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Bernie Sanders
|
 |
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United States Senator
from Vermont |
|
|
Assumed office
January 3, 2007
|
| Preceded by |
Jim Jeffords |
| Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee |
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Assumed office
January 3, 2015 |
| Preceded by |
Jeff Sessions |
| Chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee |
In office
January 3, 2013 – January 3, 2015 |
| Preceded by |
Patty Murray |
| Succeeded by |
Johnny Isakson |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Vermont‘s at-large district |
In office
January 3, 1991 – January 3, 2007 |
| Preceded by |
Peter Plympton Smith |
| Succeeded by |
Peter Welch |
| 37th Mayor of Burlington |
In office
April 6, 1981 – April 4, 1989 |
| Preceded by |
Gordon Paquette |
| Succeeded by |
Peter Clavelle |
| Personal details |
| Born |
Bernard Sanders
September 8, 1941 (age 77)
Brooklyn, New York City, U.S. |
| Political party |
Democratic (2015–2016; 2019-present)[1] |
Other political
affiliations |
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| Spouse(s) |
-
Deborah Shiling
( m. 1964; div. 1966)
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| Children |
Levi Sanders |
| Relatives |
Larry Sanders (brother) |
| Education |
Brooklyn College
University of Chicago (BA) |
| Signature |
 |
| Website |
Senate website |
Bernard Sanders (born September 8, 1941) is an American politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Vermont since 2007. The longest-serving Independent in congressional history, he was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 and caucuses with the Democratic Party, enabling his appointment to congressional committees and at times giving Democrats a majority.
Sanders was born and raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, and attended Brooklyn College before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student he was an active protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. After settling in Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party political campaigns in the early to mid-1970s. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington—the state’s most populous city—in 1981, by a margin of ten votes. He was reelected three times. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, representing Vermont’s at-large congressional district; he later co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Sanders served as a U.S. Representative for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. He has been reelected to the Senate twice: in 2012 and 2018.
On April 30, 2015, Sanders announced his campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Initially considered a long shot, he went on to win 23 primaries and caucuses and approximately 43% of pledged delegates, to Hillary Clinton‘s 55%. His campaign was noted for its supporters’ enthusiasm, as well as for his rejection of large donations from corporations, the financial industry, and any associated Super PAC. On July 12, 2016, he formally endorsed Clinton in her general election campaign against Republican Donald Trump, while urging his supporters to continue the “political revolution” his campaign began.
A self-described democratic socialist and progressive, Sanders is pro-labor rights and emphasizes reversing economic inequality.[3] He advocates for universal and single-payer healthcare, paid parental leave, as well as tuition-free tertiary education. On foreign policy, Sanders broadly supports reducing military spending, pursuing more diplomacy and international cooperation, and putting greater emphasis on labor rights and environmental concerns when negotiating international trade agreements. On February 19, 2019, Sanders announced a second presidential campaign against incumbent President Donald Trump. He joined multiple other Democratic candidates for the presidency, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.[4]
Early life
Sanders as a senior in high school, 1959
Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York City.[5][6][7][8] His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders,[9] was born in Słopnice, Galicia in Austria-Hungary (now part of Poland),[10][11] to a Jewish family; in 1921, Elias immigrated to the United States, where he became a paint salesman.[10][12][13] His mother, Dorothy “Dora” Sanders (née Glassberg), was born in New York City[14][15] to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland and Russia.[16][17]
Sanders became interested in politics at an early age: “A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.”[a][20][21][22] In the 1940s, many of Sanders’ relatives in German-occupied Poland were killed in the Holocaust, including Bernie’s uncle Abraham Schnützer, who was killed in 1942.[9][15][23][24][25]
Sanders lived on East 26th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn.[26] He attended elementary school at P.S. 197 in Brooklyn, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team.[27][28] He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954.[24] Sanders’s older brother, Larry, said that during their childhood, the family never lacked for food or clothing, but major purchases, “like curtains or a rug,” were difficult to afford.[29]
Sanders attended James Madison High School, also in Brooklyn, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race.[27] In high school, Sanders lost his first election, finishing last out of three candidates for the student body presidency. Not long after his high school graduation, his mother died at the age of 46;[15][24] his father died a few years later on August 4, 1962, at the age of 57.[11]
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–60[30] before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1964.[30] He has described himself as a mediocre college student because the classroom was “boring and irrelevant,” while the community provided his most significant learning.[31]
Early career
Political activism
While at the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America),[32] and was active in the Civil Rights Movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[23][33] Under Sanders’s chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC.[34] In January 1962, Sanders went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle‘s segregated campus housing policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders said at the protest. Sanders and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president’s office.[35][36] After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination.[37] Joan Mahoney, a member of the University of Chicago CORE chapter at the time and a fellow participant in the sit-ins, described Sanders in a 2016 interview as “… a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn’t terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn’t agree with”.[38] Sanders once spent a day putting up fliers protesting against police brutality, only to eventually notice that a Chicago police car was shadowing him and taking them all down.[39]
Sanders attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.[23][39][40] That summer, he was fined $25 for resisting arrest during a demonstration against segregation in Chicago’s public schools.[41][42]
In addition to his civil rights activism during the 1960s and 1970s,[43] Sanders was active in several peace and antiwar movements. He was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Student Peace Union while attending the University of Chicago. Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War; his application was eventually turned down, by which point he was too old to be drafted. Although he opposed the war, Sanders never criticized those who fought and has been a strong supporter of veterans’ benefits.[44][45] Sanders also worked on the reelection campaign of Leon Despres, a prominent Chicago alderman who was opposed to mayor Richard J. Daley‘s Democratic Party machine. During his student years he also read a variety of American and European political authors, from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John Dewey to Karl Marx and Erich Fromm.[46]
Professional history
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he initially worked at a variety of jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter.[31] In 1968, Sanders moved to Vermont because he had been “captivated by rural life.” After his arrival there he worked as a carpenter,[32] filmmaker, and writer[47] who created and sold “radical film strips” and other educational materials to schools.[48] He also wrote several articles for the alternative publication The Vermont Freeman.[49]
Liberty Union campaigns
Sanders began his electoral political career in 1971 as a member of the Liberty Union Party, which originated in the anti-war movement and the People’s Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate for U.S. senator in 1972 and 1974.[50] In the 1974 senatorial race, Sanders finished third (5,901 votes; 4%), behind 33-year-old Chittenden County State’s Attorney Patrick Leahy (D, VI; 70,629 votes; 49%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary (R; 66,223 votes; 46%).[51][52]
The 1976 campaign proved to be the zenith of Liberty Union’s influence, with Sanders collecting 11,000 votes for governor and the party. This forced the races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidates for those offices from garnering a majority of votes.[53] The campaign drained the finances and energy of the Liberty Union, however, and in October 1977, less than a year after the conclusion of the 1976 campaign, Sanders and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general, Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party.[53]
Following his resignation from the Liberty Union Party in 1977, Sanders worked as a writer and the director of the nonprofit American People’s Historical Society (APHS).[54] While with the APHS, he made a 30-minute documentary about American Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.[32][55]
Mayor of Burlington
In 1980, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont (pop. 38,000), at the suggestion of his close friend and political confidante Richard Sugarman, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont. He was mayor for eight years, from April 6, 1981, to April 4, 1989.[56]
Campaigns
The 39-year-old Sanders ran against incumbent Democratic mayor Gordon “Gordie” Paquette, a five-term mayor who had served as a member of the Burlington City Council for 13 years before that, building extensive community ties and a willingness to cooperate with Republican leaders in controlling appointments to various commissions. Republicans had found Paquette so unobjectionable that they failed to field a candidate in the March 1981 race against him, leaving Sanders as his principal opponent. Sanders’s effort was further aided by the decision of the candidate of the Citizens Party, Greg Guma, to exit the race so as not to split the progressive vote. Two other candidates in the race, independents Richard Bove and Joe McGrath, proved to be essentially non-factors in the campaign, with the battle coming down to Paquette and Sanders.[53]
Sanders castigated the pro-development incumbent as an ally of prominent shopping center developer Antonio Pomerleau, while Paquette warned of ruin for Burlington if Sanders was elected. The Sanders campaign was bolstered by a wave of optimistic volunteers as well as by a series of endorsements from university professors, social welfare agencies, and the police union. The final result came as a shock to the local political establishment, with the maverick Sanders winning by just 10 votes.[53]
Sanders was reelected three times, defeating both Democratic and Republican candidates. He received 53% of the vote in 1983 and 55% in 1985.[57] In his final run for mayor in 1987, Sanders defeated Paul Lafayette, a Democrat endorsed by both major parties.[58] In 1986, Sanders unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Governor Madeleine Kunin (D) in her run for reelection. Running as an independent, Sanders finished third with 14% of the vote. Kunin won with 47%, followed by Lt. Governor Peter P. Smith (R) with 38%.
After serving four two-year terms, Sanders chose not to seek reelection in 1989. He lectured in political science at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government that year and at Hamilton College in 1991.[59]
Administration
During his mayoralty, Sanders called himself a socialist and was so described in the press.[60][61] During his first term, his supporters, including the first Citizens Party City Councilor Terry Bouricius, formed the Progressive Coalition, the forerunner of the Vermont Progressive Party.[62] The Progressives never held more than six seats on the 13-member city council, but they had enough to keep the council from overriding Sanders’s vetoes. Under Sanders, Burlington became the first city in the country to fund community-trust housing.[63]
During the 1980s, Sanders was a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.[64] In 1985, Burlington City Hall hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky. In his introduction, Sanders praised Chomsky as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America” and said he was “delighted to welcome a person who I think we’re all very proud of.”[65][66]
Sanders’s administration balanced the city budget and drew a minor league baseball team, the Vermont Reds, then the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, to Burlington.[15] Under his leadership, Burlington sued the local television cable franchise, winning reduced rates for customers.[15]
As mayor, Sanders led extensive downtown revitalization projects. One of his primary achievements was the improvement of Burlington’s Lake Champlain waterfront.[15] In 1981, Sanders campaigned against the unpopular plans by Burlington developer Tony Pomerleau to convert the then-industrial[67] waterfront property owned by the Central Vermont Railway into expensive condominiums, hotels, and offices.[68] Sanders ran under the slogan “Burlington is not for sale” and successfully supported a plan that redeveloped the waterfront area into a mixed-use district featuring housing, parks, and public space.[68] Today, the waterfront area includes many parks and miles of public beach and bike paths, a boathouse, and a science center.[68]
Sanders hosted and produced a public-access television program, Bernie Speaks with the Community, from 1986 to 1988.[69][70] He collaborated with 30 Vermont musicians to record a folk album, We Shall Overcome, in 1987.[71][72]
In 1987, U.S. News & World Report ranked Sanders as one of America’s best mayors.[73] As of 2013, Burlington was regarded as one of the most livable cities in the nation.[74][75]
U.S. House of Representatives
Representative Sanders in 1991
Sanders’s 1990 victory made him the first independent candidate to be elected to Congress since Frazier Reams in 1950. It was noted by The Washington Post and others as the first election of a socialist to the United States House of Representatives in decades.[76][77] Sanders served in the House from 1991 until he became a senator in 2007.
Elections
In 1988, incumbent Republican Congressman Jim Jeffords decided to run for the U.S. Senate, vacating the House seat representing Vermont’s at-large congressional district. Former Lieutenant Governor Peter P. Smith (R) won the House election with a plurality, securing 41% of the vote. Sanders, who ran as an independent, placed second with 38% of the vote, while Democratic State Representative Paul N. Poirier placed third with 19% of the vote.[78] Two years later, Sanders ran for the seat again and defeated the incumbent Smith by a margin of 56% to 39%.[79]
Sanders was the first independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Frazier Reams‘s election to represent Ohio 40 years earlier.[77] He served as a representative for 16 years, winning reelection by large margins except during the 1994 Republican Revolution, when he won by 3%, with 50% of the vote.[80]
Legislation
Sanders meeting with students at Milton High School in Milton, Vermont, 2004
During his first year in the House, Sanders often alienated allies and colleagues with his criticism of both political parties as working primarily on behalf of the wealthy. In 1991, Sanders co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of mostly liberal Democrats that Sanders chaired for its first eight years,[15] while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or caucus.[81]
Banking reform
In 1999, Sanders voted and advocated against rolling back the Glass–Steagall Legislation provisions that kept investment banks and commercial banks separate entities.[82] He was a vocal critic of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan; in June 2003, during a question-and-answer discussion with the then-Chairman, Sanders told him that he was concerned that Greenspan was “way out of touch” and “that you see your major function in your position as the need to represent the wealthy and large corporations”.[83][84] In October 2008, after Sanders had been elected to the Senate, Greenspan admitted to Congress that his economic ideology regarding risky mortgage loans was flawed.[85][86]
Gun-related
In 1993, Sanders voted against the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks when buying guns and imposed a waiting period on firearm purchasers in the United States; the bill passed by a vote of 238–187.[87][88]
In 1994, Sanders voted in favor of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Sanders said he voted for the bill “because it included the Violence Against Women Act and the ban on certain assault weapons”. He was nevertheless extremely critical of the other parts of the bill.[89][90] Although he acknowledged that “clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them”, he maintained in his intervention before the House that the government’s ill-thought policies played a large part in “dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence”. In this same intervention, he argued that the repressive policies introduced by the bill were not addressing the causes of violence, stating that “we can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails”.[91]
In 1998, Sanders voted for a bill that would have increased minimum sentencing for possession of a gun while committing a federal crime to 10 years in prison, including nonviolent crimes such as marijuana possession.[92][93][94]
In 2005, he voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.[95] The act’s purpose was to prevent firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been committed with their products.[96] As of 2016 Sanders has said that he has changed his position and would vote for legislation to defeat this bill.[97]
Patriot Act
Sanders was a consistent critic of the Patriot Act.[98] As a member of Congress, he voted against the original Patriot Act legislation.[99] After its 357-to-66 passage in the House, Sanders sponsored and voted for several subsequent amendments and acts attempting to curtail its effects,[100] and voted against each re-authorization.[101] In June 2005, Sanders proposed an amendment to limit Patriot Act provisions that allow the government to obtain individuals’ library and book-buying records. The amendment passed the House by a bipartisan majority, but was removed on November 4 of that year in House–Senate negotiations and never became law.[102]
War in Iraq
Sanders voted against the resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002, and opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists[103] that has been cited as the legal justification for controversial military actions since the September 11 attacks.[104] Sanders voted for a non-binding resolution expressing support for troops at the outset of the invasion of Iraq, but gave a floor speech criticizing the partisan nature of the vote and the George W. Bush administration’s actions in the run-up to the war. Regarding the investigation of what turned out to be a leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame‘s identity by a State Department official, Sanders stated: “The revelation that the President authorized the release of classified information in order to discredit an Iraq war critic should tell every member of Congress that the time is now for a serious investigation of how we got into the war in Iraq and why Congress can no longer act as a rubber stamp for the President.”[105]
Other
In 1996, Sanders voted against a bill that would have prohibited police purchasing of tanks and armored carriers.[92][106]
On November 2, 2005, Sanders voted against the Online Freedom of Speech Act, which would have exempted the Internet from the campaign finance restrictions of the McCain–Feingold Bill.[107]
U.S. Senate
Elections
Sanders entered the race for the U.S. Senate on April 21, 2005, after Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would not seek a fourth term. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, endorsed Sanders, a critical move as it meant that no Democrat running against Sanders could expect to receive financial help from the party. Sanders was also endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean said in May 2005 that he considered Sanders an ally who “votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.”[108] Then-Senator Barack Obama also campaigned for Sanders in Vermont in March 2006.[109] Sanders entered into an agreement with the Democratic Party, much as he had as a congressman, to be listed in their primary but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did.[110][111]
In the most expensive political campaign in Vermont’s history,[112] Sanders defeated businessman Rich Tarrant by an approximately 2-to-1 margin. Many national media outlets projected Sanders as the winner just after the polls closed, before any returns came in. He was reelected in 2012 with 71% of the vote,[113] and again in 2018 with 67% of the vote.[114]
Legislation
Prior to his 2016 presidential run, Sanders was known as a legislator who advocated for progressive causes, but “rarely forged actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it.”[115] According to The New York Times, “Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate … Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others.”[116] During his time in the Senate, Sanders had lower “legislative effectiveness” than the average Senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made.[117]
Banking reform
Sanders has advocated greater democratic participation by citizens, campaign finance reform, and a constitutional amendment or judicial decision that would overturn Citizens United v. FEC.[118][119][120] He calls for comprehensive financial reforms,[121] such as breaking up “too big to fail” financial institutions, restoring Glass–Steagall legislation, reforming the Federal Reserve Bank and allowing the Post Office to offer basic financial services in economically marginalized communities.[126]
Sanders spoke for more than eight hours in his December 2010 filibuster.
On September 24, 2008, Sanders posted an open letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson decrying the initial bank bailout proposal; it drew more than 8,000 citizen cosigners in 24 hours.[127] On January 26, 2009, Sanders and Democrats Robert Byrd, Russ Feingold, and Tom Harkin were the sole majority members to vote against confirming Timothy Geithner as United States Secretary of the Treasury.[128]
In 2008 and 2009, Sanders voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (also referred to as the Wall Street bailout) which was a program to purchase toxic banking assets and provide loans to banks which were in free fall at the time.[129][130] Among Sanders’ proposed financial reforms is the auditing of the Federal Reserve, which would reduce the independence of the Federal Reserve in monetary policy deliberations; Federal Reserve officials say that ‘Audit the Fed’ legislation would expose the Federal Reserve to undue political pressure from lawmakers who do not like its decisions.[131][132][133]
In 2016, Sanders voted for the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which included proposals for a reformed audit of the Federal Reserve System.[131][132][133]
Supreme Court nominees
On March 17, 2016, Sanders said he would support Merrick Garland‘s nomination to the Supreme Court, though he added, “there are some more progressive judges out there.”[134]
Sanders opposed Neil Gorsuch‘s nomination to the Court, saying that Gorsuch had “refused to answer legitimate questions.”[135] Sanders also objected to the possibility of Senate Republicans using the nuclear option to “choke off debate and ram the nomination through the Senate.”[135] Sanders voted against confirmation of Gorsuch as Associate Supreme Court Justice.[136]
Taxes
On December 10, 2010, Sanders delivered an 8 1⁄2–hour speech against the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, the proposed extension of the Bush-era tax rates that eventually became law, arguing that the legislation would favor the wealthiest Americans. “Enough is enough! … How many homes can you own?” he asked.[137][138][139] A long speech such as this is commonly known as a filibuster, but because it did not block action, it was not technically a filibuster under Senate rules.[140]
In response to the speech, hundreds of people signed online petitions urging Sanders to run in the 2012 presidential election, and pollsters began measuring his support in key primary states.[141] Progressive activists such as Rabbi Michael Lerner and economist David Korten publicly voiced their support for a prospective Sanders run against President Barack Obama.[141] Sanders’s speech was published in February 2011 by Nation Books as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class, with authorial proceeds going to Vermont nonprofit charitable organizations.[142]
Labor
Sanders introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, April 2017
In April 2017, Sanders introduced a bill that would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour – an increase over an earlier Democratic $12 an hour proposal – which was co-sponsored by two other progressive Democrats.[143]
On May 9, 2018, Sanders introduced the Workplace Democracy Act, a bill that would expand labor rights by making it easier for workers to join a union, ban right-to-work laws and some anti-union provisions of the Taft Hartley Act, and outlaw some union-busting tactics. It was endorsed by several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown. Announcing the legislation, Sanders said, “If we are serious about reducing income and wealth inequality and rebuilding the middle class, we have got to substantially increase the number of union jobs in this country.”[144]
On September 5, 2018, Sanders partnered with Ro Khanna to introduce the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act, which would require large corporations to pay for food stamps and Medicaid benefits their employees receive, rather than shifting the burden onto taxpayers.[145] Khanna said, “if you bag groceries, you should be able to buy groceries.” Sanders said, “Taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who’s worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day,” referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.[146][147] The bill has received some support from conservatives; Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson endorsed the proposal on air.[148] On October 2, 2018, Bezos raised the minimum wage at Amazon to $15, effective November 1; Sanders commended him.[149]
Committees and caucuses
Senators participate in committees that are responsible for certain types of legislation and in caucuses that build a legislative constituency for shaping legislation of interest to its members.
Committee assignments
As an independent, Sanders worked out a deal with the Senate Democratic leadership in which he agreed to vote with the Democrats on all procedural matters unless the Democratic whip, Dick Durbin, agreed that he need not (a request rarely made or granted). In return, he was allowed to keep his seniority and received the committee seats that would have been available to him as a Democrat; in 2013–14, he was chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (during the Veterans Health Administration scandal).[150][151]
Sanders became the ranking minority member on the Senate Budget Committee in January 2015; he had previously been chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee for two years. Since January 2017, he has been Chair of the Senate Democratic Outreach Committee.[151] He appointed economics professor Stephanie Kelton, a modern monetary theory scholar and self-described “deficit owl”, as the chief economic adviser for the committee’s Democratic minority[152] and presented a report aimed at helping “rebuild the disappearing middle class”, which included proposals to raise the minimum wage, boost infrastructure spending, and increase Social Security payments.[153]
According to his senate website, Sanders’s other committee assignments during 2016 were as follows:[154]
Caucus memberships
Sanders was only the third senator from Vermont to caucus with the Democrats, after Jeffords and Leahy. His caucusing with the Democrats gave them a 51–49 majority in the Senate during the 110th Congress in 2007–08. The Democrats needed 51 seats to control the Senate because Vice President Dick Cheney would have broken any tie in favor of the Republicans.[155] He is a member of the following caucuses:
Approval ratings
Polling conducted in August 2011 by Public Policy Polling found that Sanders’s approval rating was 67% and his disapproval rating 28%, making him then the third-most popular senator in the country.[157] Both the NAACP and the NHLA have given Sanders 100% voting scores during his tenure in the Senate.[158] In 2015, Sanders was named one of the Top 5 of The Forward 50.[159] In a November 2015 Morning Consult poll, Sanders had an approval rating of 83% among his constituents, making him the most popular senator in the country.[160] Fox News found Sanders to have the highest net favorability at +28 points of any prominent politician included in its March 2017 poll.[161] He ranked third in 2014 and first in both 2015 and 2016.[160][157][162]
In April 2017, a nationwide Harvard-Harris Poll found Sanders had the highest favorability rating of the leading political figures included in the poll,[163] a standing confirmed by subsequent polling.[164][165] Several 2018 national polls have shown that former Vice President Joe Biden is Democrats’ top choice for the party’s 2020 nomination, with Sanders second.[166] In a June 2018 poll, Sanders was third, behind Clinton in second and Biden in first.[167]
2016 presidential campaign
Sanders announced his intention to seek the Democratic Party‘s nomination for President of the United States on April 30, 2015,[168][169][170] and his campaign was officially launched on May 26, 2015, in Burlington.[169] In his announcement, Sanders said, “I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process,” and made this a central idea throughout his campaign.[168][169] Senator Elizabeth Warren welcomed Sanders’s entry into the race, saying, “I’m glad to see him get out there and give his version of what leadership in this country should be,” but never endorsed him.[171][172]Initially considered a long shot, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses and approximately 46% of pledged delegates to Clinton’s 54%. His campaign was noted for its supporters’ enthusiasm, as well as for his rejection of large donations from corporations, the financial industry, and any associated Super PAC. On July 12, 2016, Sanders formally endorsed Clinton in her unsuccessful general election campaign against Republican Donald Trump, while urging his supporters to continue the “political revolution” his campaign had begun.[173]
Campaign methods
Unlike the other major candidates, Sanders did not pursue funding through a Super PAC or by wealthy donors, instead focusing on small individual donations.[174] His presidential campaign raised $1.5 million within 24 hours of his official announcement.[175] At year’s end the campaign had raised a total of $73 million from more than one million people making 2.5 million donations, with an average donation of $27.16.[176] The campaign reached 3.25 million donations by the end of January 2016, raising $20 million in that month alone.[177]
Sanders used social media to help his campaign gain momentum,[178] posting content to online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and answering questions on Reddit. He gained a large grassroots organizational following online. A July 29, 2015 meetup organized online brought 100,000 supporters to more than 3,500 simultaneous events nationwide.[179]
Sanders’s campaign events in June 2015 drew overflow crowds around the country, to his surprise.[180][181][182] When Hillary Clinton and Sanders made public appearances within days of each other in Des Moines, Iowa, Sanders drew larger crowds, even though he had already made numerous stops around the state and Clinton’s visit was her first in 2015.[183] On July 1, 2015, Sanders’s campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin, drew the largest crowd of any 2016 presidential candidate to that date, with an estimated turnout of 10,000.[184][185] Over the following weeks he gained even larger crowds: 11,000 in Arizona,[186] 15,000 in Seattle,[187] and 28,000 in Portland.[188]
Party presidential debates
The 2016 Democratic Party presidential debates occurred among candidates in the campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the President of the United States. The DNC announced in May 2015 that there would be six debates. Critics alleged that the small number of debates and the schedule, with half of the debates on Saturday or Sunday nights, were part of the DNC’s deliberate attempt to protect the front-runner, Hillary Clinton.[189] In February 2016, Clinton’s and Sanders’s campaigns agreed in principle to holding four more debates for a total of ten.[190] Clinton dropped out of the tenth debate, scheduled to take place just before the California primary, citing a need to devote her time to making direct contact with California voters and preparing for the general election.[191] Sanders expressed disappointment that Clinton canceled the debate “before the largest and most important primary in the presidential nominating process”.[192]
Polls and news coverage
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in May found Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a “dead heat”, but the same poll found that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee, 53% of voters would support him to 39% for Trump.[193] Clinton and Trump were the least popular likely candidates in the poll’s history, while Sanders received a 43% positive, 36% negative rating.[194] Polls showed that Democratic voters older than 50 preferred Clinton by a large margin but those under 50 overwhelmingly favored Sanders.[195]
Some supporters raised concerns that publications such as The New York Times minimized coverage of the Sanders campaign in favor of other candidates’, especially Trump’s and Clinton’s. The Times’s own “public editor” or ombudsman reviewed her paper’s coverage of Sanders and found that as of September 2015 her paper “hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say.” She also found that the Times’s coverage of Sanders’s campaign was much scanter than its coverage of that of Trump, the Republican candidate also initially considered a long shot, with 63 articles covering the Trump campaign and 14 covering the Sanders campaign.[196][197] A December 2015 report found that the three major networks – CBS, NBC, and ABC – had spent 234 minutes reporting on Trump and 10 minutes on Sanders, despite their similar polling results. The report noted that ABC World News Tonight had spent 81 minutes on Trump and less than one minute on Sanders during 2015.[198]
In November 2016, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted that on March 15, Super Tuesday III, the speeches of Trump, Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz were broadcast in full. Sanders was in Phoenix, Arizona, on that date, speaking to a rally larger than any of the others, but his speech was not mentioned, let alone broadcast.[199] Other analysts disputed that the media was biased against Sanders. According to Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, the media was biased in his favor, as it had a “systematic self-interested bias toward exaggerating how close the race is.”[200] In September 2015, George Washington University political scientist John Sides failed to find evidence that there was less coverage of Sanders than would be expected for a candidate who was considered unlikely to win,[201]saying, “if anything, you could make the case for the opposite: that Sanders is getting more coverage than he ‘should’ based on his chances of winning, perhaps because the media’s framing the Democratic race as competitive makes it more interesting to readers.”[201]The media coverage that Sanders did get was far less negative than Clinton’s, according to Sides.[201] Jonathan Stray of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab found in January 2016 that media coverage of Sanders was proportional to his standing in the polls.[202]
A 2016 report by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that Sanders did not get much media coverage in early 2015 due to initial low poll numbers, but as he “began to get coverage, it was overwhelmingly positive in tone. Sanders’ coverage in 2015 was the most favorable of any of the top candidates, Republican or Democratic”,[203] while Clinton received “by far the most negative coverage of any candidate.”[203] A second 2016 Shorenstein Center report found that “Sanders was the only candidate during the primary period to receive a positive balance of coverage”[204] and that the ratio of Clinton-Sanders coverage in 2016 was 54–46% in weeks 5–11 and 61–39% in weeks 12–19, while the ratio of Trump-Clinton-Sanders coverage was 43–37–20% in weeks 20–24.[204] As the primary progressed, coverage of Sanders was increasingly dominated by his electoral defeats and increasingly smaller chance to win the Democratic nomination.[204]
An analysis in Newsweek found that 12% of those who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary voted for Trump in the general election, enough to swing the election in his favor. However, by comparison, 25% of those who voted for Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary voted for Republican nominee John McCain in the general election.[205]
Conclusion
After the final primary election, Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee.[206] On July 12, Sanders formally endorsed Clinton[207] but he continued to work with the Democratic National Convention organizers to implement the progressive positions he had been campaigning for. Sanders spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention on July 25, giving Clinton his full support. Some of Sanders’s supporters attempted to protest Clinton’s nomination and booed when Sanders called for party unity. Sanders responded, “Our job is to do two things: to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Hillary Clinton … It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency.”[208]
On November 8, in the general election, Sanders received almost 6% of the vote in Vermont, though no longer a candidate. This was the highest share of a statewide presidential vote for a write-in draft campaign in American history.[209] He also received more votes in Vermont than Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, and Jill Stein, the Green candidate, combined.[210]
Elsewhere, it was possible to vote for Sanders as a write-in candidate in twelve states,[211] and exact totals of write-in votes for Sanders were published in three states: California,[212] New Hampshire,[213] and Vermont.[210] In those three states, Sanders received 111,850 write-in votes, which was approximately 15% of the write-in votes nationwide, and <1% of the nationwide number of votes overall.[211]
In November 2016, Sanders’s book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In was released; upon its release, it was number 3 on The New York Times Best Seller list. The audiobook received a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.[214] In 2016, Sanders formed Our Revolution, a political organization dedicated to educating voters about issues, getting people involved in the political process, and electing progressive candidates. In February 2017, Sanders began webcasting The Bernie Sanders Show on Facebook. Polls taken in 2017 have found Sanders to be the most popular politician in the United States.[163][164][165]
As of May 2018 Sanders was considering a run in the 2020 United States presidential election.[215]
In February 2018, Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election revealed that Russians communicated false information during the primary campaigns to benefit Sanders and Stein and to harm Clinton.[216] Sanders rejected the Mueller investigation’s conclusion, saying that he had seen no evidence that Russians helped his campaign.[217] Sanders furthermore blamed the Clinton campaign for not doing more to prevent Russian interference.[217] Sanders later said his campaign had taken action to prevent Russian meddling in the election, and that a campaign staffer had alerted the Clinton campaign.[218] Politico noted that a Sanders campaign volunteer contacted a political action committee (PAC) that supported the Clinton campaign to report suspicious activities but that the Sanders campaign did not contact the Clinton campaign as such.[218]
Effect of the Sanders campaign on the Democratic party
A variety of analysts have suggested that Sanders’ campaign shifted both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party politically leftward. Speaking on the PBS Newshour about the upcoming 2018 elections and discussing the main principles of the two major parties, Susan Page described the Republican party as “Trump’s party” and the Democratic party as “Bernie Sanders’ party”, saying that “Sanders and his more progressive stance has really taken hold.”[219] Noting the increasing acceptance of Sanders’ national single-payer health-care program, his $15-an-hour minimum wage stance, free college tuition and many of the other campaign platform issues he introduced, an April 2018 opinion article in The Week suggested, “Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right.”[220] In July 2016, a Slate article called the Democratic platform draft “a monument to his campaign”, noting not only Sanders’ call for a $15 per hour minimum wage, but other Sanders campaign issues, including Social Security expansion, a carbon tax, Wall Street reform, opposition to the death penalty, and a “reasoned pathway for future legalization” of marijuana.[221]
Political activities: 2016-2019
Sanders’s book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In was released in November 2016. Upon its release, it was on The New York Times Best Seller list at number 3.[222]
To build on momentum gained during the 2016 election campaign, Sanders and supporters founded a political action committee and a political education organization:
- Brand New Congress – In April 2016, former Sanders presidential campaign staffers formed a political organization, Brand New Congress, to elect Congressional representatives in line with the campaign’s political platform.[223]
- Our Revolution – In August 2016, Sanders founded Our Revolution, an organization dedicated to educating voters about political issues, getting people involved in the political process, and recruiting and supporting candidates for local, state, and national office.[224][225]
On February 16, 2017, Sanders began webcasting The Bernie Sanders Show using Facebook live streaming. As of April 2, 2017, guests have included William Barber, Josh Fox, Jane Mayer, and Bill Nye. Nye’s episode has 4.6 million views and 25,000 shares.[226][227]
As of May 2018, Sanders was considering a run in the 2020 United States presidential election.[215]
In September 2018, The Guardian published two op-ed pieces on the need for international progressive cooperation to challenge the rising threat of globalism, threat of authoritarianism and wealth inequality, one by Sanders[228] and another by European progressive Yanis Varoufakis.[229] In late October, Varoufakis announced the upcoming launch of Progressives International on November 30 in Vermont.[230]
In 2018, Sanders sponsored a bill with Senators Chris Murphy (D–CT) and Mike Lee (R–UT) to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi–led military intervention in Yemen,[231] which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties[232] and “millions more suffering from starvation and disease”.[233] Sanders first introduced the bill in February 2018 but the Senate voted to table the motion the next month;[234] after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 (which, according to multiple intelligence agencies, was ordered by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman),[235] Sanders’s bill attracted bipartisan co-sponsors and support, and the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 56–41 on December 13.[231][232][233][235]
In a statement after the Senate’s passage of the bill, Sanders said the following about his rationale for leading the bipartisan effort to pass it:[236]
“I want to stress the bipartisan nature of this legislation. We have brought Republicans and Democrats together in a very historic moment. And what that moment is about is that the Senate this afternoon stated that we will not continue participation in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth.
And that crisis is about 85,000 children starving to death; 10,000 new cases of cholera every single week; and the United Nations telling us that Yemen is on the verge of imminent famine, with the possibility of millions of people dying, all because of Saudi activities in that civil war.
And today what the United States Senate said in a very loud way is that we will not continue to have our military posture dictated by a despotic, murderous regime in Saudi Arabia – a regime which does not respect democracy, which does not respect human rights, a regime whose leader nobody doubts was involved in the horrific murder of a dissident journalist in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, Jamal Khashoggi.”[236]
The bill must also be passed by the House and signed by President Trump before it becomes law;[231] if it does, it will be the first-ever invocation of the War Powers Resolution.[231]
2020 presidential campaign
On February 19, 2019, Sanders announced on Vermont Public Radio that he would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States in the 2020 election.[237]
Political positions
Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist,[242] and progressive who admires the Nordic model of social democracy and has been a proponent of workplace democracy.[243][239][244] In November 2015, Sanders gave a speech at Georgetown University about his view of democratic socialism, including its place in the policies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.[245][246] In defining what democratic socialism means to him, Sanders said: “I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”[245] Based on Sanders’s positions and votes throughout his political career, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank have described Sanders as “a New Dealer“.[b][247]
Evaluations of his ideology
Commentators have noted the consistency of Sanders’s views throughout his political career.[248][249] Many have examined his political platform and variety of democratic socialism and found it to be based on tax-funded social benefits rather than social ownership of the means of production.
Academics have variously described Sanders’s political philosophy as “welfarism“[250] or “social democracy“[251] but not democratic socialism as defined as “an attempt to create a property-free, socialist society”.[252]
Members of various US socialist parties have said that Sanders is a reformer of capitalism, not a socialist.[253][254][255]
Others distinguish among socialism, social democracy, and democratic socialism, and describe his philosophy as an extension of such existing social democratic programs in the US as Social Security and Medicare[256][257][247] and more consistent with the social democracy found in much of Europe, especially the Nordic countries.[258][259]
Bush Administration
In March 2006, after a series of resolutions passed in various Vermont towns calling for him to bring articles of impeachment against George W. Bush, Sanders stated that it would be “impractical to talk about impeachment” with Republicans in control of the House and Senate.[260] Still, Sanders made no secret of his opposition to the Bush Administration, which he regularly criticized for its cuts to social programs.[261][262][263]
Climate change
Sanders advocates bold action to reverse global warming and substantial investment in infrastructure, with “energy efficiency and sustainability” and job creation as prominent goals.[264][265] He considers climate change the greatest threat to national security.[266][267] Sanders opposes the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the grounds that, like the Keystone XL Pipeline, it “will have a significant impact on our climate.”[268]
Democratic Party
Born into a Democratic-voting family, Sanders was first introduced to political activism when his brother Larry joined the Young Democrats of America and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson II in 1956.[269] Although elected Mayor of Burlington as an independent, Sanders endorsed Democratic presidential candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Jesse Jackson in 1988. His endorsement of Mondale was lukewarm (telling reporters that “if you go around saying that Mondale would be a great president, you would be a liar and a hypocrite”), but he supported Jackson enthusiastically.[270] The Washington Post reported that the Jackson campaign helped inspire Sanders to work more closely with the Democratic Party.[270][46]
Once elected to the House of Representatives, Sanders joined the Democratic caucus, though some conservative southern Democrats initially barred him from the caucus as they believed that allowing a self-described socialist to join it would harm their electoral prospects.[46] He soon came to work constructively with Democrats, voting with the party more than 90 percent of the time during his tenure in the House and Senate.[46]
Starting in November 2015, in connection with his presidential campaign, Sanders’s announcements suggested that not only was he running as a Democrat, but that he would run as a Democrat in future elections.[271][272][273] When challenged by Clinton about his party commitment, he said, “Of course I am a Democrat and running for the Democratic nomination.”[274] During the campaign, news sources often referred to him as a Democrat.[275][276][277] Since he remained a senator, elected as an independent, the United States Senate website continued to refer to Sanders as an independent during the campaign and upon his return to the Senate.[278] He confirmed at the end of the campaign that he remained an independent in the senate for the balance of his term, since that was how he was elected.[279]
Sanders advocated that, following Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections, the Democratic Party undergo a “series of reforms” and that it had to “break loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor.”[280]
Sanders drew parallels between his campaign and that of the Labour Party in the 2017 UK general election.[281][282] He wrote in The New York Times that “the British elections should be a lesson for the Democratic Party” and urged the Democrats to stop holding on to an “overly cautious, centrist ideology”, arguing that “momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers”.[283][284] He had earlier praised Jeremy Corbyn‘s stance on class issues.[285]
In October 2017, Sanders stated that he would run for reelection as an independent in 2018 though pressured to run as a Democrat.[286]
Distribution of wealth
Sanders opposed the 2017 Trump/Republican federal budget plan, calling it “a budget for the billionaire class, for Wall Street, for corporate CEOs, and for the wealthiest people in this country … nothing less than a massive transfer of wealth from working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor to the top 1%”.[287]
Following the November 2017 revelations from the Paradise Papers and a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies which says just three people, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population, Sanders stated that “we must end global oligarchy” and that “we need, in the United States and throughout the world, a tax system which is fair, progressive and transparent.”[288]
Foreign policy
On June 12, 2017, U.S. senators reached an agreement on legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia and Iran. The bill was opposed only by Sanders and Republican Rand Paul.[289]
Addressing Westminster College in a September 2017 speech, Sanders laid out a “progressive foreign policy” that pushes for greater international collaboration, an adherence to U.S.-led international agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal framework, and the promotion of human rights and democratic ideals. He emphasized the evils associated with “outrageous” global economic inequality and climate change, and urged reining in the use of U.S. military power, saying it “must always be a last resort”. Sanders also heavily criticized U.S. support for “murderous regimes” during the Cold War, such as those in Iran, Chile and El Salvador, and said that those actions continue to make the U.S. less safe.[290][291] He also spoke critically of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and the way President Trump has handled the crisis.[292]
In September 2017, Sanders said that Saudi Arabia is “an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism. … They are not an ally of the United States.”[293] In an October 2018 column for The New York Times, Sanders called on the United States to end its backing of the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, saying that US support for this war makes it complicit in crimes against humanity and is unconstitutional because its participation has not been authorized by Congress.[294]
Gun laws
Sanders supports banning assault weapons, universal federal background checks, and closing the gun show loophole.[295][296][297] In 1990, Sanders was supported by the NRA in his bid to become a U.S. Representative in exchange for opposing both the competing campaign of Peter Smith, who had reversed his stance on firearm restrictions, and waiting periods for handgun purchases.[298] In 1993, while a U.S. Representative, he voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (which established background checks and wait periods), and in 2005 he voted for legislation that gave gun manufacturers legal immunity against claims of negligence, but as of 2016 he has said that he would support repealing that law.[97] In 1996, he voted against additional funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for research on issues related to firearms, but in 2016 he called for an increase in CDC funding for the study of gun violence.[97]
Health care
Don’t Take Our Health Care rally in Columbus, Ohio, June 2017
Sanders is a staunch supporter of a universal health care system, and has said, “If you are serious about real healthcare reform, the only way to go is single-payer.”[299] He advocates lowering the cost of drugs that are expensive because they remain under patent for years; some drugs that cost thousands of dollars per year in the U.S. are available for hundreds, or less, in countries where they can be obtained as generics.[300] As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, Sanders has introduced legislation to reauthorize and strengthen the Older Americans Act, which supports Meals on Wheels and other programs for seniors.[301] He supported the Affordable Care Act, though he said it didn’t go far enough.[302]
On May 4, 2017, in response to the House vote to repeal and replace The Affordable Care Act, Sanders predicted “thousands of Americans would die” from no longer having access to health care.[303] Politifact rated Sanders’s statement “mostly true”.[304]
In September 2017, Sanders and 15 Senate co-sponsors submitted the “Medicare for All” bill, a single-payer health care plan. The bill also covers vision and dental care, unlike Medicare. Some Republicans have called the bill “Berniecare” and “the latest Democratic push for socialized medicine and higher taxes.” Sanders responded that the Republican party has no credibility on the issue of health care after voting for legislation that would take health insurance away from 32 million people under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).[305]
Immigration
In 2007, Sanders helped kill a bill introducing comprehensive immigration reform, arguing that its guest-worker program would depress wages for American workers.[306] In 2010, he supported the DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors.[306] In 2013, he supported the Gang of Eight‘s comprehensive immigration reform bill after advocating for the provision of a $1.5 billion youth jobs program, which he argued would offset the harms of labor market competition with immigrants.[306]
Social benefits
Sanders focuses on economic issues such as income and wealth inequality,[238][307] poverty,[308] raising the minimum wage,[143] universal healthcare,[299] reducing the burden of student debt,[309] making public colleges and universities tuition-free by taxing financial transactions,[310] and expanding Social Security benefits by eliminating the cap on the payroll tax on all incomes above $250,000.[311][312] He has become a prominent supporter of laws requiring companies to give their workers parental leave, sick leave, and vacation time, noting that such laws have been adopted by nearly all other developed countries.[313] He also supports legislation that would make it easier for workers to join or form a trade union.[314][315]
Social issues
Sanders has liberal stances on social issues. He advocated for LGBT rights as Mayor of Burlington in 1983 and voted against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. In 2006, Sanders indicated that the time was not right for legalization of same-sex marriage in Vermont, describing the issue as properly handled at the state, not the national, level, but in 2009 he supported the legalization of same-sex marriage in Vermont, which was enacted that year.[316] He considers himself a feminist,[317] is pro-choice on abortion, and opposes the de-funding of Planned Parenthood.[318] Sanders has denounced institutional racism and called for criminal justice reform to reduce the number of people in prison,[319] advocates a crackdown on police brutality, and supports abolishing private, for-profit prisons[320][321][322]and the death penalty.[323] Sanders supports Black Lives Matter.[324] He supports legalizing marijuana at the federal level.[325]
Trade
Calling international trade agreements a “disaster for the American worker”, Sanders voted against and has spoken for years against NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR with China, saying that they have resulted in American corporations moving abroad. He also strongly opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he says was “written by corporate America and the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street.”[326][327]
Trump Administration
Sanders criticized President Trump for appointing multiple billionaires to his cabinet.[328] He criticized Trump’s rolling back the Clean Power Plan of former President Barack Obama, noting the scientifically reported effect on climate change of human activity and citing Trump’s calling those reports a hoax.[329] He called for caution on the Syrian Civil War, noting that “it’s easier to get into a war than out of one.”[330] Sanders has promised to defeat “Trump and Trumpism and the Republican right-wing ideology”.[331]
Sanders gave an online reply to Trump’s January 2018 State of the Union address in which he called Trump “compulsively dishonest” and criticized him for initiating “a looming immigration crisis” by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He voiced concern about Trump’s failure to mention the finding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and “will likely interfere in the 2018 midterms we will be holding … Unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin.”[332]
War and peace
Sanders strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has criticized a number of policies instituted during the War on Terror, particularly mass surveillance and the USA Patriot Act.[333][334][335] Sanders criticized Israel‘s actions during the 2014 Gaza war[336] and U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.[337] On November 15, 2015, in response to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)’s attacks in Paris, Sanders cautioned against “Islamophobia” and said, “We gotta be tough, not stupid” in the war against ISIL, adding that the U.S. should continue to welcome Syrian refugees.[338]
Personal life
In 1963, Sanders and Deborah Shiling Messing, whom he met in college, volunteered for several months on the Israeli kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakim. They married in 1964 and bought a summer home in Vermont; they had no children and divorced in 1966.[32][339][340][341] Sanders’s son, Levi Sanders, was born in 1969 to girlfriend Susan Campbell Mott.[31] In 1988, Sanders married Jane O’Meara Driscoll (née Mary Jane O’Meara), who later became president of Burlington College, in Burlington, Vermont.[342] The day after their wedding, the couple visited the Soviet Union as part of an official delegation in his capacity as mayor.[343][344] Sanders considers Jane’s three children—Dave Driscoll (born 1975), Carina Driscoll (born 1974), and Heather Titus (née Driscoll; 1971)—to be his own.[32][345] He also has seven grandchildren.[346]
In December 1987, during his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Sanders recorded a folk album, We Shall Overcome, with 30 Vermont musicians. As he was not a skilled singer, he performed his vocals in a talking blues style.[347][348]Sanders appeared in a cameo role in the 1988 comedy-drama film Sweet Hearts Dance, playing a man who distributes candy to young trick-or-treaters.[349] In 1999, he acted in the film My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception, playing Rabbi Manny Shevitz. In this role he mourned the Brooklyn Dodgers‘ move to Los Angeles, reflecting Sanders’s own upbringing in Brooklyn.[350] On February 6, 2016, Sanders was a guest star alongside Larry David on Saturday Night Live, playing a Polish immigrant on a steamship that was sinking near the Statue of Liberty.[351]
On December 4, 2015, Sanders won Time‘s 2015 Person of the Year readers’ poll with 10.2% of the vote[352][353] but did not receive the editorial board’s award. On March 20, 2016, he was given an honorary Coast Salish name, dxʷshudičup,[c] by Deborah Parker in Seattle to honor his focus on Native American issues during his presidential campaign.[354]
Sanders’s elder brother, Larry, lives in England.[355] He was a Green Party county councillor, representing the East Oxford division on Oxfordshire County Council, until he retired from the Council in 2013.[356][357] Larry ran as a Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon in the 2015 British general election and came in fifth.[358][359] Sanders told CNN, “I owe my brother an enormous amount. It was my brother who actually introduced me to a lot of my ideas.”[359]
On May 30, 2017, Sanders received an Honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Brooklyn College.[360]
After complaints made in 2016 by Donald Trump’s Vermont campaign chairman, the FBI launched an investigation into Sanders’s wife Jane’s involvement in a bank loan for Burlington College when she was its president.[361][362][363][364] The Washington Post reported on June 25, 2017, that Sanders himself was not under FBI investigation.[365] Both Sanders and his wife have retained prominent counsel during the investigation.[363][364]
After receiving nearly $900,000 in royalty advances for his recently published books, Sanders reported earnings of just over $1 million in 2016.[366] He and his wife own three homes, two in Vermont and one in Washington.[367][368][369]
Religion, heritage, and values
As Sanders described his upbringing as an American Jew in a 2016 speech: his father generally attended synagogue only on Yom Kippur; he attended public schools while his mother “chafed” at his yeshiva Sunday schooling at a Hebrew school; and their religious observances were mostly limited to Passover seders with their neighbors. Larry Sanders said, “They were very pleased to be Jews, but didn’t have a strong belief in God.”[370] Bernie had a bar mitzvah[371] at the historic Kingsway Jewish Center in Midwood, Brooklyn, where he grew up.[370]
In 1963, in cooperation with the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, Sanders and his first wife volunteered at Sha’ar HaAmakim, a kibbutz in northern Israel.[372][373][374][375] His motivation for the trip was as much socialistic as it was Zionistic.[370]
As Mayor of Burlington, Sanders allowed a Chabad public menorah to be placed at city hall, an action contested by the local ACLU chapter. He publicly inaugurated the Hanukkah menorah and performed the Jewish religious ritual of blessing Hanukkah candles.[370] His early and strong support played a significant role in the now widespread public menorah celebrations around the globe.[376][377][378][379] When asked about his Jewish heritage, Sanders has said he is “proud to be Jewish”.[375][21]
Sanders rarely speaks about religion.[371] He describes himself as “not particularly religious”[21] and “not actively involved” with organized religion.[371] A press package issued by his office states “Religion: Jewish”.[380] He has said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner: “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways,” he said. “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”[371][381] In October 2015, on the late-night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel asked Bernie, “You say you are culturally Jewish and you don’t feel religious; do you believe in God and do you think that’s important to the people of the United States?” Sanders replied:[382]
I am who I am, and what I believe in and what my spirituality is about is that we’re all in this together. That I think it is not a good thing to believe as human beings we can turn our backs on the suffering of other people … and this is not Judaism, this is what Pope Francis is talking about, that we can’t just worship billionaires and the making of more and more money. Life is more than that.
In 2016, he stated he had “very strong religious and spiritual feelings” and explained, “My spirituality is that we are all in this together and that when children go hungry, when veterans sleep out on the street, it impacts me.”[383]
Sanders does not regularly attend synagogue, and he works on Rosh Hashanah, a day when Jews typically take a holiday from work. He has attended yahrzeit observances in memory of the deceased, for the father of a friend, and he attended a Tashlikh, an atonement ceremony, with the mayor of Lynchburg on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah in 2015.[370] According to Sanders’s close friend Richard Sugarman, a professor of religious studies at the University of Vermont, Sanders’s Jewish identity is “certainly more ethnic and cultural than religious”.[384] Deborah Dash Moore, a Judaic scholar at the University of Michigan, has said that Sanders has a particular type of “ethnic Jewishness” that is somewhat old-fashioned.[385] Sanders’s wife is Roman Catholic, and he has frequently expressed admiration for Pope Francis, saying that “the leader of the Catholic Church is raising profound issues. It is important that we listen to what he has said.” Sanders has said he feels “very close” to Francis’s economic teachings, describing him as “incredibly smart and brave”.[14][386][387]In April 2016, Sanders accepted an invitation from Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an aide close to the pope, to speak at a Vatican conference on economic and environmental issues. While at the Vatican, Sanders met briefly with the pontiff.[388][389]
Publications
See also
Notes
- ^ Hitler lost the election for the presidency of Germany on March 13, 1932, when Hindenburg received 49.6 percent of the vote to Hitler’s 30.1 percent.[18] But the Nazi Party, led by Hitler, won a plurality in the Reichstag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, in July 1932, and retained its status as the largest party thereafter.[19]
- ^ Thomas Frank‘s comments are mentioned in the following book review: Lozada, Carlos (March 11, 2016). “The liberal war over the Obama legacy has already begun”. The Washington Post. Retrieved March 17, 2016.
- ^ IPA: [ˌduːh.s.ˈhwuː.diː.ˌtʃuːp], lit. ‘the one lighting the fires for change and unity’ in Lushootseed
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Story 1: Black Russian Gay Empire Actor Busted–Jussie Smollett — Big Lie Media Mob Propagated “Despicable Lies” — Junk Journalism Aided and Abetted Criminal Hoax — Videos
Chicago Police Chief: Jussie Smollett Faked Attack ‘To Promote His Career’ | NBC News
Chicago PD Labels Jussie Smollett “Despicable”
Jussie Smollett Arrested in Hate Crime Attack | E! News
BAIL SET: Jussie Smollett’s Bail Set At $100,000
Jussie Smollett staged attack because he was ‘dissatisfied’ with his salary, police say
Jussie Smollett denies all allegations in court hearing
Jussie Smollett FULL Interview on alleged attack | ABC News Exclusive
PICTURED: Jussie Smollett leaves jail after posting $100k bail after prosecutor details video evidence against him and reveals he’d previously bought DRUGS from the brothers he paid to attack him after texting ‘might need your help on the low’
By JENNIFER SMITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 06:56 EST, 21 February 2019 | UPDATED: 17:59 EST, 21 February 2019
ussie Smollett has been freed after posting $10,000 bond and agreeing to surrender his passport at a court hearing where he was supported by his family and prosecutors shared more details of his relationship with the two Nigerian brothers he allegedly paid to stage an attack on him in the hope that it would boost his profile.
The actor was hurried out of the Cook County Jail shortly before 5pm on Thursday and said nothing as he fought his way through photographers to get into a waiting car. He was flanked by bodyguards and driven away immediately.
Three of the actor’s five famous siblings, Jazz, Jocqui and Jake, were pictured arriving at the Cook County Criminal Court before his bond hearing wearing sunglasses. They were later joined by their brother Jojo but their other sister Jurnee and mother Janet were not seen.
They left the court before Smollett once the hearing was over, fighting their way through a scrum of photographers to get into a waiting van parked outside without answering any questions.
Scroll down for video
Jussie Smollett was ushered out of county jail on Thursday by police officers and body guards after posting $10,000, ten percent of his $100,000 bond, and agreeing to surrender his passport. He clung on to his security guard’s shoulders as he followed him out to a waiting car
Smollett said nothing and held on to his security guard who led him through a crowd of photographers outside the jail
Smollett was sandwiched between security guards as he made his way to the car. He has to return to the court March 14
Even before he reached the scrum of photographers, Smollett placed his hands on his security guard’s shoulders
After the hearing, prosecutors gave a detailed description of how he allegedly put the hoax together.
Police say he knew Abel Osundairo, one of the brothers, because he bought ‘designer drugs’ from him. In text messages that predate the hoax attack, he asked Abel for ‘Molly’ – the street name for ecstasy – multiple times. The pair are believed to have met when Abel was a stand-in on Empire.
On January 25, he convinced Abel and his brother Ola to ‘simulate’ an attack on him, giving them specific instructions about which words to use and how to rough him up but not hurt him too severely, according to police.
His alleged motive was that he did not get enough attention over a letter he is said to have sent himself a week earlier and he thought that painting himself as
Smollett took them to the location where he wanted the attack to happen outside his apartment, according to prosecutors, and even pointed to a surveillance camera he believed would capture it.
The claims came after a blistering press conference during which furious police bosses alleged that he mailed himself a threatening letter then staged a hoax attack because he was unhappy with his $1.8million Empire salary.
A sketch from inside the courtroom shows Smollett appearing before Cook County Judge John Fitzgerald to have his bond set. The judge said that if true, the allegations against him are ‘utterly outrageous’. He was particularly disturbed by the use of a noose in the attack, saying it is an image which ‘conjures up such evil in this country’s history’
Jocqui (in beige coat), Jake (in black, right) and Jazz Smollett (center in fur-trimmed coat) arrive at the Cook County Criminal Court on Thursday to attend their brother Jussie’s bond hearing. There was no sign of the actor’s mother Janet, his other sister Jurnee or his brother Jojo
Jazz, Jocqui and Jake entered the courthouse without speaking on Thursday. Their other two siblings, Jojo and Jurnee, did not join them
Surveillance footage emerged on Wednesday showing Ola and Abel Osundairo buying ski masks the day before the attack. Smollett gave them a $100 bill to pay for the bleach, ski masks, red hat and gloves that they used, according to prosecutors
After his bail hearing, the state’s attorney gave a press conference where she described in painstaking detail how the hoax came together.
On January 25, he texted Abel asking him when he was planning to go to Nigeria, a trip that had been prearranged.
Jussie Smollett is shown in his mugshot on Thursday morning. The Empire actor handed himself in at 5am on charges of filing a false police report. Police now say he concocted the fake attack because he wanted a raise
They were familiar with one another because Abel had once filled in as a character on Empire who was a love interest of Smollett’s character, Jamal Lyon.
Abel replied that he and his brother were leaving on January 29 to which Smollett replied: ‘Might need your help on the low.
‘You around to meet up and talk face to face?’
That afternoon, they met up at the CineSpace studio and Smollett drove Abel home.
During the car ride, he told him about his ‘displeasure’ over 20th Century Fox’s reaction to the letter he allegedly sent himself days earlier.
He said he wanted to stage an attack and suggested that Ola, Abel’s younger brother, get involved.
Once they got to the brothers’ home, they summoned Ola outside and Smollett asked the pair if he could trust them.
Smollett then allegedly laid out what he wanted them to do and gave them a $100 bill to buy ski masks, a red hat, gloves, rope and bleach to use.
‘He stated that he wanted the brothers to catch his attention by calling him an Empire f****t Empire n****r. He detailed that he wanted Abel to attack him but not to hurt him too badly and give him a chance to fight back.
HOW THE ATTACK WAS PUT TOGETHER
January 22: Jussie Smollett receives a letter at the CineSpace studio which threatens his life and has ‘MAGA’ written on it in red pen. He reports it to police
January 25: Smollett sends a text to Abel Osundairo asking him when he is going to Nigeria and if they can meet up face-to-face
Abel goes to the studio where he is working and Smollett drives him home. During the ride, he said he was ‘displeased’ with the reaction to the letter.
Once at their home, Abel’s brother Ola gets in the car and Smollett tells them what he wants them to do. He gives them a $100 bill to buy the goods they will need to fake the attack
January 27: Smollett picks the brothers up then drives them to the spot where he wants them to fake the attack.
He then goes to New York.
January 28: Smollett is in New York City for a reading of the play Take Me Out.
The brothers are filmed buying ski masks, a red hat and gloves
January 29 – Day of attack
The attack was due to take place at 10pm on January 28 but because Smollett’s flight was delayed, it was pushed back.
12.30am: Smollett arrives back in Chicago
12.49am: He calls Abel Osundairo and they talk for three minutes
Abel orders an Uber minutes later.
1.22am: The brothers arrive in the area of the attack
1.45am: Smollett leaves his building to go to Subway
2.04am: The attack takes place in the arranged location
2.10am: Brothers get a taxi from a hotel nearby
2.25am: The brothers arrive back in their neighborhood in a taxi
2.27am: Smollett’s manager calls the police
2.42am: Police arrive at Smollett’s building and he asks them to turn off their body cameras
7.45pm: Smollett calls Abel. The conversation lasts five seconds.
7.47pm: Abel calls back and they speak for 1 minute 34 seconds.
The brothers then board their flight.
January 30, 10:46am: Smollett calls Abel who is by now in Istanbul, Turkey.
They speak for 8 minutes and eight seconds.
‘He also included that he wanted Ola to place a rope around his neck, pour gasoline on him and yell: “This is MAGA country” and “Make America Great Again,”‘ a proffer that was released by the State’s Attorney’s office said.
Police have found surveillance footage of the ride and have phone records which put Smollett in the area of the brothers home at the time.
On January 27, he picked the brothers up from their home and drove them to where he wanted the attack to happen in the late morning.
He warned them not to bring their cell phones with them and showed them a surveillance camera on the corner which he believed would capture the incident.
Smollett drove the brothers home and provided them with a $3500 personal check made payable to Abel, which was backdated to January 23, 2019.
He then flew to New York City to take part in a reading of a play.
The attack was scheduled to take place at 10pm on January 28 but was set back several hours by Smollett’s delayed flight from New York to Chicago on the day of the incident.
His flight landed at 12.30am, January 29.
At 12.49am, he called Abel and their conversation lasted three minutes. During this call, he instructed him to carry out the attack at 2am.
Abel then ordered an Uber to pick the pair up at their home and take them to the crime scene.
They took the Uber part of the way but then got out and hopped in a taxi to take them the remainder of the distance.
At 1.22am, they arrived within three blocks of it. At 1.45am, Smollett left his apartment building to go to a Subway and the brothers made their way towards the intended spot.
Smollett, however, was late. They did not cross paths until 2.04am which is when they carried out the attack. At the exact moment it was occurring, an NBC News employee was getting out of her car nearby. She told police later that she did not hear anything suspicious, despite Smollett alleging that the attackers yelled racial slurs.
The attack only lasted 45 seconds and was ‘just outside the view of the desired nearby camera that Smollett had pointed out to the brothers approximately 15 hours earlier.’
The brothers then ran away on foot, heading southbound towards the Chicago River. They then got in a taxi at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
Fifteen minutes later, they got out of the cab a few blocks from their house.
Two minutes later, at 2.27am, Smollett’s manager reported it to police and police arrived at Smollett’s apartment at 2.42am, 12 minutes later.
While being interviewed, he not only described the attack but claimed to have received a phone call on January 26 from someone who said ‘hey you little f****’ and hung up. He said the call happened near a camera and that it captured the attack. It was the same camera he pointed out to the brothers in the hope that it would capture their staged ambush.
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson abhorred him as a ‘troubled young man’ who has ‘taken advantage of the pain and anger of racism to further his career’ by allegedly lying that he was attacked by racist and homophobic assailants on January 29.
Smollett makes $100,000 per episode on Empire, according to an associate who spoke to DailyMail.com, and there are 18 episodes in the current season which earns him $1.8million.
He also has a record deal with Columbia Records but, according to police, was ‘dissatisfied’ and wanted to boost his profile.
When police learned that Smollett’s motive was to get more money, it ‘p****d everybody off’, Superintendent Johnson said, adding that Smollett’s repeated ‘lies’ were ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’.
He called for ‘absolute justice’ which he said amounted to Smollett apologizing and offering to pay for the police resources he wasted.
20th Century Fox, which defended the actor on Wednesday, is now ‘considering its options’ in light of his arrest.
President Trump has also called for Smollett to apologize for making it appear as though he was being targeted by one of his supporters.
This is the state’s case against Smollett, as laid out in their bond proffer that was submitted in court on Thursday
Police say they have found phone records which prove Smollett spoke with brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo an hour before the attack, an hour afterwards and while they were in Nigeria, keeping their heads down, while the case gained global attention.
Prosecutor Risa Lanier laid bare the allegations in a press conference after the bond hearing
They also say they have the check that Smollett used to pay them $3,500.
The brothers ‘confessed’ to the ‘entire plot’ once they were in custody on Thursday.
It began on January 22 when Smollett allegedly mailed himself a threatening letter to the Empire studio in Chicago which had ‘MAGA’ written on it and included racist and homophobic slurs.
It read: ‘Smollett Jussie, you will die’ and included a drawing of a stick figure with a gun pointed towards it.
He reported it to the police along with producer Dennis Hammer.
When that did not win him a pay rise from 20th Century Fox, however, he allegedly hired the brothers to attack him at 2am on January 29 in what he then told police was a random, racist and homophobic attack.
The attack did happen but was not caught on camera. According to the brothers, they punched him after meeting at an arranged spot and time then ran away and got into a taxi.
President Trump tweeted on Thursday after the details of his arrest emerged to demand an apology from the actor who said his attackers shouted ‘This is MAGA country!’
Smollett then went home to his friend, 60-year-old Frank Gatson, who was in the apartment and told him that he had been jumped by two masked assailants who shouted: ‘Empire f****t n****r’, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and screamed: ‘This is MAGA country!’
Police say that the actor gave himself the scratches on his face that were visible in a hospital-bed selfie he took after reporting it.
The same day, the brothers went to the airport and boarded a flight to Nigeria.
While Smollett received an outpouring of sympathy from politicians, celebrities and public figures around the world, they laid low but were allegedly in contact with the star.
As the police investigation heated up, officers honed in on them by tracking taxis that were in the area at around the time of the incident.
In particular, a ride-share the brothers took to the location gave police their details.
They were then picked up when they returned to Chicago on February 13.
Once in custody, they told police that Smollett had hired them and said it was because he wanted a higher salary.
Smollett, a vocal Trump critic, said his attackers shouted ‘This is MAGA country!’ and later suggested he was targeted because he is so critical of the president
He paid them a reported $3,500 to carry out the attack, they said, and promised them $500 more when they returned from their trip.
Smollett is in custody awaiting his first court appearance on felony charges of filing a false police report. He will appear before a judge at 1.30pm.
His lawyers issued a statement on Wednesday to protest his innocence and condemn the police for leaking so many details of the investigation.
During the press conference, Superintendent Johnson revealed Smollett went from being treated as the victim in the case to a suspect when the brothers ‘confessed’ the ‘entire plot’ in the final hour of a 48 hour hold.
That is when they, in their lawyer’s words, ‘manned up’ and revealed that they had been hired to carry out the attack by the actor himself.
Smollett actually furthered the investigation along by going on Good Morning America and confirming that the two people in a grainy surveillance footage still were the men who attacked him.
He was unaware when he made the remark that Chicago PD had identified those men as the Osundairo brothers and that they had them in custody.
‘I come to you today not only as the Superintendent of Chicago Police Department but as a black man who has spent his entire life living in the city of Chicago.
‘I know the racial divide. I know how hard it has been for our city and our nation to come together.
‘Empire actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career.
‘I’m left hanging my head and asking why? Why would anyone, especially an African American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations?
Another map shows where the assailants were dropped off in a ride-share, top right, then walked to the attack and fled to get in another taxi afterwards
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson tore through Smollett at a press conference on Thursday where he labeled him ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’
‘I love the city of Chicago, warts and all, but this publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didn’t earn and certainly didn’t deserve.
‘The accusations within this phony attack received national attention for weeks…Celebrities, news commentators and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor,’ he went on.
He added that he was ‘angry and offended’ and said it was a travesty that other crimes do not garner as much attention.
‘I just wish that the families of the victims of gun violence in this city got as much attention. That is who really deserves this amount of attention.’
He was emphatic, later, about the fact that no other investigations suffered as a result of Smollett’s claims, but said: ‘Bogus police reports cause real harm.
‘They do harm to ever legitimate victim who is in need of support by police.’
Johnson finished his remarks by saying: ‘I’ll continue to pray for this troubled young man who resorted to both drastic and illegal tactics to gain attention.
Police say Smollett cut his own cheek to make it look like he had suffered injuries in the attack. He is shown in a hospital bed selfie FaceTiming Lee Daniels, the show’s creator, hours after the attack
‘I’ll also continue to pray for our city asking that we can move forward from this and begin to heal.’
Police examined footage from 55 surveillance cameras, obtained more than 50 search warrants and conducted more than 100 interviews.
If convicted, Smollett may be asked to repay the money that was spent investigating the crime.
Smollett has not made any statements since he was taken into custody.
His lawyers said on Wednesday night that he would fight the charges with an ‘aggressive defense’.
In previous statements, his representatives have angrily hit out at the media and insisted that he is the victim.
Within hours of him being charged, Smollett’s attorneys arranged for him to hand himself in quietly at Chicago’s 1st District afterwards.
He appeared in his mugshot wearing a black puffer jacket, staring blankly at the camera.
After being processed at the station, he was transferred to the Cook County courthouse where he will appear at 1.30pm. He is being held separately from other detainees.
20th Century Fox, which released a statement hours before he was charged to say it was standing by him, is now reportedly suspending the actor.
20th Century Fox said on Thursday that it was now considering its options. It had been standing by the actor
A press conference is scheduled for 9am CT during which detectives will give more details about the arrest. It is not yet known where he was or what time he was taken into custody.
‘Like any other citizen, Mr. Smollett enjoys the presumption of innocence, particularly when there has been an investigation like this one where information, both true and false, has been repeatedly leaked,’ the actor’s attorneys Todd Pugh and Victor Henderson said.
‘Given these circumstances, we intend to conduct a thorough investigation and to mount an aggressive defense.’
The Osundairo brothers testified before the grand jury for about two and a half hours on Wednesday.
Addressing reporters outside afterwards, their attorney Gloria Schmidt said they’d ‘manned up’ by speaking out against Smollett.
The rope they put around Smollett’s neck was bought in this hardware store
They have not been arrested or charged and their lawyer said they had not been offered any form of immunity deal in exchange for testifying against Smollett.
‘There was a point where this story needed to be told, and they manned up and they said: “We’re gonna correct this.”
‘Plea deal, immunity, all of that — they don’t’ care about that.’
She said that Smollett was lying, and that she didn’t know how his conscience could let him sleep at night.
‘I think Jussie’s conscience is not letting him sleep right now and he should unload that conscience and come out and tell the American people what happened,’ she added.
‘I think the biggest thing for the American people to know. Is that this story, has a lot of complications to it.
‘We’re not trying to hide anything from the press. But we wanted to make sure that everything checked out.
‘When I say that the police spent countless man-hours trying to piece this together, I mean that, I absolutely mean that.
‘When I say that my clients spent countless hours getting their story out there to the police so that they could do their work, I mean that, too,’ she said.
The brothers’ testimony came after footage emerged of them buying ski masks, a red hat and gloves in a store the day before the attack.
The brothers said Smollett also sent himself this letter to the Fox studio where Empire is filmed a week before the attack. If he did, he faces another 5-10 years in prison on a federal mail fraud charge
Abel and Ola Osundairo’s lawyers said on Wednesday night that they ‘manned up’ by telling police that Smollett paid them. Ola once appeared on the show as an extra. He is shown with creator Lee Daniels, right
It was taken on January 28 and shows brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo inside what looks like a drug store buying the masks and one hat.
Smollett told police that he was attacked by two masked assailants who punched him, poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and called him ‘Empire n****r f****t’.
No footage has ever emerged of the incident itself.
In the video taken inside the store the day earlier, the brothers look calm as they bring the items to the register.
Smollett follows the brothers’ joint Instagram account where they post videos and photographs of themselves working out
Abel, whose full name is Abimbola, is dressed in a blue plaid jacket. About 30 seconds into the video, he puts his hood up while standing at the register.
His younger brother Ola, who once appeared on Empire as an extra, is in a green jacket.
The brothers were picked up by police at Chicago O’Hare Airport on Wednesday night as they returned from Nigeria.
Police seized a red hat from the brothers’ home along with ski masks when they raided it last week. Smollett said his attackers were wearing masks but there was not a description of a red hat in the initial reports.
Police have since shared their belief that at least one of them was wearing a red hat at the time of the attack.
Smollett’s family, many of whom are also actors, have spoken out repeatedly in support of him since the January 29 attack as have many of his co-stars on Empire.
Among them is Gabby Sidibe, his roommate at one time, who said on Instagram on Wednesday: ‘I know him. I believe him.’
Fox also insisted that he was not being written out of the show, as had been claimed, and called him a ‘consummate professional’ in a statement.
Smollett’s lawyers include Mark Geragos, who has represented Michael Jackson and Colin Kaepernick, in the past.
When news of the attack first emerged on January 29 and 30, Smollett was inundated with support across the political spectrum.
Among those who tweeted their condemnation of him were Democratic presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
But as days went by with no suspects on the horizon, details about the case and the police’s investigation into it began to cast doubt on Smollett’s version of events.
One of the earliest sources of speculation was the fact that Smollett waited 42 minutes to call the police then refused to hand over his phone to the police for them to verify his story.
He then handed over redacted files that police described as ‘insufficient’.
Frustrated with the coverage of his case, he hit out at the media for reporting on leaked information coming from within the Chicago police department and insisted he was the victim.
He then went on Good Morning America to protest his innocence.
In an hour-long interview with Robin Roberts, he wept as he recalled the attack and abhorred the reaction to it.
CELEBRITIES REACT TO JUSSIE SMOLLETT’S ARREST
Celebrities have lashed out at Empire actor Jussie Smollett following his arrest after many of them publicly voiced support for him when he first claimed he had been targeted in a racist and homophobic attack.
Actor and comedian Tyler Perry penned a lengthy Facebook post saying he had personally spoken to Smollett who insisted he was telling the truth.
Perry added that the evidence seemed to contradict Smollett’s version and that he was ‘lost for words’.
‘I have personally spoken to Jussie, and he is adamant that he’s telling the truth. Also, everyone that I know who knows him says that he is not the kind of person who would make up such a horrible and awful thing,’ he said.
50 Cent mocked Smollett and his Tupac reference with an Instagram photo of the actor’s face imposed on the cover of the rapper’s album, saying: ‘All Liez On Me’
Snoopdog posted a Scooby Doo cartoon with Smollett’s face edited in
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‘Yet the evidence seems to state otherwise. I’m lost for words. To stoke fears and raise racial tensions is wrong in every situation on ALL SIDES! Yet my prayers are still with him and his family and our Nation.’
Straight Outta Compton actor O’Shea Jackson Jr was scathing in a series of lengthy tweets about the developments.
‘What upsets me about this Jussie situation is that people were genuinely worried about you man. And the things that you said happened could have led to some serious outcomes. People were prepared to fight for you bruh. Things coulda got ugly…… and you made it up.
‘The world has plenty of real monsters. You don’t have to make up any. And what for? Just further dividing people for personal gain? It sucks for the people who actually have to deal with that type of hate.
‘And why did you call yourself the gay Tupac. What does Tupac have to do with anything that happened to you? Did you do this to sell records bro? Did you fake a hate crime, Enrage the Black community. The LBGT community and anti-Trump community just to sell records bruh?
Actor and comedian Tyler Perry penned a lengthy Facebook post saying he had personally spoken to Smollett who insisted he was telling the truth but later added that the evidence seemed to tell a different story
Straight Outta Compton actor O’Shea Jackson Jr was scathing in a series of lengthy tweets about the developments
‘People could’ve gotten hurt. Thinking they’re protesting and standing up for you. This is not a game.’
Smollett had compared himself to Tupac during a performance in West Hollywood earlier this month. He ended his set saying he fought back against his so-called attackers and said he was ‘the gay Tupac’.
50 Cent mocked Smollett and his Tupac reference with an Instagram photo of the actor’s face imposed on the cover of the rapper’s album, saying: ‘All Liez On Me’.
Andy Cohen tweeted that his ‘head is exploding’ following news of Smollett’s arrest before calling the story ‘pathetic’.
Actor Patton Oswalt retweeted a tweet from President Donald Trump, saying: ‘Way to go Jussie. You just handed this racist dips**t a ‘Get Out Of Race-Baiting Free’ card that he’s gonna wave around like a soiled diaper until he’s re-elected.’
Trump had tweeted: ‘.@JussieSmollett – what about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA’.
Choking back tears, he explained when asked why it took so long for him to contact the authorities: ‘There is a level of pride there.
‘We live in a society where as a gay man you are considered somehow to be weak and I am not weak. I am not weak and we as a people are not weak.’
Later, he added how desperate he was for them to find footage of the attack.
‘I want that video found so badly because, for probably four reasons.
‘Number one, I want them to find the people that did it.
‘Number two, I want them to stop being able to say ‘alleged’ attack.
‘Number three, I want them to see that I fought back,’ he continued, welling-up.
‘I want a little gay boy who might watch this to see that I fought the f*** back. They ran off,’ I didn’t,’ he said.
After it emerged that Smollett knew the brothers and may have been involved in the staging of the attack, the celebrities and politicians who rushed to support him walked back their claims.
Nancy Pelosi deleted her tweet about it and Cory Booker said he would now be ‘withholding judgement’ until more information emerged.
Kamala Harris said, when questioned about her tweet that it was a ‘modern day lynching’, that she was ‘very concerned’.
Key moments in reported attack on actor Jussie Smollett
January 29, 2019
Smollet is seen with a cut cheek on Jan. 29
Jussie Smollett tells Chicago police he was physically attacked by two men in downtown Chicago while walking home from getting food from a Subway restaurant at 2am.
The black and openly gay actor tells authorities the men used racial and homophobic slurs, wrapped a rope around his neck and poured an ‘unknown substance’ on him.
Smollett told detectives that the attackers yelled he was in ‘MAGA country,’ an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign slogan, which some critics of Trump have claimed is a racist dog whistle.
January 30
Chicago police say they’ve reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance camera footage, including of Smollett walking downtown, but none of the videos show the attack.
Police obtain and release images of two people they would like to question.
Reports of Smollett’s attack draw outrage and support on social media, including from U.S. Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.
Both Booker and Harris called the incident a ‘modern day lynching’.
Joe Biden said: ‘We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts.’
Police released this image of ‘persons of interest’ taken near the reported attack
January 31
Trump tells reporters at the White House that he saw a story the night before about Smollett and that, ‘It doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned.’
Smollett’s family issues a statement calling the attack a racial and homophobic hate crime.
Smollett’s family says he ‘has told the police everything’ and ‘his story has never changed,’ disputing assertions leveled on social media that he has been less than cooperative and changed his story.
February 1
Smollett issues a statement telling people that he is OK and thanking them for their support.
He says he is working with authorities and has been ‘100 percent factual and consistent on every level.’
February 2
Smollett gives sold-out concert in West Hollywood, California, opening with an emotional speech, saying he had to play the show because he couldn’t let his attackers win.
At the end of the set, he announces that he fought back against his attackers, calling himself ‘the gay Tupac’.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters is in attendance at the concert.
Smollet is seen performing on February 2, where he called himself ‘the gay Tupac’
February 5th: Chicago PD releases incident report which reveals Smollett did not want to call police. There is no mention of the MAGA country remark which he gave in a follow-up interview
Brandon Z. Moore, his manager, gives police a screenshot to prove their call.
February 11th: Smollett finally hands over redacted phone records to prove the phone call but police label them ‘insufficient’.
His neighbors say they don’t believe his version of events.
February 12th: Smollett’s rep releases statement to say he is the victim and that he has been telling the truth
February 14th: Good Morning America airs the full interview with Smollett, in which he blasts speculation that the attack was staged as itself racist and hateful.
Hours later, it emerges that two Nigerian brothers were picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on their return from Nigeria the night before.
Cops identify the two men as the individuals seen in the surveillance images released from the night of January 29 but will not share their names.
Two television stations in Chicago simul report the widespread belief among investigators that Smollett staged the attack as a hate hoax.
Chicago’s police superintendent later said that he had no evidence to prove that the attack was a hoax.
Producers of ‘Empire’ dispute media reports that Smollett’s character was being written off the show.
High-powered criminal defense attorney Michael Monico reveals that he is representing Smollett.
Brothers Olabinjo ‘Ola’ Osundairo, 27, and Abimbola ‘Abel’ Osundairo, 25, were detained by police on February 13
Police logs show the items that cops seized from the Nigerian brothers’ Chicago home
February 15
DailyMail.com confirms they are brothers Olabinjo ‘Ola’ Osundairo, 27, and Abimbola ‘Abel’ Osundairo, 25.
Later, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielimi says the two ‘persons of interest’ are now considered suspects. He says the men are in custody but have not been charged with a crime.
Chicago police release two men without charges after arresting them on suspicion of assaulting Smollett and holding them for nearly 48 hours.
A police spokesman said the two are no longer considered suspects and that investigators have ‘new evidence’ to consider as a result of questioning them.
February 16
A police spokesman said that the investigation had ‘shifted’ after detectives questioned the two brothers about the attack and released them without charges.
Smollett hired Michael Cohen’s high-powered criminal defense attorney, Michael Monico, as the police investigation into the attack he reported last month took a sudden shift amid allegations of a hoax.
Smollett’s lawyers said on Saturday the actor felt ‘victimized by reports he played a role in the assault, and that Smollett would continue cooperating with police.
February 17
A police spokesman said that Chicago police have told Smollett’s attorneys they want to do a follow-up interview with the actor.
A spokesperson for Smollett’s lawyers said she couldn’t comment on whether Smollett had agreed to another interview.
This is the letter Smollett allegedly received at the Fox studio, a week before the January 29 incident. No photographs of it emerged until after the alleged attack. He reported the letter to the police when he received it along with Empire producer Dennis Hammer
February 18
Stars and politicians who spoke out in support of Smollett walk back their condemnation of the attack amid growing suspicion that it is a hate hoax
February 19
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the Smollett case
The Osundairo brothers speak with police and prosecutors in Chicago but are halted at the last minute before going to testify before a grand jury.
Smollett hires Colin Kaepernick’s attorney Mark Geragos and his legal team present a ‘hail Mary’ piece of evidence which stops the brothers’ testimony
State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx recuses herself from the case citing her ‘familiarity with potential witnesses’
Leaked information from the brothers’ meetings with prosecutors and police emerges. They reportedly claimed Smollett was involved in sending himself the letter on January 22
February 20
Fox says Smollett is not being written out of Empire contrary to reports and Smollett’s co-stars speak out in support of him.
He is named as a suspect later in the afternoon and the brothers are seen entering grand jury offices at the courthouse.
Smollett is criminally charged with filing a false police report, a Class 4 felony which carries a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment and a $25,000 fine.
February 21
Smollett hands himself in to police at 5am.
Prosecutor: Actor Gave Detailed Instructions For Fake Attack
Kamil Krzaczynski, ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO (AP) — “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett gave detailed instructions to two brothers who helped him stage a racist, anti-gay attack on himself, including giving them specific slurs to yell, telling them to shout “MAGA country” and pointing out a surveillance camera that he thought would record the beating, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Police said Smollett planned the hoax because he was unhappy with his salary and wanted to promote his career. Before the attack, he also sent a letter that threatened him to the Chicago studio where “Empire” is shot, police said.
Smollett, who is black and gay, turned himself in to face accusations that he filed a false police report last month when he told authorities he was attacked in downtown Chicago by two masked men who hurled racist and anti-gay slurs and looped a rope around his neck, police said.
The actor “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said.
“This publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didn’t earn and certainly didn’t deserve,” he added.
As part of the instructions, Smollett also told the brothers to put the rope around his neck, Assistant State’s Attorney Risa Lanier told a news conference.
His plans for the surveillance camera were thwarted. Police say it was pointed another way and did not have a view of the beating.
At Smollett’s first court appearance, a judge set bond at $100,000, meaning that he had to post $10,000 to be released. Smollett’s attorneys asked for him to be freed on his own recognizance, but the judge, who is also black, rejected that idea and said he was particularly bothered by the allegations involving the noose.
Smollett, who was released a couple of hours after the hearing, said little during the proceedings, except to state his name. The actor, his attorneys and supporters left without speaking to reporters.
One of the attorneys, Jack Prior, told the judge that Smollett “maintains these are outrageous allegations” and denies they are true.
The FBI has been investigating the threatening letter. Johnson would not say whether Smollett could face additional charges for that.
The companies that make “Empire,” Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television, issued a statement Thursday saying that they were “evaluating the situation” and “considering our options.”
In less than a month, Smollett went from being the seemingly sympathetic victim of a hate crime to being accused of fabricating the entire thing. The 36-year-old was charged Wednesday with felony disorderly conduct, a charge that could bring up to three years in prison and force the actor to pay for the cost of the investigation into his report of a Jan. 29 beating.
Police treated Smollett as a victim until the two brothers , who had been taken into custody for questioning, admitted to helping him stage the attack, Johnson said.
It was the brothers who also explained Smollett’s motive to detectives. Authorities have a check for $3,500 that Smollett paid the brothers, he said.
Smollett, who plays a gay character on the show that follows a black family as they navigate the ups and downs of the recording industry, said he was attacked as he was walking home from a downtown Subway sandwich shop. He said the men yelled “This is MAGA country” — an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” — before fleeing.
In describing what police believe actually happened, Johnson made it sound as if Smollett was casting and directing a short movie.
“He probably knew he needed somebody with bulk,” he said of Smollett’s decision to hire the two muscular brothers. Police have said at least one of the brothers worked on “Empire,” and Smollett’s attorneys said one of the men is the actor’s personal trainer.
The brothers, who are not considered suspects, wore gloves during the staged attack and “punched him a little bit,” Johnson said. The scratches and bruising Smollett had on his face were “most likely self-inflicted,” Johnson said.
Detectives found the two brothers after reviewing hundreds of hours of video. They released images of two people they said they wanted to question and last week picked up the pair at O’Hare Airport as they returned from Nigeria. Police questioned the men and searched their apartment.
The brothers, who were identified by their attorney as Abimbola “Abel” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, were held for nearly 48 hours on suspicion of assaulting Smollett.
The two appeared before a grand jury on Wednesday to “lock in their testimony,” according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. Smollett was charged by prosecutors, not the grand jury.
Speaking outside the courthouse where the grand jury met, the brothers’ attorney said the two men testified for about two and a half hours.
“There was a point where this story needed to be told, and they manned up and they said we’re going to correct this,” Gloria Schmidt said.
She said her clients did not care about a plea deal or immunity. “You don’t need immunity when you have the truth,” she said.
Smollett has been active in LBGTQ issues, and initial reports of the assault drew outrage and support for him on social media, including from Sen. Kamala Harris of California and TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Referring to a published account of the attack, Trump said last month that “it doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned.” On Thursday, he tweeted to Smollett: “What about MAGA and the tens of millions of people you insulted with your racist and dangerous comments!? #MAGA.”
https://hosted.ap.org/article/7f419a0f017e4f7b933167f2e206de43/empire-actor-goes-victim-accused-felon-3-weeks
Hate crime
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A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime[1]) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership (or perceived membership) in a certain social group or race.
Examples of such groups can include and are almost exclusively limited to: sex, ethnicity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.[2][3][4] Non-criminal actions that are motivated by these reasons are often called “bias incidents“.
“Hate crime” generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by bias against one or more of the social groups listed above, or by bias against their derivatives. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, mate crime or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).[5]
A hate crime law is a law intended to deter bias-motivated violence.[6] Hate crime laws are distinct from laws against hate speech: hate crime laws enhance the penalties associated with conduct which is already criminal under other laws, while hate speech laws criminalize a category of speech. Hate speech laws exist in many countries. In the United States, hate crime laws have been upheld by both the Supreme Court [7] and lower courts, especially in the case of ‘fighting’ words and other violent speech, but they are thought by some people to be in conflict with the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but hate crimes are only regulated through threats of injury or death.[8]
History
The term “hate crime” came into common usage in the United States during the 1980s, but the term is often used retrospectively in order to describe events which occurred prior to that era.[9] From the Roman persecution of Christians to the Nazi slaughter of Jews, hate crimes were committed by both individuals and governments long before the term was commonly used.[4] A major part of defining a crime as a hate crime is that it is directed toward a historically oppressed group.[10][11]
As Europeans began to colonize the world from the 16th century onwards, indigenous peoples in the colonized areas, such as Native Americans increasingly became the targets of bias-motivated intimidation and violence.[citation needed] During the past two centuries, typical examples of hate crimes in the U.S. include lynchings of African Americans, largely in the South, and lynchings of Mexicans and Chinese in the West; cross burnings to intimidate black activists or to drive black families from predominantly white neighborhoods both during and after Reconstruction; assaults on white people traveling in predominantly black neighborhoods; assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people; the painting of swastikas on Jewish synagogues; and xenophobic responses to a variety of minorityethnic groups.[12]
Postcard of the Duluth lynchings of African-American men on June 15, 1920
The verb “to lynch” is attributed to the actions of Charles Lynch, an 18th-century Virginia Quaker. Lynch, other militia officers, and justices of the peace rounded up Tory sympathizers who were given a summary trial at an informal court; sentences handed down included whipping, property seizure, coerced pledges of allegiance, and conscription into the military. Originally, the term referred to extrajudicial organized but unauthorized punishment of criminals. It later evolved to describe execution outside “ordinary justice.” It is highly associated with white suppression of African Americans in the South, and periods of weak or nonexistent police authority, as in certain frontier areas of the Old West.[4]
The murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom and the Wichita Massacre were not classified as “hate crimes” by U.S. investigative officials or the media. In the early 21st century, conservative commentators David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin (Fox News channel and author) and Stuart Taylor Jr. (journalist) did describe these events as “hate crimes against whites by blacks.”[13]
Psychological effects
Hate crimes can have significant and wide-ranging psychological consequences, not only for their direct victims but for others as well. A 1999 U.S. study of lesbian and gay victims of violent hate crimes documented that they experienced higher levels of psychological distress, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, than lesbian and gay victims of comparable crimes which were not motivated by antigay bias.[14] A manual issued by the Attorney-General of the Province of Ontario in Canada lists the following consequences:[15]
Hate crime victims can also develop depression and psychological trauma.[16]
A review of European and American research indicates that terrorist bombings cause Islamophobia and hate crimes to flare up but, in calmer times, they subside again, although to a relatively high level.[17] Terrorist’s most persuasive message is that of fear and fear, a primary and strong emotion, increases risk estimates and has distortive effects on the perception of ordinary Muslims.[17] Widespread Islamophobic prejudice seems to contribute to anti-Muslim hate crimes, but indirectly: terrorist attacks and intensified Islamophobic prejudice serve as a window of opportunity for extremist groups and networks.[17]
Laws
Hate crime laws generally fall into one of several categories:
Eurasia
European Union
Since 2002, with an amendment to the Convention on Cybercrime, the European Union mandates individual states to punish as a crime hate speech done through the internet.[19]
Andorra
Discriminatory acts constituting harassment or infringement of a person’s dignity on the basis of origin, citizenship, race, religion, or gender (Penal Code Article 313). Courts have cited bias-based motivation in delivering sentences, but there is no explicit penalty enhancement provision in the Criminal Code. The government does not track hate crime statistics, although they are relatively rare.[18]
Armenia
Armenia has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes with ethnic, racial, or religious motives (Criminal Code Article 63).[18]
Austria
Austria has a penalty-enhancement statute for reasons like repeating a crime, being especially cruel, using others’ helpless states, playing a leading role in a crime, or committing a crime with racist, xenophobic or especially reprehensible motivation (Penal Code section 33(5)).[20]
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, or religious hatred (Criminal Code Article 61). Murder and infliction of serious bodily injury motivated by racial, religious, national, or ethnic intolerance are distinct crimes (Article 111).[18]
Belarus
Belarus has a penalty-enhancement statute for crimes motivated by racial, national, and religious hatred and discord.[18][21]
Belgium
Belgium‘s Act of 25 February 2003 (“aimed at combating discrimination and modifying the Act of 15 February 1993 which establishes the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight against Racism”) establishes a penalty-enhancement for crimes involving discrimination on the basis of gender, supposed race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, civil status, birth, fortune, age, religious or philosophical beliefs, current or future state of health and handicap or physical features. The Act also “provides for a civil remedy to address discrimination.”[18] The Act, along with the Act of 20 January 2003 (“on strengthening legislation against racism”), requires the Centre to collect and publish statistical data on racism and discriminatory crimes.[18]
Bosnia and Herzegovinavina (enacted 2003) “contains provisions prohibiting discrimination by public officials on grounds, inter alia, of race, skin colour, national or ethnic background, religion and language and prohibiting the restriction by public officials of the language rights of the citizens in their relations with the authorities (Article 145/1 and 145/2).”[22]
Bulgaria
Bulgarian criminal law prohibits certain crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia, but a 1999 report by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance found that it does not appear that those provisions “have ever resulted in convictions before the courts in Bulgaria.”[23]
Croatia
The Croatian Penal Code explicitly defines hate crime in article 89 as “any crime committed out of hatred for someone’s race, skin color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other belief, national or social background, asset, birth, education, social condition, age, health condition or other attribute”.[24] On 1 January 2013, a new Penal Code was introduced with the recognition of a hate crime based on “race, skin color, religion, national or ethnic background, sexual orientation or gender identity”.[25]
Czech Republic
The Czech legislation finds its constitutional basis in the principles of equality and non-discrimination contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms. From there, we can trace two basic lines of protection against hate-motivated incidents: one passes through criminal law, the other through civil law. The current Czech criminal legislation has implications both for decisions about guilt (affecting the decision whether to find a defendant guilty or not guilty) and decisions concerning sentencing (affecting the extent of the punishment imposed). It has three levels, to wit:
Current criminal legislation does not provide for special penalties for acts that target another by reason of his sexual orientation, age or health status. Only the constituent elements of the criminal offense of Incitement to hatred towards a group of persons or to the curtailment of their rights and freedoms, and general aggravating circumstances include attacking a so-called different group of people. Such a group of people can then, of course, be also one defined by sexual orientation, age or health status. A certain disparity has thus been created between, on the one hand, those groups of people who are victimized by reason of their skin color, faith, nationality, ethnicity or political persuasion and enjoy increased protection, and, on the other hand, those groups that are victimized by reason of their sexual orientation, age or health status and are not granted increased protection. This gap in protection against attacks motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, age or health status cannot be successfully bridged by interpretation. Interpretation by analogy is inadmissible in criminal law, sanctionable motivations being exhaustively enumerated.[26]
Denmark
Although Danish law does not include explicit hate crime provisions, “section 80(1) of the Criminal Code instructs courts to take into account the gravity of the offence and the offender’s motive when meting out penalty, and therefore to attach importance to the racist motive of crimes in determining sentence.”[27] In recent years judges have used this provision to increase sentences on the basis of racist motives.[18][28]
Since 1992, the Danish Civil Security Service (PET) has released statistics on crimes with apparent racist motivation.[18]
Estonia
Under section 151 of the Criminal Code of Estonia of 6 June 2001, which entered into force on 1 September 2002, with amendments and supplements and as amended by the Law of 8 December 2011, “activities which publicly incite to hatred, violence or discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, colour, sex, language, origin, religion, sexual orientation, political opinion, or financial or social status, if this results in danger to the life, health or property of a person, are punishable by a fine of up to 300 fine units or by detention”.[29]
Finland
Finnish Criminal Code 515/2003 (enacted January 31, 2003) makes “committing a crime against a person, because of his national, racial, ethnical or equivalent group” an aggravating circumstance in sentencing.[18][30] In addition, ethnic agitation (Finnish: kiihotus kansanryhmää vastaan) is criminalized and carries a fine or a prison sentence of not more than two years. The prosecution need not prove that an actual danger to an ethnic group is caused but only that malicious message is conveyed. A more aggravated hate crime, warmongering (Finnish: sotaan yllyttäminen), carries a prison sentence of one to ten years. However, in case of warmongering, the prosecution must prove an overt act that evidently increases the risk that Finland is involved in a war or becomes a target for a military operation. The act in question may consist of
Nepal
France
In 2003, France enacted penalty-enhancement hate crime laws for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s actual or perceived ethnicity, nation, race, religion, or sexual orientation. The penalties for murder were raised from 30 years (for non-hate crimes) to life imprisonment (for hate crimes), and the penalties for violent attacks leading to permanent disability were raised from 10 years (for non-hate crimes) to 15 years (for hate crimes).[18][32]
Georgia
“There is no general provision in Georgian law for racist motivation to be considered an aggravating circumstance in prosecutions of ordinary offenses. Certain crimes involving racist motivation are, however, defined as specific offenses in the Georgian Criminal Code of 1999, including murder motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 109); infliction of serious injuries motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 117); and torture motivated by racial, religious, national or ethnic intolerance (article 126). ECRI reported no knowledge of cases in which this law has been enforced. There is no systematic monitoring or data collection on discrimination in Georgia.”[18]
Germany
The German Criminal Code does not have hate crime legislation, but instead criminalizes hate speech under a number of different laws, including Volksverhetzung. In the German legal framework motivation is not taken into account while identifying the element of the offence. However, within the sentencing procedure the judge can define certain principles for determining punishment. In section 46 of the German Criminal Code it is stated that “the motives and aims of the perpetrator; the state of mind reflected in the act and the willfulness involved in its commission.”[33] can be taken into consideration when determining the punishment; under this statute, hate and bias have been taken into consideration in sentencing in past cases.[34]
Hate crimes are not specifically tracked by German police, but have been studied separately: a recently published EU “Report on Racism” finds that racially motivated attacks are frequent in Germany, identifying 18,142 incidences for 2006, of which 17,597 were motivated by right wing ideologies, both about a 14% year-by-year increase.[35] Relative to the size of the population, this represents an eightfold higher rate of hate crimes than reported in the US during the same period.[36] Awareness of hate crimes and right-wing extremism in Germany remains low.[37]
Greece
Article Law 927/1979 “Section 1,1 penalises incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence towards individuals or groups because of their racial, national or religious origin, through public written or oral expressions; Section 1,2 prohibits the establishment of, and membership in, organisations which organise propaganda and activities aimed at racial discrimination; Section 2 punishes public expression of offensive ideas; Section 3 penalises the act of refusing, in the exercise of one’s occupation, to sell a commodity or to supply a service on racial grounds.”[38] Public prosecutors may press charges even if the victim does not file a complaint. However, as of 2003, no convictions had been attained under the law.[39]
Hungary
Violent action, cruelty, and coercion by threat made on the basis of the victim’s actual or perceived national, ethnic, religious status or membership in a particular social group are punishable under article 174/B of the Hungarian Criminal Code.[18] This article was added to the Code in 1996.[40]
Iceland
Section 233a of the Icelandic Penal Code states “Anyone who in a ridiculing, slanderous, insulting, threatening or any other manner publicly abuses a person or a group of people on the basis of their nationality, skin colour, race, religion or sexual orientation, shall be fined or jailed for up to two years.”[41]
India
In past few years, a number of hate crimes in India against minority communities especially against Muslims and Christians rise tremendously. To monitor this rising trend of hate crime based on religious identity a web portal is launched name DOTO Database to track these incidents.[42]
From the 3035 reported incidents August 2018, 1892 were Muslims. That is 62% of the total violence and 740 were Christians. That is 24% of the total violence.[43]
Ireland
“The Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989″ makes it an offense to incite hatred against any group of persons on account of their race, color, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origins, or membership of the Traveller community, an indigenous minority group.”[18]
Ireland does not systematically collect hate crime data.[18]
Italy
Italian criminal law, at Section 3 of Law No. 205/1993, the so-called Legge Mancino (Mancino law), contains a penalty-enhancement provision for all crimes motivated by racial, sex/gender, ethnic, national, or religious bias.[18]
Kazakhstan
In Kazakhstan, there are constitutional provisions prohibiting propaganda promoting racial or ethnic superiority.[18]
Kyrgyzstan
In Kyrgyzstan, “the Constitution of the State party prohibits any kind of discrimination on grounds of origin, sex, race, nationality, language, faith, political or religious convictions or any other personal or social trait or circumstance, and that the prohibition against racial discrimination is also included in other legislation, such as the Civil, Penal and Labour Codes.”[44]
Article 299 of the Criminal Code defines incitement to national, racist, or religious hatred as a specific offense. This article has been used in political trials of suspected members of the banned organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir.[18][45]
Russia
Article 29 of the penal code of the Russian Federation bans incitement to riot for the sake of stirring societal, racial, ethnic, and religious hatred as well as the promotion of the superiority of the same. Article 282 further includes protections against incitement of hatred (including gender) via various means of communication, instilling criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.[46]
Spain
Article 22(4) of the Spanish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s ideology, beliefs, religion, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, illness or disability.[18]
Sweden
Article 29 of the Swedish Penal Code includes a penalty-enhancement provision for crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s race, color, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or “other similar circumstance” of the victim.[18][47]
Ukraine
I. “Constitution of Ukraine“ :
The most important law of the Ukraine country : the “Constitution of Ukraine” guarantees protection against Hate crime :
“Constitution of Ukraine“ :
Article 10 : “In Ukraine, free development, use and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine are guaranteed”.
Article 11 : “The state shall promote the development of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of all indigenous peoples and national minorities of Ukraine”.
Article 24 :”There can be no privileges or restrictions on the grounds of race, color of the skin, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds”.[48]
II. “CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE” :
in Ukraine, all criminal punishments for crimes committed under the law are required to be registered in only one law, it is the only one: “CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE”
The crimes committed for Hate crime reinforce the punishment in many articles of the criminal law. There are also separate articles on punishment for Hate crime.
“CRIMINAL CODEX OF UKRAINE” :
Article 161 : “Violations of equality of citizens depending on their race, nationality, religious beliefs, disability and other grounds
1. Intentional acts aimed at incitement to national, racial or religious hatred and violence, to humiliate national honor and dignity, or to repulse citizens’ feelings due to their religious beliefs, as well as direct or indirect restriction of rights or the establishment of direct or indirect privileges citizens on the grounds of race, color, political, religious or other beliefs, sex, disability, ethnic or social origin, property status, place of residence, language or other grounds”(Maximum criminal sentence of up to 8 years in prison)
Article 300 : “Importation, manufacture or distribution of works promoting a cult of violence and cruelty, racial, national or religious intolerance and discrimination” (Maximum criminal sentence of up to 5 years in prison)[49]
United Kingdom
For England, Wales, and Scotland, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 makes hateful behaviour towards a victim based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) in a racial group or a religious group an aggravation in sentencing for specified crimes.[50] The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (c. 24) amended sections of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.[51] For Northern Ireland, Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987 (S.I. 1987/463 (N.I. 7)) serves the same purpose.[52] A “racial group” is a group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins. A “religious group” is a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief. The specified crimes are assault, criminal damage, offences under the Public Order Act 1986, and offences under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
Sections 145 and 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 require a court to consider whether a crime which is not specified by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is racially or religiously aggravated, and to consider whether the following circumstances were pertinent to the crime:
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) reported in 2013 that there are an average of 278,000 hate crimes a year with 40% being reported according to a victims survey, although police records only identified around 43,000 hate crimes a year.[55] It was widely reported that police recorded a 57% increase in hate crime complaints in the four days following the UK’s European Union membership referendum, however a press release from the National Police Chief’s Council stated that “this should not be read as a national increase in hate crime of 57 per cent”.[56][57]
In 2013, Greater Manchester Police began recording attacks on goths, punks and other alternative culture groups as hate crimes.[58]
On December 4, 2013 Essex Police launched the ‘Stop the Hate’ initiative as part of a concerted effort to find new ways to tackle hate crime in Essex. The launch was marked by a conference in Chelmsford, hosted by Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh, which brought together 220 delegates from a range of partner organisations involved in the field. The theme of the conference was ‘Report it to Sort it’ and the emphasis was on encouraging people to tell police if they have been a victim of hate crime, whether it be based on race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability.[59]
Crown Prosecution Service guidance issued on 21 August 2017 stated that online hate crimes should be treated as seriously as offences in person.[60]
Perhaps the most high-profile hate crime in modern Britain occurred in Eltham, London, on 24 April 1993, when 18-year-old black student Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in an attack by a gang of white youths. Two white teenagers were later charged with the murder, and at least three other suspects were mentioned in the national media, but the charges against them were dropped within three months after the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. However, a change in the law a decade later allowed a suspect to be charged with a crime twice if new evidence emerged after the original charges were dropped or a “not guilty” verdict was delivered in court. Gary Dobson, who had been charged with the murder in the initial 1993 investigation, was found guilty of Stephen Lawrence’s murder in January 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment, as was David Norris, who had not been charged in 1993. A third suspect, Luke Knight, had been charged in 1993 but was not charged when the case came to court nearly 20 years later.
Scotland
Under Scottish Common law[citation needed] the courts can take any aggravating factor into account when sentencing someone found guilty of an offence. There is legislation dealing with the offences of incitement of racial hatred, racially aggravated harassment, prejudice relating to religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.[61] A Scottish Executive working group examined the issue of hate crime and ways of combating crime motivated by social prejudice, reporting in 2004.[62] Its main recommendations were not implemented, but in their manifestos for the Scottish Parliament election, 2007 several political parties included commitments to legislate in this area, including the Scottish National Party who now form the Scottish Government. The Offences (Aggravation by Prejudice) (Scotland) Bill was introduced on 19 May 2008 by Patrick Harvie MSP,[63] having been prepared with support from the Scottish Government, and was passed unanimously by the parliament on 3 June 2009.[64]
Eurasian countries with no hate crime laws[edit]
A photograph of the famous fresco Bathing of the Christ, after being vandalized by a Kosovo Albanian mobduring the 2004 unrest in Kosovo
Albania, Cyprus, San Marino, Slovenia and Turkey have no hate crime laws.[18]
North America
Canada
“In Canada the legal definition of hate crime can be found in sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code”. [65]
In 1996 the federal government amended a section of the Criminal Code that pertains to sentencing. Specifically, section 718.2. The section states (with regard to the hate crime):
A court that imposes a sentence shall also take into consideration the following principles:
(a) a sentence should be increased or reduced to account for any relevant aggravating or mitigating circumstances relating to the offence or the offender, and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing,
(i) evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor, . . . shall be deemed to be aggravating circumstances.” [65]
A vast majority (84 per cent) of hate crime perpetrators were “male, with an average age of just under 30. Less than 10 of those accused had criminal records, and less than 5 per cent had previous hate crime involvement (ibid O’Grady 2010 page 163.).” [66] “Only 4 percent of hate crimes were linked to an organized or extremist group (Silver et al., 2004).” [67]
As of 2004, Jewish people were the largest ethnic group targeted by hate crimes, followed by blacks, Muslims, South Asians, and homosexuals (Silver et al., 2004).[67]
During the Nazi regime, anti-Semitism was a cause of hate related violence in Canada. For example, on August 16, 1933 there was a baseball game in Toronto and one team was made up of mostly Jewish players. At the end of the game, a group of Nazi sympathizers unfolded a Swastika flag and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. That event erupted into a brawl that had Jews and Italians against Anglo Canadians and the brawl went on for hours.[65]
The first time someone was charged with hate speech over the internet occurred on 27 March 1996. “A Winnipeg teenager was arrested by the police for sending an email to a local political activist that contained the message ‘Death to homosexuals’ it’s prescribed in the Bible! Better watch out next Gay Pride Week.’ (Nairne, 1996).”[67]
United States
Shepard (center), Louvon Harris (left), Betty Bryd Boatner (right) with President Barack Obama in 2009 to promote the Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Hate crime laws have a long history in the United States. The first hate crime[68] laws were passed after the American Civil War, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1871, to combat the growing number of racially motivated crimes being committed by the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan. The modern era of hate-crime legislation began in 1968 with the passage of federal statute, 18 U.S. 245, part of the Civil Rights Act which made it illegal to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone who is engaged in six specified protected activities, by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.” However, “The prosecution of such crimes must be certified by the U.S. attorney general.”.[69]
The first state hate-crime statute, California’s Section 190.2, was passed in 1978 and provided for penalty enhancement in cases where murder was motivated by prejudice against four “protected status” categories: race, religion, color, and national origin. Washington included ancestry in a statute passed in 1981. Alaska included creed and sex in 1982 and later disability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. In the 1990s some state laws began to include age, marital status, membership in the armed forces, and membership in civil rights organizations.[70]
Criminal acts which could be considered hate crimes in various states included aggravated assault, assault and battery, vandalism, rape, threats and intimidation, arson, trespassing, stalking, and various “lesser” acts until in 1987 California state legislation included all crimes as possible hate crimes.[71]
Defined in the 1999 National Crime Victim Survey, “A hate crime is a criminal offense. In the United States, federal prosecution is possible for hate crimes committed on the basis of a person’s race, religion, or nation origin when engaging in a federally protected activity.” In 2009, the Matthew Shepard Act added actual or perceived gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability to the federal definition, and dropped the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity.
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have statutes criminalizing various types of hate crimes. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have statutes creating a civil cause of action in addition to the criminal penalty for similar acts. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have statutes requiring the state to collect hate crime statistics.[72]
According to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics report for 2006, hate crimes increased nearly 8% nationwide, with a total of 7,722 incidents and 9,080 offenses reported by participating law enforcement agencies. Of the 5,449 crimes against persons, 46% were classified as intimidation and 32% as simple assaults. 81% of the 3,593 crimes against property were acts of vandalism or destruction.[73]
However, according to the FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2007, the number of hate crimes decreased to 7,624 incidents reported by participating law enforcement agencies.[74] These incidents included 9 murders and 2 rapes(out of the almost 17,000 murders and 90,000 forcible rapes committed in the U.S. in 2007).[75]
Attorney General Eric Holder said in June 2009 that recent killings show the need for a tougher U.S. hate crimes law to stop “violence masquerading as political activism”.[76]
The 2011 hate crime statistics show 46.9% were motivated by race and 20.8% by sexual orientation.[77]
In 2015, the Hate Crimes Statistics report identified 5,818 single-bias incidents involving 6,837 offenses, 7,121 victims, and 5,475 known offenders[78]
Prosecutions of hate crimes have been difficult in the United States. Recently though, state governments have attempted to re-investigate and re-try past hate crimes. One prominent example is Mississippi’s decision in 1990 to retry Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, a prominent figure in the NAACP.[79] This would be the first time in U.S. history that an unresolved civil rights case would be re-opened. Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was tried for the murder on two previous occasions and it resulted with a hung jury. However, he was finally sentenced to life in prison in 1994. Presented with testimony of two FBI informants who had infiltrated the KKK, the missing transcript from the first trial, the relocation of missing witnesses, numerous witness admissions of Beckwith bragging about his role in the murder and Beckwith’s own racist writings, a mixed race jury found Beckwith guilty of murder. Even though De La Beckwith was 73 years of age when he was sentenced to life in prison, the 1994 conviction has been interpreted as a way for Mississippi to shed its racist past.[80]
According to a November 2016 report issued by the FBI hate crime statistics are on the rise in the United States.[81] The number of hate crimes increased from 5,850 in 2015, to 6,121 hate crime incidents in 2016, an increase of 4.6 percent.[82][83][84]
Victims in the United States
One of the largest waves of hate crimes took place during the civil rights movement. During the 1950s and 1960s, both violence and threats of violence were common against African Americans, and hundreds of lives were lost due to such acts. Members of this social class faced violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan as well as violence from individuals who were committed to maintaining segregation.[85] At the time, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and their supporters fought hard for the right of African Americans to vote as well as for equality in their everyday lives. African Americans have been the target of hate crimes since the Civil War,[86] and the humiliation of this social class was also desired by many Anti-black individuals. Other frequently reported bias motivations were bias against a religion, bias against a particular sexual orientation, and bias against a particular ethnicity/national origin.[87] At times, these bias motivations overlapped, because violence can be both anti-gay and anti-black, for example.[88]
Analysts have compared groups in terms of the per capita rate of hate crimes committed against them, to allow for differing populations. Overall, the total number of hate crimes committed since the first hate crime bill was passed in 1997 is 86,582.[89] David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Among the groups currently mentioned in the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the largest number of hate crimes are committed against African Americans.[100] During the Civil Rights Movement, some of the most notorious hate crimes included the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1964 murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the 1955 murder of Emmett Till,[86] as well as the burning of crosses, churches, Jewish synagogues and other places of worship of minority religions. Such acts began to take place more frequently after the racial integration of many schools and public facilities.[100]
High-profile murders targeting victims based on their sexual orientation have prompted the passage of hate crimes legislation, notably the cases of Sean W. Kennedy and Matthew Shepard. Kennedy’s murder was mentioned by Senator Gordon Smith in a speech on the floor of the US Senate while he advocated such legislation. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law in 2009. It included sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, the disabled, and military personnel and their family members.[101][citation needed] This is the first all-inclusive bill ever passed in the United States, taking 45 years to complete.[clarification needed]
Gender-based crimes may also be considered hate crimes. This view would designate rape and domestic violence, as well as non-interpersonal violence against women such as the École Polytechnique massacre in Quebec, as hate crimes.[102][103][104]
In May 2018, ProPublica reviewed police reports for 58 cases of purported anti-heterosexual hate crimes. ProPublica found that about half of the cases were anti-LGBT hate crimes that had been miscategorized, and that the rest were motivated by hate towards Jews, blacks or women or that there was no element of a hate crime at all. ProPublica found not a single case of a hate crime spurred by anti-heterosexual bias.[105]
South America
Brazil
In Brazil, hate crime laws focus on racism, racial injury, and other special bias-motivated crimes such as, for example, murder by death squads[106] and genocide on the grounds of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion.[107] Murder by death squads and genocide are legally classified as “hideous crimes” (crimes hediondos in Portuguese).[108]
The crimes of racism and racial injury, although similar, are enforced slightly differently.[109] Article 140, 3rd paragraph, of the Penal Code establishes a harsher penalty, from a minimum of 1 year to a maximum of 3 years, for injuries motivated by “elements referring to race, color, ethnicity, religion, origin, or the condition of being an aged or disabled person“.[110] On the other side, Law 7716/1989 covers “crimes resulting from discrimination or prejudice on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, religion, or national origin”.[111]
In addition, the Brazilian Constitution defines as a “fundamental goal of the Republic” (Article 3rd, clause IV) “to promote the well-being of all, with no prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age, and any other forms of discrimination”.[112]
Chile
In 2012, the Anti-discrimination law amended the Criminal Code adding a new aggravating circumstance of criminal responsibility, as follows: “Committing or participating in a crime motivated by ideology, political opinion, religion or beliefs of the victim; nation, race, ethnic or social group; sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, affiliation, personal appearance or suffering from illness or disability.”[113][114]
Middle East
Israel is the only country in the middle east who has hate crime laws. Hate crime, as passed by the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), is defined as crime for reason of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation
Support for and opposition to hate crime laws
Support[edit]
Find sources:“Hate crime” – news·newspapers·books·scholar·JSTOR (February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Justifications for harsher punishments for hate crimes focus on the notion that hate crimes cause greater individual and societal harm.[citation needed] It is said[115] that, when the core of a person’s identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people.[citation needed] Furthermore, it is asserted that the chances for retaliatory crimes are greater when a hate crime has been committed. The riots in Los Angeles, California that followed the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist, by a group of White police officers are cited as support for this argument.[12] The beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny by black rioters during the same riot is also an example that supports this argument.
In Wisconsin v. Mitchell, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that penalty-enhancement hate crime statutes do not conflict with free speech rights, because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression; rather, they allow courts to consider motive when sentencing a criminal for conduct which is not protected by the First Amendment.[116] Whilst in the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire the court defined “fighting words” as “those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”[117]
Opposition
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination in conflict with rights of free speech, because it selectively criminalized bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech for disfavored topics while permitting such speech for other topics.[118] Many critics further assert that it conflicts with an even more fundamental right: free thought. The claim is that hate-crime legislation effectively makes certain ideas or beliefs, including religious ones, illegal, in other words, thought crimes.[119][120] Heidi Hurd argues that hate crimes criminalize certain dispositions yet do not show why hate is a morally worse disposition for a crime than one motivated by jealousy, greed, sadism or vengeance or why hatred and bias are uniquely responsive to criminal sanction compared to other motivations. Hurd argues that whether or not a disposition is worse than another is case sensitive and thus it is difficult to argue that some motivations are categorically worse than others.[121]
In their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter criticize hate crime legislation for exacerbating conflicts between groups. They assert that by defining crimes as being committed by one group against another, rather than as being committed by individuals against their society, the labeling of crimes as “hate crimes” causes groups to feel persecuted by one another, and that this impression of persecution can incite a backlash and thus lead to an actual increase in crime.[122] Jacobs and Potter also argued that hate crime legislation can end up only covering the victimization of some groups rather than all, which is a form of discrimination itself and that attempts to remedy this by making all identifiable groups covered by hate crime protection thus make hate crimes co-terminus with generic criminal law. The authors also suggest that arguments which attempt to portray hate crimes as worse than normal crimes because they spread fear in a community are unsatisfactory, as normal criminal acts can also spread fear yet only hate crimes are singled out.[122] Indeed it has been argued that victims have varied reactions to hate crimes, so it is not necessarily true that hate crimes are regarded as more harmful than other crimes.[123][124] Heidi Hurd argues that hate crime represents an effort by the state to encourage a certain moral character in its citizen and thus represents the view that the instillation of virtue and the elimination of vice are legitimate state goals, which she argues is a contradiction of the principles of liberalism. Hurd also argues that increasing punishment for an offence because the perpetrator was motivated by hate compared to some other motivation means that the justice systems is treating the same crime differently, even though treating like cases alike is a cornerstone of criminal justice[125]
Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced.[126] American forensic psychologist Karen Franklin said that the term hate crime is somewhat misleading since it assumes there is a hateful motivation which is not present in many occasions;[127] in her view, laws to punish people who commit hate crimes may not be the best remedy for preventing them because the threat of future punishment does not usually deter such criminal acts.[128] Some on the political left have been critical of hate crime laws for expanding the criminal justice system and dealing with violence against minority groups through punitive measures.[6]
See also
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime
Story 2: Open Border Democrats and Republicans Are Supporting Drug Cartels By Aiding and Abetting Criminal Illegal Alien and Illegal Drug Smuggling — Videos
Six illegal immigrants linked to notorious Mexican drug cartel are arrested for trafficking meth and cocaine after police sting
By GEORGE MARTIN FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 05:53 EST, 18 February 2019 | UPDATED: 06:16 EST, 18 February 2019
Six illegal immigrants linked to one of Mexico‘s most dangerous cartels have been arrested in North Carolina during a drug trafficking operation – it has been revealed.
Police documents revealed by WSOC show that the operation involved the transportation of large amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine to Charlotte, North Carolina.
The suspects were identified as Oscar Rangel-Gutierrez, Regulo Rangel-Gutierrez, Francisco Garcia-Martinez, Rodolfo Martinez, Raul Rangel-Gutierrez and Rigoberto Rangel-Gutierrez.
Oscar Rangel-Gutierrez (left), Rodolfo Martinez (center), and Regulo Rangel Gutierrez (right)
Federal officials said more than 1,800 grams of meth were delivered from Oscar Rangel-Guiterrez’s home in Statesville in August and October last year
‘Members of the investigative team believe – based on wire intercepts, surveillance and other facts discovered from the investigation – that Oscar and Regulo transport illicit proceeds, derived from the sales of narcotics, when they travel from Myrtle Beach to Charlotte,’ the court documents read.
The person who lived there, Oscar Rangel-Guiterrez, is an alleged high-level cartel member.
Francisco Garcia-Martinez (left), Rigoberto Rangel-Gutierrez (center) and Raul Rangel-Gutierrez (right)
Court documents indicated that Rangel-Guiterrez and the five other suspects were in the country illegally
Misty Joyner, who reportedly lived near the home in Charlotte where investigators said Rangel-Gutierrez stored drug money, was in disbelief about her neighbors.
‘Just devastating,’ Joyner told WSOC. ‘They were good people.’
The group were said to have been affiliated with the Jalisco New Generation cartel which has been engaged in a blood feud with ‘El Chapo’s’ infamous Sinaola cartel.
Sinaloa’s leader, Guzman, was convicted last Tuesday in New York, likely meaning he will spend decades behind bars in the United States.
The group were said to have links to El Chapo who was convicted by a New York court last week
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6716647/Six-illegal-immigrants-linked-notorious-Mexican-drug-cartel-arrested.html
Story 3: Under Communist China’s Social Credit System Jussie Smollett Would Be Labeled As Untrustworthy And Unable To Travel Because of A Low Social Credit Score Due To Criminal Behavior and Blacklist Banning — Vast Surveillance Facial Recognition System — Safe, Secure, State Socialism in The Police Surveillance State of Communist China — Videos
China: facial recognition and state control | The Economist
Trust and consequences: China’s evolving ‘social credit system’
Everyone In China Is Getting A ‘Social Credit Score’
China bans millions with low ‘social credit’ from rail, air travel | Al Jazeera English
China Behavior Rating System V/S Sweden Microchip implants | Must watch technology
China rolls out social credit system to spy on population
Inside China’s High-Tech Dystopia
China’s social credit system shows its teeth, banning millions from taking flights, trains
He Huifeng
Updated: Tuesday, 19 Feb, 2019 10:39am
Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates.
The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost “trustworthiness” in Chinese society and is an extension of China’s social credit system, which is expected to give each of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score.
The social credit system assigns both positive and negative scores for individual or corporate behaviour in an attempt to pressure citizens into behaving.
Human rights advocates, though, worry that the arbitrary system does not take into account individual circumstances and so often unfairly labels individuals and firms as untrustworthy.
Over 3.59 million Chinese enterprises were added to the official creditworthiness blacklist last year, banning them from a series of activities, including bidding on projects, accessing security markets, taking part in land auctions and issuing corporate bonds, according to the 2018 annual report released by the National Public Credit Information Centre.
The centre is backed by the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planner, to run the credit rating system.
According to the report, the authorities collected over 14.21 million pieces of information on the “untrustworthy conduct” of individuals and businesses, including charges of swindling customers, failing to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, as well as uncivilised behaviour such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
About 17.46 million “discredited” people were restricted from buying plane tickets and 5.47 million were restricted from purchasing high-speed train tickets, the report said.
Besides restrictions on buying tickets, local authorities also used novel methods to put pressure on untrustworthy subjects, including preventing people from buying premium insurance, wealth management products or real estate, as well as shaming them by exposing their information in public.
A total of 3.51 million untrustworthy individuals and entities repaid their debts or paid off taxes and fines last year due to pressure from the social credit system, the report said.
The report highlighted untrustworthy problems at peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms and recent high-profile scandals in medical care that have caused public anger.
A total of 1,282 P2P operators, more than half located in Zhejiang, Guangdong and Shanghai, were placed on the creditworthiness blacklist because they could not repay investors or were involved in illegal fundraising.
Health care product maker
and vaccine maker
were added to the creditworthiness blacklist because of their involvement in major health sector scandals.
Quanjian was accused of making false marketing claims about the benefits of a product that a four-year-old cancer patient drank, while Changsheng, the major Chinese manufacturer of rabies vaccines, was fined US$1.3 billion in October after it was found to have fabricated records.
Lawyers worry that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system will violate an individuals right to privacy.
“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” a lawyer said. “It violates the rights of human beings.”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2186606/chinas-social-credit-system-shows-its-teeth-banning-millions
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 519-525
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 510-518
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 490-499
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 480-489
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 473-479
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 464-472
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 455-463
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 439-446
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 431-438
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 422-430
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 414-421
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 408-413
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 391-399
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 383-390
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 376-382
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 369-375
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 360-368
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 354-359
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 346-353
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 338-345
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 328-337
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 319-327
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 307-318
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 296-306
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 287-295
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 277-286
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 264-276
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 250-263
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 236-249
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 222-235
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 211-221
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 202-210
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 194-201
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 184-193
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 174-183
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 165-173
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 158-164
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 151-157
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 143-150
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 135-142
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 131-134
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 124-130
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 121-123
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 118-120
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 113 -117
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Show 112
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 108-111
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 106-108
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 104-105
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 101-103
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 98-100
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 94-97
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 88-90
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 84-87
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 79-83
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 74-78
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 71-73
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 68-70
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 65-67
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 62-64
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 58-61
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 55-57
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 52-54
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 49-51
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 45-48
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 41-44
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 38-40
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 30-33
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 27-29
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 17-26
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 16-22
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 10-15
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 1-9