At one Texas school, LGBTQ teens call onslaught of hostile laws “matter of life and death”

For 17-year-old Kayla (her name has been changed to protect her identity), coming out is a matter of survival. But faced with the possibility of being kicked out of her home and denied relevant mental health resources at her school, and confronted with mounting anti-LGBTQ policies in Texas, Kayla has decided to keep quiet about her queer identity, leading, she says, to occasional thoughts of suicide.

“There was no one that I could really talk to during this period,” Kayla said. “I didn’t want to become a burden to other people. So just having to sit with those thoughts was definitely not healthy for me. I definitely no longer wanted to live on this earth.”

Crisis calls from Texas teens to the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ adolescents, have shot up by more than 150% in the past year, the organization says. While the spike cannot be attributed to one specific cause, the culture wars targeting queer youth in Texas have escalated — in one recent example, a high school senior in a suburb of Houston faced off against parents over internet access to LGBTQ resources and literature.

Cameron Samuels, a classmate of Kayla’s at Seven Lakes High School in Katy, Texas — a community of about 22,000 directly west of Houston — appeared at a school board meeting last month to ask the district to remove an internet filter on LGBTQ mental health resources, but was drowned out by parents’ calls to remove books with LGBTQ content and their demands to enforce Texas State Rep. Matt Krause’s probe into book titles pertaining to race and sexuality

Samuels, an 18-year-old senior, and other students have collected 1,000 student signatures on a petition calling on the school district to remove a firewall on the high school’s internet service that blocks various kinds of LGBTQ-oriented online resources, including sites related to suicide prevention, and to expand the district’s anti-discrimination and anti-bullying policies to include LGBTQ students.

“It is a matter of life or death,” Samuels said at the December school board meeting, which was streamed on the Katy school board website.

According to its 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, the Trevor Project reported that LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to consider or attempt suicide than their straight peers. Among LGBTQ respondents, 42% reported considering attempting suicide last year, while 94% reported that recent political developments had negatively affected their mental health. Nicholas Turton, communications manager for the organization, reported that more than 14,500 of the 201,000 crisis calls received in 2021 alone were from LGBTQ teens in Texas, a 150% increase compared to the previous year. While the increase in crisis calls cannot be attributed to one specific cause, the Trevor Project noted that transgender and nonbinary youth in Texas have directly stated that they are stressed, using self-harm and considering suicide due to anti-LGBTQ laws being debated (or enacted) in their state.

During the 2021 legislative session, Texas lawmakers introduced 75 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation, including more than 40 bills specifically targeting transgender and nonbinary youth — more than any other state in the U.S.

Aug. 31: The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services removed information for a suicide prevention hotline and legal services for LGBTQ youth from its website.
Sept. 1: Texas House Bill 25, which prohibits transgender youths from participating in school sports teams that align with their gender identity, went into effect, along with HB 3979, which restricts how race is taught in schools.
Oct. 25: Krause launched an investigation potentially leading to the removal of 850 book titles with LGBTQ and antiracist content. This effort has since spread to public libraries in Texas.
Nov. 10: Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to target schools that provide students with materials that include “pornography,” citing books with LGBTQ content.
Nov. 19: The Texas State Board of Education rejected calls to include information on anti-LGBTQ bullying, sexual orientation and gender identity in the health education curriculum.

The state’s efforts to curtail access to LGBTQ resources have also inspired local school board politics.

Parents at the recent Katy Independent School District Board meeting cited explicit sexual content from several books as cause to enforce Krause’s book probe. LGBTQ students responded by saying that their calls to be protected under existing anti-discrimination and anti-bullying policies, to be represented in the curriculum and to access mental health resources are being sexualized. Late last year, the Katy district changed the internet filter blocking LGBTQ mental health resources from “alternative sexual lifestyles” to “human sexuality.”

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“It’s saying that LGBTQ resources such as the Trevor Project are inherently sexual, when in reality, they are not,” said Samuels, the high school senior. “We’ve searched up several websites related to human sexuality, but for straight people. For example, marriage websites, Planned Parenthood, RAINN and all those websites were accessible. So it’s showing that human sexuality is only harmful if it is homosexual.”

“It’s tough to not be able to be fully honest and live as myself to the most important people in my life,” said 18-year-old Grace, another Seven Lakes student who started the petition to remove the internet firewall and didn’t want their identity revealed. “My mental health has suffered in high school. I haven’t been able to access any mental health treatment or therapy,”

During a November Katy district board meeting streamed and posted on the district’s website, parents expressed dismay at what they said were increasing numbers of teens openly identifying as LGBTQ.

“I can’t even recognize this district,” parent Karen Perez said. “I’m asking you, board, what has changed? How does this happen? Look at how our library’s propaganda works on impressionable minds. We need parents on these library committees to vet these books.”

Another parent during a December board meeting called for any materials or discussion dealing with gender and sexuality to be removed from the school curriculum and left up to parental control at home.

“Katy ISD, please stay out of our children’s sexuality,” parent Claudia Turcott said. “The educational system was created for teaching reading, writing, math and science.”

Kayla said that many LGBTQ students do not feel that they can explore issues of their gender and sexuality at home.

“School is often the one safe haven for students,” she said. “Their wifi is being tracked at home or their search history is being tracked. They don’t feel safe looking up resources while at home. I was always taught at home that if you are anything other than straight/heterosexual that you will not go to heaven. I remember a girl had come out to our church group. As soon as she left for the bathroom, our group leader started talking about how gay people are going to hell. It was scary, really. I’m still young, and I’m still dependent on my parents. I can’t risk being kicked out or disowned right now.”

According to the Trevor Project’s study, LGBTQ youth who had at least one LGBTQ-affirming space had a 35% reduced chance of a suicide attempt.

Kayla said that in 2019, the Seven Lakes High principal required students who wanted to participate in the Pride Club and appear in the club’s yearbook photo to have a permission slip signed by their parents. The ensuing fallout led to kids fighting with their parents, the club disbanding and the yearbook adviser resigning, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

“If their goal is to make sure that school is a learning environment for students, it is much easier for students to get by when they know that they are being supported, that they’re not being targeted — not just by the students around them, but also not being targeted by the school administration,” Kayla said.

A month before launching his book probe, Krause, a Republican, had announced his plans to run for state attorney general, but has since dropped out to run for district attorney in Tarrant County instead. Krause hasn’t offered any details on how he compiled his book list. But he is a paid public speaker for the Christian organization WallBuilders, whose stated goal is “educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country and providing information to federal, state, and local officials as they develop public policies which reflect Biblical values, and encouraging Christians to be involved in the civic arena.” WallBuilders founder David Barton has previously said, “The Bible says the law is made to regulate sexual immorality, whether it’s homosexual or whatever.”

Other right-wing political action committees, such as Act in Action, Cherry Tree Republicans, Recover America and the Conservative Coalition of Harris County, have financed the recent wins of conservative candidates in local school boards, including in the Klein, Cypress-Fairbanks and Houston school districts, all in Harris County. (With 4.7 million residents, Harris is the most populous county in Texas and the third most in the entire country.)

The PAC Conservative Republicans of Harris County sent a mailer out to voters in the Cypress-Fairbanks and Houston districts stating that their endorsed candidates “promote biblical marriage” and the principle “‘God created them male and female'” while claiming their opponents “accept, affirm, and celebrate perverted sexual lifestyles and promote pedophilia.”

Since the students at Seven Lakes High delivered their petitions, the Katy Independent School District still hasn’t unblocked district internet access to LGBTQ resources such as the Trevor Project. It has, however, set up an online parental book review.

“The school board listened to those parents,” said Samuels, meaning the parents who complained about library materials, “but then refused to make a comment on our issue. Knowledge is power, and ignorance is also power. It’s so important to have access to information and not block websites or pull books from libraries or censor information. It’s inevitable that some people are going to open up and become part of the LGBTQ community or believe in certain political ideologies. Shutting off that information — that is how these elected officials are trying to protect their power. But they are not in the majority.”

Along with Grace and Kayla, Samuels will graduate from high school this year. Grace looks forward to a more inclusive college environment and for the freedom to come out, saying: “I hope to live and love openly.”

To other LGBTQ teens in Texas who’ve had similar experiences and feel they cannot come out to family, teachers and peers, Grace said: “Know that you are loved, and there will be people in this world who will love you and accept you for who you are. I promise there will come a day where you’ll be able to live as yourself.”

Read more on the GOP pushback against LGBTQ rights:

What do Democrats and Republicans actually believe in 2022? That should decide the midterms

With the Republican Party turning to Trumpism and the Democratic Party returning to their progressive roots, will we have an honest debate this election year in our media?

“What you see is what you get” is an old cliché, but it’s endured all these centuries because there’s so much truth in it. “Don’t listen to what people say, look at what they do” is another truism we can apply to inform us about today’s politics.

The past 40 years have seen three Republican and three Democratic presidencies, and the modern priorities and values of each party are now quite clear.

On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan laid the foundation for George W. Bush and Donald Trump to hand over $10 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires and giant corporations while spending an equal amount on senseless, unwanted and unwinnable wars, leaving us with a $20 trillion national debt.

Trump has since merged the Grand Old Party with the antidemocratic, oligarchic and male/white supremacist values of the pre-Civil War South, leading his followers to proudly fly Confederate flags and strut around with as many large guns as they can carry.

On the Democratic side, there’s been a steady revival of the progressive movement, along with its efforts to lift up working-class and poor Americans while cleaning up the environment and protecting the social safety net.

While the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism for a while, from 1992 until 2016, the majority of elected Democrats today are committed to extending the benefits, freedoms and privileges of citizenship to all Americans, regardless of race, religion or gender identification.

There’s an uncredited meme that’s been floating around the internet in various forms for a while, generally titled “Shocking Things Liberals Believe” that summarizes this:

People who work full time shouldn’t live in poverty
Homelessness shouldn’t exist in the richest country in the world
Women deserve both equal rights and equal pay
Corporations and rich people shouldn’t be able to legally bribe politicians
Trashing the planet for profit is wrong and must stop
Every American should have world-class health care at little or no cost
Free higher education (and quality public schools) unlock human potential which benefits the entire country
Children should learn the true racial history of America so they can empathize with their peers who are still experiencing these problems and grow up to become well-informed adults
Women should make their own medical decisions, not politicians
Massively profitable industries, from oil, coal and gas to Walmart and Amazon, shouldn’t get billions in subsidies and tax breaks
Children shouldn’t fear getting shot at school
When Wall Street banksters steal from us all, and should be imprisoned instead of bailed out
No CEO is worth $100,000 an hour ($20 million a year) or more

It’s actually a pretty reasonable summary of the perspectives and positions of most Democrats who’d describe themselves as liberal or progressive today and, while not descriptive of every elected Democrat, shows the direction the party is moving.

But it immediately provokes the counter-question: Now that Trumpism has taken over the GOP, what do they believe?

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Since the Republican Party stopped publishing a platform or clear positions on issues after the 2016 election, we pretty much have to look at its behavior, but that, at least, have been consistent. Here’s what’s obvious, based on “what they do”:

“Free and fair elections” are for suckers
White men should run the country and the world
Violence is a legitimate tool in politics
Conspiracy theories like the one suggesting Democrats drink children’s blood as an “elixir of youth” are probably true
Rich people and their kids shouldn’t have to pay taxes
More guns mean less crime and fewer deaths
The darker your skin, the more likely you’re a criminal
Leadership is about instilling fear, not vision
Women are men’s property
Climate change and evolution are tricks to take away our freedoms and ruin religion
Education makes people stupid
Going into politics is the ticket to riches and fame
Rich people should make a buck off everything the government does through privatization
Helping people who are going through a rough patch is a waste of time
The “rule of law” only applies to minorities and the poor
Money and power are the only truly important things in life
Teaching the true racial history of America is a plot to make white children feel sad
LGBTQ people don’t deserve respect or rights
Wealth is proof of goodness; poverty is proof of moral failure
“Giving” citizens things like health care, education, family leave, etc. are “socialism” and will destroy “the American way of life”
Government has no right to regulate pollution or protect consumers
“Fiscal responsibility” is a phrase that can justify just about anything

Both are obviously partial lists — an attempt to define our political parties based on their behavior, instead of just their words.

This is an election year, and these differences should be the basis of our national conversation about who leads the country in 2023 and beyond.

Is our “reality TV” news media up to the task of comparing and contrasting the two political parties, and judging the most likely outcomes of the directions they’ve chosen?

It’s going to be a challenge as long as Republicans keep spewing crap like John Kasich saying on CNN last weekend, when discussing the Jan. 6 attack, that “we have seen hatred on both sides.” Or Joe Manchin grandstanding and using long-discredited “but the deficit!” and “but the filibuster!” GOP talking points every time a camera shows up on Capitol Hill.

On the other hand, if enough of us are active in holding our fourth estate to account, particularly on social media, and can amplify truthful messages of compassion, clarity and sanity to our friends and neighbors, perhaps we can actually have a meaningful election year.

Read more on the peril and promise of the 2022 midterms:

The U.S. drops an average of 46 bombs a day: Why should the world see us as a force for peace?

The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.

Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries. That’s an average of 46 strikes per day for 20 years. This endless bombardment has not only been deadly and devastating for its victims but is broadly recognized as seriously undermining international peace and security and diminishing America’s standing in the world.

The U.S. government and political establishment have been remarkably successful at keeping the American public in the dark about the horrific consequences of these long-term campaigns of mass destruction, allowing them to maintain the illusion of U.S. militarism as a force for good in the world in their domestic political rhetoric.

Now, even in the face of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, they are doubling down on their success at selling this counterfactual narrative to the American public to reignite their old Cold War with Russia and China, dramatically and predictably increasing the risk of nuclear war.

The new Airpower Summary data reveal that the United States has dropped another 3,246 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (2,068 under Trump and 1,178 under Biden) since February 2020.

The good news is that U.S. bombing of those three countries has significantly decreased from the over 12,000 bombs and missiles it dropped on them in 2019. In fact, since the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Afghanistan in August, the U.S. military has officially conducted no air strikes there, and only dropped 13 bombs or missiles on Iraq and Syria — although this does not preclude additional unreported strikes by forces under CIA command or control.

Trump and Biden both deserve credit for recognizing that endless bombing and occupation could not deliver victory in Afghanistan. The speed with which the U.S.-installed government fell to the Taliban once the U.S. withdrawal was under way confirmed that 20 years of hostile military occupation, aerial bombardment and support for corrupt governments ultimately served only to drive the war-weary people of Afghanistan back to Taliban rule.

Biden’s callous decision to follow 20 years of colonial occupation and aerial bombardment in Afghanistan with the same kind of brutal economic siege warfare the United States has inflicted on Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela can only further discredit America in the eyes of the world.

There has been no accountability for these 20 years of senseless destruction. Even with the publication of Airpower Summaries, the ugly reality of U.S. bombing wars and the mass casualties they inflict remain largely hidden from the American people.

How many of the 3,246 attacks documented in the Airpower Summary since February 2020 were you aware of before reading this article? You probably heard about the drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians in Kabul in August 2021. But what about the other 3,245 bombs and missiles? Whom did they kill or maim, and whose homes did they destroy?

The December 2021 New York Times exposé of the consequences of U.S. airstrikes, the result of a five-year investigation, was stunning not only for the high civilian casualties and military lies it exposed, but also because it revealed just how little investigative reporting the U.S. media have done on these two decades of war.

In America’s industrialized, remote-control air wars, even the U.S. military personnel most directly and intimately involved are shielded from human contact with the people whose lives they are destroying, while for most of the American public, it is as if these hundreds of thousands of deadly explosions never even happened.

The lack of public awareness of U.S. airstrikes is not the result of a lack of concern for the mass destruction our government commits in our names. In the rare cases we find out about, like the murderous drone strike in Kabul in August, the public wants to know what happened and strongly supports U.S. accountability for civilian deaths.

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So public ignorance of 99% of U.S. air strikes and their consequences is not the result of public apathy, but of deliberate decisions by the U.S. military, politicians of both parties and corporate media to keep the public in the dark. The largely unremarked 21-month-long suppression of monthly Airpower Summaries is only the latest example of this.

Now that the new Airpower Summary has filled in the previously hidden figures for 2020-21, here is the most complete data available on 20 years of deadly and destructive U.S. and allied air strikes.

Numbers of bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the United States and its allies since 2001. (Chart by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies)

Grand Total = 337,055 bombs and missiles.

**Other Countries: Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia.

These figures are based on U.S. Airpower Summaries for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s count of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; the Yemen Data Project’s count of bombs and missiles dropped on Yemen (through September 2021); the New America Foundation’s database of foreign air strikes in Libya and other sources.

There are several categories of air strikes that are not included in this table, meaning that the true numbers of weapons unleashed are certainly higher. These include:

Helicopter strikes: Military Times published a February 2017 article titled, “The U.S. military’s stats on deadly air strikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.” The largest pool of air strikes not included in Airpower Summaries are strikes by attack helicopters. The Army told the authors its helicopters had conducted 456 otherwise unreported air strikes in Afghanistan in 2016. The authors explained that the non-reporting of helicopter strikes has been consistent throughout the post-9/11 wars, and they still did not know how many missiles were fired in those 456 attacks in Afghanistan in the one year they investigated.

AC-130 gunships: The U.S. military did not destroy the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2015 with bombs or missiles, but with a Lockheed-Boeing AC-130 gunship. These machines of mass destruction, usually manned by Air Force special operations forces, are designed to circle a target on the ground, pouring howitzer shells and cannon fire into it until it is completely destroyed. The U.S. has used AC-130s in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Syria.

Strafing runs: Airpower Summaries from 2004 to 2007 included a note that their tally of “strikes with munitions dropped … does not include 20mm and 30mm cannon or rockets.” But the 30mm cannons on A-10 Warthogs and other ground attack planes are powerful weapons, originally designed to destroy Soviet tanks. A-10s can fire 65 depleted uranium shells per second to blanket an area with deadly and indiscriminate fire. But that does not appear to count as a “weapons release” in Airpower Summaries.

“Counter-insurgency” and “counter-terrorism” operations in other parts of the world: The U.S. formed a military coalition with 11 West African countries in 2005, and has built a drone base in Niger, but we have not found any systematic accounting of U.S. and allied air strikes in that region, or in the Philippines, Latin America or elsewhere.

The failure of the U.S. government, politicians and corporate media to inform and educate the American public about the systematic mass destruction wreaked by our country’s armed forces has allowed this carnage to continue largely unremarked and unchecked for 20 years.

It has also left us precariously vulnerable to the revival of an anachronistic, Manichean Cold War narrative that risks even greater catastrophe. In this topsy-turvy, “through the looking glass” narrative, the country that is actually bombing cities to rubble and waging wars that kill millions of people presents itself as a well-intentioned force for good in the world. Then it paints countries like China, Russia and Iran, which have strengthened their defenses largely in order to deter the U.S. from attacking them, as threats to the American people and to world peace.

The high-level talks beginning this week in Geneva between the U.S. and Russia are a critical opportunity, maybe even a last chance, to rein in the escalation of the current Cold War before this breakdown in East-West relations becomes irreversible or devolves into military conflict.

If we are to emerge from this morass of militarism and avoid the risk of an apocalyptic war with Russia or China, the U.S. public must challenge the counterfactual Cold War narrative that U.S. military and civilian leaders are peddling to justify their ever-increasing investments in nuclear weapons and the U.S. war machine.

Read more on U.S. foreign policy and rising global tensions:

Sarah Palin accuses AOC of trying to “pound” sex into Americans’ heads in bizarre rant

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday accused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) of trying to “pound” sex into Americans’ brains during a rambling statement on Fox News.

During the discussion, Palin attacked Ocasio-Cortez for claiming that Republicans are “mad they can’t date me” last week, and she said it was part of a broader left-wing obsession with sexuality.

“And here her obsession, at least her suggestions of, gender and sex even, I truly believe there are enough Americans who get it and understand what her tactic is, and that is to deflect from what the real issues are,” Palin said. “But take this issue, though, with her suggestion of dating and, you know, attraction to someone, and blaming her failures on that, that obsession with sex! Look how the liberals, Rachel, want to pound that into the public’s head!”

Palin would return to the topic of liberals “pounding” sex into Americans’ heads later in the interview.

“All the things that have to do with privacy and sex, the liberals not the conservatives are the ones who pound, pound, pound!” she said.

Watch the video below.

Sarah Palin delivers a speech about liberals want to “pound” sex into people’s heads pic.twitter.com/ZTjecXsY9c

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 11, 2022

The disturbing parallels between the 2020s and 1940s in the U.S.

Editorial Board readers are familiar with my obsession with political time – or how one party and its ideas prevail with a majority of Americans for four or five decades before falling into a period of transition, after which the other party and its ideas prevail.

But most don’t know why I’m obsessed. I’ll tell you. It’s because I have been feeling hopeless. I hate feeling hopeless. Knowing that history isn’t static – knowing that it moves in recurring cycles rather than in a straight line with a beginning and an end – well, that gives me hope. It gives me hope to know, good or bad, nothing stays the same.

These “paradigms” have been for more than a year a regular subject of discussion between me and Jay Weixelbaum. He’s a writer and business historian who’s producing a streaming mini-series about the time a Nazi spy joined US businessmen to toast the fall of France in a Manhattan hotel while a Jewish FBI agent investigated.

Jay’s project is called A Nazi on Wall Street. (You can donate to the cause here.) During our conversation, he explained why he believes we are moving into a new paradigm and how the choices made in the 1940s seem to mirror choices being made in the 2020s. We could have turned fully fascist back then. Let’s hope we don’t do that now.

READ: Prominent QAnon anti-vaxxer who called for Anthony Fauci’s execution dies of COVID-19

In a recent thread, you said the J6 insurrection was a watershed moment between “paradigms.” Can you explain what you mean by “paradigms.” What does J6 have to do with them?

A “paradigm shift” describes a major change in our lives. The term “status quo” describes a time when we have a shared understanding about how politics work, how economics work and how culture works. When a paradigm shift happens, the status quo changes.

Paradigm shifts can take many years, and my belief is that we know we’re in one when it’s not just scholars pointing this out – but when everyone sees it and feels it. January 6 was a moment like that.

Many historians have observed that the Republican Party had been in the business of rejecting democratic ideals since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. They were unwilling to share democracy with people they deemed were less than them.

Watergate was part of this. The 2000 election and the 2016 election were other watershed moments of the GOP’s slide toward a full rejection of American democracy. I see J6 as a culmination.

Can you characterize the paradigm we are leaving and perhaps the one we are entering?

Paradigms are a buildup of chaos in our political, economic and social systems, as unresolved problems feed off each other. In chaotic periods, even small events can have enormous impact. We’re right in the middle of the shift, so it’s hard to see where we are going.

The reason I’m adapting my research on American businessmen working with Nazis in 1940 into a streaming mini-series is because in 1940, it really wasn’t clear which way things were going. That was a paradigm shift, too.

READ: Cult survivor explains how Trump ‘weaponizes’ the ‘us vs. them’ tactics of a ‘cult leader’

We grow up with stories about a triumphant America that won World War II, but in 1940, it wasn’t at all clear how history was going to play out. I want American audiences to understand that, especially as we inevitably look back and reflect on our current moment,

Just as 2020 was a crucial year. I believe 2022 will also decide our fates for the next era, however long it will be. Democrats in Congress are beginning the process of altering the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation this week, which is a direct response to GOP legislatures passing laws to throw out millions of votes they may happen to dislike. Democratic leaders call this a “continuation of January 6.”

That’s crucial, and we don’t know how this will play out.

Another big, unpredictable factor is the pandemic. I think future historians (provided humanity survives) will debate how covid helped push the previous president out of power, particularly his lack of ability to address it effectively.

A third major factor is the midterms. Yes, the previous status quo predicts the party holding the White House to take losses. But if we are headed toward a new status quo, the rules may no longer apply.

Corporate donations to GOP House candidates is about half of what it was. And gerrymandering, while still a major threat to democracy, hasn’t played out as badly as it could have after the 2020 census.

Also, depending on how the Supreme Court rules on reproductive choice, this may dramatically affect turnout.

So there’s still a bunch of unknowns that could have a major impact in this critical turning point.

When did this start? With the white backlash against civil rights?

The civil rights era and feminism in particular, as well as a hostility to the New Deal, animated the right. They built up religious and allegedly libertarian factions in the 1970s that coalesced in the “Reagan Revolution,” which could then be escalated for four decades.

History is always events leading to and from each other. There are certainly antecedents in the 1920s and 1930s GOP. It was taking money from literal Nazi spies in order to try to sweep FDR out of power.

Our government knew this was happening. There was an intense and often unseen struggle to fight back against this Nazi-American rightwing coalition.

Is this the 1940s fork in the road you were talking about?

Yes, precisely. Like with other paradigm shifts, there were years of building to this point, and years of aftermath. Nazi spies were operating in the US in the 1930s. The FBI was tasked with tracking them down. Meanwhile, US companies had businesses operating within Nazi Germany.

Beyond these lesser known activities, rightwing groups and personalities espoused the Nazi cause to millions of Americans. Many Americans found this ideology enticing. It’s easy to blame immigrants for problems; many Americans believed the US should stay out of European affairs; some Americans were sympathetic to Germany post-World War I. The radio priest, Charles Coughlin, broadcast these views to millions. He was kind of the Rush Limbaugh of his day.

Nazi influence in the US culminated with a huge march and rally in New York City in 1939. Thousands gathered in Madison Square Garden to listen to blatantly fascist speeches under the banners of George Washington adorned with swastikas.

In 1940, FDR gave a fresh directive to hunt down Nazis. The FBI built a secret spy headquarters inside the 30 Rock building to spy on Nazi activities worldwide, but especially in South America where they could get raw materials a war machine needs to be effective.

Without recapping the story of WWII, FDR was reelected, despite Nazi groups funneling money into Charles Lindbergh’s campaign. FDR started providing aid to Britain and preparing for war against fascism. Thus, the paradigm shift started to turn on the events of 1940.

The president pinned blame for J6 on Trump. No sitting president in my lifetime came within an inch of calling his predecessor a traitor. That seems like an indicator of paradigm shifting no?

Absolutely. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this since at least the Civil War. The evidence is so overwhelming, I think Biden was on safe political ground to take off the gloves.

It’s also important to point out that fascist violence often starts with the war on the truth. Biden was making a clear point to push back on fascist lies.

I’d call the Republicans’ sabotage of pandemic recovery a form of fascist violence, but that’s just me.

I think that’s also a fair observation. Fascism is unsustainable as a form of government. It’s inherently irrational and destructive. It’s an extreme form of populism based on emotions – feelings of grievance, more specifically. That’s an inherently unstable foundation to attempt to run a society.

Economies need stability. Political regimes need economic stability to stay viable long-term. But fascists don’t care about the long term. They care about feeding grievance addictions. They build policy around that.

Perhaps this ties into your observation about “civil war.” It would take sacrifice of an order that most people would reject.

Exactly. I think the potential for violence and destruction is great. But I don’t see that as long term, because people won’t tolerate a consumer economy being interrupted so drastically by violence and disruption.

Scholars of Nazi Germany saw this. Just below their fake bravado, the Nazis were terrified about economic problems. We’ll never know how the Nazi regime might have worked if it hadn’t made foolish military choices, but it’s pretty clear that things were quite unstable.

I think the Republican Party has been able to lean toward anti-democracy and fascism precisely, because it still rested on a liberal democratic order. Take that away and it’s a new status quo

Agree. It’s parasitic.

Yes! Fascism is a parasite on liberal democracy, but it can kill its host. Then all bets are off on how long it will survive.

What would tell you the coming midterms are different from previous midterms?

Preserving democracy is a key policy issue. It will be a particular policy point discussed in numerous midterm campaigns. Typically it’s healthcare, guns, climate, etc. Democracy as policy is a new norm.

Telling people that they need to vote now or they won’t be able to depend on the vote in the future is pretty drastic and I’d argue a new development. We saw it in 2020. It’ll be here for 2022.

Supreme Court weighs Biden’s workplace vaccine requirements, things get messy

The Supreme Court on Friday took up one of the most contentious issues of the covid-19 pandemic, hearing a series of cases challenging the Biden administration’s authority to require workers to get a covid vaccine or be tested for the virus regularly.

The issue in the cases, which challenge rules set in November by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is not directly whether the rules are legal but whether they can take effect while the cases are heard in detail by courts of appeals. The arguments lasted more than 3½ hours. A decision by the justices is expected within days.

The OSHA rule says that businesses with more than 100 employees must require their workers to either be vaccinated or wear masks and undergo weekly testing. The CMS rule requires that health care workers in facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding be vaccinated, recognizing that they work with vulnerable patients.

Lower courts have split on whether the federal government has the authority to issue such rules and whether they can take effect while the cases are argued. Although the Supreme Court has generally upheld state-level vaccine requirements, whether it will allow the federal government to impose such rules isn’t clear.

“It’s not our role to decide public health questions,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said. “But it is our role to decide who should decide.”

Notably, Friday’s arguments were held in a Supreme Court chamber with even stricter anti-covid rules than those at issue. The court is closed to most members of the public, masks are required for everyone other than the justices, and lawyers and journalists must maintain physical distance and have negative tests. As the omicron variant surges in Washington, D.C., Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes, opted to participate remotely from her chambers at the court. Also participating remotely were two of the six lawyers, including Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers, who tested positive for covid after having a mild case over the holidays.

Conservative members of the court pressed lawyers about whether the administration overstepped its authority in issuing the rules, while some of the liberal justices grilled the rules’ opponents on why the government should not move quickly and forcefully when faced with a massive public health issue. But how the justices might rule wasn’t clear from the questions they asked.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wondered why few hospitals or nursing homes are protesting the CMS rule for health care workers. “Where are the regulated parties complaining about this regulation?” he asked the state officials who have sued to block the rule.

Lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the federal government has ample power to protect worker safety in issuing its rule, which is technically an emergency standard. “This lies in the heartland of OSHA’s regulatory authority,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices.

Similarly, in the CMS case, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher told the court that “requiring medical staff vaccination during a pandemic falls squarely within the [Health and Human Services] secretary’s authority to protect the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients.”

Those challenging the rules, however, argued that although states and individual employers may impose such rules, the federal government cannot. If the OSHA rule takes effect, said Scott Keller, representing the National Federation of Independent Business, “workers will quit.”

That is even more likely in the case of the CMS rule, which does not have a testing option, said Jesus Osete, deputy attorney general of Missouri. “Rural America will face an immense crisis,” he said. “This mandate will close the doors of many of these rural facilities and will effectively deprive our citizens of health care.”

The rules are strongly supported by public health organizations and many medical groups. Opponents are “wrong on the science, they’re wrong on the medicine, and they’re wrong on the law,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told reporters in a conference call earlier in the week.

But business groups argue that employers cannot keep their doors open with such sweeping mandates in place. “If employers require vaccination, they will suffer the wrath of their workforce that refuses, for whatever reasons, to get vaccinated,” said the NFIB’s brief. On the other hand, should employers opt for the testing requirement, the brief said, “in a historically tight labor market, they will be unlikely to pass those costs on to employees without losing them (and in some states and situations they will be prohibited from doing so by law).”

The cases on the OSHA rule are National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor and Ohio v. Department of Labor. The cases involving the CMS rule are Biden v. Missouri and Becerra v. Louisiana.

Can dynamic pricing reduce food waste in supermarkets?

Imagine if the price of a tub of yogurt, gallon of milk or loaf of bread dropped a little each week as the expiration date neared. Wasteless, an Israeli-based startup, is making it happen with their artificial intelligence (AI)-powered dynamic pricing tool.

Oded Omer, CEO of Wasteless, believes that applying dynamic pricing — an algorithm that determines when to reduce the price of perishables depending on their date label — could lead to an uptick in sales and keep expired items from being tossed in the trash.

“We know that markdowns can reduce waste,” he says. “What supermarkets [need is] guidance on when the markdowns should be applied and the [amount] of the markdowns.”

Food waste in supermarkets

The goal of dynamic pricing and other similar solutions is to help supermarkets cut down on the 10.5 million tons of surplus food generated at the retail level each year. And it works.

After launching in Madrid in 2017, and expanding across Europe to an additional 40 outlets, Wasteless has seen success with their dynamic pricing tool. Data from pilot stores is impressive: Supermarkets that introduced the technology experienced 32.8% reductions in food waste and 6.3% increases in revenues from food that was sold instead of tossed.

It’s a different approach to supermarket food waste. Supermarkets generally donate surplus to local food banks, or ship it to composting facilities, small farms for animal feed, or anaerobic digesters, where it is converted into biogas. An uptick in the number of “salvage supermarkets,” where items near or past expiration dates are offered at deep discounts, also helps keep food out of landfills.

Slow Road to Zero, research done by the Center for Biological Diversity ranking supermarkets on their waste reduction efforts, noted increased efforts to track food waste in their 2019 report, with major grocery chains implementing new purchasing strategies, such as forecasting, and ordering tools to help achieve their zero food waste goals.

While the report found that only three of the 10 largest grocery chains have committed to achieving zero waste, some stores are making inroads.

Walmart, for instance, developed a tool called Eden, a self-described intelligent food system which uses a “freshness algorithm” to help associates better care for perishable items, increasing their shelf life. Grocers like Ralphs, Kroeger and Target use Shelf Engine, a demand planning tool using AI to help grocers optimize purchasing to avoid waste. To date, the Seattle-based startup estimates the technology has diverted 547 tons of food waste from the landfill.

The problem with expiration dates

A key issue with food waste management in supermarkets is the confusion surrounding sell-by, expiration and use-by date labels.

“There is no universal means for actually selecting the date that gets printed upon a label,” says Brian Roe, professor of agricultural and resource economics at The Ohio State University. “Those dates are typically chosen based on what the manufacturer thinks is going to be the date after which the quality of the product will decline in terms of your aesthetic preferences and when it may start to smell funny or taste bad . . . but there are no physiological risks.”

Aside from the date labels on infant formula, which must adhere to strict federal regulations, expiration dates are a mere suggestion. Food labeling is voluntary and producers tend to be conservative because conditions in grocery stores may not be ideal. Despite the various meanings and vagueness of these labels, they are what most consumers use to make decisions about whether to buy, keep or toss food.

Knowing this, the common practice at most grocery stores is to remove food by their sell-by dates, leading to additional and unnecessary waste.

A survey conducted by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic found that more than one-third of respondents usually or always tossed food that was past the date on the label while 84% reported doing so occasionally. In his research, Roe found that the discard rate for milk with printed expiration dates was 40% higher than the rate for milk with no expiration date on the packaging.

“By taking the date off, people really then sniffed and looked at the milk and thought about it more seriously and typically would waste less,” he says.

When consumers understand that expiration dates are related to subjective standards of freshness and not an indication that food has rotted or spoiled, it translates to higher consumption of “expired” food, less food waste and bigger savings on food bills (from not tossing out of date foods and purchasing new, fresher replacements). They are also more likely to buy foods with dates closer to their sell-by one, actions that can trickle down to behavior change in supermarkets, as stores see they can keep items on the shelves longer, reducing waste.

Reducing food waste by pricing for quality

The concept of dynamic pricing is not new: It’s used in airlines and ride sharing apps (and also known as surge pricing or demand pricing) but it’s not common in supermarkets — yet.

Companies like Wasteless, GK Software and Date Check Pro created dynamic pricing tools that use algorithms to calculate discounts, dropping the price on perishable foods incrementally until the expiration date. It’s a shift from the current model where grocers apply discount stickers the day before items expire, which Wasteless’s Omer calls, “a broken system of markdowns.”

Although it could be an effective tool in the fight against food waste, dynamic pricing isn’t easy to implement in supermarkets. Current barcodes are one of the biggest barriers, according to Robert Sanders, assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego.

“Most retailers don’t have a high-quality, real time inventory system and, even when they do, it doesn’t track expiration dates. Instead, it just tracks the SKUs,” he explains. “So, they might know how much [product] is on their shelves but they don’t know when it expires.”

The solution is to transition from the universal product code or UPC to a GS1 barcode that contains extended product information, including expiration dates. The stores in the Wasteless pilot program use GS1 codes. This change, Sanders adds, needs to happen at the manufacturing level, not in stores, so there is an additional layer of buy-in required higher up the food chain to adopt dynamic pricing in supermarkets.

Even so, The Ohio State University’s Roe believes dynamic pricing can still be an important food waste management tool.

“Ideally, if you’re trying to reduce waste, you would do studies [to determine the window for quality] and push that date to the end of that quality plateau . . . rather than trying to do dynamic pricing,” Roe says. “For products where there’s a quick drop off in quality and you need to move them pretty quickly, dynamic pricing might solve a couple of problems: It might recover some revenue streams from products that would normally have to be donated or tossed, so there can definitely be some win-wins in there for certain product categories.”

Wasteless’s Omer admits that dynamic pricing is more effective for certain products: Chicken thighs are more apt to be snapped up at a discount close to their expiration date than lower value products like bread. It also packs a bigger punch when it’s used as part of a multi-pronged strategy to reduce food waste, he explains.

Markdowns are not sufficient,” he says. “[But] the combination of markdown optimization and supply chain optimization, an option that works upstream at the distribution centers and manufacturers . . . can slash the billions of dollars of waste we have in the supermarkets.”

Moving forward

As companies continue to work on AI-based food waste management solutions, there are also ongoing efforts being made to help counter the confusion and misunderstanding around date labels. The Zero Food Waste Act was introduced in Congress in July, with the goal of passing legislation that supports better food waste management infrastructure which would reduce waste and curb greenhouse gas emissions. Passing the legislation is a critical step in the Food Waste Reduction Action Plan, a blueprint for reducing food waste that includes a call to require a national date labeling standard.

Trading Partner Alliance, an industry group that includes the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute, is one of the organizations lobbying to standardize date labeling. Their research supports the use of “best if used by” to indicate that food is still safe to purchase and consume even if past the printed date. A 2019 report found that enacting standardized federal labeling legislation could divert an estimated 398,000 tons of delicious, healthy food from the landfill.

As Wasteless’s Omer admits, dynamic pricing won’t work alone. But with a better labeling system in place, it’s possible that AI-powered tools like Wasteless, Date Check Pro, Shelf Engine, Eden and GK Software can also be part of an IT ecosystem where machine learning helps coordinate purchasing, inventory management and dynamic pricing to help grocers reduce the amount of wasted food and achieve zero waste goals.

“Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” gets flipped-turned upside down … as a drama: Watch the trailer

Now this is a story all about how
A show got flipped-turned upside down

If you thought the November 2020 reunion special was the last time TV would revisit “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” you did not dream big enough. The classic ’90s sitcom – starring Will Smith as a street-smart teen who goes to live with his wealthy aunt and uncle in Los Angeles – returns this year with a reboot, simply titled “Bel-Air.”

However, instead of the wacky antics and Carlton dances of the original series, the reboot will approach the subject matter as a serious drama.

In Morgan Cooper’s remake, Will — played by newcomer Jabari Banks — escapes a dangerous confrontation at a basketball court and leaves his hometown of West Philadelphia to go live with his wealthy Uncle Phil and Aunt Vivian in Bel-Air. The series delves into Will’s conflicting search for identity and purpose.

“This town will try to make you forget who you are and where you came from. Don’t let it do that,” says Will’s best friend Jazz (Jordan L. Jones) in the opening shot of the trailer.

Upon his arrival, Will marvels at the sheer grandness of his uncle and aunt’s luxurious estate and is greeted by their stern butler, Geoffrey (Jimmy Akingbola). Will reunites with his cousins — Hilary (Coco Jones), Ashley (Akira Akbar) and Carlton (Olly Sholotan) before attending private school and gaudy house parties alongside Carlton. But along the way, Will struggles to adjust to the affluent yet ostracizing lifestyle.

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“We have a different set of rules here, OK?” Carlton informs Will. “If you want to do well, just keep your head down and follow my lead.”

It’s up to Will to determine whether he’ll use his one shot at a second chance to fit in like the rest or embrace his differences and stand out in his own way.

Smith returns as an executive producer on “Bel-Air,” which is based on Cooper’s viral fan-made trailer of the sitcom, alongside executive producers Quincy Jones, Benny Medina and the original series creators Andy and Susan Borowitz.

“Bel-Air” premieres Friday, Feb. 18 on Peacock. Watch the trailer for it below via YouTube.

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“Yellowjackets” unapologetically follows YA logic, from the Big Dance to bitter betrayals

He would be a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy who ran the school lit magazine . . . We were going to be like, full rivals until we weren’t.”

Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) confesses this to Taissa (Tawny Cypress), imagining what their lives could have been, who they might have loved, as she makes up a bed for Taissa to sleep over beneath a poster that reads “KEEP CALM. You can still MARRY HARRY.“

This could be a scene from a bestselling Young Adult novel, but it’s from “Yellowjackets,” the Showtime series about what happens when a small plane carrying a high school girls’ soccer team crashes in a remote, mountainous area with no rescue in sight. What happens is (a dwindling amount of) people stop being polite and start getting real. Also, cannibalism.

“Yellowjackets” has been, from the beginning, unapologetically teen. And not “Sweet Valley High” teen with “easy” Annie on the cheerleading squad and oh no, Todd got a motorcycle — but drinking in the liquor store parking lot and taking medication on a breakfast tray teen. When the majority of the cast are adolescent girls, there are going to be scenes of journals and parties. But “Yellowjackets” has taken it deeper and darker with scenes of menstruation and a home abortion attempt.

Being a teen girl is rough. Surviving childhood is visceral, raw, and hard, even if you don’t have to shoot and butcher your own wild game. At the time the girls in “Yellowjackets” were growing up in the mid-’90s — and to a different extent, now — you were also maligned, simply for the fact of existing, having a body.

In 1996, the year the Yellowjackets were heading to nationals in Seattle, we were three years away from Britney Spears. Mariah Carey and Celine Dione topped the charts. I saw my first concert at the Coliseum in Columbus (Tori Amos; my friend Brad’s dad drove us, and waited in the van for us the entire show), and Fiona Apple released her first album “Tidal.” The 18-year-old, who had struggled with an eating disorder after being raped at age 12, felt pressure to look and act a certain way in her first music video. The New Yorker labeled her “underfed” while the New York Times called her “a Lolita-ish suburban party girl.”

John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and Michael Crichton made the bestseller lists, but books for young adults were a smaller but growing category. We were just a few years away from “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games.” I devoured all of Christopher Pike, pulpy teen horror books with florescent covers I had to hide from my mom. After winning a writing contest awarded by the writer Richard Peck, who was unflaggingly supportive of a young writer, I read all of his novels too.

Many were “single issue” YA books, stories that dealt with a deadbeat dad or surviving rape — but I had never read such real, intense, teen issues before. You could write about what happens to you? As a teen girl — many of Peck’s compelling narrators were young women — your story could matter?

In the years since, YA has become big business, selling 5 million books in 2013 to a whopping 10 million books last year, with many attributing the jump in YA title sales to Book TikTok. In 1996, the year the plane of “Yellowjackets” never makes it to nationals, the YA book “The Thief” by Meg Whalen Turner was a bestseller, and while the girls in the blue and gold may not have read other teen hits of that year (I know in my school we were much more likely to be assigned “Lord of the Flies” than anything by any living writer), the show certainly uses the logic of YA novels.

A central tenet of writing for children or teens? Get adults out of the way. Adults are useless, and nothing slows a story down faster than parental units. Growing up, most of my favorite novels centered orphans: “Anne of Green Gables,” “Emily of New Moon,” “The Boxcar Children.” “Yellowjackets” applies this tenet with the plane crash that swiftly dispatches almost all of the adults. The lone adult survivor, Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) loses a leg in the accident, and while he gamely does his best on a makeshift crutch, he has limited mobility and influence. As Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) defiantly and rhetorically asks him, when he says he forbids her from flying an ancient seaplane out of the forest, “What are you going to do to stop me, Coach?”

Laura Lee believes she’s The One, the singular and unlikely person chosen to save them all, a trope familiar to readers of “Harry Potter,” “The Hunger Games,” “Percy Jackson,” and a whole library’s worth of literature for young people. She was saved herself from drowning and saved in the religious sense — for this very moment, she believes, her “purpose.” But things don’t work out the way she plans.

Some of the most popular YA has a little romance, and if you think that’s not going to happen in a group with only one older teen boy (Kevin Alves as Travis), you would be wrong. It may be, as Sunday’s episode “Doomcoming” shows us, a sort of mushroom-induced romantic frenzy that gets the group into cannibalism in the first place, like the worst performance of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” ever.

From goalkeeper Van (who wasn’t asked to the dance before the crash, like she cares) played by Liv Hewson, finding what appears to be pretty intense, true love with teen Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) to Misty’s (Samantha Lynne Hanratty) nauseating and one-sided crush on Coach, love is the air, along with probably snow. “Yellowjackets” has one of the most classic YA romance plots: enemies to lovers as Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis physically compete to be the hunter for the group. It’s a slippery slope from a shooting match along the lines of the film “The Favourite,” to angrily then grudgingly working together, then to making out in the wreckage of a plane.

The show also has the traditional love triangle seen in YA from “Twilight” to “City of Bones.” Maybe in “Yellowjackets” it’s more of a love rhombus — I wouldn’t know; I was reading “The Clan of the Cave Bear” behind my textbook during Geometry — but we have the ghostly shadow of a love triangle between Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Jackie (Ella Purnell), and Jeff (Jack DePew) back home.

Then, once Jackie discovers through reading Shauna’s diaries that her best friend was sleeping with her boyfriend (in a car! So YA!), we have a love triangle between Jackie, Travis and Natalie, as Jackie tries to somehow punish Shauna and Jeff in absentia by dynamiting an entirely different couple. In a sense, we also have a love triangle between Misty, Coach, and Coach’s boyfriend Paul, at least in Misty’s mind. Poor Paul.

Speaking of Coach and Misty, here we have the classic YA plot of fake dating. You may know it from Jenny Han’s book “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” which was turned into a Netflix series of films starring Lana Condor. In “Yellowjackets,” Coach pretends to return Misty’s feelings for him in order to avoid being poisoned by her again. Good luck with that.

A big part of the penultimate episode is THE BIG DANCE. Some “Sweet Valley High” books were literally written about this one event. The girls discover Mari (Alexa Barajas) has been letting some berries rot into homemade wine. “If we have booze, let’s have a party,” Jackie reasons. “We have dresses, we have booze. We can decorate.” Teens need little more than that to throw a rager, especially with no mom or dad at home at the cabin.

“We’ll drink rotten berries and celebrate our impending death,” Jackie says with the enthusiasm of Ohio University undergrads, who once threw a series of house parties called Fugitive Fest after classes were canceled due to an armed bank robber on campus. The full moon approaches after all, and that the girls know this and know it is a cause for celebration hints at their feral unraveling.

Liv Hewson as Teen Van and Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa in “Yellowjackets” (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)

In “Doomcoming,” dubbed so by slyly brilliant Lottie (Courtney Eaton), the girls get to decorating for their dance like the high schoolers they are, twisting twigs and leaves into stark decorations, making themselves up from the Caboodles they packed. The event itself is strangely beautiful and, before it gets chaotic, sad. The girls, in dresses they brought for an awards dinner they will never attend, enter under streamers made from rags. Taissa has crafted matching “Phantom of the Opera” type masks for Van and herself, so Van, severely scarred from the wolf attack that nearly killed her, feels more comfortable.

You can be who you are in the woods. You can love who you love. You can be something else too, as the girls, led by Van’s primal scream of anguish, join in on the howls of approaching wolves. If you can’t beat them, join them. Shrooms will help.

And groups, we know from books like William Golding’s probably-should-be-considered-YA tome and from life, are capable of doing terrible things.

Trauma often freezes you in time, at the age you were when it happened. Take adult Shauna’s journals, still kept and guarded by her after all these years; adult Misty’s cartoonish-themed scrubs and child-like appearance. And the whole adult group’s immature reactions. When Natalie (Juliette Lewis) can’t get candy out of a vending machine, she throws a fire extinguisher through it. When Misty (Christina Ricci) witnesses Natalie about to use again, ride or die Misty (emphasis on die) busts in and takes the drugs herself.

And when a man hurts her, betrays her trust, Shauna literally turns into the child she was, Lynskey’s character flashing back into Nélisse. It’s scared teen Shauna that stabs him, not the adult who actually does the deed. It makes sense that YA and its many emotion-heavy threads would find its way into “Yellowjackets” — that stories for teens, about teens, would be the rules, unspoken or not, this story runs on.

Like the end of one of my beloved Christopher Pike books, where multiple teens are dead but the others move gamely on, adult Misty dismisses her time in the wilderness in typical chipper, detached fashion. “It wasn’t so bad,” Misty says. “We were all friends.”

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Yale, Brown, Columbia and 13 others colleges sued over collusion to limit financial aid for students

A lawsuit brought on Sunday alleges that over a dozen top universities, including several Ivy League schools, have for nearly two decades colluded to limit their financial aid provisions for students.

The suit, filed in an Illinois federal court, accuses the schools of participating in a “a price-fixing cartel that is designed to reduce or eliminate financial aid … and that in fact has artificially inflated the net price of attendance for students receiving financial aid.”

Among the schools named are Yale, Georgetown, Northwestern, Columbia, Brown and Duke universities. Others include California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, and Cornell, Emory, Rice, and Vanderbilt universities.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawyers representing five plaintiffs speculate that over 170,000 students who received financial aid spanning 18 years could be eligible to join the suit as plaintiffs. The defendants, the complaint alleges, have overcharged these students by “at least hundreds of millions of dollars.”

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A federal antitrust law exemption allows colleges to freely exchange their student aid formulas so long as they do not condition aid on financial need, noted the Journal. But according to the suit, many of the aforementioned schools do account for students’ financial constraints, bringing their eligibility for this exemption into question.

“Under a true need-blind admissions system, all students would be admitted without regard to the financial circumstances of the student or student’s family,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Far from following this practice, at least nine Defendants for many years have favored wealthy applicants in the admissions process. These nine Defendants have thus made admissions decisions with regard to the financial circumstances of students and their families, thereby disfavoring students who need financial aid.”

It isn’t the first time that the higher education system has been accused of infringing on anti-trust law, the Journal noted. Back in 1991, all eight Ivies and MIT were charged with price-fixing for allegedly discussing their student aid provisions amongst one another.

Three years later, Congress passed a law allowing only need-blind schools to share and abide by a set of pricing guidelines dictating how much students should receive in aid. The law was advantageous for universities because it allowed them to avoid “bidding wars” for low-income students.

Alec Baldwin shuts down claims that he’s not complying with ongoing “Rust” shooting investigation

Alec Baldwin took to Instagram on Saturday to shut down claims that he’s not complying with the ongoing “Rust” shooting investigation. Back in December of 2021, investigators obtained a search warrant for the actor’s smartphone to search for messages, calls and other exchanges regarding the film’s production. According to the New York Times, Baldwin still hasn’t turned over his phone.

“Any suggestion that I am not complying with requests or orders or demands or search warrants about my phone, that’s bulls**t,” the “30 Rock” star said in his video post. “That’s a lie.” He further emphasized that he is “one thousand percent going to comply” with the investigation.

In October of last year, Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza with a prop gun while filming on the set of the suspended Western film “Rust.” The shooting, which took place at Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe County, is currently being investigated by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and the New Mexico First Judicial District Attorney.

“There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours,” Baldwin said in a Twitter statement released the morning after the incident. “I’m fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred and I am in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.”

In a sit-down interview with George Stephanopoulos, Baldwin claimed that he was unaware that the gun had been loaded.

“Everyone was shocked. . . . The gun was supposed to be empty. I was told I was handed an empty gun. She goes down, I thought to myself, did she faint?” he explained. “The notion that there was a live round in that gun did not dawn on me until 45 minutes or an hour later.” After speaking with officials from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, Baldwin found out that the gun was loaded with a live round.

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In his recent Instagram post, Baldwin added that handling the warrant “takes time,” especially when it’s being dealt between authorities of two different states — New Mexico and New York, where Baldwin lives.

“This is a process where one state makes the request of another state,” he said. “Someone from another state can’t come to you and say, ‘Give me your phone.’ Give me this give me that.’ They can’t do that. They’re going to go through the state you live in.”

Before concluding his message, Baldwin expressed his desire to continue with the investigation and ultimately, unearth the truth.

“The best way, the only way, we can honor the death of Halyna Hutchins is to find out the truth. I have no worries about that. That’s all going to work itself out, regardless of what they say in these right-wing rag sheets.”

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“Pose” star Michaela Jaé Rodriguez makes history as first transgender actress to win a Golden Globe

During Sunday’s Golden Globes, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez took home the award for best performance by an actress in a television series-drama and became the first trans performer to win a Golden Globe. Rodriguez won the award for her role as Blanca Evangelista — the strong-willed nurturer of House Evangelista — in the final season of the acclaimed FX series “Pose.”

“This is the door that is going to Open the door for many more young talented individuals,” Rodriguez shared in an Instagram post celebrating her win. “They will see that it is more than possible. They will see that a young Black Latina girl from Newark New Jersey who had a dream, to change the minds others would WITH LOVE. LOVE WINS.” Rodriguez also praised her fellow nominees: Uzo Aduba, Jennifer Aniston, Christine Baranski and Elisabeth Moss.

In the summer of 2021, Rodriguez initially made history after becoming the first transgender actress to secure an Emmy nomination in a lead acting category — also for her performance as Blanca.

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“Pose,” which premiered in summer 2018, centers on New York City’s underground African-American and Latino queer and gender-nonconforming drag ball culture. The series features a diverse cast of transgender performers, including stars Angelica Ross, Hailie Sahar, Indya Moore and Dominique Jackson.

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In previous years, the “Pose” stars have been vocal about the show’s lack of award recognition despite its critical acclaim and praise regarding trans representation.

“Something abt trans ppl not being honored on a show abt trans ppl who created a culture to honor ourselves bc the world doesn’t,” tweeted Moore — who plays Angel Evangelista — in response to the show’s 2020 Emmy nomination snub. “Let’s call it cognitive cissonance.”

During this year’s Golden Globes, “Pose” was nominated for a best television series-drama award alongside “Lupin,” “The Morning Show,” “Squid Game” and “Succession.” Billy Porter was also nominated for the best actor category for his role as Prayerful “Pray” Tell on the show.

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Jen Psaki smacks down Fox News reporter’s bogus vaccination talking points

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday easily shredded Fox News reporter Peter Doocy’s criticisms of President Joe Biden for calling the COVID-19 pandemic a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

At the start of his question, Doocy noted that both he and Psaki had come down with cases of COVID-19 even though both of them had received both vaccinations and booster shots against the virus.

“You’re triple-vaxed, still got COVID,” said Doocy. “Why is the president still referring to this as a pandemic of the unvaccinated?”

Psaki didn’t hesitate to take a hatchet to this argument.

“Well I think, Peter, that there’s a significant difference,” she said. “I had been triple-vaxxed. I had minor symptoms. There is a huge difference between that and being unvaccinated. You are 17 times more likely to go to the hospital if you’re unvaccinated, 20 times more likely to die.”

In fact, data released by New York hospitals late last month shows Psaki may be understating the situation, as they revealed unvaccinated people in the Empire State are 32 times more likely to require hospitalization after contracting COVID-19.

Watch the video below.

Fox News’ Doocy: “I’m triple-vaxed … You’re triple-vaxed, still got COVID. Why is the president still referring to this as a pandemic of the unvaccinated?”

WH Press Sec. Psaki: “You are 17x more likely to go to the hospital if you’re unvaccinated, 20x more likely to die.” pic.twitter.com/hPcxWGCdfX

— The Recount (@therecount) January 10, 2022

If Congress can pass it, Build Back Better could be a second “Green New Deal”

As Democrats continue discussions with Senator Manchin about a trimmed-down Build Back Better Act, we should recognize that whatever does get enacted, the Biden Administration is trying to pass a version 2.0 of the Green New Deal.

The media — and most of Washington — has decided that the Green New Deal failed. Certainly the formal resolution that embodied its boldest objectives never came close to enactment or even Presidential endorsement. What remains is the essence of the Green New Deal: the marriage between a federal budget with economy-transforming green investments, and a social and environmental regulatory safety net. That’s the ideal combination Roosevelt stumbled into, and which Biden is currently being nudged towards.

How substantially America — and the global climate — are altered by this combination will be determined not only by the scale of Build it Back Better as it emerges, but also the boldness of the second, regulatory phase of Biden climate ambitions. Again, it is the marriage between these two thrusts that will shape the scale and success of the Second Green New Deal.

As David Robert pointed out in his 2021 annual review in Volts, 2021 will be the legislative highwater mark of the Biden first term for climate — for a long time to come. Roberts seems certain of this. Politics is, from my experience, too volatile to make such long-term predictions – but I agree that climate strategy must indeed be based on the premise that Congress is not going to do much more for climate action during the next five years, critical as they are to climate survival. Build Back Better, in whatever form, is the pivot point.

But I definitely differ with Roberts in his lament that such ongoing Congressional gridlock means that “those of us hoping for climate progress will have to forget about first-best solutions and begin thinking in terms of guerrilla actions, in states, cities, and the private sector. That’s a very different mindset than the push for a centralized solution.”

Well, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t achieve his victories with a centralized solution either. His biggest environmental success — cutting soil erosion in the Dust Bowl in half in five years — was the product of the Soil Conservation Service, which almost never gets mentioned in narratives of the 1930s.

Biden calls this “all of government.” It is a different mindset. But not necessarily a defensive one (guerillas are almost never on the defense – ask Mao) nor a less ambitious one. The Obama Administration offered the Clean Power Plan (CPP) as its centralized power sector solution. Courts and Congress entirely neutered it. Other forms of regulatory and community action, however, including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emission limits on other pollutants, achieved the emission reduction goals of the CPP a full decade earlier than Obama envisaged.

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A frozen Congress does not necessarily mean a frozen federal government. The Biden Administration has devoted most of its climate regulatory efforts thus far to undoing Trump rollbacks. There are obvious, and potent, standards Biden’s EPA, Department of Energy, and Department of the Interior could set – but have not yet initiated, perhaps because they would simply have given climate “go slow” Congressional Democrats i bargaining chips. Once Congress is no longer a forum, a handful of pro-fossil Democrats has a weaker hand.

Instead, the wrap up of major legislative opportunities could trigger a second Green New Deal phase, embedded in a wide array of economically attractive, climate-friendly regulatory reforms. Biden’s choice: retake the offensive or let Congressional gridlock define his Administration.

It’s an easier choice if Build Back Better emerges relatively climate-robust. Carrots and sticks work best together.

For example, EPA just announced auto carbon emission standards requiring decarbonization twice as rapid as its draft version released only 4 months ago. What changed? Well, billions of dollars of federal investment in EV charging networks and customer purchase incentives for EVs in both the bipartisan and Build Back Better budgets, along with the continued growth in states signing on to California’s independent (and ambitious) car and truck standards. A similar mix of state leadership and federal finance helped President Obama put his original, ambitious auto rules in place back in 2009.

There is a danger that the Trump Supreme Court could limit — or even overturn — EPA’s authority over emissions of carbon dioxide. Even if did, EPA is not as powerless as the media often assumes.

Carbon dioxide is unavoidably emitted by combustion of fossil fuels. But so are other Clean Air Act–covered health pollutants, particularly oxides of nitrogen. And with generous federal tax credits for carbon capture and storage, it becomes a legally “available” technology. Once EPA required carbon capture and storage — first for new, and then for existing coal and gas power plants — the decarbonization of utility sector emissions would receive a major push. Coal and gas power is already more costly than wind and solar. Add the cost of CCS and their market share shrinks even more quickly.

Power plants and vehicles are not the only major climate polluters for which Clean Air Act health concerns also mandate overdue attention. Home furnaces, water heaters and stoves are a major source of both carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides. An unvented gas stove in an average house produces enough nitrogen pollution to violate air quality health standards, and frequently emits dangerous levels of carbon monoxide as well. Almost half of the homes in the country are already all-electric; both the federal and local governments should address this obvious health risk with a zero-carbon alternative.

It’s an appalling underreported story that more than 50 years after the Clean Air Act was enacted, 40% of American still breathe unhealthy air. With recent progress in zero emission technologies for power generation, transportation, homes and even industry, there is no excuse for that scandal to continue. Combustion of fossil fuels is both a health risk and a climate curse. Combustion has had its day. Prometheus can finally rest.

Build Back Better federal financing will make industry less resistant to rapid technology change and decarbonization. State and local incentives and mandates will further help business test new innovations; accelerate early adoption of zero emission technologies; develop the needed transmission, storage, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure networks; and establish high bar regional mandates which will bring industry to the negotiating table with EPA on the fastest pathway to national adoption. Indeed, one major study I worked on has already demonstrated that even if we assume significant Congressional action, the only reliable pathway to meet Biden’s 50% emission reduction by 2030 is through a full-throated partnership between Washington and the rest of American society.

I’ll close as Roberts did: passing the Build Back Better Act remains the key strategy to fully leveraging Biden’s regulatory opportunities — the $550 billion in funding it could provide for clean energy technologies like renewables, transmission and storage will greatly accelerate coal and gas power plant retirements. More funding for electric vehicle charging remains essential to move the EV revolution forward at top speed. BBB’s loan programs will be vital to speed the decarbonization of the other biggest polluting sector, which is industry.

And for how long will the congressional window for climate action remain shuttered by Republican recalcitrance? Remember that if the Republicans seize the congressional levers of power, they must then deliver for the American people – something their congressional leadership has signally failed to do when they were, previously, in charge.

As it becomes ever-clearer to the American people that where energy is concerned, newer and cleaner = cheaper and safer, the “coal and oil forever” message is going to become an ever-heavier burden on the GOP’s shoulders. So politics aside, the second phase of Biden’s Green New Deal may prove a political game-changer. If, and only if, it is bold enough.

Read more on Build Back Better:

The 2022 midterms will be all about Jan. 6: Democrats can win if they fight Trump’s Big Lie

Donald Trump may have canceled his press conference to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection that he incited on the Capitol, but he still has managed to communicate his desire for the event to be lauded as a glorious revolution. He wants to whitewash an act of domestic terrorism in the name of fascism, making life extremely hard for Republican politicians who wish to remain on the fence over the question. One year out, Republican leaders continue to hedge their bets. They are attempting to both appeal to the Trump base by pretending to believe there are “questions” about the validity of the 2020 election and also to appeal to swing voters and moderates by publicly denouncing the violence of the insurrection fueled by such “questions.” But playing in the gray zone may not be an option for Republicans much longer —if Ted Cruz’s very bad, no good week was any indication.

Cruz’s woes started on Wednesday when he, correctly, called the Capitol riot “a violent terrorist attack” and lauded the Capitol police for their courage in fighting back. Cruz, it should be noted, should get absolutely zero credit for this. He, like most of the GOP leadership, is running interference for Trump by engaging in a massive gaslighting effort, where Republicans will admit the violence happened, but pretend that it had nothing to do with Trump or his lies about the 2020 election. Still, Trump has long been hostile to such triangulating political tactics, especially when it comes to his own ego. He clearly wants the insurrection celebrated as a triumphant strike in his war against democracy, not this mealy-mouthed “violence is bad” talk.

So, unsurprisingly, Tucker Carlson of Fox News went after Cruz, insisting that “it was definitely not a violent terrorist attack.” (It absolutely was. The FBI defines terrorism as violence committed “to further ideological goals,” which storming the Capitol in order to overthrow an election 100% is.) And Cruz, equally unsurprisingly, went on Fox News the next night to grovel for forgiveness, calling his phrasing “sloppy” and “dumb.” But because Cruz kept insisting that assaulting police officers was wrong — while he downplayed how many Trump supporters engaged in that behavior — Carlson kept tearing into him, making it quite clear that any bad word against Trumpian violence is simply unacceptable.

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The incident was the capstone in a year’s long — and now hugely successful — effort by the far-right to bring the GOP in line with not just Trump’s Big Lie, but the belief that violence in the name of the Big Lie is not just acceptable, but laudable. It is something Republican leaders have been resisting. Initially, the hesitance seemed due to a lot of them being genuinely rattled by having a mob come for their lives. Now, however, it’s purely for political reasons.

Polling shows that a huge majority of Americans disapprove of the insurrection at the Capitol. But in 2024 election match-ups, President Joe Biden and Trump are neck-in-neck. That can only mean that a lot of voters are happy to vote Republican, so long as they can keep telling themselves a story about how Republicans are not the party of violent insurrection.

That’s why Cruz and other Republican figureheads — including, at times, Carlson himself — are drawn to a narrative about January 6 that paints the event as a random anomaly, instead of the direct result of months of Trump’s fomenting of violence. Even Trump himself understands that capturing those more moderate votes for Republicans likely means backing this ridiculous spin on the events and falsifying a story where the GOP is a normal political party. That’s why he, however reluctantly, canceled his January 6 celebration event, at the request of Republican leaders who think there’s a way to push the Big Lie without also embracing the violence that resulted.

Cruz’s situation suggests that may be untenable, however. There is not and has never been a way to be for Trump while against either his coup or the violence he harnessed in his last-ditch attempt to steal the election. To support Trump is to support what Trump stands for, which is violent insurrection in the name of fascism. The only way that Republicans leaders can continue to walk this tightrope, pretending to somehow be for Trump but not for his violent insurrection, is if the issue isn’t at the forefront of the 2022 midterms. Unfortunately for Republican leaders, that’s unlikely to happen, for a couple of reasons.

For one, celebrating Trump’s coup is a surefire way to get the most hardcore Republican voters engaged and excited. As Axios reported Monday morning, prominent Republican candidates — including some Senate candidates — are campaigning heavily on the Big Lie, finding that it’s a great way to reap in piles of donations. For another, Trump’s ego won’t let the issue go away. He may have canceled his January 6 celebration, but he made it clear he intends to keep up the drumbeat of pro-insurrection talk at his various rallies and other communications.

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Democrats can — and critically should — make sure Republicans can’t play this game.

Democratic candidates must resist the campaign-consultant-driven urge to always be changing the subject to “kitchen table issues.” Instead, between now and November (and ideally as long as is necessary), Democrats must not treat their opponents like they’re in a friendly disagreement over tax rates, but make sure they have to answer for Trump and his violence every day. Bring up the insurrection often, in debates and in ads, and make sure that it’s never far from voter minds. This doesn’t need to be lieu of talking up kitchen table issues, but it simply can’t be memory-holed, as Republicans dearly wish it to be.

As the Cruz example shows, Republicans don’t have a lot of wiggle room on this issue, because they’re trapped by Fox News and the right-wing media. Attempts to distance themselves from the violence increasingly result in a sharp rebuke from the likes of Carlson and other powerful right-wing pundits and leaders. That’s why the insurrection is, despite being an unusual event in American history, is still a standard issue wedge issue, one that pits the GOP base against the moderate voters they need to win elections. (While we still have elections, which may not be for much longer if the Democrats screw up the 2022 midterms.)

The good news is, by giving a January 6 speech where he didn’t shy away from blaming Trump, Biden has given the go-ahead signal to the rest of the party to make January 6 a central campaign issue. The House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack also seems prepared to keep pushing out information and generating news hooks that make it hard for Republicans to memory-hole either the event itself or Trump’s central role in it.

There’s a reason Fox News and Republican leaders are feigning outrage at Democrats for “politicizing” Trump’s act of political terrorism. They want to scare Democrats off of talking about an issue that will rally voters to their side. Democrats should take that fake outrage as more evidence to lean into the issue, and not give in to that cowardly urge to avoid controversy that has already lost them elections.

Jim Jordan refuses to tell Jan. 6 panel about Trump calls after claiming he had “nothing to hide”

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said on Sunday that he is refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, after previously claiming he had “nothing to hide.”

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., last month asked Jordan to provide information about his “multiple communications” with former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. Jordan has admitted that he spoke with Trump that day, but said he didn’t “recall the number of times.” Jordan has also repeatedly said he was willing to provide information about the calls.

“If they call me, I got nothing to hide,” Jordan said last July. He reiterated during a House Rules Committee hearing in October, “I’ve said all along, ‘I have nothing to hide.'”

But in a letter to Thompson on Sunday, Jordan said he would not cooperate with the committee’s request to discuss the calls, as well as other communications he had with Trump’s allies in the “war room” at the Willard Hotel, or with Trump’s legal team, White House staff, and “others involved in organizing or planning the actions and strategies for January 6th.”

“This request is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry, violates core Constitutional principles, and would serve to further erode legislative norms,” Jordan wrote, dismissing the Jan. 6 attack as a “Democrat obsession.” He alleged that the committee’s request for him to discuss calls he made while “performing my official duties” were an “outrageous abuse” of the committee’s authority and would “set a dangerous precedent for future Congresses.”

“Even if I had information to share with the Select Committee, the actions and statements of Democrats in the House of Representatives show that you are not conducting a fair-minded and objective inquiry,” added Jordan, who was himself blocked from sitting on the committee by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after he voted to block the certification of election results on Jan. 6 and called the investigation a “partisan attack.”

Jordan’s refusal comes after multiple reports have suggested that he played a major role in Trump’s efforts to overturn his electoral defeat. Jordan worked closely with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to pressure the Justice Department to investigate baseless claims of voting irregularities and to press state legislatures to conduct dubious “audits” meant to cast doubt on the election results, according to the New York Times. Jordan was among the Trump allies who met with White House officials two days after the election was called to push Trump’s “Big Lie” strategy, according to the report. On Dec. 21 2020, he met with Trump, Meadows and Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Mo Brooks, R-Ala., the latter three of whom reportedly played key roles in organizing the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol assault. One day before the riot, Jordan forwarded a text to Meadows urging for then-Vice President Mike Pence to “call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

Committee Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said last year that the panel could subpoena Jordan because he was “involved in a number of meetings in the lead-up to what happened on Jan. 6, involved in planning for Jan. 6, certainly for the objections that day.”

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The committee is particularly interested in Trump’s actions during the riot as his allies pleaded for him to intervene and stop the violence. Thompson said last month that the panel has received testimony “indicating that the president was watching television coverage of the attack from his private dining room” before his lawyers resumed efforts to “delay or otherwise impede the electoral count.”

Jordan is the second Republican to reject the committee’s request. The panel asked to meet with incoming House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., who along with Jordan played an outsized role in Trump’s post-election efforts, to discuss “events surrounding January 6, including his involvement in efforts to install former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark as acting Attorney General.” Perry responded by calling the committee “illegitimate.”

“I decline this entity’s request and will continue to fight the failures of the radical Left who desperately seek distraction from their abject failures of crushing inflation, a humiliating surrender in Afghanistan, and the horrendous crisis they created at our border,” he tweeted.

Thompson said last week that the committee is looking into whether it can issue subpoenas to sitting members of Congress. If they can, he said, “there’ll be no reluctance on our part.”

The committee said Sunday that it would consider its next steps in the coming days.

“Mr. Jordan has admitted that he spoke directly to President Trump on Jan. 6 and is thus a material witness,” Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the panel, said, according to the Times. “Mr. Jordan’s letter to the committee fails to address these facts. Mr. Jordan has previously said that he would cooperate with the committee’s investigation, but it now appears that the Trump team has persuaded him to try to hide the facts and circumstances of Jan. 6.”

Read more on the Jan. 6 anniversary and continuing investigation:

How to make almond paste from scratch

It’s always more fun to DIY. We’re here to show you how to make small batches of great foods at home. Today: With Linda Xiao from The Tart Tart‘s homemade almond paste, you can take your almond-based desserts and pastries to a whole new level.

Whenever I think of almond paste, I’m reminded of the marzipan mushrooms I made to top my yearly bûches de Noël for French class in high school. They were the perfect finishing touch, but I’d never actually eat them. Are you even supposed to eat marzipan?

More: Pick up some extra almonds for a batch of homemade almond milk.

Since then, I’ve sampled almond paste in plenty of other forms and I have come to love it. It even began to make an appearance in my baking — for a batch of amaretti cookies or an almond cake, for instance — but its price tag turned me away again and again.

When I realized how easy it was to make almond paste at home, visions of all the almond-laced pastries I could make swam through my head. Once you try homemade almond paste that isn’t supplemented with ground apricot or peach kernels (like most commercial versions), you’ll want to make cloud cookies, frangipane tarts, and linzer tortes, too.

Almond Paste

Makes 1 pound

1 1/2 cups blanched almonds
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 egg white
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 pinch salt

1. Grind the almonds.

In a food processor, process the almonds until finely ground, about 1 minute, scraping down as needed. It’s likely that they’ll clump together because of the oils in the nuts. (Psst, if you’re wondering if you can swap in almond flour or almond meal instead of blanched almonds: Yes, you can. Just substitute 295 grams of either one, which shakes out to about 3 1/2 cups for both.)

2. Add the rest of the ingredients and process again.

That’s the confectioners’ sugar, egg white, almond extract, and salt. Process the mixture for another minute or so until well combined. At this point, taste your almond paste and adjust the sugar, almond extract, and salt to your personal preference.

3. Form into a log and wrap.

Empty the contents onto a surface dusted with confectioner’s sugar and form the clump into a log shape. Wrap the log in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about an hour, or until firm. At this point, the almond paste is ready to use. It can be stored in the refrigerator for about a week.

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Linda Xiao

5 recipes that use almond paste

1. Bear Claws
The pastry kind, that is. Flaky, buttery, and filled with lemony almond paste, we would happily eat these for breakfast or dessert. They’re best when still warm (but you knew that already).

2. Pear and Almond Cake
A fruity-nutty number inspired by David Lebovitz’s almond cake and Mimi Thorisson’s Italian pear cake. We bet it would be great with apples, too (like the cake below).

3. Toasted Cashew-Marzipan Blondies
In a recipe like this, you can do a 1:1 swap of marzipan to homemade almond paste. You can also swap out the cashews for any nut you love — think almonds (yes, more of them!), pecans, or hazelnuts.

4. Apple-Almond Cake
Luisa Weiss, author of Classic German Baking, sourced this recipe “from everywhere” — friends, family, magazines, old cookbooks, websites, “and even from the back of a generic brand of almond paste sold at the grocery store.”

5. Almond Paste Waffles
This waffle recipe convinced recipe developer Posie Brien of one thing: Almond paste makes baked goods better. Here, it adds a bonus sweetness and creamy nuttiness. Top with tons of maple syrup.

6. Rainbow Cookies Meet Crumb Cake
Two classics (Italian rainbow cookies and New York-style crumb cake) mashup in this holiday cookie. Recipe developer Rebecca Firkser notes, “if you’re lucky, you can find the elusive rainbow-cookie/crumb-cake hybrids at a select few establishments, but why not make your own?” But also rainbow cookies purists should feel free to skip the crumb topping.

7. Chocolate-Almond Croissants
If almond croissants are an improvement on classic croissants, chocolate almond croissants are even double the fun. These croissants start out as a pretty classic pain au chocolat, but finish them off with almond cream. Serve them with a bowl of cafe au lait for extra enjoyment.

8. Peach Bostock
This peach bostock recipe from Jason Schreiber’s cookbook Fruit Cake calls for the best peaches you can find. So if you can’t get your hands on good fresh stone fruit when the craving strikes, try swapping in frozen and defrosted peaches, or sub in another fruit that happens to be in season.

9. Peach Frangipane Galette
This peachy galette recipe from contributor Alexandra Stafford actually makes enough for two batches of the dessert. If you don’t need both tonight, stash the second dough and half the frangipane in the freezer. You never know when you’ll need a galette, STAT.

10. Almond Scones
Grate frozen almond paste into a classic buttery scone dough for the most floral, nutty, eat-the-whole-tray scones you’ve ever tasted. PS: A big swoosh of cherry or citrus jam would only make these treats more tasty.

11. Molly Yeh’s Dark Chocolate Marzipan Scone Loaf
This Genius Recipe from blogger, cookbook author, and Food Network host Molly Yeh actually calls for marzipan instead of almond paste — marzipan is a bit sweeter and more firm than almond paste, so you can turn almond paste into marzipan by beating in 3 cups powdered sugar and 2 egg whites for every pound of almond paste.

Is pre-minced garlic really such a bad thing?

No matter what article or recipe we’ve just pushed live on the site or promoted through email or on Instagram and Facebook, there is one page on Food52 that is almost constantly in the list of ten URLs with the most real-time viewers.

It’s from nine years ago and it’s entirely unedited.

The Hotline thread “How much minced garlic equals one clove?” has nearly two million views since it was posted sometime in 2012. It’s the first search result that comes up when you type the question into Google, which means a lot of people really do want to know just how much minced garlic equals one clove.

So what’s the answer?

Well, it’s not cut and dry: It depends on how finely minced the garlic is, and even if the chop is standardized, clove size may vary. For ChefOno,

“clove” [is] a useless measurement. Look at the variation on this page — anywhere from 1/4 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon — that’s a variation of 1200 percent. I use the conversion of one clove equals one teaspoon. I believe Cook’s Illustrated does the same.

What’s more interesting than the non-answer answer (one clove is equal to one teaspoon . . . kind of, sometimes, maybe . . . but in the, it end all depends on your taste, anyway: vampires versus garlic fiends) is the judgment that is scattered throughout the thread. Fortunately for Food52 readers, you’ll find that across the board, our recipes measure garlic based on the amount of cloves and heads needed, not teaspoons or tablespoons.

Take the answer that’s been “voted the best” as an example: “Answer” would be a generous term, actually. It’s more like a withholding of information:

Sorry, I would toss the “packaged” garlic that has chemical preservatives in it in favor of spending the 20 seconds it takes to chop or mince fresh real garlic cloves.

But riding alongside this judgment is a rebuttal:

It’s quite a bit longer than 20 seconds and if it’s ORGANIC garlic then there aren’t any preservatives.

This opened up a whole new can of worms (err jarred garlic) that got away from the discussion of whether or not a jar of minced garlic is an acceptable substitute for fresh garlic.

Is pre-minced garlic that bad?

We’ve established that pre-minced garlic saves time. That is an unequivocal fact. But what about the flavor — is the flavor of pre-minced jarred garlic worse than a fresh clove of garlic? Food52 staff writer Kelly Vaughan thinks yes: “There are plenty of dishes that are garlic heavy (think: pot roast or chicken with 40 cloves of garlic), but for the most part garlic is an aromatic, a flavor-enhancer meant to carry canned San Marzano tomatoes, brighten basil, and offset the sweetness in a brown sauce for stir-fry. When you open a jar of minced garlic, take a whiff. It smells like the contents have already gone bad. The aroma of tiny bits of garlic floating in a bath of garlic juice (if there is such a thing) is overpowering, off-putting, and personally offensive.”

The previous arguments were just the most visible squabble. One commenter wrote, “You will never get the flavor of fresh garlic from a jar, so, there is no equivalent.” But then we have another Food52er in New Zealand who explained that she uses pre-minced garlic because fresh garlic is so expensive where she lives (and because she likes to add a lot).

These strong convictions about garlic reminded me of Anthony Bourdain’s (in)famous Kitchen Confidential garlic credo:

Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago, garlic that has been smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. […] Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.

Do we care so much about garlic, in particular, because it’s the flavor basis of many dishes, so that taking a shortcut at the foundation means unstable architecture later on? Or is it because chopping garlic is one of the most menial, least pleasurable, smelliest of tasks, and a refusal to do so indicates a resistance to work for our food? Or is it because a failure to appreciate the difference between freshly-chopped and factory-chopped garlic is emblematic of a greater failure to discern between “good” food and “bad” food in general?

The pre-minced garlic shortcut seems more offensive than canned beans (perhaps because dried beans take so long to cook). But what about store-bought pie dough: Is that more or less egregious than a jar of garlic? Considering that pie dough is hard to get right whereas chopping garlic is hard to get wrong, the premade crust would probably be less snubbed. For me, personally, I’d rather cut butter into flour than chop 3 cloves. So, where do we draw the shortcut line?

I also couldn’t help but wonder about the millions of people who did have the same question as Sean,Murray, the Food52 user who originally asked. Isn’t it possible that many were, let’s say, following recipes that called for three or four teaspoons minced garlic and questioning if they’d have to run out to the store to buy another head or if the one clove would do? Maybe most of the curious minds weren’t reaching into jars at all.

Or maybe they were. Is it a sin? (We’re not asking you, Bourdain.) I’d certainly go for the jar or the press if I wanted to make a double-batch of Braised Chicken Thighs with Tomato and Garlic (12 cloves) or Chilled English Pea Soup with Garlic Cream (two heads).

As rldougherty put it, “Yes, fresh garlic is best. Applause to anyone that is trying to be a better home chef, no matter what kind of garlic you are using.”

Here’s what food scientist J. Kenji López-Alt has to say: Prechopped garlic, garlic pasta, garlic juice, and other convenience products of their ilk should be roundly rejected. Just as with onions, the aromatic compounds in garlic are formed through an enzymatic chemical reaction that occurs as soon as its cells are ruptured. So, to maximize garlic flavor, you need to cut it just before incorporating it into a dish. Precut garlic has none of the complexity and freshness of whole garlic cloves,” he writes in his tome, The Food Lab. As for garlic powder? He’s against that as a substitute for the fresh stuff too.

I’d have to agree.

However, if you want to save time, here’s what I think is the happy medium: chop garlic (fresh! whole! cloves!) in a food processor. It will break up the cloves of garlic into hundreds of tiny allium bits, saving you from what many seem to think is the hassle of chopping whole cloves on a cutting board.

There is something therapeutic, and certainly alluring, about peeling and cutting garlic. Some may call it smelly, but I think it’s that the papery skin will inevitably stick to your fingers and your hands will smell like garlic for days. But that’s part of the beauty of home cooking and I will continue to defend garlic in its whole, unadulterated form.

Garlicky recipes, sliced or minced

1. Pot Roast with 40 Cloves of Garlic

Not for the faint of heart (though we hear garlic has cardiovascular benefits!) — both because of the big, bold, garlic flavor, and because, yes, you really have to peel all 40 cloves. But it’s well worth it for the melt-in-your-mouth meat and perfectly seasoned, super-silky vegetables that result.

2. Harissa Lamb, Beans, and Garlicky Greens

Is it the tender, shreddable lamb belly that makes us love this dish so much? Or the creamy, plump, flavor-packed beans swimming in lamby broth? Nope — it’s the hit of grated garlic that showers the earthy, slightly bitter greens accompanying both components. It brings some much-needed brightness and sharpness to the party.

3. Cornish Game Hen Soup with Garlic, Ginger, and Fried Shallots

Garlic and ginger bolster and heighten otherwise mellow poultry broth, also seasoning the game hen meat from the outside in. A flourish of fried shallots gives some crunch to the whole affair, but doesn’t overpower the aromatic undertones of the soup.

4. Shroom and White Bean Scampi

You know and love classic shrimp scampi, with all its buttery, garlicky, lemony charms. But have you ever tried it with umami-rich mushrooms and creamy white beans? If not, we highly recommend it.

5. Creamy Garlic Chicken

Garlic, butter, herbes de Provence, Dijon mustard, and, yes, heavy cream, make for a delightful sauce you’ll want to eat by the spoonful. Pro tip: Make a double batch of the sauce and slather it on anything and everything beyond just chicken — steamed green beans or asparagus, crusty bread, a baked potato, for starters.

6. Crispy Garlic Dip

If you have Greek yogurt, garlic, and salt and pepper, you have your new favorite partner for chips. Seriously! It’ll remind you of the beloved party fodder, French onion dip, but with a lot more personality and pizzazz. One reader raved: “Lovely, simple and much more than the sum of its parts. Got gobbled up greedily.” Can we come next time there’s dip for gobbling?!

Trump’s troops: The far-right has a tight grip on too many in uniform

Everyone surely remembers Donald Trump’s appeals to “law and order” going all the way back to his infamous full-page ad condemning the (innocent) Central Park Five titled “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police.” When he ran for office he sought out law enforcement at all levels as a discrete constituency, promising to let them take the gloves off and encouraging them to not “be so nice” to suspects. During the George Floyd protests during the summer of 2020, he told federal law enforcement and military leaders he wanted them to “crack skulls” and “beat the shit out of” the protesters. At one point he said, “just shoot them.” Luckily, they didn’t do that. It took a devoted Trump-loving vigilante named Kyle Rittenhouse to execute that order.

Until the January 6th insurrection, Trump was the nation’s most vociferous defender of police. But on that day he was strangely reserved, tepidly tweeting that the rioters should be respectful but pretty much remaining hands-off for hours as his rabid followers stormed the U.S. Capitol and assaulted hundreds of police who were trying to keep the mob from attacking members of Congress. That night he said the violent horde that did the following was very special and that he loved them.

New video of the Capitol assault, obtained by @CBSNews from the body cam of D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, shows him being pulled into a crowd of rioters before being tased and beaten unconscious. He suffered a heart attack and brain injury. pic.twitter.com/9daa15dPTX

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) June 24, 2021

You would have thought that this abject betrayal of Trump’s supposed fealty to the men in uniform would have shaken their faith in him. But according to this new profile of former D.C Metropolitan police officer (and Trump voter) Michael Fanone by Molly Ball of TIME, most of his former colleagues on the force remain devoted to Trump. Fanone came forward to publicly speak out about what happened in order to stand up for the police who were attacked that day. It didn’t occur to him that the police themselves wouldn’t back him:

Maybe officers like him and Dunn, who wanted Trump held accountable, were the exception. Watching the body-cam footage again, he noticed how many cops were standing around, kibitzing with the rioters. He thought of his MPD colleagues: out of more than 3,000 on duty, about 850 had responded to the Capitol. What about all the others?

Ball continues:

Where was his backup? Where was the police union, which rushed to the defense of any officer criticized by left-wing politicians? The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, had issued a lukewarm statement on Jan. 6 urging “everyone involved to reject the use of violence and to obey the orders of law enforcement officers to ensure that these events are brought to a swift and peaceable end.” Numerous active-duty FOP members have since been charged in connection with the riot. In at least one case, the union is trying to keep an accused rioter from being fired by his department…

Colleagues he’s known for decades don’t talk to him anymore. Guys who never called to check in when he was in the hospital send him taunting memes about his liberal-darling status.

Fanone thought he was speaking for his fellow officers. But he wasn’t. And he asks himself today, “the vast majority of police officers—would they have been on the other side of those battle lines?”

That is the question, isn’t it? The police on duty that day were protecting members of Congress from a violent mob that was trying to stop the transfer of power. And there is ambivalence among cops about whether that was the right thing to do? That’s chilling.

And it isn’t just the police. Trump’s love for men in uniform wasn’t confined to law enforcement. He saw the military as a constituency too and was very popular among the troops. In fact, he was so popular that a number of active duty military were among the rioters on January 6th. Many are also members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group of former and current military and law enforcement.

Last month the Pentagon released new guidelines on how to deal with extremism in the ranks, which they now realize is a growing problem. The Washington Post reported that the University of Maryland consortium “released a report last month showing that since 1990, 458 crimes tied to extremism involved veterans or active-duty U.S. troops.” In fact, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil before 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, was carried out by a military veteran who had been radicalized while on duty and later joined a far-right militia group.

The military really doesn’t have any idea how widespread this problem is.

When you consider that someone like former Gen. Michael Flynn, a far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump’s first national security adviser was in charge of Military Intelligence just a few years ago, it’s clear this problem is not confined to the rank and file. There are probably quite a few extremists among the active duty brass as well.

So once again this raises the question, what if it happens again? Three retired generals wrote an op-ed recently asking that very question. They note the participation of active duty and retired personnel in the January 6th insurrection as well as a number of retired flag officers who have signed on in support of Trump. And they offered this hair-raising scenario as a possibility:

The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad level — is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” commander in chief cannot be dismissed…

All service members take an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

The prospect of members of law enforcement agencies and the military breaking off into rogue commands seems like something out of a political thriller. And it’s probably not very likely. But then the election of Donald Trump was unlikely as was the insurrection of January 6th. I would have thought it unlikely that police officers would defend a vicious mob beating other cops with flagpoles or that active duty military would boldly participate in it. We all should recognize by now that anything can happen.

What’s actually the difference between heavy cream and half-and-half?

We love you heavy cream, but you don’t always do what we need. Sometimes your high fat content is just too thick and luscious to be used as a coffee creamer or an ingredient for pudding pie. That’s where half-and-half comes into play. Where heavy cream is too rich, half-and-half is there. But sometimes, it fails too. Half-and-half will never turn into whipped cream and no amount of churning will turn it into butter. We know they’re not the same, but what really is the difference between heavy cream and half-and-half?

What is half-and-half

To understand how to cook and bake with half-and-half, it’s important to understand exactly what it is. According to my bedtime reading aka the FDA’s Code of Federal Regulations, “Half-and-half is the food consisting of a mixture of cream and milk which contains not less than 10.5% but less than 18% milkfat. It is pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized, and may be homogenized.”

What is heavy cream?

Heavy cream is a high-fat cream that contains at least 36% fat. It, too, is either pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized, and may be homogenized, according to the FDA. Heavy cream may also be labeled as heavy whipping cream; different names, same product!

Can you substitute them?

Most of the time you can use half-and-half in a recipe that calls for heavy cream, and vice versa. Low stakes examples are mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, macaroni and cheese, and bread pudding. Keep in mind that, depending on which one you choose, your recipe may be richer or a little less so.

You can also use half-and-half for ice cream recipes that call for equal parts of whole milk and heavy cream because essentially, half-and-half is a combination of the two.

You can’t use half-and-half in place of heavy cream for whipped cream or homemade butter. The fat content in heavy cream is what allows the dairy product to form stiff peaks for a sweetened whipped topping; keep whipping and those peaks will turn into butter.

Wait, but what is light cream?

Ah yes, the somewhere-in-between dairy product. Light cream is a type of cream that contains between 18% and 30% fat content. Quite honestly, not many of our recipes call for light cream and it can even be hard to find in grocery stores, particularly compared to the ubiquity of heavy cream and half-and-half. But you asked, so we answered!

A year later, we’re still trapped in a bad fascist-coup movie: It doesn’t end well

Just over a year ago, Donald Trump and his allies tried to stage a coup against American democracy. This was something new in American history, but in another sense it was typical: It was the next stage in the collapse of a failing democracy.

As I explained in an earlier essay for Salon, the Trump coup attempt was quite “unique” in that it was publicly announced years in advance and organized in plain sight, with more than enough warning that it could have easily been stopped from occurring. In practical terms, many members of America’s political class, news media and other elites allowed the coup attempt to take place, either through negligence or tacit consent.

Trump’s attempt to overthrow American democracy (which continues) is atypical in another important way: In the year since Jan. 6, 2021, the American people and the world have learned a great deal about almost every aspect of Trump’s coup plot and the Capitol attack.

In her newsletter Lucid, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently explained many of the central or common factors involved in coup attempts, whether successful or otherwise. She begins with the observation that “controlling the flow of information” is crucial, especially when the coup fails and damage control is necessary:

Coups involve secrecy and speed. Their power lies in the element of surprise — the shock of the unthinkable happening, and happening fast. … The conspiratorial element of coups means we are not often privy to the details of their planning. If the coup is successful, it may become part of the origin story of the new national collective. Then a leader may release details about it to enhance his reputation for daring and bravery. This was the case with Muammar Gaddafi, who planned his 1969 coup for years and was its undisputed author.

What if the leader who comes to power via coup was the last person to come on board, either because of his cautious nature (Francisco Franco) or because the coup’s instigators did not fully trust him (Augusto Pinochet)? Then it can take a long time for the truth to come out….

When coups fail, the government that survived the coup attempt might release information in order to turn public opinion against the plotters and justify whatever punishments are meted out.

Many questions remain unanswered about the Trump regime’s attempt to overthrow American democracy. If we hope to save American democracy and ensure some measure of justice is served, the truth will need to be revealed. At some point in the future, the House Jan. 6 special committee, various whistleblowers, Department of Justice investigations, journalists, documentarians, scholars and other researchers will have compiled something close to a full accounting of the Trump regime’s coup attempt.

That’s an entirely separate question from whether Donald Trump and the high-level planners and plotters of his coup will ever face proper accountability or punishment for their crimes against democracy. The answer to that question is probably not.

In all, a type of surreality and malignant normalcy took hold over America during the Age of Trump, and its hold has endured into Joe Biden’s presidency. The events of Jan. 6 were the middle act in a much bigger story that now includes the Big Lie, a feeling of impending doom emanating from the Republican fascist movement, the growing threat of sustained right-wing violence or even low-level civil war, and our status as a society where reality, facts and truth are no longer agreed upon because the Republicans and their enablers have undermined any such consensus.

In so many ways, Jan. 6 and the Age of Trump have shattered the myths that many Americans have long entertained about themselves and their country.

Those myths and narratives come from many sources, but America is a society where the dream merchants and fantasy manufacturers of Hollywood (and the mass media more generally) exercise almost unlimited power to shape the collective imagination of the public. The result is that Americans, for decades, “have been amusing themselves to death”. Too many of us have lost the capacity to distinguish mass media fantasies (including online and other digital spaces) from reality and its painful truths.

To wit. On Jan. 6 of last year, there were no Special Forces commandos, Secret Service assault teams or FBI hostage rescue units making a dramatic assault on the Capitol Building — as would have happened in a Hollywood movie — ready to fight off Trump’s terrorist mob and keep the members of Congress and other innocent people safe from harm.

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Instead, it was rank-and-file Capitol police officers and other members of law enforcement who exemplified great courage in attempting to do that dangerous work. They were understaffed and unprepared, and ultimately could not keep Trump’s rage-fueled attack force from breaching the building’s defenses and running amok in an apparent hunt for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other perceived enemies.

In the real world, there was no national leader who rose to the occasion, placing Trump and his cabal under arrest, delivering a rousing speech about the true values of American democracy and perhaps declaring the sixth of January as a new national holiday, a second Independence Day.

This was not “Seven Days in May” or some other Cold War-era thriller featuring a seemingly perfect plot to overthrow the government, only stopped by the actions of a few courageous souls. There was no moment on Jan. 6 or afterward when “principled” Republicans joined en masse with Democrats to save American democracy by denouncing Trump, his cabal and their movement, and unmasking the full scale of the coup plot.

In reality, Republicans in the House, only hours after the coup attempt, still voted to nullify the 2020 presidential election, standing with the coup leader and against legitimate democracy.

There have been no televised trials or hearings about the Trump regime’s coup attempt, and no serious efforts to punish the wrongdoers to the maximum extent of the law. There has been no closure, no public exhalation of relief and no sense that the coup was conclusively defeated. The threat from Trump and his movement is escalating, and the coup has not been stopped: If anything, it is gaining momentum on the state and local level. Republicans will likely win control of the House this fall, and could well win the Senate as well. A return to the White House in 2024 is distinctly possible. If Republicans cannot use voter exclusion and other Jim Crow-style anti-democratic tactics to win that election, they may launch another coup — and that one will be far more likely to succeed.

Consider the fascinating and, at times, undeniably entertaining characters of TrumpWorld. Donald Trump himself is a reality TV star and pro wrestling “heel” who somehow became president. He has surrounded himself with other characters straight from central casting, including corrupt consigliere Roger Stone and “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani, now a grossly incompetent go-between and a legal adviser of dubious skill and wisdom.

It’s easy to laugh, but we cannot overlook those smart and very dangerous foes of democracy such as Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, John Eastman, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and numerous others. There are also the lesser-known true believers and ideologues who lurk in the shadows of think tanks, interest groups, academia, business and finance, the news media, right-wing evangelical churches, paramilitaries and “tactical culture,” military and veterans groups, and elsewhere in the private sector and the world of public policy and consulting.

In total, Jan. 6 and its anticlimactic outcome offer a portrait of American society seemingly filtered not through Hollywood blockbusters but through the artistic visions of Jim Jarmusch, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet and John Schlesinger. But none of this is a movie the American people can switch off or walk away from. It is entirely too real. Denial, exhaustion, learned helplessness or just flat-out surrender can offer no salvation.

The ridiculous and surreal aspects of Jan. 6 and its aftermath do nothing to diminish the peril America now faces. Indeed, fascism and other forms of civic evil do their work by making the unthinkable, the ridiculous and the seemingly impossible appear both normal and acceptable. We are almost there now. Jan. 6 was just one important landmark on that journey.

More from the aftermath of Jan. 6 and the GOP’s attack on democracy:

Biden urged to “engage” with Russia to “avert” World War III over Ukraine

Ahead of highly anticipated talks scheduled to begin Monday, a diverse coalition of organizations sent a letter to the White House urging President Biden to “engage diplomatically” with Russia to prevent an armed confrontation resulting from rising tensions involving Ukraine.

“Continuing engagement is necessary to avert a military conflict that will harm the interests of the United States, harm innocent civilians in Ukraine, and risk spiraling into a potentially catastrophic war between the world’s two leading nuclear powers,” says the Saturday letter from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Just Foreign Policy and 13 other groups.

“We greatly appreciate your decision to respond to the substantial Russian military deployment near Ukraine by engaging in direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and arranging broader talks next week,” adds the letter. “We urge you to continue to pursue diplomatic progress, to promote de-escalation, and to seek negotiated solutions to disputes that avoid war.”

Top U.S. and Russian diplomats plan to sit down together Monday in Geneva, followed by a NATO-Russian Council meeting Wednesday in Brussels and an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) event Thursday in Vienna.

Not everyone in Washington is mobilized for another confrontation: coalition of conservative/prog/transpartisan groups send letter to Biden urging no expansion of NATO, no troops to Ukraine. MORE: https://t.co/AEw2g3Gyao

— Responsible Statecraft (@RStatecraft) January 9, 2022

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told host Jake Tapper that he doesn’t foresee any major breakthroughs in the upcoming meetings.

“It’s hard to see making actual progress, as opposed to talking, in an atmosphere of escalation with a gun to Ukraine’s head,” Blinken said. “So, if we’re actually gonna make progress, we’re gonna have to see de-escalation, Russia pulling back from the threat that it currently poses to Ukraine.”

While U.S. intelligence has recently suggested Russia is plotting a potential offensive against Ukraine involving up to 175,000 troops, Moscow has denied any planned invasion. As Tapper noted, Moscow has also advocated for pulling back some U.S. forces in Eastern Europe and ruling out expanding NATO — an alliance dating back to 1949 — to include Ukraine.

“Neither of those is on the table,” Blinken said of those demands, adding that “there are two paths before us: There’s a path of dialogue and diplomacy. … The other path is confrontation.”

As the Associated Press noted:

U.S. officials on Saturday unveiled some details of the administration’s stance, which seem to fall well short of Russian demands. The officials said the U.S. is open to discussions on curtailing possible future deployments of offensive missiles in Ukraine and putting limits on American and NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe if Russia is willing to back off on Ukraine.

But they also said Russia will be hit hard with economic sanctions should it intervene in Ukraine. In addition to direct sanctions on Russian entities, those penalties could include significant restrictions on products exported from the U.S. to Russia and potentially foreign-made products subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Moscow on Sunday made clear “it would not make concessions under U.S. pressure and warned that this week’s talks on the Ukraine crisis might end early,” Reuters reported.

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Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who will lead his nation’s delegation in Geneva, supposedly suggested the negotiations could end after just one meeting.

“I can’t rule out anything, this is an entirely possible scenario and the Americans … should have no illusions about this,” Ryabkov said, according to the state-owned RIA news agency.

In their letter to Biden, the 15 groups emphasized that “diplomacy is the only reasonable path forward” and echoed a recent call from over 100 former American officials and scholars, “who stated that, in addition to addressing urgent security challenges, we must engage in a serious and sustained strategic dialogue with Russia ‘that addresses the deeper sources of mistrust and hostility’ while deterring Russian military aggression.”

QI board member @KatrinaNation: "Paradoxically, NATO now largely exists to manage the risks created by its existence." https://t.co/czXYeI6Flz

— Quincy Institute (@QuincyInst) January 6, 2022

“These dialogues must engage with President Putin’s explicit pursuit of ‘reliable and long-term security guarantees’ that would ‘exclude any further NATO moves eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory,'” the letter says.

“Russia perceives NATO expansion as a threat,” the groups note. “It is in the interests of the United States, the region, and the world to address these and other root causes of tension with Russia as part of an ongoing strategic dialogue. Such a dialogue does not necessarily preclude the use of other mechanisms to deter Russian aggression that are appropriately scaled, do not harm innocent civilians, and do not risk a disastrous escalation into war.”

Noting that Biden faces “a stark and profoundly consequential choice,” the coalition concludes that “it is in the interests of the United States, our allies, the people of Ukraine themselves, and the world community that the disputes between our nations be settled peacefully.”

More on rising global tensions and U.S.-Russian relations:

After the Storm: A year after Jan. 6, Trump supporters still lost in blizzard of conspiracies

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On January 6, 2022, the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, the one thing Trump loyalists could agree on was everyone else was to blame for the carnage that day but them.

Jim Griffin, who was outside the Capitol last January, claimed FBI infiltrators were all “over the entire event and they were telling people to go inside the Capitol.”

Griffin, who handed out business cards calling himself “The True Captain America” with photos in costume parading a 20-foot-tall American flag on the Capitol grounds, knew who the infiltrators were.

“QAnon is FBI. … FBI infiltrators is QAnon. They’re the ones who organized the event,” referring to the failed coup. Griffin said it was QAnon who broke into “Nancy Pelosi’s and all their offices and all that crap.” At the same time, the infiltrators “was only two of them [among] at least 4 million people” at the Capitol last Jan. 6.

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Griffin spoke as he held a lit candle shielded in a clear Starbucks cup during a nighttime vigil outside of D.C.’s Central Detention Facility, which holds the remaining band of hardcore insurrectionists as they await trial. His millions at the coup had dwindled to a dozen at the vigil.

Griffin said antifa and BLM were also responsible for Jan. 6. “There were four busloads of … antifa and they were in Trump outfits. And the guy who got paid $75,000 admitted it,” he said.

Griffin was apparently referring to John Earle Sullivan, who sold footage of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt to news outlets for $90,000 but was stripped of the money as ill-gotten gains after the government indicted him for allegedly participating in the insurrection.

Accompanying Griffin last year and this one was “Big John.” He blamed militias, not QAnon or antifa for violence on Jan. 6. “The FBI had people that were infiltrated into the Proud Boys, into the Oath Keepers, who were actually leading people up to the steps to doors that were thrown open in front of them and to barricades that were pulled away in front of them.”

Big John was more modest in his estimates of the Jan. 6 crowd than Griffin, putting it at “well over a million.” He said of Trump supporters who entered the Capitol, “Nobody got into that building that wasn’t allowed into the building.”

Wilma Ward claimed antifa stirred the pot as well. She said videos show “people pointing out antifa in the crowd and some of them were saying, ‘Yeah.'” Ward was one of the few at the vigil who wasn’t there in 2021. She came from San Diego “to keep Ashli’s name alive and hopefully the prisoners get some justice.” Babbitt was killed by a Capitol Hill officer who claimed he warned her repeatedly as she climbed through a broken window that was the last barrier between the insurrectionists and members of Congress.

When asked if there were members of antifa in the jail, Ward said, “Yes, there are. There are. At least that’s what we’re being told when we write the prisoners … who to trust, and who not.”

These conspiracies could have come from Newsmax, “the Trumpiest channel on TV,” known for hiring journalists previously fired for sexual harassment. Its daily viewership has plunged to 93,000, a drop of more than 70 percent since briefly surging post-election after feeding its audience a steady diet of the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump. Newsmax’s bootlicking has earned it a spot in lawsuits seeking billions of dollars from individuals and outlets promoting “baseless election fraud claims.”

Michael, a correspondent for Newsmax, was among the journalists outside the D.C. jail who outnumbered conspiracists about five to one. He asked, “Was there any evidence that showed President Trump asked people to break through windows or doors,” an allegation he seemed to have invented, and answered his own question, “There hasn’t been any evidence.”

Following a testy exchange, with Michael asking me, “Are you larping as a conservative,” he gave his take on Jan. 6. He did blame Trump supporters while trying to spin the day as MAGA gone wild, “I think it was a celebration of President Trump’s candidacy of his time as president that got out of hand and mob mentality took over.”

His opinion might put his colleagues at Newsmax in a tizzy. Even as the insurrection was in full swing, they were already blaming antifa and BLM “infiltrators.” By the night of Jan. 6 Newsmax declared the mob innocent, “Trump supporters don’t do these things” — as supporters partied at hotels across the city, defied mask mandates and curfews, abused staff and guests, and declared, “We won.”

Since Jan. 6, Newsmax has left no conspiracy behind. It called it a “false flag operation.” It speculated that Michael Fanone, the D.C. cop pummeled and Tasered by the Trump crowd until he had a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury, was “mistaken for antifa.” It has amplified Matt Gaetz histrionics that the FBI organized and participated in the insurrection.

One Jan. 6 participant seemed to have learned the error of his ways. Keith Scott said he survived Trump’s “Election Fraud Cult.” Before Jan. 6, “It consumed my life.” A resident of Corpus Christi, Texas, Scott said, “If a Tweet came from Stop the Steal that there was a rally in Lansing, Michigan, I would drop everything and go there.” He crisscrossed the country, listening to testimony about voter fraud, but he was disillusioned by Jan. 6.

Scott says, “Trump didn’t go far enough.” Scott didn’t want the insurrection to go further, but rather, “It was just political theater. Was [Trump] just trying to get eyeballs that day on Jan. 6 for his speech or was he trying to really show everyone there was fraud and expose the fraud?”

Scott wanted Trump to appoint Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell as special counsel. He said Trump “could have gotten rid of the head of the FBI and CIA. There are things that he could have done to really dive in and look into” election fraud.

Scott’s faith was unshakeable: the election was stolen. He walked away when asked for evidence of voter fraud other than verbal claims. Scott’s problem wasn’t the cult. It was the cult leader. A publicity-hungry Trump had abandoned him and the true cause of election fraud.

Julie, a D.C. native, shared Scott’s delusions. She watched on election night as “The machines couldn’t keep up with Trump’s votes. They shut down all at once in six states: Nevada, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, others.”

In the cult that may prove stronger than the leader, Micki Witthoeft has a special status. She is the mother of their martyr, Ashli Babbitt. Earlier in the day outside the Capitol, Witthoeft embraced Marjorie Taylor Greene and the falsehood that the election was stolen.

Outside the jail, she said, “Patriots are scared to show up in numbers now and who can blame them they’re still being hunted down.” Insurrectionists in jail “did little more than carry a flag.” Ashli “had every right to be in the building.”

“Where are our leaders,” Witthoeft pleaded, expressing appreciation for the Representatives from Jewish space lasers, child sex trafficking, and palling around with Holocaust deniers.

It’s easy to make fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar. The detachment from reality is wondrous to behold close up. Four million on Jan. 6! Antifa! Stolen Election! QAnon!

But being mesmerized by conspiracies is like thinking the sun is nothing more than the gaseous eruptions bursting from it rather than understanding the fury on the surface is powered by the incendiary core.

On the anniversary of Jan. 6, there were glimpses of the white-hot core.

Scott said he favored picture I.D. laws for voting and to “get rid of all this mail-in voting.”

Jim Griffin, upset at my questions, said, “You’re not one of us,” pointing at my Gadsden hat. That’s the one with a coiled rattlesnake reading “Don’t Tread On Me.” I had disguised myself. When interviewing Trump cultists, friendly apparel elicits more honest responses and fewer assaults.

“You are not one of us,” he repeated. “You know what we are? The backbone of America. The people that work every day. The people that are in the freaking military. The people that are law enforcement. The people that work and sacrifice. That is the American people.”

Micki Witthoeft said, “This country’s not lost. Know that in your heart, we’re not lost.”

The sentiments fit together seamlessly. Beneath flights of deadly fancy is a sense of searing loss. America is being lost, but in their mind, it’s a romanticized vision that never existed. Hard work isn’t respected anymore. Manly virtue, cop and soldier, aren’t respected. Voting, the one rare system free of fraud, is thoroughly corrupted.

And they are right that America is dying, but they can’t recognize the disease or the symptoms. It’s dying from oligarchs, climate chaos, gun culture, racist policing, a pandemic without end, infotainment, misery for the proles, welfare for the fat cats.

The Trump cultists have convinced themselves they are superheroes saving the nation when in fact they are wielding the knives, killing America with a thousand cuts.

To combat fabricated voter fraud, Scott demanded actual voter suppression.

Witthoeft’s plea, “We’re not lost,” is kin to Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” conspiracy that whites are being replaced by diseased barbaric hordes pouring across our borders.

Griffin’s rant, “The people that work hard and sacrifice,” is producerism. It’s the ideology of President Andrew Jackson. White Americans are the producers, the hard workers who sacrifice and create the wealth. But they are beset by parasites above and below. Trump loved Jackson so much he put a portrait of the genocidaire of Native Americans in the White House.

Trump and Tucker have convinced the insurrectionists that America is dying because of “illegal aliens” and Blacks on welfare on the ladder right below them and sneering liberals and arrogant experts on the ladder right above them. The Trump cult refuses to blame or even idolizes those at the top of a ladder so tall it is being stretched into the heavens by men racing to be the first trillionaire and the first to colonize space.

To reconcile the harsh reality that America is dying with the demented fantasy that blame falls on immigrants, Black people, public-school teachers, Muslims, public-health experts requires a con game so elaborate that even if QAnon disappeared today, new insane conspiracies would appear tomorrow to bridge the chasm between the far-right bizarro world and actual reality.

The Trump cult is no joke. The fanatics are a small portion of the country, perhaps 15-20 million voters. But they are the malevolent heart of a party that sees a winning formula in conspiracism, voter suppression, Democratic incompetence, manufactured outrage that teaching racism is the real racism (otherwise known as CRT), and a propaganda machine that would make Joseph Goebbels envious.

If the fascistic right gains power then the deranged mythology that the 2020 election was stolen and FBI and antifa were behind the insurrection becomes our reality. We will be dragged into a world where “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

ICU doctor reveals the horrors his colleagues are facing: “Somber faces and dispirited demeanor”

An intensive care unit (ICU) doctor in rural Ohio is speaking out about the battle he and his staff have been fighting with the latest wave of COVID-19.

In an op-ed published by HuffPost, Dr. Jason Chertoff, M.D., M.P.H. painted a picture of the scene unfolding at the “moderate-sized community hospital” where he works. “I, like many other health care workers, am frustrated and concerned about our nation’s path as we enter year three.” Chertoff wrote.”

In his piece, he offered a brief timeline of the start of his career compared to how things are now. “When I became board certified in my specialties just three years ago, COVID-19 did not exist,” Chertoff wrote. “But now my new norm and second home is a 24-bed ICU filled with COVID-19 patients on ventilators, medically paralyzed and flipped on their stomachs, with many more patients waiting to enter. Sometimes in the midst of the vital sign alarms blaring, overhead code blue alerts, and grueling end-of-life family meetings, I ponder how much longer this pace can be sustained.”

Chertoff warns that the ongoing pandemic is taking its toll on healthcare workers.

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“As we embark on our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to name all of the health care resources that have neared depletion, with ventilators, personal protective equipment, emergency room, and intensive care unit beds, physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, and other essential health care workers being just a few,” he wrote. “Gazing at my colleagues’ somber faces and dispirited demeanor, it is clear that an underappreciated health care resource deserving mention, which is now quickly dwindling, is morale.”

Even with high salaries healthcare professionals are being offered to fight the pandemic, Chertoff notes that the ongoing shortages are a clear indication of how morale is waning. He also explained why hospitals are unable to resolve the problem.

“Never before have health care workers been offered such high salaries, stipends, and bonuses to do their jobs, but still the shortages persist. They persist because money fails to address the crux of the problem, which is that the morale and resolve of health care workers are at all-time lows.”

As healthcare workers continue their battle against the mutating virus, it is continuing to spread rapidly. So, what is driving America’s COVID crisis? According to Chertoff, the answer is “simple ― albeit controversial and politically heated.”

“Hospitals continue to exceed capacity, exhaustion of vital health care resources persist, and human lives are still being lost. Why? The answer is simple ― albeit controversial and politically heated: Not enough Americans have been vaccinated”

In wake of the bleak battle healthcare workers are faced with, Chertoff is calling on leadership to help the medical community. He also offered a bit of advice.

“Our health care community is currently wounded and in dire need of uplifting leadership and direction, similar to others that have experienced crisis in our nation’s history,” Chertoff wrote. “So, to those supposedly in charge, I plead with you to talk to us and remind us why we chose this profession in the first place. Assure us that we still serve a purpose and that together, we can work toward a better future.”

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