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Georgia prosecutor details new timeline of investigation into Trump’s election scheme

The Fulton County, Ga., investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election is progressing to a new phase, according to District Attorney Fani Willis said.

On Thursday, Willis conducted an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she offered an update on the case. Per the interview, prosecutors are now focused on “a newly approved special purpose grand jury.” The jury would give prosecutors the ability to “authorize subpoenas to compel testimony from more reticent witnesses.”

“We realize that we’re coming to a place that there are enough people that will require a subpoena for us to speak to or for us to be able to get information,” she said during the interview.

She also indicated that the case is moving forward. “There’s a possibility that after two months we’ll have all the information we need to press forward. There’s a possibility that after week one that some appellate issue will come and there’s a halt,” she said. “But what I do think is within a year we will have all the information that we need.”

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Willis’ rare remarks about the investigation are significant because she has confirmed their intent to incorporate a prosecutorial tool. Per The AJC: “Unlike a regular grand jury, which hears information on dozens of felony cases on any given day, this group will focus solely on the Trump investigation.”

While she did not indicate if charges would be brought against the 16 Republicans involved in the fake electors’ scheme, the House Select Committee has issued subpoenas to some of those who were involved.

“Our investigation is going to be complete,” the veteran prosecutor said. “So if it is found that that which you speak of with the electors is part of a scheme to do something criminal related to the 2020 election, then it’s going to be looked at.”

Willis’ remarks come just days after Trump’s recent rally where he slammed prosecutors investigating him. It’s no secret that prosecutors have gathered evidence to support their cases, Trump argues that they are merely just “radical, vicious, racist prosecutors.”

“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” Trump told supporters last weekend, adding, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

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What voting rights mean for the planet

As studies increasingly tally the death toll of climate change, the recent stalemate over voting rights legislation in the Senate puts the United States at a grave crossroads. 

The Republican Party that is rolling back voter protections in the states and blocking them on Capitol Hill – enabled by conservative Democrats – is the same party blocking, watering down, and gutting environmental protections at every opportunity. That means that as long as voting rights hang in the balance, so does environmental justice.

Last year, a study by Harvard University and British researchers found that nearly 9 million people around the world died in 2018 from inhaling the particulate matter of fossil fuel pollution. That includes 350,000 premature deaths across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.

In another ground-breaking 2021 study published in the Lancet, nearly 70 researchers found that more than 5 million people a year are dying from extreme cold or heat, with heat deaths expected to increase. That includes 173,600 deaths a year in the U.S. 

There were no racial breakouts for those studies, but there is plenty of evidence that the very people most in need of voting rights are also in need of environmental protection. 

In New York City, Black people comprise 24 percent of the population but accounted for 49 percent of heat-related deaths from 2000 to 2012, according to city data. Chicago is 29.6 percent Black but in its historic 1995 heat wave, 49 percent of fatalities were Black. In California, emergency visits for heat-related illness from 2005 to 2015 rose by 27 percent for White victims, but they soared a respective 67, 63, and 53 percent among Black, Latino, and Asian victims.   

In the South, the disproportionate proximity of people of color to coal ash dumps, refineries, oil and gas fracking sites, and “cancer alleys” hyper-concentrated with petro-chemical plants is well documented. In the predominantly Black town of Reserve, Louisiana, chemical plants give residents a cancer risk 50 times the national average.  

It thus should be no surprise that voters of color are also environmental voters. In a 2020 Yale University and George Mason University poll, 69 percent of Latinos and 57 percent of Black respondents said they were “alarmed” about climate change. That compares to just 49 percent of White respondents.

The alarm is because Black and Latino households disproportionately breathe in the particulate pollution from our consumption of goods and services – disproportionately caused by White households. Black and Latino households are more likely to be in “fenceline communities,” a term used for neighborhoods in close proximity to, or literally  abutting, industrial facilities and traffic corridors.

Black and other families of color are also more likely to live in neighborhoods that become potentially fatal summer heat islands for lack of tree shade and less ability to afford air conditioning. Flood risks under climate change are expected to dramatically shift disproportionately to predominantly Black census tracts, in a country where families of color are less able to access federal aid. 

Many of these environmental injustices, which result in chronically compromised health, are tragically being exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years into the pandemic Black, Latino, and Indigenous people still have double the chance of dying from an infection than a White person.

The Biden administration promised action on environmental justice and last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan outlined several actions it was taking to achieve that goal, including $600,000 for air monitoring in the U.S.’s most infamous cancer alley in Louisiana. At best, that’s a tiny first step when there are 150 toxic plants along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with several census tracts having the highest cancer rates in the nation.

The chances of having state and federal agencies with the commitment to eliminate the disparities, remediate the damage, and regulate future industrial pollution depends on the most affected people being able to elect the most effective, representative government. 

Between 2011 and 2012, as a clear attempt to stop the possible reelection of the nation’s first Black president, 19 states passed 27 laws making it harder for people to vote according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Last year, after President Trump claimed a stolen election and egged on the January 6 insurrection, the same number of states passed 34 laws restricting voter rights. The nastiness of the measures was symbolized by Georgia’s criminalizing the act of passing out water to voters in long lines.

Despite 25 states also passing laws last year expanding voting rights, the Brennan Center for Justice said, “this expansive legislation does not outweigh the impact of the restrictive laws… there is a stark and growing divide in the nation, where access to the right to vote increasingly depends on the state in which a voter happens to reside. That divide only stands to widen next year unless Congress acts.”

With Republicans controlling the legislature in 30 states, it means that any high turnout by voters of color in much of the country is democratic heroism. One example is the 2020 primary in my home state of Wisconsin, where Republicans required in-person voting, despite COVID-19 raging throughout the state. Milwaukee was hit so hard by the pandemic, it had only five polling places open, one at Marshall High School, my alma mater. 

I was proud of the long lines at my old school. Even before all this, I experienced how easily a voter could be disenfranchised by the sheer laziness of voting officials. The weekend before the 2008 presidential election, my father was in a Veterans Administration hospital in Milwaukee for a heart attack. Hooked up to I.V.s and monitors, he said he still wanted to vote. So I went downtown to the city’s election office to get him an absentee ballot. The clerk insisted the deadline had passed for him to obtain one, even for major health reasons. 

I went back to the hospital and told my dad this in front of one of his nurses. The nurse happened to be a patient advocate for various services, including elections. She angrily said that what I was told was nonsense for hospitalized veterans. She left the room and returned with a document for me to take back downtown. 

When I went back to the elections commission, the same clerk saw me coming, remembered me, and had words for me before I could open my mouth.

“I thought I told you that you were too late,” she said.

I handed over the document: “Take this to your supervisor.”

I watched the clerk and her supervisor stammer for a few minutes before the clerk finally came back and gave me the ballot, without a word, without apology.

I went back to the hospital with the ballot and watched as my dad’s hands — trembling from his traumas — marked off the spot for Barack Obama. I learned forever that if it is this hard for just one Black man to vote, even in one of the “bluest” cities in the United States, who knows what barriers will rise elsewhere?  

We’re getting that answer. While the turnout in the 2020 presidential election was historically high, aided with early voting and pandemic mail-in balloting, major racial gaps in turnout persist. The Brennan Center found that while white turnout was 71 percent. Black, Asian, and Latino turnout was a respective 63, 60, and 54 percent. Overall, the turnout of people of color was 58 percent, 13 percentage points behind that of White voters.

In a college basketball game, a 71-58 final score would be decisive from any angle.  The Brennan Center, citing several studies on voter ID laws, distance to polling stations, and reductions of early voting days, said, “There is ample evidence that the sorts of barriers being introduced by Republicans this year disproportionately reduce turnout for voters of color.

This is happening at precisely the same time that young voters and voters of color are voting for environmental protection. Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) reported a big boost in 2020 turnout among voters aged 18 to 29, with climate change hugely on their mind. Those voters were crucial in Biden winning battleground Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While 78 percent of all voters 18-29 said they were concerned about climate change, 84 percent of young voters of color said they were concerned.

Nathaniel Stinnett, head of the Environmental Voter Project, told public radio’s “Living on Earth” that high Black turnout, with the environment as a priority, helped send Georgia’s first Black and Jewish senators to Washington in a special 2021 runoff. The project’s analysis of the election found that nearly 7,000 voters who voiced strong concerns for the environment voted in the runoff even though they had not voted in the state’s monumental presidential upset of Trump by Biden.

Stinnett said these voters care about the environment “because coal-fired power plants aren’t put in lily-white suburbs. They’re put in communities of color.”

If there is one good thing from this war on voting rights, it’s that legacy environmental groups are signing up for the fight after years of frequent criticism for pursuing conservation agendas and greenhouse gas strategies that leave out communities dealing with fossil pollution. Back in June, environmental and conservation organizations were prominent among the more than 200 groups calling for an end to the Senate filibuster. 

The coalition called the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 votes in the 100-seat chamber to close debate to let most legislation reach the floor, “a relic of the Jim Crow era. It was designed and used for decades to thwart civil rights legislation, including blocking critical protections for voting rights and anti-lynching legislation. It has also been used to stop legislation that would protect workers, to relax environmental safeguards, and to stifle other legislative initiatives that have had broad support among the American people.”

As Texas Southern environmental policy professor Robert Bullard told E&E News this month, “Our environmental justice movement grew out of civil rights, and the fight for equal protection, the fight and the right to vote and not be intimidated, and not to be treated differently in that way.” It is critical to the fate of democracy and the planet itself that the Senate sees it this way.  

How “And Just Like That” makes its new friends compete for a seat at the table

“And Just Like That…” covers a year in the life of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) over its first season, but in many respects our fictional, fashionable besties barely moved beyond what we expected of them.

Executive producer and showrunner Michael Patrick King almost certainly would beg to differ with that, given the massive life changes Carrie and Miranda underwent.

Carrie loses the love of her life when John, aka Mr. Big, dies in the season premiere. He remains very present after he’s gone, though. It takes her 10 episodes to set him free, along with herself, with a Paris journey to spread his ashes in the Seine – a trip from which Chris Noth was cut after several women claimed he sexual assaulted them.

Miranda dumps her job, then dumps her marriage to head west with her new love Che (Sara Ramirez), whom everyone hates, when they take a job in California to make a TV pilot.

RELATED: The fun 50s on “And Just Like That”

Out of all of them, Charlotte remains closest to the way we remember her while traveling the farthest from where she began, loosening her stranglehold on tradition and adherence to the Way Things Must Be. This is forced upon Charlotte by her child deciding she no longer wants to be known as Rose, but Rock, and doesn’t want to be labeled as anything – including Jewish, a true inconvenience to one’s parents at one’s “they mitzah.”

Old Charlotte would have canceled the party. Instead, she claims the celebration as her bat mitzvah, and why not? From the look of it, she and Harry (Evan Handler) spent a small fortune on the candy bar alone.

The rotating fourth seat filler

In the end, the overarching message is one of change. And yet, so much of what came before involved an unspoken audition for the empty fourth seat at the table.

This is not proverbial. In nearly every episode the ladies gather at a restaurant to dissect whatever issues are bedeviling them that week, a device “Sex and the City” employed with enough success to make brunch and cosmopolitans fashionable. Only this time, when the fourth seat wasn’t empty, it was being filled by a rotation of guest diners, as if the ladies were auditioning their next top bestie.

This was the balancing act King and the writers struck between keeping Samantha in the series as a loving yet unseen presence and bringing in a new perspective – courtesy of a character who isn’t white or necessarily straight.

The writers eased into it, seating Stanford Blatch (the late Willie Garson) first – who doesn’t love Stanford? He called Charlotte on her uptight hesitance to include him in their reindeer games, as if to imply that he wasn’t part of Carrie’s A-team. Alas, Garson died in real life, and Stanford up and moved away, abandoning Mario Cantone’s Anthony in the process. But Anthony has always expressly been Charlotte’s main man, aside from Harry; more importantly, he fiercely maintains a life beyond these women.

From there is where things get . . . interesting. As the writers grappled with how to introduce new characters – specifically two Black women, Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) and Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), along with Sarita Choudhury’s Seema Patel – we see them mixing with the trio in their sacred restaurant settings with varying degrees of integration. And in each case, the success and plausibility of each of character’s insinuation into the group corresponds to how much time they get to spend with all three at a four top. They are quite literally, if unconsciously, competing for a spot at a table.

Those who choose to rewatch are invited to look closely to see what I’m talking about. Charlotte’s friend Lisa Todd Wexley meets Carrie and Miranda as they’re enjoying a lunch date. Carrie and Miranda exit while LTW, as Charlotte calls her, sits down to nibble on someone else’s fries.

Carrie and Charlotte have similar fly-bys with Nya, whose entire friendship with Miranda makes absolutely no sense – and yet, her infertility issues receive an extensive airing separate from Miranda’s mess. Only, that is, after Miranda gives her airtime by shutting up about Che.

Later Nya and her husband have their own restaurant excursion with friends, entirely apart from anything Miranda, Carrie and Charlotte are doing – existing as a satellite to their lives as opposed to being fully woven into the mix. This is in addition to Nya’s breezing over Miranda’s cascade of racist microaggressions upon their first meeting, which she forgives without the two of them circling back to address it in any way that matters.  

The only new friend who shares a table with all three of the “Sex and the City” O.G.s for an extended amount of time is Seema, who is single and sexy, and also the type of “ethnic” friend who offers Carrie a fashion shopportunity. Seema invites Carrie to her family’s Diwali celebration and grants her permission to wear a sari to the event. Doing so, Seema explains, makes it “cultural appreciation” as opposed to cultural appropriation, which delights Carrie, a woman who’s always on the hunt for unconventional fashion.

Anyway, this earns her the ultimate “in”-vitation, sitting at a restaurant with the rest of the girls as they plan Carrie’s reintroduction to the dating world. This is something Samantha would have done, and yet, Seema is entirely distinct from Samantha. But the larger point this scene tacitly makes is that she’s made it to the tier of intimates placing her in proximity to Carrie’s nearest and dearest. Nya and LTW don’t quite make it there.

I suppose we shouldn’t expect a fully enlightened friend group blend from King, who explains his ethos regarding inclusion to The Daily Beast by saying, “What’s in the world right now that wasn’t in the world, on these characters’ tongues, when they were 35? And what that is, is race, sex, privilege.”

Oh. Oh, friend. He means well. (Ask a Midwestern native what that phrase implies)

Give him and the rest of the show’s producers some credit – at least they’re trying. They’re damn clumsy about it, but hey . . . they could have fallen back to the old “Sex and the City” view of New York. Nya, LTW and Seema women have always been in that world, proven by Seema and Carrie lamenting the death of the Barney’s warehouse sale. Problem was, “Sex and the City” pretended they weren’t. “And Just Like That…” tries to correct that massive slight, albeit in slapdash fashion, and while never quite figuring out how to integrate these new characters in a way that doesn’t tokenize them.

Expanding the one-time foursome to a group of six, with Che on the outskirts along with the rest of the queer folks, would be a heavy lift for the most thoughtful writing team. My colleague Alison Stine already pointed out the many ways the show fails its queer characters by sliding into ancient tropes.

But Nya, LTW and Seema contend with another problem, in that they never quite move alongside their white counterparts as equal but, rather, supporting roles. Sympathetic viewers might give “And Just Like That…” a pass on that front in the first season, since so much revolves around the reintroduction of classic characters we haven’t spent time with in a decade.

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Nevertheless, in a show where having the right look is a central concern, it’s a bit stunning to witness how imbalanced these relationships are, and how the development of plots involving characters of color are reliant on how much the three main white women decide to center them.

This includes the one between LTW and Charlotte, which is mainly propped up by Charlotte’s ardent desire to have a powerful, chic Black friend. No kidding – when Carrie and Miranda ask Charlotte what’s so special about Lisa, Mrs. Goldenblatt replies by rattling off the highlights of her LinkedIn page.

At least the awkwardness of their new friendship is plopped in the middle of the table in the fourth episode, “Some of My Best Friends,” where Charlotte declares to Harry, “It is unacceptable that we do not have a more diverse friendship circle!” before walking into dinner at LTW’s home, where they are the only white people.

Charlotte makes a couple of terrible mistakes before everyone acknowledges their discomfort and nervousness about saying the wrong thing when they only want to do their best. A few beats later Charlotte defends her friend diplomatically and passionately when her mother-in-law turns up her nose at the money LTW has spent on artwork, each piece of which is an investment item.

In that exchange Charlotte shows her passion for culture includes a high estimation for the contributions of Black artists. This isn’t something Charlotte has to study – she simply knows. The gaze she shares with her new friend LTW is genuinely warm, confirming the start of something genuine.

Eventually – maybe – that will earn her a brunch invite.

All episodes of “And Just Like That…” are currently streaming on HBO Max.

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Romney family battle breaks out as Mitt criticizes niece’s RNC effort to censure Cheney, Kinzinger

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) harshly criticized the “shame” of the Republican National Committee on Friday, which is chaired by his own niece.

Romney’s comments came as the RNC was expected to pass a censure resolution against Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for participating in the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol,” Romney wrote.

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The RNC is chaired by his niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel. The RNC chair is the daughter of Mitt Romney’s older brother. The Michigan political dynasty began with three-term Gov. George Romney. Both McDaniel’s mother and grandmother ran for the U.S. Senate.

“Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost,” Romney wrote.

Mike Pence: Trump is “wrong” that he could have overturned 2020 election

Former Vice President Mike Pence had some choice words for his previous boss Friday — saying Donald Trump was “wrong” to insist earlier this week that Pence had the power to overturn the 2020 election and that the Republican Party should move on from the twice-impeached ex-president’s continuing crusade to falsely cast doubt upon his loss to Joe Biden.

“President Trump is wrong,” Pence told a group of conservative lawyers gathered in Florida for a Federalist Society event, according to The New York Times. “I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.”

“And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” he added.

The statement marks by far Pence’s strongest rebuke of Trump in the year since the duo left office. The former vice president has largely kept silent about the pressure campaign against him by Trump and his allies in the White House, saying simply that they did not “see eye to eye” about the events and choosing not to cast any blame for inciting the deadly Capitol attack onto the former president.

Now, however, Pence’s tune appears to be shifting after what appears to be an accidental admission earlier this week from Trump, in which he released a statement which said his ultimate goal was indeed to “overturn” the election (though he did attempt to walk back the language in a subsequent statement, saying he instead wanted to “send back the votes for recertification or approval”).

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The former vice president is also reportedly considering a presidential run against Trump in 2024, with a focus on moving the Republican Party beyond Trump and his debunked claims of a stolen election. In his speech Friday, he painted that decision as one of existential urgency that threatened the very foundation of American democracy.

“The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes,” Pence said. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”

It’s a plea that appears to be falling on deaf ears — just hours before Pence’s speech, the Republican National Committee also chose to censure two of its own members, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, for their role in investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and the events leading up to it.

As a part of the resolution, the party also declared the Capitol attack to be “legitimate political discourse” — a stunning statement of support for the deadliest attack on the U.S. Capitol in more than two centuries.

RELATED: RNC officially labels Jan. 6 attack on Capitol “legitimate political discourse”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel later amended the statement to say the Jan. 6 committee is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol” — but by then widespread outrage had already begun to mount. 

“The Republican Party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan. 6 committee. “It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at, to think that a major political party would be denouncing Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution and not saying anything about Donald Trump’s involvement in the insurrection.”

Cheney and Kinzinger both responded to the censure vote Friday by saying they had no regrets — and that they’d continue to investigate both the lead-up to and the deadly events of Jan. 6.

“I have no regrets about my decision to uphold my oath of office and defend the Constitution,” Kinzinger wrote in a statement. “I will continue to focus my efforts on standing for truth and working to fight the political matrix that’s led us to where we find ourselves today.”

A new HIV vaccine is in phase one trials. But scientists aren’t holding their breath just yet

Future historians studying the 2020s may disagree about many things, but it is safe to assume all of them will agree that the COVID-19 pandemic was transformative. It has changed the way we socialize and do business, led to collective trauma and was likely a critical factor in President Joe Biden’s election. When it comes to humanity’s ongoing war against infectious diseases, this pandemic accelerated development of a new vaccine platform known as mRNA technology, one that scientists believe could some day be used against everything from malaria and tuberculosis to all strains of influenza. There was even an early hopeful sign with HIV vaccine research, with researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announcing in December that an experimental mRNA vaccine had successfully treated an HIV-virus relative in mice and rhesus macaques.

Now Moderna — which, along with Pfizer/BioNTech, was one of the first pharmaceutical companies to develop a successful COVID-19 vaccine — has announced that it is in phase one of a clinical trial for an HIV vaccine. Just as they did when fighting COVID-19, Moderna is using mRNA technology to develop this new vaccine. The fact that it is in phase one means that they are still very early in developing the inoculation, but are confident enough in its safety and potential effectiveness that they were willing to put experimental shots in people’s arms. Nor is Moderna working alone on this: The trial, known as IAVI G002, is being conducted in partnership with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and is partially funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

RELATED: mRNA vaccines changed the course of the pandemic. Now, they could cure all kinds of other diseases

The project to develop a vaccine against HIV has long been a holy grail of public health. The virus has become very treatable, thanks to anti-retroviral medications, but an actual vaccine has proved out of reach for decades. 

Yet while IAVI CEO Mark Feinberg said in a news release that they are “tremendously excited” by the new trial, not all of the scientists who spoke with Salon shared that optimistic tone.

“This is on the much, much more difficult side by many orders of magnitude than the development of a vaccine for COVID-19,” Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist renowned for his work in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, told Salon. After noting that scientists have been unsuccessfully trying to create an HIV vaccine since the 1980s, Haseltine explained that the specific advantages conferred to vaccine manufacturers by the mRNA platform will not in and of themselves be enough to make this effort succeed where others have not.

“There is nothing magical about what mRNA vaccines do,” Haseltine observed. “They enter a cell and the mRNA is programmed to make a protein. That protein is recognized by the immune system. And that’s exactly what happens with most other vaccines. The advantage of an mRNA vaccine is it can be made quickly, but that’s about its only significant advantage.” When asked if he felt there was a growing cultural attitude toward mRNA vaccines that might be unrealistic, he answered in the affirmative.

“I think mRNA [vaccines are] valuable in that they can be made very quickly to adapt to new pathogens, and that’s their major advantage,” Haseltine pointed out. “They’re not qualitatively different from other vaccine modalities. It could be very useful against viruses like COVID or influenza that change quickly. It’s essentially why the Gates Foundation supported the development of the mRNA vaccines.” Yet they have not always been effective, and should not be perceived as a “panacea.”

Mitchell Warren, Executive Director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, also struck a cautious tone when describing the new effort. Warren drew attention to the fact that while mRNA vaccines are a valuable platform, they are only as useful as the actual inoculation contained within them.

“It is clear from the success in developing multiple mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines that mRNA is terrific platform, or vector, to deliver a vaccine into the immune system,” Warren told Salon by email, adding that it was “exciting” to see the new HIV trials and noting that Moderna and colleagues had been working on an mRNA vaccine for HIV before the COVID-19 pandemic. “But a safe and effective vaccine requires both a great platform vector (like mRNA) and a great immunogen, or insert, so these new studies are critical in exploring what to actually put in the mRNA that might effectively prevent HIV infection. We’ll only know this strategy works when it has been tested in an efficacy study, which is still a few years away.”

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Warren also drew attention to the fact that, while the SARS-CoV-2 virus was challenging, the HIV virus has always been much more difficult.

“HIV is far, far more complicated pathogen that continues to defy vaccine developers,” Warren told Salon. “As devastating as COVID-19 continues to be, from a vaccine development perspective, it is an easy pathogen; HIV is not. But COVID-19 vaccines have also taught us that terrific scientific innovation cannot end pandemics without a commitment to global, equitable access. So in HIV vaccines, we have to adapt and apply the scientific lessons of COVID-19 and do way, way better than we’ve done in COVID-19 in terms of translating insights into public health impact.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, explained to Salon that the fundamental difference between HIV and SARS-CoV-2 in terms of combatting them is that they HIV is a retrovirus and SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus.

“The challenge is that HIV is a retrovirus so its RNA is made into DNA and then that DNA integrates into our host chromosome so that HIV stays with the host long-term,” Gandhi explained by email. “SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and will eventually leave the host.  Moreover, HIV infects CD4 T cells preferentially, leading to immunosuppression without treatment, which makes it more difficult to harness the immune system (with a vaccine, for instance) to fight it.”

This does not mean, however, that Gandhi felt hope is entirely unwarranted.

“The vaccine candidates so far for HIV have not managed to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies and T cells against the virus but preliminary work with the mRNA vaccine developed for HIV shows the development of both,” Gandhi explained. “Moreover, preliminary evidence in a small group of macaques show good effectiveness in preventing SHIV with the adapted mRNA HIV vaccine. These two reasons are giving HIV researchers and clinicians hope that the mRNA vaccine for HIV may be the breakthrough the need.”

Corresponding with Salon by email, Dr. Dagna Laufer — the vice president and head of clinical development at IAVI — acknowledged that there is a long road ahead in HIV vaccine research, and that this is because of the many obstacles which have always been part of that undertaking. Describing the overall challenge of HIV research and how that has shaped their approach with this vaccine, Laufer explained that “the vaccine antigens being evaluated in IAVI G002 are designed to be part of an eventual multi-step vaccination regimen designed to stimulate an immune response to neutralize, or block, HIV. On their own, the vaccine antigens being studied in this trial will not lead to this outcome. But, if this early stage trial is successful, we will see evidence that the vaccine antigens have efficiently stimulated production of rare immune cells needed to start the process of generating broadly neutralizing antibodies.”

Laufer added, “Follow-on studies will be needed, if this trial is successful, to evaluate a multi-step vaccination regimen, and so we are still looking ahead to a long development timeline.” That timeline, however, is likely to be much shorter than would have been the case without mRNA technology. As Laufer put it, “producing a recombinant protein for a vaccine candidate is a very long, exacting process, whereas producing an mRNA-delivered vaccine candidate is much shorter process. With conventional approaches, it can take years to advance a promising idea in the lab into a vaccine candidate that can be evaluated in humans.” mRNA technology condenses that timeframe from a matter of years to one of months, “leading to a more nimble and responsive approach to vaccine design and testing, potentially shaving off years from typical vaccine development timelines.”

The experimental vaccine, which was developed by researchers at IAVI and Scripps Research led by Dr. William Schief, works by using the mRNA platform to deliver HIV-specific antigens into the body. It will follow 56 HIV-negative adults, 48 of whom will have received at least one dose of the primary vaccine. Within that group, 32 will also receive a booster shot, while eight participants will only get that booster. As far as scientific studies go, this is a sign of moderate progress: It is further along than studies which are conducted in vitro or on animals, but not as rigorous as if the cohort of participants was in the hundreds or thousands.

If mRNA technology is able to produce an effective HIV vaccine, it will in some ways count as the story of this vein of medical research coming full circle. Much of the research used to develop a COVID-19 vaccine originated from research on an HIV vaccine, with Scripps Research’s chair of immunology and microbiology Dr. Michael Farzan telling Salon in August that the ability to progress in developing mRNA technology was “just one of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic, the manner in which that was propelled forward.”

For more on mRNA vaccines:

A 3-ingredient marinade for the juiciest chicken breasts ever

When I’m reaching for a protein to whip together a quick dinner, a few items make my shortlist: salmon, extra-firm tofu, spicy Italian sausage and crispy chickpeas. Chicken breasts don’t tend to factor into my weeknight dinners because, as Alton Brown once told me, “I go straight for the thighs.” 

If I’m eating chicken, I want it to be juicy and packed with flavor, which is not something that could be said for my longtime chicken breast “prep.” I just kind of patted them dry with a paper towel, tossed them in some lemon pepper and threw them in the oven, hoping for the best.

RELATED: A 3-ingredient marinade for sheet pan salmon that gets dinner on the table in no time

However, new year, new me — and new chicken breasts. I set out to create a recipe for flavorful chicken breasts that never dry out. The key to this? The right preparation and the right marinade.

Preparation

One thing I neglected to do in my quick and dirty (and ultimately disappointing) preparation was pounding out the chicken to an even thickness. This is a simple step, but it’s one that I was unsure was really worth it when I was trying to get dinner on the table as expeditiously as possible. Spoiler: It is absolutely worth it.

Take the extra five minutes to pound your chicken breasts between two pieces of wax paper or plastic wrap. You can do this using a meat mallet, the back of a large spoon, a heavy skillet or even the heel of your hand. Once the cutlets are a uniform 3/4-inch across, they’re ready to marinade.

Marinade

For a marinade, we’re looking for a short list of ingredients that pack a big flavor punch and aid in further tenderizing the meat. Here’s what to grab from your refrigerator and pantry: 

  • Beer: Beer contains enzymes that help break down tough fibers in meat and prevent them from drying out. I like light lagers — Modelo Especial is nice because it has a gently orange blossom honey flavor — but feel free to experiment with your personal favorites. 
  • Brown Sugar: The flavor of brown sugar plays really well with the gentle hoppiness and herbiness of beer. It also caramelizes nicely, which encourages some tasty browned bits to form on the chicken breasts when cooking. 
  • Scallions: Scallions are one of my favorite double-duty ingredients because the green portion is a little herbier, while the white portion veers a little more garlicky. 

You can, of course, add additional flavors here. Soy sauce would be nice, as would smoked paprika. Go crazy and add a squeeze of citrus! However, these three ingredients are more than enough to get a delectable dinner on the table.

***

Recipe: Beer and Brown Sugar Chicken Breasts

Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
30 minutes
Cook Time
30 minutes

Ingredients

  • 4 chicken breasts
  • 1 12-ounce beer 
  • 1 scallion, finely chopped (green and white portions)
  • 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar 
  • Neutral oil for cooking 
  • Salt and pepper to taste

 

 

 

Directions

  1. Pound the chicken breasts to an even 2/4-inch thickness. Salt and pepper them and set aside. 
  2. Add the beer, scallions and brown sugar to a large plastic baggie or a bowl with a lid. Shake or stir until the mixture is fully combined. Add the chicken breasts to the marinade and allow them to sit for at least 30 minutes. (The chicken can marinate for up to 24 hours in this mixture.)
  3. Remove the chicken breasts and salt and pepper them again. 
  4. Prepare a sheet pan by drizzling it with neutral oil. Heat the oven to 375 degrees and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, flipping halfway through.
  5. Once the chicken is ready, remove it from the pan and allow it to sit for 5 minutes. Cutting immediately will cause the juices to escape from the chicken breast.

More simple 3-ingredient recipes: 

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RNC officially labels Jan. 6 attack on Capitol “legitimate political discourse”

The Republican Party on Friday officially censured two of its members, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, for their role in investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and the events leading up to it. In its resolution, the Republican National Committee also declared the riot, whose stated goal was to delay the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, as “legitimate political discourse.”

The section in question reads: “WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes …”

It was a stunning statement of support for the deadliest attack on the U.S. Capitol in more than two centuries, and the furthest anyone in the party has gone in endorsing the tactics of the attackers who injured hundreds of police officers, caused several deaths and racked up millions of dollars in damage. The resolution itself was passed without any discussion in the Republican caucus, The New York Times reports.

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“We’ve had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told the Washington Post. “This has gone beyond their original intent. They are not sticking up for hard-working Republicans.”

Following widespread outrage, McDaniel later amended her statement to say the Jan. 6 committee is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

Republicans have been batting around the idea of a censure vote against Cheney and Kinzinger for weeks now, as the party continues to downplay the seriousness of the Capitol attack and keep secret the details of a sustained campaign by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election using a variety of questionable methods. A number of far-right members have also called for the duo to be kicked out of the party conference, a push that is sure to gain steam following Friday’s censure.

The vote also comes just days after Trump himself came close to openly endorsing the attempted insurrection — offering to consider pardons for the attackers should he be re-elected in 2024 and releasing a statement that his ultimate goal was indeed to “overturn” the election (though he did attempt to walk back the language in a subsequent statement, saying he instead wanted to “send back the votes for recertification or approval”).

Friday’s censure resolution also shows a remarkable about-face for Congressional GOP leadership, who in the hours after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol almost unanimously denounced the rioters — and Trump’s role in egging them on to carry out violence on his behalf.

“The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said during a floor speech that night. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”

RELATED: Donald Trump is done pretending. He is now openly celebrating the Capitol riot

When asked by reporters about the censure resolution, a number of House Republicans demurred, either ignoring the questions or labeling the entire thing a “distraction.” Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas told the Times it was “dumb stuff,” while Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee said the focus should instead be on “this abysmal administration’s record.”

Democrats seemed to have a more fully formed opinion on the matter.

“The Republican Party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan. 6 committee. “It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at, to think that a major political party would be denouncing Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution and not saying anything about Donald Trump’s involvement in the insurrection.”

The RNC’s Democratic counterpart, the Democratic National Committee, put out a statement blasting McDaniel on Friday. 

“The Republican Party has no shame. Donald Trump incited his supporters to storm the Capitol, attack police officers, smear feces on the wall, and try to overturn an election — in no world is that ‘legitimate political discourse.’ Ronna McDaniel and the GOP keep reminding voters that there is no low they will not go to to protect Donald Trump and his chaos. 

Kinzinger, who is retiring from Congress following the end of his term this year, said in a statement that he has no regrets over his participation in the Jan. 6 investigation.

“I have no regrets about my decision to uphold my oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he wrote. “I will continue to focus my efforts on standing for truth and working to fight the political matrix that’s led us to where we find ourselves today.”

Cheney, for her part, blasted her own party before the vote Thursday, saying that they had become “willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy.”

Stop feeding Joe Rogan’s trolls: Progressives must reclaim the politics of pleasure

There are lots of versions of the story I can tell about how I transitioned from the Republicanism of my childhood to become a progressive in my late teens: critical thinking skills, education, relocation from a small town to liberal Austin, Texas. But likely the truest story is the simplest one: The left was a lot more fun.

The progressive world had better music, more interesting books, and entertaining parties. Feminism interwove political discourse with pop culture, fashion, and sex. Liberalism was an ideology that promoted curiosity, beauty, humor, and freedom — so totally unlike the small-minded and boring conservatives I grew up around. When I think about attracting people to the left now and getting them motivated, however, I have to admit that it no longer seems so obvious that liberals are the fun ones.

It’s not just that the right has done a surprisingly good job at marketing themselves as edgy trolls and painting the left as a bunch of dour snowflakes. Progressives in the past couple of years haven’t been doing ourselves many favors. The dominant discourse is so often focused on suffering and surviving, without any talk about happiness and thriving as a counterbalance. (Calling the stimulus checks “survival checks” is a good example of the grim vocabulary that dominates lefty rhetoric.) Humor is in short supply. The gleeful progressivism I used to know has been replaced by competitive self-denial. 

RELATED: The critics were right: “Critical race theory” panic is just a cover for silencing educators

The recent kerfuffle over Spotify is a good example. The ostensible goal of deplatforming Joe Rogan is a good one. But I’m not so sure that the main avenue that the protest has taken — people showily unsubscribing from Spotify — is really about that, especially since this boycott is unlikely to work. The action feels more about performing self-sacrifice, proving liberal bona fides by showing off the small indulgences you’ll give up. That garners likes and retweets, but as political action, it’s likely to backfire. It will be used as confirming evidence that liberals are fun-hating scolds — which makes it easier for Rogan and his allies to recruit more young people to the right. 

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I’m far from the only one who has noticed. On “Pod Save America” this week, host Jon Lovett complained about the “grim and joyless aspect” of progressive politics and warns “nobody wants to become part of a sour and sanctimonious movement.” It’s not a popular message, but it’s uncomfortably true. 

There’s good news, however, in 2022. The right has granted the left a golden opportunity for liberals to remember that we’re the ones who value pleasure and beauty and creativity. And conservatives are, Greg Gutfeld-style window dressing aside, the ones advocating for a sad and colorless world.

RELATED: “Parental rights” started on the Christian fringe — now it’s the GOP’s winning issue

That should be obvious when we look at the two biggest culture war issues that are rising up this year: Reproductive rights and book banning. This is the year that Republicans are almost certainly going to overturn Roe v. Wade, uncorking what promises to be an onslaught of laws meant to punish sexually active women with forced childbirth. On top of it, conservatives are waging all-out war on classrooms and libraries, trying to snatch some of the greatest books of the 20th and 21st century out of the hands of curious young readers. If liberals can’t use this moment to remind the public that we’re the ones who want you to get laid and enjoy a good book, then truly, we deserve to lose. 

On the talking-about-pleasure front, both these issues should be easy lay-ups for the left. The longstanding opposition to abortion rights — and to contraception access — on the right is certainly about misogyny and racism. But also, conservatives are a bunch of prudes. Remember Ben Shapiro getting grossed out at the idea of vaginas being wet during sex?

It’s the same story with the right’s censorship campaign. It’s about racism and homophobia, sure. But it’s also because right-wingers have no real love for art or beauty. On the contrary, there’s a lot of suspicions aimed at people who find pleasure in reading, for the same reason that conservatives still think it’s hee-larious to make jokes about how modern art just looks like a bunch of scribbles to them. Expanding the imagination and exploring new ideas are antithetical to conservatism, and it’s a good time for the left to start talking about that again. 

And yet, so much of the progressive response to these attacks on reproductive rights and literature has been about literally anything but pleasure. We talk about the importance of educating children about history and how books like “Maus” and “Beloved” can aid in that education. But what we haven’t been talking about — and I’m as guilty as anyone on this front — is why. Reading these books doesn’t feel like homework. The subject matter may be somber, but the narratives are so graceful and beautiful that it’s transporting. When we hand these books to kids, we’re not just teaching history, but teaching them the deep pleasures of a good book, even when that book is about dark topics. 

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On abortion rights, it’s long been a problem that liberals shy away from sex talk and instead talk strictly in terms of suffering. The focus is on the rape victim forced to carry a baby, the pregnant teenager with abusive parents, the domestic violence victim trying to escape a bad relationship, the woman with health problems who can’t carry this pregnancy to term. Such a grimness-only mandate seems to have hardened in response to the Texas ban on abortion and the upcoming likely overturn of Roe. We talk about bodily autonomy, about health care, about the damage that forced childbirth does to women’s lives.

But we don’t talk very much about the cause of most unwanted pregnancies — people having sex for pleasure. We, of course, should talk about pleasure, because a woman’s right to enjoy sex is central to why abortion rights are so important.

Republicans very much prefer to fight over abstractions like “autonomy” and wish to avoid having to explain why they don’t think women deserve to feel good about their sexuality. It certainly cuts against GOP efforts to convince people that they’re the fun ones! There’s a reason people — even Republicans — want to date Democrats and not Republicans, and it’s not because they deleted Spotify. 

RELATED: Young Democrats are right: There is no reason to date or befriend Trump voters

Grimness becomes a habit, and it’s been hard in the past couple of years not to fall into it. The political polarization of COVID-19 turned a discussion about the temporary-but-necessary pandemic restrictions into a moralizing discourse. Wanting the simple pleasures of a happy hour or a gym class stopped being just an understandable desire to be temporarily deferred, and became a sign of moral weakness or even suspicion of secret right-wing impulses. Plus, things have just sucked a lot lately. Voting rights failed, fascism is rising, and Democrats couldn’t even hang onto the child tax credit. It’s hard to talk about positive things when everything seems to be collapsing.

The problem is that darkness has spread across progressive discourse, sucking light and color and fun out of everything. Liberalism has focused so long on subtraction that we forgot that our main appeal is additive. Equality and justice aren’t just about bodies surviving, but granting all people the opportunity to feel good, to feel fulfilled, to have a chance to use their precious years on earth actually living. We don’t just want people to survive. We want them to thrive. 

Well, 2022 is the year to get our groove back. The right has opened the door, by inviting us to debate whether sex should be fun and reading should be pleasurable. That’s a fight that the left can win, easily. We just have to remember that fun matters, beauty matters, and people are drawn more to the light than the dark. We used to be people who knew this. We can get back to who we once were. 

Republicans in Congress were in on Trump’s coup plot

Two and a half years ago, Special Counsel Robert Muller submitted his report in which he declared that Donald Trump did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with agents of the Russian government who had interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Numerous members of Trump’s campaign were indicted on various related and unrelated charges, but the special prosecutors were never able to gather enough evidence of a conspiracy. While Trump had behaved in extremely suspicious ways, investigators simply couldn’t prove that he knew what the Russian government was doing.

Trump went on to spend his entire term committing overt acts of corruption, combining his business with his duties and openly defying all ethical restrictions against conflicts of interest. He blatantly obstructed justice many times and was even impeached for abusing his power by attempting to sabotage his political rival’s presidential campaign. He broke the law repeatedly and got away with it every time.

So why wouldn’t he engage in a conspiracy to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power and overturn the election he lost?

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That is exactly what has come into focus this week as one revelation after the other implicating him in such a conspiracy is reported. And it’s also become clear that there were many people who were aware of what Trump and his co-conspirators were doing, yet none of them sounded the alarm. I don’t know if that makes them accomplices in a legal sense but it certainly makes them shamefully unethical.

All week, I’ve been writing about the latest developments, from the contemptible comments Trump made at his rally last weekend — dangling pardons to insurrectionists and summoning the mob to take to the streets if anyone tries to hold him legally accountable for his criminal acts — to the reports that he had contemplated issuing Executive Orders to seize the voting machines. Every day brings new details, each one more stunning than the last.

To recap the week: We learned that Trump had asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr to have the Department of Justice seize the voting machines in states in which he thought he could overturn the results. Luckily, he was told that would be illegal. It was then revealed that his former national Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.), and his lawyer, Sidney Powell,  had tried to persuade him to order the Pentagon to seize the voting machines in those same states and that he directed his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to get the Department of Homeland Security to do it. He was talked out of this each time, but it took a massive effort to get him to back off of these daft plans.

RELATED: Donald Trump’s having an awful week — and it’s only Wednesday

On Thursday the Washington Post reported that there was yet another plot brewing around the same time — and it’s just as nuts as the others:

The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued the Dec. 18, 2020, memo, which was circulated among Trump allies.

The “next steps” were almost certainly the seizing of the voting machines.

This is the same day Flynn and Powell sneaked into the White House to argue that Trump should issue a national security Executive Order that would activate the military to seize the voting machines. Whether any of this was connected with that or if it was a separate plot is unknown but suffice to say that there were multiple people involved in trying to get those voting machines and this certainly appears to have been yet another attempt.

RELATED: Donald Trump’s lackeys failed him — and saved democracy

This memo arguing to deploy the NSA to sift through electronic communications involved some new people who have not previously been identified, including a former Trump National Security Council member by the name of Rich Higgins. You may have heard of Higgins — he was the guy who was forced out for making the charge that globalists, Islamists, and other forces within the government were subverting President Trump’s agenda. The plot also involved a lawyer for the Army who not very convincingly claimed to the Post that he knew nothing about any of it and a former Republican candidate for Congress from Virginia.

Keep in mind that one of the live theories that was floating around at the time was “Italygate,” which held that an Italian defense contractor and the CIA had penetrated the voting machines and changed the votes from Trump to Biden. (You may recall that at one point Sidney Powell called up the Pentagon and demanded that they send in a special forces crew to rescue CIA director Gina Haspel whom she said had been taken into custody while on a covert operation to destroy the evidence. I’m not kidding.)

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Needless to say, using the NSA for this purpose is completely outrageous not to mention illegal. There’s no indication that Trump himself was involved in this particular plot although he was certainly on board with the voting machine seizure idea, so who knows? But according to the Post, there were other high-level government officials who definitely knew about it. Republicans Sens. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia M. Lummis of Wyoming were all invited to a meeting at the Trump Hotel by Mr. My Pillow, Mike Lindell, where the conspiracy theory that there was foreign interference in the election and the notion of seizing the machines came up again. After that meeting, Cramer and Johnson were sent a copy of that memo outlining the use of the NSA to search for evidence. Apparently, GOP members of the House were briefed on all of this as well. 

We already knew that the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had tried to enlist the DOJ to investigate this inane “Italygate” conspiracy theory and it was previously reported that GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “vetted” the fraud claims, even going so far as to call people around the country to verify them. In fact, it’s fair to assume that most of the GOP members of Congress were aware of the machinations that were happening in and around the White House because it’s so crazy that word almost certainly got around. Quite a few were being heavily lobbied by the president and Rudy Giuliani to object to the count on January 6th.

Not one of them spoke up and alerted the public about what was going on. Cramer is the first to go on the record at all and it took him well over a year to do it. They all knew that Donald Trump was plotting a coup and they said nothing. Again, I don’t know if it’s illegal for an elected official to stand by passively as someone plots to overthrow the government but I know it should be. 

Read more:

Paul McCartney’s Wings debut “Wild Life,” panned at the time, shimmers at 50 with a powerful reissue

Originally released in December 1971, Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Wild Life” is a hidden gem of an album. The debut LP from Beatle Paul’s new band was widely panned at the time — even by McCartney himself, who seemed to shrug the album off as a kind of early solo career embarrassment.

Early reputation notwithstanding, “Wild Life” has been given a bravura vinyl rerelease. The new half-speed master vinyl edition was cut by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios this past July. Working with the original master tapes, Showell has created a powerful, ear-popping remastered version of the LP.

RELATED: How Paul McCartney proved Wings haters wrong with “Band on the Run“

And “Wild Life” — not to mention Wings themselves — is well-deserving of this level of attention. In spite of the animosity about McCartney’s new band in the wake of the Beatles, Wings invariably found themselves at the top of the heap during their heyday. From 1971 through 1980, they produced eight Top 10 U.S. LPs, including five chart-toppers. During that same period, the group landed 14 Top 10 singles — six of which captured the number-one spot. Perhaps even more remarkably, all 23 of Wings’ U.S. singles registered Top 40 hits. Over the years, the band won six Grammy Awards, while selling some 14 million records, which was plenty enough to earn seven platinum and nine gold discs along the way.

Which brings us back to “Wild Life,” their humble debut. Recorded in scarcely more than a week in the summer of 1971, Wild Life was, by any measure, a homespun rush job. The band’s lineup had come together rather quickly, with McCartney on lead vocals and bass, wife Linda doing her damnedest to fake it ’till she could make it as a keyboard player, ex-Moody Blues singer-songwriter Denny Laine on guitar, and Denny Seiwell, one of McCartney’s recent Ram sidemen, on drums. The makeshift quartet would mark the beginning of three major lineup shifts over the next several years, with various side musicians clustering around the mainstay nucleus of the McCartneys and the ever-faithful Laine.

Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

With 10 songs, “Wild Life” clocked in just shy of 40 minutes — and as pop-musical ambitions go, it sounded like a trifle, a morsel to be easily digested and just as quickly forgotten. In the reissue edition, the album’s highlights shimmer appropriately. Then and now, “Some People Never Know” and “Tomorrow” are the kinds of rock confections in which McCartney specializes like no other — endearing, emotionally affecting, and eminently well-played. Yet at the same time, there’s simply no amount of varnish that can transform “Bip Bop,” the lumbering title track, or Linda’s limp vocal turn on “I Am Your Singer” into the stuff of greatness.

But for my money, the most transfixing moment of “Wild Life” — the harbinger of even greater things to come — was hidden in plain sight all along. As the album’s penultimate track, “Dear Friend” is a veritable showstopper, a heartbreaking olive branch directed at John Lennon, McCartney’s estranged songwriting partner. A singular work of lasting beauty, the song plays like a kind of funeral dirge, with McCartney singing, “Dear friend, what’s the time? / Is this really the borderline?”

At just 29 years old, the composer speaks from a worldly wisdom that belies his age, pondering the encroaching fears and looming responsibilities of adulthood and growing up. With an orchestral arrangement from Richard Hewson, “Dear Friend” takes on a sense of dramatic power that exists well outside of “Wild Life”‘s other, at times less potent contents. In its remastered vinyl version, “Dear Friend” positively shines. And even today, more than five decades later, it stands among McCartney’s finest work.

More critical appraisals of Paul McCartney: 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article credited the orchestral arrangement on “Dear Friend” to George Martin. It was originally arranged by Richard Hewson. The story has been updated. 

So what was Trump’s plan after seizing the voting machines?

The big news this week wasn’t really news at all, but rather confirmation of what we already knew. After a rally of supporters last Saturday in Conroe, Texas, the former president admitted for the first time that his goal was to have his Vice President, Mike Pence, “overturn the election.”

Well, whoop-de-do. Pundits call that “saying the quiet part out loud,” one of those phrases that is so meaningless it should be put in a bottle, sent out on the Japanese current and retired forever. There was never a “quiet part” with Donald Trump. He came right out and told you what he was doing nearly every day. Once he woke up on the morning of Nov. 4, 2020, all he did was try to overturn the election. He claimed repeatedly that he had “won by a landslide” even after election results came in showing him losing by more than 7 million votes overall, and by 74 votes in the Electoral College. 

If anything could be said to have been real news this week it was that reports surfaced that Trump had tried repeatedly to find some arm of his government that would seize voting machines in battleground states for him. The New York Times headlined it this way: “Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines.” All you had to do was read to the end of the first sentence in the story to see how completely the headline understated what really happened. “Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call.” Get that? He directed his law-poodle Giuliani to call another one of his poodles in the Department of Homeland Security and see if that department would be willing to go out there into the battleground states and seize voting machines. The Times goes on to report that he had considered and rejected having the Department of Defense do his dirty work for him, and he had previously asked his supreme law-poodle, William Barr, his attorney general, to have the Department of Justice send its agents into the field and pick up the voting machines.

RELATED: Donald Trump’s lackeys failed him — and saved democracy

Trump was doing this in December of 2020, having lost one lawsuit after another trying to challenge the results of the election in every single battleground state he had lost. He was desperate. People like Michael Flynn, his disgraced former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, the lawyer who filed several of the lawsuits he had already lost, had gotten through to him in the Oval Office. They were pitching wild theories that the Chinese Communist Party had manipulated the vote by hacking into voting machines, and former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who had died in 2013, and lefty bogeyman George Soros were somehow manipulating the software of Dominion Voting Machines on behalf of Joe Biden.

Voilà! There it was right in front of them! It was those damn voting machines! All they had to do was get their hands on those voting machines in three “key states” and … well … what was the plan, exactly? 

That’s the “quiet part” all the reporting this week leaves out. Two of the plans reached the stage of draft executive orders for Trump to sign. Both would have ordered some federal department — Trump apparently didn’t care which — to seize the machines. After that the executive orders, and the reporting about them, peter out.

While we know what he wanted to do, we don’t know what his plans were from that point on. But there have been a few hints. The Times reported on Wednesday that Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, was in the Dec. 18 meeting in the Oval Office when Flynn and Powell pitched the idea of having the Department of Defense use soldiers to seize the voting machines. Byrne had funded multiple lawsuits on Trump’s behalf challenging the election results. In a book he published last year, Byrne wrote, “We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished by Christmas.” Byrne was apparently referring to “portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost,” the Times reported. The plan also included a proposal that Trump appoint Sidney Powell (!) as “a special counsel overseeing election integrity,” according to the Times.

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So there’s at least a scrap of a plan. The Powell-Flynn-Byrne team thought that it would take only seven days to get a recount done in six large counties of multiple states Trump had lost. 

We now know, by the six months it took the Cyber Ninjas to recount the vote in Maricopa County, Arizona, that this was a wildly optimistic estimate. We also know the results of that particular recount didn’t exactly come out the way Trump and his people expected they would. Biden’s win in Arizona was confirmed by the “forensic audit,” with an additional 300 votes awarded him.

We also know by the example of the last special counsel assigned to investigate an election — Robert Mueller’s investigation of the 2016 presidential election – that months would have gone by before any proposed team led by Powell or anyone else would be able to issue any kind of report on “election integrity.”

So we know that part of the plan wouldn’t have worked in a way that would have benefited the struggling president at all. One deadline had already passed: Electors in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had met on Dec. 14, cast their ballots and forwarded their “Certificates of Ascertainment” to the vice president and the archivist of the National Archives. So that was over and done.

The next deadline was, of course, Jan. 6, when a joint session of Congress was to meet and count and certify the electoral ballots and determine the winner of the election.

Aha! Maybe that was the plan! Let’s see if we can do a little mind reading. Say, as Flynn et. al. proposed, a bunch of soldiers had shown up with trucks in six counties in three or four states and driven away with thousands of voting machines and taken them God Only Knows Where, to do God Only Knows What with them. What do you figure would happen?

Hmmmm … chaos, maybe? 

First there would be the coverage of what could only be described as raids on state and county election offices and storage facilities. Those images would fill the news for days. Then there would doubtlessly be a battle, as happened months later in Arizona, over whether the news media would be allowed into whatever enormous facility had been rented for the purpose of storing the voting machines, at least initially, and then “analyzing and assessing” the vote, as was called for in the proposed executive order. There would be multiple jurisdictions of authority involved, all the way from county voting commissioners through the secretaries of state to the governors of those states, representatives of both parties and of the Trump and Biden campaigns, all the way to law enforcement officials from each state, probably including the attorneys general and state police commanders…

Are you getting the picture? Does the word clusterfuck come to mind?

And of course there would be leaks to the media, lots and lots of leaks from every rotting timber of this listing vessel, alleging all manner of corrupt practices, skullduggery, attempts to influence the count — if in fact a count could even get underway — and accusations by both campaigns and both political parties that the other was attempting to “fix” or “rig” the outcome of whatever the hell was going on.

Christmas would come and go, leaving just 11 or 12 days until Jan. 6 (depending on whether Christmas Day would be taken as a holiday and work suspended) when the joint session of Congress was scheduled to meet — a deadline set not by political parties or campaigns, but by federal law.

What do you figure would happen on that day if thousands of voting machines had been seized by the military and taken away somewhere and some kind of “recount” was taking place being managed by … well, by whom, anyway?

Do you figure that challenges to the electoral votes of at least those states whose machines were seized would happen in the House and Senate? Do you figure the joint session would devolve into, yes, chaos? Do you figure some kind of motion would be made and some kind of vote taken that the entire clusterfuck should be suspended and the election should be “thrown into the House,” as the saying goes? 

And if all of that should come to pass, well, you know as well as I do what the outcome of a vote in the House would be: Trump would be declared the victor and he would remain in office.

So maybe that was the plan all along: chaos. Does chaos sound like it would appeal to anyone you know? 

My goodness, it’s beginning to look like we escaped that one by the proverbial hairs on our chinny-chin-chin, doesn’t it?

Read more on Donald Trump’s attempts to undo democracy:

Are the Democrats in trouble? Gallup editor on what those bad-news polls really mean

Joe Biden has been president for a little over a year and took office in the midst of several historic crises, including the immediate aftermath of a coup attempt by his predecessor and a pandemic that will surely kill more than a million Americans. Yet many among the pundit and political classes are already writing the Biden administration’s political epitaph.

Such people have concluded that Biden’s bold and transformative domestic policy agenda is a failure, and that the American people are now turning on him. Many are citing inflation as a massive political liability, in an attempt to cast Biden is a 21st-century version of Jimmy Carter afflicted with national malaise and “stagflation.” What they conveniently ignore is that Biden’s economic growth numbers more closely resemble the “good old days” of Ronald Reagan, circa 1984.

Biden is accused of being aloof, disengaged, overly distant, somehow boring and not compelling, and overly reluctant to be available to the news media (and by implication the American people) because he does not give daily or weekly press conferences.

RELATED: The whisper campaign against Joe Biden won’t stop — unless he can change the narrative

Historic trends are also highlighted: It is probable that Republicans will take control of the House in this year’s midterms, and perhaps the Senate as well. So Biden’s failed presidency is seen as preordained. Some prediction markets now indicate that Donald Trump is likely to defeat Biden if they face one another again in 2024.

The narrative of Biden’s “failed presidency” is based on public opinion polls showing that his levels of support have fallen to the level of Donald Trump’s, or lower, on several occasions. This is taken as proof that the American people have turned against Biden and his policy agenda.

There is a widely-discussed new poll from the Gallup organization that shows a 14-point swing from Democrats to the Republicans, in terms of party identification since January of 2021. By that measure, Republicans enjoy a 5-point advantage over Democrats in the upcoming midterms.

Ignoring considerable evidence to the contrary, many pundits are declaring that Biden is overly “progressive” and has surrendered to “wokeness” and “political correctness.” Their proposed solution, of course, is that Biden must pivot back to some imagined middle that will allow him to lure back “independent” and “suburban” voters and members of the “working class.”

Reality is more complex. The mainstream media is creating and embracing the narrative of Biden’s failure because it fits their predilection for horserace journalism, “both-sides-ism” and a desire for dramatic partisan conflict. Many things are impacting the public assessment of Biden’s presidency: the aftermath of the Trump regime, years of mass death, economic insecurity and widespread uncertainty about the future. 

Ultimately, it may not matter what the Biden administration actually does. A feeling of doom has taken hold. Hope is running out in this interregnum period. For many Americans, perception becomes reality. Biden’s presidency may indeed be in trouble, but not for the reasons that America’s pundits and others who police the boundaries of approved public discourse would like to acknowledge.

The real problem is that American democracy and the future of the country are in peril because of the Republican-fascist movement’s escalating assaults, and the deep structural problems and other cultural problems that made such a disaster possible.

In an effort to better understand the meaning of Gallup’s recent poll, I recently spoke to Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones, who oversees research and analyzes Gallup’s U.S. polling surveys. In this conversation, Jones offered his interpretation of what these poll results actually tell us about how Americans people feel about Biden, and their relative support for Democrats or Republicans.

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He also discussed what public opinion polls can and cannot tell us, and highlighted the growing power of independent voters in American politics. More than anything else, Jones stressed that negative partisanship and other forms of extreme political polarization are damaging democracy. Toward the end of this conversation, he suggested that we should read this new Gallup poll — and other public opinion polls — with an open mind, rather than to validate our preconceived conclusions.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What it is like being a professional who conducts public opinion polls in a moment of such change and crisis?

So many aspects of politics and American society are polarized. We know how Republicans and Democrats are going to rate presidents, for example. So much is dependent now on independents and which way they trend.

Respondents were less influenced by partisanship back in the late 1990s, when I began at Gallup. If the economy was good and the country was at peace, then people had no problem saying  they were satisfied with how things were going in the country. Now, because of polarization, people won’t really say that if the other political party is in control. They are pretty negative across issues.

Polarization works in the other direction as well, where the party of the president in office, to a large degree, determines whether everything is great or whether obvious problems in the country are minimized when evaluating national conditions.

How is partisan polarization impacting public opinion, specifically, and the country more generally?

The United States as a whole is a centrist, moderate, maybe slightly right-leaning nation. And theoretically, if you want to win elections, that’s where you should govern from or appeal to in campaigns. But it seems increasingly that the people who are elected to office emerge from primaries where, to win, a candidate must appeal to the people who are less toward the middle than the country as a whole. Increasingly, it also seems as if voters choose more on candidate party affiliation rather than candidate qualifications, issue positions or experience.

RELATED: The center cannot hold: Manchin and Sinema are wrecking America — here’s how to beat them

As we have seen in recent congressional elections that have produced turnover in party control, many candidates are elected to national and other high-profile offices as a type of protest vote against the party in power. This is not a mandate — even though many people elected in the last few decades have governed as though they were given one. They were elected largely because people were unhappy with how the other side was governing. The other party is voted into office in response, and then they go off too far in one direction: Bill Clinton in 1994 with health care, George W. Bush with Iraq in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010 with government spending and health care, Donald Trump in 2018 with immigration and other issues and quite possibly Joe Biden in 2020 with government spending programs. 

That doesn’t mean voters want to go too far in the other direction once the other party gains power. Maybe just stop going too far in the direction the government was going under the old party. 

What is it like doing this type of a work in a moment when the United States is experiencing a democracy crisis?

We at Gallup are committed to the independent, neutral, scientific measurement of where the public stands. It is an important input in the democratic process. Elected leaders may take it into account in deciding how to vote on issues, although maybe less so than in the past, with the party loyalty in Congress as strong as it is. Public opinion may also establish certain guardrails that politicians might take into account in determining how far they can go on certain policies, either to represent the views of their constituents, their party or the country more broadly. 

How does negative partisanship impact public opinion?

It has really changed how people evaluate the president. The pattern is clear. It is getting more extreme.

We have seen increased polarization in how the public evaluates presidents. But it is not so much among people who support the president’s political party — those ratings have always been very high. The change is among those people who are opposed to the president’s party.

In decades past, maybe 50% of Republicans would approve of a Democratic president or vice versa. Then it went down to no higher than 30% by the Clinton administration, but now is mainly in the single digits. There is no honeymoon period at all from the opposition party, although as we have seen with Biden and other presidents, independents may give a new president a honeymoon. We are seeing single-digit levels of support for presidents on Day One of their administrations from the opposition party.

There is definitely a ceiling on presidential approval now, where there was not one in the past. That’s because the other side is unwilling to approve of a president from the other party.

What can the new Gallup Poll on partisan identification tell us? And what can it not tell us?

This new poll tells us that the American people are responsive to what is going on in the country, and that influences their identification with the two major parties. They give credit and assign blame when things are going well or not going well. For example, at the start of 2021, when Trump was still in office, the COVID situation wasn’t going well and Trump was disputing the outcome of the presidential election.

Jan. 6 certainly did not help his standing. Trump’s approval rating dropped 12 points from the time of the election. That is the most we’ve ever seen a presidential approval rating decline after losing an election.

RELATED: What’s protecting Trump and the coup plotters: American exceptionalism

Joe Biden takes office. During the first few months COVID cases began to decline. Biden was getting credit for that, and it was shown through pretty decent approval ratings from independents. In the first quarter, Democrats had their largest advantage on party affiliation since 2012.

Biden’s poll numbers started to decline in the summer, as COVID cases rose and the administration struggled to control the pandemic. Democratic affiliation started to erode a little. Then came Afghanistan and now inflation, which caused people to question the competence of Biden and the Democratic Party. The American people were responsive to those issues. Certainly in the polling we saw Biden’s approval rating go down. By the fourth quarter, the Democratic advantage in party affiliation had been wiped out and the Republican Party now held a five-point advantage, its largest since 1995.

Public opinion polling cannot go too deeply into people’s decision-making processes and why people believe the things they do. Often we are just measuring positive or negative attitudes. That information is still useful. The average person does not have a great deal of information about political matters, and they are not ideologically consistent in their opinions for the most part.

But even what polls reveal about basic favorable or unfavorable, positive or negative, favor or oppose on certain policies gives leaders important information. Even if the average American is not spending four hours a day reading newspapers or watching the news, they do have meaningful opinions that leaders can respond to.

How do we locate this new poll in the larger context of American politics?

One of the big conclusions of the polling results is that the fortunes of political parties — both in terms of whether people identify as supporters of a party or vote for them in elections — are tied to perceptions of how the president is doing. Partly because of party polarization and also widespread dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the country, which has been consistently below 50% since 2004, it seems harder for presidents to get passing grades from the American public. A passing grade would be majority approval.

Presidents with less than majority approval see great losses for their party in Congress in midterm elections, as we have seen in 1994, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and likely 2022. They are also vulnerable to defeat when seeking re-election, as with George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Donald Trump in 2020. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were re-elected, but in relatively close contests. Both had job approval right around 50% when re-elected.     

What do we see in the polling regarding divergent perceptions about Jan. 6 and Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol?

We see a widening party gap in trust in the news media, in particular, and in other U.S. institutions generally. Republicans have very little trust in the news media, so they are unlikely to believe news reports that cast doubt on allegations of a fraudulent or stolen election. If Republicans don’t trust the media in general, who do they trust? Republican elected officials, especially Donald Trump, and conservative media that in many cases disputes what the mainstream media is reporting. 

People’s political realities thus differ based on the type of information they get, and it is hard to forge consensus on the key issues of the day — be it the COVID threat, the health of the economy and the legitimacy of the 2020 election or how elections need to be reformed. That is very concerning for a democracy, where some consensus is important for leaders to agree on which direction to go with policy. Both parties want election reform — but their ideas of what is needed are very different. 

RELATED: Democrats and the dark road ahead: There’s hope — if we look past 2022 (and maybe 2024 too)

We take the data at face value: We seemingly live in two different countries. There is a Republican country and a Democratic country. Democrats believe one thing and Republicans believe the other on many issues.

Now, is that because they have different opinions? Or is it because they do not want to agree with the other side?

Many pundits and other members of the commentariat are obsessed with “independent” voters. What do we actually know about them?

Independents are now the largest political group, whereas in the past it might have been that Democrats, Republicans and independents were roughly even at 30%. We are now at 40% independents. To me that suggests that many Americans are turned off by both parties. We know that many independents lean one way or the other, in terms of Democrat or Republican, and they probably vote that way. Their issue positions are generally consistent with partisan people who identify with the two main parties. If independents vote like partisans and have issue positions that are like partisans, the fact that they won’t identify with a party tells us something about how they fell about the parties.

We know that the public’s views of both parties are pretty negative. A belief that government is gridlocked is one of the things driving these numbers. We see these numbers primarily from people who are not particularly attached to either party. They are not really upset about who’s in office as much as about how the government is working, or not working.

Gallup’s new poll showed a 14-point swing in party identification and support from Democrats to Republicans, one of the largest such movements in American political history. What does this actually tell us about the country’s political terrain? 

Again, that move tells us that the American people are responsive to what is going on in the country. With independents being the largest group, public opinion is not as fixed as it once was. They’re the ones who are moving the most. Hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats are not going to move that much. This larger group of independents can. On a good day for the Democrats, these leaners might say they’re a Democrat. On a bad day, they might say they’re an independent. The same is true for Republicans.

Much of the movement in partisanship is in and out of the independent category, as opposed to flipping from one side to the other. It is generally true that people do not flip from Republican to Democrat. But people can move in and out of the independent category to the partisan category. That is what I believe we are seeing.

So many inferences and other conclusions are being made from the new Gallup poll, many of which, to my eyes, are incorrect and the result of partisan blinders and other biases.

If people are claiming that we are a Republican country or a Democratic country, they are wrong. Why? Because only about 60%, combined, identify with either party. Independents are the largest group, over 40%, and you can’t win elections without them.

Neither party can claim to have the majority of Americans behind them generally. In order to build a majority, you’re going to have to appeal to independents and maybe even some from the other party to get elected and have support for your governing policies. I would agree that the United States is probably center-right on some issues. On others, however, the country might be center-left.

It can be hard to figure where the country stands, looking at all the data. When people are asked if they are conservative, moderate or liberal on social issues, they are about equally split. But on a lot of specific moral issues — same-sex marriage, having a baby out of wedlock — they are becoming increasingly liberal. On economic issues the country is more likely to identify as conservative than liberal, but they also support left-leaning specific policies.

What advice would you give about how to understand public opinion data in general, or this poll in particular?

It’s to their advantage to read the analysis in an honest and fair way, and to be open to the evidence and findings that do not support their preferred narrative.

It is certainly better to look at multiple polls than a single poll. More data is better. With a single poll, a person might find a question and answer that supports their point of view. But that question may be poorly worded, or there may be other forms of bias in the results. Moreover, if you look at other questions on the topic and they come to different results, that may be where in fact the preponderance of the evidence is. Ultimately, be open to accepting that other people have opinions that might differ from yours. That is fine. 

As for the current survey, it is important to remember that party preferences are not fixed for many. As conditions in the country change, things can move pretty quickly, from a large Democratic advantage early in the year to a nearly complete flip by the end of the year. I would add that our most recent polls show the parties at near-parity in terms of party identification, so things may be starting to stabilize, with the two parties about equally strong. 

Biden pleads for unity — in speech at anti-LGBTQ, faux-bipartisan Prayer Breakfast

This article is part of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

After keeping their involvement secret until this week, President Biden, Vice President Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and other prominent Democrats participated in this year’s National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. Biden made news with a speech appealing for “unity” and praising America’s diversity of faith before a purportedly bipartisan crowd at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

The president told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has doggedly obstructed his agenda, “Mitch, I don’t want to hurt your reputation, but we really are friends. You’ve always done exactly what you’ve said. You’re a man of your word, and you’re a man of honor.”

Most major media completely ignored the controversy surrounding the Prayer Breakfast, or its multiple ties to far-right evangelical groups with strongly anti-LGBTQ agendas. The Washington Post report described the event as “a Washington tradition where politicians could set aside their partisan differences and find commonalities in their faiths.”

RELATED: Bias, theocracy and lies: Inside the secretive organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast

The White House only revealed that Biden and Harris would attend Sunday evening, when it released his weekly schedule. That was well after the White House had told The Family.

Neither Biden nor Gillibrand, this year’s breakfast co-chair, disclosed their involvement in response to earlier queries, even after The Family began letting its network and members of Congress know that the two, and at least a dozen other Democrats, would be involved.

It’s not clear why Biden, Gillibrand, and the other Democrats didn’t admit their involvement earlier, let alone announce it in a manner befitting an event that is ostensibly meant to unify political figures of different faiths and ideologies. But Democratic participation has become increasingly fraught, in political terms, and this year comes in the face of mounting pressure from LGBTQ and secular groups.

For years, Democratic participants have helped legitimize Family prayer breakfasts around the world. While the events are superficially anodyne, The Family uses them not only to build right-wing networks but also to mainstream activists and policies opposed to LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

Congressional participation helps foster the implication that guests are invited by members of Congress, or even the president, but internal Family documents show that that’s a very rare occurrence. In fact, conservative, evangelical Family insiders draw up the vast majority of the guest list, and The Family even secretly allows anti-LGBTQ officials in other governments to invite guests of their choosing to the breakfast.

Although the event is ostensibly ecumenical, the breakfast website betrays its true nature. The site exalts Jesus explicitly and its congressional “honorary host committees” have no Jews, Muslims, Mormons or any non-Christians, even though all of those faiths are represented in Congress.

Of the 32 members of Congress named, all but three are white. Two, both men, are Black and one is Latino. There are 23 men and nine women.

Secular, interfaith and LGBTQ organizations responded strongly to Democratic participation in Thursday’s breakfast. One called Biden’s involvement “mind-boggling.”

RELATED: Chick-fil-A, the National Prayer Breakfast and right-wing Christianity: Delicious combo!

This year, even the breakfast itself — a scaled-down version, presumably due to COVID — was not announced publicly. Instead, The Family posted information about the event, including Biden’s participation, on a website intended only for in-person attendees, limited to members of Congress and their spouses. The Family’s other site hosted a livestream, but even that site doesn’t appear to have been shared with the general public through a press release or on social media.

Traditionally, The Family has held the breakfast at the Washington Hilton. Last year’s was virtual due to COVID. This year, for the first time, it will be held on federal property, at the Capitol Visitor Center. (The website for members of Congress to register for attendance makes no mention of any COVID protocols.)

The Congress-only website did not even make clear that Biden would speak, as he did last year and as presidents historically have done. The congressional site said only that the “Honorary House and Senate Committees request the pleasure of your company at the [breakfast] with The President of the United States.”

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When TYT asked the White House in December whether Biden would participate this year, a spokesperson responded, “We will circle back with you when we have something to share.” That circling-back never happened.

Responding to a TYT followup, the same spokesperson emailed on Jan. 27: “We are trying to coordinate with Scheduling now.” When it was suggested they had inadvertently revealed that Biden was scheduling something related to the breakfast, the spokesperson responded, “We don’t have anything further to share yet at this time.”

Google, however, cached The Family’s congressional website as early as Jan. 25. And the URL appeared online even earlier, on Jan. 10.

Even after The Family began selectively sharing its websites, the White House had neither disclosed Biden’s participation to TYT nor announced it publicly, apart from his weekly schedule (Biden’s remote address to the 2021 breakfast was never posted to the White House website). The White House has also never explained why Biden has chosen to participate.

Even earlier, in September, TYT asked Sens. Gillibrand and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., about a source’s claim that they would co-chair the 2022 breakfast. Neither responded, and as of earlier this week, neither had made any public disclosure of their participation.

Democratic participation appears to be growing sparser, as well as more sensitive.

Seven Senate Republicans are on the Senate “host committee.” Six Democrats are also listed, along with Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats. But one of those Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, told TYT in December through a spokesperson that he had not attended since 2016 and had “no intention of attending” this year. It wasn’t clear why Kaine’s name is still on this year’s list and his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RELATED: Tim Kaine becomes first Democratic senator to ditch National Prayer Breakfast

It’s on the House side where the growing Democratic shortfall shows up. Only five House Democrats are listed, compared with 11 Republicans. Last year, eight House Democrats lent their names to the event.

A source close to The Family told TYT that, “They would prefer more [Democrats] so I would take that that they couldn’t find any more.” (Only two of this year’s Democrats responded to requests for comment.)

No longer listed this year are at least seven Democrats who have been cited in TYT’s recent reporting about The Family. One, Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., distanced himself from the breakfast a year ago after TYT reported on Family insiders backing Donald Trump’s false election claims.

Although Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., defended her involvement last year, her name is also not on this year’s invitation. Neither is that of Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., whose appearance at a Ukrainian prayer breakfast run by anti-LGBTQ politicians prompted one LGBTQ group to warn that Vargas had been “misled.”

Other past Democratic “hosts” not signing on this year include Reps. Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo., Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., Grace Meng, D-N.Y., and Lisa Blunt Rochester D-Del.

Rochester’s absence is noteworthy due to the fact that her state’s senior senator, Chris Coons, remains on the list, and is also The Family’s most prominent Democratic defender. (The source said that this year’s keynote speaker is criminal-justice reformer Bryan Stevenson, another Delawarean. Stevenson’s organization did not immediately respond to an email). Delaware’s junior senator, Sen. Tom Carper, another previous Democratic attendee, doesn’t appear on this year’s list.

RELATED: Members of Congress urged to boycott anti-LGBTQ National Prayer Breakfast

Carper’s absence may have nothing to do with revelations about The Family, which seems to have a stronger Democratic bench in the Senate. The Family added three new Democratic Senate “hosts”: Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., a past “host,” is back this year. When asked about his involvement, Correa said in a statement:

Every Democratic President in recent history including Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Biden have been part of the Prayer Breakfast. I’m a Christian and a Catholic who strongly believes in human rights and equal rights for all. If we assume that everyone has a certain set of views, then if the rest leave, then who is left?

The Family’s only brand new House Democrat, Rep. Frank Mrvan of Indiana, also provided a statement, saying:

I ran for Congress in order to continue to be a tireless advocate to bring people together and have the difficult conversations that are necessary to bridge the great divides that are confronting our nation. On January 6, 2021, those of us who were on the House floor were gathered in a secure location, and in that uncertain moment we joined hands and prayed with House Chaplain [Margaret] Kibben. It is in that spirit of prayer from January 6 that I agreed to lend my name for the National Prayer Breakfast committee. My voting record and history as an elected official demonstrate my unwavering commitment to fight against any form of discrimination, including standing up for members of all religions and members of the LGBTQ community. I will continue to make myself present in any room in order to lend my voice to help bring people together and live up to our mission to be our brother’s and sister’s keeper.

A recent congressional disclosure form shows that Kibben, along with Vargas and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, D-Pa., was invited by Ukraine’s anti-LGBTQ organizers to their prayer breakfast last year. Kibben told TYT in an email last year that she did not attend, but declined to answer followup questions.

Mrvan’s suggestion that his attendance will bring people together echoes past rhetoric from other Democrats and The Family. But there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests not only that that is false but that it helps to whitewash The Family’s secret work at the closed-door “breakout sessions” that are part of the breakfast.

Rabid Trump supporter and election truther Mike Lindell, for instance, says that his claims about the 2020 election have a religious basis. TYT reported last year that the Prayer Breakfast was an important tool for Family insiders and allies who radicalized Lindell religiously and politically.

Similarly, Ukraine’s prayer breakfast had proved divisive even before TYT’s reporting on its organizers. The TakeCareTim blog reported more than two years ago that Family insider Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., a member of this year’s host committee, used side events at Ukraine’s breakfasts to push overtly political, anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice messages.

Last week, TYT revealed that Family insiders secretly used the U.S. and Guatemalan prayer breakfasts to stand up an evangelical political network that helped crush a UN task force aimed at cleaning up Guatemalan corruption. Guatemala is now a major source of frustration for the Biden White House and human-rights activists alike.

Presaging Mrvan’s unity claims, Family insider David Beasley, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, had predicted that forming prayer groups in Guatemala would unite rival factions. But after Guatemala’s evangelical president began targeting the UN task force, its supporters were no longer invited to the D.C. breakfast. Forced to flee the country, Guatemala’s former attorney general now relies on financial help from fellow refugees and does her prayers in a studio apartment outside Washington.

“Many of the Dems enjoy and value the time together [at the breakfast],” the source close to The Family said. “But [they] do not fully understand the wider activities or their implications.”

Asked how they would explain those implications to participating Democrats, the source said, “Have them read your reporting.”

Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance, told TYT that “the socially conservative agenda promoted by the sponsors ought to make those committed to diversity, equity and inclusion think twice about lending their names and titles to this set of events.”

Rémy Bonny, executive director of the LGBTI organization Forbidden Colours was considerably stronger:

The National Prayer Breakfast is a deceptive organization by the world’s leading ultraconservatives. The same evangelicals are responsible for the anti-LGBTIQ+ initiatives in Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. Democrats should not treat the NPB as a bipartisan event. The Family uses this event to create deception about their real agenda: [to] recreate a patriarchal society outlawing LGBTIQ+ persons across the world.

Bonny’s claim about evangelicals appears to be a reference to leading evangelical pastor Franklin Graham. As TYT discovered, Graham’s secret financial backing of the breakfast has helped keep its operations afloat during COVID. Graham has been identified as a major funder of anti-LGBTQ networks in Europe and elsewhere.

The rest of the “host committees” consist largely of Republican Family allies sympathetic to Graham’s sentiments, as well as a few Democratic breakfast veterans who otherwise support LGBTQ causes. Here are the other House members:

  • Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala.
  • Rep. Virginia Foxx R-N.C.
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas
  • Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo.
  • Rep. French Hill, R-Ark.
  • Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa.
  • Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich.
  • Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.
  • Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
  • Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind.
  • Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y.
  • Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas
  • Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.

Here are the remaining host committee senators:

  • Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark.
  • Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
  • Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.
  • Sen. Robert Casey D-Pa.
  • Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.
  • Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.
  • Sen. Jim Lankford, R-Okla.
  • Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.

Some of the Republican “committee” members have undercut Democratic claims about prayer’s unifying power. Gillibrand’s co-chair, Sen. Rounds of South Dakota, last year tweeted what appeared to be a threat to Biden.

Gohmert’s friendship with former Rep. Janice Hahn, D-Calif., a Family ally, has been held up by both as an example of a bridge built on prayer. Last year Gohmert responded to the failure of his legal challenge against Biden’s victory by saying on TV, “You got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and [Black Lives Matter].” Similar examples can be found from other Family Republicans.

One reason the breakfasts don’t yield unity may be that not everyone gets invited. TYT previously reported on the guest lists’ scarcity of progressive leaders and LGBTQ people.

After TYT shared internal Family guest and invitation lists with him, Moline called it “remarkable” that aside from pro forma invitations to Jewish diplomats and office-holders, “There seemed to be no cohort of Jews, leaders or otherwise … no renowned scholars or pundits from the community.”

Moline added, “For people who claim to have a Biblically-induced love for the Jews and the State of Israel, you almost have to be intentional not to have guests from the wide range of Jewish and Israel-friendly organizations that inhabit every inch of the religious and political spectrum.”

In a statement, the Secular Coalition for America said:

[T]he presence of our nation’s leaders at this Christian nationalist event organized by an extremist organization makes it appear as if the U.S. government endorses a fringe movement within one particular religious sect. The National Prayer Breakfast makes a mockery of our secular Constitution and serves to undermine our democracy. It is deeply disappointing to see our elected officials legitimize this event, we strongly urge them to reconsider their involvement.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president and co-founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, was even more critical. In a statement, she said:

We are deeply disturbed that President Biden has chosen to address an event that has become a hotspot for Christian nationalists and theocrats, anti-LGBTQ bigotry and influence-peddling. It has been mired in scandal after scandal, including the FBI’s arrest of a Russian agent with ties to Vladimir Putin. Every year more and more members of Congress walk away from this event. Why Biden still embraces it, is mind-boggling.

At a time of rising Christian nationalism, with LGBTQ and reproductive rights under assault, Biden has not explained why he continues to facilitate The Family’s work. There’s no evidence that his eloquent words about forging unity and ending division at this week’s breakfast are likely to make those things happen. 

Fury as Louis DeJoy defies Biden Administration on electrifying Postal Service truck fleet

A leading House Democrat on Wednesday demanded the ouster of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over his push to spend $11 billion on a new fleet of largely gasoline-powered USPS delivery trucks, a plan that flies in the face of President Joe Biden’s proposed shift to zero-emission government vehicles.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee that oversees the USPS, warned in a social media post late Wednesday that DeJoy is aiming to “spend billions on gas-powered vehicles despite clear goals set by President Biden and Congress to electrify the federal fleet.”

“I want a full examination of this contract, and I am pursuing a legislative remedy,” wrote Connolly. “But DeJoy has to go right now.”

Last February, the DeJoy-led USPS awarded a 10-year contract to Oshkosh Defense—a Wisconsin-based manufacturing company—to produce up to 165,000 trucks, the largest effort in decades to replace the Postal Service’s aging fleet. Oshkosh plans to produce the vehicles in South Carolina, a state with some of the most anti-union labor laws in the country.

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The lucrative contract—which Oshkosh won over Workhorse Group, an electric truck maker—drew scrutiny from lawmakers at the time it was awarded, and Connolly is demanding that Congress take a closer look given the significant climate implications.

Transportation represents the biggest single source of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which Biden has pledged to cut in half by the end of the decade. Postal Service delivery trucks make up about a third of the federal government’s vehicle fleet.

“The average age of the postal fleet is 30 years,” Connolly told the New York Times in an interview Wednesday. “They’re spewing pollution and they are guzzling gas. There is no question we have to replace the fleet, and it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take electric vehicle technology to the next level with the second-largest vehicle fleet in America.”

“If we miss this opportunity it sets back the whole thrust of the electric vehicle agenda,” warned the Virginia Democrat warned, who argued that DeJoy’s plan for new gas-powered trucks is an “enormous example” of why he should step down or be removed from his post.

“I would love for him to resign, and if he won’t resign, I want the board of governors to fire him,” said Connolly.

RELATED: Trouble piles up for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

As currently constituted, however, the USPS board does not appear willing to oust DeJoy, with former President Donald Trump’s nominees outnumbering Biden’s picks 5-3. Last month, Biden announced his nominees—one Democrat and one Republican—to replace two Trump-appointed members of the board.

Even if the latest Biden picks are confirmed by the Senate, it’s not clear the board will have enough votes to remove DeJoy, a major Trump donor who has come under fire for slowing mail delivery and hiking prices.

DeJoy has previously dismissed calls for his resignation, telling lawmakers last February that he intends to remain head of the Postal Service for “a long time.”

Shortly ahead of Connolly’s comments, the Biden administration requested that DeJoy hold up the $11 billion truck contract, arguing that the Postal Service’s environmental analysis of the deal was deeply flawed and incomplete, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

In a letter to the USPS on Wednesday, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) noted that—among other failures—”the Postal Service chose not to consider in detail even a single feasible alternative to its proposal that would be more environmentally protective, evaluating only alternatives the Postal Service itself considered to be infeasible.”

RELATED: Louis DeJoy rolls out plan to slow USPS, despite calls for his ouster

“The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world,” the EPI argued. “A 10% commitment to clean vehicles, with virtually no fuel efficiency gains for the other 90% is plainly inconsistent with international, national, and many state GHG emissions reduction targets, as well as specific national policies to move with deliberate speed toward clean, zero-emitting vehicles.”

If the USPS—which is independent of the executive branch—brushes off the Biden administration’s concerns, environmental groups could have the option of suing to block the contract, the Washington Post noted Wednesday.

Adrian Martinez, an attorney for Earthjustice, told the Post that climate groups would have a good chance of winning in court, given the shoddiness of the Postal Service’s environmental review.

“It is hard to predict what courts will do, but the Postal Service’s work here is just so embarrassingly flimsy,” Martinez said. “They don’t reveal the source of the information for many of their conclusions, instead dismissing electrification outright.”

In a blog post earlier this week, Martinez urged the Biden administration to “play hardball over this contract.”

“The environmental analysis from the USPS is bad—almost eighth-grade science report bad—and misleading,” Martinez argued. “Agencies like the EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality not only can, but have a moral obligation to push the postal service to do an analysis that is honest and lawful. They should avail themselves of every opportunity under bedrock environmental laws like National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act in this fight for clean air and our climate.”

National GOP proxy war breaks out in crowded primary to succeed Texas congressman

The race to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, has boiled over into a tense proxy war, with some of the best-known Republicans in Texas — and the country — split between two of the leading candidates.

The March 1 primary features 11 contenders, but the battle between the GOP factions has centered on Morgan Luttrell and Christian Collins.

Luttrell is a former Navy SEAL backed by former Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Houston and the top super PAC aligned with House GOP leadership. Collins, meanwhile, is a young political operative who has the support of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the campaign arm of the House Freedom Caucus, and some of the most ardent pro-Trump Republicans in the House, like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was permanently banned from Twitter last month for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

There are few notable policy differences between Luttrell and Collins — they both fervently want to secure the border, restrict abortion and protect gun rights. But at least one of them sees the race as having implications for the future of the GOP, pitching himself as more of a pro-Trump warrior who will battle leadership.

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“[Luttrell] is lining up with the establishment in Washington, and I’m lining up with those who are the tip of the spear,” Collins said in an interview, calling himself the “true pro-Trump conservative” in the primary. However, he acknowledged it is a “very divided community right now.”

Indeed, the race is not as clear-cut. While House GOP leadership is pulling for Luttrell, he also has Trump loyalists in his corner, like U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson of Amarillo, and has the endorsement of the leader of the Texas House Freedom Caucus, state Rep. Mayes Middleton of Wallisville.

Luttrell has so far run a campaign less driven by contrast, trying to keep the focus on his background as a military hero who came home and did right by his community. But at a forum Wednesday night, Luttrell fired back at Collins’ criticism of his support that is linked to House GOP leadership.

“I got those PAC donations because I’m a better candidate, plain and simple,” Luttrell said, adding that he is “not the candidate who got … almost a million dollars by one person” — a reference to a pro-Collins super PAC donor. “I’m supported by all these people across the country, in this state and by those PACs because no one can hold a candle to my resume, my experience and my fortitude. Period.”

Collins has pledged to join the congressional Freedom Caucus if elected, while Luttrell has not made the same commitment, saying he first wants to get to Washington and survey the landscape. That has helped drive the wedge for Collins and his allies — including Cruz, who recently spent a day in the district campaigning with Collins and assuring voters he has the “guts” to stand up to House leadership.

RELATED: Texas redistricting broke voting rights laws, GOP state senator admits in sworn court statement

Luttrell was unavailable for an interview for this story.

The race was triggered by Brady’s announcement in April that he would not seek reelection after a long tenure during which he ascended to the top of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. His 8th Congressional District, which spreads from the northern Houston suburbs into more rural territory, has been safely Republican and stayed that way through redistricting, meaning the primary will effectively decide his successor.

Brady — who carved a path as both friendly to Trump and loyal to House leadership in recent years — is staying out of the race.

Luttrell has been a candidate for months longer than Collins has, and he has emerged as a formidable fundraiser, raking in $1.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. But as the March 1 primary nears, Republicans are watching to see if the two will head to a runoff — where the intraparty feuding will likely only intensify.

Controversial allies

While trailing Luttrell in campaign fundraising, Collins has been boosted by a trio of super PACs that have spent over $800,000 on his behalf. At least two have them appear to have been overwhelmingly funded by Robert Marling, a Woodlands banker and friend of Cruz. The outside groups have heavily spent in support of Collins, though one of them, Texans for Freedom, has also disclosed anti-Luttrell expenditures.

That group has at least one billboard up in the district attacking Luttrell over his support from Crenshaw, who has emerged as something of a lightning rod in the race.

RELATED: Texas GOP candidate won’t ditch overt white nationalist staffer, blames “cancel culture”

The rising-star Republican, who is also a fellow former Navy SEAL, has backed Luttrell since the first days of his campaign. But his involvement in the primary took on a new light in early December after he made national headlines for invoking the House Freedom Caucus while warning about “grifters” and “performance artists” inside the GOP — at an event alongside Luttrell, to boot. Crenshaw later denied he was singling out the Freedom Caucus with the comment, but it caused an intraparty furor and made Collins’ allyship with the Freedom Caucus more relevant.

Collins has done political work for Crenshaw previously, but he said he now shares the view of prominent Houston radio host Michael Berry, who recently said he no longer supports Crenshaw and is “embarrassed I helped him win.”

“Christian Collins used to work for me,” Crenshaw said in a statement. “He’s a nice kid but his professional career has only been on campaigns. His opinions change with the political winds. For instance he wrote a master’s thesis advocating for amnesty for illegal immigrants, and tried to have the paper withdrawn once he realized it was bad politics.”

That is a reference to Collins’ Liberty University thesis, which was published in 2013 and posited that Republicans could be more compassionate on immigration to win over Hispanic voters. It was written in the shadow of the 2012 presidential election, when the GOP grappled with whether its nominee, Mitt Romney, had been too hardlined on the issue. The university site where Collins’ paper was once available says it “has been withdrawn.”

Asked for comment on Crenshaw’s criticism, Collins pointed to an interview he gave Breitbart last month distancing himself from the paper, emphasizing it was written “almost 10 years ago” and saying he has since “spent my entire adult life fighting for conservative principles, most importantly border security.” He is now running on a hardline immigration platform, including opposition to a path to citizenship and support for decreasing overall immigration.

RELATED: Texas GOP’s voting meme shows how Trump-style messaging wins internet’s attention

Collins and his allies are also targeting Luttrell’s loose affiliation with U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a leading anti-Trump Republican who is on a mission to purge his party of the former president’s influence. Luttrell’s campaign reported receiving a $5,000 donation — the maximum amount — from a Kinzinger political action committee in August.

At a January forum, Luttrell professed ignorance, saying he does not involve himself in his campaign’s fundraising and “didn’t know the check was cashed.” He said his campaign returned the check when they realized who it was from, while adding that he served in the military with Kinzinger and does not hold “any ill will” toward him.

“I don’t believe in anything Adam’s doing right now,” Lutrrell said. “I don’t back his politics at all. But I don’t hate that man. I’m a practicing Christian, and he and I served together.”

However, there are conflicting reports around how they got the donation in the first place. The Hill reported in December that Luttrell had asked Kinzinger for a donation, and a Kinzinger spokesperson, Maura Gillespie, confirmed to The Texas Tribune that the congressman made a contribution “because it was solicited.”

“I don’t know what Morgan knows or doesn’t know,” Collins said, “but the bottom line is Adam Kinzinger, to Republicans, is a traitor.”

Collins’ political ambition has long been apparent. He worked on Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, serving as an aide to Cruz’s father and campaign surrogate, Rafael Cruz. Collins went on to work as campaign manager and adviser to Brady. And in 2020, he started the Texas Youth Summit, an annual gathering for young conservatives in suburban Houston where Cruz, Crenshaw and other members of Congress have spoken.

Luttrell does not have nearly as much of a political resume. He retired from the Navy in 2014, and when Perry became Trump’s emergency secretary a few years later, Luttrell went to work for him as a special adviser. Luttrell got an executive certificate in professional leadership development from Harvard Business School, and he currently serves as an adjunct professor at Sam Houston State University, teaching law enforcement leadership, while running a small business.

Courting Trump

One major Republican voice has not weighed in on the primary yet: Trump. Both Collins and Luttrell are lobbying for his support.

Collins in particular is working to prove his pro-Trump bona fides, not only highlighting the donation by Kinzinger — whom Trump loathes — but also aligning himself with those who echo Trump’s conspiratorial obsession with the 2020 election results. On Wednesday, Collins got the support of Wendy Rogers, a far-right Arizona state senator who has led the charge to undermine Trump’s reelection loss there.

Trump raised speculation that he could get involved by staging a rally Saturday in Conroe, one of the biggest cities in the district, but he did not address the race there. Both Collins and Luttrell attended, and Perry showed up in a Luttrell campaign sweatshirt.

The race is personal for the former Texas governor. He is especially close to the Luttrell brothers and has a father-son-like relationship with Marcus Luttrell, who the Perrys took in after he showed up unannounced at their residence in 2007.

Luttrell also has a critical Trump ally on his side in Patrick, the lieutenant governor, who the former president has openly touted as the top broker for his Texas endorsements. Patrick, the presiding officer of the state Senate, endorsed Luttrell relatively early, acknowledging he does not normally issue endorsements outside Senate races “unless it’s something very special to me.”

For now, though, Trump’s plans for the primary remain a public mystery. In the lead-up to Saturday’s rally, a Trump spokesperson declined to say whether Trump would choose a candidate for the 8th Congressional District.

“Not a two-man race”

Nine other Republicans are on the ballot, and they have been vocal about their displeasure with the spotlight that has followed Collins and Luttrell.

“This is not a two-man race,” another candidate, Dan McKaughan, said at the January forum, suggesting that the “D.C. and Austin establishments … want to continue the status quo” with their preferred contenders in the primary.

Luttrell is not the only veteran running. McKaughan is a retired Navy lieutenant commander, while another candidate, Jonathan Hullihan, was a Navy judge advocate general. Hullihan has the backing of U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a member of the Freedom Caucus.

But in addition to their endorsements, Collins and Luttrell have led the way in financial support — and especially Luttrell. He has raised almost $2 million since announcing in June, and his $1.2 million haul in the fourth quarter made him one of the top congressional fundraisers anywhere in Texas. Collins, who entered the race in early October, raised $334,000 through December.

Luttrell ended 2021 with a large cash-on-hand advantage — $1.6 million to $288,000 for Collins.

Canceling CNN’s Jeff Zucker show – an ignominious career of ruining networks & developing characters

Jeff Zucker has a yen for viewing humans as TV characters. In theory, this should have made him an excellent network executive.

In practice, he proved to be a terrible programmer.

We got that clue when he became NBC’s entertainment president in 2000 and drove it from first place to fourth by, among other sins, betting on Emeril Lagasse’s appeal as a sitcom star.

We’ve reaped the results of that paradigm during Donald Trump’s political career – the former host of “The Apprentice” being one of Zucker’s greatest character development stories at NBC. As the chief of CNN Worldwide, Zucker enabled Trump’s rise from his candidacy through a presidency which was in part (but not entirely) delivered to him via an estimated billions of dollars’ worth free media coverage on CNN and other 24-hour news channels.

None of that is the reason that Zucker was suddenly pushed out of his position as the president of CNN Worldwide after nine years. Zucker’s official statement is that he resigned, but according to CNN’s Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy’s sources, he would have been terminated if he hadn’t tendered his resignation.

RELATED: CNN shocker: Zucker out post-Cuomo probe

The official reason is Zucker’s failure to disclose his romantic relationship with executive vice president and chief marketing officer Allison Gollust, one of his first hires at CNN and one of his closest lieutenants. However, Zucker and Gollust’s relationship has been an open secret for years, with none other than former “Today” show host Katie Couric dropping hints about it in her 2021 memoir.

In any event, the fact that the average person knows anything about Zucker at all is because he has styled himself to become a character. Zucker probably does not see that as a negative estimation. What he might debate, however, is the nature of his role.

He likely envisions himself as a Cory Ellison, the handsome president of the fictional network news division on “The Morning Show.” Ellison’s character is in part modeled on Zucker, the man who made his bones by becoming the youngest executive producer of NBC’s “Today” and steering it from near-irrelevance into dominance.

But Cory, for all his ruthlessness, is somewhat likable. The real world’s audience doesn’t see Zucker that way. To the public, Zucker is the one- or two-season guest star who joins the workplace drama ensemble and mucks up the joint. He’s the guy who screwed over Conan O’Brien and thought, wrongly, that America was craving more Jay Leno in prime time, at a time when the host’s popularity had tumbled.

He’s the man who saw the end of “Friends” on the horizon and thought “Joey” would solve that problem.

On the plus side, he’s also the guy who was at NBC’s helm when “30 Rock” and “The Office” were on. But he is more Michael Scott than Jack Donaghy, a man whose name is synonymous with the phrase “failing upward. “

Nobody bloviates his way into ever-greater positions of power without having the alliances to make that possible. And this has worked for Zucker, a guy who moves forward and selects a few co-stars to bring him without substantially improving the company he’s been put in charge of.

This may be why the reaction within CNN to his ouster is mixed.

Zucker may not have done wonders for the integrity of the CNN brand as a news organization, but he did elevate a few careers. Don Lemon told Variety “I just think so highly of Jeff, and he is the best boss we have ever had, and one of the best things that has ever happened to CNN.”

One expects Lemon to feel this way, since Zucker plucked him from his weekend anchor post and gave him his own weeknight show in prime time. In doing so he transformed Lemon from a punchline into an officer in network’s prime time Trump opposition forces – a terrific hero role, all told.

Another was Lemon’s prime time partner until very recently. Chris Cuomo came to CNN from ABC at the same time that Zucker arrived, in January 2013, as a morning anchor, bumping out award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien, among others, in the process. (It’s also worth noting that before Gollust joined CNN she worked for a brief time as former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s communications director.)

Zucker likely recognized that Cuomo had a following for reasons having little to do with his fact-finding skills. To wit, while he hosted “Cuomo Prime Time” he maintained a steady Instagram presence featuring his workouts, including shirtless shots.

CNN already had plenty of personalities in its stable before Zucker arrived, including Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper. The latter has proven over the years that he’s an effective journalist on top of being a magnetic screen presence. The same is true of Jake Tapper, who also joined CNN in 2013 and remains one of the network’s most respected anchors.

Nevertheless, the onset of the Trump era inspired Zucker to transform the network into a stage for screaming matches between liberal commentators and Trumpian wingnuts, presented as covering both sides with its hosts frequently playing the part of referees as opposed to offering context and adequate fact checking.

Zucker is portrayed as being very hands-on with the news operation, transforming a network whose bread and butter was once its wall-to-wall coverage of world news into a pundit farm whose main crop was false equivalency.

 In a 2017 New York Times story Zucker likened his legitimization of lie-peddling right-win surrogates such as Kayleigh McEnany and Corey Lewandowsky to casting  “‘characters in a drama,‘ members of CNN’s extended ensemble cast.”

This compromised the network’s best talents despite their efforts to produce useful journalism, which we saw far less of during his tenure. Trump painted CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta as a fake news peddler and his enemy, ensuring that fans and foes adore or hate him for reasons having little to do with his actual skills. Still, it made him a central player on this stage, giving him a level of public recognition that he didn’t previously have.

The oddly poetic coincidence within Zucker’s various defenestrations, first at NBC and now at CNN, is his reliance on the wrong friends and his extreme underestimation of their loyalty.

Making Trump a star earned him the reward of backstabbing and public humiliation, both courted for the sake of ratings.

A surreptitiously recorded 2016 phone conversation between Zucker and former Trump lackey Michael Cohen revealed that on the same day as a Republican primary debate that CNN hosted, Zucker was still referring to Trump as “the boss” and saying, “I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.” This received very little coverage because the person who obtained the recording was Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

This was before Trump was elected, remember. When Trump was a candidate, CNN devoted outsized amounts of uninterrupted airtime to his campaign rallies, including shots that lingered on empty lecterns with chyrons hailing his imminent arrival.

When Trump was president, he painted CNN as the enemy and insulted Zucker regularly even as the network placed his liars on the payroll.

As for Chris Cuomo, Zucker encouraged his on-air playtime with Andrew despite the ethically questionable nature of it. He also protected Chris after it came out that he helped coach Andrew on how to respond to the multiple sexual harassment allegations brought against him . . . that is, until he couldn’t.

According to an analysis in The Wrap, the network gained ground in the Trump era but lost a substantial slice of the adults ages 25-54 demographic in prime time over the last nine years – to the tune of 29%.  During the same period, the top-rated Fox News Channel’s audience in that demo rose 23% from January 2013.

MSNBC fares worse in the demo (a 44% drop from 2013), but in total day viewership estimates it is up 44% over the numbers from January 2013, while CNN is only up 11%.

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This brings us to the lasting effect of what Zucker has wrought at CNN. In transforming its newsroom from a breaking news destination into an infotainment generator, he brought a pugilistic energy to the place but never figured out how to keep whatever ground CNN won.  

As usual, the ultimate losers were, and are, news consumers. This is how Samantha Bee breaks it down during 2017’s “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” telecast.

Zucker’s greatest success since ‘The Apprentice’ – which by the way, thanks for that – is filling the airtime between car crashes with a reality show loosely based on the news. Where loyal partisan hacks make us measurably dumber by spewing mendacious nonsense, while a hologram of Anderson Cooper stands by counting the seconds to the commercials for all the pharmaceuticals he probably wishes he could gulp down to sedate himself . . . 

Zucker’s reign wasn’t a complete loser. Similar to how he succeeded in expanding NBC Universal’s cable channels while allowing the Peacock to molt, Zucker correctly surmised that digital platforms will be where future audiences will gravitate to get their news. CNN+ launches in late March, with a number of star journalists already on board, including former NPR co-host Audie Cornish and former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace.

He will not be there to oversee that launch although he expected to be, and likely expected a promotion once the merger between Discovery, Inc. and Warner completed. Zucker has a close relationship with Discovery’s chief executive David M. Zaslav, according to the New York Times.

Once again, he was watching the wrong show. WarnerMedia’s chief executive Jason Kilar, who was perceived as less powerful as Zucker, ended up being the one to demand his resignation. That’s not a “Friends” episode. That’s going all “Game of Thrones” on your enemy’s ass.

But what is dead may never die, which is why this is not a career obituary for Zucker. You can bet he’ll pop up someplace that desperate for a temporary ratings win, that isn’t too concerned about the long term loss in that overhaul.  

More difficult to estimate is whether CNN can recover from their third-place position among cable news networks, which is where they were when Zucker came aboard. But the news and information business is another beast than what it was nine years ago.

Everything analysts say organizations such as CNN should be doing, such as in-depth, thoughtful longform journalism and reporting, hasn’t proven to be a successful business model, as shuttered outfits such as Current and Al Jazeera America show us. Propagandizing and outrage drive the business now, and trying to steal a piece of that stream while claiming the middle hasn’t done CNN any favors.

As for Zucker, maybe he’ll glean some tips from his brother from another fictional mother. The second season finale of “The Morning Show” depicts Cory Ellison on the brink of losing his position after betting it all on a digital streaming service and losing, and backing a star TV personality who lied about her relationship with a sexual predator. Cory also declared his love for that host’s co-worker, a woman he hired and championed. Without a control booth to rule, maybe his best bet is to call that writers’ room and lend his expertise by suggesting what a man like Cory would do next to yank success out of the deep, stinking bowels of failure.

Now there’s something he would be great at.

More stories like this:

“I bought into the whole diet industry”: Valerie Bertinelli on loving herself, food and Betty White

Valerie Bertinelli has had enough.

The Golden Globe award-winning actor, New York Times bestselling author, and Emmy award-winning television host’s new memoir is all about having “Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today.” The veteran of the Norman Lear classic “One Day at a Time,” “Touched by an Angel,” “Hot in Cleveland” and “Valerie’s Home Cooking” joined us recently on “Salon Talks” to discuss self-acceptance, the joy of cake from a mix, Van Halen and what Betty White taught her about gratitude. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written books called “Losing It,” “Finding It,” and now . . .

“Enough Already.”

You use that phrase so often in the book. What does that mean to you at this moment in your life?

It means a couple things. It means, enough already, with the self-loathing, the bad talk, being unkind to ourselves. Enough already. It also means I am enough already. Perfection isn’t a part of being human, I’m enough. In and of myself, I am lovable. I don’t don’t have to be a certain weight on the scale. I don’t have to be a certain size in my jeans. I’m enough, I’m enough. We all are, we are all enough.

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It’s about being fed up but also acceptance. You talk in this book about something that I don’t know too many women who can’t relate to — gaining and losing the same 10 pounds.

I’m so tired of the script.

What caused the shift in you? When did you say, “Okay, I don’t want to do this with these same 10 pounds for the rest of my life”?

Age might have something to do with it. I’ve just lived long enough on this treadmill that I don’t want to be on anymore. When am I just going to be happy? Just be happy. I like to say all the time, “When faced with a choice, choose happy.” But happy was getting more and more challenging to choose because I was so worried about what I looked like. As you age, you start to worry less, or at least I do. It is what it is.

I think I learned at a very, very young age that when I gain weight, I’m unlovable, which is a huge lie. The way my father treated my mother when she would gain weight wasn’t very kind. I had an elementary school teacher point at my belly and say, “You’re going to want to keep an eye on that.” Before that, I wasn’t even aware of my body. Those things now make me angry. What they did to me as a young child is they gave me a core memory of how to be accepted. Don’t gain weight, that will make you unlovable. Now I’m just trying to dig all of that crap out of my body and my heart and my mind, so that I can truly live in this body that I have today and just accept myself.

I’ve done too many things to make my life miserable because I didn’t like what the number on the scale said. I never liked what the number on the scale said, it doesn’t matter how small it was. When it was big, I wanted to hide away, but it was never small enough. What’s the point? If that number’s never going to make me happy, stop looking at it. And I have. When I finished writing the book, I stopped getting on the scale and my jeans still fit. Obviously, I was so worried I was going to gain so much weight if I didn’t know what it was.

I want to be very clear though, that because I’m saying enough already, I’m not going to worry about this any longer, it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to care about putting good things into my body. I want to eat more fruits and vegetables. I don’t want to have as much alcohol. I want to have less sugar. I’m not going to deny myself anything, but I am going to try and treat my body in a way that will get me up those stairs when I’m 80 years old, so I don’t have to worry about that.

RELATED: Lily Rabe on working with director George Clooney: “He’s a great leader”

That’s the difference. It’s about moving from a place of self love. That is always a work in progress. I was really heartened the other day, you posted something on Instagram where you admitted you were really a having a hard day. It’s not something that we arrive at and then it’s ever done.

There’s no sexy before and after picture, like when you lose weight.

Yet you famously have been the sexy before and after girl, Valerie.

I bought into the whole diet industry, as well. I’m actually a little ashamed of my role in it, that I would ever make someone feel less than just because I got into a bikini. It was my job to do that. I worked out twice a day, I barely ate. It was not a way to live a life, for sure. That’s not the life that I want to live. It just keeps coming back to that.

But all of this is real. These expectations and these judgments are real. We don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s hard to wake up in this world every day.

It doesn’t just click on like a light bulb. That’s why I wanted to show that I was struggling that day because I had seen a picture of myself that was going to be printed in a magazine. I was like, “Oh God, everyone’s going to see it.” Well, who cares? Yes, I’ve gained weight obviously, but it doesn’t make me less of a human being. I’m still the same kind person or, at least, I try to be. I was traveling into that self-loathing and I could feel myself spiraling down and I thought, “OK, this is where I put into action everything I’ve been trying to learn for the past few years.”

How do I get myself out of it? I have to click my mind onto something else and not just stay in my head. I walked outside in the rain. I thought, “OK, I’m going to look at the rain. It’s beautiful, it makes me feel good. I love the water.” Looking around in my surroundings and looking at the flowers and just clicking your brain into something else, so you don’t stay there. I wanted to just show how I hopefully got out of it. I think a lot of people were focused about me not being there yet and being uncomfortable with where I am and not being where I want to be. I also showed how to get out of it, and I hope that was helpful for some people.

You talk in the book about your career in food television and how unexpected that was and what a new chapter that has been. I wonder if that’s part of your shift in your relationship with your body and having this new relationship with food. How has that affected you and how you feel in your self image?

I had to go back to the original thing about food, where food is love. Food is the way that my mother showed her love. Food was my Nonie’s love language. It was my great-grandmothers, who I never met. I was able to find out that she actually worked in a home in San Remo as the house chef. So it’s in my life. Food is important. It feeds you, it feeds the love that you have for people. It feeds your soul. I wanted to get back to that because there was a lot of years there where I was afraid of food and it’s going to destroy me.

It’s not the food doing it, it’s the way I used food. Now that I’ve somehow got this amazing career, being able to cook for people, it feels like, food’s not the enemy. I’m actually able to show people love again. So I’ve taken this full circle. I’ve come back to the love of food and how you could share your love with people that way. There’s never not a recipe developing in my head. So I’m going to deny that for the rest of my life? No, no, no. That’s part of me.

You talk about the way that food has also been a love language for people towards you. A lot of the book is also about your mom. Talk to me about what you learned about your mother through learning from her recipes.

That’s where regret comes in, too, because I wish that I was able to talk to her more and open up with her more and have her open up to me more. She was a very reserved woman with a great sense of humor but she never felt like anybody listened to her anyway. We were able to get closer near the end of her life, thankfully, and we did have a great joking relationship. She was always telling me my lasagna wasn’t right because there was no ricotta in it because I like to change it over to béchamel.

I know that she used food to engage my dad’s family because she was not accepted into the family. She was an English-Irish woman and this is a purely Italian family and they weren’t having it. Then she gets pregnant and they have to get married. I think her learning how to cook like an Italian woman is what got her closer to the family. She used food as acceptance. That was important in her life because the family that she had growing up, wasn’t a family. Her mother died when she was nine. She really wanted to be accepted by my dad’s family and she was finally, through food.

And then, I see you doing that in the beginning of the book with your mother-in-law.

Oh, yes. It was the one thing we could talk about without her hurting my feelings. She was really good at hurting people’s feelings. I don’t think she even realized it but she had a really tough life, as well. I never ever knew it, until Ed would tell me something after she passed. I didn’t get a chance to really dig into her and her heart and her soul, as well. I did learn to cook some of her amazing dishes and I’ll forever be grateful for that. The way I grew up was Italian cooking.

And then to learn that there’s this Indonesian cooking that is amazing and spicy but yet they still have a spaghetti dish, called Bami. It’s a little bit different. It made me realize that food really is so universal that we all have a spaghetti dish, a noodle dish. We all have a dumpling dish, a ravioli dish.You can have gyoza or you can have ravioli or cappalletti. And it’s all around the world. People have different kinds of bread, pizza. We’re so much more alike than we really give ourselves credit for. To celebrate other foods, other cultures, it connects us so much more. I’m so grateful for Mrs. Van Halen having teaching me all of those things.

One of the things that really jumped out at me is a carryover from your show, as well. The way you talk about food and the way that you write the recipes, they’re all so accessible. You use the no boil noodles. You make this Sicilian love cake, which is just the sexiest sounding thing in the world.

It’s with a box mix.

I’m a big fan of the St. Louis gooey cake, which is also a box mix recipe.

Well, I need to know what that is.

It’s made with a box and that’s part of what makes it so delicious. We have this culture of perfectionism and your recipes are very anti-perfectionism. It’s about, it’s okay to use the no boil noodles. It’s okay to use a box mix.

Absolutely.

Why is that an important part of the conversation around food?

Because, I think, sometimes people get intimidated by food, intimidated by cooking. It really is much easier than some chefs would have you believe. Yes, there’s some techniques that I’ll never be able to learn and I don’t really want to. I want my life to be easier in the kitchen. I want to have fun in the kitchen. I want to create, I want to use it as a way of expressing myself. That means making it a little bit easier, too, so it can connect with a lot of other people. I can show love and they can feel love through this because they’ll want to recreate it for themselves. If it’s going to be challenging and there’s going to be ingredients that you’ve never heard of, it’s not going to be fun to make.

Throughout the book, you use these recipes to illustrate these moments of connection. So much of the spine of this book is your relationship with your late ex-husband Eddie Van Halen. So much of it is framed around the last year or so of his life and this incredibly loving, respectful friendship that not a lot of exes get to have, Valerie. How did you two manage that? Because it’s really so inspiring to see.

He was angry at me when I first left for quite a bit. He was really angry with me. I was angry at him for a lot of the things that he had done, but I never hated him. I always loved him even when I was angry with him. I know he always loved me even when he was angry with me, so we always had that to fall back on. Near the end of his life, it was important for him to really let the people know how much they were loved and how much he appreciated and how regretful he was about things that he had done in his past that I still don’t blame him for.

Because drugs and alcohol were his tool in his toolbox to deal with the pain that he felt, the immense grief and pain that he felt in his life and the challenges of his life. I used food. I wish that I had been a little bit more understanding early on, but I was 20 when we got married. I wasn’t really developed in a way of relationships like that. I was learning with my relationship with him on how to treat someone you love. I took things way too personally. His drug and alcohol had nothing to do with me but I felt like his addiction.

I felt it very personally. Like, “Well, if you loved me, you would get better.” That’s impossible. Nobody can love you enough to get better. They have to love themselves enough to get better. That’s the only way it works. I didn’t know that back then, so I could have been a little bit more understanding. But luckily we grew. We knew each other for 40 years, so we were able to grow into that and really come back to the real love that we shared with each other.

To end a life on that note, I’m sure that meant a great deal to your son to see the two of you connecting like that.

Oh, yes. We stayed connected and stayed friendly for Wolfie, but then it grew back to the original feeling of that soulful love that we have for one another.

I want to ask you about some of the other people who have been in and out of your life. We’re thinking a lot about one of your former co-stars, Betty White. In the book, you describe her as a person who glowed. As someone who also has spent decades in entertainment, what did you learn from her as this amazing, hilarious veteran of show business?

Besides her timing being impeccable, and you can’t really learn that, that really is innate. Take away all the brilliance that she is as a comedic actress and a dramatic actress — and people don’t give her credit for that. She was a really wonderful, dramatic actress, as well. She was just a really kind person. That oozed out of her, that was her glow. That was when she would walk on a set, not even making a big deal, just walking on a set. There was just this beautiful aura around her. She was just the embodiment of gratitude and love and kindness. She never tried to be nice, she just was nice. She never tried to be kind, she just was. And she really, really lived in gratitude.

That’s a good one to try and learn from each other, for sure.

It is, it is. It was a really good lesson to just be grateful for everything, even the bad days because through the bad days, you can see the light days. You can’t have the light without the dark. So you’ve got to have that comparison. We don’t want it all the time, but it’s good to see sometimes.

Speaking of your co-stars and show business veterans, you have been working more recently with Demi Lovato, who like you started out as a teenager, has been very open about the system and the pressure put on actors to be a certain size and a certain weight.

I can’t believe that they’re still having to deal with that, as well. We should be beyond that by now. We really should be beyond that. They are old enough to be my daughter, young enough to be my daughter. I’m really excited about this show that we’re shooting together because it is about that. Suzanne Martin, who wrote “Hot in Cleveland,” also wrote this for Demi. I play Demi’s mother and it really is about the diet culture and what society has done to make you feel less-than because of what you weigh or what you look like. It really speaks to that in a very funny, smart, witty way. I cannot wait for people to see it. We’re going to be shooting it in about a month. The original pilot, they want to redo for a multicam, which I think is so much better. So I’m really excited about it.

Can you tell me what it’s called or what the tentative title is?

It’s called “Hungry.” It’s perfect. Hungry for life. Hungry for love. Hungry . . .  just hungry to be accepted.

Hungry for cake.

Yes. And cake is OK.

 

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Alabama schools accused of teaching “critical race theory” by recognizing Black History Month

School officials in Alabama say they’re being accused by parents of teaching students the now-forbidden tenets of “critical race theory” simply by recognizing Black History Month.

AL.com reports that Alabama Superintendent Eric Mackey told members of the Alabama House Education Policy Committee this week that many parents are accusing schools of teaching critical race theory even if the lessons in question have nothing to do with CRT.

“I had two calls in the last week that they’re having a Black History Month program and they consider having a Black history program CRT,” Mackey said. “Having a Black history program is not CRT.”

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While many Republican legislatures have banned teaching critical race theory, there is little consensus about what such teachings entail, and books and lessons that have long been considered mainstream education are now being caught up by anti-CRT fervor.

Mackey defended his schools’ curriculum while talking with Alabama lawmakers and insisted that nothing related to CRT is part of students’ education.

“I can tell you what’s in the state curriculum,” Mackey said. “I can tell you what’s in our textbooks and CRT is not in there.”

Read more stories like this:

The psychological reason that so many fall for the “Big Lie”

Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Big Lie.” According to the supposed quote, Goebbels said that if you tell “a lie big enough” and regularly repeat it, “people will eventually come to believe it.” That said, Adolf Hitler actually did use the phrase “big lie” — but not to describe his own propaganda strategy. In a darkly ironic case of psychological projection, he came up with the expression to defame the Jewish community.

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf,” his 1925 autobiographical manifesto. He observed that most people are only comfortable telling small lies, and imagined others would be as uncomfortable as themselves perpetuating big ones. “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously,” Hitler explained. “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

Indeed, like many abusers before him, Hitler rationalized his own depraved behavior by falsely accusing his victims of doing the same thing. The story of World War II is, in many ways, a tale of a Big Lie run amok. Germany felt humiliated after its loss in World War I, and the nationalistic pride which had fueled that conflict still burned in the hearts of millions.

This tactic, of a leader hypnotizing vast swathes of the public through the perpetuation of a grandiose falsehood, is a phenomenon that extends well beyond World War II and Adolf Hitler. Recently, the term has been recycled to refer to the falsity that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” in some indeterminate way, a lie that is repeated ad infinitum by Trump and a slew of his supporters at all levels from yard-sign wielding footsoldier all the way up to his closest legal counsel. 

The term “Big Lie” is believed to have been first popularized in the Anglophone world by Walter Langer, a psychoanalyst who prepared a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler for the U.S. government in 1943. In that report, Langer wrote: 

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Beyond Langer, psychologists and sociologists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century have been intrigued by the success of the Big Lie strategy — meaning a story pushed by a political leader that is clearly bald-faced, yet so grandiose as to make it hard to believe that someone would fabricate it. Indeed, it is an intriguing question as to why this works politically, and why so many millions are so quick to believe Big Lies — be it about voting fraud or Jewish conspiracies. The counterintuitive nature of the Big Lie tactic is perhaps what is most peculiar: wouldn’t a small lie be easier to pass off than a large one?

Not necessarily, psychologists say. 

RELATED: The Revolution of 2020: How Trump’s Big Lie reshaped history after 220 years

“Repetition is important, because the Big Lie works through indoctrination,” Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor of psychology who is noted as an expert on narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, told Salon by email. “The Big Lie then becomes its own evidence base — if it is repeated enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the Lie.”

Durvasula added that this is amplified by the numerous media platforms which exist in the modern era, as they trick people into thinking a certain falsehood has been reinforced even if all of their media platforms have the same political leanings.

“The banners and hats crucially add an air of silliness to everything. If I can buy a novelty hat about it, can it really be so serious? It’s a genius mindf**k.”

“Hear something enough it becomes truth,” Durvasula explained. “People assume there is an evidence base when the lie is big (it’s like a blind spot).”

Indeed, Hitler rose to power through a Big Lie that soothed Germans’ wounded egos and targeted already-popular scapegoats: Jews and socialists, who according to the Nazi narrative had betrayed Germany through backroom dealings after the empire had won on the battlefield. All of the “evidence” that Hitler marshaled to support this claim was false (fact-checkers who pointed this out were described as Jews promoting a “big lie”), and for that reason only die-hard Nazis believed the Big Lie — at first. After Hitler gained power, however, he was able to effectively spread both that fabrication and other lies, convincing more and more people that a conspiracy of Jews and leftists were enemies of Europe’s supposedly superior races. Dissent was squashed, fascism prevailed and even so-called moderates began to think that there must be at least some truth in the accusations. After all, they were being repeated everywhere.

This omnipresence, apparently, is a big part of what makes it so easy for people to be fooled by a Big Lie.

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Logician Miriam Bowers-Abbott, an associate professor at Mount Carmel College of Nursing, stressed the importance of repetition in spreading a Big Lie.

“What’s especially helpful is repetition in a variety of contexts,” Bowers-Abbott wrote to Salon. “That is, not just the same words over and over — but integration of an idea in lots of ways. It builds its own little web of support.”

As a hypothetical example, Bowers-Abbott suggested a scenario where she would want to falsely convince Salon that green grapes are a superfood.

“I need to do more than state, ‘Green grapes are a superfood’ repetitively, I need to work it into conversations,” Bowers-Abbott explained. “‘Oh, I see grapes are on sale this week, so much nutrition at such a low price!’; ‘My dietician has a great superfood recipe that features kale and grapes!’; ‘Yes! Green grapes are green! That’s the color of superfoods!'”

Dr. Matt Blanchard, a clinical psychologist at New York University, told Salon by email that this kind of immersion does not have to be merely rhetorical. If the purveyors of a Big Lie are shrewd, they can even incorporate it into a target’s physical environment.

“You might think I’m kidding, but…. Nothing sells the Big Lie like novelty t-shirts, hats and banners,” Blanchard told Salon. “These items are normally associated with sports teams, not life-and-death political issues. But [former President Donald] Trump and his circle have deftly used these items to generate the kind of unbridled loyalty Americans associate with pro football.” Blanchard noted that the mob which attempted a coup on January 6th was “at points indistinguishable from a rowdy tailgate party. The banners and hats crucially add an air of silliness to everything. If I can buy a novelty hat about it, can it really be so serious? Or a flag featuring Trump as Rambo? The use of these sports fan items allows them to both be attacking the Capitol building and at the same time, just having good clean fun.”

He added, “It’s a genius mindf**k. This goofy paraphernalia has confused our response to the riot ever since.”

Bandy Lee, an American psychiatrist who edited the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” noted that people embrace outrageous assertions for emotional reasons, and that propagandists play into that as they repeat their narrative.

“Usually, they are trying to find comfort and to avoid pain,” Lee wrote to Salon. “This happens in states of lesser health, where one is less inclined to venture into new domains or to seek creative solutions. There is comfort in repetition, and so a people or a nation under duress will gravitate more toward what is repeated to them than what is realistic. Adolf Hitler understood this very well, which is why the American psychologist Walter Langer coined the phrase to describe his method.”

Durvasula also speculated that Big Lies benefit from humanity’s hierarchical nature, given that “primate groups do tend to organize into tribes with alphas and leaders and hierarchies, and that’s us as people.” She added that many people are not sufficiently informed about the narcissistic behaviors that are warning signs “that there are people in our midst that lack empathy, have no care for the common good, are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own egocentric needs.” Instead “a sort of halo effect imbues leaders with presumed expertise and power — when that is not at all the case (most if not all megalomaniacal leaders, despots, tyrants, oligarchs share narcissism/psychopathy as a trait).”

Obviously, most of those who rally around a Big Lie do not do so from a place of deliberate deceptiveness — and they certainly wouldn’t call it that. Take the Big Lie being spread by Trump: That the 2020 election was stolen from him. Like Hitler’s Big Lie, all of Trump’s “evidence” of fraud has been exposed as spurious, from the dozens of lost legal cases (he never once proved fraud in court) to the fact that his own attorney general and Vice President admitted the election had not been stolen. To believe that the election was stolen, one would have to envision a conspiracy including hundreds of Republicans as well as Democrats and absolutely no “smoking gun” leaks — an absurd concept if one tries to break it down logistically. 

“We don’t truly ‘believe’ things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful.”

Yet the lack of substance is precisely the point, as Big Lies are structured to turn attention away from their lack of substance — in most contexts, a person with Trump’s personal history and lack of evidence would never be taken seriously — by instead playing on the desires of their targets. 

“Everything we know about the human brain suggests it is composed of numerous systems that interact, overlap, excite, inhibit, and often contradict each other, and may even hide information from consciousness,” Blanchard told Salon. “So it comes as no surprise that the act of ‘believing’ is not just one thing that humans do. Instead, this one word represents a wide range of relationships that humans have with information. We don’t truly ‘believe’ things, so much as provisionally accept information we find useful.”

As Blanchard put it, people will weigh information that directly impacts their lives differently than information which seems more abstract. The name of the game is proximity.

“For example, a man who suspects his wife is cheating on him (close proximity) may work feverishly to find the truth, plant cameras in the home, hire a private detective, and so on,” Blanchard explained. “But if the topic switches to Joe Biden’s election (far proximity) the same man probably won’t bother to even check a second news source before he decides what to ‘believe.'” This can lead to a “pretty careless” relationship with political information because people do not truly appreciate the long-term consequences.

“We tool-using humans look at every object and wonder, ‘How can I use this? What is this good for?'” Blanchard told Salon. “Political information is no different. The Big Lie is no different.”

He added, “So most people don’t whole-heartedly ‘believe’ the Big Lie, but they are more than happy to provisionally accept it because… why not? It might be entertaining. It might flatter your identity. It might help you bond with other people in your community. Or it might help you vent some rage.”

The popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram further exacerbates these trends because they add new elements of social pressure. An individual who has embraced a Big Lie repeatedly in those public settings will feel a level of personal investment that makes dislodging that much more challenging.

“It was easier to dislodge untruths before social media,” Bowers-Abbott told Salon. “In social media, people tend to take public positions. When that position turns out to be wrong, it’s embarrassing. And backing down is typically seen as weakness. So they double-down on untrue claims to save face and personal credibility.”

She added, “We are way too emotionally attached to being right. It would be better for our culture as a whole to value uncertainty and intellectual humility and curiousity. Those values help us ask questions without the expectation of permanent answers.”

Durvasula expressed a similar point, arguing that the best antidote to Big Lies is for people to learn more about critical thinking skills.

“Pushback means education in critical thinking (but given that school board heads are facing death threats over teaching critical thinking — that is not likely to happen),” Durvasula wrote. “It means ending algorithms that only provide confirmatory news and instead people seeing stories and information that provide other points of view (again, not likely to happen), creating safe spaces to have these conversations (who will be the referee?), encouraging civil discourse with those who hold different opinions, teaching people to find common ground (e.g. love of family) even when belief systems are not aligned.”

“‘Belief’ is always predicated on usefulness, and useless beliefs do not survive.”

Durvasula was skeptical about the idea that you can persuade someone to abandon a Big Lie through evidence — and Blanchard said the same thing. The problem is that, simply put, a lot of people believe the Big Lie because they want to. It helps them. And the only way to stop the Big Lie, in those situations, is to stop the people spreading it.

“Trump’s lies have always been about power,” Blanchard wrote to Salon. “He demonstrates his power by lying to your face, and when there are no consequences, his power is seen to be confirmed. The actual content of his lies is of secondary importance.” As such, Trump and the other spreaders of the Big Lie will only be discredited in the eyes of their supporters if they face their greatest fear — accountability.

“They must be seen to lose at the ballot box, they must be arrested when they break the law, they must be sued for every defamation, they must be pursued with every legal tool available in an open society,” Blanchard explained. “Above all else they must be seen as weak. Only then will their lies lose their usefulness for the millions who once saw something to gain — personally, psychologically, politically, financially — in choosing to believe.”

He added, “As I said above, ‘belief’ is always predicated on usefulness, and useless beliefs do not survive.”

Lee compared disabusing someone of the falsehoods in a Big Lie to treating regular delusions. One rule: Don’t put them on the defensive.

“Confronting them, or presenting facts or evidence, never works,” Lee told Salon. “You have to fix the underlying emotional vulnerability that led people to believing it in the first place. For populations, it is usually the pain of not having a place in the world, which socioeconomic inequality exacerbates. Deprivation of health care, education, an ability to make a living, and other avenues for dignity can make a population psychologically vulnerable to those who look to exploit them.”

More articles on psychology and politics:

Bacon and cheddar and scallions, oh my! Try this new one-skillet loaded baked potato gnocchi

Growing up, we’d have a “baked potato night” at least once a month. My mom would slide freshly baked potatoes out of their little aluminum foil jackets onto a big platter. Then she’d place it alongside a row of toppings: a tub of sour cream, a few pats of butter, a plastic baggie or two of shredded cheese, Kirkland bacon bits, pico de gallo and minced chives. 

Occasionally, there would be a small pot of chili in the mix, too. Inevitably, my brothers would bring something random — crushed potato chips, a kaleidoscopic array of hot sauces or ranch dressing — to the table “just to see how it tastes.” Though they really were simple meals, loaded baked potatoes have maintained a special place in my heart as a result of all those family dinners. 

RELATED: Crispy, creamy, loaded baked potatoes satisfying enough to be dinner tonight

That’s why, when I recently found myself with all the baked potato fixings but no potatoes, I had to get creative. So, I reached for a packet of gnocchi (pillowy-soft Italian potato dumplings) that I had intended to find sauce for and got to work. 

The result is gnocchi folded in a rich, velvety white cheddar sauce (that’s been amped up with a little sour cream) and topped with crushed bacon and scallions or chives. It takes all the best ingredients of baked potato night and combines them all together in a single 30-minute skillet meal. 

***

Recipe: Loaded Baked Potato Gnocchi 

Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
5 minutes
Cook Time
25 minutes

Ingredients

  • 16 ounces gnocchi
  • 4 slices bacon 
  • 1/4 white onion, minced 
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 tablespoons AP flour 
  • 1 1/2 cups of whole milk, plus extra 
  • 4 ounces (8 tablespoons) sharp white cheddar, shredded 
  • 1 tablespoon grated parmesan 
  • 2 tablespoons full-fat sour cream, plus extra 
  • 2 teaspoons paprika
  • 2 teaspoons cayenne 
  • Salt to taste
  • Scallions or chives for garnish 

 

Directions

  1. Cook gnocchi in a sturdy pot according to package directions, drain and set aside. 
  2. In the same pot, sauté the four strips of bacon over medium-high heat, flipping occasionally, until they’re crisp and slightly browned — about 4 minutes. Remove the strips and let them drain on a paper-towel covered plate. Crumble when cool to the touch. 
  3. Add the minced white onion to the bacon grease and sauté over medium-high heat until it’s soft and a little jammy. Reduce the heat to medium, and to the same pot, add the butter. Once it’s melted, quickly whisk in the flour until a thick paste forms. Continue to stir until the pasta has taken on a slightly toasted color. Season the paste with salt to taste. 
  4. At this point, add whole milk in a steady stream while continuing to whisk. It should form a thickened white sauce, which is called a béchamel. Season with salt to taste again, and then, while continuing to whisk, slowly add the shredded sharp white cheddar cheese and grated parmesan. Finally, add the sour cream. 
  5. Look at the sauce: Is it too thick? Add an extra tablespoon or two of milk. Too thin? Increase the heat and allow it to slowly simmer. Once you’re satisfied with the consistency, season with paprika, cayenne and more salt, if needed. 
  6. Fold the gnocchi into the cheese sauce and stir gently over medium heat until they’re completely coated. 
  7. Divide among four bowls. Top with crumbled bacon and chopped scallions or chives for garnish.

 

Cook’s Notes

Like baked potato night, feel free to try different combinations of toppings and add-ins — but you really can’t beat the comfort of a simple bowl. 

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Anti-masker Rudy Giuliani’s surprise cameo on “The Masked Singer” prompts judges to walk out

For someone who’s firmly remained anti-mask during the pandemic, Rudy Giuliani showed his love of them on a certain reality show called “The Masked Singer.” Apparently, the former Trump attorney is apparently a contestant on the next season of Fox’s wildly popular singing competition, where masks are a strict requirement.

According to Deadline, Giuliani was unmasked as a costumed contestant during last week’s taping of the Season 7 episode, and as expected, it wasn’t without some controversy. Following Giuliani’s dramatic unveiling, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke promptly walked off stage, albeit briefly, while judges Jenny McCarthy and Nicole Scherzinger allegedly stayed put.

RELATED: Donald Trump’s lackeys failed him — and saved democracy

Although the episode hasn’t aired yet — it’s slated to sometime next month — Giuliani’s cameo quickly incited complaints on social media. A fun reality show is not going to make us suddenly not remember the role he played in Trump’s tumultuous presidency, which was spent pushing lies, endorsing mistreatment and fueling violence. Let’s not forget that Giuliani also made claims of voter fraud after the 2020 presidential election and afterward, hosted a botched press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Even though Trump’s reign has come to an end, his closest companions don’t deserve to be celebrated or erased of their misdeeds on national television. As Salon’s Melanie McFarland wrote, “[W]e cannot allow them to dance their way onto the broader stage of business-as-usual normalcy. That wouldn’t merely be unjust. It would be dangerous.”

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Giuliani is not the first politician to make a surprise appearance on the primetime singing competition. In May 2020, Sarah Palin stirred the pot after revealing herself as the masked cotton-candy-resembling Bear. Although no explanation was needed — or wanted — for her feature, the politician later said that she took part in the show as “a walking middle finger to the haters out there.”

“It was all about the mask,” she told host Nick Cannon, per Entertainment Weekly. “I knew it would be so refreshing and so freeing and well, in a real respectful way, kind of a walking middle finger to the haters out there in the world where I could do whatever I wanted to do and not care what anybody said because they wouldn’t know until after the fact. So it all worked out.”

As of now, Giuliani’s costume and selected song have not been revealed. According to Deadline, the theme for the upcoming season is comically “The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly.”

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Fox News guests use questionable lockdown study to launch misleading attacks on masks, vaccines

Fox News segments on Wednesday repeatedly conflated a new study that questions the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns with the controversies over vaccines and mask mandates, essentially to claim that all public health measures are ineffective. Yet many scientists across the globe have rushed to speak out against the paper, pointing out its flaws — something that Fox News did not address in its constant coverage of the study. 

The network repeatedly highlighted a non-peer-reviewed study published online by a group of economists at Johns Hopkins University that claimed lockdowns had little effect in reducing COVID deaths. Fox News then trotted out various conservative pundits with no expertise in public health who equated lockdowns — a blunt instrument largely intended to prevent hospitals from being overrun in the early days of the pandemic — with public health measures that have been shown to work at reducing transmission and preventing severe disease and death.

The paper in question was a meta-analysis concluding that lockdowns had reduced COVID-19 deaths by just 0.2%, while shelter-in-place orders reduced deaths by 2.9% on average. In the study, a “lockdown” is defined as a government mandate that directly restricts peoples’ movement — for example, by closing schools and businesses, and banning most non-essential travel.

“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the researchers concluded. “In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

Notably, the researchers said that closing non-essential businesses did appear to have reduced COVID-19 deaths by 10.6%. Researchers suspect that was likely related to the closure of bars.

RELATED: Joe Rogan can’t stop pushing ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Experts are tired of debunking him

The study was published in a publication called Studies in Applied Economics, which is not a peer-reviewed journal and describes itself as a “series of working papers” published on the website of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins, jointly run by the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering. The institute was co-founded by one of the authors of the paper, Steve H. Hanke, who is also a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Many of the working papers in the online site for Studies in Applied Economics are written or coauthored by Hopkins undergraduates, and most are written by individuals with a background in economics, not public health.

The paper was not peer-reviewed, and according to the website, the papers are published in a series that “fills gaps in the history, statistics, and scholarship on a variety of subjects.” The authors are fellows and students at Hopkins University. There is an entirely different peer-reviewed journal called Studies of Applied Economics, and the similar names could easily lead to confusion. 

On Wednesday, scientists in the United Kingdom released statements pointing out flaws in the study. 

Professor Neil Ferguson, Director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, said in a statement via the Science Media Centre that the analyzed policies which included “lockdowns” varied widely in different countries. Ferguson questioned whether measuring the effectiveness of lockdowns based on deaths was an appropriate statistical analysis.  

“Such interventions are intended to reduce contact rates between individuals in a population, so their primary impact, if effective, is on transmission rates,” Ferguson said. “Impacts on hospitalisation and mortality are delayed, in some cases by several weeks. In addition, such measures were generally introduced (or intensified) during periods where governments saw rapidly growing hospitalisations and deaths.”

This might be one reason why deaths were substantially higher following the introduction of lockdowns, as Ferguson elaborated on. 

Dr. Seth Flaxman, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, said that the exclusion of papers regarding disease transmission likely altered the results of the Johns Hopkins paper. 

“These do not include key facts about disease transmission such as: later lockdowns are less effective than earlier lockdowns, because many people are already infected; lockdowns do not immediately save lives, because there’s a lag from infection to death, so to see the effect of lockdowns on Covid deaths we need to wait about two or three weeks,” Flaxman said in a statement. “This was all known in March 2020 – we discussed it in a paper released that month, and later published in Nature. Our paper is excluded from consideration in this meta-analysis.”

Flaxman explained the flaw via a metaphor on smoking and cancer. 

“It’s as if we wanted to know whether smoking causes cancer and so we asked a bunch of new smokers: did you have cancer the day before you started smoking? And what about the day after?” Flaxman said. “If we did this, obviously we’d incorrectly conclude smoking is unrelated to cancer, but we’d be ignoring basic science.”

Flaxman added: “The science of diseases and their causes is complex, and it has a lot of surprises for us, but there are appropriate methods to study it, and inappropriate methods. This study intentionally excludes all studies rooted in epidemiology–the science of disease.”

Fox News guests and hosts did not scrutinize or even discuss the study’s origins, but took its findings at face value arguing that it proved that lockdowns have done “more harm than good” and suggesting that the study doesn’t merely undermine the basis for lockdowns but for all other public health measures as well. (Vaccines and mask mandates are not mentioned in the study.)

“Lockdowns are not based in science,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a segment, before conflating lockdowns with other public health measures that have been found to be effective. “Masks didn’t work,” he said, although studies have shown that surgical and filtered masks reduce COVID transmission.

An analysis of 72 studies published in BMJ last fall showed that masks were the most effective non-pharmaceutical measure in reducing the spread of COVID. An analysis commissioned by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s office last year found that localities with mask mandates had fewer COVID deaths than those that did not. Another analysis from the University of Kansas last summer found that hundreds of lives were saved in Kansas counties that adopted mask mandates.

“The one thing we know that did work is vaccines and natural immunity,” Paul argued. In fact, public health experts have pushed for additional mitigation measures during the omicron surge, as breakthrough infections penetrated both vaccine and natural immunity. Paul then went on to defend dining in a restaurant that refused to enforce Washington’s vaccine mandate, arguing that there are “not enough police” in the city to shut down all the restaurants that refuse to comply with policies that “make no scientific sense.”

Even though the omicron variant has been shown to penetrate both vaccine and natural immunity, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that vaccine boosters are 90% effective against hospitalization and also offer some level of protection against infection. Unvaccinated Americans over age 50 are 45 times more likely to require hospitalization after COVID infection than those who received a booster, according to the CDC.

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Former Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., in another segment, predicted that future studies would also show that “masks didn’t work, the vaccines and vaccine mandates didn’t work to stop the spread, all of these public health policies have been ineffective at stopping the spread.”

Even amid the spread of the highly-transmissible omicron variant, vaccine boosters have been shown to reduce the spread, though it’s unclear for how long. They are highly effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalization, and death. Duffy, who has nine children, later said it was “insanity” to vaccinate young children because their hospitalization rate is “very, very low.”

It’s true that children are far less likely to be hospitalized with COVID than older adults, but the number of child hospitalizations spiked to record levels last month. A recent analysis from the Mayo Clinic found that babies under one year old may be at higher risk of severe illness than older kids.

“I don’t know why we would risk the health of our little kids and vaccinate them,” Duffy said, dismissing concerns that children could spread the virus to high-risk people. “Everyone’s getting COVID!” he said.

RELATED: The kids are not alright: Data suggests 10% of children with COVID-19 become “long-haulers”

A study published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics last year found that younger children are more likely to transmit the virus to other household members than older children, even when they do not have symptoms.

British author Douglas Murray, in a different segment, used the study to criticize all “restrictions,” including vaccine and mask requirements in states like New York.

“If they remove them, they have to admit, or at least start to try to admit, that what they did in recent years was such a disaster,” he said.

A meta-analysis study like the one cited by Fox News is a statistical analysis that looks at the results of multiple studies and lands on a conclusion based on research from these studies. For this Studies in Applied Economics paper, the authors started with 18,590 studies, but after three levels of screening — a typical filtration process for a meta-analysis study — only 24 studies qualified for inclusion in the study that met the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews) guidelines. The PRISMA guidelines involve a 27-item checklist and a 4-phase flow diagram that help researchers determine which evidence-based studies to use to conduct a meta-analysis to answer the question at hand. The researchers purposely excluded studies that analyzed the effect of early lockdowns in contrast to later lockdowns, as they note in the study. Not all papers included in the analysis were peer-reviewed.

Researchers in the Studies in Applied Economics paper noted that some of the studies they analyzed found that shelter-in-place orders lowered COVID deaths, but argued that the data series in those studies didn’t cover a full COVID “wave.” Some studies analyzed argued the opposite, which the researchers suspected “could be the result of an (asymptomatic) infected person being isolated at home under a SIPO [shelter-in-place order] can infect family members with a higher viral load causing more severe illness.”

RELATED: Hype or hope? Viral studies suggest cannabis could help treat COVID-19

“They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” the researchers argued. “These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best.”

It’s important to note in context that while a meta-analysis can certainly have value in science, it is not considered a primary source. Additional recent studies have argued that lockdowns did indeed save lives. For example, a retrospective study published in PLOS One by University of Michigan researchers this month, which was peer-reviewed, found that lockdowns implemented during the first six months of the pandemic saved far more lives (between 866,350 to 1,711,150) than the number of lives potentially lost (57,922 to 245,055). When looking at the quality-adjusted life expectancy added by lockdown, however, researchers concluded that the results were more “ambiguous” and added that their research should not be used to implement more lockdowns. 

“We evaluated the full packet of public health measures as it was implemented in the beginning of the pandemic, but lesser mitigation measures may have worked just as well to reduce lives lost,” Olga Yakusheva, an associate professor at Michigan’s School of Nursing, said in a press statement. “The fact is, we just will never know. At the time, we had to work with the information that we had. We knew the pandemic was deadly, and we did not have therapeutics or a vaccine.”

Why stand in line for TikTok famous cookie pies when you can bake them yourself?

Praise be to the pop star food! Hail to the icons people line up at dawn for, the ones who sell out in 15 minutes. Dominique Ansel reset the bar set by Krispy Kreme when he introduced the cronut out of his Soho bakery in 2013.

In the years since, the cruffin, cereal milk soft serve and unbaked cookie dough have capably carried on the tradition of gastronomic obsession. In a world where everything seems bleak and sad, there’s something touching about the human desire for an over-the-top treat.

The newest inductee into the viral dessert hall of fame is Crumbl, with a cookie to desire like it’s a new season of “Succession.” The TikTok famous sensation hasn’t yet arrived in my town, so until I can get my hands on the real thing, I’ll settle for a homemade version. Perusing the Crumbl menu this week, I was intrigued by the banana cream pie cookie. The thought of “creamy, smooth banana pudding stuffed into a buttery pie crust and topped with a vanilla wafer” really called to me. 

RELATED: What’s a great way to use up bananas that got too ripe? This banana bread is so moist and delicious

Because I haven’t tasted the real thing, I can’t vouch for my version’s authenticity. I can, however, testify that my banana cream pie-ambivalent family gorged on it like it was kale in 2014. I’ve cobbled mine together from Pillsbury’s dead easy little pudding pies and Magnolia Bakery’s own legendary banana pudding, cutting a few corners along the way for ease. You can knock these out in a lot less time than it would take to wait in line for them — and you’ll feel like an absolute rock star for your achievement.

***

Recipe: Crumbly Mini Banana Cream Pies
Inspired by Magnolia Bakery and Pillsbury

Yields
16 servings
Prep Time
10 minutes
Cook Time
10 minutes

Ingredients

  • 2 pre-made pie crusts, homemade or store bought and thawed
  • 32 mini Nilla wafers (You can substitute graham crackers, shortbread or your favorite other cookies here.) 
  • 2 ripe bananas, each cut into 16 slices
  • 1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 1/2 cups cold water 
  • 1 3.4-ounce package instant vanilla pudding mix
  • 3 cups heavy cream 

 

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
  2. Invert and lightly oil a pair of 12-cup muffin pans.
  3. Roll out the pie crusts, and with a 3-inch round cookie cutter or inverted glass, stamp out 16 rounds.  
  4. Drape the rounds over the muffin forms, with 8 on each pan. Pinch the dough to make sure each cup makes a neat shape.

  5. Bake for 10 minutes, or until lightly golden. Remove the crusts from the oven. Let them cool for at least 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack or plate.

  6. While the crusts are baking, add the water and condensed milk to a large bowl and whip for a minute or so.

  7. Add the pudding mix and continue to beat another 2 minutes, until well combined.

  8. Add the heavy cream and beat about 5 minutes. The mixture should be thickened and fluffy.

  9. Spoon the pudding into the pie crusts. Top each with 2 slices of banana and 2 Nilla wafers. These are best chilled at least 30 minutes, but they’re totally fine to eat immediately.

Cook’s Notes

You’ll wind up here with more pudding than pies, a situation known as “a luxury problem.” You can repurpose the leftover pudding by serving it with berries and whipped cream or using it as a luxurious filling for a Boston cream pie. That’s what I’d do.

And, if you want the gist of this experience without making all that pudding, by all means just use the stuff that comes in a container. It’s still great.

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