This one-pot chicken soup will do more than warm your soul

Every week in Genius Recipes — often with your help! — Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

This overachiever is really two Genius recipes, and will revolutionize your cooking in so many ways. It will give you a freezable sauce that — in a single step (blend) — can instantly bring life to any dinner that needs it.

And it points to the place you’ll want to unleash that sauce first: a one-pot chicken soup that isn’t just brothy, restorative, and cold-curing in the ways that all good chicken soups are — but also has a feature others can’t claim: energizing.

Both come from chef Zoe Adjonyoh’s recently re-released cookbook “Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen” and reflect the ways she manifests Ghanaian cuisine in her own home cooking and career.

Zoe distilled the sauce, which she named Chalé, from her father’s everyday cooking routine. “He would whip this up and then literally throw in any type of meat, fish or protein,” Zoe writes in “Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen.” The flavors of onion, ginger, and chiles, carried into a fiesty tomato sauce, are so foundational, Zoe refers to them as the Ghanaian holy trinity, and dispenses them similarly to Italian passata or Nigerian ata dindin.

But because Zoe ran a supper club and wrote a book for busy home cooks, instead of starting from scratch for every meal, she condensed and froze the first steps in time. By chucking all the ingredients into a blender and storing the deep red sauce in the fridge or freezer, she could be halfway to brightly flavored stews, pastas, and much more. “Use it for okra soup one day, the next time use it for meatballs, another time use it for moussaka or use it for jollof,” Zoe told me. The name Chalé is a nod to both her dad Charles and the Ga word for “friend.”

With Chalé Sauce tucked in the freezer, you have a sly shortcut to the bowl of comfort that is the Ghanaian stew nkrakra, or light soup. “All cultures have this healing, hot, light chicken soup that’s economical to make and easy to bulk out,” from matzo ball soup to caldo de pollo, Zoe said. “I love that about it — it shows people the connections we have in food culture.”

Nkrakra will putter along all afternoon with little intervention from you, anytime you want to warm your belly, soul, and home. You won’t even need to brown the chicken, batch by batch, spattering everything within spatters’ reach — time (and Chalé Sauce) do the work.

When it’s done, the chicken will melt, and the broth will coax you to life. “It’s like you’ve just had a beautiful meditation, like ‘ooh all my energy’s refreshed now’ — it’s not the kind of heat that is going to knock your palate out for three days,” Zoe told me. “It’s just a really beautiful, warming, slow-rising heat that’s perfect for winter.”

It’s everything January, and especially January 2022, needs: Not just coziness and warmth and peace, but fire.

***

Recipe: Nkrakra (Light Soup With Chicken) from Zoe Adjonyoh

Yields

6 servings

Prep Time

30 minutes

Cook Time

3 hours

Ingredients

For the Nkrakra

2 kilograms (4 pounds 8 ounces) or 8-10 bone-in, skinless chicken thighs
3 tablespoons sustainable red palm oil
1 onion, finely diced
20 grams (0.7 ounces) fresh thyme sprigs
4 to 5 Guinea peppers, cracked open
1 teaspoon extra-hot chili powder
1 Scotch bonnet pepper, pierced
3 garlic cloves, finely diced
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
300 milliliters (10 fluid ounces) Chalé Sauce (see below)
750 milliliters to 1 liter (1 1/4 pints to 1 3/4 pints) good-quality chicken stock
Freshly ground black pepper
2 inches (5 centimeters) grated fresh ginger
250 grams (9 ounces) white cabbage, sliced (optional)
100 grams (3 1/2 ounces) yam, peeled and diced (optional)
100 grams (3 1/2 ounces) carrots, peeled and diced (optional)
Sprig of cilantro, to garnish (optional)
Slightly toasted sourdough bread or fufu, for serving (optional)

For the Chalé Sauce

200 grams (7 ounces) canned tomatoes or 300 grams (10 ounces) fresh tomatoes
1 roasted red bell pepper
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 small white onion, roughly diced
one 1-inch/2.5-centimeter piece fresh ginger, grated
1 small red Scotch bonnet chile (use half and deseed if you have a low heat tolerance, or substitute 1/2 teaspoon cayenne for a milder heat)
1/2 teaspoon dried chile flakes
2 garlic cloves (optional)
Fine sea salt to taste
1 teaspoon extra hot Madras curry powder
1/2 teaspoon extra hot chili powder

Directions

For the Nkrakra

Place the chicken in a large, heavy-based saucepan or Dutch oven with the sustainable red palm oil, onion, thyme, peppers, chili powder, garlic, and 1 teaspoon of the sea salt. Cook together over a low heat, partially covered, until the juices start to run from the chicken.
Pour the Chalé Sauce over the chicken mixture, then cover and simmer for about 30 minutes.
Stir in the stock and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 1 hour until the chicken is tender. Season to taste with pepper.
Add your choice of vegetables, if desired, and cook until tender (approximately 30 minutes). Remove the sprigs of thyme before serving.
To serve: I love to serve this dish in a traditional Ghanaian asanka pot with a ball of fufu on the side, as it looks so inviting that way. You can also serve it on its own in a large bowl garnished with a sprig of cilantro, or with a slice of slightly toasted sourdough bread on the side.
Tip: If you’re happy to go low and slow while cooking, this dish is perfect for cheaper cuts of chicken such as from older hens or broiling hens — you get tons of extra flavor but need to slow cook for 3 to 4 hours over a low heat.

For the Chalé Sauce

Place all the ingredients in a blender and blend together until you have a fairly smooth paste.
This is your Chalé Sauce. Throughout Zoe’s book there are references to adding Chalé Sauce, so she recommends making a big batch and freezing in smaller quantities to make many of the stew and sauces recipes much faster to re-create at home. Use straight away, or store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days, or freeze for future use.

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The Southern and Low Country pantry ingredients one cook can’t live without

Welcome to Amethyst Ganaway‘s pantry! In each installment of this series, a recipe developer will share with us the pantry items essential to their cooking. This month, we’re exploring eight staples stocking Amethyst’s Southern and Low Country kitchen.

“Southern food” is often used interchangeably with “soul food,” a term coined before, but most commonly used during and after, the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The term describes the foods and foodways of Black Americans, as well as the reclaiming of African roots. Yet even today, some people still view soul or Southern food through the outdated lens of literal table scraps from white people, or as a lesser cuisine compared to European cultures. For me, the food is about honoring who we are at our core. The history and cultures put into a pot and poured into each bowl are rich, unique stories full of deep, different flavors.

The food of the Low Country, like many other smaller communities pocketed across the South, has numerous cultural influences. It’s its own type of Creole, with African, Indigenous, and European cultures blending together to create the cuisine that’s commonly found across the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and some parts of North Carolina and Florida. While closely related to our Creole cousins’ cultures found in Louisiana and around the Gulf of Mexico, Low Country cuisine focuses less on French culinary influence and technique (although it is evident in many of the 19th-century cookbooks from the region, like “The Carolina Housewife” and “The Carolina Receipt Book,” among others); instead it utilizes more traditional West African and Indigenous cooking processes to develop flavor and texture. Nestled along coastal waterways, which created fertile loamy soil, the Low Country is abundant with fresh seafood, produce, and grains. Fresh fruit and vegetables like berries, tomatoes, squash, melons, leafy greens, oranges, and bananas are found not just on farms, but in people’s yards (and then on their kitchen counters).

https://www.instagram.com/p/CS5ITSbpEAu/

My pantry has changed and grown as I have over the years, but there are a few items that have remained consistent no matter where I’ve lived. It’s sort of a reflection of who I am — organized chaos hiding behind the door, overflowing with items that feel like home. Ingredients like flour, sugar, and salt — staples in any Southern kitchen — will always be in my pantry. How else are you going to make bread or biscuits?

My grandma always calls these pantry staples “packages” (an ex of hers used to call them that — the name stuck in our family). Packages are those ingredients you always try to have at home, so that even during hard times, you can still eat a decent, filling meal.

When I think of packages, my mind goes to my holy trinity of grains: rice, cornmeal, and fonio, all of which are used traditionally in West African and Afro-Diasporic cooking, and found commonly on my own table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These grains make up the bulk of the carbs that I eat on a daily basis, and can be the base of a meal for anytime of day. And in the South, hearty dishes are still the norm from days past. People had to eat filling grains to stay nourished throughout a long, hard workday, or because resources were too scarce to eat much of anything else.

I’m always looking for new ways to incorporate more of my background into my dishes. By using African-influenced ingredients like smoked canned fish and benne seeds, I find that our most traditional and well-loved Southern dishes are bumped up in flavor and texture. These ingredients aren’t new to many beloved recipes of the South, but as time has gone on, they have been forgotten or left out due to changing palates or the inability to source them.

A lot of Southern cooking in particular is based on using the ingredients around you, or “making do.” Making the most out of certain ingredients, so that the flavors come together in a dish that can feed multiple people, means you can taste the soul and love put into the food. You don’t need much to make a good meal, and as long as your Southern pantry is stocked full of packages, you’ll eat well for days. Here are a few of my favorite Southern and Low Country pantry staples.

My 8 Southern and Low Country pantry essentials

1. Cornmeal

Cornmeal is used so commonly across the South, you’d think we came up with all the ways to use it, but it’s through the ingenuity of the Indigenous cultures across North and South America that we have what we now know as cornmeal to make hoecakes, cornbread, mush, and my favorite: grits.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN0yU6hHXij/

2. Benne

Benne, like rice, was brought to the South during the time of slavery. These sesame seeds can be ground into a powder and used as a thickener and flavor enhancer in soups, stews, sauces, and dressings, but my favorite use for benne is lightly toasted and sprinkled over veggies, salads, and dessert.

3. Fonio

Fonio is a grain many people haven’t heard of yet, but should know about. I work for Yolélé, the food company started by Senagalese Chef Pierre Thiam that focuses on bringing the ingredients and flavors of West Africa to the world. I didn’t know much about fonio myself before my work with the company — but now it’s a staple I can’t stop eating. It’s a tiny grain, almost the size of a grain of sand, and it cooks in just 5 minutes. It’s virtually impossible to mess up during cooking, and has a mild, nutty flavor that pairs well with and soaks up the flavor of just about anything. You could use it as you would millet, sorghum, and other grains; I also sometimes like to get creative with fonio, as I did by blending the cooked grain into the topping of this blackberry cobbler.

4. Rice

Rice has deep roots for me, being from Charleston. Starting with the slave trade, the crop was used to build the wealth of America through the enslavement of West Africans and their descendants. I cook a pot of white rice regularly: I eat it for breakfast (with tinned or fresh fish, or eggs, peppers, and onions); for lunch or dinner (purloos, fried rice, and so much more); and as a dessert, because who doesn’t love rice puddin’!

5. Smoked and canned fish

Smoked and canned fish, like sardines, mackerel, and salmon, are ingredients I always have in the pantry. While they’re great to add into my leafy stewed greens, nothing beats a po’ man’s meal of sardines and saltine crackers (my granny has me in the habit of needing an ice-cold Pepsi to suckle down with my snack). I also love frying the fish into patties or fritters mixed with peppers and onions, or serving them sautéed, stewed, or smothered over hot grits or rice with fresh veggies or some sort of gravy.

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6. Tomatoes

Tomatoes are an ingredient used all the time in Southern and Low Country cooking. Fried green, stewed, and sliced fresh off the vine with a little salt and pepper (my favorite!), tomato is used to add sweetness and body to dishes like stewed okra, or to add acidic brightness to salads, especially when paired with cucumber, onion, and vinegar. I keep a few different types in my pantry at all times: large slicing tomatoes for snacks, and fresh cherry or grape tomatoes for salads; but also canned — diced, stewed, sauce, and paste for their various uses in dishes. Adding canned tomatoes to meals like okra soup, rich lamb and goat stews, shrimp and grits, gravy, or even just homemade spaghetti and marinara sauce takes out not only some of the work of using fresh tomatoes, but is often a cheaper ingredient that yields similar results. Canned tomatoes also come in handy in cold months when I can’t get any of the beautiful, fresh local tomatoes that grow here.

7. Muscadine grapes

Growing up in the South, I was (and still am) able to go outside and forage for my own ingredients. Fruit grows wild everywhere in Charleston: citrus, kumquats, berries, a variety of wild plums, and one of my seasonal favorites: the bull grape, aka muscadine or scuppernong. Thick-skinned and meaty, it’s not the typical grape you find in stores, and it makes a phenomenal bottle of wine or homemade hooch. I personally chew and swallow the skin and slightly bitter seeds found in the center of the spherical grapes, while other folks peel the skin (which sometimes causes an itchy throat) and spit out the seeds, opting only for the sweet flesh.

8. Leafy greens

I grew up always eating an abundance of fresh, leafy greens with my meals. Salads were a common quick and cheap meal, and of course stewed greens (collards, mustard, turnip, kale, and more) with smoked meat or fish as well as cabbage are commonplace dishes on the dining room table. Greens grow well in the Low Country because of the loamy soil and hot, humid weather, and the greens are especially good once the first frost has come in, which is right around the December holidays. I can get fresh greens here for dirt cheap (pun intended), about two bucks a bunch, which is a welcome change from when I lived across the country — where I could easily pay upwards of $8 for a weak-looking bunch of collards. My favorite greens, though, come from someone’s backyard garden (by the winter, people typically have plenty and will happily share), or from the local farmers who sell the biggest, most beautiful bunches out of the back of a pickup truck on the side of the highway.

Tucker Carlson has a grand plan

Last week the highest-rated show on cable news was Fox News’ “The Five,” a gossipy round table of smart-alec right-wingers led by the network’s recently promoted to primetime pundit Jesse Watters, best known as Bill O’Reilly sidekick who stalked people on the streets and harassed them for profit. But last week was unusual. Normally, the highest-rated show on Fox News is “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

I doubt, however, that Carlson has anything to worry about. His is the most popular Fox News show most weeks and his influence on Republican Party politics is matched only by former president Donald Trump himself. And lately, Carlson’s been outdoing himself with appalling, provocative commentary that must make Trump feel very much off of his game.

This week he hosted COVID crank Alex Berenson, who shared this outrageous lie with the Fox News audience:

“The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point.”

Carlson didn’t refute that blatant lie. In fact, he said it was demonstrably true that the vaccines don’t work. It doesn’t get any more shockingly irresponsible than that.

Of course, Carlson’s long history of racist rhetoric is well known. He has relentlessly pushed the “Great Replacement Theory” lamenting that the Biden administration is trying “to change the racial mix of the country — in political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,” the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” Former KKK leader David Duke was thrilled to hear him endorse this theory, which he and everyone else recognize for exactly what it is.

So it was a bit rich to hear the white nationalist Carlson condemn “identity politics” over President Biden’s promise to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court, shedding crocodile tears about how it harms the women who are being considered while suggesting that George Floyd’s sister be nominated because Biden allegedly requires no qualifications except race and gender. That’s a lie. Biden said:

“I’ve made no decision except the one person I will nominate someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity. And that person will be the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue.”

Apparently, Tucker Carlson doubts that such a person exists. In fairness, Carlson isn’t the only right-winger making this grotesquely racist critique, but nobody can do it with the slithery unctuousness that he can.

It’s pointless to mention the shameless hypocrisy in these complaints by noting that presidents of both parties going back decades have taken diversity into consideration with their appointments, from naming the first Jews and Catholics to the first Black justice to the first woman among others. Carlson and his cronies didn’t say a word when Trump promised to name a woman to the court or when he picked the highly inexperienced Amy Coney Barrett but, of course, she isn’t Black.

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Equally disturbing, as Salon’s Jon Skolnik reported, Carlson’s views on the possible Russian invasion of Ukraine (he often parrots the Russian government line) have taken the activist base of the GOP by storm. Here’s more from Axios:

GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET show. Carlson has been telling his viewers there is no reason why the U.S. should help Ukraine fight Russia.

Even Democratic offices have been fielding these calls from Carlson’s viewers. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) tweeted that he got “calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”

Russian state TV is impressed but reportedly concerned that Carlson might be going too far:

https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1486307616066265089

Carlson told Axios that he doesn’t care if people call him a Russian pawn (or in old-fashioned parlance, “useful idiot”) because he doesn’t speak Russian, has never been to Russia and is not that interested in Russia. That is probably true. He seems to be much more interested in what the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has dubbed “an alignment with a kind of right-wing Internationale, a loose international alliance of authoritarian nationalists who despise liberal internationalist commitments.”

The modern right’s romance with Putin is nothing new, of course and Carlson certainly didn’t invent it. All the way back in 2015 I wrote about Donald Trump’s embrace of the right’s Putin fever which had been building for some time. He’s not the only one who loves a strong man.

Carlson’s real affinity is for Viktor Orbán, the president of Hungary who has the distinction of being the progenitor of the modern “soft fascism” that Carlson and many of the thought leaders of the right are so taken with these days. Last summer I wrote about Carlson taking his show to Budapest and he is planning another trip soon. While he was there he put together a “documentary” for his streaming show called “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization” which Media Matters described as “a ham-handed propagandist screed that heavily recycles the same antisemitic tropes that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to get reelected in 2018.” As Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence quipped on Twitter, “[it] could be a thread on daily stormer but its actually the centerpiece of fox news streaming platform.” It’s that bad.

Here are a couple of short clips to give you the flavor.

He also spends a great deal of time extolling the virtues of Orbán’s push for women to have as many children as possible so as to preserve the purity of the “legacy” Hungarians rather than depending on immigration for labor. The visuals are chock full of white children everywhere. No wonder Carlson feels so at home there.

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Everyone says that it’s all about ratings for Tucker Carlson and nothing more, that he pushes the envelope for attention. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. He clearly is reveling in his celebrity and power. But this obsession with Orbán is obviously driven by something more than that. There is just no way that the same Fox audience that whines about Dr. Seuss and loves Donald Trump is really all that interested in some Hungarian politician.

No, Carlson has a game plan and he’s using his platform to promote a specific brand of white nationalism for his own purposes. What those purposes are is unknown. But as long as he continues to push this propaganda on the most-watched news channel in the country, there’s a good chance we’re going to find out what it is. And I don’t think we’re going to like it very much.

Is there a place for spirituality in space science?

It wasn’t just that he mentioned a religious holiday. After all, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wasn’t the only person to observe, following the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope last month, that the long-awaited feat had occurred on Christmas Day. Rather, Nelson’s comments raised eyebrows for their “spiritual tone.”

“It’s significant that we had the delays and it kept us all the way to today, Christmas Day,” Nelson said in a video released by NASA shortly after the launch. He went on to quote a passage from Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.”

To some viewers — especially those who believe religion and science are incompatible — the very mention of a religious text seemed to undercut the messaging of scientific achievement. The suggestion that the telescope served a Christian purpose, or that its use would reinforce a Christian worldview, also seemed to belie a commitment to inclusivity in science that NASA has claimed to value. (The agency is still reeling from the controversy over its decision to name the telescope after James Webb, a man alleged to have been complicit in the persecution of LGBTQ government workers.)

These are all valid concerns. But it’s also worth remembering that Nelson’s biblical references follow in a long tradition of religious rhetoric in the U.S. space program. There’s a tendency to flatten this history — to imagine that religious language is and always has been inappropriate in the scientific discourse. But one needs only look back a few decades to find a time when comments like Nelson’s were not only acceptable in the American space culture — they were a central part of America’s science identity.

From the 1950s, the United States was embroiled in a decades-long rivalry with the U.S.S.R. known as the Space Race — a competition that turned the technological and military practicalities of space exploration into a sort of proxy battle for cultural, political, and economic validation. Each nation’s scientific successes were interpreted as triumphs of one national ideology over the other. Among those warring ideologies were the nations’ sharply contrasting attitudes toward religion.

The U.S.S.R. had officially embraced atheism (though some Soviet citizens were people of faith). In her recent history of Soviet atheism, Victoria Smolkin describes how Soviet leaders and cosmonauts used their victories in the Space Race as occasions to wave a banner of antipathy toward religion. During a 1962 visit to the U.S., Smolkin writes, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space, proclaimed his atheism, remarking “that he had not seen ‘God or angels’ during his 17 orbits of Earth.” Later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev similarly joked to American reporters about God’s failure to show up in space. The brash rejection of God served to advance the Soviet effort to solidify state atheism and defuse religion’s threat to state authority.

But the Soviet Union’s dismissal of religion also stirred a backlash on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cosmology, American scientists criticized the ideological dogmatism of Marxism, claiming that it impaired free scientific inquiry. Whereas the Soviet regime was totalitarian and oppressive, the American scientific establishment, by embracing religious tolerance, projected an image of openness. Opposed to the strict atheism of the Soviets but wary of the perceived anti-science attitude of fundamentalist Christians, the American scientific establishment staked out a middle ground of respectable, generic — but still Christian-leaning — religiosity.

As public figures as well as scientists, NASA astronauts were frequently seen as exemplifying this milquetoast religious identity. Some astronauts were explicit about their own Christianity; others were more vague about the spirituality they experienced in the stars. Neil Armstrong, though he considered himself a deist, was nonetheless looked up to as a Christian role model who fulfilled a divine promise that humanity would someday reach the stars.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 broadcast themselves from lunar orbit reading from the opening passages of Genesis as the Sun rose above the Moon’s horizon: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The juxtaposition of those words with images of the lunar sunrise seemed to symbolize the convergence of religious and scientific values.

The Christmas Eve reading prompted Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of the organization American Atheists, to file a lawsuit against NASA, arguing that the act abridged their First Amendment rights. But the lawsuit failed, and since then the tradition of astronauts expressing their personal faith, carrying objects of religious significance among their personal effects, even celebrating holidays in space, has largely been permitted — and even incorporated into NASA’s public outreach. American Presidents including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan all used religious language when talking about the Space Program, often with implicit or explicit criticism of the Soviets. Ultimately, NASA, American politicians of both parties, and the wider U.S. public created a narrative that America’s religiosity had helped the country succeed in the Space Race over its godless rival. This religiosity was effective in part because it avoided the messy specifics that might have created friction with science or between theologies.

Few people exemplify this melding of space exploration and spirituality more than Nelson himself. In 1986, decades before he became NASA Administrator, Nelson went to space on the shuttle Columbia, the last NASA mission before the Challenger disaster. His 1988 memoir described his extraterrestrial sojourn as an eye-opening religious experience that contrasted starkly with that of his Soviet counterparts. “Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut, proudly proclaimed when he returned to earth that he had looked for God and had not found him,” Nelson wrote (perhaps misattributing Titov’s 1962 comments). “I looked, and could see nothing else.” The Soviets might have reached the heavens first, but the Americans were the first to find God up there.

Nelson also recalled reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Bible while on the Columbia:

“I remembered when, as a student at Yale, I had read the ancient words of the 19th Psalm, written by a shepherd boy in Israel almost 3,000 years ago. My college mind had wondered, What could David possibly know about space? As I read those words again, I was amazed that they could express my feelings so perfectly: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament sheweth His handiwork.'”

More than 30 years later, Nelson uttered the same scripture nearly verbatim while reflecting on the launch of the the telescope. It is a passage that has long been invoked by scientists and theologians to express the idea that there are truths that can only be discovered outside of scripture — truths that must be learned from the handiwork of nature. It’s been quoted to argue against Biblical literalism and science denial. And, for Nelson, it seems to give voice to a certain sense of awe and spiritual wonder at nature that has abided in him since his time as an astronaut.

The scientific, religious, and political culture of the U.S., however, has evolved tremendously since then. Christian nationalism has become a widespread and antidemocratic political force — one that has been deployed to attack government-supported, science-based efforts to stem the Covid-19 pandemic and curtail climate change. Cold War-era God-talk, and the embrace of generic religiosity, no longer exemplify America’s place in the modern geopolitical world. The words Nelson uses to capture his connection with the cosmos may not have changed since the 1980s, but it’s a different nation now.

Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He is the author of “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools,” and (with Thomas Dixon) the forthcoming “Very Short Introduction to Science and Religion.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

White women and fascism: Seyward Darby on how right-wing women embrace their “symbolic power”

White women have played a central role in America’s neofascist movement and its assault on multiracial pluralist democracy.

Either as figureheads or actual leaders, white women have stood at the forefront of the Republican Party’s attempt to use the bogeyman of “critical race theory” to launch a widespread moral panic and restrict the teaching of American history. The ultimate goal is to severely undermine or fully destroy our current system of public education, and replace it with “patriotic” indoctrination meant to reinforce and protect white privilege and other forms of inequality.

White women are also among the loudest voices in the movement to take away women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. The anti-choice movement has found considerable common ground with overt white nationalists and other white supremacists. In a new essay at the Guardian, Moira Donegan explores this:

Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. … But the affinity goes both ways: just as the alt-right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt-right. …

In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of “race suicide” has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called “Great Replacement“, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color. (Some antisemitic variations posit that this “replacement” is somehow being orchestrated by Jewish people.)

The way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties … have only become more fervent … as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country sometime in the coming decades. The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.

White women played a key role in planning and organizing the Trump regime’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. White women were also strikingly visible among the attackers. To wit: A white woman became the only person directly killed by police that day, and has now been elevated into a martyr for the American neofascist cause.

Contrary to the hopes and expectations of many on the American left, white women as a group have historically chosen to ally with white men in defense of whiteness and white male power, rather than forging alliances with other women across the color line. In broad terms, that has been true both in the United States and around the world.

Contrary to the commentariat’s obsession with the “suburban women” and “soccer moms” who supposedly “turned the tide” against Donald Trump in 2020, a majority of white women actually voted for him. In fact, Trump did significantly better among white women voters in 2020 than he had in 2016.

Seyward Darby is the author of “Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.” Her writing has also been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s and the Atlantic. In our recent conversation, Darby discussed how sexist stereotypes about white women, in her view, obscure their role and power in the white right and larger neofascist cause, including their support for political violence and other terrorism. Darby also talked about the central role played by women in America’s long history of white supremacy and opposition to multiracial democracy, including in the rise of Trump and the current Republican-fascist movement.

She addressed the status of prominent right-wing figures such as Sarah Palin, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who perform a particular type of “traditional” white womanhood that is clearly anti-feminist while still leveraging the struggles and victories of the feminist movement in order to obtain and expand their political and personal power.

Toward the end of this conversation, Darby explained that the Republican attack on “critical race theory” is nothing new, but only the most recent iteration of white women’s vigorous defense of Jim Crow white supremacy by opposing school integration and the civil rights movement during the 20th century.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

White vigilantism and other threats continue to escalate, as we saw with the Kyle Rittenhouse case. It has been more than a year since the Jan. 6 coup attempt, and the threat of right-wing political violence has not receded. Public opinion research shows that white Americans are increasingly supportive of violence as a legitimate political tool, if used against their perceived enemies. How are you making sense of all this?

There has been a reluctance over the last few decades, on the part of the gatekeepers of the country’s public discourse, to admit that white supremacy is not a fringe problem. It is a mainstream problem, integrated into every facet of American society. It doesn’t just manifest in vigilante violence. It manifests in the media and the justice system and education. What we’re seeing now is the damage that reluctance has done, to the point that in some camps, reluctance has given way to outright permissiveness.

Some observers say the changing demographics in the country are the “end” of something, that we’re seeing white supremacy’s last gasp. But what if it is actually the beginning of something? A backlash? There are a lot of people who benefit from white supremacy, and from how American society has been structured. Many of them don’t want things to change.

I’m feeling very scared about how the Rittenhouse verdict and other right-wing violence will embolden people on the far right. They may well respond to social justice protests, to efforts to change the status quo, with violence — because they feel like they can get away with it.

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I’m feeling very scared about the reaction — or, really, the non-reaction — to Jan. 6. It feels like most of the country, and the government, have moved on. Again, that’s emboldening to people who saw that as a trial run for the next time an election doesn’t go the way they like.

And I’m feeling very scared about the assault on women’s rights, namely our reproductive rights, and most prominently at the Supreme Court. There was a celebratory air at the recent Right to Life rally in Washington, and why wouldn’t there be? The opponents of women’s freedom, including the women of the far right, who are zealously pro-natal, are getting exactly what they’ve always wanted. If the midterms and 2024 go badly for Democrats, which seems very likely, they’re poised to get even more.

Sorry, don’t come to me for optimism. I have very little.

The role of white women in right-wing extremism and neofascism is hardly ever discussed by the mainstream news media.

When there is an acknowledgment that white-supremacist and other right-wing extremist violence is a problem, it is very often seen as a law enforcement problem. It is seen as something on the fringe, to be dealt with through arrests, prosecution, prison. If you start to dig deeper at who helped organize the violence, if you look at the systems that support the violence, if you look at the rhetoric and symbols that inspire the violence, that is where you often find white women. This is not to say that white women are not on the front lines of the violence sometimes. But they’re more often behind the scenes, where no one is bothering to look.

In this moment of white backlash here in America, there are so many examples of how “white victimhood” is being weaponized by both white men and white women. White women have long used crying as a way of performing victimhood and inciting violence, in particular against black men who were lynched as a result of white women’s tears. Now white male “conservatives” are publicly crying as a way to exercise their power and privilege, and to deflect responsibility for their harmful behavior.

There is a lot of anger and entitlement behind those white men’s tears. To me, they signal just how far these men believe — or need people to believe — they have been pushed by their critics, opponents or victims. Things have gotten so bad and so unfair for them, and for men like them, that they’re willing to cry about it publicly. This gets to the imaginary idea that whiteness — and particularly white masculinity — is under some kind of threat, which is a core idea of white supremacy.

How does the white right conceptualize what it means to be a white woman and a mother?

White women are seen as being fundamentally different than white men. The far right believes in very distinct genders and traditional gender roles. But they also believe that those roles are complementary and equal to each other. Separate but equal, if you will. From their point of view, men are willing to put their lives on the line. Men are the builders and protectors of civilization. Women are the protectors of the home.

But the home is fundamentally a political space for the right. The entire project of white nationalism is about ensuring that the “white race” continues to grow, and to expand and entrench its power across society into the future. Nothing could be more important to that process than making sure that you have white children, and that they’ve been inculcated in the ways of white supremacy.

The whole idea of traditional gender roles is misogynistic, of course, and there is a large amount of gender-based violence in the white supremacist space. But it’s not true that most women are there because they don’t have a choice. Such a narrow view really marginalizes the role that women play. Similarly, their support is not just, “Oh congrats, honey! Today you were a great white supremacist, I’m proud of you! Here’s your dinner.” It goes far beyond that. Women organize, they teach, they vote — and they embrace the symbolic power they have in a movement that puts women on a pedestal and claims to fight for their sanctity and security.

Considering current examples of prominent white women on the right, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, what vision of white womanhood are they channeling?

The people that I study are at the extreme end of the right-wing spectrum. These are the avowed white nationalists. The majority of Republicans and conservatives would not describe themselves that way — but they are only a few ticks down on the spectrum from sharing the same beliefs as white nationalists. They just use more coded language. Greene and Boebert fall in that camp, if on the very edge of it.

Greene, Boebert and other white women on the right are performing a very interesting balancing act. On one hand they are saying, “Look at me, I am a ‘traditional’ white woman in a lot of different ways.” They’re married, they have kids. They say that’s what matters most, that what they’d really like to be doing is focusing on the domestic side of life.

But at the same time they’re saying that the United States is at a precipice, where “traditional values” and “real America” and the “American way of life” are so at stake that they have to step up. These women are signaling that they’ve gotten into politics, they’ve taken on more traditionally masculine roles, because the country is in crisis: “It’s gotten to the point where I feel like even someone like me has to take a stand. I am not a career politician, but I looked around and saw the state of the country and had to do something.”

There is also this language of “mama bears” often used by the white right and its propagandists in their battle against “critical race theory” and their efforts to make discussing America’s real history of racism a kind of thought crime. The meaning and origins of that “mama bear” discourse is not being critically interrogated by the mainstream news media.

Sarah Palin was the tip of the iceberg, in terms of such language and the politics it represents. Palin was speaking to this idea of white motherhood as being powerful, white motherhood as an asset to wield politically, to defend your “traditional” way of life. It’s this whole idea of, “I have been pushed to a point where — I would like to just be a mom, I would like to just raise my kids — but I have to fight because I’ve been pushed so far. My children’s future has been put at such risk that I have no choice. I must act now because everything is in danger.” Whether they actually believe that or not isn’t the point. The point is that this way of presenting themselves gets traction.

These attacks on “critical race theory” are part of a long history of white supremacist organizing against Black and brown people’s civil rights and freedoms. The mainstream media usually doesn’t offer that important historical context. White women have played a central role there.

They are the descendants of the “committees of mothers” and other women who opposed integration in the 1950s and 1960s. They protested at schools. They shut down schools in places like Little Rock, Arkansas. I also see the United Daughters of the Confederacy working to manipulate and write textbooks in the early 20th century. These textbooks whitewashed the history of the United States, and in particular the causes and truth about the Civil War. This is all part of a long history of white women making education a political battlefield.

Of course they don’t actually understand critical race theory as an academic theory and research approach. And the language used by the right-wing groups going after CRT has been very carefully crafted. They say things such as, “We don’t see color,” or, “We believe in an America that is aspirational. We don’t want to talk about the past and the negative things. We want to look at how far we’ve come.” They try to make it hard to argue with them. But in fact such language is a way of evading and denying the centuries of harm caused by racism and white supremacy in American society. This idea of, “Well, I don’t want my seven-year-old to learn about sad or scary things” is just a way of saying, “I don’t want my child to have to deal with racist realities, because it’s not their problem or my problem.”

It’s worth noting that a lot of the language being used against CRT comes from the white nationalist movement. Activists in that space have been testing and experimenting with this language for some time, figuring out what’s most palatable to the widest set of white people. Now that language has become mainstream among conservatives.

The anti-“critical race theory” movement is now branching out, and trying to stop the teaching of other subjects they deem to be “un-American” or “anti-family” or “divisive.” How do we explain this historically?

We’re foolish if we think the enemies of justice and progress won’t cast their net as widely as possible, as strategically as possible, to eliminate what they don’t like. Or that they won’t be emboldened by one victory to enter another battle on an adjacent front. We’ve seen it happen so many times before. White supremacy has always been about maintaining a particular power structure, policing who can go where and cleaning house of all matter of “undesirable” ideas.

Why do you believe that there is so much resistance, especially among many liberals and progressives, to the basic premise that white women are invested in white supremacy?

It is rooted in sexism — this idea that women are somehow the better angels of the human race and so wouldn’t participate in white supremacy. It is the result of a very old unwillingness to look at women as equal, in terms of the good they do and the harm they do. America hasn’t done that with white women — not really, not yet.

Among America’s pundit class, there is predictable surprise and shock when white women vote for or support policies that actually hurt women, for example, on reproductive rights and freedoms. There was so much commentary among the chattering classes about how it was “unthinkable” that so many white women could support Donald Trump, given that he is a misogynist and has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault. How do you explain those reactions?

It is willful denial and self-deception. You have to look at the facts in history. A majority of white women have only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate twice in the last 50 or so years. Why are we surprised that so many white women supported Trump? The real question is, why wouldn’t they? Conservative white women have time and again made decisions to support a system they benefit from.

There is also an assumption that women will vote in the best interest of fellow women, that they’re going to vote for the party or the candidate that actually wants to improve the lives of women across the board. But that’s a very naïve way of thinking about the world, and especially about America. There are women who don’t vote because of who they are as women — they vote because of who they are as white women. They vote because of who they are as conservative white women. Whether this is in the forefront of their minds when they vote or make other political decisions — “Oh, this is going to help me as a white woman” — does not really matter. The calculus is more ineffable, but no less pernicious: “I prefer things that make me more comfortable, that are more familiar. I’m going to support what keeps those things in place.” And frankly, what makes a lot of white women feel safe and comfortable is usually at odds with social justice.

Tucker Carlson’s Hungarian rhapsody: A far-right manifesto for waging the “demographic war”

Earlier this week, fans of the highest-rated host in U.S. cable news were told that one of the most recognizable and demonized Jews in public life is waging a “political, social and demographic war on the West.” Hungary, they were told, is this monstrous figure’s “main hunting area,” but all of North America and Europe are in his sights, and only through the widespread embrace of aggressive conservative nationalism can he be defeated.

In fairness, not all of that is made clear at first. For the first quarter of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s new documentary short, “Hungary vs Soros: The Fight for Civilization,” it’s hard to tell why it was made. Yes, over the last several years Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s proudly “illiberal” Hungary has become the centerpiece of American conservative vision-boarding. Yes, many on the U.S. right would love to emulate Hungary’s pronatalist policies to encourage early marriage and large families; its crackdowns on press and academic freedom, including the defunding of university gender studies; its effective ban on Muslim immigration, and its actual bans on same-sex marriage, adoption and LGBTQ content for minors. It’s no secret that Soros remains one of the right’s foremost villains, blamed for everything from protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation to Donald Trump’s election loss to migrants seeking entry to America.

But all that aside, the latest “Tucker Carlson Original” looks and feels, at least at first, like old news: a tighter, better produced, chalkboard-free remake of Glenn Beck’s three-hour 2010 anti-Soros series, “The Puppet Master,” which was widely condemned as antisemitic and is sometimes credited for helping drive Beck’s departure from Fox the following year.

Carlson’s reboot, which wasn’t aired on Fox News proper but its seedier online streaming service, Fox Nation, includes many of the same ingredients as the original. There’s the same sort of ominous soundtrack and grayed-out coloring when Soros appears on screen, and the same fixation on Soros as a “globalist” who is allegedly erecting a new world order through his sprawling web of influence and his control of media “storylines.”

There’s a familiar framing, early in the film, of Soros as being amoral in some difficult-to-specify way. In Beck’s version, an opening quote from Soros noted that his mother, in pre-Holocaust Hungary, had been “ashamed of being Jewish.” In Carlson’s, within the first minute or so we see a clip of Soros telling an interviewer he doesn’t believe in God. While Carlson doesidn’t repeat Beck’s use of ghoulish medieval puppet props, he deploys the same metaphor, accusing Soros of using his money and NGO network “to oust democratically elected leaders and install ideologically-aligned puppets into positions of power.” And, like Beck, Carlson cites as evidence Soros’s support for various Eastern European “color revolutions,” without acknowledging to his audience that those revolutions were almost entirely peaceful protests against communist or post-communist dictatorships.

There are some notable differences in Carlson’s update. In establishing Hungary under Orbán as the last bulwark against Soros’s allegedly creeping empire, Carlson turns into something of a Budapest tour guide, marveling at airport advertisements encouraging people to have more children, the city’s architecture and anti-Soros street signs. (“Will George Soros attack our country again?”) He works in some combat reporter-style helicopter footage as he tours the Hungarian border fence, and lingers long on the faces of two hapless teenage-looking refugees who were caught trying to enter the country, and who Carlson darkly suggests probably aren’t Syrian, as they claim. He even stops to appreciate Budapest’s “mostly conservative” graffiti, like a wall spray-painted with “Fuck Liberals” (in English) and a symbol that looks a lot like the white supremacist rendering of the Celtic cross.

But the big reveal begins about a quarter of the way through, when Carlson first mentions “nationalism.” Orbán was once the beneficiary of Soros’s philanthropy, Carlson says, but now understands him as a threat after becoming “a Hungarian nationalist.” This is likely to fly under the radar for most viewers, but that is effectively the documentary’s guiding theme: Orbán is “the sort of man, the sort of political leader, who has taken these populist nationalist instincts and turned them into effective policy.” Furthermore, “Soros opposes Orbán because Soros opposes nation states” and the upcoming Hungarian elections “will be the defining battle in the war between George Soros and Viktor Orbán, in the battle between globalism and nationalism.”

None of that rhetoric is anything new when it comes to Orbán, who’s made Hungarian national sovereignty the defining issue of his political identity. But it definitely says a lot about Carlson, and how he’s helping to mainstream one of the most contentious and troubling ideologies of the contemporary right.

Last November, hundreds of right-wing academics and thinkers gathered in Orlando for the highbrow National Conservatism conference. Much of the three-day gathering focused on trying to develop a new conservative coalition along post-liberal lines. As I wrote in The New Republic earlier this month, the National Conservatives see classical liberalism — meaning old-fashioned, small-L liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and private property, and is embraced by many staunch conservatives as well — as the root of modern society’s problems. A society ordered around unfettered personal and market freedom, they argue, makes it too difficult to raise families according to “traditional” values. A widespread commitment to multicultural pluralism, in their view, has led to an oppressive cultural imperialism where individual countries are prohibited from protecting their borders or upholding their historical cultures. They’d like to see newly empowered national governments that embrace official or public religion, use state power to coerce people into leading virtuous lives (according to their standards) and reassert the sort of proud, unapologetic nationalism that reigned before the horrors of World War II.

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Besides academics and writers, the National Conservatism movement has recently been adopted by former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, and is influential enough that the November conference drew a number of leading Republican politicians and contenders, including sitting senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and wannabe-senator J.D. Vance.

Many of the intellectuals heading up the postliberal/National Conservatism movement are Roman Catholic “integralists,” who ultimately want to see the country governed according to a conservative Catholic vision of the “common good” (with most details about what that means left strategically vague). Other leaders are avowed nationalists, seeking to reclaim the term from what they see as its unfair association with the likes of Nazi Germany. A number of them have made that case prominently in books published in the last four years, including First Things editor R.R. Reno’s “Return of the Strong Gods,” National Review editor Rich Lowry’s “The Case for Nationalism,” and National Conservatism conference organizer Yoram Hazony’s “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

In both of those camps within right-wing intellectual circles, Hungary has emerged as the most practical model they can aspire to: It’s the sort of nationalist “Christian democracy,” as Orbán calls it, that they believe stands the best chance of replication in the U.S. (at least until there’s enough support for the right-wing Catholic utopia sometimes described, jokingly or not, as the Empire of Guadalupe). As abundant media coverage has noted, the U.S. right has cheered on most of Orbán’s most controversial policies. His government has assiduously courted their support, including through private institutions’ offer of visiting fellowships and scholarships to numerous conservative academics and thinkers and Orbán’s personal invitation to figures like American Conservative writer Rod Dreher that they consider Hungary their “intellectual home.”

Those overtures have reaped undeniable benefits. Fulsome statements of support have flowed in from the likes of Dreher (who plays a starring role in the Fox Nation documentary) and Carlson, who broadcast his top-rated prime-time show from Budapest for a week last August. Orbán’s reelection bid has drawn the endorsement of Donald Trump and many of his acolytes, all the way down to, just this week, the New York Young Republicans Club. In tangling with critics about the endorsement on Twitter this Thursday, the club’s vice president taunted his foes by writing, “We’re literally unifying the international right. …I’m not here to argue. I’m here to win.”)

Orbán’s regime also had a major presence at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando. There was a promotional table offering free conservative Hungarian books and magazines; a panel on “international nationalism” featuring Orbán’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation), who enjoys a sizable American following; and a plenary address from Dreher on “What Conservatives Must Learn from Orbán’s Hungary.” (They must learn to unashamedly embrace “state power” in defense of conservative values and build a “conservative deep state” to ensure that entrenched right-wing policies can survive the unfortunate results of electoral defeat.)

Most of Carlson’s viewers are unlikely to know much about all the ideological furniture in the background, or to care about it. But he’s doing his best to bring them the Cliff Notes version, breaking the ideas discussed by Ivy-educated right-wing elites in Orlando into digestible bite-sized chunks, and delivering them, airplane-style, into mainstream conservative discourse.

One of those chunks is the rehabilitation of nationalism as a conservative virtue. Another is the idea that it’s not just acceptable but commendable to use family policy as a means of engineering a country’s racial makeup.

For years, Hungary had one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. Combined with high emigration— mostly to other European Union nations — it was losing 32,000 people from its population annually. Orbán’s government sought to address this by unveiling an aggressive suite of pronatalist policies in 2019, including interest-free loans to families that are forgiven with the birth of a third child, subsidies for minivans, and a lifetime exemption from income tax for mothers who have four or more kids.

Policies like these have enjoyed support from some conservative quarters for years. In 2007, the international right-wing coalition World Congress of Families called for similar measures while warning about what it called “demographic winter.” This was the idea that European countries were producing too few children, leading to both “the graying of the continent” and the creation of dangerous population vacuums that would be filled with immigrants too difficult to assimilate. At the time, as I reported in The Nation, most of the racial hand-wringing was couched in euphemistic terms. But these days that subtext has become text, and sometimes the flashing headline, with the proliferation of conspiracist narratives about “white genocide” and the “Great Replacement,” or Trump-era activists calling for a “white baby challenge.”

In this new context, Orbán has been embraced by some on the right for framing his pronatalist policies as an intentional barricade against Muslim immigration, saying that while other countries were buoyed by immigration, Hungary didn’t merely “need numbers” but rather “Hungarian children,” or that Hungary didn’t “want our colour, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others.” Katalin Novák, the stylish and combative former family minister who became the face of Hungary’s pronatalist campaign, warned that countries that abandon tradition will find themselves “condemned to [demographic] death.” Conservatives on this side of the Atlantic swooned, with Breitbart dedicating regular coverage to Hungarian pronatalism, the National Review cheering that Orbán was “redefining the possibilities for modern social conservatism,” and Carlson praising the plan as a model of family values during a 2019 interview with Hungary’s foreign minister.

Orbán is not quite that blunt in Carlson’s new special — the second half of which focuses on Hungary’s pronatalist initiatives as part of the country’s battle against Soros — but unlike other countries that choose to, in Carlson’s words, “import new citizens from the rest of the world,” the prime minister says Hungarians “would not like to leave this country to the migrants, we would like to leave it to our grandchildren.” Carlson nods along with this, visiting a series of large Hungarian families as they beam at each other on playgrounds or buy new cars with government subsidies, before cutting to a black-and-white clip of a grim-faced Soros, saying that he’s very concerned about the direction Hungary is headed. The unsubtle takeaway is that these amorphous questions of shifting populations and changing family structures is actually deliberate “demographic war,” with Soros as general of the opposing army.

That’s not an original idea either. It’s the encapsulated narrative within or beneath the Great Replacement or white-genocide conspiracy theories, which hold that liberals — and specifically Jewish liberals — want to bring large numbers of immigrants and refugees into the U.S. or Europe to “replace” the white population there. That narrative has been the direct inspiration for numerous mass murder events, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, the mosque murders in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the assault on worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, where the killer blamed a Jewish group for aiding refugees.

In September Carlson finally introduced the term “the great replacement” to his audience — after hinting or gesturing at it for months — calling it a “policy” to “change the racial mix of the country” through “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

In the documentary released this week, Carlson illustrates this premise with a series of images intended to land more powerfully than words: a back-and-forth contrast between scenes of white people strolling amid the old-world beauty of Budapest streets or boating on the Danube, and scenes of Black and brown people, almost exclusively in situations of violent chaos, surging against fences, fighting with cops or, at their most benign, crying on the street. Toward the end of the documentary, the video cuts rapidly and repeatedly between second-long shots of white couples on park benches and footage of a crowd of shirtless Black men, shouting in a foreign language and lunging at the camera.

The next shot is meant to come as a relief: Orbán, back at the interview table, saying that he hopes his administration’s work will “be enough to convince the people that it’s a reasonable decision to support us, and not give the country to George Soros.”

Carlson’s larger point appears to be that a similar decision, one with apocalyptic or civilization-scale consequences, faces Americans as well.

Read more on right-wing media and the mainstreaming of white nationalism:

Republicans splinter over Russia

Back in August, when the Taliban overran Kabul, marking an end to a multitrillion-dollar war spanning nearly twenty years in Afghanistan, President Biden was universally condemned by Republicans in Congress for “botching” America’s withdrawal. But now, as Biden wrestles with yet another crisis abroad – Russian brinkmanship over Ukraine – Republicans are displaying a much less united front, with intra-party disagreements about how, when, and why the U.S. should engage in the conflict.

Over the past two weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has coordinated a massive military buildup of about 100,000 troops and weaponry along Ukraine’s eastern border. The standoff comes on the heels of ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine starting back in 2014, when Russia began annexing large swaths of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula along the northern coast of the Black Sea. Since then, Putin has become increasingly married to the notion that Ukraine fundamentally belongs to Russia, even though Ukraine has openly expressed its desire to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – a move that would solidify the country’s independence from Russia.

President Biden is currently weighing a number of options to prevent Russia from waging a military incursion against Ukraine, including a U.S. military buildup that would station thousands American troops along the border. The U.S. has also threatened to impose severe economic sanctions if Russia invades, which could have calamitous effects on both the Kremlin’s and regular Russian citizens.

As expected, Republicans have been broadly critical of Biden’s handling of the crisis. Still, the right-wing pundits and politicians have promoted a uncharacteristically broad range of different foreign policy postures, including military deterrence, sanctions, and even absolute isolationism.

Back in December, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a GOP lodestar, openly expressed sympathy for Putin, arguing that “NATO exists primarily to torment” the Russian leader. The host has also directly blamed the conflict on Biden, accusing the president of instigating “a hot war with Russia,” even though the U.S. has yet to deploy any armed forces.

More recently, Carlson asked his viewers on Monday “who benefits” from a potential war with Russia, suggesting that even sanctions should be off the table.

“The United States certainly doesn’t benefit, that’s obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a second,” he said. “We would be impoverished immediately overnight! “Has nobody in Washington thought of this? Apparently not. Imposing ‘tough new sanctions’ every few months feeds their moral vanity. It makes them feel like good people. What fools they are.”

One House Democrat this week said that his office has been bombarded with calls from folks who “say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine” and want him to “support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”

To be sure, conservative sympathy for Russia is not entirely new. Back in 2014, amid Russia’s annexation of Crimea, numerous Fox News pundits and guests gushed over Putin’s “macho” persona as compared to then-President Obama – a distinction that stemmed in large part from Obama’s insistence on addressing the conflict diplomatically rather than militarily.

“Putin sees himself as a macho man who’s going to do pretty much what he wants,” now disgraced former host Bill O’Reilly said at the time. “The president sees himself as a renaissance man who wants to accommodate.”

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans appear to share Carlson’s isolationist attitudes, suggesting that the U.S. should do nothing in response to Russian brinkmanship.

“We have no dog in the Ukraine fight. Not one American soldier should die there,” tweeted Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., on Saturday. “We just lost Afghanistan to sandal wearing goat herders. I assure you [the] Russian military is no joke either.”

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“THERE SHOULD BE NO AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN UKRAINE,” echoed Rep. Anthony Sabatini, R-Fla., that same day.

However, other members of Congress have assumed a more bellicose stance, implying that Biden should be gearing up for military deterrence.

“I think [Russia President Vladimir] Putin again smells weakness here,” said Rep. Michael McCaul in an CNN interview this week. “Rather than threatening after an invasion takes place, we ought to be providing deterrents before an invasion takes place.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. a member of the House Armed Services Committee, likewise told The Washington Post that he’d support deploying an entire battalion of troops to Ukraine. “I think it puts Russia on the defensive,” Gallagher said. “And if nothing else Russia knows that it would be a massive escalation if they are going against U.S. forces on the ground.”

But Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Tex., the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, doesn’t agree. Instead, McCaul said, Biden should merely “put things on the table like sanctions … arms sales, weapons sales to Ukraine.”

Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark. have also backed McCaul’s middle-ground approach.

As Cotton told Fox News on Sunday, the U.S. needs to be “clear about the kind of sanctions we would impose on Russia’s oil and gas and mining and minerals industries, how we’d cut them off from the international banking system, and that we all continue to try to provide the weapons that Ukraine needs to defend itself.”

Cotton also stressed that the American people “care about what happens in Eastern Europe” because “it emboldens and encourages our adversaries everywhere if we simply look the other way when Vladimir Putin might invade Ukraine.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. said that it’s prepared to impose sanctions and export controls on key sectors of the Russian economy, including microelectronics, banking, and energy. The Pentagon has meanwhile put 8,500 troops on “high alert” to assist NATO in defending Ukraine in the case of an invasion. According to The Intercept, House Democrats are quietly planning to push through a massive defense spending bill, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., reportedly looking to “skip marking up the bill and move it straight to the House floor.”

Gun-maker slammed for 2.5-pound “children’s assault rifle” based on AR-15

Gun control advocates on Wednesday sharply condemned an Illinois-based company for recently unveiling the JR-15, a long rifle inspired by the AR-15 but marketed for children.

Although it is under 2.5 pounds and 20% smaller than the standard version, the JR-15 “operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun,” WEE1 Tactical said in a statement. The weapon “functions like a modern sporting rifle,” but its “lightweight and rugged polymer construction and ergonomics are geared towards children.”

WEE1 Tactical launched the JR-15 earlier this month at an annual trade show sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is based in Newtown, Connecticut—where a gunman with an AR-15 murdered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

“The callousness of the National Shooting Sports Foundation to promote a children’s version of the same type of assault rifle that was used in a horrific mass shooting of 20 first graders and six educators in our shared community is just the latest proof that the organization, and the gun manufacturers it represents, will do anything in pursuit of continued profits,” Po Murray, chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, said Wednesday.

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Other critics of the new rifle took aim at the gun-maker, which is also selling “swag” featuring cartoon skulls with baby pacifiers—one with bows and pigtails, and another with a mohawk.

As Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center (VPC), put it: “At first glance, this comes across as a grotesque joke. On second look, it’s just grotesque.”

“That a gun-maker has embraced imagery of dead children to promote gun ownership by youth surreally illustrates how detached this industry is from the death and injury that result from its products, especially among the young,” he added.

NEW: Gun Violence Prevention Groups Condemn Launch of AR-15 Assault Rifles Designed Specifically for Children

Manufacturer Says Its JR-15 Child-Sized Assault Rifle “looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad’s gun”https://t.co/w8qDPHFxAv pic.twitter.com/8N0DhAdevC

— Violence Policy Center (@VPCinfo) January 26, 2022

Sugarmann authored VPC’s 2016 report entitled “Start Them Young”: How the Firearms Industry and Gun Lobby Are Targeting Your Children. He likened the gun lobby’s efforts targeting young people to those of Big Tobacco:

The tragic frequency of shootings involving children and teenagers is well documented and unfortunately now a regular part of our daily existence. Yet few realize that the firearms industry and the organizations that represent their interests, including the National Rifle Association, have made it one of their top marketing priorities to promote the use of guns among America’s children, as young as grade-school age. In doing so, the gun industry is following a trail once blazed by the tobacco industry in its efforts to entice children to smoke cigarettes.

The report concludes that “while the firearms industry and gun lobby consistently work to present this marketing effort in terms of tradition and family, the real impetus lies in profit and political power. Most tragically, the effects of this campaign are all too often measured in unnecessary death and crippling injury.”

In line with such marketing tactics, WEE1 Tactical said in its statement that “the JR-15 is the first in a line of shooting platforms that will safely help adults introduce children to the shooting sports.”

Kathleen Sances, president and CEO of One Aim Illinois, expressed concern about what lies ahead as adults purchase the weapon for children.

“The marketing of children’s assault rifles by an Illinois company not only brings shame to our state,” she said, “but can only increase the threat of gun death and injury to children here and across the nation.”

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How Paul Gosar emerged as a far-right favorite and subsequently the “most dangerous man in Congress”

Over the last two years, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has emerged as a heavy favorite among far-right conservatives. As an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump, Gosar has managed to gain more than 90 endorsements as the midterm election season approaches.

During a recent rally, Gosar spoke before a crowd of right-wing supporters as he declared to be “considered the most dangerous man in Congress.”

“This is where it all began,” Gosar said prior to Trump taking the stage. “This is where we questioned: ‘Was there fraud? Absolutely. Was it enough to overturn the election? Absolutely.'”

At the same event, per The Guardian, the Republican lawmaker also echoed the stance of other right-wingers who have criticized critical race theory (CRT), the military and food shortages. Last but not least, he pivoted toward a Trump favorite: voter fraud and illegitimate elections.

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So what makes Gosar different from other Trump-supporting Republicans?

Per The Guardian, Gosar is “the kind of politician that Trump – who is embarking on a series of rallies to try to cement his allies’ power in the Republican party – is increasingly seeking to support.”

“Gosar has extensive links to white nationalists and Capitol rioters and, many observers say, represents a dangerous new breed of Republican politician, who would have once been considered fringe, but whom Trump is increasingly making central to Republican party politics.”

Joe Lowndes, a political science professor at the University of Oregon who also co-authored the book “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” weighed in on the rise of Gosar. “We no longer have an ability to make a clear delineation between the right and far-right in the Republican party,” said Lowndes.

He went on to explain how Gosar’s rise underscores the problem within the Republican Party as Trump-like figures are taking center stage. The issue appears to be one that Republicans will be haunted by for quite some time.

“The Trumpist wing of the Republicans isn’t just ascending – it’s the dominant wing of the Republican party. It’s the dominant wing not just in national politics, but in state and local politics as well,” said Lowndes. “The Republican Party has committed itself to a party of minoritarian rule, figuring out ways to rule in the long term without having majority support of voters.”

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Temuera Morrison: Boba Fett talks “far too much” in Star Wars spinoff

“The Book of Boba Fett” is changing the way we understand the titular Star Wars icon, who first showed up in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” as a taciturn bounty hunter who barely spoke three lines. In the new show, he’s taking over Jabba the Hutt’s criminal empire on Tatooine and getting a lot more chatty. That change hasn’t sit well with everyone, including star Temuera Morrison.

“I was not very successful, I was hoping not to say as much as I have already in the first two episodes,” Morrison recently told NME. “I speak far too much. In fact, in the beginning, I was trying to pass my lines on to Ming-Na [Wen, who plays bounty hunter Fennec Shand]. I said: ‘Excuse me, director, I really feel that Ming-Na should say these lines, ’cause I wanna stay mysterious. I wanna stay quiet.'”

Wen, for her part, was having none of it. “He wasn’t just trying to be a very generous actor — which he is — he was just trying to parlay some of the work to me,” she laughed.

“The Book of Boba Fett” star thinks his characters speaks “a bit too much”

But there’s a question as to whether Boba Fett’s newfound loquaciousness is a laughing matter or an odd turn for the character. Morrison’s idea is that having Fett talk too much takes away from his mystique. There hasn’t been conflict on set, but the actor did bring it up to creator Jon Favreau and writer Noah Kloor. “Sometimes, I’d say [to Favreau], ‘I think this is too much, I think this is too much,'” Morrison remembered. “I said: ‘Noah, this scene tomorrow. I’m talking too much! This Boba Fett doesn’t talk this much. Look, I’ve got all these paragraphs. I think we should get rid of it and Jon’s going to Atlanta so don’t tell him!'”

Then, that morning on set, I get a call from Atlanta: ‘Jon wants you to say all that dialogue. We’ll cut it out later.’ (laughs) So he was even keeping an eye on us from all areas.

Big parts of the series flash back to immediately after Boba Fett frees himself from the Sarlacc Pit he fell into in “Return of the Jedi,” and involve him living with a tribe of Tusken Raiders who don’t speak English. Given all that, “I had to start talking I guess,” Morrison conceded. “We had to fill in the gaps and give out a little bit of information . . . But yes, I think I did speak a bit too much.”

What do you think? Is the new, chatty Boba Fett what the series needs or too far afield from how the character we know?

New episodes of “The Book of Boba Fett” air on Disney+ on Wednesdays.

Meghan McCain fumes at Sarah Palin for dining out while COVID-positive: “Stupid, reckless, arrogant”

Meghan McCain called Sarah Palin “stupid, reckless and arrogant” for eating in public — not once, but twice — after testing positive for COVID-19.

The political scion and former host of “The View” also told The Daily Mail (where she has a regular column) that she was “embarrassed” to have once called the former Alaska governor her friend after her recent anti-vax turn, a particularly biting comment given the fact that her late father, Sen. John McCain, had chosen Palin as his running mate during the 2008 presidential election.

The entire saga began earlier this week when Palin was spotted eating out at a swanky Italian restaurant, Campagnola, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — a confounding situation given her very public refusal of the COVID-19 vaccine and New York City’s strict vaccination rules. The very next night, she was seen at another fancy Upper East Side establishment, Elio’s, dining indoors alongside four other people.

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With public fascination concentrated on how she gained admission to both establishments, The New York Times revealed that she had tested positive just days before traveling to the city for a defamation trial against the paper, a detail that emerged when she requested that the trial’s start date be pushed back.

A manager at Elio’s, Luca Guaitolini, later admitted to making a “mistake” in allowing Palin to dine indoors, saying that the staff was investigating and wanted “to get to the bottom of this.”

“She probably just walked in and strolled over,” Guaitolini told the Times.

It was a decision that didn’t sit right with McCain — who said the decision to go outside when knowingly positive might have infected someone who is at higher risk of serious symptoms.

“Is she crazy? Day two?” McCain fumed. “I haven’t seen her or talked to her for many years, aside from some short emails when my father passed, so I can’t imagine what she is thinking but this is highly irresponsible.”

“This was selfish, reckless and stupid. Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it is not unethical.”

“This is why she shouldn’t be in politics anymore. You have to lead by example. I’m embarrassed to have once known her.”

Janet Jackson is finally back in control of her rightful legacy in must-see docuseries

Lifetime’s “Janet Jackson.” is a choreographed dance partnering thunder and calm, appropriate to its subject and her life. Most of what we know of about her story has been told through external sources or incomplete passes like the “New York Times Presents”‘ recent analysis of the so-called “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

But the reality of Janet Jackson contradicts the picture conservatives and the entertainment media painted in the wake of that incident. She is a notoriously private person, which her four-part documentary’s director Ben Hirsch acknowledges by contrasting her recessive personality against the screams and passion that greeted her everywhere she went at the height of her celebrity.

When such clips tear through the calm of the performer’s confessionals, we appreciate how jarring fame is for a woman raised to be a performer despite her desire for a normal life – something she could never have as the daughter of Joseph Jackson and Michael’s little sister.

“Janet Jackson.” announces itself as the definitive, official perspective on the singer’s life with the period at the end of the title even if, at 55, her career is far from finished. Quite the opposite – this examination of Jackson’s life, executive produced by the artist and her brother Randy, arrives at a time when the six-time Grammy Award winner is positioned for a resurgence.

It’s also a reminder of her family’s incredible story along with a subtle invitation to reassess her place in that lineage. As a sibling, Janet was always closest to Michael and Randy. As performers, the world placed them in competition with each other. At the peak of her popularity, Jackson could not avoid being associated with Michael or treated by some as if the accomplishments she achieved on her own were somehow a reflection of his glory. That meant his legal and reputational tumbles became her problem as well.

Recognizing that they’re completely different documentaries, and women, and lives, it may be helpful to describe the worth of “Janet Jackson.” alongside last year’s “Tina.” If the power of that film is in taking us into the life of a woman permanently associated with surviving and overcoming, this gives us a celebrity and a woman, who we should appreciate more for her example of evolution and becoming that she gifted to a generation of young women.

Jackson played an important part in the larger society story of young women asserting their independence and agency over their bodies, their sexuality and their confidence. To young women won over by her story of cutting ties with her father and inspired to take the reins of their careers and lives, she is the blueprint, as Regina King succinctly puts it in the second hour.

Generation X grew up with Jackson, whose mass audience introduction came by way of roles on “Good Times” and “Fame” in her teens. Her 1986 album “Control” is credited for ushering in the New Jack Swing era of R&B, a sound defined in part by its producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

In spite of this, Jackson did not receive a nomination for induction into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame until 2016 despite being eligible in 2007, because her breast was accidentally exposed on national TV for nine-sixteenths of a second at that halftime show.

There aren’t many record-setting, best-selling musical artists with No. 1 singles in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s who vanished off our radar as suddenly and unjustly as Jackson did, and even fewer of her caliber snubbed as harshly by the political arm of the entertainment industry.

The world still has ample love for her, confirmed in the participation of famous entertainers and confidantes present in “Janet Jackson” who share their perspective on what Janet means to them, to music and the wider culture. Those who watched the FX/New York Times project on Jackson and wondered where her supporters’ voices were now have their answer.

Weighing in alongside luminaries such as Missy Elliott, Regina King, Debbie Allen, Samuel L. Jackson are collaborators such as Jam, Lewis, Paula Abdul, who choreographed videos for “Control,” stylist Wayne Scot Lukas, and her ex-husband James DeBarge, among others.

According to what Lukas told Page Six in November, Jackson asked her associates not to participate in the other documentary, which is completely in line with what we’d expect from an artist who, understandably, keenly curates what the public sees of her.

Having said that, “Janet Jackson.” is not lacking in intimacy, owing to Jackson’s emotional openness which, at times, causes her palpable discomfort. As guarded as she is about her personal life, Hirsch coaxes forth enough vulnerability in her responses to help us appreciate the singular loneliness soaked into her identity.

“Does it ever feel like a burden, the Jackson name?” he asks her at one point. Jackson answers the question in that moment, but to anyone watching the entirety of that response is the substance of these four hours.

Janet (Lifetime Network)

Fans created the #JusticeForJanet hashtag in 2017 in wake of the announcement of Justin Timberlake’s planned return to headline the 2018 Super Bowl’s halftime show, the same year that a documentary crew began filming Jackson’s eighth concert tour and kept the cameras rolling for five years afterward. Hirsch distills that footage, alongside interviews and never-before-seen home videos filmed by Jackson’s second husband Rene Elizondo, Jr. into these hours.

The net product is a polished defense of Jackson’s impact as a separate entity from the machine her father constructed that also answers questions that have dogged her throughout her career.

Some is gossip she’s obliged to dispel, including one about the secret baby she was alleged to have had with DeBarge during their very short, doomed marriage. Others address larger speculations she’s contended with throughout her life, primarily regarding her relationship with Michael, to whom she was very close as a child.

In the main, the two hours provided for review strike a balance between introspection, rumination, and elation. The first half of the opening hour is pure biography, starting with a return to the Jacksons’ two-bedroom 670 square foot house in Gary, Indiana where Joe and Katherine Jackson raised their nine children with modest means.

Jackson would not make her professional debut until 1974, when the Jacksons performed in Las Vegas. Contrary to what most might assume, she reveals, “I don’t ever remember being asked. I, um, just remember being put into it.” This admission about her reluctance to claim the stardom her father envisioned for her becomes a through line in this work, and her frequent shifts in her chair and the hesitancy in her voice lets us know it is genuine, creating a fascinating stew of mournfulness and appreciation.

By authorizing the content and direction of the documentary, Jackson takes care to preserve and even somewhat redeem Joseph’s legacy, one that other documentaries, specials and fictionalized versions of Michael’s life have characterized as abusive. “Discipline without love is tyranny. And tyrants, they were not,” she says. “They just loved us and wanted us to be the best that we could possibly be. Obviously it worked.”

Janet, Randy, Tito and Rebbie, the only siblings to appear in the first two episodes, do not deny their father’s disciplinarian bent or his unrelenting dominion over his children’s lives.

Tito admits a touch of shock in looking back at their father’s insistence that Janet perform. Nevertheless, he says, “If he hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t haven’t gotten Janet Jackson.”

That woman’s emergence dominates the second hour, closing on an emotional peak designed to make the choir applaud or sing along. That’s said without a note of sarcasm – it truly is an enlivening, stand-the-hell-up sequence for anyone who appreciates “Rhythm Nation” as a universal banger.

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A teaser for the third hour hints at a deep dive into how Jackson survived the whirlwind emerging from the child sexual abuse allegations made against Michael and his subsequent reputational reversal beginning in the early ’90s.

Given the close familial bond Hirsch and Jackson establish in the first two episodes it’s doubtful that any unexpected revelations about her relationship with Michael will come out in that hour. (Early in the documentary she hints that their relationship began to change around the time that 1982’s “Thriller” was released.)

If there are any surprises in the second half of “Janet Jackson.”, which was not available for review at press time, it may lurk in the list of interviewees discussing how the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime performance negatively impacted Jackson’s career.

Timberlake hasn’t filmed anything recently about his role in participating in and profiting off of Jackson’s unofficial exile from broadcast and radio. Between the preview trailer’s inclusion of a 2018 scene confirming he reached out to her and the fact that they share the same publicist, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that his participation is being kept under wraps until that episode debuts.

If Timberlake does appear, it should be in service of restoring her to her rightful place in pop culture’s firmament instead of repairing his mildly dented image. The level of command with which Jackson and Hirsch shape this piece indicates that the audience shouldn’t expect otherwise.

Above all, “Janet Jackson.” is a reminder that behind all the achievements, personal setback and the drive for artistic excellence is a human being who didn’t always feel like her life lived up to the title of her musical breakout.

“Control” and its 1989 follow-up “Rhythm Nation 1814” shattered sales records and officially lifted Janet out of her brother Michael’s shadow. She’s the first woman nominated for the Grammy’s Producer of the Year award, and still holds the record for the biggest debut tour in history.

And yet in the opening scene of her documentary, as her limousine drives her past an arresting black and white mural of the Jacksons watching over a main street, it only includes her five oldest brothers.

In the moment, she isn’t fazed. “Oh look! I’ve never seen this. Turn the camera around . . . Oh I love that,” Jackson says, happily, before she starts to cry. “That’s so sweet. They’re all looking upward. Except for Mike, he’s looking straight out. Always so nosy.”

That tribute was demolished along with the building upon which it was painted in November 2020, which is unfortunate. But it also presents an opportunity for a future version include their youngest sister. She always deserved to be up there with the rest of them.

“Janet Jackson.” premieres over two nights at 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 28 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 29 on Lifetime. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube:

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Omicron variant of COVID may be the most contagious virus to ever exist, scientists say

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been undeniably bad, the extremely contagious omicron variant is setting scientific records. The mutant SARS-CoV-2 variant came seemingly out of nowhere, continues to have unknown origins and has so far spawned several ominous relatives including the so-called “Son of Omicron.”

Now, scientists have revealed something particularly disturbing: The omicron variant is either the first or second most contagious virus known to humanity, depending on how you measure it.

The slight uncertainty between gold and silver place depends on how you define “most contagious of all time.” If you do so by measuring the speed at which a disease spreads throughout the planet, then omicron is the clear winner.

“You can have an extraordinarily contagious virus, we see that right now with COVID,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Salon. “COVID is approaching the contagiousness of the virus that we think is the most contagious ever studied, namely the measles.”

The measles virus was long considered the gold standard for contagiousness. The virus has a reproductive number (R0) that varies between 3.7 to 203.3, meaning that one infected person is apt to infect between 3.7 and 203.3 people. In the sixteenth century, two-thirds of the indigenous population of Cuba was killed by the disease.

Other scientists concurred with Schaffner’s conclusion that is is approaching the contagiousness of measles.

“Omicron is certainly the most rapidly spreading virus among the ones we have been able to investigate at this level of detail,” Dr. William Hanage, an epidemiologist and the co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University, told El Pais.

As PolitiFact succinctly explained, “When measuring the speed of global spread, the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is the fastest in history, experts say.” Yet things get murkier when you define contagiousness by how quickly a disease spreads between individuals. At that point, it starts facing steep competition from measles.

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“One of the things about Omicron that is very different from all of the other variants of this COVID virus is that its transmissibility efficiency is at least twice what any of the other strains of this COVID virus has been,” Deborah Hayes, president and CEO of The Christ Hospital, said during a briefing with reporters earlier this month. “It is a virus that spreads almost as, if not as, easily as measles.”

Some argue that omicron does indeed spread faster and easier than measles. Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya, a physician and infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, told El Pais that omicron has an advantage over measles because of how it spreads. If you look at the amount of time which elapses between a person becomes infectious and the people they infect also become infectious, that takes an average of 12 days for the measles and only four or five days for omicron.

“One case of measles would cause 15 cases within 12 days. One case of omicron would give rise to another six at four days, 36 cases at eight days and 216 after 12 days,” Bhattacharyya pointed out. This makes omicron unusually infectious even when compared to the measles — and certainly quite infectious if compared to the previous SARS-CoV-2 viruses that caused COVID-19.

“Omicron’s reproductive number (R0) is estimated to be as high as 10, second only to the extremely infectious measles, mumps, pertussis, and varicella,” Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Sanjay Mishra and Dr. Jeremy Warner wrote in The Cancer Letter. “This compares to R0 of 2.5 for the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and ~5 for delta. Because this number is an exponential coefficient, a “doubling” of R0 portends for an extreme jump in infectiousness.”

Even after omicron has left the scene, there are still lingering conditions for new mutant viruses like omicron to emerge.

“It’s a certainty,” Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist renowned for his work in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, fighting anthrax and advancing knowledge of the human genome, told Salon earlier this month when asked if other variants should be expected. “It’s not a fear. There will be more variants. It is as close to a certainty as you can get.”

Read more about the omicron variant:

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

A retiring Republican state senator in Texas admitted in a sworn declaration that he believes his party violated federal voting laws when it drew new boundaries for the state’s senate districts in 2011 and 2013 — a stunning admission that was made public this week as part of an ongoing federal challenge to Texas’ redistricting process.

State Sen. Kel Seliger’s statement specifically mentioned the state’s Senate District 10, which split predominantly Black and Hispanic communities in the Fort Worth area into two other districts that ultimately held majority-white populations, according to the Texas Tribune. Even the minority voters who remained in District 10 were “lumped in” with a number of neighboring counties that happened to be white-majority as well, the outlet reported.

“Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings, and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution,” Seliger said in the declaration, which he signed in November.

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The challenge to Texas’ decade-old redistricting boundaries is being spearheaded by state Sen. Beverly Powell, a Democrat who represents the current District 10. She is hoping to have a federal judge to nix the district map ahead of the state’s March primary election, the Tribune reported. Throughout the case, the chief Senate map-maker Sen. Joan Huffman has insisted that the maps were drawn in “race-blind” fashion.

Though if proven, this would not be the first time Republicans have been found guilty of wrongdoing in the state’s redistricting process. A federal court in Washington, D.C. ruled back in 2012 that lawmakers — led by Seliger, who chaired the state Senate’s redistricting committee at the time — had actively discriminated against minority voters when it split their communities into several disparate Congressional districts.

Seliger himself also appears to be a victim of the redistricting process. He announced his retirement last year after discovering that redistricting meant he would have to face a new primary challenger.

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Why experts say the banning of “Maus” is not like the censorship of “Huckleberry Finn”

On Wednesday, a Tennessee county school board pulled “Maus” – Art Spiegelman’s award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust – from its eighth-grade curriculum, sparking outrage amongst liberals who accused the board of engaging in censorship. But on Thursday, commentators online attempted to push back against this narrative by downplaying the board’s vote and accusing the left of apparent hypocrisy.

To make their point, many critics pointed to minutes taken by the McMinn County Board of Education during its meeting on earlier this month, arguing that the board was not motivated by antisemitism but concerns over instances of obscenity and nudity. Throughout the transcript, board members made such objections, claiming that the book was inappropriate for the classroom.

The concerns were not over teaching the Holocaust, it was profanity and nudity, and I believe they didn't ban it, they removed it from the curriculum. Seems naive to think eighth graders are as yet still innocent of profanity and naked women, of course.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 27, 2022

As Lee Parkison, Director of School, said during the meeting, “there is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” noting that the board could redact key lines. Still, other members, like Tony Allman, clearly took issue with the novel’s visual depictions of Nazi atrocities. “It shows people hanging,” Allman said. “It shows them killing kids.”

“Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff?” he asked. “It is not wise or healthy.”

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Jeff Trexler, Interim Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, who read the board’s minutes, told Salon that the school officials completely misread the novel.

“To say that Maus promotes violent abuse and dehumanizing language is to show that you don’t understand it,” Trexler said. “Schools are supposed to be in the business of promoting literacy, and this is just one example of how school leaders are using their own illiteracy as justification for keeping children from learning what the adults in charge have not.”

Some commentators also took issue with the use of the word “ban” to describe the school board’s decision, contending that it is a misnomer given that McMinn County simply nixed the “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum.

But Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, said that he doesn’t think the term “is reductive at all.”

Pointing to a piece he wrote last year, Friedman reiterated that “the American Library Association and other advocates for the freedom to read” have “long considered” curricular and library removals as “efforts to ban books from circulation, to effectively disallow and discourage others to read them.”

Wait, did that Tennessee school "ban" MAUS (see the headline) or did they remove the book from their curriculum (see the lede)?

Those are really different things.

I found and read—and loved—MAUS in our school library. It was never a part of the curriculum. pic.twitter.com/cv2VgVC0k2

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 27, 2022

At the same time, many critics viewed liberal outrage over the board’s vote through the lens of “leftist hypocrisy,” noting that books like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” have been restricted in the past over accusations of racism.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" was recently removed as a requred text from a WA State school system's curriculum for reasons that are just as dumb as what's going on in TN. This is *all tribal*. That's the only way people choose what to be mad about and how mad https://t.co/11WcE0LtCq

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 27, 2022

Earlier this week, Mukilteo School Board in Washington state voted to remove “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its ninth-grade required reading, though the board granted discretion to individual teachers who wanted to use the novel in their curricula.

In the past, Friedman noted, PEN America has pushed back on schools looking to pull “To Kill a Mockingbird” from course curricula, writing in 2020 that the novel “[deals] with difficult subject matter from our country’s complicated and painful history, including systemic racism.” Still, he noted that most of the book bans we’re seeing are being leveled against LGBTQ+ authors, authors of color, and books that deal with race, sex, and gender.

“The challenge right now is to recognize that the weight of the momentum here is so very clearly swinging in one direction,” Friedman said.

Thus far, McMinn is the first known county to pull “Maus” from its students’ curricula. It remains unclear whether the book will see more restrictions throughout the rest of the country, though it’s possible, given that other districts have had the tendency to target the same authors and works.

Andrea Pitzer, who wrote “A Global History of Concentration Camps,” said that it’s important for kids to be exposed to books like “Maus” when “so much of the language of conspiracy theories swirling around the country today – from QAnon to anti-vaxx and anti-democratic movements – rises out of antisemitic literature used in the past to devastating ends.

“The county that handed down the decision about MAUS is in Tennessee, which also passed a law not long ago that may allow publicly funded adoption agencies to discriminate on the basis of religion,” she added. “Last week, we saw stories about a lawsuit filed by a Jewish couple saying they were refused as clients at one agency in the state because of their religion. When you include the kind of synagogue violence we’ve seen recently in Texas and Pittsburgh, it makes for a frightening trend. This isn’t some isolated, abstract situation – it’s part of a larger, concrete phenomenon.”

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes had network of “escape tunnels” in backyard, estranged wife says

Tasha Adams, the estranged wife of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, is providing photographic evidence of the “elaborate escape tunnels” he allegedly constructed in their backyard.

On Wednesday, a federal magistrate judge cited Adams’ testimony about the escape tunnels in an order denying Rhodes bond on seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the Capitol insurrection.

A short time later, Adams posted photos corroborating her testimony.

“Folks if you ever feel tempted to rent a backhoe and dig escape tunnels in the backyard of your rental house, keep in mind it may come back to haunt you if you later attempt to overthrow the US government,” Adams wrote.

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“This isn’t even the tunnel system I was talking about,” Adams added, clarifying that the photos actually showed a “training hole” that was “less elaborate.”

“I might have pics of the real thing somewhere, my daughters used them as a playhouse,” she wrote.

Another Twitter user asked Adams about her statement that it was a “rental house,” inquiring whether the landlord was also a member of the Oath Keepers.

“(I)f not bet they’re pissed,” the person wrote.

“Yes. He thought it wasn’t a bad idea,” Adams responded, referring to the landlord.

In a related twist, Rhodes reportedly claimed in court that at the time of his arrest by the FBI on Jan. 13, he was living with his girlfriend, Kellye SoRelle, who is now serving as acting director of the Oath Keepers.

However, contacted by BuzzFeed News’ Ken Bensinger, SoRelle reportedly denied the two are in a relationship.

“She (SoRelle) conjectures that he may have told the court that in a bid to get released to her house,” Bensinger reported.

“I think Stewart just wanted to have a place to stay,” SoRelle reportedly told Bensinger.

More below:

Oath Keeper relationship news:

According to a federal magistrate, Stewart Rhodes "is currently in a relationship with Kellye SoRelle" and attempts by the court to reach @kellyesorelle "were unsuccessful" pic.twitter.com/ftu6W3QC4P

— Ken Bensinger (@kenbensinger) January 26, 2022

Rep. Cori Bush’s parked car struck by bullets — but luckily she wasn’t in it at the time

CNN.com is reporting that Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) car was struck by bullets, though she wasn’t inside it at the time.

It doesn’t appear that Bush was the target of an attack and other cars in the area showed that their handles had been tampered with. In a statement from the congresswoman on Thursday, she announced the details about the incident and thanked those contacting her to check how she’s doing.

“I’m touched by everyone who has reached out. Thankfully no one was harmed,” Bush tweeted, linking to a local report. “But any act of gun violence shakes your soul. That’s why our movement is working to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep everyone safe.”

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“No one should have to fear for their safety here in St. Louis and that is exactly why our movement is working every day to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep every neighborhood safe,” Bush said to KSDK News.

I'm touched by everyone who has reached out. Thankfully no one was harmed.

But any act of gun violence shakes your soul.

That's why our movement is working to invest in our communities, eradicate the root causes of gun violence, and keep everyone safe. https://t.co/AZHLUwiN6O

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 27, 2022

Could a super-deadly flu like the one in “Station Eleven” really exist?

In “Station Eleven,” what’s left of humanity exists in a post-apocalyptic world after a very deadly flu outbreak kills most humans 20 years prior to when the show begins.

The HBO Max series is based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, written way back when COVID-19 was just a twinkle in a bat (or a pangolin’s) bloodstream. Though it might feel a bit too close-to-home to watch mid-pandemic, the limited series does showcase some survival skills for a worst-case scenario of complete social collapse amid a pandemic. Plus, while there are some painful parallels between today’s pandemic and “Station Eleven,” there is relief in knowing that COVID-19 is nowhere near as socially destructive as the catastrophic flu of the book and TV show.

Indeed, the fictional flu in “Station Eleven,” which is dubbed the “Georgia flu,” has a 99 percent fatality rate and thus offers its victims little hope of survival. Not only is it super-deadly, but the characters explain that it has “no incubation period,” presumably meaning it starts spreading immediately after someone contracts it.

On the show, people die within hours of showing symptoms — at their steering wheels, or while performing on stage, like one of the main characters, Arthur Leander. The rapid spread and high death rate results in a total collapse of civilization within months, as electricity, water and the internet cease to function. Those who do survive do so by luck or foresight — either because they had the resources to quarantine themselves for months in their homes, or because they were stranded at an airport and never left.

Science fiction is meant to stretch what is feasibly possible, and “Station Eleven” is not highly fantastical sci-fi by any stretch of the imagination. But how much science is in this fictional world? In other words, could an influenza virus experience an antigenic drift (small mutation) that could match what’s depicted in “Station Eleven?”

“Scientists just always hesitate to say ‘never’ because that’s such a large word, but essentially, never could we anticipate that there would be a pathogen that has characteristics, each of which are so extreme, that it’s at the very end of what we think can happen on occasion,” said William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “It’s never from an evolutionary perspective in the pathogen’s interest to kill every human being or every animal that it infects, because very quickly it will run out of people to infect and that has no evolutionary advantage to the virus — because all of a sudden it will come to a dead end.”

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Indeed, it is generally understood among scientists that viruses usually evolve to become more transmissible — not more lethal. Schaffner pointed to the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 as an example.

“You can have an extraordinarily contagious virus, we see that right now with COVID,” Schaffner said, noting that COVID-19 is close to being the “most contagious virus ever studied.” “But even so, it has limitations,” he added.

Leonard Mermel, a professor of medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, agreed.

“It would not make evolutionary sense for a pathogen to have 99% mortality towards its primary host,” Mermel said. “If a pathogen killed just about all their hosts, it would be unlikely to pass on those genes, as the hosts would die and so would they.”

Mermel added that in the case of deadly flus, humans often aren’t the primary host of many viral flu strains.

“As is the case with avian (bird) flu infecting humans, mortality can be high — such as ~50% mortality with H5N1 infections in humans,” Mermel said.

And what about the fictional virus’ lack of incubation time? Is it possible for a deadly flu to have no incubation time?

“Well, if there’s no incubation time, that means from the moment of exposure to the moment of developing symptoms, that would be very, very brief,” Schaffner said. “Now one of the things that that would do for the virus, that’s to the virus’ disadvantages, is that would immediately make that person sick and not able to get around as frequently — therefore, it would make it harder for the virus to spread.”

Schaffner explained that COVID-19 and the flu usually are infectious for 24 hours or more before a person actually feels sick, allowing an infected person to move around and come into contact with people and spread the virus.

Mermel agreed that the idea of no incubation period “does not make sense.”

“An infectious agent such as a respiratory virus like flu must be deposited on a mucous membrane (mouth, nose, eyes) and then invade a susceptible cell, utilize its genetic material to build many virions in that cell, then release those viruses to infect other cells, etc.,” Mermel said. “So this takes time accounting for what we call an incubation period.”

Mermel said that the only way to avoid an incubation period from an infectious agent is via “toxin production.”

“Some forms of food poisoning such as from staph or bacillus cereus occur just hours after a contaminated meal due to the effect of the toxin rather than the bacteria infecting cells and reproducing and infecting others cells and so on,” Mermel said. “However, toxin production to the best of my knowledge is not part of human viral infections.”

Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, agreed.

“There is always an incubation period,” Gandhi said. “I can’t see this ever happening.”

In other words, doomsday preppers shouldn’t see “Station Eleven’s” Georgia flu as a prophecy. The fictitious flu virus fails the realism test.

Read more on the omicron variant:

Why the right sees Biden’s promise of a Black woman on the Supreme Court as an attack

Justice Stephen Breyer’s upcoming retirement from the Supreme Court was reported late Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday night, Fox News and other right-wing outlets already had their narrative: President Joe Biden’s new nominee is proof that a white man can’t catch a break in the U.S. of A.

Mind you, there is no nominee yet, though potential shortlists have been floated. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to nominate a Black woman for the court, a promise he reiterated from the White House on Thursday. “I’ve made no decision except one, the person I will nominate will be someone of extraordinary qualifications, character and experience and that person will be the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.”

Of the 115 justices that have sat on the Supreme Court, 0 have been Black women, but 107 of them have been white men. Nonetheless, GOP media swiftly circled around the claim that this nominee — whoever they may be — is proof that white men are the real victims of discrimination. One of those white men confirmed to the court — Justice Brett Kavanaugh — now is one of the most powerful people in the country. Still, he was held out as even further proof that white men are the most victimized of all victims.

“Biden didn’t mention the Supreme Court nominee’s legal qualifications or judicial philosophy or ability to perform one of the most important jobs in the country. He didn’t even tell us she was a nice person. All he said was she’s going to be Black and she’s going to be female, because to him, that’s all that matters,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson screeched in one of his typical fascistic rants Wednesday night. He sneeringly suggested George Floyd’s sister, Bridget Floyd, is the “obvious choice,” because even though she “is not a judge or a lawyer or whatever,” Biden supposedly doesn’t care about “this law stuff.”

The obvious implication of Carlson’s rant is there is no such thing as a Black woman who is qualified for this role. This is, unsurprisingly, an easily disproved insinuation. The top name floated from Biden’s likely shortlist is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — the same court that Kavanaugh was nominated from by Donald Trump and now Attorney General Merrick Garland was nominated for the Supreme Court from by Barack Obama. The other reported top name is California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger. Both of these women, one a Harvard law and one a Yale law graduate, are very much into “this law stuff.”

Carlson’s rhetoric is hyperbolic, but the more “respectable” right-wing press is playing the same game of trying to disqualify Black women and painting Biden’s promise as discrimination against supposedly more qualified white men.

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Ed Whelan of the National Review wrote a piece earlier this month claiming “black women are massively overrepresented among Biden’s appellate picks” and that “the big losers (I take some delight in noting) are liberal white males.” The New York Times then uncritically echoed Whelan’s point:

According to a 2021 profile of the legal profession by the American Bar Association, just 4.7 percent of American lawyers are Black and 37 percent of lawyers are female. The report did not break out Black women in particular, but the implication is that roughly 2 percent of American lawyers are both Black and female.

Never mind, of course, that only eight Black women had served on federal appeals courts prior to Biden taking office — and none before 1975. Black women are nearly 7% of the population and continue to be 0% of the Supreme Court, as has been true literally throughout its history.

Nevertheless, the idea that white men are being shoved aside so Black women can steal “their” jobs was the theme that carried the day in Republican reactions.

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network tweeted that “The Left bullied Justice Breyer into retirement” and Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch echoed the talking point with the claim that “The Left forced Breyer off the Supreme Court.” On Fox News, Sean Hannity whined that it was “gender discrimination” for Biden to try to rectify the wild imbalance towards men with a female nominee. Carlson’s lengthy tantrum included complaints about the “casual racism of affirmative action” and that “Joe Biden’s nominees look nothing like America, not even close.”

The bellyaching about the alleged victimization of white men was also the theme of Greg Gutfeld’s conniption on Fox News. “Whoever gets nominated, I’m going to say that that person — be they male or female, or nonbinary — did something really bad to me,” he “joked” in his typical unfunny way. He added sarcastically, “it’s going to be 100 percent true and disgusting.”

This is an obvious reference to Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh. On the right, it’s hardened into received wisdom that she made it all up in order to hurt him. In reality, of course, her testimony under oath was calm and absolutely no lies were discovered in it — while Kavanaugh lied repeatedly during his testimony in ways that were so obvious that multiple lies were turned into jokes and memes. (For instance, Kavanaugh repeatedly insisted he had never drank to excess, despite emails describing blackout drunken nights and being awarded “Beach Week Ralph Club Biggest Contributor” by his high school classmates.) In addition, Ford’s testimony was corroborated by two other women who said they had similar encounters with Kavanaugh in college.

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The attempts to pre-emptively disqualify any Black women became downright baroque on Fox News with one segment in which the supposed “news” anchors ran wild with speculation that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the nominee.

“So this person has to be a woman, she’s got to be Black and she has to be younger,” Fox News host Harris Faulkner said. “Anyone thinking what I’m thinking? They don’t know what to do with Kamala Harris in the White House right now.” Trump’s former spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany immediately concurred, calling the theory “credible.”

What’s going on is not mysterious. The hosts know their audience has no knowledge of the multiple highly qualified candidates that are being circulated on media shortlists. Because the audience for Fox News can’t name a single qualified Black female candidate, they assume that Biden himself is similarly ignorant — an assumption that the hosts at Fox News are shamelessly feeding. It’s all part of the larger narrative insisting that any Black female nominee is inherently unsuitable.

One way or another, what’s clear is that right-wing media sees the upcoming Supreme Court battle as a golden opportunity to advance their already ridiculous narratives about how white men are being oppressed by women and people of color. On Fox News, this narrative has merged neatly with ideas drawn directly from neo-Nazis and other white nationalists. It really doesn’t matter who the nominee is, or how qualified they are. Fox News will demonize this person to whip their audiences into a fascistic frenzy.

None of this is to say that Biden should break his promise to nominate a Black woman. Fox News has its narrative built in without even knowing who the nominee is. There is nothing Biden can say or do that will mollify them. Any nominee — even the blandest white guy — would be spun as a secret agent of antifa and Black Lives Matter and a communist plant. Biden should simply go forward with his promise. Let the Republican reaction expose them as the racist misogynists they are.

This cheesy, no-tear French onion soup is ready in under 30 minutes

When I was in high school, our French teacher would periodically take us in to Manhattan to see artsy movies at the Alliance Française, followed by food and conversation at La Bonne Soupe. I thought it was the most sophisticated, comforting place in the world — a position that remains largely unchallenged all these years later. It was the restaurant’s famed onion soup that cinched it: a thick, bubbly bowl of bronzed alliums with gruyère draped over the whole business like a blanket.

Making onion soup home at home, however, never held any appeal. There seemed not a single element of the cooking process that didn’t sound like a huge pain in the neck. All that chopping and caramelizing. All that crying. Non, merci!

But lately, I’ve been craving a little piece of Paris — or at least of midtown Manhattan, anyway — in my own kitchen. By cobbling together a frankensoup that relies on the easiest and fastest tips I could find, I wound up with a cozy dish of cheese and onions sans the watery eyes.

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The most revelatory part of this recipe is a hack too insane sounding to be true. I’d already cut up two onions when, with tears streaming down my face, I Googled some tips for surviving the rest of the process. I didn’t like the idea of running my onions under cold water, and I don’t own safety goggles. Then I read a trick that sounded like it had to be an old wives’ tale: Stick a piece of bread in your mouth. As the Greatist observed, “The spongy texture of the bread seems to have absorbed some of those noxious chemicals before they had the chance to attack my eyes.”

I grabbed a thick piece of brioche from beside the toaster and stuck in my mouth like I was Ralphie from “A Christmas Story” being punished with a bar of soap. And I did not cry. There’s varying consensus out there about whether this method is BS or not, and I can’t attest to the effectiveness of other types of breads here (maybe it’s a brioche only thing). All I know is that I will never chop onions any other way again.

The other magical element here comes from baking soda, which unbelievably speeds up the caramelization process. While I always stand by the slow cooker method of cooking onions, Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s technique is nothing short of miraculous. It’s especially handy if you didn’t happen to decide this morning that you wanted onion soup tonight.

For maximum crunchy-oozy effect, I’ve put extra cheese at both the bottom and on the top of the bowl here. You could, of course, use your most expensive gruyère from the local fromagerie. I picked up all of my ingredients at Target, and everything turned out beautifully. Now that I know how easy this is to make, next time, I won’t shed a single tear.

***

Recipe: No Tears French Onion Soup
Inspired by Martha Stewart and Serious Eats

Yields

4 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

25-30 minutes

Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons sugar
4 medium yellow or white onions, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
4 cups beef broth, or 3 cups beef broth and 1 cup red wine
Salt and pepper, to taste
Olive oil
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 small baguette, sliced into rounds
1 package Swiss cheese slices (7 ounces)

Directions

Step 1
Heat a large skillet over medium heat and add the sugar. Let the sugar melt, about 3 minutes.

Step 2
Add the onions and stir, using a wooden spoon, to coat with the melted sugar. Add the butter, baking soda, salt and pepper. Stir occasionally, for about 6 – 8 minutes.

Step 3
Add 2 tablespoons of water and stir, scraping the bottom of the pan to get all of the brown bits. Stir, adding water one tablespoon at a time, as needed for another 3 – 5 minutes. You should have a soft, dark, jammy pan of onions.

Step 4
Add the broth (or broth and wine) to the pan, along with the thyme. Lower the soup to a simmer.

Step 5
Preheat your broiler.

Step 6
Arrange the bread slices on a large sheet pan and drizzle with olive oil. Top each round with 1/2 slice of cheese (or as much as you want).

Step 7
Broil the toasts 3 – 5 minutes, until golden.

Step 8
Place a slice of Swiss cheese in each bowl, then pour the hot soup over it. To serve, top with at least two cheesy bread rounds.

Cook’s Notes

You can easily make this soup vegetarian by reaching for mushroom or vegetable broth. Also, feel free to experiment with different kinds of melting cheeses here.

More French-inspired recipes we love:

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Fox News melts down over Biden Supreme Court pick — before he’s nominated anyone

Fox News hosts spent much of Wednesday criticizing President Joe Biden over his nonexistent Supreme Court pick after news leaked of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement.

Multiple outlets reported on Wednesday that Breyer is planning to retire at the end of the Supreme Court term in June, immediately sparking speculation about who would replace him on the bench. Breyer’s replacement would not affect the balance of the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority. On this occasion, right-wing judicial groups are not expected to put up a big fight, according to Politico, especially since Democrats control the Senate until at least next January.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden vowed to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court in the country’s history. It’s not unusual for a president to nominate someone based on their identity: Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan both vowed to appoint women to the Supreme Court during their campaigns. But Fox News hosts on Wednesday raged that for Biden to pick a Black woman amounted to “affirmative action” and might even be “unconstitutional.” To be clear, Biden has not nominated anyone and, for that matter, Breyer has not officially announced his resignation.

Host Tucker Carlson accused Biden of playing “identity politics” and “believing all Black women are the same.”

“The people it’s designed to help are completely dehumanized and patronized, reduced to colors rather than human beings, and in some cases, the rest of us really crappy service, because the best people aren’t being chosen,” he said.

Carlson baselessly alleged that Biden was not even considering his potential picks’ qualifications, suggesting that Bridget Floyd, the sister of George Floyd, would be the “obvious choice.”

“She is not a judge or a lawyer or whatever, but in this case, who cares? Clearly, that’s not the point anymore — this law stuff,” he said.

Biden is widely rumored to be considering at least three Black judges for the seat, according to The New York Times. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Harvard Law grad who served as a law clerk to Breyer, sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Justice Leondra Kruger, a Yale Law grad who served as a law clerk to former Justice John Paul Stevens, sits on the California Supreme Court and previously worked at the Justice Department. Judge J. Michelle Childs is a former private attorney and South Carolina state official who sits on the Federal District Court in Columbia, South Carolina.

Other Fox News hosts also criticized Biden’s vow to nominate a Black woman. Sean Hannity suggested it might be potentially “unlawful” and “unconstitutional” to only consider judges of a specific race or gender.

Biden hasn’t nominated anyone yet and Hannity is already calling it unconstitutional pic.twitter.com/cxKnrSDgIZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 27, 2022

On Fox News’ “straight news” lineup, host Harris Faulkner discussed Biden’s vow with George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who complained that Biden’s pick would hear an upcoming case on affirmative action policies in college admissions.

“And so this is obviously going to come up where the president’s going to have to decide if he intends to fulfill a pledge that the court would never allow if he was actually admitting someone into a college,” Turley said.

“What you’re talking about is discrimination,” Faulkner said.

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Faulkner also discussed the nomination with Fox pundit Tomi Lahren.

“I’m sure it would be a Black woman,” Lahren said of Biden’s pick. “We saw how well that worked out with Kamala Harris, but here’s hoping he has a better choice in mind for this position.”

Tomi Lahren reacts to Stephen Breyer's retirement: "Now again I’m sure it would be, as Guy said, a Black woman. We saw how well that worked out with Kamala Harris, but here’s to hoping he has a better choice in mind for this position." pic.twitter.com/4oZoxsIbrx

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 26, 2022

Faulkner went on to speculate that Biden would appoint Harris to the seat.

“This woman, she has to be Black and she’s gotta be younger,” Faulkner said. “Anyone thinking what I’m thinking? They don’t know what to do with Kamala Harris in the White House right now. I can’t be the only person seeing this.”

Fox News floats a theory that Biden is going to remove Kamala Harris as vice-president and place her on the Supreme Court.

"I can't be the only person who is seeing this," Harris Faulkner says.

" I think it’s a theory that could be credible," Kayleigh McEnany adds. pic.twitter.com/5V28LsxiZg

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 26, 2022

Carlson summed up the conservative complaints about Biden’s apparent intention to nominate the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, pointing to census numbers showing that Black women make up a small percentage of the population.

“Biden claims that his race-counting is essential so that the court and the rest of his administration ‘looks like America,'” Carlson said. “Of all the lies that Joe Biden tells, this could be the easiest to check. We have the latest census numbers, and we can promise you with dead certainty that Joe Biden’s nominees look nothing like America.'”

Tucker Calrson says insisting on a Black woman for SCOTUS nominee is "exactly why Americans hated segregation" pic.twitter.com/h1J5gA8fOK

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 27, 2022

Unsurprisingly, Carlson ignored the fact that there has not been a single Black woman on the Supreme Court in the country’s history. There have been 114 Supreme Court justices in the country’s history and 108 of them have been white men, a far cry from what the country “looks” like.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, on Wednesday called on Biden to keep his promise to nominate a Black woman so that the court would finally “reflect the diversity of our country.”

“It is unacceptable that we have never in our nation’s history had a Black woman sit on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Murray said in a statement. “I want to change that.”

Read more:

“Orwellian”: Tennessee school board sparks outrage with vote to ban Holocaust graphic novel “Maus”

A Tennessee school board voted to pull Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” – an award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust – from the county’s eighth-grade language arts curriculum, citing eight instances of profanity and one image of a nude woman.

The 10-0 vote by McMinn County Board of Education was originally made on January 10 but is just now garnering national attention. The decision, first reported by The Tennessee Holler, comes amid a nationwide GOP-led push to purge hundreds of books dealing with themes of race, sex, and gender from K-12 library shelves.

Asked about the board’s vote, Spiegelman called the move “Orwellian.”

“I’m kind of baffled by this,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book.”

The 73-year-old graphic novelist added that he suspects the board nixed his work not because of cursing or nudity but because of its subject matter.

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“Maus” tells the story of Spiegelman’s father Vladeck, a Polish Jew, living in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The novel, which depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, is intercut with scenes of Spiegelman interviewing Vladeck in the present day to glean more information about his father’s past. “Maus” was one of the first graphic novels in U.S. history to be referenced in academia, and is widely regarded as a pioneering work for the medium.

Lee Parkison, Director of School, who presided over the board’s vote on “Maus,” said during a January 10 board meeting that “there is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” according to minutes taken by the board.

Tony Allman, another board member attending the meeting, told fellow members that “we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”

“It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy,” Allman added.

The board apparently weighed redacting the specific material they found to be objectionable in “Maus,” but ultimately chose to remove the work altogether over fears of copyright infringement.

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This week, McMinn County’s vote was widely condemned by writers and authors online.

Award-winning book author Neil Gaiman lampooned the vote, tweeting: “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”

There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days. https://t.co/fs1Jl62Qd8

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) January 26, 2022

“Amazing that these woke liberals are so concerned with people being offended that they’re banning Holocaust literature,” chimed Zack Beauchamp, Senior Correspondent at Vox. “Wait, sorry, these are the other guys.”

The U.S. Holocaust Museum meanwhile stressed that it’s important for young students to learn about the atrocities of the past as a way to guide their worldview in the present.

“Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors,” the museum tweeted. “Teaching about the Holocaust using books like Maus can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.”

How to recork Champagne for long-lasting bubbles

I come to you today to tell you about something magical — a foolproof trick that will teach you how to recork champagne and store it for days. I find this magical for several reasons, the first and foremost being that it has to do with Champagne — or really, any sparkling wine at all. And, anything having to do with sparkling wine I find naturally has a certain allure and sophistication. It is immediately something I want to know about because sparkling wine — in any guise, be it a flute, a coupe, a cocktail, a spritz — is one of my very favorite things to drink.

Champagne is second only to water and coffee, which I guess technically makes it third. But it’s first in my heart, even if it’s third in the pecking order of necessity for functioning. Along with all other sane people, I turn toward a regular rotation of Aperol spritzes and sparkling rosé during the stretches of summer that are the most sun-soaked and Mediterranean.

And the rest of the year, I keep a bottle of sparkling wine on hand at all times just in case there is something to celebrate or a bad day to shake off, which, let’s face it, there is at least a couple of times a month.

But, here is the trouble with sparkling wine: It is sparkling, and if you don’t drink the whole bottle, it will go flat and subsequently go to waste. Here are two methods that will help you properly save and store champagne, while protecting millions of delicate bubbles.

Save sparkling wine using a spoon

Here comes the true magic: You don’t need anything fancy to save champagne. All you need is a spoon. I learned this trick at least 9 or 10 years ago and have been using it quite effectively ever since. No one else I have shared it with has known about it already or has even remotely been able to explain it. Thus, magic.

Today I share it with you, and if you can explain it, well, I’m not sure I want to know. This is the trick: All you have to do is dangle a spoon, bowl side up, handle hanging down, in the top of the open sparkling wine bottle and leave it in the fridge. Seriously. That’s it!

No other closures, no nothing, just a dangling spoon. I feel stupid even saying it. But, somehow, someway it works.

It works best with a silver spoon (because all magic works best with silver), but I have also had it work just fine with a plain old stainless steel spoon. Plastic, on the other hand, is no dice. The handle doesn’t need to be touching the liquid or anything (if it is, you clearly haven’t had enough of your wine and probably should have at least one more glass). You just dangle the spoon in, refrigerate, and leave it. It has not worked 100% of the time, but over the last decade of regularly drinking sparkling wine, and regularly taking multiple days to make my way through the bottle, I think it has only not worked three times.

That’s a dang fine performance. If I have an open bottle of sparkling wine, it routinely takes me at least four days to finish it if I don’t have someone else sharing it with me (what can I say, my husband stereotypically prefers beer. On a similar note, this same method has also worked for us with large bottles of beer we didn’t finish in one sitting, like those fancy Belgian-types, for example). If I dangle in a spoon, the wine is still fizzy on all three consecutive extra days when I pour myself a glass.

So, pour yourself a glass of bubbly — and grab a spoon so you can save the rest — because this is a trick worth celebrating.

Coravin wine preservation system

If you’re into gadgets — or maybe you have a friend who is super into wine — then the Coravin Sparkling Sparkling Wine Preservation System ($399) will come to the rescue. It’s flashier, pricier, and all-around extra compared to the silver spoon method. But it too works. Here’s how: the original Coravin Wine Preservation System allows you to pour a glass of wine without actually taking the cork out. This means that the wine inside the bottle never goes bad because it is never exposed to oxygen. It’s a great gadget if you want to have a glass of wine but aren’t planning to finish the bottle within two or three days.

The brand just launched a new version that allows you to open a bottle of sparkling wine, prosecco, or champagne and ensures that it will stay bubbly for up to four weeks. Not four hours or four days. Four *weeks.* The system includes three pieces: a Sparkling Charger, Sparkling Stoppers, and Sparkling CO2 capsules. To use it, open a bottle of champagne and uncork it like you always would. Fill a coupe or flute with as much bubbly as you want. Now the magic happens: place one of the stoppers on the open bottle and lock it in place against the beck of the bottle. “Charge” the stopper using the sparkling charger, which will ensure there is plenty of carbon dioxide inside the bottle. From here, store leftover champagne bottles in the refrigerator for weeks, preserving the airtight cork and preventing flat champagne altogether.

Budget-friendly champagne stopper

If you like the idea of using a gadget to save your champagne, but find that the Coravin is out of your budget, there are plenty of under $20 options. This bestseller from Amazon gets high marks from reviewers.

Coming Supreme Court battle: Moment of reckoning for Biden — and America

We are headed for a reckoning.

Or if you prefer, as George Carlin said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

On Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will reportedly announce his retirement, once again giving a large group of stupid people (better known as congressmen and senators) the ability to lead us into another national apoplectic fit of hair rending and teeth gnashing.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, who successfully kept Barack Obama from seating a justice on the court, recently spoke as one of the key leaders of stupid people in a large group. In answering a reporter’s question about voting rights, and concerns that Republicans are trying to block them, McConnell said, “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

The statement is both factually misleading and racist, and McConnell later amended it. But the damage was done. McConnell, and the large group of supporters who clean his shoes with their eager tongues, continue to drive a wedge into a population that grows both weary and increasingly uncomfortable with the division.

Not to be outdone, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently suggested that members of the Jan. 6 committee should be jailed — meaning not those who committed crimes last January, but those who are investigating those who committed crimes. That, according to Gingrich, is the real crime. And if the Republicans win back the House in the midterms, those arrests might happen. If our culture manages to survive, then in the future we are destined to look at these politicians the same way we look at Homo neanderthalensis.

Facing a growing foreign policy problem with Russia and Ukraine, President Biden spent last weekend at Camp David, apparently to reset and relax. The unrest in Eastern Europe, with a potential long-term commitment of troops to support Ukraine, or the horrifying brevity of a potential apocalyptic war, adds to the scarred national psyche. Biden has done little to calm those concerns.

So the president returned from Camp David to a cacophony of sounds and the stench of a divided country, with little new to report on either his domestic or foreign policy agenda.

The heart of America is seen in microcosm on the trip from the White House to Camp David. It goes through heavily urban areas to the suburbs before reaching where the suburbs go to die before finally entering an overwhelmingly rural countryside populated by small towns filled with shops that always include an antique shop, a gas station, a hardware store and at least one sit-down restaurant. Some also have car dealerships and fast-food joints. Each mile traveled further away from the District of Columbia exposes you to dissipating Democratic influence — leading out from the White House like the ripples from a rock thrown into a still pond.

Until the Trump era, tolerance was still prevalent among the denizens even in the reddest districts. The sourest, meanest, most racist, irascible fan of stupidity had a modicum of decorum in public, whether they were shopping for jeans at Walmart or buying food at the local grocery store.

Call it manners, call it a fear of prosecution — but as recently as five years ago things were much different. Now, everyone appears eager to show their ass in public. That’s led to a thicker sludge of putrescence exploding from the infected boil on the rump of American culture. It has spawned many ignorant hypocrites in Congress and nurtured the infections named McConnell, Jordan and Paul. Nobody will ever go walking up over the hill singing their names the way Dion sang “Abraham, Martin and John.”

Today, with the poison spreading, you can witness people at the grocery store arguing over wearing masks. In some areas these confrontations resemble grade school lunchroom arguments, while in other settings they look more like a WWE smackdown or a scene from “Tombstone.” These people are no daisies. Many are just wound a bit too tight.

This discord makes it difficult for any president to make headway even if he is a master of communication — which Joe Biden definitely isn’t. In this atmosphere the selection of a new Supreme Court justice promises to be as rancorous as vaccination and mask mandates.

* * *

There are two political parties in the United States. One is the Democratic Party, a big-tent conglomeration of people who can’t get along (including former Republicans, who don’t formally belong and may be just visiting). This disparate group shares something in common: a belief in liberty, justice and constitutional principles. The group is diverse politically, racially, socially, sexually and any other way we divide ourselves into smaller groups.

The other party calls itself the Republican Party, but it’s really the fascist party. This party just wants to rule — whether a majority of Americans agree with them or not. What does this party actually stand for? What do they want to do?

In a recent two-hour long press conference that will either go down as a historic and unique attempt to talk to the press, or the high-water mark of embarrassment (depending on which Big Media Voice you pay attention to), President Biden asked that question. Of course, Biden is often criticized for his own trouble communicating with the public — after all, he does a horrible job selling the world on reality, much less his ideas to solve our problems.

He had one great success in his first year in office; getting an infrastructure bill passed with the help of his Republican “friends.” He celebrated the signing of that bill with a crowd of nearly a thousand people on the South Lawn of the White House this fall. But his victory contained the seeds of future failure.

McConnell, whom Biden still calls a friend, leads the Republican Party in a perpetual circle-jerk and hardened his heart after the infrastructure bill. He abhors consensus. He thrives on division and is set on denying Biden any other victories while at the same time blaming him for Congress’ inaction. This has been his agenda for “leading” since he ascended to leadership of his party. Biden was part of the Obama administration and saw this first hand. The question for him this time around is: Why didn’t he see this coming? Biden says things have gotten worse since Obama. No kidding. The insurrection should have told him that. His inability to outmaneuver McConnell and the fascists is perhaps the single greatest cause for concern among those who wish to avoid further division — and seat a new Supreme Court justice.

The senior senator from the Commonwealth of Kentucky is nothing if not consistently ignorant and arrogant. The last time he pulled this stunt, he not only thwarted most of Obama’s agenda, including a Supreme Court nominee, but helped give us Donald Trump — a man McConnell loathes. McConnell is either naïve about the consequences or simply doesn’t care, as long as he can get total control to pack the courts and gerrymander enough districts to successfully press forward a fascist agenda. That saucy little minx flashed us his racist Freudian slip in his recent comment about minority voters. But at the end of the day McConnell doesn’t care. He’s every bit as narcissistic as the former president.

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Which brings us back to Biden’s question: If the Fascist-Republicans have their way, then what do they stand for? What will they do?

By now, it should be obvious. The fascists are for enhancing their stature and power and crushing souls to do it. Pick an issue: Taxes. Race. Voting rights. Unions. Health care. On virtually every issue, they stand in the minority and on the wrong side of history. They want to build walls, both metaphorically and concretely, while trying to convince people that liberty can be obtained by denying it and turning those who have less into human chattel. The cherry on top? Many of them want to do this in the name of almighty GAWD! (Can I get an Amen or a Hallelujah?)

This is no “existential threat” to our country. This is a direct threat. The members of the fascist party stand together and support the “Big Lie.” Some are responsible for planning to overthrow the U.S. government. All of them who fail to speak against it are complicit in the plot.

All that stands in their way from dominating the government is a ragtag group of disgruntled former soldiers of the Empire, and a motley crew of well-meaning do-gooders that include aging hacks, minor criminals, mumbling centrists and bumbling leftists who — while they don’t necessarily like each other — at their core believe in the Constitution to the best of their sometimes limited understanding. Where are Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker? We could use the help.

The United States faces the distinct possibility of consuming itself in a paroxysm of violence, followed by many years of fascism, if current trends continue and the most dire pundits of doom have their way.

But I don’t think it will go down that way.

If you want to really see America, then visit its many diverse neighborhoods. It isn’t a packed house of aging white men with bladder control and erectile dysfunction issues. It is filled with multiracial people of all ages, of many religious backgrounds and national origins and from a variety of socioeconomic groups. And a whole lot of them live in suburbia, where there is a nearby city park with swimming, skateboarding, hiking and miniature golf. The drinking water is clean. There are no potholes in the well-paved roads nearby. Electricity is reliable. Public schools are within walking distance. Food is available day or night. I live in such a neighborhood.

A variety of work opportunities exist for the unskilled and the highest skilled here. My nearby neighbors include an elderly retired woman, living on an assisted income. A young Hispanic couple who do yard and house work live nearby with their three children. One neighbor is nearly my age and experiencing fatherhood for only the second time in his life. The African American gentleman down the street is a scientist, and so is his wife. Their children love Harry Potter. Next door to him lives a Hispanic extended family that owns a small-time plumbing business. My other neighbor is a former hippie redneck who won’t get vaxxed and always smiles at me. We all have a lot in common — we’re just trying to get through the day without a major conflagration.

Every time I look out my window at my neighborhood, I still have hope. I think about the one word Biden uses to describe the United States: “Possibilities.” We remain a land of possibilities — but we face a day of reckoning in the midterm elections that will decide what those look like for many years to come.

Does the majority rule or does a vocal and powerful minority? Do we jail those who violated our Constitution or do we jail those who investigate the crime? How do we build our future?

Though we are a nation of possibilities, some of them are quite grim. Avoiding the worst of them requires focus on a big picture many of us cannot or do not wish to see — and others eagerly anticipate.

The spectacle of picking a new Supreme Court justice, and how that plays out, will be one of the key issues that decide exactly which “possibilities” come to fruition.