few weeks after
Chelsea Manning was released from military prison, having served seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking official secrets, she came to a terrible realization. "I was out, but I saw that while I had been away, the prison had moved out here as well. That's how I feel. I feel like I haven't left, we've just exchanged prisons."
That grim assessment, that even in freedom she was trapped within a prison, dawned on her as she walking one day through the streets of Brooklyn. The New York borough has a reputation for hipster cool, but she was shocked to see so many heavily armed police.
"There was this immense police presence and they were militarized. I've been part of an occupying force in a foreign country, and I know what that looks like. That's what I saw in Brooklyn – an occupying force."
Her powerful fear about what America has become in the seven years of her incarceration, combined with an equally powerful determination to do something about it lies behind Chelsea Manning's announcement this week that she is running for a
US Senate seat.
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Manning says she is putting her faith in victory in the local activist and student groups with whom she has been building connections since her release. "We are not doing a centralized ground game, we are waiting for local communities to come to us. I will come, and I will listen."
Does she fear that she could crash and burn, as the Black Lives Matter celebrity DeRay Mckesson did when he contested the Democratic primary for Baltimore mayor in 2016, coming in sixth with just 2% of the vote?
"Baltimore is a deep-rooted city with a very active activist community, and I don't think DeRay utilized that," she replied. "I'm not going to criticize a friend of mine, but at the same time we are talking to local people in Maryland, and we are taking the time."
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Manning calls her politics "radical anti-authoritarianism". Asked to explain, she grew animated, her voice crescendoing: "The United States has the largest and most expensive military in the world, but we always want more. We have the largest prison system in the world, yet we want more. We have the largest and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world by far, and still we want more. How much is enough? That is my moment – we need this to stop."
Though she says she has no animus towards Cardin – "I voted for him twice" – she sees him as part of the problem. She points to the
Israeli Anti-Boycott Actthat he championed that has been widely criticized for attempting to stifle protests against Israeli settlements.
In her first campaign statement, Manning mentions three core policy areas: criminal justice, healthcare and immigration. In each, she pitches herself strikingly to the left of Bernie Sanders. Prisons should be closed and inmates released; all hospitals should be free at the point of use, no questions asked; US borders should be open.
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And she does not mention Donald Trump.
Why no reference to the man who for many progressives has become the embodiment of evil?
"All our problems are personalized into one individual, but it's a systemic problem. Our broken immigration system didn't pop up overnight, it was a machine built over decades by centrists from both sides."
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Attack lines that she is certain to face on the campaign trail have already begun to be aired. She is a traitor to her country, is the most predictable iteration, followed by conspiracy theories that she is in the pay of the
Russians attempting to destabilize a sitting Democratic senator.
Again she appears unfazed. "Everybody is a traitor these days. James Comey, Hillary Clinton, Trump, Obama … the word has no meaning any more. Any form of 'I don't agree with you' becomes 'treason', and in that kind of society we can't have debates."
WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, to whom she leaked the documents in 2010, are also certain to be invoked against her. What does she say now of WikiLeaks?
"I made a decision in 2010 to release the documents. I reached out to the New York Times and the Washington Post, I ran out of time, and that was the decision I made. I can't change that."
Has she had any contact with Assange since the data transfer?
"No. Zero."
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