J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Activist Nadine Seiler demonstrates in front of the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 20, 2023. The justices this week agreed to hear an abortion case for the first time since overturning a constitutional right to abortion last year.

The U.S. Supreme Court this week agreed to hear an abortion case for the first time since overturning a constitutional right to abortion last year.

The case, which concerns the federal approval of the widely prescribed pill mifepristone, comes at a time when abortion access is being fiercely litigated across the United States. Voters in states such as Kansas, Michigan, and Ohio have voted to preserve access, while state courts in places like Texas, where near-total bans have been implemented, remain loath to approve medical exceptions. The drug is used in more than half of all abortions, and a ban would complicate access for women in states where the procedure remains legal.

A decision in the case is expected next summer, just months before a presidential election where abortion is expected to be a major issue for voters.

Mifepristone has been publicly available since 2000, when it was first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency has made the drug more accessible since then, issuing new regulations in 2016 and 2021. A coalition of anti-abortion groups and doctors filed a lawsuit in Texas earlier this year, seeking to pull the medication off the shelves. The approval processes for mifepristone were flawed, they argue, and the drug is too dangerous to be kept on the market.

The FDA and the manufacturer of mifepristone dispute these arguments in the case FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. In April, a conservative district court judge blocked all FDA approvals of the medication. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit largely overturned that order but reinstated the agency’s pre-2016 restrictions on mifepristone, such as requiring an in-person visit.

After the district court ruling, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order that kept the drug publicly available. This week, the court also declined to take up a challenge to the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone in 2000. Both actions “augur badly for the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine,” says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law.

“We know a majority of the justices are skeptical about something with the case,” she adds.

This means that however the court ultimately rules, there most likely won’t be the overnight change the country felt after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Mifepristone will likely stay on the market, but if the justices uphold the Fifth Circuit ruling, the medication would become more difficult to access. A win for the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, meanwhile, would have the potential to transform how the U.S. regulates medical care and prescription drugs.

Since 2016, the FDA lifted the requirement that patients make an in-person visit to get a prescription. It also allowed nurse practitioners to prescribe the drug. Mifepristone is now used in more than half of all medication abortions in the U.S., according to a survey from the Guttmacher Institute. Researchers also consider it one of the safest methods for managing miscarriages early in pregnancy.

The Supreme Court will first have to decide if the lawsuit can be brought at all. This standing issue – which boils down to whether a party has been harmed enough to justify taking legal action – has been controversial from the beginning. The anti-abortion groups and doctors claim that, because mifepristone can lead to life-threatening medical complications they may have to deal with in emergency rooms, the physicians have suffered the necessary harm to meet requirements.

A study by the FDA found that there were 5 deaths associated with mifepristone for every 1 million people who have been prescribed it since 2000. That compares with 20 deaths per 1 million for penicillin, a widely prescribed antibiotic, the FDA pointed out in its amicus brief.

“This is an incredibly attenuated theory of standing,” says Laura Portuondo, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “If [it] works, there’s no drug that you couldn’t have standing to sue against.”

If nothing else, the case drives home the fact that the Supreme Court’s declaration in Dobbs that the issue would now be returned “to the people and their elected representatives” in states has not come to pass. “Dobbs did not get the Supreme Court out of the business of abortion,” says Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School, in an email. “There are so many issues that remain to be resolved under the federal constitution.”

And with abortion restrictions proving unpopular with a majority of American voters, including in red states, courts will likely remain a popular forum for those hoping to restrict abortion access further.

Another big change is that women, including women who want more children such as Kate Cox in Texas, are going public with deeply personal stories of being denied miscarriage care and being denied emergency medical exemptions, even though lack of treatment threatens their health and fertility.

“We’re seeing stories of abortion inside and outside of court being told by women,” Professor Ziegler says. “We’ll see more of that, and ... that’s very different from the pre-Dobbs landscape.”

While the mifepristone case is the first big abortion case since Dobbs, it is unlikely to be the last – no matter how the justices decide.

“Whatever the court does means more kinds of cases like this are going to show up, it’s just a matter of what kinds of cases,” says Professor Ziegler.

The standing issue “is a perfect off-ramp if they don’t want to deal with this,” she adds. And “they might not want to have a big abortion [ruling] right before the election.”

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

House members attend a Dec. 12 markup hearing on an impeachment inquiry, in Washington: (from left) Joe Neguse, D-Colo.; Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa.; House Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass.; House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla.; and Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas.

On Sept. 12, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, citing a “picture of corruption” that had emerged from a monthslong investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and the Biden family.

He said the inquiry was needed to give House Republicans greater power to obtain financial records and other documents. He was also under pressure from his right flank and former President Donald Trump, who was twice impeached himself.

Speaker McCarthy did not hold a House vote on the inquiry, due to some vocal Republican holdouts who cited a lack of evidence. But on Wednesday, when newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson brought the issue to the House floor, all Republicans voted in favor, 221-212. Many said they were persuaded by White House stonewalling of the three committees spearheading the investigation.

Despite the additional legitimacy conferred by a formal vote, the outcome of the inquiry will ultimately hinge on whether House Republicans can directly connect Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling to his father – a connection that even some Republicans say has not been established so far. 

Hanging in the balance is the impact this inquiry may have on the 2024 presidential election – and perhaps on the impeachment process itself, which some say is increasingly becoming a routine political tool rather than a measure reserved for extraordinary circumstances. Three of the four presidential impeachments in U.S. history have occurred in the past 25 years.

How does an “inquiry” relate to impeachment?

The Constitution, which empowers the House of Representatives to impeach a president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” does not specify the process for a preliminary investigation. House rules do not require a formal vote to initiate an impeachment inquiry, and recent precedent has been mixed. 

Mr. McCarthy cited the Democrats’ 2021 precedent of launching an impeachment inquiry against then-President Trump without a formal vote, despite having earlier criticized that move and saying he would hold a vote. He tasked House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer with leading the inquiry, together with Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan and Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith.

Republicans have said an inquiry will not necessarily lead to impeachment, and that they will follow where the evidence leads. 

Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio, flanked by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith of Missouri (left) and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky (right), talks to reporters following a vote to formalize an impeachment inquiry on Democratic President Joe Biden, in Washington, Dec. 13, 2023.

What was the GOP’s basis for launching the inquiry?

In a Sept. 27 memo, the three GOP chairs laid out their rationale, writing that their committees’ investigations so far indicated that Mr. Biden, during his time as vice president, “may” have changed U.S. policy or provided access to his office “in exchange for his family’s receipt of foreign money.” They also accused his administration of impeding efforts to look into these “foreign entanglements.” 

A central concern involves Hunter Biden’s former role on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Republicans allege that then-Vice President Biden improperly thwarted a corruption investigation into the company, which was paying his son millions, by pushing for Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin to be fired – which he was in March 2016. 

Democrats have pointed out that the State Department, European Union, and International Monetary Fund had long been pushing for Mr. Shokin to be fired for being too soft on corruption. In 2019, they impeached then-President Trump for allegedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch a public investigation into the Bidens and Burisma by withholding U.S. loan guarantees. 

In an FBI document released by Republicans this summer, a confidential informant relayed conversations with Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, about the corruption investigation and the company’s efforts to acquire a U.S. oil and gas company. According to the informant, Mr.  Zlochevsky said, “Don’t worry, Hunter will take care of all those issues through his dad.” The informant also said Mr. Zlochevsky claimed he was “forced” to pay $5 million to both Hunter and his father and had 17 recordings featuring the Bidens – including two of Joe Biden – proving that. The informant, who has remained anonymous, said it was common for Ukrainian business people to pay bribes but could not provide any further opinion on the veracity of Mr. Zlochevsky’s claims. (For more, see our Sept. 27 story.)

Democrats have lambasted the impeachment inquiry as baseless, calling it a desperate effort to distract from the GOP’s failure to govern effectively since winning back the House last year. Republicans counter that Mr. Biden and his administration have not turned over financial documents that could disprove the allegations. 

What evidence have Republicans produced since then?

Two weeks into their inquiry, the GOP chairs laid out their case at a Sept. 28 hearing. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who has testified at the past three impeachment proceedings, testified that he believed House Republicans had met the threshold for justifying an inquiry. He added, however, that it wasn’t yet clear whether Vice President Biden was directly involved, noting that it was possible Hunter and other relatives were selling “the illusion of access.”

Since then, committee chairs have largely restated the same claims but also presented a few new findings. Chair Comer released several bank records showing direct payments to Joe Biden, including two checks for $40,000 and $200,000 from his brother and sister-in-law labeled “loan repayment.” He also released a form from 2018 authorizing monthly transfers of $1,380 from Hunter Biden’s corporate account to his father, though The Washington Post reported that an email verified by forensic analysis showed they were payments for using a Ford Raptor truck purchased by his dad.

Mr. Comer has asked for documentation proving that the loans were legitimate. He also claims that some of this was “laundered” Chinese money, citing a bank investigator who flagged “erratic” payments to Hunter Biden’s corporate account with no evidence of services rendered. The investigator noted a pattern of China targeting children of politicians and trying to purchase political influence. 

The Judiciary Committee also produced an interim report arguing that the Justice Department had given Hunter Biden preferential treatment in its prosecution of criminal charges against him, including tax evasion. It credited two IRS whistleblowers with breaking open the case, and called out the younger Mr. Biden’s lawyers for pushing for the whistleblowers to be prosecuted.

On Dec. 7, two days after the report came out, a federal grand jury issued a nine-count indictment against Hunter Biden for seeking to evade millions of dollars in taxes on foreign income. 

On Wednesday he defied an Oversight subpoena for a closed-door deposition, instead giving a rare press conference outside the Capitol. He told reporters he was willing to testify, but only in public, so that his remarks could not be selectively leaked. 

Does this vote give the inquiry more legitimacy? 

Committee chairs said Hunter Biden’s “obstruction” was further proof of the need for the House resolution, to enforce subpoenas and other requests. They note that the president has softened previous denials that he was involved in his son’s business dealings. On Wednesday, Hunter told reporters his father was not “financially” involved – raising speculation about other types of involvement.

The resolution instructs the three House committees involved to continue their investigation, underscores their subpoena power, and lays out guidelines for hearings and other procedural questions.  

President Biden denounced the inquiry in a statement after the vote. “Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies,” he said.

Michael Andersen works out of his hulking, white Ford Transit van. It is roomy and robust, and he couldn’t deliver furniture or work in logistics without it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Andersen’s office on wheels puts out too many emissions for London’s ultra-low emissions zone (ULEZ), which was extended this year to include his working-class borough of Dagenham, nearly an hour east of central London.

“It’ll cost me £250 [$319] a month just to be able to drive my van,” says Mr. Andersen, explaining that driving a noncompliant vehicle in the ULEZ calls for a £12.5 ($16) daily fee. “But I’ll just have to drive it until I can afford a new van. I have to work, and I can’t use public transport.”

Until recently, the ULEZ was just a spot in London’s public transit-heavy city center. But in August, it was expanded to wrap in all of London, including its transit-poor outer areas. Pointing to the 4,000 annual premature pollution-related deaths that should be “reversed,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that emission-producing vehicles being driven and parked where people live was a key cause. “Clean air is a right, not a privilege,” he said.

But those who couldn’t afford to upgrade their vehicles were suddenly unable to drive to work, run errands, or visit family without paying that fee. And even though 9 out of every 10 vehicles were estimated to be ULEZ-compliant, the policy became a political football in a highly publicized by-election to fill former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s seat.

It’s a phenomenon that’s happening all over Europe with public health or climate change policies. The lesson learned, say policy experts, is that changes must be well communicated, fair, and properly funded, or they can become a public relations disaster and even work against their original goal.

“It’s an issue of domestic and international solidarity, intergenerational solidarity, etc., to do everything we can to mitigate against environmental catastrophes,” says Jon Cruddas, a Labour Party member of Parliament whose district includes Dagenham. “But it must be a just transition. ULEZ is an illustrative example of the dangers intrinsic to addressing some of the environmental challenges we face. Unless we handle it creatively and make sure that it doesn’t fall disproportionately on those least equipped to deal with it, then it could upend precisely what we want to achieve.”

“It could ensure we are unable to meet this global and domestic challenge because we lack the agility to make sure that we can take the poor with us.”

Toby Melville/Reuters

A road information sign and enforcement camera are seen at the new extended boundary of London's ultra-low emissions zone, in Ickenham, outer London, Aug. 22, 2023.

Clean air becomes contentious

Public health policies weren’t typically controversial, says Gary Fuller, an air quality scientist affiliated with the Imperial College London. “Those of us in the air pollution arena didn’t really face the systematic misinformation and disinformation that prevails in the climate arenas,” he says. “We didn’t have people out there who are evidence deniers. That’s changed tremendously.”

Road traffic accounts for most of the nitrogen dioxide emitted in British towns and cities; cars bring pollution straight to where people live; and air pollutants have been linked to asthma, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and other ailments, according to the United Kingdom’s chief medical officer.

More than 300 low-emissions zones have been put in across Europe with little fanfare, says Dr. Fuller. And studies show local communities have benefited, with reductions in heart and circulatory problems, and fewer admissions to hospitals.

Yet there’s a cost-of-living crisis, and societies are more polarized and unequal than before, creating an environment where antipollution efforts can become unpopular quickly and weaponized by politicians. That’s what the Conservative Party did in the Uxbridge by-election, says Bob Ward, policy director at LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. It was worried about dropping poll numbers and also felt pressure from fringe climate change critics on its right, and so attacked the ULEZ as a Labour policy – despite it originally being a plan announced by Mr. Johnson when he was mayor of London.

In addition, the ULEZ has raised questions about who should bear the brunt of its cost. Health- and climate-related policies are typically based on “polluter pays” principles to incentivize people to change their behavior, says Mr. Ward. With the ULEZ, the idea is not to collect money, but to spur owners of polluting vehicles to upgrade to cleaner ones.

But Mr. Ward says that the burden of the ULEZ has fallen too heavily on working-class vehicle owners who are struggling to make the needed upgrades. Even with a trade-in payment implemented by the London mayor’s office, the maximum subsidy was only £2,000 for cars and motorcycles, and there were all kinds of exceptions that vehicle owners found confusing and exclusionary. (Larger vehicles like vans do get a larger trade-in payment, which was increased in August.)

“There was no pushback against the original ULEZ,” says Mr. Ward. “The public will support policies if they think they’re fair, and fair means you help people do the right thing. You don’t force them into an impossible choice. Against a backdrop of high prices, with people particularly on low incomes struggling with the cost of living, it would have been smarter for government to properly subsidize.”

The social justice angle also complicated the rollout of the ULEZ, says Tim Dexter, policy manager of Asthma and Lung UK, a British charity. Air pollution impacts poor people more, as they are more likely to live near major thoroughfares and industrial sites.

“These schemes do work, but we need to be a lot more honest across the spectrum about the amount of support that’s required to be able to do this,” says Mr. Dexter. “We need a fair transition. We’ve got the solutions, we know the tools, and it’s been done elsewhere in the U.K. and other countries. And tackling air-pollution impacts is the first line of the battle against climate change.”

Lenora Chu

Commuters wait in a bus line in Dagenham, a working-class exurb now part of London's ultra-low emissions zone, Nov. 13, 2023. Almost everyone here has an opinion about the ULEZ.

“It’s just ill-thought out”

Back in Dagenham, commuters file out of the subway station and wait in bus lines on a Monday afternoon.

Almost everyone has an opinion about the ULEZ. This working-class neighborhood sits about a 50-minute metro ride east of central London. Ford Motor Co. moved a plant here back in the 1930s, and for a time Dagenham was home to Europe’s largest car plant, a British weapons manufacturer, and other industrial sites. Today it has one of the highest child poverty rates in London.

Many locals don’t own cars, but some do. Spencer Landers, a railway worker, says he occasionally drove an older neighbor to the grocery store who couldn’t immediately upgrade his car. “He’s had to scrimp and scrape all his savings. I’ve took him down about a mile and a half to where he does his shopping,” says Mr. Landers. “He’s just retired and he’s had to try to piece together whatever money he can to get a new car.”

Terry Goodes was happy to call the ULEZ and the London mayor a few choice expletives. The retired carpenter is recently widowed and has thought about getting back to work. But coming up with the money to comply with the ULEZ might put up a roadblock.

“Most working-class people are at the brink of what they can do financially, you know?” says Mr. Goodes. “It’s just ill-thought out. The cost of living and generally the state of things – and this just didn’t help. It’s as black-and-white as that, really.”

Jean-Francois Badias/AP/File

The Parliament of the European Union reached an agreement last week with representatives of its 27 member states on the draft text of the Artificial Intelligence Act.

“Landmark” was the headline of choice, and little wonder. After months of discussion and debate among politicians, pundits, and pressure groups worldwide, a group of legislators was finally taking regulatory steps to address the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

And not just any legislators. Following a series of marathon meetings, the Parliament of the European Union – the world’s largest bloc of free-trading democracies – had reached agreement with representatives of its 27 member states on the draft text of the Artificial Intelligence Act.

Last Friday’s announcement, however, also drew attention for the twin wake-up calls it sounded.

First, it brought home how difficult it is proving for governments to place effective guardrails on the dizzyingly rapid expansion of AI. The EU began working on its AI strategy in 2018, and the new law won’t take full effect until sometime in 2026.

Yet it also homed in on the main reason that task is becoming more urgent: the impact already being felt on the everyday lives, rights, and political autonomy of individual citizens around the globe.

The EU’s purpose is explicit: ensuring “trustworthy, human-centric” use of AI as ever more powerful computer systems mine, and learn from, ever larger masses of digital data, spawning an ever wider array of applications.

The same technology that may now allow researchers to unlock the mystery of a virus could help create one. Large language models such as ChatGPT not only can produce fast, fluent prose from billions of words on the internet. They can, and indeed do, make mistakes, producing misinformation. And that same huge store of data can be abused in other ways.

One key individual-rights concern for the EU legislators was the prospect that AI could be employed, as is the case in China, to surveil and target citizens or particular groups in Europe.

The new law bans scouring the internet for images to create face-recognition libraries, as well as the use of visual profiling. The police would be exempted, but only under tightly defined circumstances.

Carolyn Thompson/AP/File

A camera with face-recognition capabilities is installed at a New York school in 2018, before such cameras were banned from schools in the state earlier this year.

More broadly, though the exact wording of the law has yet to be published, it will reportedly ensure that people are made aware whether the words and images they’re seeing on their screens have been generated not by humans, but by AI.

Among systems to be banned outright are any “manipulating human behavior to circumvent free will.”

The most powerful “foundation” AI systems – the general-purpose platforms on which developers are building a whole range of applications – will face testing transparency and reporting requirements, obliged to share details of their internal workings with EU regulators.

All of this will be enforced by a new AI regulatory body, with fines for the most serious violations as high as 7% of a company’s global turnover.

Still, the laborious process of producing the AI Act is a reminder of the head winds still facing efforts to place internationally agreed-upon guardrails around a technological revolution whose reach transcends borders.

In the world’s major AI power, the United States, President Joe Biden issued an executive order in October imposing safety tests on developers of the most powerful systems. He also mandated standards for federal agencies purchasing AI applications.

His aim, like the EU’s, was to ensure “safety, security, and trust.”

Yet officials acknowledged that more comprehensive regulation would need an act of Congress, which still seems far from agreeing on how, or even whether, to legislate limits.

One obstacle is the AI companies themselves. Though they acknowledge potential perils, they have argued that there is a risk that overregulation could limit the growth of AI and reduce its benefits. 

And would-be regulators also face geopolitical obstacles, especially the rivalry between the U.S. and China.

One sign has been Washington’s move to limit Chinese access to the latest, specialized computer chips key to building the highest-powered AI systems.

And that touches on a wider national security issue: the growing role of artificial intelligence in weapons systems. Drones have played a major role in Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invasion and in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. The next evolutionary step, military analysts suggest, could be AI-powered “drone swarms” on future battlefields.

The priority of the U.S. is clearly to seek an edge in AI weaponry – at least until there is a realistic hope of bringing China, Russia, and other high-tech military powers into the kind of agreements that, last century, helped limit nuclear weapons.

The EU’s new law does not even cover military applications of AI.

So for now, its main impact will be on the kind of “trust” and “human-centric” issues that European authorities and Mr. Biden both highlighted: letting people know when words or images have been created by AI, and, the lawmakers hope, blocking applications that seek deliberately to manipulate users’ behavior.

Still, that could prove important not just for individuals but also for the societies they live in – the beginning of a fight against the use of AI to “amplify polarization, bias, and misinformation” and thus undermine democracies, as one leading AI expert, Dr. De Kai, recently put it.

The historian Yuval Harari has voiced particular alarm over AI’s increasingly powerful ability to “manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds, or images,” noting that language, after all, forms the bedrock of how we humans interact with one another.

“AI’s new mastery of language,” he says, “means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization.”

Cornel West, prominent public intellectual and progressive activist, has embarked on a new mission: to break up the duopoly of America’s political system and offer voters a fresh choice by running for president. 

But doesn’t Dr. West – along with the other independent or third-party candidates – risk helping former President Donald Trump beat President Joe Biden in 2024? After all, third-party candidates proved crucial in key states in 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 

“To me, brother Donald Trump is a bona fide gangster and a neofascist. ... So I understand the fears,” Dr. West told reporters at a breakfast Thursday hosted by the Monitor. But “brother Biden has a military adventurism as part and parcel of his past and present.” 

Both men, Dr. West says, are “beneath mediocrity,” though he sees some “positive features” in President Biden over former President Trump. Ultimately, he says, “we got one who’s pushing us toward a second civil war at home, and the other is pushing us toward a World War III abroad.” 

And maybe, he suggests, 2024 isn’t a Biden-Trump rematch after all. 

“Let’s go ahead and have debates. ... See which way the country moves,” says Dr. West, a self-described socialist who over the years has been a professor of philosophy, religion, and African American studies at Harvard, Princeton, and other universities. He currently holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. 

Other prominent independent or third-party 2024 presidential contenders include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. In recent polls, Dr. West has averaged 2.4% of general-election voters, according to Real Clear Politics. 

“I don’t think that what I’m doing is in any way aiding the triumph of fascism,” he says. “I think I’m trying to give voice to some of the most crucial anti-fascist voices, figures, movements in the culture.

“And I can say this, too: that if the only alternative to fascism in America is a milquetoast neoliberalism at home and a military adventurism abroad, America will go fascist anyway.”

Dr. West’s platform – entitled “Policy Pillars for a Movement Rooted in Truth, Justice, & Love” – is expansive and ambitious, if vague. The first two items are “abolish poverty” and “abolish homelessness.” He would also disband NATO, end U.S. war funding for Ukraine and “invest in peacemaking,” cease military funding to Israel, and “end Israeli apartheid of Palestinian people.” 

The professor began his 2024 presidential campaign in June under the People’s Party, switched to the Green Party nine days later, and then in October opted to run as an independent. 

“The Green Party, God bless them, they were kind to me,” he says. “They had [ballot access in] 17 states automatically, and that was one of my motivations. ... But I found out that it was just too difficult to work with the Green Party. It’s hard to be a jazz man in a party band.” 

So far, Dr. West has raised about a half-million dollars and has 18,000 volunteers, according to a campaign co-manager traveling with him. A big task will be getting on the ballot in as many states as possible – and raising enough money to keep his operation going. Dr. West is in Washington for a fundraiser by “local activists,” he says, and other meetings.

Following are more excerpts from the Monitor Breakfast with Dr. West, lightly edited for clarity: 

What type of voters are you reaching out to in particular? 

I’m trying to convince those who were thinking about voting for Trump to vote for me. And I’m spending some good time in Trump country, because I’m convinced that a lot of people who voted for Trump are not die-hard Trump-ists; they’re just deeply disillusioned with the Democratic Party.

So much of our campaign is actually zeroing in on those who don’t vote, especially young people. Part of this campaign is about convincing young people that there are examples of persons who are concerned about public life having quality moral and spiritual greatness, rather than just upward mobility. And to see that in action in the flesh, so we can pass on the best of America to the younger generation.

A poll released Tuesday by GenForward found that 17% of Black voters would vote for Mr. Trump today – up from 8% in 2020. What’s happening? 

Well, it just reminds us that skin pigmentation is not a determination of wisdom, courage, and moral clarity and insight. Something else mediates that. Now what are the reasons why so many Black folk, especially the Black brothers, [have moved toward Mr. Trump]? 

It could be the hypermasculinity that they see in Trump. [It also] could be the fact that the Democratic Party is associated with the invention and the creation of the mass incarceration regime, which I consider a crime against humanity. 

If you were the president of a major university and were asked the question that Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York posed at a congressional hearing, how would you have responded? Would there be any sanctions against people on campus calling for the genocide of Jews?

There would be some kind of move toward a disciplinary process. You can’t be the judge and executioner at the same time. But I would go further. There was a time before universities became so corporatized and commodified – it’s just sad to see how these big donors and these big benefactors more and more are dictating what the content and character of education is.

That to me is just a form of intellectual vulgarity if not moral bankruptcy. But I would say also, as a president of a university, that our Jewish students are just as precious as our Palestinian students. Our Palestinian students are just as precious as our Black students, Black students just as precious as our white Catholic students, on and on and on.

Do you think the answers that the three university presidents gave last week should have cost them their jobs? Harvard President Claudine Gay said that the university response to calls for genocide of Jews would depend on “context.”

Their answers were weak. And they were weak in part because we no longer have university presidents who speak with the moral clarity and the kind of passion required. You could just see the tutoring from the lawyerly consultants they had.

But should they have lost their jobs, as happened to the president of the University of Pennsylvania?

Absolutely not. Since when can you have donors and benefactors get together and dictate who’s president of major institutions, let alone these ruling-class institutions like Harvard and Penn and so forth? My God, what kind of vulgarity are we talking about? What happened to robust discourse? This isn’t Wall Street. This isn’t Silicon Valley. This isn’t hedge fund land. These are universities.

Reuters/Aly Song/File Photo

A Volkswagen electric vehicle makes a debut during an auto show in Shanghai, China, on April 17, 2023.

Seldom does a staff mutiny within so small a firm cast so broad a ripple.

Last week, the German automaker Volkswagen said a Chinese-led inspection of its plant in Xinjiang, a province where state repression has drawn international criticism for years, found no evidence of forced labor. The assessment was endorsed by Löning, a Berlin-based business consultancy focused on human rights. Yesterday its roughly 20 employees publicly challenged the audit’s credibility.

The dispute is a reminder that the economic and security interests of nations cohere through transparency, the rule of law, and regard for human dignity. It comes at a moment when China, grappling with its worst economic slump in decades, faces new demands for openness.

European leaders confronted Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last week with a list of 13 China-based entities they accuse of breaking international sanctions imposed on Russia over its war in Ukraine. They have also taken steps in recent months to finalize a new European ban on goods made with forced labor.

The new law includes a framework for investigating companies and supply chains. It would take direct aim at the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry in China, where companies like Volkswagen are partnering with state-owned counterparts.

“Clearly, the Europeans are taking a much more robust stance than the Chinese were expecting or wanting to see,” Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, told The Diplomat yesterday.

At a meeting last week, the Communist Party Politburo declared that it was “necessary to ... strengthen economic propaganda and public opinion guidance” to boost China’s economic recovery in the new year. That nod toward secrecy, however, tells an incomplete story.

In an agreement signed last year with Washington, Beijing opened access for foreign regulators to audit Chinese firms listed on overseas exchanges. Those audits cover both financial matters and social concerns such as labor practices. In most cases so far, foreign assessment teams have had to partner with local counterparts who collect and interpret the data. That is what led to the dispute at Löning. An unnamed Chinese law firm conducted the Volkswagen audit. The top two officials at Löning merely reviewed the assessment.

But a door once opened may be hard to shut. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the main U.S. watchdog, has undertaken an audit of all 200 Chinese companies listed on American stock exchanges this year. It is also auditing the auditors. In a midyear report, the board found that three-fourths of the assessments it reviewed by U.S. and Chinese auditors contained an “unacceptable” level of deficiencies.

Such steps toward transparency and accountability may help seed a gradual shift in China’s governing culture based on secrecy. “Democracies ... have their own competitive advantage: openness,” wrote Christopher Walker, a vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy, in the journal Foreign Affairs. A small office in Berlin has sent Beijing a big reminder.