Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein on journalism, Trump and history: “The truth is not neutral”

Carl Bernstein’s memoir of his apprenticeship in reporting, “Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom,” is on the surface a story about journalism, and about America, in a historical period that to most of us now seems long in the past. Bernstein’s first job in the business came in 1960, as a 16-year-old “copy boy” for the Evening Star, at the time the No. 2 daily in Washington, D.C. (The Star ceased publication in 1981, part of a wave of newspaper consolidation that prefigured the industry-wide collapse of the internet era.) This book begins there, allowing for a bit of back story, and concludes in 1966, after Bernstein had left the Star and spent a year at the Elizabeth Daily Journal in New Jersey (a paper that, almost unbelievably, had a circulation of 50,000). He was about to return to Washington and take a job with the Star’s better-known competitor — but that story is not this one.

I was both relieved and delighted to discover that “Chasing History” is not an elder statesman’s nostalgic account of the Good Old Days, nor a reverse-engineered personal history of how a Great Man rose from obscurity. It’s both subtler and more interesting than that, as well as an immensely entertaining read — jam-packed with famous names and juicy anecdotes — for anyone who cares about the past and future of journalism, or the lessons to be drawn from that tumultuous period of American history.

Bernstein’s future employer, the Washington Post, mostly plays a role in this story as the snooty, less enterprising competitor to the Star. His future reporting partner at the Post, Bob Woodward — alongside whom Bernstein became a household name and half of the most famous investigative team in our profession’s history — only appears in the acknowledgments. Richard Nixon certainly comes up, first as a defeated presidential candidate in 1960 and then, two years later, as a defeated gubernatorial candidate clear across the country in California. (Bernstein acknowledges, in passing, that his destiny and Nixon’s would cross paths in the future.)

What at first appears to be a story about the past turns out, as is so often true, to be a story about the present, or perhaps an illustration of Faulkner’s famous pronouncement that the past isn’t dead, and isn’t even past. In our recent conversation for Salon Talks, Bernstein told me that he hadn’t exactly been conscious, while writing “Chasing History,” that so many of the themes of his youthful career would resonate in 2022 — he made the connections at an intuitive level, which is after all what writers do. He knew his book was partly about racism and race relations, a beat he frequently covered as a young reporter and one of the Star’s strengths (despite its nearly all-white newsroom, which was certainly not unusual.) One of his mentors at the paper, Mary Lou Werner — herself one of the first prominent female news reporters — had won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the racist “massive resistance” against school desegregation in Virginia.

But Bernstein could not have foreseen how many of the “local” issues he covered as a teenage cub reporter — battles over racial issues in education, over voter suppression and false claims of voter fraud (yes, really!) or over the threat of right-wing insurrectionist violence (again, really) — would resurface in our drastically different era, clad in new rhetorical garb but reflecting the same unanswered questions that have tormented America since the beginning. He had a lot to say in our conversation, about the state of journalism then and now, about the contradictions of truth-telling in the Trump era, about the imperiled state of our democracy. (When the video was off, we debated which of us has deeper parental roots in the American left: I think it’s a tie.)

I didn’t even ask him about being played by Dustin Hoffman in the most famous of all journalism movies, or about his period of full-on celebrity in the late ’70s and ’80s, when he reportedly dated Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor and Martha Stewart, among other famous women. What I loved about Carl Bernstein’s book was the same thing I most enjoyed about talking to him personally: the endless curiosity and the sense of discovery. You can spend your life chasing history, as he has done with illustrious results. You never quite catch up to it.

Carl, maybe the most interesting thing about this book is what it’s not about. It’s not about your career at the Washington Post or your partnership with Bob Woodward or the reporting on Watergate that led to “All the President’s Men,” both the book and the movie. It’s about how you broke into this business as a teenager at a daily paper that hasn’t existed for more than 40 years now. So why tell that story now?

This book is, as you indicated, about the five-year period from age 16 to 21 that I worked in my apprenticeship at probably the greatest afternoon newspaper in America, the Washington Evening Star in my native city. I’m a second–generation Washingtonian. So the book is not written from the point of view of the old man looking back: Nothing in the action of the book, except for an epilogue, says anything about the future. It ends in 1965, and it covers this amazing five-year period of my life when I go to work as a copy boy at this amazing newspaper, and for the next five years, this kid — and it’s written in the voice of the kid — gets to have the greatest seat in the country.

It’s remarkable. Could it happen today? Probably not. But I was able to have this apprenticeship with the greatest reporters of their day, and greatest editors, during a period of civil rights, the Kennedy presidency and assassination, the beginning of the Great Society, the beginning of the war in Vietnam, and also this kid covering cops, con men, the streets and alleyways of the capital, which is a very different city than the marble-columned halls of government, the shrines and emblems of the nation. There is an integration in the book of our lives in Washington at the time, and particularly what I was doing as a young reporter and a copy boy with all these opportunities.

It‘s a mix of the high and the low. That’s really what reporting is, as a matter of fact. So there is a straight line from this book to Watergate and “All the President’s Men,“ but the future is never mentioned.

I think you avoid the usual pitfalls of nostalgia really well. I mean, you talk about how the Star was a great newspaper but you never strike that elegiac tone of, like, “Everything was better then, everything is worse now.”

That‘s very true, because it’s about, again, an experience that is absolutely formative in my life, and it’s told as I experienced it. So what I hope comes through the pages is the kid being open to all of these different forces, including everything I know about how to be a reporter and these people who became my family. I was by far the youngest person in that newsroom. Even when I left as a reporter at age 21, the copy boys were still older than me, or a good number of them were.

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It‘s also the experience of this kid in the capital of the United States, watching history in front of him, but without a recognition that these were hinges of history. The last week or month that I was at the Star, I covered the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What are we talking about today? What’s the news on the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times? It’s about the restoration or stripping of that Voting Rights Act that I covered in 1965. So you get a sense of the country, in my five years at the Star — which bracketed the years of the Civil War, 100 years later exactly.

I grew up in Jim Crow Washington. Washington was a segregated city. I went to legally segregated public schools in the capital of the United States. I’ll bet you that one-fiftieth of the people watching us right now know that the capital of the United States had segregated public schools until Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, Brown did not apply to the District of Columbia, because it wasn’t a state. There had to be a separate case, Bolling v. Sharpe, which was about the District of Columbia public schools that I was in. I was in the sixth grade when our schools were finally integrated. The restaurants downtown, when I grew up, Black people couldn’t eat at them. They had to stand at the lunch counters.

I talk about the first sit-ins with my parents, who were left-wing people and were very instrumental in desegregating downtown Washington. They took me with them when I was eight, nine years old, to these sit-ins at the lunch counters and at the tea room in Woodward & Lathrop department store. A lot of the book is about civil rights, which I got to cover. The first thing I did when they made me a reporter at 19, it was a horrible, terrible thing, I was sent to National Airport to spend the day with Rita Schwerner, who was — she didn’t know she was a widow yet. Her husband was Mickey Schwerner of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. At that moment they were searching for the three men in Mississippi. They were found about 72 hours after I met with Rita Schwerner, under a levee in Mississippi, victims of the horror that was going on in the South at that time. So that experience was formative, and it’s an experience that was formative for the country, as well as for journalism.

The Rita Schwerner chapter is extremely moving. I think every journalist should read that. You talk about what you realized when writing that story: There’s a crucial difference between a story as an assembly of facts, which may be accurate in themselves, and presenting them in a context in which they make sense. That’s a difficult thing to pin down, and I think you express it very well.

The line in the book — I remember reading it when I wrote it and saying, “Ah, I’ve been able to express this,” is that the truth is not neutral. I learned that covering civil rights and I learned it particularly from Southern reporters who were covering civil rights. Among my mentors was Mary Lou Werner, the state editor of the Washington Star. She had won a Pulitzer for covering “massive resistance“ to desegregation in Virginia. It’s another amazing thing about the Star: When I went to work there, the head copy boy gave me a tour of the newsroom, which is described in the book, and he took me down the center aisle, on either side of which were the reporters’ desks.

He told me about three of the great reporters in the newsroom, they were all women. Miss McGrory, as he put it, Miss Ottenberg and Miss Werner. All three were Pulitzer winners, two of them in the last two years. So that was what this paper was about. What I learned covering civil rights was that when you see and hear the widow of one of the three men shot to death and put under a levee in Mississippi, there aren’t two sides to that story. In journalism I think we’re burdened by the myth of objectivity. Being a reporter is the most subjective of acts. Why is that? Because you’re choosing to define what is news, that’s the primary thing.

What is news? What are you looking at? What’s important? Then, going about the reporting, the perseverance, the refusing to use just one source, but going to one source after another, all the things that the movie of “All the President’s Men” shows so well. You can see a straight line from this book and knocking on doors to “All the President’s Men.” It’s about the methodology. One of the problems today in news is that the methodology, which should be preeminent and prominent and we should be using these amazing tools that we have to work more rapidly and give more depth to our stories — but the reporting, the basic reporting, has to be done the old way.

What’s going on in our newsrooms today? People aren’t going outside the newsroom, they’re using Google, they’re occasionally using the cellphone, but by and large — there are thousands of people doing what’s called news in this country, and this is not about nostalgia — they don’t go out of the office, they don’t knock on doors, they don’t develop sources. The biggest problem in journalism today: We’re lazy.

I agree with you 100%. I think it’s a chronic problem that is larger than journalism, right? It‘s a social problem, a cultural problem.

Let me stop you right there, because you just used the term “cultural problem.” The other element, and this is different from the time I was at the Star, is that the big story in this country today is the culture of America. It’s not what’s going on in the capital, it’s what’s going on with people in this country, including state legislatures, including politicians, including the Capitol building in Washington, but also the people and what is on their minds and what is in their hearts and what is in their prejudices and what is in their hatreds. We are in the midst of what I would call a cold civil war, for most of the Trump years and before that. It goes back 20 or 30 years.

Trump ignited it, it’s no longer cold, it’s reached a point of ignition. That‘s where we are. We look at journalism and politics as separate entities, no. It’s about the culture of this country. This book is hardly just about race, it’s about covering a plane crash, it’s about going to after-hours clubs in the middle of the night, it’s about interviewing Barry Goldwater by ham radio, as I did the day that he was nominated to be president of the United States.

That’s an unbelievable story. Share that one.

It’s a funny story. I had heard that Goldwater was a ham radio operator and that he had taken his equipment out to the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco with him so he could play at being a ham radio operator while he was getting nominated to be president. It was stupefying, and I said, “Maybe I could interview him by ham radio.” So I got in touch with his press secretary, who thought it was a great idea. I found this ham radio operator in Arlington, Virginia, and we got on the ham radio and Goldwater says, “I’m Zero Kilowatts, this, that and the other thing.”

We radioed back, “We’re Wonder John Roger whatever.” We proceeded to have this interview hours away from when he was nominated, it was hilarious, got on the front page. But here’s the kicker to the story, and it’s not in the book. Here’s where you go from here to Watergate to today. Woodward and I, when we wrote “The Final Days,” about the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, we went to see Barry Goldwater, who remembered this interview that I had done with him by ham radio. Goldwater was drinking a Scotch and he went and got his diary, and he told us how he and the leaders of the Republican Party, after Nixon’s tapes had come out — the Judiciary Committee in the House had voted impeachment articles — now it was going to be certain impeachment and trial in the Senate. Nixon thought he could beat it, like Trump. He thought he’d be acquitted by the Senate.

Goldwater, the former presidential nominee, a conservative in his party, organized the Republican leadership to go to the White House. They sat across from Richard Nixon, and Nixon asked Goldwater, “Barry, how many votes do I have in the Senate?” Goldwater looked at him and said, “I’m not sure, Mr. President, maybe four right now. But you certainly don’t have mine.” At that moment, Nixon knew he was through and he resigned two days later. But the Republican Party was not ready to put up with this criminal presidential conduct. Look at the Republican Party today. Why do we have a seditious president that has been able to have a seditious movement following him? Because the Republican Party has been craven. It has been taken over by these seditious forces who are willing to do anything that Trump says should be done.

We had a coup, a conspiracy by the president of the United States to undermine the free electoral process in this country, followed and enabled by the Republican Party. You have to go back to the Civil War to have this kind of sedition, but never have we had a seditious president or a totally seditious political party. Look at what’s going on now, about Jan. 6 and the investigation. A year ago, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, said exactly what was true: The president was responsible for this. Now he’s trying to conspire to shut down a legitimate investigation of this sabotage of democracy, of this sedition.

Recently we saw two members on the House floor, two Republicans who were wiling to go onto the floor during the talk about the Jan. 6 insurrection. Who were they? Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice president, exercising his privileges as a former member of Congress. Astonishing. So there is a straight line from this book to Watergate. I just never make the connection out loud.

I definitely agree that the kind of training and rigor you write about in this book is more difficult to find these days. I tell younger reporters that there’s a big difference between your personal opinion, which should not play a role in reporting, and the historical and social context that‘s necessary to understand an issue, to telling the truth. The term I use is “rational inference,“ meaning things that we can reasonably conclude based on the evidence. A lot of people don’t understand how to walk that line.

Well, here’s the other difference between the period when I worked at the Star and even at the Washington Post and today. I don’t know the exact percentage, but certainly huge numbers of people, maybe most people in this country, are looking for news and information to reinforce what they already believe.

So the same bifurcation that we have in the country, the same polarization, exists in terms of consumption of news. It’s a horrible thing. At the time I’m describing in this book, at the time of Watergate, most people were open to the best attainable version of the truth, the complexity of the truth. That’s not the case today. Going back to the point about how this is cultural, not political, we have a culture where a huge percentage of our people is not interested in truth. This is a sea change.

Were you conscious when you were writing the book that it wasn‘t just about the ’60s, that it was also about today? I mean, a lot of it is about race relations, about voting rights. You even write about the emergence of right-wing violence, such as around civil rights. That feeling kind of snuck up on me: In a lot of ways, this book is not about the past.

Not while I was typing, but after. One of the things that happens, if you’re a writer, not just a reporter — one of the great things I got to do at the Star was study some of the greatest writers for newspapers in America. Mary McGrory comes to mind, but there were many others. There was a rewrite man, who as I describe him, could make the words jump like trout. I studied these people and how they wrote and how they reported. There was a guy named John Sherwood who would ply the Chesapeake Bay in his sloop and find these islands where the oystermen still spoke almost in Elizabethan dialect, and write these rhapsodic pictures. Every year at the beginning of oyster season, he would use the same lede: “Behold the succulent bivalve.”

I actually shared that with Salon‘s staff this morning. Completely irresistible.

So when you write, and this is true sometimes even when you’re just writing on deadline, but it’s really true when you’re writing a book, you don’t know. You’re in a different place when you’re writing, and then you look at the paragraph or the sentence and you say, “Oh, my God.” There are times when I was doing that in this book and I would say, “That’s Donald Trump.” You see these resonances, and that is also what reporting is about. So the book does this jumping trick, maybe. Did I set out to do the jumping trick? No, it happens with the writing.

Before we end, let me briefly tell you a Washington Star story, although it’s before your time. On the wall behind me I have a picture of my mother that was published in the Star, I believe in 1946. She was leading a march to the White House against the Ku Klux Klan. She’s got heels and a summer dress on and she’s wearing a placard that says, “Outlaw the Ku Klux Klan.” If you’re wondering whether she was connected to an infamous left-wing movement, as I know your family was, the answer is absolutely yes.

Wow. Well, you know, my father was a union organizer, my parents were members of the Communist Party in the ’40s, the book mentions that. Obviously there is a commonality in your mother’s story.

It seems very likely they knew each other. My mother was a union organizer at the time too, and her husband was a reporter for the Daily Worker.

Really? You might even have more serious left-wing credentials than I do, from childhood. There’s a key paragraph in this book when I describe what I do as learning about the best obtainable words, and the truth in this paragraph comes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the realization that the Star and reporting were a refuge for me from the discomfort I felt in ideology. My parents, even though they were left-wing people, my father actually detested ideology. He would call people in the party, for instance, “trolley car guys,” because they followed a line.

Remember, the Star was the conservative paper in Washington. The Post was the liberal paper. My father got me an interview at the Star because his union was the United Public Workers of America, the government workers’ union, and the Star had covered a strike by his union with great fairness. The Post had a government columnist who was a red-baiter, and covered the strike looking for subversion, rather than covering the fact that government workers at government cafeterias and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing couldn’t get a dollar an hour.

So my father got me an interview at the conservative Washington Star, which — in those days, the joy we took in beating the Washington Post and being a better newspaper was part of the esprit of the newsroom. We were a better paper than the Post partly because the line between church and state, between opinion and reporting, was absolute at the Star. It was not at the Washington Post, until Ben Bradlee got there and said, “Enough of this. We’re here to report the news.” Does that part stay in the interview, I hope?

Of course it does. That’s a great story.

Mitch McConnell’s moment of truth: For many whites, Black people aren’t real “Americans”

Years ago, a prominent Black psychologist told me that racists almost always tell on themselves. That advice has proven very useful in my life. That tendency — if not compulsion — to reveal their racist beliefs and values is especially powerful for the affluent, the influential and others with a public voice.

You just have to know to listen. Sometimes the reveal is obvious, and at other times it is subtle. But they almost always tell on themselves.

Why? This is likely a function of hubris and arrogance, along with a deeply held belief that people like them will not be held responsible for their behavior. They also believe that most other white people agree with them, albeit if in secret, but are constrained by politeness or “political correctness.” In essence, they think white racists are America’s real “silent majority,” and moreover that white people are the most authentic and “real” Americans. Black people and other nonwhites are something else, something second class or less than — they are diminished Americans at best, in various ways, inauthentic or suspect.

Such a belief about the inferiority of nonwhites, at least until proven otherwise to the satisfaction of the white gaze, is a type of background noise constantly present between the beats of so much of American life and history.

Last week, in response to a reporter’s question about the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: “If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Later that day, on Jan. 20 — the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden’s inauguration — Senate Republicans refused even to allow a vote on the bill named for the legendary civil rights leader, which would help ensure that the voting rights of all Americans are protected.

The meaning of those words was clear enough, no matter how McConnell sought to spin them afterward. The Republican leader in the U.S. Senate was saying that Black people are not exactly “Americans,” as compared, quite obviously, to white people.

Contrary to what some would prefer like to claim, this was not a gaffe or a clumsy misstatement. McConnell spoke his personal truth. As powerful white men so often do, he told on himself. Indeed, why should this surprise anyone? McConnell has shown through his behavior and words, and more importantly through the public policies and laws he has supported and advanced, that these are his deeply held and sincere beliefs.

McConnell supports a new Jim Crow apartheid system, where Black and brown people’s votes — and by implication their other civil rights and human rights — are to be restricted and suppressed, through voter exclusion, gerrymandering, changes to election rules and other means both legal and otherwise, including violence, intimidation and, if need be, a coup against democracy such as the one we experienced last January.

Mitch McConnell remains a leading figure in the Republican Party — in legislative terms, perhaps its most powerful figure — which can now be considered the world’s largest white supremacist organization. The fact that McConnell personally dislikes Donald Trump is, in this context, largely irrelevant. He supported Trump’s fascist agenda without complaint for four years, advancing it through Congress as far as possible.

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This should be obvious but still needs to be said: McConnell’s implicit belief that Black Americans are not full-fledged “Americans” is absurd on many levels. It is based on the premise that Black people remain guests or provisional residents in a country they literally built through centuries of violence, enslavement, murder, rape and other forms of exploitation. In so many ways, America would not exist as it is today without the labor, suffering, survival, intelligence, creativity and strength of Black people.

Ralph Ellison addressed this in his famous essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks“:

The fantasy of an America free of Blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society. While we are aware that there is something inescapably tragic about the cost of achieving our democratic ideals, we keep such tragic awareness segregated in the rear of our minds. We allow it to come to the fore only during moments of great national crisis.

On the other hand, there is something so embarrassingly absurd about the notion of purging the nation of Blacks that it seems hardly a product of thought at all. It is more like a primitive reflex, a throw-back to the dim past of tribal experience, which we rationalize and try to make respectable by dressing it up in the gaudy and highly questionable trappings of what we call the “concept of race.” Yet despite its absurdity, the fantasy of a Blackless America continues to turn up. It is a fantasy born not merely of racism but of petulance, exasperation and moral fatigue. It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy….

Materially, psychologically and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the Black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, between our assertions and our actions. Without the Black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has always threatened its existence from within.

In many ways, the Black Freedom Struggle was (and is) an attempt to save America from its own worst impulses — from racism and white supremacy, but also from greed and selfishness and widespread inequality and other anti-democratic and anti-human forces.

Consider one of recent history’s great what-ifs: Would America now face its current crisis of democracy — and so many other disasters, both day-to-day and existential — if Black America’s warnings about Trump, the Republican Party and the larger white right had been heeded in 2016? How much misery, death, destruction, sorrow, pain and loss, both already here and soon to come, could have been avoided?

Mitch McConnell has no such awareness. But with his clear pronouncement that “African American voters” are in some unspecific way not “Americans,” he was summoning up from the worst parts of the country’s history — like a dark priest calling up a Lovecraftian horror — a question that has remained unanswered for centuries.

Are Black Americans full and equal citizens and members of this nation and this society, on the same level as white Americans? Should all Americans, irrespective of race or color, be equal in their constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties? Does “We the People” include white people and nonwhite people on an equal footing?

These questions, and how they should be answered, are the driving force behind the rise of Trumpism and American neofascism, and the subsequent assault on America’s multiracial democracy. McConnell’s straightforward statement that Black people are somehow distinct from “Americans” does not reflect an isolated or anachronistic belief, but rather one widely held across white America.

Public opinion and other research has repeatedly demonstrated that being “American” is conflated with being “white.” Social scientists and other experts have also shown that white Americans believe themselves to be more patriotic and more loyal, and to possess more quintessential “American values,” such as hard work, “personal responsibility,” individualism and discipline, than Black Americans.

Other research shows that the political (and other) decision-making of many white Americans, especially conservative authoritarians and Trumpists, is highly motivated by social dominance behavior and a desire to protect and expand the power of white people in American society. A significant percentage of white Americans — especially those who identify with the Republican Party or who support Trump — are willing to abandon democracy if it means sharing equal power with Black and brown Americans.

New research also shows that tens of millions of white Americans are willing to condone or endorse violence to remove Joe Biden and the Democrats from power, in defense of the “American way of life” and “traditional values,” thinly veiled code phrases for white power and white privilege. Those are the same people who are likely to support last January’s attempted coup and the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

In response to McConnell’s remarks, many Black Americans took to social media and elsewhere to assert their dignity, humanity, and full American belonging. Many Black women and Black men donned their military uniforms as they channeled the power of the “Double V” campaign during World War II and Black Americans’ centuries of military service and patriotism as a way of battling against white supremacy in its many forms. That Black Americans feel the need to do this all over again in the 21st century is an indictment of America’s lack of progress along the color line.

In January of 1942, a man named James G. Thompson wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent African-American newspaper. In that letter, he tried to work through the complex and conflicted feelings many Black Americans had about World War II, America and the conundrum of military service:

Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending? Will America be a true and pure democracy after the war? Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past? These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believe every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know. …

The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so–called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery, and tyranny. If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the double V V for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.

Thompson’s letter still resonates; it offers more evidence of how America’s history, for good and for ill, echoes through to the present. This is especially true in the Age of Trump, a moment when America’s neofascist tide is rising and so many in white America still doubt that Black and brown people should have the same equal and full rights as white people.

Mitch McConnell’s beliefs about who is a “real” American, and who is not, took vivid and monstrous human form last Jan. 6. Trumpists waved the Confederate flag, one of America’s and the world’s most potent symbols of white supremacy, as they attacked the Capitol. They assembled a working gallows: In America, such imagery cannot be separated from the lynching of thousands of Black men, women, and children during the Jim and Jane Crow terror regime. Trumpists carried a huge Christian cross through the crowd, a symbol of the way white supremacy and “White Christianity” are inseparable bedfellows in America’s history.

Trump’s attack force was willing to kill and die for that cause of ending multiracial democracy and their collective belief, stated or otherwise, that white people like them have a special claim on the status of “American.”

Black and brown Capitol police officers (and their white comrades) fought back against these thousands of rage-filled Trump attackers to defend the Capitol and the people in it — and multiracial democracy itself. Many of those law enforcement officers were assaulted with racial slurs and other white supremacist invective. After Trump’s attack force had finally been driven from the Capitol, it was Black and brown janitors and other maintenance people who put things back together again, cleaning up feces, urine, litter and other evidence of vandalism and hooliganism.

Beyond his beliefs about who the real “Americans” are, Mitch McConnell’s comment was incorrect in another sense as well. As the Washington Post explained:

McConnell not only overstated the situation a bit, but comparing the turnout of Black voters to the entire voting population is misleading because these numbers are apples and oranges — the entire population (in which the turnout rate is dragged down by other ethnic groups) versus just one ethnic group. The more appropriate comparison is between ethnic groups, such as White Americans and Black Americans. That comparison shows there has been a persistent gap — and it increased in 2020.

But even to vote in the numbers they did, Black Americans had to overcome numerous roadblocks and obstacles put in place by the Republican Party and its agents. In response, McConnell and his allies and supporters have made clear that they believe Black Americans (and other nonwhites) must work much harder still, even to have the hypothetical chance of exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed rights and liberties on an equal basis with white Americans.

In America, white privilege and white power remain normalized and idealized, and rich white men — especially if “Christian” and “conservative” — are understood to be the natural and rightful rulers. White America will not surrender such a vision, and such entrenched power, without a struggle. The psychological and material wages of that idea of whiteness are too great. Far too many are willing to kill and die for it.

More from Salon on the renewed rise of white supremacy:

U.S. hypocrisy on Ukraine paralyzes media, Congress — and even progressive Democrats

Hidden in plain sight, the extreme hypocrisy of the U.S. position on NATO and Ukraine cries out for journalistic coverage and open debate in major American media outlets. But those outlets, with rare exceptions, have gone into virtually Orwellian mode, only allowing elaboration on the theme of America good, Russia bad.

Aiding and abetting a potentially catastrophic — and I do mean catastrophic — confrontation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers are lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the media they echo and vice versa, members of Congress, including highly touted progressives, can scarcely manage more than vague comments that they want diplomacy rather than war.

Imagine if a powerful Russian-led military alliance were asserting the right to be joined by its ally Mexico — and in the meantime was shipping big batches of weapons to that country — can you imagine the response from Washington? Yet we’re supposed to believe that it’s fine for the U.S.-led NATO alliance to assert that it has the prerogative to grant membership to Ukraine — and in the meantime is now shipping large quantities of weaponry to that country.

Mainstream U.S. news outlets have no use for history or documentation that might interfere with the current frenzy presenting NATO’s expansion to the Russian border as an unalloyed good.

“It is worth recalling how much the alliance has weakened world security since the end of the Cold War, by inflaming relations with Russia,” historian David Gibbs said last week. “It is often forgotten that the cause of the current conflict arose from a 1990 U.S. promise that NATO would never be expanded into the former communist states of Eastern Europe. Not ‘one inch to the East,’ Russian leaders were promised by the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker. Despite this promise, NATO soon expanded into Eastern Europe, eventually placing the alliance up against Russia’s borders. The present-day U.S.-Russian conflict is the direct result of this expansion.”

The journalists revved up as bloviating nationalists on U.S. TV networks and other media outlets have no use for any such understanding. Why consider how anything in the world might look to Russians? Why bother to provide anything like a broad range of perspectives about a conflict that could escalate into incinerating the world with thermonuclear weapons? Jingoistic conformity is a much more prudent career course.

Out of step with that kind of conformity is Andrei Tsygankov, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, whose books include “Russia and America: The Asymmetric Rivalry.” “Russia views its actions as a purely defensive response to increasingly offensive military preparations by NATO and Ukraine (according to Russia’s foreign ministry, half of Ukraine’s army, or about 125,000 troops, are stationed near the border),” he wrote days ago. “Instead of pressuring Ukraine to de-escalate and comply with the Minsk Protocol, however, Western nations continue to provide the Ukrainian army with lethal weapons and other supplies.”

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Tsygankov points out that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has two decades of experience of trying to persuade Western leaders to take Russia’s interests into consideration. During these years, Russia has unsuccessfully opposed the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and build a new missile defense system in Romania, expand NATO, invade Iraq and Libya, and support Kyiv’s anti-Russian policies — all in vain.”

The professor nails a key reality: “Whatever plans Russia may have with respect to Ukraine and NATO, conflict resolution greatly depends on the West. A major war is avoidable if Western leaders gather confidence and the will to abandon the counter-productive language of threats and engage Russia in reasoned dialogue. If diplomacy is given a fair chance, the European continent may arrive at a new security system that will reflect, among others, Russia’s interests and participation.”

In the midst of all this, what about progressives in Congress? As we face the most dangerous crisis in decades that risks pushing the world into nuclear war, very few are doing anything more than mouth safe platitudes.

Are they bowing to public opinion? Not really. It’s much more like they’re cowering to avoid being attacked by hawkish media and militaristic political forces.

On Friday, the American Prospect reported: “A new Data for Progress poll shared exclusively with the Prospect finds that the majority of Americans favor diplomacy with Russia over sanctions or going to war for Ukrainian sovereignty. Most Americans are not particularly animated about the escalating conflict in Eastern Europe, the poll shows, despite round-the-clock media coverage. When asked, 71 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans said they support the U.S. striking a diplomatic deal with Russia. They agreed that in the effort to de-escalate tensions and avoid war, the U.S. should be prepared to make concessions.”

The magazine’s reporting provides a portrait of leading congressional progressives who can’t bring themselves to directly challenge fellow Democrat Joe Biden’s escalation of the current highly dangerous conflict, as he sends still more large shipments of weaponry to Ukraine with a new batch worth $200 million while deploying 8,500 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.

Asked about the issue of prospective Ukraine membership in NATO sometime in the future, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., treated the situation as a test of superpower wills or game of chicken, saying: “I would not be blackmailed by Putin in this situation.”

Overall, the American Prospect ferreted out routine refusal of progressive icons in Congress to impede the spiraling crisis:

The 41 co-sponsors of a sanctions package moving through the Senate include progressive heavyweights like Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. In a press release on the bill, Markey said the legislation was designed to “work in concert with the actions the Biden administration has already taken to demonstrate that we will continue to support Ukraine and its sovereignty.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put out a statement on Wednesday with Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). “Russia’s strategy is to inflame tensions; the United States and NATO must not play into this strategy,” the representatives said. The statement raises concerns over “sweeping and indiscriminate sanctions.” But pressed on what, exactly, the United States should be prepared to offer in diplomatic talks, a spokesperson for Lee did not respond.

Reached by the Prospect, spokespeople for leading progressives, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), declined to comment on questions including whether the U.S. should commit not to bring Ukraine into NATO and whether it should provide direct military aid to Ukraine. Sanders declined to weigh in. In a statement, Warren said, “The United States must use appropriate economic, diplomatic, and political tools to de-escalate this situation.”

Spokespeople for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who have previously criticized American interventionism in the Middle East, did not respond to questions from the Prospect, including ones on sanctions policy and NATO commitments.

Progressives in Congress have yet to say that Biden should stop escalating the Ukraine conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. Instead, we hear easy pleas for diplomacy and, at best, mildly worded “significant concerns” about the president’s new batch of arms shipments and troop deployments to the region. This evasive rhetoric amounts to pretending that the president isn’t doing what he’s actually doing as he ratchets up the tensions and the horrendous risks.

All this can be summed up in five words: Extremely irresponsible and extremely dangerous.

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In Earth’s galactic backyard, a never-before-seen space anomaly blinks on and off

Astronomers believe they may have discovered an “‘ultra-long period magnetar,” a hypothetical type of neutron star that rotates remarkably slowly due to the way it interacts with surrounding ionized gas — yet scientists caution that more observational data is needed to better confirm this so-called “spooky” unknown object that is not that far away (galactically speaking) from Earth.

The object belongs to a caste of astronomical events called “transients,” which are by nature short-lived and in flux. When astronomers are observing transients in the universe, they are generally observing the unusual activity of a massive star, or the behavior of the remnants that star has left behind. Pulsars, which sometimes emit a bright flash over a period of second or milliseconds, are known as fast transients. Slow transients, such as a supernovae, become extremely luminous over days or months. And then there are fast-radio bursts, or FRBs for short, which are very brief yet incredibly powerful bursts of radio wave energy that appear to be coming from all corners of the universe, yet whose origins are still ill-understood.

Now, astronomers have discovered a new, unknown kind of transient in our galaxy that flashes three times an hour — about every 18 minutes. This transient object has become one of the brightest radio objects in the sky, and its flash lasts between a half of a second to a minute. This slow timeframe, compounded with extreme brightness, makes it a peculiar discovery, according to a paper published in Nature.

“The emission is highly linearly polarized, bright, persists for 30–60 [seconds] on each occurrence and is visible across a broad frequency range,” the scientists explain in the paper. “At times, the pulses comprise short-duration (<0.5 [second]) bursts; at others, a smoother profile is observed."

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The co-authors add: “By measuring the dispersion of the radio pulses with respect to frequency, we have localized the source to within our own Galaxy and suggest that it could be an ultra-long-period magnetar.”

A magnetar is a specific type of neutron star with a very strong magnetic field; neutron stars are the collapsed remnants of much-larger stars. They are formed when a large star becomes so dense in its core that gravity collapses it in on itself, resulting in a chain reaction that smushes negative electrons and positive protons together into neutral neutrons, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Essentially huge balls of neutrons, neutron stars have the density of atomic nuclei, the mass of suns, yet are small — typically the width of human cities. Their density is legendary; a commonly quoted and true statistic is that a teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh around one billion tons.

Neutron stars generally spin fast on their axes, and the energetic processes which take place within release powerful radio waves from their poles. The radio emissions from such stars were initially believed to be aliens when such signals were first detected in 1967.

The reason that neutron stars generally rotate so fast is the same reason that a swivel chair spins faster if you extend your arms and bring them in as you start to spin. Because of conservation of angular momentum, a physics principle, any object that is spinning will spin faster if it suddenly shrinks in width. For instance, Earth’s sun spins about once every 22 days, though if the sun were to suddenly contract into a tiny neutron star, it would spin thousands of times per second.

This is partly what makes this new discovery so unusual. Unlike many neutron stars, which spin hundreds or thousands of times per second, this theoretical ultra-long period magnetar is spinning much more slowly than any other one observed.

Astronomers made the discovery of this likely ultra-long period magnetar by using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, a low-frequency radio telescope in Western Australia, when it was being used by Curtin University Honors student Tyrone O’Doherty. The team has been using the telescope to map radio waves in the universe.

“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” said Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astronomer with the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and co-author of the paper. “That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.”

Notably, the object is about 4,000 light-years away — which, as Hurley-Walker noted, is “in our galactic backyard.” For comparison, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is around 100,000 light-years across, and the nearest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away from us.

The research team credits the telescope’s wide field of view and extreme sensitivity for being able to pick up this strange radio object. The object was super bright in the radio spectrum — though not in the visible spectrum, meaning it can’t be seen with the naked eye. Scientists suspect that its strong radio emissions be a result of the object having a very strong magnetic field, which fits the profile for it possibly being the hypothetical “‘ultra-long period magnetar.”

“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”

A related class of transient object, fast radio bursts, are very difficult to study by dint of their brief duration. Very few fast radio bursts ever repeat; and since they only last a millisecond, telescopes can rarely focus on them in time to get a good look. Moreover, astronomers do not quite know exactly where fast radio bursts are coming from, or where the next one might land.

Yet this new strange transient object in question is believed to have switched on in the first part of 2018, when it emitted 71 flashes of radio signals between January to March of that year. Then, it switched off. Kiyoshi Masui, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — who wasn’t involved in the study — told NBC News that it’s possible FBRs and magnetars could be related.

“If this object is, in fact, a magnetar, that could mean that at least some types of magnetars can survive much longer than we thought they could,” Masui said. “That could solve the thorn in the side of the magnetar hypothesis for fast radio bursts.”

Dr. Hurley-Walker told Salon via email that scientists hope to probe a possible connection between ultra-long period magnetars and fast radio bursts.

“Ultra-long period magnetars are a potential progenitor for Fast Radio Bursts, and we do see spikes in our data that are unresolved at our time resolution (0.5s),” Hurley-Walker said. “If we could find more of these repeating low-frequency transients, and look at them with higher time resolution, we could test whether they can generate FRBs.”

Hurley-Walker emphasized this possible connection has yet to be confirmed.

Dr Hurley-Walker is now monitoring the object to see if it turns back on, as more detections are needed to better understand the source of these strange radio waves.

“I’m planning a campaign with the Murchison Widefield Array to scan our galaxy every week and search for more, and process the data in near-real time,” Hurley-Walker told Salon. “If we make a detection, we can then follow it up immediately with high time resolution radio observations, and other telescopes, and that will be absolutely critical in understanding these sources.”

Hurley-Walker said if they do find enough of these sources, “simply looking at where they are in the Milky Way — their range of brightnesses, how they pulse, how long they live, et cetera — will help us understand them.”

But, as Hurley-Walker cautioned, neutron stars are “stunningly hard to spot.”

“If it’s not emitting in the radio [spectrum] (and it isn’t at the moment) we might never see anything again,” Hurley-Walker said.

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States were sharing Covid test kits. Then Omicron hit.

In a few short months, states have gone from donating surplus rapid covid-19 tests to states with shortages to hoarding them as demand driven by the spike in cases strains supplies.

Last January, North Dakota had amassed 2.7 million Abbott Laboratories BinaxNOW rapid covid tests from the federal government — roughly 3½ tests for each person in the state of 775,000 people.

The state had so many covid tests that it donated a total of 1 million of them to Montana and Pennsylvania as part of a sharing program among states that formed when the delta variant was the dominant strain and covid outbreaks rippled across the nation in waves. But now that omicron has turned the entire nation into a coronavirus hot spot and driven up demand for tests everywhere, that system has been upended.

Some states are holding on to expired tests for use as a last resort. In early January, North Dakota was one of them, with a stockpile of 600,000 expired rapid tests.

“I want to make sure that our state is covered,” said Nicole Brunelle, North Dakota’s chief nursing officer. “The entire nation is fighting for these tests.”

Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the state exchange program has stopped operating, and while federal health officials are working to get it going again, the timing is unclear. “Once covid-19 and its variants began to ramp up and more testing was needed, states no longer had a surplus to provide extra tests,” Reed said.

By early January, some states, including Montana and Indiana, had depleted their inventory of rapid covid tests for distribution. Along with North Dakota, Florida and Maryland have held on to expired tests in hopes the federal government would extend the tests’ shelf life.

The inevitable result: States have gone from cooperation to competition.

“Emergency management and federal assistance across the country is built on the idea that we won’t have a need everywhere at once,” said Ken Sturrock, a Colorado-based regional emergency coordinator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The state test exchange program was created amid concerns that tests would expire unused. Federal health agencies built an online platform that states could use to relay what they had or needed.

Some states have gone outside the program to exchange tests. For example, Mississippi donated more than 79,000 tests to Pennsylvania in November, said Jim Craig, senior deputy for the Mississippi State Department of Health.

For the states that participated, the exchange program was effective in identifying and shipping tests to places in need across the country through much of 2021. Colorado, for instance, received tests from five states from May through August of last year, bringing in about 340,000 kits that were close to expiring.

Some donations went farther. When nationwide demand for testing diminished early last year, the Arkansas Department of Health couldn’t find a state to take 300,000 tests close to expiring. Danyelle McNeill, a department spokesperson, said Arkansas donated the tests to India, where the delta variant was first identified, in late winter 2021.

Brunelle, North Dakota’s chief nursing officer, said the state expanded access to its supply of tests to schools, businesses, health providers, and others, offering free kits and training to those who would use them. Even then, Brunelle said, the state had more tests than it could distribute before they expired.

In January 2021, North Dakota sent 250,000 tests to Montana. Demand in Montana was low at the time, but Jon Ebelt, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, said the state “did not want to turn down free tests” after supplies had been tight earlier in the pandemic.

That summer, Montana sent 51,000 of those tests to Colorado.

But by January 2022, Montana’s supplies had been depleted. Health officials notified school districts that the pool of BinaxNOW test kits had run dry. The state worked through suppliers to order 650,000 tests and planned to start distributing them on Jan. 30. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, blamed the Biden administration, saying it had repeatedly failed to increase testing supplies.

The Biden administration has created a website where households can sign up to receive four free tests, and officials have said tests are expected to ship within seven to 12 days of orders being placed. But that initial rollout raised access issues for some of the most vulnerable.

In fall 2021, North Dakota sent 750,000 rapid tests to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. David Rubin, the hospital’s director of population health innovation, said the hospital distributed those supplies to a school-based testing program in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Rubin said that without the federal platform, the hospital is trying to get more tests for the program through federal agencies but that the line for them is long.

“We’re starting to imagine a world with less testing right now because it’s the reality,” Rubin said.

In some cases, the FDA has extended the shelf life for certain tests, most recently this month when it put a 15-month life span on Abbott’s at-home tests.

Amid the shortage, states have also sought permission to use outdated stock still on their shelves. Andy Owen, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Health, said that on Jan. 18, the FDA gave the state an additional three months to use 97,000 expired rapid tests that must be administered by a provider. That’s after Florida got another three-month extension to use roughly 1 million test kits that had expired at the end of December.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released guidelines in 2020 that allowed states to use expired tests “until non-expired supplies become available.”

New Mexico Department of Health spokesperson Katy Diffendorfer said the state told a school that it could use older tests after the school’s supply dwindled to outdated kits. “They desperately needed to be able to test,” Diffendorfer said, adding that the state would send non-expired tests as soon as possible.

In North Dakota, which once had an abundance of tests, Brunelle said the state was starting to see access issues this winter, especially in rural places. The state has been careful about sending tests out, even within the state. North Dakota stalled its program to distribute tests to businesses, which Brunelle hopes is temporary.

“Right now, we need to keep our priority with our health care system, our first responders, our vulnerable populations,” she said.

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What it means to be a red wine mom in Netflix’s “The Woman in the House”

Ah, the wine mom. You may know her from “The Good Wife.” Or as Skyler White, the wife of Walter White in “Breaking Bad.” What these female characters have in common, along with being mothers, is the wine glass frequently in their hands or omnipresent by their sides. Wine is their constant companion. Often, their only one.

There is so much drinking in “Bad Moms” and “A Bad Moms Christmas,” a series of films about overworked and unappreciated mothers, that the franchise has spawned signature cocktail recipes. Multiple ones. The demands of parenthood, marriage, careers and the general overwhelm of the world push the moms in these movies to the breaking point. And the breaking point involves alcohol. A lot of free-flowing alcohol.

But from Tami Taylor on “Friday Night Lights” to Jen Hardy on “Dead to Me,” the wine of choice for many fictional wine moms is frequently white. “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window,” Netflix’s murder mystery spoof that features “Bad Moms” star Kristen Bell, doesn’t break new ground in just about any way. But every time Anna (Bell) of “The Woman” drinks — which is an incredible lot — it’s red. Her choice of wine says volumes (or milliliters) about her as a character and the idea of the wine mom in general.

“This one’s good. What’s it called again?” Jenny (Emily Spivey) asks in the Netflix film “Wine Country,” about a group of women on a wine vacation. Amy Poehler’s character answers: “White wine.”

Lucille Bluth has her vodka. The southern women of “Sweet Magnolias” have their margarita nights. But many moms who are wine moms on television, film and books are white wine moms. It’s white wine in the glasses of the ladies in the “Saturday Night Live” skit “Birthday Gifts” who all give their friend kitchen signs about being a wine mom. (And none of them except the birthday girl see the problem with this.)

White wine is easy. It’s drinkable, even the wine that is objectively terrible. Sometimes, wine moms make it more drinkable — and more terrible — with the addition of ice cubes. Liz Lemon on “30 Rock” calls a lethal combination of white wine, Sprite and ice cubes her “funky juice.”

The often-high sugar content of dessert wines and late harvest wines make them go down easier perhaps than say, a meaty Cab or full-bodied Malbec. Easier possibly to get drunk without realizing it, and pretty catching the light in a glass. Sometimes you need a good hot tub wine.

White wine just feels casual, something the wine mom could drink in the backyard by the pool. In the afternoon. Maybe, mid-morning. “Wearing black to their house parties/Crosby, Stills and Nash is playing/Wine is flowing with Bacardi” the (notably sober) Lana Del Rey sings in her song “Bartender” — and you just imagine it’s Riesling or white wine sangria the “ladies of the canyon” are quaffing.

Beyond its sweetness and ease, there is a practicality to white wine. In graduate school, I stopped drinking red wine at university functions, even though I prefer it to white, because the red would sometimes stain my lips. I was also terrified of spilling on a professor’s expensive carpet or down my inexpensive clothes.

Red wine seems . . . dangerous, especially in a house with children. But Anna is a mother whose child is dead, something “The Woman” makes frequent and terrible light of. The fact that she’s alone in the house means she can pour herself a full glass of red in motion as she walks quickly through her immaculate, childless living room. She can stay up all night drinking that red, wearing light-colored loungewear (more danger). She can fall asleep over her glass. And Anna spills, creating a massive red wine stain which ruins her armchair, looking like blood.

When Anna fills her wine glasses, she fills them to the brim, so full her first drink is a bent-over slurp. A frequent and only gag in the show is how she manages not to spill all the time, though really this is more scary than funny, like a wine car crash.

Add to Bell’s sizable acting chops the ability to swing around full glasses of wine the size of her head without incident.

Unlike the wine mom sipping mimosas at brunch or a refreshing white at the afternoon garden party, Anna starts drinking early in the morning, after the elementary school drop-off. She starts with and only drinks red, so much so that she has a punchbowl in the kitchen full of corks. Drinking this early tells us: She’s a serious drinker. (She also literally tells us this in a voiceover.)

But drinking only red tells us: She’s a serious person. She’s not mindlessly binging a streaming service at night, but reading a book, what looks like a literary thriller titled “The Woman Across the Lake” (not to be confused with “Yellowjackets” fake book club novel “The Girl in the Train Window”).

Sometimes you need something that you don’t have to think about. And wine moms in shows often do not want to think. Frequently, they drink to forget. But along with that, Anna is puzzling things out. She’s gonna solve a murder and save a girl — or thinks she is. Even the dress Anna manages to put on – when she decides to, then decides against, finally going on a date – is red wine-colored.

White wine is the social choice, according to the wine moms who drink it together like Jen and Judy in “Dead to Me,” like Tami Taylor and everybody. Red is the solitary wine for sitting by the window alone in the dark, night after night, and scrolling through your ex’s photos (where he’s pictured with a new woman who also drinks red). It’s the wine Anna curls up with, pretends is a hearty enough substitute for a meal, or for a friend, for a life outside her house.

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Men drink. Men drink quite a bit more than women. A good 68% of men compared to 64% of women consume alcohol according to a 2020 study, but men drink in larger quantities: almost three times more alcohol than women per year, and nearly twice as many men as women are diagnosed with an alcohol abuse disorder. Still, it’s mothers who drink who have acquired that label. The wine mom.

As Ashlie D. Stevens writes, we don’t hear about the wine dad. We also don’t really hear derisively about the beer dad, even though that is many dads. But the wine mom label has stuck, likely because it is big business: T-shirts, message wine glasses, memes, those signs that “SNL” mocked.

It’s easier to laugh at a type than it is to think closely about it, to consider what about the conditions of motherhood might drive mothers to drink in the first place, conditions that have only and drastically worsened under the pandemic. What is drinking concealing? As Megan Garber writes in the Atlantic article “The Women and the Wine“: “wine, to varying degrees of acuteness, indicates the pressures that bear down on [women], constantly. And the notion that those pressures must be borne, ultimately, alone.”

And it’s easier, as Anna does, to sit with a glass, to sit with glass after glass after glass, than to sit with her feelings: the husband who left, the daughter who is gone, the career that never took off due in part to the unequal demands of motherhood. It’s easier to disappear in wine, red or white, than to confront the life that disappeared on you a long time ago and how to move forward now.

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Joe Rogan denies spreading “misinformation,” as Spotify counters with content warnings

Even if you don’t listen to Joe Rogan‘s podcast, he has a message for you.

In light of recent backlash against his pseudoscience claims regarding COVID-19, Rogan took to Instagram to defend his Spotify podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” and deny spreading “misinformation.”

“I think there’s a lot of people that have a distorted perception of what I do, maybe based on sound bites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging,” the mega-popular commentator said in a 10-minute-long video post, per Variety.

Rogan has consistently used his platform to spread erroneous claims about vaccines and viable treatments for the coronavirus. Following his positive diagnosis for COVID in September of last year, Rogan advocated for ivermectin — an obscure drug used to treat parasites — and supposedly used the drug to help with his recovery. Rogan’s podcast has also provided space for vaccine skeptics to spew harmful rhetoric and beliefs. In a New Year’s Eve episode of the podcast, Dr. Robert Malone stated that the nationwide advocacy for vaccines was caused by a “mass formation psychosis.” A separate episode featured anti-vax scientist Dr. Peter McCullough, who asserted that vaccines were responsible for killing thousands of people.

“I don’t know what else I can do differently other than maybe try harder to get people with differing opinions on right afterwards,” Rogan added. “Again, I’m not trying to promote misinformation. I’m not trying to be controversial. I’ve never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people and have interesting conversations.

“I wanted to hear what their opinion is, I had them on and because of that. Those episodes in particular were labeled as being dangerous — they had dangerous misinformation,” Rogan added. He also described both Malone and McCullough as “very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative.”

In a statement released on Sunday, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek responded to the controversy and introduced a new plan to implement content warnings, which will appear alongside podcast episodes discussing COVID-19.

“Based on the feedback over the last several weeks, it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time. These issues are incredibly complex. We’ve heard you — especially those from the medical and scientific communities,” Ek wrote in the statement posted on Spotify’s website.

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In January, a group of medical professionals and public health experts urged Spotify to take action against Rogan’s December episode with Malone.

Since then, pop culture figures and musicians have also made their own protests against Spotify platforming dangerous anti-vax information. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell production company expressed concerns to Spotify about “the all-too-real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform,” per Yahoo! Entertainment. On Wednesday, musician Neil Young removed his music from Spotify over misinformation claims. Shortly afterwards, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and rock musician Nils Lofgren followed suit.

Additionally, author and researcher Dr. Brené Brown, who has an exclusive deal with Spotify for two podcasts, “Unlocking Us” and “Dare to Lead,” took to Twitter to announce her decision to halt future episodes until further notice.

According to Ek’s statement, Spotify’s content warnings will include up-to-date information from reputable scientific sources, resources and credible links on COVID-19. The initiative is also the “first of its kind by a major podcast platform.”

“I trust our policies, the research and expertise that inform their development, and our aspiration to apply them in a way that allows for broad debate and discussion, within the lines,” Ek continued. “We take this seriously and will continue to partner with experts and invest heavily in our platform functionality and product capabilities for the benefit of creators and listeners alike. That doesn’t mean that we always get it right, but we are committed to learning, growing and evolving.”

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Scientists just learned what makes dogs huge or tiny — and it long predates selective breeding

Sometimes it is difficult to believe that all dogs are related. How can the tiny chihuahua be from the same species as the massive Great Dane? A male beagle is usually between 14 and 16 inches tall; a male English Mastiff can be as tall as 28 to 36 inches. One does not see similarly massive size disparities in other species, much less humans. (This would be the equivalent of adult humans regularly varying from two feet to six feet tall.)

Clearly there is something in the canine genetic code that explains this, just as doggie DNA has unlocked secrets regarding sled dogs, brachycephalic heads and self-domestication. For years scientists have attempted to solve the biological puzzle that can cause up to 40-fold size differences between dogs — and now, thanks to authors of a recent paper published in the journal Current Biology, we have the answer.

It all starts with a gene called IGF1, which regulates growth hormones and has long been suspected of playing a role in canine size variation. Scientists at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health compared variations in the region around that gene in dogs and wild canids with every imaginable body size. After doing so, they discovered that two alleles (or versions) of a single variant in a strand of long non-coding RNA, one that plays a role in controlling IGF1 protein levels. If dogs had only one copy of each allele, they tended to be medium-sized, but if they had two copies they would either weigh less than 15 kilograms (33 pounds) or more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds). That depended on which allele they had — and this further demonstrates that these genetic quirks are responsible for the drastic size disparities in dogs.

Even more intriguingly, these alleles were present in wolves more than 50,000 years ago — long before humans domesticated them. Scientists in England and Germany found that the mutation existed in DNA from 54,000-year-old Siberian wolf fossils. Every modern canid species, from coyotes and foxes to jackals and wolves, has this mutation in their DNA.

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“This is tying together so much about canine domestication and body size, and the things that we think are very modern are actually very ancient,” American geneticist Elaine Ostrander, one of the corresponding authors on the paper, said in a statement. She also referred to the fact that, although canids have always had the genetic tools to produce animals with wildly differing sizes, this did not happen on a widespread basis until the last 200 years — when humans began creating modern dog breeds.

“It’s as though Nature had kept it tucked in her back pocket for tens of thousands of years until it was needed,” Ostrander explained. While identifying the mutations responsible for size variation is a big deal, Ostrander told Live Science that there is still a lot more work to be done.

“The next step is to figure out how all the proteins produced by these genes work together to make big dogs, little dogs and everything in between,” Ostrander said.

Although there has not been as much controversy over breeding small dogs as there has been over breeding dogs with flat faces, they are still prone to health issues like intervertebral disk disease and tracheal collapse. They are also perceived as being more prone to behavioral issues, and scientists are still unclear as to why that seems to be the case.

“It could be a genetic association with small body size,” Dr. James Serpell, an animal behavior expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told Salon by email in August. “It could be because little dogs feel more threatened and defensive than bigger dogs and are therefore more likely to react aggressively. And it could be that the owners of small dogs are more protective of their pets and consequently fail to socialize them properly when they are young and impressionable. Or maybe it’s a combination of all three.”

More stories on dog science:

Jan. 6 committee seizes on Trump’s “admission”: He wanted Pence to “overturn” election

Members of the House committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot called out former President Donald Trump’s “admission” that he wanted Vice President Mike Pence to “overturn” his election loss.

Trump cited the recent bipartisan push to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to claim that he was correct that Pence had the power to “change the outcome” of the election. The admittedly confusing law, which governs the certification of electoral votes, makes clear that the vice president’s role is purely ceremonial but Trump allies circulated a memo by right-wing lawyer John Eastman claiming that Pence had the power to unilaterally reject certain electoral votes on Jan. 6. A bipartisan group of senators is working on a bill that would clarify the law in an effort to deter similar efforts in the future.

“If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?” Trump said in a statement, repeating his repeatedly debunked false claims about the election. “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., rejected Trump’s claim in an interview with CNN.

“We’re taking a look at the Electoral Count Act because it’s an old statute and … some of our colleagues in the House had tried to exploit ambiguities in it,” she said. “But I frankly think the role of the vice president will probably remain unchanged.”

Lofgren pointed out the irony of Trump’s claim, noting that if he believes the vice president can “choose the next president” then Vice President Kamala Harris would be free to reject electoral votes from Republican states in January 2025.

Conservative attorney George Conway, a frequent Trump critic, trashed Trump’s argument on Twitter.

“The Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 already make it entirely clear that the Vice President merely opens the envelopes,” he wrote. “But sometimes we want to make laws even clearer so that even semiliterate psychopaths have a chance at understanding them.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., one of the two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel, called out the silence in his own party over Trump’s “admission.”

“This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement,” he tweeted. “It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side … Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation anymore.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice-chair of the committee, linked Trump’s statement to his earlier comments at a weekend rally in Texas, where he suggested he may pardon Capitol rioters charged in the Jan. 6 attack if he is elected again, and called for possible protests against the various prosecutors investigating him.

“Trump uses language he knows caused the Jan 6 violence; suggests he’d pardon the Jan 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy; threatens prosecutors; and admits he was attempting to overturn the election,” Cheney said on Twitter. “He’d do it all again if given the chance.”

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At his Saturday rally in Texas, Trump claimed that Capitol rioters jailed on charges related to the attack were being treated unfairly.

“If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” Trump said at the event in Conroe, Texas. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

Numerous Republicans pushed back on the comments. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close Trump ally, called the statement “inappropriate.”

“I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol. … I don’t want to do anything that would make this more likely in the future,” Graham told CBS News on Sunday. “It will make more violence more likely,” he added. “I want to deter people who did what on Jan. 6. And those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”

During the Texas rally, the ex-president also attacked New York Attorney General Letitia James, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, all of whom are Black, over their various investigations into his company’s business practices and his effort to overturn his loss in Georgia.

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

The statement prompted Willis, who is investigating Trump’s attempt to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss, to contact the FBI. Willis sent a letter to J.C. Hacker, FBI special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, asking for security assistance after “security concerns were escalated this weekend” by Trump’s rhetoric, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“I am asking that you immediately conduct a risk assessment of the Fulton County Courthouse and Government Center, and that you provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents,” Willis wrote. “It is imperative that these resources are in place well in advance of the convening of the Special Purpose Grand Jury.”

A court last week granted Willis’ request to impanel a special grand jury to investigate Trump.

“We must work together to keep the public safe,” Willis wrote to the FBI, “and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Read more on the Trump investigations and the Jan. 6 aftermath:

Trump takes control of the Jan. 6 story — while the media and Congress sleep on it

Over the weekend, emboldened by a cowardly mainstream media and a slow-moving January 6 House Select committee, Donald Trump escalated his efforts to seize control of the story of the violent insurrection at the Capitol he incited last year. At a rally held in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Trump painted the insurrectionists as martyrs and heroes, claiming those who have been arrested and charged — more than 700 — “are being treated so unfairly” and promised, “if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons.” On Sunday, Trump doubled down, releasing a statement all but confessing he had wished for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election on January 6.

“Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome,” his statement claimed. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

The statement makes clear what Trump’s intentions were when he incited the people to storm the Capitol on January 6, some of whom were recorded chanting “hang Mike Pence.” (Trump has previously defended the chanters.) On Monday, Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast reported that Trump has been conspiring for months with GOP lawmakers, should they regain control of Congress in the midterm elections, to abuse their power to launch fake “investigations” into January 6 aimed at further confusing public understanding of the riot and painting the insurrectionists as martyrs.

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Trump’s boldness in trying to rewrite the history of January 6 is horrific, but not shocking. The man has never failed to press an advantage. He has a huge one when it comes to gaining control of the narrative of January 6: There’s no one really out there stopping him. The mainstream media is falling behind on the job, failing to treat Trump’s downright criminal aggression on this front with the gravity it deserves. Meanwhile, Democrats who ostensibly control Congress and the White House are too slow-moving and cautious in their response, giving Trump the opening to go all-out with his valorization of January 6 and efforts to stoke further attacks on democracy.

The one-year anniversary of January 6 came and went. President Joe Biden marked the occasion with a speech, and plenty of information was leaked to the press, but overall, it simply didn’t garner the attention needed to counter Trump’s revisionist history. Promises were made that “televised hearings and reports that will bring their findings out into the open,” and yet this entire month went by without a single hearing.

Last week, committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin told Dean Obeidallah in a Salon Talks interview that the planned hearings have been pushed back to “later in the spring, April or May more likely.” Raskin blamed the delay on people like Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows for doing the “hokey pokey.” Meadows, who has been refusing to cooperate, received a referral for contempt of Congress in December. Democrats are not rising to the moment. It’s been seven weeks and Meadows still has not been arrested by Biden’s Department of Justice.

It’s tempting to shrug off these delays. One could even argue that maybe it’s better to have hearings closer it is to the midterm elections. But this failure to move faster is bad news for democracy. It was entirely predictable that Trump would successfully pressure his lackeys into not cooperating. The failure of the January 6 committee to anticipate that and prepare for it means that they will likely be snookered again — and that “April or May” may come and go with more hearing delays caused by Trump, who now has good reason to believe he will avoid answering for his crimes for the rest of year, to the committee or anyone else. The failure to arrest Meadows, and to get more charges flowing for other non-cooperators, is clearly emboldening Trump even further.

Trump has a very good reason to delay things as much as possible: It gives him an incredible opportunity to shape the narrative. As usual, it’s an opportunity he is taking full advantage of. While loyal Democratic voters won’t be fooled, low information voters — who also tend to be the swing voters who decide elections — can and already are being manipulated by Trump’s disinformation. Both focus group and polling data show that these kinds of voters have no idea how serious January 6 was, or how much the GOP is covering up for Trump’s crimes while conspiring to make sure the next coup is successful. Troublingly, even Democratic voters routinely underrate the ongoing risks. The longer Democrats fail to educate voters, the more time Trump has to make sure his lies stick.

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But it’s not just Democrats. The mainstream media paid very little attention to Trump’s escalation over the weekend. When there was front page coverage, the focus was not on the danger of Trump’s open and ongoing coup. Instead it was filtered through the “horse race” style of covering politics. The Washington Post ran with “Trump’s Texas trip illustrates his upsides and downsides for Republicans and their midterm hopes” while the New York Times had “Trump’s Grip on G.O.P. Faces New Strains.” Given those headlines, readers might imagine Trump’s behavior is mainly a problem for the GOP’s midterm prospects, not an open threat to national security and our democracy.

Peter Baker, a preeminent political reporter for the New York Times, acted baffled in a Sunday night tweet as to why there wasn’t a bigger public reaction to Trump’s statements. “Old enough to remember when it would have been shocking to see a former president admit that his goal was to have ‘overturned the Election.’,” Baker tweeted.

Old enough to remember when it would have been shocking to see a former president admit that his goal was to have "overturned the Election."

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) January 31, 2022

As many pointed out in reply, a main reason the public seems unaware is that Baker and his colleagues are failing to make them aware. As one Twitter user noted, “Then make it a 96 pt headline on the paper where you work and have influence. The media decides how shocking something is and you know that.” Others pointed out that the press was able to make a scandal over the non-story of Hillary Clinton using a private email server, and all but yawn and shrug it off when Trump publicly admits his fascistic intentions. As anyone at a progressive publication can attest, reader interest is there. There might even be more if mainstream media treated it as a scandal instead of a page A24 oddity.

Neither the Democrats nor the media are helpless in the face of Trump’s continued provocations. The January 6 committee needs to be smarter about anticipating Trump’s tactics, and moving faster to gain control of the narrative. Biden’s Department of Justice needs to arrest Meadows. The media could choose to treat Trump’s continuing efforts to end democracy with the same five-alarm coverage they gave to Clinton’s mundane use of a personal email account.

The public takes its cues about what is important and what is not from leaders and media figures. If journalists and Democrats don’t step up more aggressively, then Trump’s lies about January 6 will keep gaining more traction. It will get even worse if Republicans control Congress next year, and use their own hearing power to offer Trump’s lies an even bigger gloss of mainstream respectability. Every day Trump is allowed to control the narrative, his power only grows stronger.

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie attacks Dr. Fauci — by quoting neo-Nazi convicted for child porn

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., on Sunday tweeted out an inspirational quotation he attributed to Voltaire, the 18th-century French writer and philosopher. In fact, its original source was likely an American neo-Nazi and accused pedophile, who pled guilty to child pornography charges in 2008.

Massie’s remarks, reported by Insider, came in a tweet targeting Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who over the past several years has repeatedly been scapegoated by conservatives over the government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

“You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science,” tweeted Massie, alongside a cartoon illustration of weary workers holding up a large hand attempting to squash them.

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” Massie captioned the photo, attributing it to Voltaire.

According to a USA Today fact-check, the quote, which regained popularity last May, has no apparent connection to Voltaire, a major figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment regarded as one of the greatest French writers. In fact, Etymologist Barry Popik has concluded that the maxim likely stems from a 1993 radio broadcast by neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of a white nationalist group called National Vanguard. In 2008, Strom pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography in after being charged, among other things, with attempting to coerce a 10-year-old into a sexual relationship. National Vanguard disintegrated shortly after Strom’s conviction.

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In an online post from 2017, Strom confirmed that the quote was his, writing that “it’s pretty clear, even to my critics, that I came up with the idea and the quote — and Voltaire never did.”

Lots of people pointing out that the quote is actually by neo-nazi Kevin Strom, but here's another fun fact:

The illustration is from an anti-child labor cartoon, which is ironic, given Massie's vote in Dec. to protect importers who use forced labor. 👀https://t.co/bEd7HyrY4H pic.twitter.com/OrSbwAoJqr

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) January 30, 2022

One Twitter user, Kendall Brown, also pointed out that the illustration Massie shared originated as an anti-child labor cartoon from the early 1900s, “which is ironic, given Massie’s vote in Dec. to protect importers who use forced labor.”

Indeed, in December, Massie voted against a House bill to blocks the importation of products made through forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. The measure was passed 428-1, with Massie as the sole member of Congress to vote no.

Despite Massie’s misattribution and strange choice of visual imagery, at this writing the congressman has not yet taken the Twitter post down.

This isn’t the first time Massie has apparently invoked Nazism in debates around COVID-19. Back in August, one of Massie’s interns quit after the congressman compared vaccine cards to the policies of Nazi Germany. At the time, Massie tweeted a photo with an image of a weathered wrist tattooed with a concentration camp identification number, captioning it: “If you have to carry a card on you to gain access to a restaurant, venue or an event in your own country … that’s no longer a free country.” He later deleted that post.

Read more on the GOP attacks on COVID-related regulations:

How to substitute for fish sauce in a pinch

While Leela Punyaratabandhu’s “Simple Thai Food: Classic Recipes from the Thai Home Kitchen” — one of our favorite resources on the cuisine, to be sure — is “simple” by name, it certainly doesn’t shy away from bold flavors and time-honored techniques.

In the book, Punyaratabandhu shares a selection of her family’s most-beloved Thai recipes, many of which don’t require anything more than supplies you’ve already got in your pantry. However, a few dishes do require stocking a few special ingredients — common pantry items in Thai cuisine, but maybe ones that are a bit harder to find elsewhere. And yes, while in the age of near-instant online ordering, sometimes you need to satisfy your Thai craving even sooner.

We get that — and luckily, Punyaratabandhu does too. She offers numerous ingredient substitutions throughout the book, especially when it comes to condiments, like fish sauce and tamarind pulp, and sometimes harder-to-find produce, such as long beans and water morning glory. After all, she writes, “cuisine exists to serve us, not the other way around, and cooking should be enjoyable.”

With that in mind, here are several easy-to-find substitutes for Thai ingredients. We’re starting with fish sauce, because it’s one of the most-reached-for Thai staples around — aka, you’ll probably encounter it in most Thai recipes out there. But if you don’t have it, fear not! We’ve got you covered.

What is fish sauce?

In order to find the best substitute for fish sauce, you need to learn what it is. Fish sauce is made from fermenting salted fish (usually anchovies) in barrels for at least a year. It’s been a staple ingredient in Thai, Vietnamese, and other southeastern Asian cuisines for thousands of years. “The longer the fermentation, the less fishy and the nuttier — and more umami-rich — the flavor,” writes Christopher Kimball in “Milk Street: The New Rules.” The highest quality fish sauce is the result of the first pressing; this is the kind you’d put on the table for drizzling as a finishing sauce. The second press is used as an ingredient in dipping sauce; it’s less important for the flavor to be super concentrated because it will likely be mixed with other ingredients such as lime juice, sugar, garlic, ginger, and chile peppers. The third press is seen as the worst quality (though it’s certainly not bad); that just means it’s best for cooking stir-fries, fried rice, and Phở.

Where to find fish sauce

You won’t find fish sauce in the seafood department. Instead, it will be lined up alongside glass bottles of soy sauce, tamari, sriracha, and sambal oelek in the “Asian” or “International” sections of the grocery store. (We put those words in quotation marks because it’s obviously unfair to lump ingredients from dozens of different countries on just a few shelves without any specific qualifier beyond calling the area “ethnic,” but it remains how most American grocery stores are organized.)

Fish sauce substitute

While fish sauce (aka a liquid condiment made of fish or krill that have been salted and fermented for two years or more) commonly found in even your average supermarket now, vegetarians and vegans avoid it for obvious reasons, as do many with shellfish allergies. So how do you get the punchy umami kick without turning to the bottled stuff? Here are our go-to fish sauce substitutes:

1. Mushroomy, umami broth

Cook’s Illustrated discovered that a salty broth made from mushrooms, salt, and soy sauce could be used in a 1:1 ratio with the real deal.

2. Soy sauce + minced anchovy

Alternatively, for one tablespoon of fish sauce, you can use a tablespoon of soy sauce mixed with a finely-minced anchovy fillet (scaled up or down, depending on your recipe needs).

3. Soy sauce + vinegar + a pinch of salt

Soy sauce is plenty sweet and umami-fied, but needs a little bit of pucker to make it an adequate fish sauce substitute. Try mixing equal parts of soy sauce and vinegar (white, cider, wine or champagne, or rice all work — just not balsamic) together, and adding a little pinch of salt, then use it in the same proportion as fish sauce.

4. Liquid or coconut aminos + a pinch of salt

Made from soybeans treated with an acidic solution, or fermented coconut sap, respectively, liquid and coconut aminos have a salty, sweet, and umami-inflected flavor that’s somewhat reminiscent of fish sauce — it’s not exact, though, and the underlying brininess of fish sauce won’t be present using this option. Use aminos in a 1:1 ratio, and be sure to add a pinch of salt to taste.

5. Vinegar + wakame powder + pinch of salt

Wakame powder, aka a variety of edible seaweed that’s been dried and crushed finely, pretty closely approximates the briny flavor of fish sauce. Mixed together with any vinegar of your choosing (except — you guessed it — balsamic) plus a pinch of salt, this sub will be pretty dang close to the original. It will also, however, be dark green and murky in color, so keep this in mind based on the recipe you’re hoping to use it in (you might want to keep it out of dipping sauces or clear broths, for example).

6. Vegan Fish Sauce

This recipe combines a number of the tricks and substitution suggestions above. It’s also a little more involved than the others, but well worth it — it tastes just like fish sauce. All this said, we recommend making a big batch so you can add dashes and drizzles for many pans of pad Thai to come!

The Thai pantry

Along with fish sauce, these three ingredients are staples in Thai cooking, but you might not have them on hand. Learn how to substitute palm sugar, Makrut Lime leaves, and Green Papaya.

Palm sugar

While Punyaratabandhu recommends buying palm sugar in its soft, pasty form, it’s often sold in giant blocks or wheels, which need to be grated. If real palm sugar eludes you, use light brown sugar. And as one Food52 reader points out on the Hotline, dried and hardened brown sugar can be grated or melted just the same. Readily-available coconut sugar is also an option.

Makrut lime leaves

These are “not even close to being interchangeable in the minds of Thai cooks,” writes Punyaratabandhu — but we’re going to tell you to do it anyway because these leaves are among the most difficult Thai ingredients to source. Dried leaves are stripped of the natural oils that make them so unique in the first place, but Punyaratabandhu does point out that frozen, fresh leaves are available online. Alternatively, many chefs find that lemon verbena delivers a similar flavor profile, as does lime zest to taste.

Green papaya

This fruit is a staple in Thai cuisine, where it’s mostly treated as a vegetable. Some markets, points out Punyaratabandhu, even sell it pre-grated, by the pound, which can save you a lot of trouble — and your knuckles. If you can’t find green papaya, swap in regular papaya in a pinch, but it must be wholly unripe and rock hard.

Trump is feeling the heat from investigations — and wants his mob to save him

If you were wondering if former Donald Trump is feeling the heat from multiple investigations, his comments on Saturday at a rally in the Houston suburb of Conroe, Texas, confirmed it. He is freaked out — and signaling to his faithful followers that he may need them to take to the streets.

The rally featured all of Trump’s greatest hits, as usual. He even did a tedious dramatic reading of “The Snake” for old times’ sake. But he added some new material that not only revealed his current anxiety level over his legal troubles but also suggested he has developed an aggressive new strategy for dealing with them. These comments weren’t just Trump riffing off the cuff, as he often does. They were scripted — he read them off the teleprompter.

If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, 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.

They’re trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the Supreme Court or most other courts.

As he was petulantly whining, “They’re trying to put me in jail,” he also inexplicably claimed that he was being prosecuted by Hillary Clinton’s law firm and the crowd immediately started chanting, “Lock her up.” (Self-awareness is not a strong suit among the Trump fan base.) He went on to suggest to the state attorneys general in attendance — who were in Texas for one of those border photo ops — that perhaps they could help him out and do something to put Hillary away. (One of them was South Dakota AG Jason Ravnsborg, who ran over and killed a man in 2020 and is currently facing impeachment — he’s definitely Trump’s kind of guy.)

But let’s look more closely at what Trump said about these prosecutors. Presumably, he’s speaking of New York Attorney General Tish James’ civil investigation, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal investigation into the Trump Organization (which Bragg inherited from previous DA Cy Vance) and the Fulton County, Georgia, criminal investigation into Trump’s meddling in the election. All three of the prosecutors involved are Black, which explains why Trump bizarrely accused them of being racist on top of being “mentally sick.” I don’t think he’s ever used that as an accusation before and it’s noteworthy when you consider his call for “the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”

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Perhaps one wouldn’t naturally assume that was a call to violence if it weren’t for the fact that the last time Trump called for a massive protest his supporters, some of them carrying Confederate flags, stormed the Capitol and tried to hunt down the speaker of the House and hang the vice president. If anyone should be a bit more circumspect about inciting people to take to the streets, it should be him. When you put that in the context of what Trump said just a few minutes later it becomes even more obvious:

If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.

I think his followers can feel confident that he will pardon those who committed the Jan. 6 insurrection. If others happen to get into trouble at “protests” against his prosecution, well, I would imagine think they’d be treated “fairly” under a second Trump presidency as well. After all, they would only be doing their patriotic duty in the face of prosecutors who are “vicious, horrible people,” not to mention “mentally sick” racists. .

Again, all of that was on the teleprompter as part of Trump’s scripted remarks, not a spontaneous commentary delivered in the moment. He has thought about this and said it purposefully. Once again, he is telegraphing his intentions right out in public.

Yes, he added enough phony caveats for his defenders to say with a straight face that he wasn’t exactly calling for people to riot if he’s prosecuted or specifically promising to pardon them if he wins the next election. But Trump has a track record of inciting violence. He has pardoned cronies who helped the Russian government interfere in the election his behalf, old friends and political allies like Steve Bannon and even war criminals Why wouldn’t some of his ardent supporters believe that they have a “Get out of jail free” card as well?

They really should think twice. Politico reported a few months back that judges are taking Trump’s ongoing insistence on the Big Lie into account when they decide whether to release some of the Jan. 6 defendants:

Judges have started citing this argument — as part of broader analysis — in cases where they’ve decided to detain defendants for presenting a threat of future violence, and even in some cases where they’ve agreed to let defendants go free, pending trial. They’ve agreed that Trump’s rhetoric could spur his most radicalized supporters to attack again.

Prosecutors have also cited Trump’s inflammatory lies about the “rigged election” as reason to detain those who continue to believe him, calling them an ongoing threat to the community. It’s fair to say that a lot of the Jan. 6 defendants would be better off if the former president stopped “helping” them.

Of course I don’t know if any of this will come to pass. At this point there are no actual prosecutions of Donald Trump, only investigations. There is every likelihood that he will slither out of trouble once again, as he has done his whole life. If he is prosecuted in civil court, that just means he’ll have to fork over some money, something he’s done many times in the past to cover up his misdeeds. Much as he may resent it, he considers that a cost of doing business.

The Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been indicted for tax fraud in the Manhattan DA’s criminal case, but it doesn’t appear that Weisselberg will testify against his boss. Who knows where the Georgia election case is headed? But it’s clear that Trump is very worried about these cases, so much that he’s preparing to activate the mob to save him. I wonder which one of these has him so spooked?

Read more on the multiple Trump investigations:

34 ways to cook with walnuts

I’ve never been a person that goes wild for walnuts. They’re a superfood, so you’re supposed to like them. I dutifully buy walnuts in bulk and store them in one of those large hermetic jars (so they don’t go stale, of course) and they stare back at me . . . quietly, like walnuts do.

Enough with this game of chicken! I set out to create walnut recipes I’d hunger for. And I succeeded: 20 steal-your-heart savory-ish recipes, and 14 knockout sweet ones. Who knew walnuts could be so much more than a snack or a salad topping that really reads as an afterthought, a “might as well” addition.

Walnut skins can be bitter, but toasting them brings out a richer nuttiness and makes those skins easy to rub off. Many of the recipes here call for toasted walnuts but even if they don’t, there’s no reason to avoid doing so. It will make everything taste that much better.

1. Pasta with Creamy Crushed Walnut Sauce from Heidi Swanson

You don’t need many ingredients to make this speedy pasta, but at the heart of the dish is two cups of toasted walnuts.

2. Walnut Cake

It’s sweet, but not too sweet. It’s nutty without being too nutty (though is there such a thing?). It’s a baking project, but not one that will take you hours and hours to complete. In short, this cake hits all the marks and offers something for everyone.

3. Laurie Colwin’s Rosemary Walnuts

The ultimate bar snack is spiced, herby nuts. Toss walnuts in a combination of butter, rosemary, salt, and cayenne pepper for a flavorful, poppable bite.

4. Creamy Kale and Walnut Strudel

“A savory take on strudel, that’s perfect alongside a big salad for brunch, lunch, or dinner. Paired with a little creaminess and plenty of walnuts, this strudel is perfect for nearly any season, but is an especially comforting baking project when the weather is chilly outside,” writes recipe developer Erin Jeanne McDowell.

5. Brown Butter Pasta with Butternut Squash, Walnuts, and Sage

Come October 1st, we are all about butternut squash. And brown butter. And walnuts. And sage. Bring it all on.

6. Flourless Walnut Brownies

Chocolate lovers have very divisive takes about brownies: Should they be plain or have mix-ins like chocolate chips or nuts? What about a swirl of peanut butter? If you’re team nuts, you’ll love these extra-fudgy, extra-nutty brownies.

7. Banana Bread Walnut Butter

No, this isn’t a recipe for banana bread. It’s a recipe for banana bread butter.“Freeze-dried bananas are the key to transforming an otherwise straightforward walnut butter into banana bread butter. The freeze-dried bananas offer a concentrated hit of banana flavor, while also absorbing some of the nut oil yielding a thick and spreadable butter,” explains Food52 resident Sohla El-Waylly.

8. Sage-Candied Walnuts

The trick to getting herbs and spices to stick to any kind of nut (in this case, we’re using walnuts) is tossing them in a frothy egg white, which acts as a “batter.” Maple syrup, light brown sugar, and regular granulated sugar ensure plenty of sweetness.

9. Herby Whipped Ricotta with Pea and Walnut Pesto

Two Italian-inspired classics go on a blind date for a one-of-a-kind crudité dip that could easily double as the ultimate pasta sauce.

10. Walnut-Lentil Lettuce Wraps

Lettuce wraps often call for beef or chicken, but Food Editor Emma Laperruque found a marvelous meaty swap using a duo of walnuts and lentils.

11. Ruth’s Peanut Butter–Date Balls

This is the easiest recipe ever. In fact, you could memorize it and do it in your sleep. That’s because it calls for one cup each of chopped walnuts, chopped dates, crunchy peanut butter, and confectioners’ sugar. Roll the balls in melted chocolate for an easy bite.

12. Nutty Espresso-Chocolate Chip Cookies

At first glance, you’ll see these and think, “Hey chocolate chip cookies, I know you!” But once you read the recipe list and realize that these are no ordinary cookies: there’s sweetened condensed milk, espresso powder, two kinds of chocolate (semi-sweet and white chocolate), and toasted walnuts, too.

13. Parsnip Risotto with Caraway-Paprika Oil and Orangey Walnuts

When you think about risotto, mushrooms, lobster, shrimp, and lots and lots of Parmesan probably comes to mind. What you might overlook (but shouldn’t!) is topping a bowl with an orange-infused walnut paste.

14. Smoky Eggplant Dip with Kefir and Buttered Walnuts

This is kind of like baba ganoush . . . until it’s not. Walnuts are toasted and sauteed with dried mint, paprika, and lemon zest, which is served over warm roasted eggplant.

15. Whole Grilled Red Onions with Sage, Honey, and Walnuts

Who knew red onions could look so pretty?

16. Pakoras with Coriander and Walnut Chutney

These bite-sized snacks are popular street food in India; this particular recipe calls for a filling of cauliflower, potatoes, kale, red onions, and green chiles. Each pakoras is served with a walnut-based chutney.

17. Lentil Walnut Loaf

Anytime you’re looking for a substitute for ground meat, just turn to lentils and walnuts. They’ll take care of business, as is the case with this “meat” loaf.

18. Orange, Parsley, and Walnut Salad

“This salad can be the perfect light start to heavier dishes served in colder months, like shepherd’s pie or baked chicken casserole, bringing a pop to winter meals. An ingredient as strong and sweet as an orange is a perfect companion for the parsley and the sharp crunch of endive,” writes recipe developer Ali Rosen.

19. Calabrian Walnut Cake (Torta di Noci)

Our take on the traditional Italian torte is made with just three ingredients — walnuts, eggs, caster sugar — plus powdered sugar for dusting on top of the baked cake.

20. Chocolate-Walnut Rugelach

Bless you Jake Cohen and your recipe for triple chocolate rugelach (there’s dark, milk, and semisweet chocolate) with chopped walnuts.

21. Walnut Sage Scones with Brown Butter Maple Glaze

You wanted walnut recipes and we heard you. These scones were voted our readers’ favorite walnut and sage recipe, which is proof of its belonging here.

22. Walnut Sponge Cake

You might think that walnuts would weigh down an otherwise light and airy cake. To avoid such a sad fate, recipe developer Alice Medrich grinds the nuts into a fine powder, which acts entirely as the flour. Bonus: Now the cake is gluten-free!

23. Grilled Broccolini Salad with Basil-Walnut Vinaigrette

You’ll find a double dose of walnuts in this salad: First, they’re mixed into the salad base, which includes broccoli and chopped cabbage; but wait, there’s more! Think of the vinaigrette as walnut pesto in the form of a more vinegary salad dressing.

24. Roasted Onion Salad with Arugula and Walnut Salsa

Onion salad sounds kind of unappealing, right? That is, until you roast them until they’re caramelized and serve them over a bed of arugula and parsley with goat cheese.

25. Mocha-Walnut Marbled Bundt Cake

Leave it to Dorie Greenspan to develop our new favorite walnut cake recipe. This one falls somewhere in between a regular yellow cake and a mocha cake. We love her suggestion of serving it with vanilla ice cream and warm fudge sauce.

26. Broccoli Salad with Pesto, Apples, and Walnuts

Yes, raw broccoli can be, and is, delicious and yes, you should try it in this salad. It’s served with honeycrisp apple slices and tossed in a walnut pesto.

27. Walnut-Crusted Trout with Rosemary and Thyme

Instead of panko breadcrumbs, we coated trout filets in crumbled walnuts mixed with Pecorino, thyme, and garlic.

28. Vegan Apple Brownies

This autumnal take on brownies features apples and walnuts; there’s no chocolate, so I guess they’re not technically brownies, but they’re delicious nonetheless.

29. The Perfect Cheese Ball

On New Year’s Eve, the only ball I’ll be watching drop is this cheese ball . . . onto my plate. Bad jokes aside, take in the beauty of this nut-crusted ball made of cream cheese, cheddar cheese, horseradish, and plenty of herbs.

30. Toasted Walnut Teacake with Herbal Lemon-Honey Glaze

Doesn’t a slice of soft lemon cake with a zesty glaze and a cup of tea sound just delightful?

31. Olive Oil Carrot Cake with Sesame Buttercream

We know everyone loves sheet cake, but we wanted to figure out a way to make it a little bit friendlier: so we turned it into a sheet cake. And we added a lot of olive oil for extra-moistness and pineapple for sweetness. And then we smeared the whole thing in a tahini-based frosting.

32. Teta Ole’s Walnut Torte

Not only does this torte have an abbreviated ingredients list (seven total!), you can also freeze it in advance of serving, which is a dream for holiday entertaining.

33. Roasted Autumn Vegetables with Walnut-Miso Sauce

If you’re bored of maple- or honey-glazed roasted vegetables, try this: coarsely ground walnuts mixed with olive oil, red miso paste, crushed red pepper flakes, and garlic.

34. Nut BonBon Cookies

Simple and twistable, a single walnut or maraschino cherry is tucked into a tender cookie dough. The twists are baked and ready to be served at your next cookie swap or holiday party.

Arizona bills embrace Trump conspiracy theories, could allow GOP to reject election results

Arizona Republicans opened the legislative session this month with a slew of new voting bills, including legislation that would allow the GOP-led state legislature to “reject” election results.

Arizona Republicans, who already approved numerous new voting restrictions last year, are turning many of the GOP’s conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s election loss into legislation even after their “forensic audit” of results in Maricopa County failed to turn up any evidence of fraud. Perhaps the most far-reaching bill was introduced by Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, whose legislation could open the door for the Republican-led legislature to overturn election results for no reason at all. The bill already has 15 Republican co-sponsors, including state Rep. Mark Finchem, the Trump-endorsed secretary of state candidate seeking to take over the state’s elections.

Fillmore’s 35-page House Bill 2596 includes a section that would require the legislature to hold a special session to “review the ballot tabulating process” and then decide whether to “accept or reject the election results.” The legislature does not have to have a specific reason to reject the results. If the legislature rejects the election results, “any qualified elector” can go to court to “request that a new election be held.”

“This bill is probably one of the biggest threats that we have seen here to our democracy,” Arizona House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, a Democrat, said in an interview with Salon. “Nearly half the [Republican] caucus believes that the legislature should be the final decider, which goes against everything that we stand for when we talk about election integrity, democracy and what it means to truly be a republic.”

Fillmore, who backed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat in four key states, insisted that the bill was not partisan and had nothing to do with the former president.

“I don’t care what the press says,” he said during a hearing on Wednesday. “I don’t trust ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox or anybody out there. Everybody’s lying to me and I feel like I have a couple hundred ex-wives hanging around me. This is not a President Biden thing. This is not a ‘the other red-headed guy’ thing.”

Fillmore’s bill would also eliminate no-excuse early voting, which is used by more than 80% of Arizona voters, and would require that all ballots be hand-counted within 24 hours of polls closing, which election administration experts say would require thousands, if not tens of thousands, of additional election workers in a state with more than 3 million voters.

Fillmore said on Wednesday that he wants elections to run the way they did in the 1950s.

“We should have voting, in my opinion, in person, one day, on paper, with no electronic means and hand counting that day,” he said. “We need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

Bolding said many Arizonans do not want to hear about “returning back to 1958.”

“I think about the 1950s, where you had poll taxes, where you had literacy tests, where Jim Crow was the law of the land,” said Bolding, who is Black. “For a large portion of our country, when they hear things like, ‘Let’s go back to 1958,’ they think about when their livelihood and their life could have been threatened just for simply having the ability to participate in democracy.”

Election administration has also made great strides since the 1950s and Arizona voters have increasingly moved away from traditional Election Day voting since the 1990s, said Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor to the elections program at the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Democracy Fund.

“For Arizona to introduce legislation to go back 70 years in the way in which we provide services to our voters is I think irresponsible,” she said in an interview. “If this bill were to pass, the vast majority of voters in Arizona would have to change the way in which they interact with the franchise. You will see massive confusion and I think some real drop-off in turnout and who’s going to participate on both sides of the aisle,” she said.

Patrick said many lawmakers pushing voting bills are trying to “game the system by introducing legislation that they feel will benefit themselves and their party, when in reality it’s going to affect all voters across the spectrum.”

Patrick, who served for over a decade as Maricopa County’s head of federal election compliance, said the bill would also violate federal law. The Help America Vote Act allows people voting on Election Day to have “second-chance voting,” which means they can correct errors on their ballots if the voting system rejects it. Voters would not have this opportunity if they drop their ballot to be hand-counted.

Fillmore’s bill would create a logistical nightmare. The number of polling places in Arizona has been drastically reduced, from more than 11,000 down to fewer than 800 over the last two decades, as voters have increasingly moved away from Election Day voting. So to adjust to this proposed law, that the state would have to fund a massive expansion of polling locations and poll workers, Patrick said. Arizona ballots also typically include between 40 to 60 different items to vote on, including local elections and propositions.

“The only way for them to complete a hand count of the full ballot within 24 hours, on millions of ballots in Arizona would be to hire literally thousands of people — in fact, it might be as many as tens of thousands,” she said. All these provisions would come with a huge cost attached, Patrick observed. “To date, this country has said we want cheap elections because we don’t invest in them, except episodically, every five to 10 or 20 years, the federal government kicks in some money. States are constantly cutting budgets, local offices, country boards, city councils. They have what they consider to be more pressing services to provide to the public. So the elections infrastructure is continually being depleted.”

The most concerning part of Fillmore’s legislation is its attempt to allow the legislature to overturn the will of the voters, a growing trend in legislatures across the country, Patrick said. The bill’s language does not include any criteria or necessary requirements to reject election results.

“What is the situation that would allow the legislature to step in and subvert the will of the people in a legitimate election outcome?” Patrick asked. “There’s that lack of specificity and there’s ambiguity around when the legislature can do this.”

States already have laws and protocols if anything is amiss with elections. Any candidate, political action committee or individual voter who has evidence of wrongdoing has legal recourse to challenge elections.

“But you have to have evidence. It can’t be merely conjecture,” Patrick said. “There were more than 400 court cases around the 2020 election and all but one of the federal court cases was thrown out. … In all other cases, they were thrown out for lack of evidence. It’s problematic because legislatures are introducing these kinds of bills as though there should be an additional channel outside the courts, and that it should go back to the legislature to decide whether or not they agree with their population.”

Fillmore did not respond to a request for comment. He insisted earlier this week that the bill would not allow the legislature to overturn the election, and that only the court system could do that, according to the Arizona Mirror. It’s unclear what would happen if the legislature rejected the results under the new law and a court did not order a new election, or whether a court would have to order a new election for all races or individual ones.

Fillmore’s bill would also allow the legislature to audit any election’s results, though it does not say if there are any criteria to trigger such an audit. State Senate President Karen Fann last year ordered an audit by Cyber Ninjas into the results in Maricopa County, which produced a report that was almost completely debunked by Republican county officials. Cyber Ninjas, which is planning to shut down, is being fined $50,000 per day by a judge after refusing to turn over records from the audit.

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Fillmore’s bill is one of dozens introduced by Republicans in Arizona, with many seemingly inspired directly by right-wing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“One of the most troubling aspects is that we see carryover from the conspiracy-theory language regarding the Maricopa County audit, in which there’s this view that hand-counting ballots is the only way to ensure that you have a free and fair election,” Bolding said. “We know that not to be the truth. I think that’s this long line of conspiracy theories that we’ll continue to see in 2022 all the way through the next election cycle as well.”

The state Senate Government Committee advanced seven bills along party lines this week, including one that would require an audit of voting machines — despite the failed Cyber Ninjas audit of Maricopa County’s machines — and would mandate that all ballots use “anti-fraud” paper with holograms or watermarks. That comes after Republicans apparently hunted for traces of bamboo over a conspiracy theory that thousands of ballots had been flown in from China. Another bill advanced by the committee would also require all ballot images to be published online.

Other bills would increase voter ID requirements to include fingerprints or special security codes; impose a ban on same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration, both of which are already illegal in the state; expand the election recount threshold from 0.1% to 0.5%; and enact bans on drive-through voting and drop boxes.

A bill by state Sen. Wendy Rogers, one of the most ardent election conspiracy theorists in the state, would create a Bureau of Elections that answers to the governor and is empowered to investigate allegations of election fraud, a proposal similar to those floated by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue. Voter fraud is exceptionally rare, despite numerous anecdotal reports of Trump supporters illegally voting, and there are numerous laws on the books criminalizing it.

Bolding said he is particularly concerned about the “constant attacks” from Republicans on the vote-by-mail system. “Because you’ve seen Arizona move from a ruby-red state to one that is shifting purple and moving blue, I think you see politicians now are trying to implement power grabs,” he said.

Patrick said that when she was Maricopa County’s federal compliance officer, her main job was to submit every policy to the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act, which required the DOJ to pre-clear any voting changes in states with a history of racial discrimination.

Because the legislature knew that egregious voting-law changes “would never be pre-cleared by the federal government,” such changes were not enacted or even introduced, she said. But since the Supreme Court gutted that provision of the law, “it gives everyone carte blanche ability to implement any kind of voting legislation, irrespective of whether or not it’s retrogressive or hurtful to all voters or even to specific voting populations.”

The Senate failed to pass voting rights legislation that would bring back the pre-clearance requirement after Republicans filibustered the bill and Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., refused to back their party’s proposal to change the filibuster rules.

Republican lawmakers last year introduced hundreds of voting restrictions in state legislatures and have already rolled out many new proposals in states across the country. Some Democrats are hopeful that voter backlash will hold Republicans pushing to restrict ballot access accountable.

“I absolutely think these voter suppression and voter restriction bills will backfire,” Bolding predicted. “The same process that Republicans use to vote, Democrats and independents use those measures to vote as well. I think it’s short-sighted. I think it is to appease former President Trump, but Arizona is no longer that place. Arizona voters expect common sense from lawmakers. They expect legislation that’s going to advance voting rights, not that’s going to suppress people from having the ability to participate.”

Patrick said she is also hopeful that voters will overcome the new obstacles to ballot access.

“The power really still is in the hands of the people and in the hands of the voter. It might be more inconvenient. It might be more of a challenge to make sure that you get your voices heard in November, but it’s never going to be more important than now,” she said. “It is really important to hold people accountable when they continue to push misinformation and disinformation, when they continue to rule on the side of authoritarianism and anti-democratic values and undermine the will of the people.”

Read more on voting restrictions and Arizona’s “forensic audit”:

Right’s attack on “critical race theory” goes back decades — but media hasn’t noticed

Conservative media in the United States does not play the normal role of the Fourth Estate in a democracy, which is to inform the public so they can make reasoned and principled decisions about significant social and political questions. Today’s right-wing media is effectively a dedicated propaganda and disinformation machine in service to the Republican Party and the “conservative” movement.

Its primary goal is to convince (white) people to support the Republican fascist movement, both by recruiting new members and securing the loyalties of those who are already members of the fascist cult. Another important task is to attack and demobilize liberals, progressives, Democrats and others deemed to be “the enemy.” To accomplish these goals, the right-wing media and its larger echo chamber are tasked with replacing empirical reality with an alternate universe of lies, misinformation and other malignant fables.

The right-wing news media and its larger echo chamber are also a financially lucrative operation, generating profits used to help fund and expand the movement while also enriching its leaders, spokespeople and select operatives.

In a recent report for Salon, Kathryn Joyce offers this context:

Over the last few years, political scientists and media researchers have charged that right-wing media has evolved into a separate and unaccountable ecosystem that functions as a “propaganda feedback loop,” providing its audience with news and opinions that reconfirm what they already believe, while simultaneously making them distrustful of any outside media source that might serve as a check on disinformation. In the 2018 book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics,” authors Hal Roberts, Robert Faris and Yochai Benkler describe this as “identity-confirming news” that attacks all potential sources of error correction as too biased to be worth considering. As journalist David Roberts has noted, that self-perpetuating cycle was pioneered in part by Rush Limbaugh in the early days of “Climategate,” when the demagogic radio host told listeners that the U.S. was divided into two universes: One was a lie, controlled by “the four corners of deceit” (media, government, academia and science), and the other was “where we are,” and “where reality reigns supreme.”

Matthew Sheffield, former right-wing activist (and Salon reporter) and host of the Theory of Change podcast, offered these insights in a series of posts on Twitter just before Election Day 2020:

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That’s not how the former operated.

I eventually realized that most people who run right-dominated media outlets see it as their DUTY to be unfair and to favor Republicans because doing so would somehow counteract perceived liberal bias….

Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms “the left.” It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.

This assumption is behind all conservative media output. They never tell you what their actual motives are. Most center-left people don’t realize just how radical many conservative elites are, largely because they don’t wear it on their sleeves.

Despite decades of evidence, the professional centrists, hope peddlers, stenographers and other members of the mainstream American media refuse to accept these basic truths. It would cause a type of narcissistic injury to admit that their cherished norms about the inviolate importance of truth, facts, intellectual honesty, fair play, professionalism and “democratic institutions” and “norms” are not shared by conservatives (who are a large percentage of the American public).

Rather than pivoting to pro-democracy journalism and unapologetic truth-telling about America’s democracy crisis, the professional centrists and other such types sell false hope and happy pills to an increasingly desperate public (specifically Democrats, and too many liberals and progressives).

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To discuss these issues and others, I recently interviewed Sergio Munoz, policy director for the watchdog and advocacy organization Media Matters for America. Munoz is an expert on progressive law and politics, who has worked with such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Federal Rights Project and the National Council of La Raza.

In our conversation, Munoz explained how the right-wing media propaganda machine has used the “critical race theory” moral panic as a weapon in a decades-old (or even centuries-old) struggle against multiracial democracy and the Black Freedom Struggle. He also discussed how the mainstream news media has failed in its coverage of the origins, motivations, goals and larger strategy of the white right’s campaign against “critical race theory” and the teaching of real American history.

He offered his insights about why, even a year after Jan. 6, 2021, the mainstream news media continues to normalize Donald Trump and the Republicans’ attacks on democracy by refusing to use appropriate language such as “fascism.” At the end of this conversation, Munoz explained that while many in the media have consistently presented the attacks on CRT as something new, and perhaps a story of genuinely “concerned” parents, the real story is about racism, white supremacy and other destructive values and beliefs.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you making sense of America’s escalating democracy crisis and this never-ending tumult of “revelations” and other supposedly shocking events?

There are some jaded cynical Beltway types who want to suggest that we have seen this before. In reality, we are in a uniquely dangerous moment. This is because of a confluence of many factors, some intentional and some unintentional.

Technology is a big part of it. Media Matters has had our eye on “fake news” since at least 2016, and the vectors for misinformation that certain online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter could become. I’d be the first to say that I don’t think any of us really thought this could be as significant a problem for American society, and frankly American democracy, as it turned out to be.

Media Matters was set up as a watchdog for misinformation, and originally, we were tracking purveyors on radio and in print. We were monitoring Fox News when it became a significant problem. The misinformation problem has of course been around well before we were founded. But it’s definitely happening at a far more significant degree now. Misinformation and these new technologies are exposing many of the weaknesses that were always present in American democracy.

No holds are barred now. The guardrails are really not concrete enough to hold the country on track when we have certain actors in society who are completely willing to drive us off into the ditch of fascism.

As a professional observer of the American news media, how do you make sense of their failures in the Age of Trump — failures that continue even after a coup attempt and an emboldened neofascist party and right-wing movement that has blatantly attacked democracy?

False equivalency and “he said, she said” journalism has been a deep problem for the mainstream corporate media for a long time. Sometimes there are not two sides to a story in terms of reasonable dialogue. At present here in America, too many have invited to the table of public discourse ideas and ideologies and people that are anathema to civil public discourse and multiracial democracy.

We are literally expected now to sit at the table with white supremacist ideologues who don’t even bothering to hide their beliefs through dog-whistles anymore, and to treat such ideas as something respectable. There are people who possess white supremacist beliefs while serving in positions of public trust. When the public sphere has been expanded to include such perspectives and people, it puts that tendency for the news media to go for false equivalents or “he said, she said” reporting in a whole new problematic light.

For example, there was a controversy with a school district that believed, to be in compliance with one these new anti-“critical race theory” laws, that children needed to be taught “both sides” of the Holocaust. It sounds ludicrous, but that is just one small, representative example of where we’ve arrived at by allowing normalization of so much bigotry and hatred and evil. It makes it very difficult to have civil society with literally uncivil actors.

Why is there still a reluctance, if not outright refusal, to use correct language to describe Donald Trump, the Republicans and the larger white right? This is a neofascist movement. On occasion the mainstream news media will let such language slip out, but then it is quickly discarded. Or they will instead say “populist” or “authoritarian.” How are these editorial decisions being made?

Part of the problem is that we as Americans have not been honest with ourselves about how easy it was to get to this moment where we elected a white supremacist president — or a white nationalist, depending on the day. We also unleashed a movement, in the form of the Republican Party, which has absolutely zero problems in indulging themselves in such values and behavior.

It’s sociopathic. That is an objectively true description. And that description applies to one of the country’s two main political parties. This speaks to your point about editorial decisions. Too many among the decision-makers for the mainstream news media are just as far behind as the rest of society. They were too late to open their eyes to what was going on and to take it seriously.

The anti-civil rights sentiments, the anti-democratic sentiments, the sentiments of hatred for multicultural society and multicultural democracy have been with us since before the founding of the country. This is not new. It is catastrophic to have the institutions of American democracy in the hands of fascists and white supremacists and white nationalists. We are going backward as a society.

Is there literally a directive from senior management and the owners of large American media companies that the news people are not to say “fascism”?

I think it’s instinctual. We have done studies and campaigns to encourage the news media to use accurate language in the way you are describing. Eventually the message is clearly passed from the producers to the on-air personalities, or it’s passed from the communications people to the specific writers. We do see a change where they provide necessary context but then they soon revert to old habits.

On a range of issues from voter fraud to immigration reform, for example, we will see some good change and positive behavior and then unfortunately it will trend backward. Every situation, I’m sure, is different: Sometimes it’s a reporter, sometimes it’s an editor. It’s a combination of factors. But overall, as a collective entity I do believe that it is instinctive for the American corporate news media to go back to the path of least resistance, where you don’t ruffle any feathers or burn any bridges. In addition, they don’t want to burn any access points so they can just continue again with this “both sides” types of reporting.

Reporting on the right’s attacks on “critical race theory” has been subpar. Basic questions are not being asked. Historical and other context is usually lacking. For example, who are these groups like the so-called Moms for Liberty?

The lack of context in the reporting, be it intentional or unintentional, works to conceal the truth about a decades-long movement. Right-wing media is a huge part of this movement. The National Review was against the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. America had its versions of Fox News well before the one that exists today.

The right-wing media has long been crucial to this campaign to overturn the gains of the civil rights movement. Part of how they accomplish their goals is by obscuring the context, or pretending it’s about something else. The “parents’ rights” angle that Moms for Liberty is using is an example of this. What’s particularly interesting here is that this is the same terminology that was used decades ago when these forces were fighting against school integration. The goal was to make white parents afraid and uncomfortable about the safety of white kids in integrated schools.

When opposition to civil rights can be masked by rhetoric about “freedom” and “safety” and “choice,” it becomes a type of common sense. They also know such rhetoric has worked in the past in the attack on civil rights.

In groups like Moms for Liberty, there are three different elements at work. You have a general opposition to COVID protocols such as wearing masks and quarantining. Out of the 60,000 supposed members in Moms for Liberty, I’m sure there’s some folks whose primary concerns are on that issue. I’m also sure there are people who are involved in politics and realize that Moms for Liberty is a great way to build out an email list, for example. There’s a long tradition of using groups like this for political mobilization purposes.

There are the other people in Moms for Liberty, who, as much as they might deny it, are part of that long tradition of opposing desegregation and civil rights. One of the things that struck us at Media Matters about Moms for Liberty wasn’t the fact that they themselves were hiding these anti-civil rights sentiments, but that, unfortunately, some of the established mainstream media weren’t digging into it. They were taking Moms for Liberty and its motivations and goals at face value. You didn’t have to dig very far into the background of Moms for Liberty to realize that their opposition to “critical race theory” was based on an ugly strand of anti-civil rights thinking.

Where is the money coming from to fund these anti-CRT groups and activists? Again, this is a basic question that the mainstream media is not exploring. For those who care to investigate, the answer is not all that complicated or unexpected.

I don’t know why certain media outlets did not do their homework in a few of these pieces. Maybe they didn’t think it was relevant, or didn’t have the time or resources. Moms for Liberty actually has recommended readings for people who are concerned about their issues. The readings were affiliated with the John Birch Society. That should not have been hard to dig into, either by finding the receipts, as we say ,or by just having a general knowledge of how this “critical race theory” campaign is just the latest manifestation of a decades-long right-wing anti-civil rights project.

As to the money and funding, over the years dark money groups have become better and better at two things. One is being really vague or outright hiding where the funding is coming from and where the funding is going, largely by delaying tax disclosures. At this point, we usually have to wait years before the relevant 990 forms are released. In terms of the groups that have to file tax disclosures, they either don’t file them or they get delays and extensions. Therefore, the actual tax disclosures don’t come out until years after the fact. We have absolutely no expectation of seeing the tax returns of some of these anti-CRT groups for years. And even when the information is finally released, they’re professional enough to know how to make the description of the funds obscure enough that you can’t be entirely sure what it was for, or they utilize one of the many dark money techniques where the information is completely blacked out.

Despite the fact that these groups know how to intentionally hide the funding, we can still make educated guesses. Right-wing foundations and think tanks and rich individual activist funders have been extremely honest about what their goals are.

Even if they try to hide it in the rhetoric of personal liberty and American exceptionalism and unencumbered capitalism, it is not that hard to find out that those terms are being used to justify undermining multicultural democracy and rolling back civil rights laws. They’re not shy about it. In some respects, what you’re seeing right now with CRT is the same campaign that was used against affirmative action years ago.

This CRT bogeyman moral panic is a perfect fit for the right-wing hate media. You almost could not have made up a better story.

We were tracking “critical race theory” with Tucker Carlson and some of the segments on his show last year when it first manifested. Certainly after Trump appropriated it during the campaign, the rest of the right-wing media machine started focusing on it because they believed it would have traction. Fox News tripled down on “critical race theory.” Even though this seems like a recent phenomenon, the CRT smear campaign is not new. The right wing tried it against Barack Obama in 2012.

Obama, when he was a Harvard Law student, was friendly with Derrick Bell, who was one of the founders of the real critical race theory framework. But the attacks didn’t catch on at all. The right wing was trying to push it on Fox News with the same scary demonization of critical race theory we are seeing today. They were using almost exactly the same rhetoric as they’re using now, it just didn’t catch on.

If you look back even farther, in 2010, one of the reasons the right wanted to ban ethnic studies in Arizona was that they were allegedly teaching critical race theory. We can go back even farther to 1993 and Lani Guinier’s nomination as assistant attorney general. Her writings on critical race theory were used to end her nomination.

When critical race theory stops working as a buzz phrase, they’re going to switch to another one, because the campaign itself has been around for decades. They just change the terminology based on what worked. If this one stops working, if it stops getting eyeballs and mobilizing their base, the right-wing activists, politicians and other leaders will move on to a different issue. The American right is not going to stop this anti-civil rights campaign until they win.

Should Breyer’s Supreme Court replacement have a term limit?

A vacancy sign hangs above the Supreme Court bench following reports on Jan. 26, 2022, that long-serving liberal justice Stephen Breyer is set to retire.

Names are already being thrown around in the media as to who will replace him, aided by helpful hints from President Joe Biden himself. But whoever it is can, depending on their age, expect a lengthy spell on the bench of the highest court in the land.

Precedent shows us that justices tend grow old in the position. Breyer is one such example. When he joined the Supreme Court in 1994, he was an already very accomplished 55-year-old former law professor and appeals court judge. Now, at age 83, he is set to retire from the court at the end of the current term in June.

Supreme Court justices in the U.S. enjoy life tenure. Under Article 3 of the Constitution, justices cannot be forced out of office against their will, barring impeachment. This provision, which followed the precedent of Great Britain, is meant to ensure judicial independence, allowing judges to render decisions based on their best understandings of the law – free from political, social and electoral influences.

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Our extensive research on the Supreme Court shows life tenure, while well-intended, has had unforeseen consequences. It skews how the confirmation process and judicial decision-making work, and causes justices who want to retire to behave like political operatives.

Problems with lifetime tenure

Life tenure has motivated presidents to pick younger and younger justices.

In the post-World War II era, presidents generally forgo appointing jurists in their 60s, who would bring a great deal of experience, and instead nominate judges in their 40s or 50s, who could serve on the court for many decades.

And they do. Justice Clarence Thomas was appointed by President George H.W. Bush at age 43 in 1991 and famously said he would serve for 43 years. There’s another 12 years until his promise is met.

The court’s newest member, Donald Trump’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett, was 48 when she took her seat in late 2020 after the death of 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee who joined the court at age 60 in 1993, refused to retire. When liberals pressed her to step down during the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama to ensure a like-minded replacement, she protested: “So tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would rather see on the court than me?”

Partisanship problems

Justices change during their decades on the bench, research shows.

Justices who at the time of their confirmation espoused views that reflected the general public, the Senate and the president who appointed them tend to move away from those preferences over time. They become more ideological, focused on putting their own policy preferences into law. For example, Ginsburg grew more liberal over time, while Thomas has become more conservative.

Other Americans’ political preferences tend to be stable throughout their lives.

The consequence is that Supreme Court justices may no longer reflect the America they preside over. This can be problematic. If the court were to routinely stray too far from the public’s values, the public could reject its dictates. The Supreme Court relies on public confidence to maintain its legitimacy.

Life tenure has also turned staffing the Supreme Court into an increasingly partisan process, politicizing one of the nation’s most powerful institutions.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Supreme Court nominees could generally expect large, bipartisan support in the Senate. Today, judicial confirmation votes are almost strictly down party lines. Public support for judicial nominees also shows large differences between Democrats and Republicans.

Life tenure can turn supposedly independent judges into political players who attempt to time their departures to secure their preferred successors, as Justice Anthony Kennedy did in 2018. Trump appointed Brett Kavanaugh, one of Kennedy’s former clerks, to replace him. A similar turn of events may occur if President Biden nominates Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former Breyer clerk, to the current vacancy on the court.

The proposed solution

Many Supreme Court experts have coalesced around a solution to these problems: staggered, 18-year terms with a vacancy automatically occurring every two years in nonelection years.

This system would promote judicial legitimacy, they argue, by taking departure decisions out of the justices’ hands. It would help insulate the court from becoming a campaign issue because vacancies would no longer arise during election years. And it would preserve judicial independence by shielding the court from political calls to fundamentally alter the institution.

Partisanship would still tinge the selection and confirmation of judges by the president and Senate, however, and ideological extremists could still reach the Supreme Court. But they would be limited to 18-year terms.

The U.S. Supreme Court is one of the world’s few high courts to have life tenure. Almost all democratic nations have either fixed terms or mandatory retirement ages for their top judges. Foreign courts have encountered few problems with term limits.

Even England – the country on which the U.S. model is based – no longer grants its Supreme Court justices life tenure. They must now retire at 70.

Similarly, although many U.S. states initially granted their supreme court judges life tenure, this changed during the Jacksonian era of the 1810s to 1840s when states sought to increase the accountability of the judicial branch. Today, only supreme court judges in Rhode Island have life tenure. All other states either have mandatory retirement ages or let voters choose when judges leave the bench through judicial elections.

Polling consistently shows a large bipartisan majority of Americans support ending life tenure. This likely reflects eroding public confidence as the court routinely issues decisions down partisan lines on the day’s most controversial issues. Although ideology has long influenced Supreme Court decisions, today’s court is unusual because all the conservative justices are Republicans and all the liberal justices are Democrats.

In December 2021, the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States released its report on Supreme Court reform, which examined term limits for the justices. Although the commission did not take a position on the merits of term limits, it did outline a variety of means by which they could be imposed, including through the constitutional amendment process and by congressional statute.

Ultimately, Congress, the states and the public they represent will decide whether the country’s centuries-old lifetime tenure system still serves the needs of the American people.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 6, 2021.

Paul M. Collins, Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst and Artemus Ward, Professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Republican racism and misogyny could be on full display for Biden’s Supreme Court nomination

It remains to be seen who President Joe Biden will nominate for the U.S. Supreme Court seat presently held by the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, but he has said that the nominee will be an African-American woman — and the top contender, according to many reports, is believed to be 51-year-old D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Whoever the nominee is, journalist Kali Holloway warns in a scathing op-ed published by the Daily Beast on January 28, she can expect to be bombarded with both racism and misogyny by Republicans.

“For nearly 180 years,” Holloway writes, “every American president made an unspoken pledge to only nominate White men to the U.S. Supreme Court. Race and gender went unmentioned, because they were foregone conclusions…. Now, a lot of those White men are hopping mad, firing off racist responses the minute President Joe Biden reaffirmed his campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, without even waiting to find out what Black woman they’re attacking.”

One of the Republicans who has been sounding off about Biden and a nominee to replace Breyer is far-right Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini.

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Holloway observes, “Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini — most famous for wearing blackface, dressing up as a racist ‘Mexican’ caricature, and requesting that every removed Confederate statue from around the country be sent to his home district — went the ‘reverse racism,’ White grievance route, demanding that President Biden ‘be impeached for his anti-White racist exclusion of any White nominee to the Supreme Court.'”

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Holloway notes, was “mockingly suggesting that Bridget Floyd — sister of George Floyd, who was murdered by police —should be nominated, adding that ‘she is not a judge or a lawyer or whatever, but in this case, who cares?'”

“This is all fueled by misogynoir, pure and simple,” Holloway emphasizes. “We’re actually likely to see Biden choose a candidate whose talents, expertise, and skill are unassailable, because she will have already been scrutinized in ways her White and male peers never had to face. To have arrived at the point of being picked for a SCOTUS seat is to have already navigated a racist and sexist career minefield for any Black woman. The problem isn’t that we’re going to have a Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, it’s that it took this long for us to get here, and people are still effectively claiming it shouldn’t happen.”

6 celebrities who have appeared on court shows

Beginning with “The People’s Court” in the 1980s, television viewers have grown accustomed to having a portion of daytime programming devoted to the arbitration of personal and professional grievances filed in small claims court. Whether it’s Judge Joseph Wapner, Judge Judy Scheindlin, or, somewhat inexplicably, Judge Steve Harvey (who is not a judge), these series recruit litigious people who don’t mind being on camera in exchange for a free trip to California and any possible judgment against them being paid by the producers.

Most of these faces are unfamiliar, but you might sometimes see a recognizable plaintiff or defendant. The following examples can be admitted into evidence.

1. BEA ARTHUR

Bea Arthur became a household name thanks to her portrayal of the no-nonsense Dorothy Zbornak on NBC’s long-running “The Golden Girls.” Like many celebrities, she utilized her popularity to draw attention to causes. For Arthur, that meant advocating for animal welfare. In 1996, the actress appeared on “Judge Judy” as a witness for the plaintiff — a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) representative — to argue against the keeping of big cats. The defendant was accused by PETA of animal cruelty related to his training of animals in captivity at Tiger’s Eye Productions, a controversy that dated back to 1994. Entities like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Florida Fish and Game Commission had previously investigated and cleared Tiger’s Eye of any wrongdoing. So, too, did Judge Judy, who found in favor of the defendant by ordering PETA to stay away from them.

2. RICK JAMES

In 1998, Rick James — the late music legend (“Super Freak”) parodied on Chappelle’s Show — went in front of Judge Joe Brown with the hope of resolving a dispute involving former bandmate and guitarist Geronne Turner, whom James alleged owed him money for musical equipment James loaned him that was subsequently stolen from Turner’s vehicle. At one point, James’s testimony veered into the bizarre when he began describing how Turner once groped James’s buttocks at a club. (Turner said the butt-grabbing was being “taken out of context.”) It was an appropriately weird appearance for one of music’s most eccentric personalities, but his tangents didn’t seem to bother Brown: He ruled James was owed $4,600 for the equipment.

3. JOHNNY ROTTEN

The onetime lead singer of the Sex Pistols (real name John Lydon) took his rebellious attitude and turned it toward notoriously stern Judge Judy. Rotten was before the bench in 1997 to settle a dispute involving a drummer named Robert Williams, whom Rotten had toured with for his “Psycho’s Path” album: Williams alleged Rotten owed him $5,000 for his work on the tour and also claimed he was subject to assault and battery.

For his part, Rotten seemed aware of the potential inherent in his anti-establishment persona appearing before the scowling Judge Judy and milked it for all it was worth, blowing his nose, interrupting, and otherwise antagonizing the stone-faced jurist. Despite his lack of manners, she ruled in favor of Rotten.

4. COOLIO

The “Gangsta’s Paradise” rapper appeared before Judge Joe Brown in 1999 to settle issues with his Wylde Bunch back-up troupe. The band claimed they were injured in a van accident during a tour with the performer. When Coolio halted the tour, the Bunch wanted to be compensated. Coolio offered $8,000; they rejected it and took him to TV court. Brown awarded the Wylde Bunch $4,000.

Curiously, Brown himself was once entangled with the law. In 2014, a year after the cancellation of his show, he got into a heated argument with the sitting judge handling a child support case for which Brown was acting as an attorney. He spent five nights in jail for contempt of court.

5. AMY SCHUMER

Most court show spectator seats are filled out by extras paid a modest fee (around $8 an hour) to watch the proceedings. While financial compensation is usually the motive to sit for small claims cases, some do it just because they’re fans. In 2017, actress Amy Schumer and her sister appeared in the audience of “Judge Judy.” The reason? “Because we love her,” according to Schumer’s Instagram. “My sister and I are crazy big Judge Judy fans, and she kind of agreed to have lunch with us,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “So, we got to watch a bunch of cases and sit in the room. So, I’m going to be, like, a background actor in a lot of this season of ‘Judge Judy.'”

6. MR. AMERICA

While not quite as notable as Bea Arthur, onetime Mr. America Rex Ravelle still stands out as a special guest of “The People’s Court.” In 1986, Ravelle (who won the bodybuilding title in 1951) appeared before Judge Wapner in an effort to claim $2,000 he alleged he was owed by a tenant in one of his rental properties. Wapner ruled in favor of the defendant, but that wasn’t the end of it. Later, Ravelle sued the series via its production company, Ralph Edwards Productions, for $1 million, arguing he had been “coached” by producers to be verbally aggressive during taping and that Wapner had ruled against him for dramatic effect. The company settled with Ravelle in 1988, marking the first time an onscreen litigant sued a court show and won. While it would have made for some great television, that case didn’t air.

Does it really empower women to expect them to make the first move?

Heterosexual dating conventions have long held that men make the first move: First to flirt, first to ask out on a date, first to propose.

What if the roles were reversed?

That’s what one dating app, Bumble, has tried to do.

Bumble brands itself as a feminist dating app that’s designed to empower women. According to Bumble’s website, the app was developed to “challenge the antiquated rules of dating” by requiring those who identify as women to initiate communication with men they match with.

With over 100 million users as of 2020, Bumble is one of the most popular dating apps on the market, and in interviews I conducted with over 100 people about online dating in my “Connecting Digitally” study, more than half reported using Bumble.

But my research shows that Bumble, despite purporting to empower women, leaves many female users feeling frustrated and vulnerable. This disconnect can be linked in part to the ways in which many men engage with online dating apps.

When a match is meaningless

Bumble’s attempts at “levelling the playing field and changing the dynamics of dating” and empowering users to “connect with confidence” makes sense in theory, but not in practice.

Women in my study reported a number of counterproductive user practices based on their own swiping experiences and conversations with male Bumble users.

A 39-year-old female participant in my study described the frustration of making the first move and not getting any response: “So then all of a sudden you’re a match, but they would never say anything or respond to you . . . you wouldn’t hear from them. What’s the point? Why even bother?”

Rather than evaluating profiles carefully and swiping “yes” on women they’re serious about, men are often likely to swipe right based only on the profile photo.

In addition, many men approach online dating as a numbers game and practice what some call “power swiping” or “shotgun swiping” by saying “yes” to everyone and seeing who shows interest and matches with them. Many of them will only read a women’s profile information after matching.

Lastly, because some men are just swiping for the ego boost of “likes,” they’ll simply delete the match rather than respond to a women’s invitation to chat.

Women in my study often pointed out that a match was far from a guarantee of mutual interest. Unfortunately, due to “the gamification of dating” — the way the apps are designed to be engaging and addictive — mindless swiping is a common phenomena across all dating apps, not just Bumble.

Communication and power

For decades, language scholars have been researching how people connect — or fail to connect — in conversation.

We say that the person speaking “holds the floor,” and they can wield power through choosing the topic, talking for longer periods of time and steering the conversation in certain directions.

However, not all power is maintained through holding the floor. Not taking up a speaker’s topic in conversation, either by changing the topic or ignoring the question altogether, is another way to exercise power.

In other words, in any conversation, it takes two to tango. As the authors of a study on email communication and response times put it, “failure to respond or to take the floor creates a breakdown.” On dating apps, not responding to an opening message is akin to ignoring someone who’s asking you a question in a face-to-face conversation.

On Bumble, women may be given the control to take the floor first and direct the initial topic of conversation through, as Bumble terms it, “first move privileges.” However, when men fail to respond or unmatch after receiving that opening message, the women in my study reported feeling dismissed, rejected and, ultimately, disempowered.

In 2020, Bloomberg published an article exploring Bumble’s marketing tactics and brand messaging. Though the company maintains that requiring women to message first “reduces harassment” and “creates a kinder exchange between two people,” the author of the article noted that Bumble was never able to provide tangible proof of “how Bumble was keeping women safer or leading to more equitable relationships.”

Switching poles doesn’t solve the problem

On a positive note, Bumble has become a catalyst for conversation about gender, power and communication in online dating. And while many may not be ready for women to make the first move, most of the male and female Bumble users in my study noted that they chose the app precisely because of its philosophy of empowering women. To me, this speaks to the fact that people are ready to embrace Bumble’s goals of “shaking up outdated gender norms.”

That hasn’t stopped some men and women from decrying Bumble’s unique design as sexist. In fact, a class action lawsuit filed in 2018 accused Bumble of discriminating against heterosexual male app users because the app only allows women to send messages first. Bumble denied wrongdoing, but agreed to settle in 2021 to avoid further costly litigation.

A 37-year-old female participant in my study thought the app’s emphasis on gender was artificial and constrictive: “I don’t like it when people limit things by sex or gender. That doesn’t feel empowering to me. It just feels like they’re trying to [enact] reverse sexism.”

By creating a situation where the right to speak and direct conversation is only given to members identifying with one gender, the work of coming up with unique and engaging opening messages falls on that group.

Men have traditionally done more of this work. Many of them don’t exactly cherish initiating conversations with countless strangers, a process that’s rife with anxiety and rejection.

For heterosexual matches on Bumble, women are now required to do the part. Yet to place the work of initiating conversation solely on one group seems to encourage passivity in the other party, which seems to only hamper healthy communication.

Riki Thompson, Associate Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing Studies, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You need to know about head injury and dementia, even if you’re not a football player

My father has dementia. The handsome young man who left before I was born, the pleasant, elusive fellow I have only met a few times in my life, struggles now to remember names and understand context. I got the news via a long-lost cousin recently, just a few days after my mother died after her own lengthy and painful journey through Alzheimer’s. But my father’s neurological path has been very different from my mom’s, and it provides different warnings and lessons. It seems he didn’t inherit his condition. He didn’t develop it as an inevitable consequence of extreme old age either, because he’s not that old. Instead, it turns out that the seed of his disease was planted long ago.

My mother’s descent was part of a terrifying family legacy. Her sister started showing signs of early onset Alzheimer’s when she was in her fifties, as did her elder brother. My mother-in-law’s dementia, meanwhile, seems likely a result of her advanced age and the isolation of a pandemic that gifted her with COVID — twice. This was, I had assumed, how dementia happens for most people, via genetics and time. I didn’t realize how great the other risks are, even for those of us who aren’t boxers or football players. My father’s dementia is from head injury.

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I knew about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In recent years, it’s been the subject of intense scrutiny and calls for serious reform across a variety of sports. There was the case of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and convicted murderer who died by suicide at the age of 27 in 2017. After his autopsy, researchers declared he was suffering “the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition.” That same year, a study by neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKeen found evidence of CTE in 99% of the deceased former National Football League players’ brains studied. More recently, there was former NFL player Phillip Adams, who last April shot and killed six people before turning the gun on himself. A posthumous brain examination “showed significantly dense lesions in both frontal lobes, an abnormally severe diagnosis for a person in his thirties.”

My father was not a professional athlete. As far as I know, he never played any team sports at all. When my cousin reached out to me last month, she explained that his neurologist’s diagnosis was that the dementia was the result of a variety of head injuries throughout his life, including a car accident he survived in his twenties. I had mistakenly presumed that long term damage of blows to the head was always the result of sustained and repetitive punishment. I’d read so much about athletic young men in their prime dying with neurodegenerative conditions that made their brains appear much, much older and sicker. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone with a skull, at any age, might be vulnerable as well.

As the Alzheimer’s Association explains, “Certain types of traumatic brain injury may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia years after the injury takes place.” In other words, while “There’s no evidence that a single mild traumatic brain injury increases dementia risk,” you don’t need be out on the field every Monday night for years either. You don’t have to have been in a life-threatening accident. A 2018 study of military veterans found that “Even mild TBI [traumatic brain injury] without loss of consciousness was associated with more than a 2-fold increase in the risk of dementia diagnosis.”

Reframing the risks for dementia can be especially important for women, who are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with the condition. It matters because while we may as a whole spend less time in the boxing ring, we are far more likely to experience intimate partner violence. Back in 2018, Toronto Western Research Institute senior scientist Dr. Don Weaver noted his research on the connection between domestic abuse and dementia in Canada’s National Post, writing, “One case-control study that I carried out with colleagues shows that spousal abuse could be associated with the development of Alzheimer’s.”

As awareness of the devastating neurological consequences of head injuries, regardless of age, increases, there’s the potential to misdirect our efforts. As NPR reported in December, “a quiet population of everyday men and women who never played professional sports fear they have the disease [CTE]. Frantic for a cure, they often turn to dubious treatments, controversial doctors or health care providers with financial stakes in the products they recommend .… from cannabis to neurological chiropractors.” Unsurprisingly, they note, “the loosely regulated brain health industry is profiting.”

While there are promising treatments and clinical studies to slow down the effects of dementia, there is no cure. Understanding the potential long term consequences of head injuries, and doing our best to avoid them, remains our best option for a healthy brain. We can’t prevent every fall or every crash, but we can wear our seat belts and our bike helmets, and talk to our doctors about events in our pasts that may affect our cognitive futures. My neurologist and I have had plenty of discussions about my grim family history, but now I see how it wouldn’t hurt to bring up that old skiing accident too.

I doubt my father ever had the slightest idea that a car wreck he lived through decades ago would come back to haunt him now. I wonder if he had, what might have been done earlier to mitigate his symptoms? My cousin sent me a photo yesterday of him at his wife’s recent funeral. He looks elegant in his black suit. And more than that, he looks so sad, and so very lost.

More on the science of our brains:

How potential Trump pardons could affect Jan. 6 plea negotiations

Former president Donald Trump’s suggestion that he would pardon Jan. 6 insurrections if he returns to the White House could affect ongoing plea negotiations for hundreds of Capitol rioters.

“Another thing we’ll do — and so many people have been asking me about it — if I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” Trump said during his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.

“And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly,” he added.

On Sunday, Politico noted that while most of the more than 725 Capitol rioters facing charges are likely to receive sentences that would end before January 2025 — when Trump could return to the White House — others will undoubtedly still be in prison.

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“Trump’s hint that he may pardon people his supporters claim have been treated ‘unfairly’ could become a calculus in their decisions to accept plea deals or enter into negotiations with prosecutors,” the site reported. “Some of those facing the most serious charges grumbled about Trump’s inaction in his final days in office — thoughts captured in private messages obtained by the Justice Department — even as he pardoned dozens of other political allies.”

Politico pointed to the case of Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean, who said in one message cited in a May 2021 court filing: “We are now and always have been on our own. So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and sh*t on us on the way out.”

Read the full story.

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Julia and Paul Child’s marriage was “a true feminist love story,” directors of “Julia” doc say

Julia Child is remembered as many things — a larger than life TV personality, a cookbook author, the catalyst for a shift in how Americans view food as sustenance and entertainment. But how did she become such an enduring icon?

In their documentary film “Julia,” which has been shortlisted for an Oscar and will be released to digital retailers on Feb. 1, co-directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen use never-before-seen archival footage, personal photos, first-person narratives and gorgeous cinematography to trace Child’s decades-long journey to revolutionize the world of food.

West and Cohen, who also collaborated on the 2018 documentary “RBG,” spoke with Salon about how Child became an unlikely TV star at the age of 50, her feminist marriage to Paul Child, how Child’s views on homosexuality evolved during her lifetime and the lengths they went to meticulously replicate Child’s iconic kitchen.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Something I was struck by when watching this film is that it can sometimes be lost on folks today how anomalous Julia Child’s presence on TV would have been when she first busted onto the scene on Channel 2 in Boston.

Julie Cohen: I think you really hit the nail on the head. In the early ’60s, when Julia Child shows up on television, there are two main models of what a woman on TV was going to be. She was either going to be super-wifey — you know, wearing a little apron, serving her husband, speaking when spoken to and her behavior is constrained in a certain way. Then there’s like “sexy girl,” as will be true throughout all history and going into the future. She’s going to be young, perfect hourglass figure, blonde bombshell. TV is always going to have plenty of those.

What a woman is not going to be is 6 foot 2 inches tall, really loud, kind of gawky and awkward, and frankly, telling people what to do. There was this assumption that, “Oh, people don’t want to see that.” But then Julia shows up on TV — very, very much by happenstance — and really knocks everyone’s socks off. Not only women who are hungry for this kind of role model, but guys really loved her, too.

Betsy West: I was watching television back in the 1960s. I totally remember what it was like, and certainly on public television, you didn’t see any women. It was mainly kind of white pointy-headed academic men who were giving lectures. There wasn’t much children’s television, and it was all very earnest and borning. What was amazing about Julia, as Julie said, was the way the audience reacted to her authenticity. Here was this person who was just totally confident and sure of herself but not afraid to make a mistake, laughing it off and having a good time. People loved that, and they really responded.

I was also really personally delighted to learn more about Julia’s relationship with her husband, Paul Child. If someone saw the 2009 Meryl Streep film “Julie & Julia,” they may have gotten a sense of how affectionate they were. But you were actually able to dig into archives of photographs and letters — what did you learn about their relationship?

BW: I mean, it’s a true feminist love story. Julie McMasters meets Paul Child during WWII when they’re both posted in the Far East. He was 10 years older, more sophisticated, better read, with just much more sense of the world. He really introduced Julia to the world. Then, because of his job as a diplomat after they were married, they were posted to France where, of course, Julia discovers her passion.

This was while having a very fulfilling and wonderful marriage with Paul. We love in the archive not only the diary entries and letters Paul was writing to his brother about Julia and their evolving relationship and those of Julia to various friends but also the photographs there. Paul Child was an extraordinarily talented photographer. You can just see his love in all the pictures that he took of Julia from the time they first met.

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Then, of course, there’s the amazing turn that happens when Julia is becoming a superstar, Paul’s career is in decline as he’s left the State Department. But rather than feeling sorry for himself or bitter, he is so enjoying Julia’s success and such a part of Julia’s success. He pitches in every single way he can to support his wife, so the tables were turned. We loved being able to illustrate this feminist love story when feminist marriages weren’t so common.

You know, it’s funny — I just wrote about how when I moved into my first “grown-up apartment” with a kitchen, a friend gave me a Julia Child prayer candle where she is depicted as a saint. This to say, her appeal hasn’t faded with time. In putting this film together, why do you think that is?

JC: I think it’s for some of the same reasons she appealed to people when she showed up on television in 1963. People like someone who is just their true authentic self. At first, that seemed like maybe it was going to be a problem. She’s making a lot of mistakes when she’s cooking – which, everyone makes mistakes when they’re cooking, but not everyone has a television camera on them. This wasn’t during a time when they could shoot twice as much footage as they wanted and cut it down.

But she’s like, “Ah, well. Look at me! I screwed up, and I’m moving on.” It turned out that was one of the things that audiences gravitated to immediately. It’s one of the things that people remember best about her show.

I love the moment that we have very near the end of the film where Julia is doing a book signing, and a young lady comes up to her for a signing and says, “You taught me that it’s OK to make a mistake. I don’t need to be perfect.”

That’s actually the lesson that everyone in general — and women in particular — really not only want to hear, but really need to hear.

BW: The other thing that I would add to that is that over the course of doing this film, we discovered the reverence with which the cooking world holds Julia. First of all, the chefs that we spoke to — Jacques Pépin, José Andrés, Marcus Samuelsson, Ina Garten — they really give Julia credit for opening up America to this kind of cooking. Not just French cooking, but understanding the role of cooking and food in our lives and celebrating that. She is the founding mother of this awakening that Americans had about food that seems to be lasting.

The film also tracks how Julia Child evolved not only as a cook but also as a person. Were you surprised how her views on homosexuality shifted through time?

JC: Julia made a very marked evolution from her earlier life when — like unfortunately many of her generation, were not just homophobic as a feeling — she would speak derogatorily and disrespectfully about gay people. It’s kind of crazy because she’s in the professional food world, where there were certainly plenty of gay people. James Beard, for instance, was a close friend of hers.

But then her close friend and lawyer, Bob Johnson, gets AIDS, and she becomes a huge supporter of him in his final months of life. But then, beyond that, it just makes her stop and think like, “Well, this is crazy. Why doesn’t the country care more about people with AIDS and speak out?” And the reason is because of stigmatization having to do with homophobia. So, all of the sudden, she’s speaking out for people with AIDS and for AIDS research publicly at a time when not too many people — and certainly not too many celebrities with middle America fanbases — were coming out doing an AIDS benefit in 1988. It’s pretty astounding.

I had read that your producer, Holly Siegel, took extra care to reconstruct Julia’s kitchen. Do you know what that process was like for her?

BW: Extra care doesn’t really describe the kind of detailed, dedicated and intense way that Holly was about replicating Julia Child’s kitchen. She had drawings done, and she really designed it not only to match the look of Julia’s kitchen with the colors and the pegboard, but also she found an old rundown Garland stove in New Jersey and restored it to working order — well, at least the top stove part of it.

She worked really hard, and she did it in a way that would allow us to film in the kitchen. So, for example, we had a removable panel behind the stovetop that our wonderful camerawoman, Claudia Raschke, could get behind and shoot in that direction.

It was all done in service of making the food that we were going to film looking its best. The food was absolutely central to how we were envisioning the documentary.

JC: That’s right. We didn’t want the food to just feel like it was an intermission or decoration for the film. We really wanted it to be part of the story. It was the last step of making this movie, and we worked with a cook and food stylist Susan Spungen — who actually also was the food stylist for “Julie & Julia” and is a real expert on Julia Child’s recipes.

Everything you see in that film is an authentic Julia Child recipe filmed exactly as Julia Child prepared it.

I left the film hungry because of that beautiful cinematography. Did putting this film together change, at all, your relationship with food or cooking?

BW: When we began this film, both Julie and I liked to cook — and that was one of the most appealing things about doing this film. We had the great experience of being able to go to France and film there for a week and experience some amazing food. After we came back to start our edit, the pandemic happens. One day, we’re in the office with everybody else working, and the next day, we’ve all retreated to our home offices where I am right now.

I think everybody’s relationship to cooking into food has evolved during this time, as it has just become much more central to what we were doing. We had the added joy of working on this film, which was a lot of fun to edit. To tell Julia’s story and to experience her love of food, I think that did affect us.

It didn’t cause me to go to the beginning of “Mastering” and start moving my way through the cookbook, but I certainly did start to cook some of Julia’s recipes. Julie and I discovered we were both doing salad nicoise, which was something I had really liked to do before, but I adjusted the presentation based on Julia’s instruction. That’s one of the recipes that ended up in our film as the wonderful credit sequence because it’s so beautiful.

During a pretty tough and difficult time, when so many people were suffering, we felt super lucky to be sharing our time with Julia and to take some of those lessons about the meaning of sharing food with our families.

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University of Nebraska alters mascot logo to omit hand gesture adopted by white nationalists

The University of Nebraska is altering its athletic mascot logo to remove a hand gesture that in recent years has been adopted by the white nationalist movement, reports said.

In past versions of the design, Herbie Husker, the school’s cowboy-hat wearing farmer mascot, was pictured making the “OK” sign with his thumb and pointer finger — a gesture that has long stood for a general sense of approval but was co-opted by alt-right figures like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos to mean “white power,” according to anti-hate groups. From there, it became a favorite of white supremacists and trolls looking to “trigger” liberals on 4chan, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The gesture was also added to the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols back in 2019, with the organization writing that its users quickly “abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy.”

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“The concern about the hand gesture was brought to our attention by our apparel provider and others, and we decided to move forward with a revised Herbie Husker logo,” a statement from the university’s athletic department statement said. “The process of changing the logo began in 2020, and we updated our brand guidelines in July of 2021.”

The school added that Herbie Husker will now be depicted with a single finger up, a gesture meant to signal “No. 1.”

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