toddler drinks, saying they “can contribute to nutritional intake and potentially fill nutrition gaps for children 12 months and older.”

Toddler milk made up just 11% of all formula sales in the United States in 2023, but it was much more popular abroad, according to Euromonitor, which tracks sales data. Worldwide, it made up 37% of sales. In Thailand, it accounted for more than half.

The country is now struggling to address the consequences of the law’s weakening, researchers and officials say. More than 1 in 10 Thai children under 5 years old face what researchers call a “double burden of malnutrition” that leaves some struggling with obesity and others lagging behind growth targets. Increased breastfeeding could help address both problems.

“You go to school and see a lot of kids are overweight,” said Dr. Somsak Lolekha, president of the Royal College of Pediatricians of Thailand and the Pediatric Society of Thailand. “We have a big problem in Thailand.”

Targeting “the Sippy Cups of the World”

Formula is one of only two products with international recommendations to prohibit its marketing. The other is tobacco.

The warning dates to 1981, when the nations that make up the governing body of the WHO passed the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. It aimed to stop all promotion of drinks meant to replace breast milk.

The move followed reports in the 1970s that thousands of infants in impoverished countries were falling ill and dying after drinking formula.

Not only were mothers using costly formula to replace breast milk, which would have given their babies better immunity, but the water parents mixed milk powder with was sometimes contaminated, leading to life-threatening bacterial infections and diarrhea. Overdiluted formula was causing severe malnutrition, too. Activists called for a boycott of the world’s biggest formula maker, Nestlé, which had heavily promoted its products in developing countries.

During the height of the controversy, an average 212,000 babies in low- and middle-income countries died preventable deaths linked to formula use annually, an academic paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated last year. (Nestlé disputed the research and said it was the first formula company to incorporate the WHO recommendations into its marketing policy in 1982.)

The United States cast the sole “no” vote against the international code, with the Reagan administration citing First Amendment protections on advertising. The Washington Post quoted a senior federal official who resigned over the decision, saying it would be “seen in the world as a victory for corporate interests.”

To be sure, formula was crucial for babies who didn’t have access to breast milk. But for those who did, public health experts feared aggressive advertising and free samples would derail a critical cycle. Once babies start drinking formula regularly, research shows, their mothers’ breast milk supply can drop.

“The evidence is strong,” a WHO and UNICEF report explains. “Formula milk marketing, not the product itself, disrupts informed decision-making and undermines breastfeeding and child health.”

In the years since the international code was adopted, at least 144 countries have sought to enshrine its voluntary restrictions into laws that bar formula marketing in stores, hospitals and elsewhere. Despite poor enforcement in many places, the laws have had measurable benefits. Studies have shown that countries that adopted marketing bans saw their breastfeeding rates rise, and more breastfeeding is in turn linked to fewer infant deaths. It also reduces mothers’ risk of certain cancers.

Baby formula manufacturers responded to slower growth in infant formula sales by creating products for older babies and toddlers — age groups that fell outside most regulations.

“We have a proven global demand-creation model,” Greg Shewchuk, Mead Johnson’s head of global marketing, told investors in 2013. “Capture baby very early on, often before it’s born, hold onto them through feeding and their feeding challenges and extend them as long as possible.”

Mead, which was based in the United States until a British company bought it in 2017, termed the strategy A-R-E: Acquisition, Retention, Extension.

To make toddler products more attractive to parents, who usually just gave their kids cheaper cow’s milk beginning at age 1, formula makers began adding nutritional supplements like DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and algae with purported benefits for brain and eye health.

The claims, however, are unproven. Studies have found no definitive link between babies’ brain and eye development and DHA supplementation, a 2017 meta-analysis of 15 studies found, according to Cochrane, a nonprofit that supports systematic reviews of health research. In fact, breastfed babies perform better on intelligence tests.

Still, formula companies used additives like DHA “as a hook to expand their market share,” said Peter Buzy, CFO and treasurer of Martek Biosciences Corp., which produced DHA, at an analysts’ meeting in 2004. “Really targeting, you know, the sippy cups of the world.”

A spokesperson for the Infant Nutrition Council of America defended the health and nutrition claims, saying they “are based on science and medical research and meet all legal, regulatory and nutritional science requirements.”

The marketing worked. Toddler milk has overtaken infant formula in worldwide sales, according to Euromonitor. Global toddler milk sales have grown by 25% since 2013, to almost $20 billion. A little less than two gallons of toddler milk can cost $30 or more, compared with around $3.94 a gallon for regular milk in the U.S.

For formula manufacturers, the popularity of the product had another benefit: It helped them circumvent local rules against marketing infant formula. By using similar logos, colors or fonts across product lines, legal advertisements for toddler milk effectively promoted baby formula too, even in places where it was subject to a marketing ban. Nutrition experts and advocates called the tactic “cross-promotion.”

During the past decade, sales of regular infant formula grew about 10% worldwide, to $15 billion.

A Focus on Developing Nations

In 2014, Jintana gave birth to the couple’s first child, whom they nicknamed “Captain” after a soccer player.

The family lived in military housing in Lopburi, a rural province two hours north of Bangkok whose capital city is world famous for its flourishing monkey population. With Sumet serving in the Army, Jintana took time off from her job in customer relations to care for the newborn.

She breastfed Captain until it was time to return to work three months later. The couple shopped for formula. Health claims formula makers listed on packages were “very important,” Sumet said through a translator. They settled on a product called Dumex that promised to strengthen Captain’s brain, immunity and eyes. It was made by the French giant, Danone, which boasts that the brand “has happily raised generations of Thais.”

Millions of women like Jintana had been entering the workforce in developing regions such as Southeast Asia. The big six transnational companies that make most of the world’s baby formula saw this as a boon.

For Mead Johnson, the maker of Enfamil, the benefits of developing economies were twofold. “Firstly, in most countries, breastfeeding is incompatible with women participating fully in the workforce,” CEO Kasper Jakobsen said in a 2013 earnings call. “And, secondly, as women participate in the workforce, that creates a rapid increase in the number of dual-income families that can afford more expensive, premium nutrition products.”

By then, Thailand was Mead’s fifth-biggest market worldwide. And Southeast Asia was well on its way to becoming more important to the formula industry than the U.S. and European markets combined.

As business boomed, advocates lambasted the industry for its practices. Mead employees, for example, allegedly bribed health care workers at government hospitals in China so they would recommend the company’s formula to new mothers — charges the company ultimately resolved with a $12 million settlement in 2015; the company did not admit or deny regulators’ findings in the agreement. Danone faced similar allegations from Chinese media related to the brand Captain and Gustun drank, Dumex. Danone said at the time that it accepted responsibility for the lapses and suspended the program involved, according to the BBC.

The industry maintained close relationships with the medical establishment in Thailand, too. One pediatrician and advocate for breastfeeding, Dr. Sutheera Uerpairojkit, told ProPublica that two decades ago, she saw formula companies offer doctors and medical staff trips abroad in exchange for giving patients free samples and collecting their data. Some took the trips. Sutheera did not participate.

Thailand adopted the international code in 1984 — but only as a voluntary measure. Over the years, Siriwat and others pushed for tougher formula marketing restrictions without success. In one meeting, he and colleagues at the Thai health ministry pressed formula companies to comply with the voluntary rules, which they’d routinely broken. The businesses resisted. “One company said, ‘If I do not violate, I cannot compete with other companies,’” Siriwat recalled in September.

“That makes me very angry,” he said, remembering how he stormed out of the room.

By 2014, with Thailand’s breastfeeding rate at only 12%, according to one survey, Siriwat persuaded the health minister to seek legislation to formally ban marketing infant and toddler formula. He wanted the new law to include enforcement and penalties for violators.

The WHO, a United Nations agency promoting health, wanted more countries to pursue such measures. Its staff in 2016 released new recommendations on ending the promotion of formula products for toddlers, as well as infants. In theory, that guidance could help countries like Thailand fend off trade complaints about new marketing bans. And an endorsement by the WHO’s member nations would underscore the recommendations’ importance.

But public health wasn’t the only concern as nations prepared to vote.

U.S. Intervention on a Global Stage

The WHO effort alarmed formula makers, which worried that it would kick off a new round of laws against formula marketing. “That’s what’s at stake by a new measure that’s being proposed by the WHO, without any scientific evidence,” Audrae Erickson, a Mead Johnson lobbyist, told a trade association crowd.

Industry groups scrambled to arrange meetings with high-level officials in Washington. “Clearly, the potential economic and international trade implications from this proposed draft guidance are quite significant,” the pro-industry Infant Nutrition Council of America said in a letter to an FDA official in 2016.

That year, companies and trade groups connected to commercial milk formula, including Abbott Laboratories and Nestlé, spent almost $7 million lobbying U.S. officials about WHO matters, after a decade in which their lobbying disclosures had not mentioned the organization at all, a study found.

The industry’s outreach spanned Washington. The Infant Nutrition Council of America, for instance, lobbied the Senate, House and USTR — as well as the commerce, state, agriculture and health departments, lobbying records show. The efforts attracted the attention of leaders in both parties, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called President Barack Obama about the issue, according to records obtained by ProPublica.

Inside the administration, USTR took up the formula industry’s cause. “USTR does not support issuance of the guidance or resolution” on toddler milk, wrote Jennifer Stradtman, a USTR official, in an email to other federal officials. Furthermore, she wrote, her office “will not be able to accept” any resolution that encouraged WHO member countries to convert any of the guidance into law.

It wasn’t the first time the USTR sided with industry despite public health concerns: In 2013, a group of Democratic senators scolded U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman for a proposal to help tobacco companies use trade law to “subvert” tobacco control measures — a stance the lawmakers called “deplorable and a serious threat to global public health.”

In the debate over toddler milk, officials from Froman’s office repeatedly questioned science, prompting a fight with public health officials, internal documents show.

In one exchange, then-USTR lawyer Sally Laing objected to a sentence from the guidance that said research suggests food preferences are established early in life.

“Unsupported,” Laing wrote.

Health officials pushed back on that, as well as other USTR edits. “MUST NOT DELETE,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protested in all caps, arguing that key language in the resolution was, in fact, backed by scientific evidence. But such concerns appeared to get lost in the debate, as those sentences were ultimately struck from the text.

Meanwhile, as WHO member nations gathered to vote in Geneva, formula lobbyists had U.S. officials “on speed dial” and urged them to weaken the WHO resolution, said Jimmy Kolker, who led the negotiations for the U.S. as an assistant secretary in the Health and Human Services Department.

And the industry’s agents appeared to have inside knowledge. A baby-formula industry association lobbyist cornered Kolker. “From her approach, it was obvious to me that she had been forwarded an internal, very-limited-distribution USG email,” he wrote in an email to other U.S. government officials. “This is unacceptable and makes our job as negotiators significantly more difficult.”

In the end, the United States delegation persuaded WHO nations not to “endorse” their staffs’ own recommendations. Instead, the body voted only that it “welcomes with appreciation” the guidance — language that undercut its utility. The resolution, lacking the weight of an official endorsement, left many nations puzzled over whether it would help neutralize trade complaints.

“That has caused a lot of confusion,” said Laurence Grummer-Strawn, a WHO official who focuses on child feeding and former nutrition chief for the CDC. “What does that really mean?”

Stradtman and Laing could not be reached for comment. Froman did not respond to requests for comment, and a USTR spokesperson declined to comment on the office’s actions during the WHO debate. In a general statement, the spokesperson said that “with regard to infant formula, USTR, in conjunction with others in the interagency, work to uphold and advocate for policy and regulatory decisions that are based on science.”

The practical impact of the resolution’s weakened wording became clear within months, when the U.S. and other dairy producers like Australia and Canada accused Thailand of attempting to obstruct trade with its marketing ban. Thai officials argued their country had a “strong need for a regulation,” saying the “sales promotion” of milk formula for babies and toddlers contributed to the nation’s low rate of breastfeeding. But when it referenced the WHO’s guidance and resolution to support its position at the WTO, the U.S. countered that those measures did not amount to “an international standard.”

When the Thai National Legislative Assembly finally passed its formula marketing measure in April 2017, the provisions that the U.S. and its allies — plus some Thai doctors and industry lobbyists — had complained about most loudly were either watered down or gone entirely. Lawmakers had reduced the maximum criminal penalty for violations from three years in prison to one year in prison and the maximum fine from about $8,730 to $2,910, a USDA document shows.

The law banned the marketing of infant formula and outlawed cross-promotion, but it still allowed advertising on products for 1- to 3-year-olds.

At a June 2017 meeting of the WTO, the U.S. called the changes “a welcome modification.”

“Addicted to the Bottle”

The next year, Sumet and Jintana celebrated the birth of their second child, Gustun. As she had with her firstborn, Jintana breastfed Gustun until he was 3 months old, then started him on formula so she could go back to work.

The couple diligently followed the “stages” prescribed by Dumex, which came in a cheery red package: Stage 1 formula when Gustun was an infant, Stage 2 when he was an older baby and Stage 3 when he became a toddler. He craved formula, and his parents, believing it was healthy, always gave him more. By the time he was 3, he reached his peak weight of about 66 pounds — the same as an average9-year-old. He was drinking six or seven bottles a day, each holding about 12 ounces of toddler milk.

Jintana wasn’t worried at first as Gustun grew pudgy. His brother, Captain, had been big, too — almost 60 pounds — at the same age. But when Gustun started school in person after the pandemic, his teachers were concerned. They had seen others arrive, as one put it, “addicted to the bottle.” The weight slowed Gustun down during movement time, his teacher Tida Rakrukrob said through a translator. “He would move slowly and was less active compared to other children,” she said.

When another teacher posted a video on TikTok showing herself comforting and talking with Gustun one day, it went viral — receiving 732,000 likes and many comments about how cute he was. But his teacher’s concern with his difficulty moving led his parents to bring him to see a doctor, who tested him for a hormone imbalance and checked him for diabetes. The tests came back negative. The parents reduced the fried food, dessert and snacks Gustun ate.

The biggest change the family made, though, was eliminating toddler formula from his diet. His school gave him cow’s milk instead, as it did for other children.

Gustun’s extra weight began to disappear.

Looking back, Jintana said she thinks he gained so much “because of the toddler milk.”

Today at age 6, Gustun is no longer on a restricted diet — he can eat fried food and dessert — and weighs 35 pounds, about half of what he weighed at the peak of his Dumex consumption. He is more outgoing at school, Jintana said, and plays soccer with his older brother every day. Captain lost a similar amount of weight after switching to cow’s milk at school and is now 9 and slim, weighing around 51 pounds.

One Monday in September, the brothers — both in soccer jerseys — kicked a ball back and forth in the driveway of the family’s brightly painted red house. Gustun, who has a lightning bolt shaved into his hairline, chased the ball and tried to get it away from his brother, who darted about quickly, tapping it from foot to foot.

“Now, his movement is perfect,” his mother said.

Danone, the company that makes Dumex, said in a statement that while breast milk offers children the best nutritional start, “50 years of scientific research into nutritional needs in early life underpins our products, and we do not make claims that have not been backed up by scientific research.” The company said that research has shown that toddler milk can provide nutrition and help improve the diet of children age 1 and older, reducing the risk of iron and vitamin D deficiency.

“We encourage parents to follow the guidelines on pack when using our products, which are carefully calibrated so that babies and infants receive the right amount of nutrients they need each day from our products,” the company said.

“The Tactic is ‘I Will Violate Your Law’”

Thailand’s marketing restrictions have done little to curb practices like cross-promotion, said Nisachol Cetthakrikul, who has worked in the Thai health ministry and studied the law.

Indeed, at two supermarkets in Bangkok, shiny walls of powdered formula boxes seven shelves high greeted shoppers on a warm day in September. There were few differences between packages for products intended for babies and those intended for toddlers.

Formula makers and stores offered steep discounts for toddler milk, calling one a “Mommy Fair Shock Deal.” An offer on one shelf told parents if they spent about $87 on Hi-Q1 toddler formula, made by Danone, they could receive a free yellow and blue swing set worth about $27. Other offers included a clay “pizza dough cooking fun set,” a toy keyboard and microphone, and even a pushable “speedcar trolley” that a toddler could sit in.

A 2022 study led by Nisachol found 227 instances of formula marketing that violated the law.

The government has levied fines for violations, but Thailand’s health ministry doesn’t name offenders. “The tactic is ‘I will violate your law,’” Siriwat said, “‘and prepare the budget for the fine.’”

Thai health authorities have tried to fight back by raising parents’ awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding. The health ministry, for example, erected billboards saying “breast milk is medicine” and called doctors to a meeting to urge them to promote breastfeeding among their patients. But these campaigns are no match for the formula companies’ massive spending on marketing, Siriwat said.

While Thailand’s exclusive breastfeeding rate for babies six months or younger rebounded to about 29% in 2022, UNICEF found, it is still far short of the WHO’s target of at least 50% by 2025. The country’s rates of obesity and stunting for children 5 and under are higher today than they were in 2016, the year before the watered-down formula law passed.

Dr. Somsak Lolekha, president of the Thai pediatric society, said formula isn’t the only reason for children’s weight problems. But it plays a big role, he said, because it’s so easy to drink — a point that tracks with studies showing that babies who breastfeed longer are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes than those who drink formula.

Last summer, Thailand joined more than 100 nations at the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva to explore ways to fight unethical formula marketing. Attendees sat at long tables in a sleek, modern auditorium. Like other nations’ representatives, Dr. Titiporn Tuangratananon, an official with Thailand’s health ministry, declared her intentions on brightly colored paper posted at the front of the room: “Fully control” the marketing of formula to young children, and “Increase + expand enforcement.”

In an interview, Titiporn said health officials are trying to update the country’s marketing rules — including making some forms of toddler formula advertising, such as giveaways, discounts and free samples, illegal.

But that could ultimately prove difficult in a country that is now the seventh-largest market in the world for formula.

In fact, according to Titiporn, the government has already been deluged by public comments critical of its regulatory efforts. She suspected the pro-marketing remarks, some of which had been repeatedly copied and pasted, came from representatives of the formula industry.

“We know that it’s not real,” Titiporn said. “It’s not the real mothers.”