Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the elections we had in the before times — when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.

It’s not because we didn’t have big disagreements back then. The Iraq War kicked up some pretty vehement arguments. It’s not because we weren’t polarized. Pundits have been writing about political polarization since at least 2000 and maybe well before.

Politics is different now because something awful has been unleashed. William A. Galston defines this awful thing in his fantastic new book, “Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.” Even before the Charlie Kirk assassination it was obvious that the dark passions now pervade the American psyche, and thus American politics.

A core challenge in life is how do you motivate people to do things — to vote in a certain way, to take a certain kind of action. Good leaders motivate people through what you might call the bright passions — hope, aspiration, an inspiring vision of a better life. But these days, and maybe through all days, leaders across the political spectrum have found that dark passions are much easier to arouse. Evolution has wired us to be extremely sensitive to threat, which psychologists call negativity bias.

Donald Trump is a man almost entirely motivated by dark passions — hatred, anger, resentment, fear, the urge to dominate — and he stirs those passions to get people to support him. Speaking before a CPAC conference in 2023 he warned of “sinister forces trying to kill America,” by turning the nation into a “socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.”

Trump is a master of this dark art, but I wouldn’t say my Trump-supporting friends have darker personalities than my Trump-opposing ones. Progressives also appeal to dark passions. A decade or so ago I had a poignant conversation with a Democratic ad-maker who was anguished because to help his candidates, nearly every ad he made was designed to arouse fear and animosity.

“The thing people forget is that the political left were really the ones who perfected the politics of anger,” left-wing social organizer Marshall Ganz told Charles Duhigg for an essay in The Atlantic in 2019. “It’s the progressives who figured out that by helping people see injustice, rather than just economics, we become strong.” Michael Walzer, the eminent co-editor emeritus of the progressive magazine Dissent, put it clearly, “Fear has to be our starting point, even though it is a passion most easily exploited by the right.”

We in the media appeal to those passions too. One of our jobs is to motivate you to click on our headlines. A team of researchers from New Zealand looked at headlines from 47 American publications. They found that between 2000 and 2019, the share of headlines meant to evoke anger more than doubled. The prevalence of headlines meant to evoke fear rose by 150%.

I want to understand how dark passions are ruling us, so let’s take a quick look at each one:

Anger

Anger rises when somebody has damaged something you care about. Anger can be noble when directed at injustice. But the seductive thing about anger is that it feels perversely good. It makes you feel strong, self-respecting and in control. Expressing anger is a dense form of communication. It lets people know, quite clearly, that you want something to change. The problem is that these days we don’t have just bursts of anger in our public life. Anger has become a permanent condition in many of our lives.

Hatred

You can be angry at someone you love. Hatred, on the other hand, is pervasive. As Galston writes, “We feel anger because of what someone has done, hatred because of who someone is.” The person who hates you wants to destroy you. Antisemites hate Jews. During the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus hated the Tutsis. “Hatred cannot be appeased,” Galston continues, “it can only be opposed.”

Resentment

Resentment is about social standing. Someone makes you feel inferior to them. Someone doesn’t offer you recognition and respect. Resentful people are curled in on themselves. They can’t stop thinking about and resenting the people who are so lofty that those other people may not even know they exist. Anger is often expressed, but resentment is often bottled up because the person in its grip feels powerless, socially inferior.

Fear

Fear is healthy when it alerts you to some real threat. But as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted, “Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free-floating, with no clear address or cause.” When that happens fear turns into a feeling of existential menace that doesn’t lead to any clear course of action. When fear turns into terror, it makes rational deliberation almost impossible. When people can’t locate the source of their fear, you never know who they will lash out at and blame; you just know that a scapegoat will be found.

The urge to dominate

This is the one we talk about least, but it is the darkest of the dark passions, the most omnipresent and the most destructive. St. Augustine called it libido dominandi. It’s the urge to control, to wield power over someone, to make yourself into a god. It is often driven by repressed anxiety, insecurity and a fear of abandonment that causes people to want to establish their power in every situation. It exists in personal life and causes some people to try to manipulate you, interrupt and talk over you. In families, it leads to overbearing parenting, conditional love, boundary violations and isolation tactics — cutting someone off.

In intellectual life, it causes some people to want to dominate reality, to impose their own false view of the truth on everyone around them. People with a strong urge to dominate can’t stand the condition of doubt. They want to impose brutal certainties and crude simplifications.

Politics is about power, so of course it attracts people with a strong libido dominandi. When that urge is combined with what psychologists call a “dark triad” personality type (Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy), you wind up with some pretty brutal characters — Hitler, Mao, Stalin.

In public life the urge to dominate can take brutal forms. When you see cops beating a man who is on the ground and barely conscious, that’s the urge to dominate. It can also take more subtle forms. I’m struck by how powerful the human urge to segregate and exclude is. For example, once left-leaning people established a dominant position in academia, the media and nonprofit sector, they mostly excluded conservative and working-class voices. They wanted control.

Dark passions are part of our nature, like keys on a piano. If we’re bombarded with speech that presses the dark keys, antipathy will rise. When people consume communication that demonstrates respect, curiosity, communion and hope, antipathy falls. The problem is that dark passions are imperial. Once they get in your body, they tend to spread. Dark passions drive out the good ones.

Today American politics is driven by dueling fears, hatreds, resentments. If liberal democracy fails, it will be because a variety of forces have undermined the emotional foundations on which liberalism depends. Dark passions lead to heartlessness, cruelty, violence, distrust. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words that arouse the dark passions can kill you.

America’s Founding Fathers spent a lot of time thinking about dark passions. Samuel Adams declared that humans are driven by “ambitions and lust for power.” Patrick Henry confessed that he had come to “dread the depravity of human nature.” John Jay declared, “The mass of men are neither wise nor good.”

They preferred democracy because they didn’t trust one man or one small group of people to hold power. They thought it more prudent to spread power around, and then in the Constitution, imposed all sorts of ways to check human desire.

Since then, and especially over the last 60 years, there has been a great loss of moral knowledge, a naivete about and ignorance of dark passions. “Sinful” used to be a powerful, resonant, soul-shaking word. Now it is mostly used in reference to desserts. “When I think back to my years of growing up in the 1950s,” Andrew Delbanco once wrote, “I realize that this process of unnaming evil, though it began centuries ago, has accelerated enormously during my lifetime.”

How did we get so ignorant about the struggle between light and dark forces within us? Well, religion is all about that struggle, and religion plays a smaller role in public life.

After World War II, an array of thinkers, including those in the self-esteem movement, argued that human nature is essentially good. If there’s evil in the world, it’s out there in social structures, not in ourselves. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychology became the primary way people understood themselves. The psyche replaced the soul and symptoms replaced sin. Then we privatized morality. Schools, for example, got out of the moral-formation business and into the career prep business. We told successive generations to find your own values, find your own truth. That’s like telling someone to find your own astrophysics. If we don’t have teachers and leaders guiding us through the long human tradition of moral knowledge, we’re going to wind up pretty damned ignorant.

There is one force above all others that arouses dark passions, and we possess it in abundance: humiliation. People feel humiliated when they are not granted equal standing and when they have been deprived of something they think is their right. And as we all know, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. Humiliated people eventually lash out.

Humiliation drives world events. Germany was humiliated at the end of World War I. The Arab world was humiliated after its defeat in the Six Day War. Russia was humiliated by its defeat in the Cold War. China scholar William Callahan wrote, “The master narrative of modern Chinese history is the discourse of the century of national humiliation.”

Humiliation produces horrors at home. Since the Columbine shooting we’ve had a long string of humiliated and solitary men brooding over their insults and then finding a psychic solution through the gun. Over the last 60 years the educated elite has created a meritocracy, an economic system and a cultural atmosphere that serves itself and leaves everybody else feeling excluded and humiliated. Over the last 30 years the richest, whitest and best-educated members of our society have become the most extreme people on the right and the left and began a war on each other that leaves all sides feeling furious and fearful. I’m not the only one to wonder if history would have been different if then-President Barack Obama hadn’t humiliated Donald Trump at a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

So to return to my original question: Why does politics feel so different now than in times past? My short answer is that over these years, demagogues in politics, in the media and online have exploited common feelings of humiliation to arouse dark passions, and those dark passions are dehumanizing our culture and undermining liberal democracy. My intuition is that we’re only at the beginning of this spiral, and that it will only get worse.

History provides clear examples of how to halt the dark passion doom loop. It starts when a leader, or a group of people, who have every right to feel humiliated, who have every right to resort to the dark motivations, decide to interrupt the process. They simply refuse to be swallowed by the bitterness, and they work — laboriously over years or decades — to cultivate the bright passions in themselves — to be motivated by hope, care and some brighter vision of the good, and to show those passions to others, especially their enemies.

Václav Havel did this. Abraham Lincoln did this in his second Inaugural Address. Alfred Dreyfus did this after his false conviction and Viktor Frankl did this after the Holocaust. You may believe Jesus is the messiah or not, but what gives his life moral grandeur was his ability to meet hatred with love. These leaders displayed astounding forbearance. They did not seek payback and revenge.

Obviously, Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind: “To our most bitter opponents we say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience, obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you.”

Obviously, Nelson Mandela comes to mind. Far from succumbing to dark passions, he oriented his life toward a vision of the good. “During my lifetime,” he said near the beginning of his imprisonment, “I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.”

Galston, who is a political theorist, revives the ancient tradition that emphasizes that speech and rhetoric have tremendous power to arouse or suppress passions. When we choose our leaders we are not only choosing a set of policies but the moral ecology they create with their words. He also points out that in the early 2000s, as millions of manufacturing jobs went away, the national leadership class barely stopped to notice.

Related Articles

Letters: If Hamas cared about civilians at all it would release the hostages

Joe Soucheray: The fraud continues, but Walz thinks he’s earned another term

David M. Drucker: Trump is not as unpopular as his opponents think

Lynn Schmidt: Presidential incapacity and the limits of the 25th Amendment

Other voices: That’s more Karl Marx than Ronald Reagan

I’d add only that in order to repress dark passions and arouse the good ones, leaders need to create conditions in which people can experience social mobility. As philosophers have long understood, the antidote to fear is not courage; it’s hope. If people feel their lives and their society are stagnant, they will fight like scorpions in a jar. But if they feel that they personally are progressing toward something better, that their society is progressing toward something better, they will have an expanded sense of agency, their motivations will be oriented toward seizing some wonderful opportunity, and those are nice motivations to have.

The dark passions look backward toward some wrong committed in the past and render people hardhearted. The bright passions look forward toward some better life and render people tough-minded but tenderhearted.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

Veteran TV and radio broadcaster Stan Turner believed that preparation was the key to any successful interview, TV broadcast or radio show.

In 1983, for example, Turner spent days preparing for an interview with President Ronald Reagan. He assembled a thick file on the president that included clippings, facts and questions to ask, said longtime friend Tom Oszman.

“Stan always wanted to do quality work,” said Oszman, who runs TC Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to digitizing local TV broadcasts. “He would prepare for his show all morning, probably even before he came in with lots of papers. He knew about his guests. He knew about their history. He was very factually correct. He was very prepared. He didn’t just come in and turn the microphone on.”

Turner died Sunday at Our Lady of Peace Hospice in St. Paul of complications related to breast cancer. He was 81.

Turner had one of those voices that was instantly recognizable, Oszman said. “He loved telling stories. He loved telling stories about people in our community. I think that we have lost one of the great storytellers of our area.”

Turner told the Pioneer Press in 2018 that his love of journalism was sparked by reading “My Weekly Reader,” the educational classroom magazine, while he was growing up in St. Louis Park. “I just loved reading about things and then telling other kids what I had found out because I knew they weren’t reading it,” Turner said. “It sounds corny, but that’s how I got into it. I love telling stories.”

Stan Turner and his daughter Laura during their regular walk around the Maplewood Mall in December 2020, not long after he underwent open heart surgery. (Scott Takushi / Pioneer Press)

Turner was born to be a journalist, said his daughter, Laura Turner Schubkegel, who lives in Woodbury. “My dad just had this uncanny, insatiable thirst for knowledge, facts and reporting. And that voice of his. He’s always had it. It was authoritative and believable. You knew you could believe this man. It was very credible. Trusting, that’s the word. Oh, and it was smooth. Just like butter.”

Turner majored in journalism at the University of Minnesota and, while still a student, got a job in the news department at KDWB Radio after splicing together an audition tape at his childhood home in St. Louis Park. He moved to KSTP Radio News in 1966, then was hired back at KDWB as news director a year later. He returned to Hubbard Broadcasting in 1968, taking a job as government reporter for KSTP-TV.

“That’s when he found his niche, covering government and the political scene,” Schubkegel said. “That’s where he really wanted to be. He just loved the truth. He loved the action. He liked the two sides in the chambers going at it, trying to pass bills. He found that fascinating, and he made a lot of friends at the Capitol. Politics just really resonated with him. People trusted him. He knew that was the most important thing.”

Turner, who taught an Introduction to Radio and Television Journalism class at the University of St. Thomas, always stressed the importance of impartiality and fair and balanced reporting, said KSTP chief political reporter Tom Hauser, one of Turner’s students. “He always said that the story is the story. The reporter is not the story,” Hauser said. “He would say, ‘People don’t care what you think. They care what the people you interview think.’ I’ve always kept that in mind, and that’s how I report the news.”

Turner also believed that “reporters and photographers are the backbone of any news operation,” Hauser said. “An anchor just kind of throws to what the reporters are out in the field doing. He always felt that nothing was more important than covering what the government is doing with your taxpayer dollars and with policies they are passing.”

An innovator

Turner served as KSTP’s associate news director, weekend anchor, news director and weekday co-anchor before he was hired, in 1989, to help launch a 24-hour satellite news channel for Hubbard Broadcasting called the All News Channel, where he served as primetime weekday anchor and writer. He lost his job when the channel went off the air in 2002.

Turner was “an innovator and a great broadcaster and a great newsman,” said Stan Hubbard, the chairman of Hubbard Broadcasting, which owns KSTP.

“It’s a terrible loss,” Hubbard said Monday. “Stan was a wonderful person. He was a hard-working, dedicated newsperson who was not afraid to go after the truth. He was always very prepared. He was terrific. Everything he did was good.”

In 2004, Turner became news director, reporter, and newscaster with the Minnesota News Network. He also began hosting a Saturday program on KLBB-AM Radio in downtown Stillwater. His “All Request and Dedication Show” soon took the noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday slot.

Turner’s time at KLBB was a gift to everyone in the east metro and beyond, said Don Effenberger, a longtime friend and former Pioneer Press editor.

“While there’s all this well-deserved attention to Stan’s newsgathering and all his news jobs, I wouldn’t want it to be forgotten what he did for the east metro community with his KLBB shows, both that Saturday show he did and of course, the ‘All Request’ one,” Effenberger said. “Stan found so much joy in music and sharing it with people, and I think that’s what made the show so popular.”

Turner told the Pioneer Press that his love of music came through “osmosis” when he was a baby. “I had eczema, a terrible skin rash, when I was born, and I almost died from it,” he said in 2018. “It was tough to get me to take naps or get to sleep because I hurt all the time, so my mother would roll the crib over by the radio, and that would help me go to sleep. I think that’s part of it. I just absolutely adore music.”

Among his favorite artists: Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. His favorite Presley song was “Loving You,” he told the Pioneer Press. “I like lyrics. I like melody,” he said. “I like words I can repeat.”

Here’s part of the playlist from one of his “Request and Dedication” shows on KLBB in 2018: country star Terri Gibbs, Chuck Berry, novelty songs, Motown, some Johnny Mathis, local chanteuse Sharone LeMieux and Guy Marks singing “Loving You Has Made Me Bananas.”

Each song had a story, one that was meticulously researched by Turner. His music library filled his KLBB office and included “Billboard’s Hottest 100 Hits,” “The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul” and “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950.”

Related Articles

Retro movies are hitting big at the box office. Why cinephiles and theaters are going back in time

Sonny Curtis, Crickets member who penned ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ theme, dies at 88

Movie Review: ‘Him’ fumbles a potent premise

Movie review: Matthew McConaughey steers a white-knuckle wildfire drama in ‘The Lost Bus’

Robert Redford’s neighbors reveal his quiet, ‘sad’ life in California

“I love doing research. This is my bible right here,” Turner told the Pioneer Press at the time, pointing to “The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits.” “I find out information people wouldn’t otherwise get or have or know. I call them ‘Eureka moments.’

“To me, this is a logical extension of being a reporter, which I’ve been all of my life,” he said. “We are hunters and gatherers.”

Turner’s popular show ended in March 2018 when KLBB went off the air. “He was a loyalist,” Oszman said. “He did that show till KLBB closed; it was not canceled. He did the All News Channel until they went off the air. He stayed with companies until they were done, and he had a 35-year track record at Hubbard. He was at KLBB for about 14 years. He was a loyal guy, a loyal friend, and a loyal employee.”

A ‘St. Paul guy’

Stan Turner, left, is joined by Anthony Andler, the proprietor of Heimie’s Haberdashery, for a test run of his popular “All Request and Dedication Show,” in a new radio broadcast space in Andler’s business in the Hamm Building in downtown St. Paul on Sept. 27, 2019. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)

Turner was a “St. Paul guy through and through,” said Rick Shefchik, former Pioneer Press reporter, columnist and media critic. “As a radio newsman, he became intimately knowledgeable about politicians, lawmaking and legislators at the Capitol,” Shefchik said. “When he  moved to TV in the late 1970s, he was one of the key faces in a fiercely competitive TV news market at a time when local anchors became celebrities.”

But Turner was “never taken with his own importance, being a news reporter to his soul,” Shefchik said.

Turner clearly reveled in his years hosting the “All Request and Dedication Show” on KLBB, said Shefchik, a frequent guest and the author of “Everybody’s Heard About the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ‘n’ Roll in Minnesota.”

“When a famous musician died, Stan would meticulously assemble a tribute show, and took great satisfaction in researching the background of even the most obscure songs requested by his loyal listeners,” Shefchik said.

Related Articles

Scandia ready for Gateway Trail, but landowner raises issue with tunnel

Mahtomedi football game canceled Friday night due to nearby law enforcement activity

Drivers asked to use extra caution for motorcycle Flood Run weekend

‘Field of Bands’ fundraiser at Washington County Fairgrounds to aid veterans and troops

Leapin’ Lena’s stick is now a part of Stillwater history

Turner said: “In this day and age of hard, jagged corners and nasty rhetoric and everything, it’s nice to connect to this every day, isn’t it? I am lucky. I’ve always known that. From Day One. I never have taken this for granted.”

Turner met Ruth Juneau Huberty, a part-time weather reporter and office manager at KDWB, when he worked there in 1965; she was a divorced mother of two children, John and Katie, whom he later adopted. The couple got married in 1966; their daughter, Laura, was born the following year. The couple divorced in 1981.

Turner is survived by his children, Laura Schubkegel, Katherine Urich, and John Turner, and his longtime companion, Mary Brennan.

A celebration of Turner’s life will be held at a later date. Wulff Funeral Home in Woodbury is handling arrangements.

As the first full week of training camp begins, there’s no hint of an answer to the question that most Wild fans have about the coming season and the half-dozen or so seasons to come after that. If star forward Kirill Kaprizov is to sign a contract extension that will keep him in Minnesota after July of next year, neither his agent Paul Theofanous nor Wild general manager Bill Guerin are admitting to having anything cooking right now.

Theofanous reportedly made an unannounced trip to Minnesota last week and had a lengthy conversation with a member of the Wild’s hockey operations department during a training camp scrimmage at TRIA Rink. But if those talks yielded any progress, or any setbacks, neither side is talking about it.

He is healthy and has been a full participant in training camp, and Kaprizov is even back to his familiar habits of staying on the ice after practice for a few extra shots and skating drills, until the Zamboni driver politely asks him to vacate. He did not travel to Winnipeg for the Wild’s preseason opening 3-2 overtime win over the Jets on Sunday, nor will Kaprizov be part of the traveling party that heads to Dallas for a 7 p.m. Tuesday night preseason game versus the Stars.

The Stars will be coming to visit on Thursday night for the Wild’s first home game of the preseason and their first game since the name change at what’s now known as Grand Casino Arena.

In his meeting with reporters on day one of camp, Kaprizov reiterated that he likes playing in Minnesota, likes his team and likes the fans here, calling it his second home (after his native Russia). When asked about the state of his contract talks and why he would reportedly turn down an offer of the richest contract in NHL history, he deferred those topics to Theofanous, and made mention of the fact that Kaprizov remains under contract with the Wild until July 1, 2026.

“We have a lot of time, it’s just 2025,” Kaprizov said. “It’s one more year I have.”

Roster moves announced

On Monday, the Wild reduced their training camp roster to 52 players and signed a goalie for their minor league system.

They signed Chase Wutzke, a butterfly goalie with some size, to a three-year entry-level contract after selecting the 19-year-old in the fifth round of the 2024 NHL Draft. The Wild then assigned Wutzke to the Red Deer (Alberta) Rebels of Canadian major junior leagues, where he has played since 2022.

Major junior is also the destination for forwards Lirim Amidovski, Adam Benak and Carter Klippenstein. Benak, an undersized but skilled rookie, skated more than 16 minutes versus Winnipeg on Sunday.

The Wild released defensemen Rowan Topp and Jordan Tourigny, and sent three players – forward Matthew Sop and Ryan McGuire and goalie William Rousseau – to Iowa Wild training camp.

Related Articles

Veteran Jack Johnson looking to stick with Wild defenders

‘Thicker’ Marco Rossi happy to be back with Wild

Late Wild exec honored for service to American hockey

Mizutani: Kirill Kaprizov’s contract dispute is a distraction, though Wild say otherwise

Kirill Kaprizov says he’s happy in ‘Minny’ as Wild camp begins

By JIM GOMEZ

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Thousands of people were evacuated from northern Philippine villages and schools and offices were closed Monday in the archipelago and neighboring Taiwan as one of this year’s strongest typhoons threatened to cause flooding and landslides on its way to southeastern China.

Related Articles

High-tech tax authority helps Greece return to Europe’s financial mainstream

Moldova detains 74 people over an alleged Russia-backed unrest plot around key election

Dozens arrested and hurt in clashes with police near Philippine presidential palace

UK charities cut ties to Sarah Ferguson after reported email describing Jeffrey Epstein as ‘friend’

Venezuelans in ‘reverse migration’ pushed to new perils in effort to return home

Super Typhoon Ragasa had sustained winds of 134 mph with gusts of up to 183 mph when it slammed into Panuitan island off Cagayan province on mid-afternoon Monday, Philippine forecasters said.

Tropical cyclones with sustained winds of 115 mph or higher are categorized in the Philippines as a super typhoon, a designation adopted years ago to underscore the urgency tied to such extreme weather disturbances.

Ragasa was heading west and forecast to remain in the South China Sea at least into Wednesday while passing south of Taiwan and Hong Kong before landfall on the Chinese mainland.

The Philippines’ weather agency warned of coastal inundation, saying “there is a high risk of life-threatening storm surge with peak heights exceeding nearly 10 feet within the next 24 hours over the low-lying or exposed coastal localities” of the northern provinces of Cagayan, Batanes, Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.

Power was knocked out on Calayan island and in the entire northern mountain province of Apayao, west of Cagayan, disaster-response officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or further damage from Ragasa, which is locally called Nando.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. suspended government work and all classes Monday in the capital and 29 provinces in the main northern Luzon region.

More than 8,200 people were evacuated to safety in Cagayan while 1,220 fled to emergency shelters in Apayao, which is prone to flash floods and landslides. Domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces lashed by the typhoon while fishing boats and inter-island ferries were prohibited from leaving ports due to rough seas.

Ragasa, the 14th weather disturbance to batter the Philippines this year, comes while authorities and both chambers of Congress investigate a corruption scandal involving alleged kickbacks that resulted in substandard or non-existent flood control projects.

Taiwan’s southern Taitung and Pingtung counties ordered closures in some coastal and mountainous areas as well as on the outlying Orchid and Green islands. Ragasa also forced the cancellation of afternoon flights to outlying islands and suspended various ferry services, the Central News Agency reported.

In Fujian province, on China’s southeast coast, 50 ferry routes were suspended. Officials in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese tech hub, planned to relocate about 400,000 people, including residents living in low-lying and flood-prone areas. Shenzhen’s airport said it will halt flights, starting Tuesday night.

China’s National Meteorological Center forecast the typhoon would make landfall in the coastal area between Shenzhen city and Xuwen county in Guangdong province on Wednesday.

China’s ruling Communist Party chief in Guangdong, Huang Kunming, urged departments across the region to minimize harm and “fully enter emergency state and war-ready state.”

Ragasa is expected to sweep south of Hong Kong and Macao. While Hong Kong’s airport is expected to remain open, the city’s airport authority said flights would be significantly reduced after 6 p.m. Tuesday and most flight operations would be affected on Wednesday.

Hong Kong’s flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways said passenger flights scheduled to depart and arrive in the city after 6 p.m. Tuesday will be suspended, with more than 500 flight cancellations expected.

Other Hong Kong-based airlines announced their flights would be disrupted, including budget airline HK Express, which reported a cancellation of over 100 flights between Tuesday and Thursday.

All schools in Hong Kong and Macao will be closed for the next two days. More than the usual number of sandbags have been provided to flood-prone areas in Hong Kong, while Macao police urged people living in low-lying areas to prepare for possible evacuation.

Ragasa is expected to bring torrential rains and heavy winds to China’s mainland coastal areas, starting Tuesday. Multiple cities such as Jiangmen, Yangjiang, Zhongshan and Zhuhai in southern Guangdong province ordered the suspension of schools, offices, factories and means of transportation.

The typhoon could make landfall in Guangdong more than once, China’s weather agency said.

Authorities urged residents to stockpile emergency supplies, reinforce doors and windows, and evacuate underground areas.

Associated Press writers Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Kanis Leung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.