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The 5 French mother sauces every cook should know

The five French mother sauces are: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomato. Read on to learn how to make each one.

In the 19th century, Marie-Antoine Carême anointed Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, and tomato sauce as the building blocks for all other sauces in his work “L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siecle.” Later on, Hollandaise got added to the family. Since then, many people consider others sauces — sweet and savory from all around the world — as unofficial extended relatives of these five sauces.

Though some will argue for the importance of chimichurri and chocolate sauce, it’s a knowledge of the five French mother sauces that will prove essential. They may seem intimidating, but mother sauces will nurture your kitchen confidence. With a few simple ingredients (mostly flour, butter, and a liquid) and a couple easy techniques, these five sauces, all equally important to your cooking repertoire, serve as the starting point for a slew of other classics.

Once you get the feel for these sauces, you’ll be able to whisk them up whenever you want to get fancy. And soon enough, you’ll feel confident enough to break tradition and take that Mother Sauce somewhere she’s never gone before. Here’s what you need to know about the building blocks of sauces:

Beyond flavor, the most important element of any sauce is its ability to smother and cling to whatever it gets drizzled, dolloped, or poured on. That means making the sauce thick and stable, which is accomplished with three techniques: a roux, an emulsifier, and a reduction (liquid that’s slowly cooked down until thick). 

Four out of the five mother sauces start with a roux. Roux is a fancy name for flour mixed with fat. Equal parts butter and flour get cooked over medium heat, then a liquid gets added. This mixture then boils, thickens (reduces), and becomes the base of your sauce. Just note, if you’re making a white sauce — like Béchamel or Velouté — do not brown the butter, as it will darken the finished product. The last mother sauce is a product of emulsification, which I’ll explain below. 

Here are the basic formulas of the five mother sauces:

Béchamel: Roux + Dairy (traditionally milk or cream)
Velouté: Roux + White Stock (traditionally chicken, but also vegetable or fish)
Espagnole: Roux + Brown Stock (traditionally veal or beef)
Tomato: Roux + Tomatoes (or, go the Italian route by skipping the roux and simply reducing tomatoes over medium-low heat until thick)
Hollandaise: Egg Yolks + Clarified Melted Butter + Acid (like lemon juice or white wine)

Now that you understand the basics, let’s talk about each mother sauce in more detail (and what to pair them with):

1. Béchamel

If you’ve eaten homemade macaroni and cheese, a classic croque madame, or lasagna, chances are you’ve experienced the rich creaminess of Béchamel. It can be made in its most basic form by just combining roux and cream, or it can be mixed with other ingredients to create new sauces: Mornay is made by adding Gruyère or Parmesan, and mustard sauce is made by adding — you guessed it — mustard.

Recipes to flaunt your Béchamel skills

Creamiest Baked Mac and Cheese

Baking mac and cheese means you get the best of both worlds: a crunchy topping and a creamy interior. Recipe developer Josh Cohen has a trick for avoiding any dryness during baking: undercook the pasta and use extra cheese sauce.

Croque Madame Hot Dish

The classic ham-and-cheesy croque monsieur becomes a madame with the addition of an egg. In this recipe from Justine Chapple’s cookbook “Just Cook It,” it becomes a hot dish, a Midwestern casserole layered with béchamel, ham, Gruyère, and topped with fried eggs.

Lasagna Bolognese

A proper lasagna bolognese requires time. Time to make the meat sauce; time to make the parmigiano-leaden béchamel; time to layer the noodles, sauces, and cheese; time to give it a nice long bake; and, most importantly, time to savor every bite.

Here are some other ways to use Béchamel:

  • Swap in Béchamel for some of the cream in a gratin.
  • Pour it over polenta cakes and broil for a few minutes until bubbly and golden brown.

Once you’ve mastered basic Béchamel, here’s how to get more creative: Spike a classic Béchamel with soy and miso for a new take on Trent Pierce’s Miso-Creamed Kale or Nobu’s Fried Asparagus.

2. Velouté

Like good old Béchamel, Velouté begins with a white roux, but then it gets mixed with white stock made from fish, chicken, or veal. Technically not a finished sauce, it’s used as a flavorful starting point for gravies, mushroom sauces (hello chicken pot pie), and shrimp sauce (hello shrimp bisque). 

Get your Velouté on with these recipes

Velouté aux Champignons de Paris (Button Mushroom Soup)

Made with plenty of butter and cognac, this Parisian-inspired mushroom soup is just as good hot as it is cold.

Deep-Dish Chicken Pot Pie

Is there anything cozier than chicken pot pie? Yep: deep-dish chicken pot pie. This creamy meal is baked in a springform pan, making a hefty pie that’ll really stick to your ribs.

Buttermilk Drop Biscuits and Sausage Gravy from Millie Peartree

Chef Millie Peartree’s biscuits and sausage gravy are for those lazy mornings when you’re craving a breakfast that’ll keep you full for hours.

Here are some other ways to use Velouté:

  • Whip up Velouté with veal stock, then use it to make Swedish Meatballs.
  • Smother biscuits with an herby gravy for breakfast.

Once you’ve mastered basic Velouté, here’s how to get more creative: Make velouté vegetarian with a mushroom-based stock for this Vegetarian Mushroom Thyme Gravy.

3. Espagnole

Although some think blond roux have more fun, Espagnole proves that dark roux know how to party, too. Also known as brown sauce, Espagnole begins with a mirepoix (carrots, celery, and onions), beef stock, and deglazed brown bits (fond) from beef bones. From there, tomato paste and spices may be added.

To make a demi-glace, a rich French brown sauce, combine the Espagnole with more beef stock; to create Bordelaise, a red wine sauce that pairs well with steak and mushrooms, mix the demi-glace with red wine and herbs. Serve this with filet mignon for an excellent dinner.

Explore Espagnole in these recipes

Chopped Steak Marchand de Vin

This recipe, from “Canal House: Cook Something,” calls for store-bought veal demi-glace — we’re a fan of any shortcut that makes dinner faster.

Dan Barber’s Braised Short Ribs

Chef Dan Barber’s braised short ribs take classic Espagnole to new heights with the addition of bright tamarind paste, which cuts through the fattiness of the meat.

Here are some other ways to use Espagnole and its variations:

4. Tomato

Probably the first mother sauce you ever tasted (over a heaping bowl of spaghetti), tomato sauce is often a mixture of just onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Although some traditionalists may start with a roux, most tomato sauces merely rely on a tomato reduction to build flavor and create thickness.

Tomato, tom-ah-to — you need these sauce recipes

Pizza Sauce

Pizza sauce certainly isn’t classic French, but the two are no doubt linked. We like to keep a quart of this in the freezer for pizza-emergencies.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Shakshuka

Shakshuka’s saucy tomato base isn’t traditionally French either, but it is perfect for savory breakfast fans — but we like this recipe any time of day.

Once you’ve mastered basic tomato sauce, here’s how to get more creative: Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce can’t be beat, but if you want to think outside of Italy, use your tomato sauce to make Lentil Cakes with Tikka Masala instead. 

5. Hollandaise

Think of Hollandaise as a fancy mayonnaise that uses clarified butter in place of oil and gets drizzled over asparagus and eggs without judgment. Instead of using a roux or a reduction, Hollandaise uses the method of emulsification: the act of using a binding agent (in this case, an egg yolk) to force two ingredients that don’t mix well together (here, butter and lemon juice) to like each other immensely. Hollandaise takes patience, as you’ll need to temper the mixture so that the eggs do not curdle. The sauce can break easily, but you can patch things back together by adding a little heavy cream and whisking until the sauce returns to its smooth state; or use Amanda’s trick for fixing broken aioli — a close relative of Hollandaise sauce — by using the broken emulsification to start your next batch. Sound like a lot of hard work? This Fried Green Tomato Benedict makes it all worth the trouble.

When mixed with unsweetened whipped cream, Hollandaise suddenly becomes airy Mousseline that can be poured over fish or vegetables. 

Recipes when you want hollandaise for days

Hollandaise Sauce

Start off strong with a classic Hollandaise sauce recipe to keep bookmarked.

Avocado Toast Eggs Benedict

Eggs Benedict (or Florentine) are instantly improved when merged with another breakfast favorite: avocado toast.

Poached Eggs with Miso-Brown Butter Hollandaise

Try Food52 Resident Mandy Lee’s miso and brown butter Hollandaise, and you may never make the classic recipe ever again.

Béarnaise is another close relative to Hollandaise. But unlike Hollandaise, which has lemon juice in it, Béarnaise is perfumed with tarragon, shallots, and white wine vinegar.

Here are some other ways to use Hollandaise:

Once you’ve mastered basic Hollandaise, here’s how to get more creative: Let another breakfast staple enjoy the creaminess of Hollandaise with this Savory Oatmeal recipe. Or take your next Caramelized Pork Bahn Mi to new heights by replacing the mayonnaise with a Sriracha-spiked Hollandaise sauce. 

Trump calls Biden’s Jan. 6 speech “very hurtful” while continuing to spread election lies

Still banned from social media for spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election that inspired an insurrection, former president Donald Trump repeatedly blasted reporters with statements on Thursday as the country marked the one-year anniversary of the attempted coup.

First Trump issued a statement saying America has lost its confidence. After President Joe Biden addressed the nation on the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump released a statement saying it was “just a distraction.” His third statement called Biden a failure and spread his debunked lie that the election was rigged.

His fourth statement revealed that how he thought the speech made people feel.

“To watch Biden speaking is very hurtful to many people,” Trump said.

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He then repeated the lies that incited his supporters to attack the Capitol.

“They’re the ones who tried to stop the peaceful transfer with a rigged election,” Trump falsely claimed.

Biden pointing out Trump “spread a web of lies about the 2020 election” appeared to anger the former real estate developer.

“They spread a ‘web of lies’ about me and Russia for 4 years to try to overturn the 2016 election, and now they lie about how they interfered in the 2020 Election, too,” Trump said.

He went on to allege that “Big Tech was used illegally,” that ballots were sold for $10 in Georgia, and that gas costs $5 a gallon.

Read more on Jan. 6 and Donald Trump’s continuing hold over the Republican Party:

16 ideas for leftover prime rib (other than, you know, just eating it)

So you did the thing. To the delight of your family and friends, you herb-rubbed, temped, roasted, temped again, carved, and served up a prime rib during the holiday season. But now, you’ve found yourself with a bit of a (tasty) problem: What to do with all of the leftover prime rib roast? Sure it’s easy enough to make a leftover prime rib sandwich topped with caramelized onions, a dollop of sour cream, and au jus for dipping, but that’s not exactly reinventing the wheel (though it does sound damn tasty).

We’ve got you covered. From tacos to pho, here are 16 ways to keep the good prime rib times going.

WE’RE TAKING YOUR QUESTIONS TO THE AIRWAVES

Best leftover prime rib recipes

1. Grilled Steak Sandwich with Blue Cheese Coleslaw

For a throne worthy of your prime rib, look no further than these fluffy ciabatta rolls. Use slices of prime rib in place of the grilled steak for an excellent dip sandwich.

2. Grilled Flank Steak Tacos with Feta and Oregano Salsa

No matter how perfect the prime rib roast was, there’s always leftovers of the juicy pink meat. It serves a crowd and most likely your guests loaded up on too many croquettes and blinis during happy hour, leaving little room for the roast. When that happens, reheat leftover slices of the beef the next day, drape into charred tortillas, and dot with herby salsa.

3. Merguez and Sweet Potato Hash

Roughly chopped and re-crisped, leftover prime rib would make a pretty delicious hash with sweet potatoes. (Just add a fried egg for the ultimate Boxing Day breakfast).

4. Brussels Sprouts Hash and Eggs

Hash it up again with Brussels sprouts, which are at their prime during the holiday season.

5. The Silver Palate’s Turkey Hash Salad

Swap the turkey for thin slices of prime rib for the low-effort salad you want to make (and eat) the day after a prime rib dinner.

6. Beef and Stout Pot Pie

ChrisandAmy‘s pot pie calls for a certain stout that’s brewed with oysters, and prime rib and oysters are a traditional pairing.

7. Viet Hapa Pho

Thin slices of leftover prime rib would be delicious over rice noodles in broth. Just add huge handfuls of crunchy beansprouts and cooling herbs, and a squeeze of lime.

8. Roasted Delicata Squash Stuffed with Autumn Farro

Winter squash stuffed with hearty, chewy farro and garlicky, herbed prime rib makes a cozy main perfect for yet another dinner party.

9. Our Best Philly Cheesesteak

Though Test Kitchen Director Josh Cohen calls for boneless ribeye here, why not slice your leftover prime rib very thinly and use it in a cheesesteak? The rest of the recipe is, really, what makes the dish: caramelized Jimmy Nardello Peppers and onions stuffed into an Italian hoagie roll with two melty cheeses.

10. One Beef Roast, Four American Sandwiches

And of course, you can’t go wrong with more sandwiches — four more, to be exact. Just set out all the fixings and let guests build their own!

11. Beef Flautas

Chop a few slices of prime rib finely and proceed right onto step three. Dinner, done!

12. Beef Stroganoff

The reason why this beef stroganoff works so well with leftover prime rib is because it’s less about the beef and more so about vegetables like cremini mushrooms, carrots, parsnips, onions, and scallions. So slice or cube whatever prime rib you have left in your fridge and then just add it to the creamy stir-fried vegetables in the last few minutes of cooking so that it fully reheats without becoming tough and chewy.

13. Leftover Prime Rib Quesadilla

Follow this guide to learn how to make griddled (or fried!) cheese quesadillas that are understated in appearance, but will wow with each and every bite. Once you nail the cooking basics, thinly slice leftover prime rib and use it for a meaty filling. We don’t think quesadillas get much better than this.

14. Corned Beef Hash

Before you scoff and say “but this says corned beef, not prime rib,” we know but listen: You can easily make leftover prime rib hash using the remains of your holiday dinner and dare I say, it will taste even better. (Just bookmark this recipe and you can do it all over again post-St. Patrick’s Day).

15. Bone Broth

For once, we’re not focusing on how to use the leftover meat. Instead, repurpose the bones from a bone-in prime rib by making this feel-good aromatic beef broth. If needed, grab some extra bones from your butcher, who will surely have extras on hand after the holiday rush.

16. Just Eat It

When I asked freelance recipe tester Townsend Smith what he would do with leftover prime rib, he said, “I’d probably just eat it.” It’s true — you’ve put so much effort into sourcing, preparing, and carving the roast. Plus, when else during the year do you get to enjoy this festive meat?

Ted Cruz blasted by Tucker Carlson, right-wing Twitter for calling Jan. 6 a “terrorist attack”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson tore into Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., on Wednesday for calling the Capitol riot a “violent terrorist attack,” accusing the Texas Republican of “repeating the talking points that [Attorney General] Merrick Garland has written for him.”

Carlson’s comments came in response to comments made by Cruz during a Wednesday Senate Rules committee hearing, where the senator remarked upon the “solemn” anniversary of the Capitol riot. 

“We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week,” Cruz said. “And it is an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol, where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery, risk their lives for the Capitol.”

Carlson, who has repeatedly downplayed the insurrection, did not take well to Cruz’s off-brand remarks.

“Now let’s be honest,” Carlson said during a Wednesday broadcast. “Everyone who’s conservative appreciates Ted Cruz. You may not like him. But you’ve gotta appreciate him. He’s legitimately smart. He’s one of the more articulate people to serve in the Congress, maybe the most articulate.”

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RELATED: How to stop an Insurrection Caucus: These reforms could reduce GOP extremism and save our democracy

After sufficient flattery, the Fox News firebrand then proceeded to lambast Cruz’s word choice when describing the Capitol riot.

“He described January 6th as a violent terrorist attack,” Carlson said. “Of all the things January 6th was, it was definitely not a violent terrorist attack. It wasn’t an insurrection. Was it a riot? Sure. It was not a violent terrorist attack. Sorry! So why are you telling us it was, Ted Cruz?”

“What the hell’s going on here?” he added. “You’re making us think, maybe the Republican Party is as worthless as we suspected it was. That can’t be true. Reassure us, please, Ted Cruz.”

Both the FBI and the Congressional Research Service have classified the Capitol insurrection as an act of domestic terrorism. 

Although Cruz is a member of the “Sedition Caucus” – a group of eight Republican senators who voted to reject the Electoral College vote count for Arizona and Pennsylvania – his comments nevertheless drew widespread scorn from conservatives who were quick to point out his apparent lack of fealty to the party. 

RELATED: “Treason Caucus” campaign targets Cruz, Hawley, and others for role in Capitol insurrection

“Ted Cruz followed Lindsey Graham and showed his true colors today,” wrote right-wing journalist John Cardillo.

“The minute you call it a ‘violent terrorist attack on the capitol,’ you lose most of your standing when complaining about the DOJ, Dems and Media because they have diff views than you how to handle a ‘violent terrorist attack on the capitol,” tweeted Yossi Gestetner, co-founder of the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council.”

Donald Trump aide Sebastian Gorka also chimed in, remarking on Trump’s sudden cancellation of a press conference set for the anniversary of the Capitol riot. “I’m so done with Ted Cruz. What are the odds he’s the Senator who told President Trump not to speak tomorrow?” 

twitter.com/SebGorka/status/1478932171410837505

You only need 3 ingredients and 15 minutes to bake this magical chocolate cake

Please don’t make any resolutions of the swearing off chocolate and butter variety, because I’m about to change your life.

The flourless chocolate cake is one of the greatest feats of baking magic ever invented. It’s a chic little showstopper, the kind of thing that makes people go, “It’s so rich, I can only have a teensy slice,” but you’re like, “I’ll be the judge of that, thank you.” It’s exactly the right dessert to chase away the winter blahs, a cake that feels festive when the weather says otherwise.

There are as many varieties of flourless chocolate cake recipes out there as there are brownie recipes, and you’d be hard pressed to go wrong with any of them. I discovered mine several years ago. (For the record, my colleague Ashlie Stevens’ gingerbread cloud version will knock you out.)

RELATED: 5 tips for buying better butter at the grocery store, according to an expert

I had recklessly offered to host a friend’s bridal shower before remembering that her mother was the Ina Garten of her social set, a woman famed for her stellar parties and fantastic food. I fussed and fretted over the entire menu, but this recipe from London’s River Café somehow wouldn’t stop calling my name. A streamlined version of the restaurant’s famed chocolate “nemesis” cake, it seemed like it would be either very good or very weird.

I can’t tell you a single other thing I made for that party, but the bride’s mother became a lifelong friend that day. It was definitely the cake.

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I’ve made this recipe on repeat over the years, and it’s never failed me — not even once. This cake is a chocolate lover’s platonic ideal — fudgy and intense, but not too sweet. From bridal showers to New Year’s Eve, it’s perfect for celebrating with an intimate group of friends — and it goes down exceptionally well with a glass of champagne.

One word of warning: This is a very simple recipe, but it’s also very ingredient and technique specific. There are only 3 ingredients, so pick out the butter, chocolate and eggs you really love.

Yes, you really have to whip the eggs for 5 minutes; you really have to use a bain-marie; and you really have to cover it in foil and then remove the foil. Look, this recipe is so good that if it called for you to do a little dance, I’d strongly advise you to do it. This one’s absolutely worth it.

***

Recipe: 15-Minute Chocolate Cake

Inspired by “Italian Easy: Recipes from London’s River Cafe”

Yields: 12 servings (or maybe 8, no judgment)
Bake Time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

  • 1 pound of chocolate with at least 70% cocoa solids, broken up into pieces (I like Lindt.)
  • 2 1/2 sticks of butter (I’m fond of Kerrygold.)
  • 6 eggs, organic if possible

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 425°F.
  2. Generously butter a 10-inch springform pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. (No springform pan? You can do this in a cake pan of the same size, but it will be trickier to release.)
  3. Set a medium pan of water to simmer. You’ll be whipping your eggs in a bowl over this water, so fill it about halfway.
  4. In a large microwave-safe bowl, melt the chocolate and butter in the microwave for 1 minute. Stir, then microwave in 15 second intervals until completely melted. (You can do the melting over a simmering bowl of water thing, if you’re inclined; but I never have, and I wouldn’t ask you to try.)
  5. Break all of the eggs into a bowl large enough to fit over the pan of water. Place the pan over the water and beat the eggs until they just start to thicken, about 1 minute or so.
  6. Remove the pan from the heat and beat the eggs another 4-5 minutes, until they’re very light and foamy.
  7. Meanwhile, pour your hot water into a roasting pan.
  8. Fold half of the eggs into the chocolate mixture to combine, then fold in the remainder.
  9. Pour the batter into your springform pan, then cover with a lightly buttered sheet of foil. Gently place the springform pan in the roasting pan, so the water comes about halfway up the sides.
  10. Bake for 5 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 10 minutes.
  11. Remove everything from the oven. The cake should be a little wiggly in the center. Remove it from the roasting pan and allow it to cool completely.
  12. Unmold and dust with confectioners sugar, or serve with whipped cream and fruit.

More of our favorite recipes involving chocolate: 

Trump’s coup failed — but January 6 was a success

I spoke on the phone with a conservative acquaintance on January 6, 2021. She had been posting disinformation about “voter fraud” on Facebook. I had pushed back in comments by pointing out one batch of votes Donald Trump was demanding be thrown out — the ones from Philadelphia — included mine. Things had been tense for a couple of days, with multiple Republicans trying somehow to deny they were targeting my vote, while also standing by claims that the ballots should be tossed. By the time the situation had escalated to a phone call, insurrectionists had already stormed the U.S. Capitol, trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory through violence. 

Immediately, she dashed any hope I had that she might feel remorse, seeing the impact of spreading these lies on Facebook. Instead, the conversation was a disjointed mess. She said she opposed violence, but then made excuses for it. Most were incoherent — she even griped at one point about local government officials who she believes sit around in their cars and don’t work — but I got the gist. It was the usual right-wing nonsense about liberalism breeding indolent parasites who feed off hardworking Americans. And if Trump’s “solution” to this non-problem is overthrowing democracy, well, so be it. It was then that I realized that January 6 would be a galvanizing moment for Republicans.

RELATED: Sorry, Republicans, but there’s no way to acquit Trump without endorsing his insurrection

It did not, contrary to what many liberals hoped or the mainstream press assumed, make them realize things had gone “too far” or to abandon Trump. Instead, the violence of Jan. 6 functioned more like the hazing rituals used by cults (or even fraternities) to draw their members deeper in. Induced to go along with that which ranges from embarrassing to immoral, once having gone there, members feel they can’t go back. Use whatever cliche you wish — “in for a penny, in for a pound,” “crossing the Rubicon,” “down the rabbit hole” — but ultimately it’s all the same thing. Having the leader of their party incite a fascist riot created a stark and undeniable choice for Republicans, both voters and politicians: You’re either a fascist or a Democrat — and the vast majority of them think there’s nothing worse than being a Democrat. 

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On the night of the insurrection, a lot of Republican politicians — ensconsced in the Beltway press and all of its assumptions — freaked out, believing that this really would be the breaking point for Trump and Trumpism. Some GOP Congress members backed off plans to vote for Trump’s plan to throw out electoral college votes from swing states he lost. Others — 147 in total, 65% of House Republicans and 15% of Senate Republicans — went forward with plans to formally support Trump’s attempted coup by voting against election certification. But by the time Trump’s impeachment for inciting the riot came around, he had scooped up most of the stragglers — 93% of House Republicans voted not to impeach Trump and 86% of Senate Republicans voted to acquit. 

Republicans tried to spin excuses for why voting against the impeachment was not somehow a vote for the insurrection, but the political reality is that voting against impeachment was voting for the insurrection. What had changed in the weeks between the insurrection and Trump’s impeachment and trial was that the polling data came in and made it quite clear: The Republican base still backed Trump, which means they are all-in on this insurrection, and in overthrowing democracy generally. 

RELATED: A second civil war: One year after Trump’s violent insurrection, how worried should we be?

To be sure, few of them will come right out and say they’re for the insurrection. Instead, as I saw on the day of the actual riot, there’s a lot of dissembling excuses. They’ll tell pollsters Trump didn’t do it, or antifa did it, or it wasn’t that violent, or that the mob was trying to protect rather than overthrow democracy. None of these are sincerely held beliefs, so much as ways for Republicans to say they support the insurrection without coming right out and saying so. As Osita Nwanevu explained in the New York Times, the true belief motivating Trump and his supporters is that they are owed “an eternal compact that keeps power in their rightful hands,” and nothing, not even democracy, should stand in their way. 

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No one should doubt that, in the extremely unlikely chance that Trump had succeeded last year, Republicans would be heralding the Jan. 6 anniversary as a day of celebration and the insurrectionists would be celebrated as heroes. Indeed, Trump was going forth with plans to celebrate the day anyway when he was pulled back by Republicans who want to maintain the pretense of official disapproval for the violence, while still steadily working to make sure that the next time Trump tries to steal an election he will succeed. 

It’s easy to see the game Republicans, both voters and leaders, are playing. To each other, they need to signal support for the insurrection and the broader goal of ending democracy. But they use coded language, so as not to out themselves as opponents of democracy to either the mainstream press or those low-info swing voters they still need to win elections. So there’s lots of disingenuous posturing about how the riot was bad — sometimes aided with false claims that it was really leftists or the FBI who did it — coupled with actions that speak the truth, which is that the vast majority of the GOP is fully on board.

This kind of bad faith comes easily to Republicans, who have employed it for years to cover for other repulsive views they have. Support for forced childbirth is laundered as “pro-life,” racism is laundered as opposition to “political correctness” or “critical race theory,” and a rejection of responsibility for stewardship of the planet is laundered as “skepticism” of climate change. So it’s really not much of a mental leap for your average Republican to get on board with ending democracy, while pretending all along it’s about saving it. 

RELATED: How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

This strategy works for complex reasons that have been thoroughly examined in both the mainstream and liberal press.

There is the media’s addiction to false equivalence that makes it impossible for them to cover Republican radicalism for what it is. The corruption of a handful of Democrats, mainly Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, means the continued blockage of vital democracy-saving legislation at the behest of greedy lobbyists. There have been decades of failure to pass meaningful legislation to dramatically reduce the influence of moneied interests over voter interests. Corporate leadership is more worried about quarterly returns and low taxes on the wealthy than preserving the democracy that allowed their companies to grow in the first place.

So many people feel it’s in their individual interests not to stop fascism that they’re failing to see that the long-term collective interest is in doing something to stop this — before it’s too late. Many historians and researchers see strong parallels between January 6 and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, in which the Nazi leader and a couple of thousand followers tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Hitler failed, and much of the press treated the attempt like a joke. But it ended up being a galvanizing moment for Nazis to move forward and seize power through legal means. The same thing is playing out now, with Republicans rewriting state election laws and purging election officials who are disloyal to the fascist cause. It’s all with an eye towards making sure that, next time Trump wants to be declared the winner of an election he lost, there’s no one to stop him. Every day that plan isn’t thwarted, he gets closer to success. One year later, time is only running out. 

An eyewitness to history, as it broke: I was there — and no, it didn’t make sense

Last year, on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, I caught a ride down to the Mall with a friend who works in the mayor’s office. 

I’ve known this friend for about half-a-decade, a period of time during which I’ve found myself filing, with depressing regularity, dispatches from right-wing events across the country.  The stakes were high — in just a few hours Congress was set to certify the election—and in the car together I asked him about how the day might go. Was there a worst-case scenario?

 “Maybe he calls an impromptu rally at Freedom Plaza, maybe he motorcades there himself.” The city’s resources were already stretched thin. “How the hell would we enforce that?” 

He dropped me at a roadblock off 13th Street, just north of the White House. The entrance to the rally had been cordoned to a narrow checkpoint. There were vendors everywhere, it seemed. One was selling pretzels and water from a metallic shopping cart, along with “official” Stop the Steal t-shirts. Another was hawking pink beanies with Trump’s jagged signature across the brim.

People were carrying yellow cardboard signs with I HAVE GOOD NEWS on the front and JESUS SAVES on the back. The checkpoint itself was made up of two enormous snowplows, their beds blocking the street. We waited in line to pass through, two at a time, until the small gap gave way to reveal the view beyond: a sight I hadn’t been expecting.

RELATED: I was there for the day that poisoned America — and I think we can still recover

The attendees already numbered in the many thousands. Off in the distance, rising like a rudimentary amphitheater, the National Mall sloped toward the Washington Monument. Trump supporters crowded along it, filling the narrow stretch to the Ellipse. And more were on their way.

Just then I found myself standing alongside a man in baggy corduroy pants. He was shirtless, his torso completely bare except for a cheap red backpack. In his hand he was holding an American flag, which had been lashed to an actual spear. The horns on his head reared up out of a fox-colored fur hat. It was the now-famous Jacob Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, the 33-year-old “QAnon Shaman” from Arizona. I was familiar with the conspiracy he championed, a system in which a cabal of global elites supposedly sought eternal life by harvesting the adrenochrome secretions of captured, tortured children. Not that I recognized Chansley then. 

“Dude,” I said to him. His shoulders were so narrow, his stature as slight as a teenager’s. I wanted to shout about the weather — For the love of God, put on a shirt! But he didn’t really see me, and as he bounced by on the balls of his feet, I recognized the manic gait of a man who didn’t feel the cold. 

I continued on toward the Mall. But a moment later, I found myself standing alongside another incomprehensible figure. He was tall, stiff-limbed, decked from head to foot in flowing white robes. He wore on his face what appeared to be a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, the cheeks and forehead painted with the characteristics of the American flag (stars and vertical stripes). Atop his head: a golden cowboy hat. Together we were standing on either side of a small table-like object: a kiosk he’d set up in the very middle of the road. From its base he’d draped two enormous banners. The first read TRUMP 2020. The second displayed a yin/yang symbol, the emblem of the Republic of Korea. “UFOK TV,” he’d pasted along the side of his stand. “U.S. Presidential Fraud Election Result, 100% accurate prophecy, Watch on YouTube Now!” I made my way around him. The entire time his gaze never wavered. 

Across Constitution Avenue the winter grass quickly gave way to mud. There were more signs now. THE OBSOLETE MAN, one read. WATCH UNPLANNED, declared another. Later I’d look these up — the former referenced an old “Twilight Zone” episode, the latter a 2019 pro-life biopic — but in that moment none of it made any sense.

The crowd was growing denser. In the distance, toward the Ellipse, two enormous video screens had been set up, relaying a view of the stage. I decided to make my way in that general direction. I cut through what appeared to be a patch of open space — only to find myself at the center of a small, tight-knit ring. 

In every direction, attendees displayed handheld signs. How had I ended up here, I wondered? They were holding messages I’d never before seen at a pro-Trump rally. 

ELIMINATE THE EVIL CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY. And CCP INFILTRATION IS EVERYWHERE. And NO CCP FOR ME! And finally: CHINA KILL THEIR OWN ER DAY…

These attendees, I’d learn, were members of Falun Gong, the Chinese spiritual movement that’s become increasingly political — and, with the help of its multimedia enterprise, the Epoch Times, conspiratorial.  It all felt uncanny: the circle, their silence, the absence of even the most negligible eye contact. An instant later, a gap opened again in their ranks, and I bolted through it, nearly slipping in the mud.

RELATED: The corporations behind Trump’s coup are back at it

Rudy Giuliani went onstage at 10:47 a.m. Recently I had watched his face melt on live television, and now, for nearly a minute, he gesticulated before all of us in silence. 

It was a technical issue. When the audio feed finally returned to life, the crowd around me cheered: “Ruu-DY! Ruu-DY!” 

He had details to share with us, he explained, regarding “the worst election in American history.” He mentioned “crooked voting machines.” He warned about “unvoted voters.” He shook his head and lamented, as if for the very first time, “just how they stole it.” 

Alongside him, standing in a long camel coat, was John Eastman, the conspiracy-peddling lawyer who, a few days earlier, had secretly authored a memo on how to decertify the election results — diagramming what amounted to a government coup in the way an assistant football coach might scrawl out his plans for a fake punt.

“If we’re wrong,” Giuliani shouted, “we’ll be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat!”

From the crowd around me someone shouted, “War! War! Fucking war!” Others joined in, their words ringing. 

“You got to say to yourselves,” Giuliani added, “‘I’m doing the right thing!'”

A woman to my right, the hood of her yellow ski jacket pulled low across her eyes, screamed, “We want action!” 

From somewhere behind me a man shouted, “Let’s drive them out of the Capitol. Now!”

RELATED: Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro says 100 House members were “ready” to carry out election coup

It all reminded me of the 2016 Republican National Convention, with its Nixonian dog whistles and lines about “barbarians at the gates”; also the 2017 inauguration, during that infamous “American Carnage” speech; and all those CPAC appearances, each somehow more outlandish than the last. Not to mention the two most recent protests in D.C., on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12, both of which Trump hadn’t even bothered to attend, leaving it to groups like the Proud Boys to march through the city instead.

Giuliani and Eastman spoke for about 10 minutes. Afterward the crowd seemed to lose steam. Trump was next, yes. It could be anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, which I knew by now to be par for the course. In the meantime, along with thousands of others, there was nothing to do but wait.

I tried to pass the time by taking notes:

president’s supporters = predominantly white / out of town, ages maybe 25 and 60. Huddling together. Hunting jackets + MAGA leggings + elaborately knitted caps. Contrast to the crowd at 2017 Inauguration. Back then: Christian Conservatives + sleek businessmen + small town apparatchiks. Communists. Plandemic. General Flynn. 

Finally, just before noon, Trump made his way on stage. To my surprise, he jumped right in. It was a spectacle I recognized: His remarks had been prepared and fine-tuned, and every so often he’d return to them, reciting halfheartedly from the teleprompter, though after a sentence or two the substance of what he was saying would suddenly hit him, and he’d react with astonishment, so that I always had the sense that he was reading the language of the teleprompter now, to us, for the very first time. 

As his speech went on, it all began to feel increasingly unnerving. What was new, I came to realize, kept coming out during his call-and-response dialogue with the crowd.

Across the deep swath of the Mall a great number of people were chanting. “Stop the steal!” they proclaimed. “Send it back!” And: “Fight for Trump!”

At that moment I thought about a passage I’d read only a few days before, from the ending to Don DeLillo’s “Libra,“ a novel about the JFK assassination:

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut stories of men who find coherence in some criminal act. 

By now the crowd had noticeably thinned. I figured I’d continue to the Capitol with everyone else, about a mile or so west. But for most of the morning, I realized now, I’d actually been walking in the opposite direction, doubling the distance I needed to cross. 

Instead, I decided to find a hotel lobby and warm up for a bit. The Mayflower was nearby. I was tapping at my phone when, on the edge of the crowd, I nearly ran into one of the few people still gazing toward the stage: a man in a white plastic hazmat suit, a single zipper down the front. His face was hidden behind the bulk of a gas mask. Goggles across his eyes. A used blue surgical glove on each hand. He was holding what appeared to be an old JVC camcorder, the viewscreen along its side flipped open. He pointed it down at me. Across the hazmat suit, I realized, he’d written a series of short messages and logos. Count only the real votes, a passage at his shin proclaimed. John 3:16, he’d stenciled down his leg. The names of Biden and Harris had been circled and crossed out at his chest. Over his heart: Jesus Is Forever. Around his neck: an anti-vax slogan I could only partially make out. To top it all off, adorning the high white hood of his suit, he’d written a single number in red: 45.

RELATED: How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

Let’s be clear: If, with this essay, I’m attempting to express what it might have felt like, as someone who was there on Jan. 6 (for parts of it, at least), witnessing up close an event that hundreds of millions of people were simultaneously experiencing from afar, then, for me at the very least, this moment with the behemoth and his plastic suit is as good a jumping-off point as any.

Hours earlier, I’d started at a checkpoint with recognizable markers in time and space. But here I was, trapped in the phantasmagoric clash between expectation and reality, standing next to a man in a handmade hazmat suit who held in his gloved hand a ’90s camcorder. Politics and religion and fandom and pandemic paranoia had literally been scrawled across his margins. The dirty blue surgical gloves. The terrible posture. And while these details, taken together, might indeed make perfect sense to someone else, including a decent segment of the crowd I’d just left, they didn’t make any sense to me. It was as if I’d arrived outside of history. And no amount of research into QAnon or Cowboy Guy Fawkes or the politicization of Falun Gong would help me back from that.

Still. Stop reading into things, I told myself, and find a place to write.

I left the rally. The sidewalks were packed with Trump supporters. At a corner up ahead, a man was holding a large, blocky sign. What did he have to say that I hadn’t already heard? I looked closer. 

DEFUND YOUR BUTTHOLE BY 75 PERCENT, it read.

I passed him quickly. I did not make eye contact.

*  *  *

A half-hour later, I was sitting in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, talking with Brad, a former Army sergeant who’d flown in from Arizona for the rally, when the first news reports started coming in. My partner Dani sent her own updates. They had evacuated the Senate. The old friend who’d dropped me off that morning had gone into lockdown with Mayor Bowser. He had no idea when he’d be heading back. Get out of city now, he texted me. Walk if you have to.

The lobby of the Mayflower was about seven miles away, a straight shot up 16th Street, from where I lived, just over the Maryland line. I decided to start walking.

It was just after 3 p.m. In every direction the city was ringing. A sound as ubiquitous as the afternoon itself, vibrating and dense, the air settling beneath it. There were sirens of all different kinds. They came from first responders, law enforcement, even the Secret Service. Where else? For a moment I thought I could pick out the deep, plaintive wail of a military alarm. An air-raid horn? Overhead, helicopters encircled the Mall. I’d heard something like it only once before, as a small child, during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, its epicenter located a few miles from my Bay Area hometown: The car alarms had started just as the shaking stopped, pitching together like waves.

I walked north. Along empty streets I passed the White House, Black Lives Matter Plaza and Lafayette Square. Eventually I came to the William Howard Taft Bridge, a thousand-foot arch that spans the gorge of the creek below, connecting one part of D.C. with the next. Dani picked me up here. Together on her car radio we listened as President-elect Joe Biden consoled the nation. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are,” he said. It was nice to feel on the same side as his “we.”

A year later, I’m not so sure. In his Inaugural Address, Biden recalled Saint Augustine. A people, Augustine said, was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. 

What are the common objects of ours? But maybe this is the wrong question. Who we are seems more bound up in common wounds than common love. It’s clear how some of us will remember Jan. 6: prayers on the House floor, testimony from members of Congress, a three-part series from the New York Times — all of it culminating in Biden’s speech to mark the one-year anniversary. 

How, I wonder, will they?

“Particularly cooperative”: Mike Pence’s team is reportedly helping Jan. 6 committee build its case

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s team has been “particularly cooperative” with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to Axios.

Some former Pence aides have testified without a subpoena, according to the report. Former Pence chief of staff Marc Short, former press secretary Alyssa Farah and former adviser Keith Kellogg are among those who have cooperated with the panel or have given depositions. A source told Axios that Short, who was banned from the White House by former President Donald Trump after Pence refused to block the certification of electoral votes one year ago today, would not have cooperated with the committee without Pence’s approval.

Some of the “most helpful” information, however, has come from lower-ranking aides who were not directly involved with the events of Jan. 6 but were at the White House on that day and had access to senior officials, according to the report. Many of those aides met privately with Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the vice-chair of the committee, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., rather than the entire panel.

RELATED: Jan. 6 committee to investigate Trump’s calls to allies at Willard Hotel before Capitol riot

Farah, who also served as White House communications director during the period leading up to and immediately following Trump’s election loss, told Axios that the committee has already pieced together a lot of details of Trump’s actions during the riot.

“From the two [interviews] I was in, you could see how much information they already had,” she said. “Those who are refusing to cooperate likely are doing so out of complete fealty to Donald Trump and not wanting to piss him off. But, secondarily, because they’re realizing the committee has quite a bit more information than they realized. And their involvement is known to a much greater degree than they realized.”

The committee is looking at Trump’s actions during a three-hour period when his aides and allies pleaded for him to intervene and call on his supporters to stop the violence. The committee has released texts from Trump’s allies, including numerous Fox News hosts, urging him to quell the riot. Cheney said last week that the committee has “firsthand testimony” that Ivanka Trump twice told Trump to “stop the violence.” The panel is also probing the administration’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. The committee last year released a PowerPoint presentation detailing the Trump administration’s internal plans to block or reverse Joe Biden’s victory. Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called the document “an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election.”

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Kinzinger said that the committee “would love” to interview Trump, who has sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena for White House documents, but that his testimony is not necessary because of the amount of information the panel already has.

“We can put the pieces together without him,” Kinzinger told NBCLX on Wednesday. “Know that every new thing [the public] learns, we probably know three or four times that information that we haven’t released yet.”

But the committee’s leaders expressed hope this week that Pence himself will voluntarily cooperate with their investigation.

Thompson told CNN on Tuesday that he hopes Pence “would do the right thing and come forward and voluntarily talk to the committee.”

“We have not formally asked. But if he offered, we’d gladly accept. Everything is under consideration,” Thompson said, adding that the committee is particularly interested in knowing “what [Pence’s] security detail told him was going on” before and during the riot.

Cheney told NBC News that she views Pence as a “hero” for his actions a year ago.

“Former Vice President Pence was a hero on Jan. 6. He refused the pressure of the former president. He did his duty, and the nation should be very grateful for the actions that he took that day,” she said. “We look forward to continuing the cooperation that we’ve had with members of the former vice president’s team, and I look forward as well to his cooperation.”

Cheney said the committee is considering whether to recommend criminal charges against Trump to the Justice Department.

“Certainly we will be looking at that. There are important questions in front of the committee, such as whether the action or inaction of former President Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, attempted to delay the count of electoral votes,” she said. “We also know that it was a supreme dereliction of duty. The president of the U.S. refuses to take action to stop a violent assault on the Congress, to stop a violent assault on any of the coequal branches of government, that’s clearly a dereliction of duty.”

Read more on the grim one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection:

The corporations behind Trump’s coup are back at it

In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, a handful of major U.S. corporations pledged to stop funding the campaigns of Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. One year later, campaign filings reveal that these companies have completely abandoned their promise, donating to countless members of the so-called Sedition Caucus.

According to a new report by political watchdog Accountable.US, the private sector poured $8.1 million into the coffers of 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to reject President Biden’s victory. Among the most notable donors to the GOP objectors include Pfizer, Cigna, Boeing, General Motors, and ExxonMobil. 

Following the January 6 Capitol riot, Pfizer announced a six-month suspension on donations “to any of the 147 Members of Congress who voted against certifying the Electoral College results,” according to an internal memo obtained by Popular Information. In the months following, however, the company donated at least $49,500 to these very legislators.  

Weapons contractor Lockheed Martin made a similar about-face. In the wake of the insurrection, the company vowed to reshape PAC strategy in line with the company’s “core values and the constantly changing political landscape.” The company later donated $184,000 to the Sedition Caucus. 

ExxonMobil likewise said last January that it had a “robust process” to assess any “candidate’s platform, prior voting record, and consistency with the company’s priorities.” But throughout the course of 2021, the oil giant’s PAC contributed $61,000 to lawmakers who voted to challenge the Electoral College. 

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Aside from those already listed, top corporate donors to the Sedition Caucus included the American Bankers Association ($203,000), the National Beer Wholesalers Association ($196,000), Boeing ($190,000), the Credit Union National Association ($188,500), and Raytheon Technologies ($186,000). 

It isn’t the first time that critics have pointed out the misalignment between Corporate America’s rhetoric and record. 

Back in April, just after Georgia passed a sweeping restrictive voting bill, numerous Georgia-based corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta spoke out against the measure. But FEC documents show that these two companies donated heavily to the very state lawmaker who backed the bill. 

RELATED: ​​Corporate America is backing away from Georgia’s anti-voting bill — after funding its sponsors

In June, at the height of George Floyd protests, we saw a similar pattern among many major U.S. corporations keen on speaking out against racial injustice. As Salon reported at the time, some of the most vocal among them – like AT&T, Target, and Amazon – have consistently donated to various police foundations across the country, even when these foundations have shown themselves to be at odds with the goals of racial justice advocates. 

They “gave the Capitol rioters what they wanted”: New ad targets complicit Republicans in Congress

A progressive political advocacy group launched an incisive ad campaign on Thursday aimed at holding election objectors accountable, targeting three pro-Trump lawmakers with attack ads broadcasted in their own congressional districts.

The campaign, launched by MoveOn’s political action committee, specifically takes aim at Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., Mike Garcia, R-Calif., and Jefferson Van Drew., R-N.J. – all of whom voted to oppose the Electoral College’s votes in the 2020 presidential election. 

“Last election our voices were clear,” the ads say, “but some Republicans didn’t like what we had to say.”

All three lawmakers, the spots add, “gave the Capitol rioters what they wanted. They used violence to drown us out. But they will never silence us. There are more of us than them. And in 2022, we again have the power to decide who represents us.”

RELATED: Republican Congressman publicly admits regret for voting to overturn 2020 election

The 30-second videos, titled “Sounds of the Insurrection,” were released on the anniversary of the Capitol riot, an event that left five Americans dead and 140 law enforcement officers injured. 

Just this week, Van Drew, a former Democratic House member who switched to the GOP while Trump was in office, suggested that the nation should “move on” from the deadly insurrection, telling USA TODAY: “We shouldn’t dwell on this forever.”

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

All three lawmakers steadfastly supported Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Last January, immediately following the riot, Malliotakis defended her position to challenge President Biden’s win, claiming that she did so to “highlight [sic] need for a proper hearing into unconstitutional rule changes, irregularities and alleged fraud.proper hearing into unconstitutional rule changes, irregularities and alleged fraud.” 

Garcia similarly said in a statement at the time that “when threats of fraud arise regarding the results of the election … America’s elected Congressional Representatives must ensure that any uncertainty is resolved.”

RELATED: Ex-Trump aide Peter Navarro says 100 House members were “ready” to carry out election coup

In a Thursday press release announcing the ad campaign, MoveOn painted a dire picture of politics, suggesting the 2022 midterms will be highly consequential for American democracy.

“The January 6 insurrection and ongoing sabotage of our electoral process aim to negate the rising political power of communities of color and threaten our democratic system,” the group said in a press release. “Voter suppression tactics and abuse of the Jim Crow filibuster in the Senate following the insurrection continue a long legacy of efforts by the GOP to silence voters in underserved communities at the polls, in order to give themselves more power to control election outcomes.”

Beyond greenwashing: How chain restaurants could actually address their climate pollution

When McDonald’s opened its first net-zero restaurant in the U.K. last month, the backlash was swift. Despite a number of measures to boost the location’s sustainability — insulation made from sheep’s wool, on-site wind turbines and solar panels, and a biodiversity garden sustained by rainwater collected from the parking lot — environmental advocates cried foul, arguing that the chain had failed to address the outsize environmental impact of its business model.

“McDonald’s plan is greenwashing, plain and simple,” Jim Walsh, a senior energy policy analyst for the nonprofit Food and Water Watch, told Grist.

It’s not a problem unique to the Golden Arches. According to Walsh and others, McDonald’s is one of a growing number of fast food chains that have promoted “meaningless” climate solutions while resisting deeper change. Burger King’s reduced-methane burger, for instance, was criticized as a “gimmick” when it was rolled out back in 2020, since it was based on inconclusive science and did not address broader problems associated with industrial beef production. And more recently, Greenpeace lambasted Taco Bell for “greenwashing” after it announced in April that it would switch to recyclable hot sauce packets. According to a statement from John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA’s oceans campaign director, the announcement was “a distraction from Taco Bell’s broader single-use plastics problem.”

So what can restaurant chains do to meaningfully reduce their climate and environmental footprints?

If the primary goal is to mitigate climate change, an obvious first step is to focus on food, since that’s where most of restaurants’ emissions come from. For McDonald’s, roughly 80 percent of its climate pollution stems from its supply chain, especially its procurement of carbon-intensive animal products like beef and dairy. According to Simon Fischweicher, head of corporations and supply chains for CDP, a nonprofit that helps companies tally and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, that number is even higher for the food and beverage industry writ large. Operational emissions — the greenhouse gases emitted directly by restaurants, like through their use of gas to heat buildings — tend to be negligible by comparison.

“While it’s important to consider and focus on and reduce operational impacts … supply chain management is of the most importance,” he told Grist, suggesting that the climate impact of switching to energy-efficient light bulbs and compostable takeout containers — or even putting solar panels on the roof — could be dwarfed by changes to the kinds of food that restaurants purchase. 

Meat is a particular area of concern, since animal agriculture is responsible for more than half of the emissions from global food production. “Not changing their menus makes everything else look like window dressing,” said Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity. According to her, fast food chains like McDonald’s — where more than one-third of Americans ate on a daily basis before the COVID-19 pandemic — enable the overconsumption of animal products, both directly, by offering them on their menus, and indirectly, by encouraging a culture of meat consumption at home and at other chains. Molidor called on restaurants to decenter meat from their menus, replacing options like beef burgers with plant-based alternatives like lentil patties and black bean wraps.

Indeed, switching to plant-based proteins like beans and legumes could have a huge impact on restaurants’ emissions and the U.S.’s broader climate goals. One hundred grams of protein from pulses like lentils, for example, creates just one-sixtieth the greenhouse gas emissions associated with 100 grams of beef protein. According to a study released last year by University of Michigan and Tulane University researchers, replacing just half of the animal foods in Americans’ diets with plant-based alternatives would get the U.S. 24 percent of the way toward achieving its Paris Agreement goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some chains have taken steps in this direction — like Burger King, which added a veggie burger to its menu in 2002 and now offers an Impossible Whopper. But so far, Panera is the only national chain to announce plans to expand plant-based options to cover half of its menu.

However, emissions are only one consideration when it comes to boosting restaurants’ sustainability. According to Sarah Reinhardt, a senior analyst for food systems and health at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a focus solely on greenhouse gas emissions is too narrow; restaurants should also address their contribution to environmental ills like air and water pollution, as well as social injustice. “You can make your energy use more sustainable in some ways,” she said, “but that doesn’t erase other harms on social or environmental fronts.”

Meat is again implicated in these environmental damages — especially when it’s sourced from factory farms, where concentrated fecal waste can emit harmful compounds into the air and leach heavy metals into water supplies. But industrial crop production can also be deleterious to the environment, since liberally applied fertilizer commonly drains into waterways, causing algal blooms that kill off native species and can contaminate drinking water. Walsh, the energy policy analyst for Food and Water Watch, specifically emphasized the need for restaurants to support a transition away from monocropping — the practice of planting a single crop over large expanses of land in order to maximize profit — because it depletes soil nutrients, hastens deforestation, and makes ecosystems less vulnerable to threats like disease and drought.

To move toward true sustainability, Walsh said, McDonald’s and other restaurant chains should make a public commitment to support the development of regional food systems, where practices like polyculture farming — where complementary crops are grown on small plots to boost soil health and support biodiversity — are more feasible. Besides gradually swapping ingredients on their menus for sustainably procured food, this could involve lobbying in favor of legislation to spur the decline of industrial agriculture. Senator Cory Booker’s proposed Farm System Reform Act, for example, could help, as it would place a moratorium on new large factory farms, phase out existing ones by 2040, and make it easier for small farmers to compete in the national marketplace.

Reinhardt added that restaurant chains should also support legislation to boost equity in the food industry, like a livable minimum wage that applies to everyone from restaurant employees to farmworkers. Despite some wage increases won over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, food chain workers have historically been paid some of the lowest median hourly wages of any industry in the U.S., even though they routinely face life-threatening work conditions — including exposure to the coronavirus — and may be denied workers’ compensation. For a big restaurant like McDonald’s to claim sustainability while relying on these “exploitative” labor practices, Reinhardt said, would be disingenuous. (McDonald’s didn’t reply to a request for comment from Grist.)

Addressing all of these components of the food system is a big task, and there’s no single path forward toward greater equity and sustainability for restaurant chains. One thing that environmental advocates tend to agree on, however, is that restaurants are unlikely to voluntarily implement the ambitious changes that are urgently needed. Reinhardt called for intervention from the federal government — perhaps a Department of Agriculture mandate compelling restaurants to comply with sustainable supply chain protocols, or sustainability-minded nutritional standards. The Department of Health and Human Services has already developed a framework of sustainability standards for food purchasing and waste diversion; although the standards are voluntary and currently only apply to federal facilities, Reinhardt said they could serve as a blueprint for food industry-wide regulation.

In the meantime, Molidor said that chains like McDonald’s should use their vast social and economic capital to veer U.S. food culture toward a model of greater sustainability — not through sheep’s wool insulation and interior design made from recycled polystyrene cups, but by normalizing low-carbon meals. 

“They have an opportunity to change our culture of consumption in a positive way for everyone,” Molidor said, noting that fast food companies have already prompted major shifts in consumer behavior by aggressively marketing beef burgers and throwaway packaging. “They’ve done it before and they can do it again.”

I was there for the day that poisoned America — and I think we can still recover

At first I thought I was dealing with a group of men and women — but mostly men — like the ones who show up half-naked at weekend NFL home games during December. 

You know them. You’ve seen them. Maybe you’re one of them. In a joyous fit of inappropriate loyalty for whatever corporate entity owns your favorite team, you show up without a shirt, freezing to death but adorned with face and chest paint in your local team’s colors. Maybe you’re wearing a team jersey with a team-sponsored necklace, a gaudy hat or some other headdress to drive the point home.

That was exactly what the insurrectionists reminded me of when I saw them for the first time on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to scale a wall outside the Capitol. I had already seen a few with headgear, mostly hats and one dressed like a Wookkie who made pretty much the same grunts, cheers and shouts as your diehard NFL fan cheering on his losing team. So when I got to this group of wall-crawlers I thought I knew who I was dealing with. 

But I was mistaken. As I watched that group trying to climb a wall near the Capitol I shouted, “Hey, you know there’s steps on either side! You don’t have to pretend to be Spider-Man. Someone’s going to break their neck.” That prompted about a half a dozen of them to approach me with menacing sneers, larceny in their hearts and smelling distinctly of body odor. One had what appeared to be a car antenna firmly gripped in his hand. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.

They threatened to pound me into little patties of reporter’s meat until they noticed I was carrying a press pass from Playboy, and then they became exactly like the guys you see at NFL games. One even asked me if I could get him into a Playboy party. Another wanted to know if I could get him into the mansion.

But despite the headgear, the outrageous costumes and the cosplaying, these folks were far more dangerous than your weekend NFL warrior-fan. But it took the guy with the broken antenna in his hand to make that clear to me. I should’ve known better. Even after the large gentleman carrying an oversized Confederate battle flag on 17th Street, a block from the White House, threatened me as I approached work that morning, part of me simply thought it was all theater. 

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I still believe that for many of them, at least in the beginning, that’s precisely what it was: theater of the absurd. I’d heard the many complaints, the disjointed logic, the denial of facts and science many times before. During the Obama years it became a mantra among the bigots and the illiterate. They argued the presidency had been stolen. They sneered at the rule of law. “They took our jobs,” became a comic cry and then an ongoing “South Park” joke. But the crazies who’d languished in irrelevancy and on the sidelines emerged center stage by 2021 — driven out of the shadows by manipulative politicians, entertainers, reporters and anyone else who could make a buck off of their ignorance, gullibility and willingness to spend their hard-earned cash on a chance to be seen and heard in a viral moment on social media.

The whole group screamed, “Pay attention to me!” It didn’t matter if their argument made any sense — which it didn’t. Sentiments being what they were and the politicians being who they were, by the time the group reached the Capitol they had been whipped into a rancid frenzy.

More intent on making social network moments than contemplating what their actions truly meant, most of the insurrectionists I saw were adrenaline-fueled fans who thought they were cosplaying and then got caught up in the moment the hard cases had come to make.

Inflamed by their fetid stench of self-righteous, self-serving, self-inflicted pain, the insurrection burst like an infected national boil. I’ve covered riots. I’ve covered wars. I was in Kuwait City while the fires raged and the violence stank. Never had I seen Americans in such large numbers trying to kill and attack other Americans — and worse yet, at the literal center of our democracy.

Make no mistake, in the end it doesn’t matter why they say they came to D.C. that day. You want to say you were a tourist? Those motives are matters for the nation’s criminal courts. The actions were indictable. No tourist beats innocent people, squats in government offices, destroys public property and kills police officers. Talk about your “Ugly American.” It is on those actions we must concentrate our efforts, as we try to understand what happened, prosecute those who did it and ultimately prevent any repeat performance. 

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Since that dark day of demonic flatulence, the flames of anger have been fanned by minor imps and hell-driven icons with names like Boebert, Greene, Jordan and Hannity, along with other fanged and clawed creatures who would be more at home in a carnival sideshow working the back roads across the South  and Midwest, along with huckster bible salesmen and their con-artist kin. 

It doesn’t matter if these politicians believe what they’re selling. It only matters if you do — and enough people do that many political observers now question the continued survival of American constitutional government, based on the wild behavior of its politicians and their misguided fans.

Some, like Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, have pushed hard for accountability — even possible expulsion — of his political colleagues. Attorney General Merrick Garland says justice will be served, but the Republican Party is not interested in prosecuting their own and it appears the Democrats don’t have a large enough majority to get things done — no matter what Garland says. Worse, there is a fear that House Democrats (22 of whom won’t run for re-election this fall) will lose their majority in the midterm elections, ending any chance of bringing the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection to justice. 

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As time passes, the number of those who seem willing to nod their heads and ignore what happened grows. “It’s in the past, let’s move forward,” is something I hear almost daily — even from some Democrats, and from far too many ignorant and self-important reporters.

I have a problem with this. I was there. I witnessed beatings. I saw them erect a scaffold and a hangman’s noose — they were serious about dragging Vice President Mike Pence out there and stringing him up. It sent a chill up my spine. I saw the vicious, uncontrolled and illogical anger vent itself on innocent victims. There can be no moving on without accountability. You don’t dismiss a serial killer by saying, “Let’s move on,” without the perpetrator of the crime being dragged before a court and held accountable for his or her actions.

But you can’t get Congress to agree to that. The problem is that, proportionally speaking, there are as many nuts in Congress as in society at large. These squeaking, flying, festering cockroaches draw others of their kind to them, and they’re eager to avoid the exterminator. They don’t want to be held accountable. They know they’re in the minority — but they don’t just want to survive, they want to rule.

So what do we do? Let them rule in hell. Make them accountable here and now and punish them for their actions in the real world. From top to bottom. Everyone involved in the most un-American activity I’ve witnessed in the United States during my lifetime must be held accountable for their treasonous actions. Expel every member of Congress who embraced the Big Lie.

The lessons of last January cannot be learned until then.

The motives behind the actions are issues for the courts. The actions themselves cannot be disputed: The death and beating of innocent people. The capture of government offices. The destruction of public property. The disregard for the Constitution, the rule of law and common human decency. Although a year later many people have been prosecuted, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced for their actions that day, the country knows that those in Congress and elsewhere who manipulated people into traitorous actions for the sake of their own power have yet to be brought to justice.

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There is a national cry for it. There must be a sustained will to get it done. That never bodes well for the criminal. As a correspondent for “America’s Most Wanted,” I often saw concerned communities help bring criminals to justice. Perhaps we need to reboot the show for elected officials who’ve done us wrong. It would be a huge hit on Fox News and/or on CNN — with the right hosts, of course.

There are many who believe that the reaction to the insurrection shows the depth of political division in this country and that we are headed for another civil war. The media is awash with such speculation. Newspaper and magazine articles have even been written speculating on whether or not the U.S. military is ready for such a war. 

RELATED: In the coming second American Civil War, which side are you on?

Outside the world of pundits, political scientists, politicians and reporters, I see little stomach for civil war, but there is sustained anger that can lead to continued outpourings of violence. And we must address that.

Politicians who have whipped angry people into misguided action are part of the problem. But the anger itself must be addressed. The distance between the poor and the rich grows daily. A lack of education, infrastructure, family leave and basic health care are huge problems — which some politicians will tell you deserve no consideration because solving them will require “socialist” policies. Those same politicians instead eagerly give their energy to legislation that benefits themselves and their corporate donors. They screw us, and then turn us against our own self-interest so they can keep on doing so.

Imagine being told, and believing, that we don’t need parental leave because “we didn’t need it when I was a kid,” without acknowledging that we’ve become a society that demands two wage-earners in a family, instead of one, in order to make ends meet. 

We are a nation consumed by our own fictions, and all too easily manipulated by those who know the difference between appearance and reality.

The insurrection showed us both.

The appearance is that we are deeply divided. I believe the reality is that we’ve been made to think we are by politicians who stand to gain from convincing us that our neighbors are being treated better than we are, and getting advantages they don’t deserve.

Those politicians failed to do what they wanted last year: overthrow the government and the rule of law for their own authoritarian goals. But they won’t quit until they succeed, or until they are held accountable for their behavior.

Hold their feet to the fire. Prosecute them. Make them accountable. Then go and embrace your neighbor, who’s not so different from yourself — even if they’re wearing a different color shirt and cheering for a different team.

Read more from Brian Karem on the troubles and travails of the Biden administration:

How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

In the midst of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested man in Viking horns who’s come to be known as the QAnon Shaman, stopped his fellow marauders in the Senate chamber to pray. “Thank you Heavenly Father for gracing us with this opportunity … to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs,” he said. “Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” 

The prayer, caught on video by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson, was just one moment among hundreds that day illustrating how deeply the insurrection was intertwined with Christian nationalism. Across the sea of protesters in and outside the building, t-shirt and ball-cap slogans proclaimed it: “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president”; “God, Guns, Trump”; or, on the sweatshirt of a man helping construct the rough gallows erected on the Capitol lawn, “Faith, Family, Freedom.” (The gallows itself was quickly covered in handwritten notes — “as if it were a yearbook,” observed lawyer and author Andrew Seidel — reading “Hang them high” and “In God We Trust.”) 

Elsewhere, protesters carried gigantic portraits of Jesus and replica statues of the Infant of Prague, or chanted about the blood of Jesus washing Congress clean. A long-haired blond man sang praise songs into a microphone plugged into a stack of amplifiers he was wheeling on a hand-truck. A Nebraska priest performed an exorcism on the Capitol building to banish the demon Baphomet, who he claimed was “dissolving the country” in order to “bring it back as something different.” One rioter later indicted for breaking into the Capitol was actually a cast member in a touring production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Another, Leo Brent Bozell IV, came from a long line of Christian right activists: His father, L. Brent Bozell III, founded the right-wing Media Research Center and his grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., wrote speeches for Joseph McCarthy and a manifesto for Barry Goldwater. 

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“It was evident to anyone watching that there was this religious character to what was going on, both in the Trump movement writ large but particularly in the leadership of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement,” said religious studies scholar Jerome Copulsky, co-director of a new website, Uncivil Religion, dedicated to collecting “digital artifacts” of Jan. 6 religiosity and exploring what it means for, say, violent protesters to dress up like Captain Moroni — a legendary warrior from the Book of Mormon — or sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” alongside fellow protesters carrying Confederate flags. “It wasn’t just the Stop the Steal rally, then the assault,” Copulsky continued. “People really wanted to display their religious commitments, literally wearing them on their sleeves.”  

The Uncivil Religion project developed from a Twitter hashtag, #CapitolSiegeReligion, created by author and religious historian Peter Manseau and based on his sense that the religious subtext (and text, and blaring headline) were “*the* story of what happened” on Jan. 6. In Manseau’s view, religion wasn’t an incidental element, but had been the driving motivation that had brought many people to the Capitol. Much of that had begun much earlier, with Christian right leaders — both official and self-declared — framing the 2020 election, and the rest of America’s polarized conflicts, as an all-or-nothing showdown between good and evil. 

Some were national names, like Samaritan’s Purse president Franklin Graham, who in August 2020 warned in a Christian Broadcasting Network interview that if Trump lost, churches would close down and Christians would be attacked. But that message was echoed so widely, in both religious and secular conservative media and across numerous niche religious right communities, that allegations about the “stolen” election became nearly inseparable from messages of apocalyptic faith.  

Much of that was on display on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, when a large-scale interfaith prayer protest, the Jericho March — widely seen as a forerunner to Jan. 6 — brought together a number of religious right factions to pantomime the biblical Battle of Jericho in praying to “bring down the walls of the Deep State.” The carnivalesque full-day rally — organized, as journalist Sarah Posner reported, by two then-current employees of the federal government — featured an odd fusion of charismatic evangelicalism, Christian Zionism and right-wing Catholicism. There was contemporary Christian praise music and Virgin of Guadalupe iconography; a rendition of “Ave Maria” that concluded with the singer whooping “Giddy up”; and the female pastor of a New England pro-cannabis church wearing Catholic vestments while blowing on a Jewish shofar.  

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Emceeing the event was evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, author of a bestselling biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a key figure in building an alliance between conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Metaxas had become increasingly extreme throughout the Trump era. The week of the Jericho March rally, he told TurningPoint USA founder Charlie Kirk that the 2020 election was like “somebody is being raped or murdered … times a thousand,” and that conservatives would need “to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood” to keep Trump in office.  

That December rally featured several notable names on the Catholic right, including a bishop from Texas who refused to acknowledge Biden as president-elect, a nun who had delivered a fiery pro-Trump address at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, most prominently, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a dissident Catholic figure who had once been the Vatican ambassador to the U.S. but fell into disgrace after calling for Pope Francis’ resignation in 2018. Since then, Viganò has turned into a sort of alternative pope for disaffected Catholic traditionalists at odds with their more moderate pope, and in 2020, he published an open letter to Trump warning that a “deep church” was working with the “deep state” to use the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests to undermine his presidency. After Trump tweeted a link to the letter, Viganò attracted so much support on the broader right that when he appeared, via video, at the Jericho March — praying “for the conversion of public officials who have become accomplices in public fraud” — an audience largely composed of evangelical Protestants cheered alongside his Catholic fans. 

Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau, who in 2016 famously compared Trump to the biblical figure of Cyrus — a “heathen” king who nonetheless served as the instrument of God — also sounded the theme of intra-religious conflict. “This is the beginning of a Christian populist uprising. There is a backlash coming,” he said. “And you’re going to see this wrecking ball of a reformation hit the church as well … because it’s going to divide between those who are awake and those that are asleep. … There is a great awakening coming, and this is the spark that is starting it right now.” 

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Not all speakers at the Jericho March were religious leaders in the traditional sense. Stewart Rhodes, the devoutly Christian founder of the militia group the Oath Keepers, was on hand to urge police and military members to prepare to fight Chinese “proxies” in the U.S., who he claimed were working to install Joe Biden as their “puppet.” Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, freshly pardoned by Trump for lying to federal investigators, appeared in a flag bandana to talk about spiritual war and lead the crowd in an “Our Father.” And conspiracy-theory talk-show host Alex Jones delivered a barn-burning near-sermon, proclaiming, “This is the beginning of the great revival before the Antichrist comes. World government, implantable microchips, Satanism — it’s out in the open. The Bible is fulfilled, Revelation is fulfilled.” 

And there was Ali Alexander, the bombastic founder of the Stop the Steal movement, who appeared frequently on stage alongside Metaxas, vowing that if Biden was installed as president, Alexander and his supporters would return to “occupy D.C. full of patriots,” adding, “We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.” 

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In the following weeks, Alexander repeatedly underscored the religious dimensions of his mission. In late December, he told the Epoch Times-affiliated NTD television network, “We are in a fight of good versus evil, of light versus the darkness, and a global order over sovereign citizens. … I believe that this is a metaphysical fight and we are channeling all energy in heaven and on earth towards a favorable outcome.” 

On New Year’s Eve in 2020, Alexander announced on Twitter that he was converting to Catholicism, in part, he explained, because he’d become convinced that the Catholic Church had been “infiltrated” by an “earthy [sic] order that works in concert with Satan himself against the Church,” and that he had been personally called to join the battle. And when the Jericho March returned to Washington on Jan. 5, for a slate of protest events leading up to the following day’s MAGA march, Alexander spoke again, whipping the crowd into a chant of “Victory or death.” 

“The Jericho March put a definite religious imprimatur on Jan. 6,” said Posner. “After Jan. 6, the organization put a note on their website that they condemned violence. But they held multiple rallies in which they talked repeatedly about the election being stolen, that God told them they must have the church ‘roar,’ and that they were going to be like Joshua’s army in the Bible and the walls of the Deep State would fall.” 

But no matter how explicit — and violent — the religious rhetoric swirling around Stop the Steal was, it was little recognized before the Jan. 6 attack. “We have gotten so used to religious language used by evangelicals and other religiously-affiliated officials that the danger that was there — whether at the Jericho March or the Jan. 6 rally that led up to the attack on the Capitol — was really just noise to some people,” said Anthea Butler, chair of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. “And then it happened, and everyone pretended to be shocked. But that’s willful ignorance about the role religion has played in the last 40 or 50 years in the Republican Party. It hasn’t just been this alliance of how to get people elected, but has had this element of things that have fed upon each other to create a monster that threatens democracy.” 

RELATED: Religion scholar Anthea Butler on “White Christianity” and its role in fueling fascism

That has remained central to the legacy of Jan. 6, as religious leaders have used the rhetoric of faith to minimize and redirect responsibility for the violence of that day: whether it’s people like Wallnau or South Carolina televangelist Mark Burns blaming “antifa soldiers” for perpetrating a false-flag operation to smear Trump supporters; Mike Huckabee suggesting, in email newsletters over the last six months, that Nancy Pelosi may have orchestrated the attack, and casting indicted Jan. 6 protesters as political prisoners; or former Vice President Mike Pence, in a December interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, downplaying the very attack in which an angry mob called for his execution. 

The rest of its legacy is more diffuse, but no less troubling: Metaxas suggesting that the creation of COVID-19 vaccines is akin to experimenting “with the bodies of Jews we murdered in the concentration camps,” or Viganò writing that COVID exists merely as a “psycho-pandemic”; Wallnau calling “wokeness” the religion of the Antichrist and, on the eve of the Jan. 6 anniversary, blessing a cardboard cutout of Trump; Flynn declaring that if America is to be one nation under God, it must have only one religion. More systematically, there’s the fact that much of the religious organizing energy that went into Stop the Steal has now transferred itself, as Posner reports, into mobilizing the Christian right on behalf of voter suppression initiatives. 

A year later, none of the religious fervor that helped drive Jan. 6 has vanished, says Copulsky. “It’s built into the fabric of American life. There’s a radicality to it, but this didn’t come out of thin air. And it’s not going to go away. It’s incumbent on religious leaders and organizations to think about what that means.” 

The insurrection will be decentralized: The next Jan. 6 will happen in the state houses

A year ago, a stunned world watched rapt as pro-Trump insurrectionists smashed through windows and barricades at our nation’s Capitol, disrupting the constitutionally mandated tally of Electoral College votes certifying President Biden’s win. But that display of violence ought to have come as no surprise, as escalating threats and violence in our state houses throughout 2020 presaged the Capitol insurrection. 

A year later, we must again look to our state houses for a preview of what is to come. In key battleground states, Republicans are steadily building toward a future where they can engineer election outcomes. GOP-controlled legislatures are setting the stage for another attempted coup. The next insurrection will be decentralized, coming from our state houses with the sheen of legal authority. If we do nothing to stop their plans, then as the 2024 votes are tallied in our states, the laws and rules governing the process and outcome will have been rewritten for a particular outcome: Republican wins, regardless of the votes. And an arch-conservative Supreme Court could stand poised to thwart a constitutional challenge to this state power grab. We have the opportunity to stop this in its tracks — by pouring resources and attention into key state legislative chambers and races immediately. What we do next for our states could determine the fate of our democracy.

RELATED: Beware the “Independent State Legislatures doctrine” — it could checkmate democracy

In the year since the Capitol riot, Republicans have made their 2024 play well known. Step one in this strategy is to pass state-level laws making it harder to vote. And indeed, Republican-controlled state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in the past decade. Step two is to change state laws so that partisan actors can interfere with election processes or reject election results outright. Here too, we see the strategy in action: At least 14 states enacted laws in 2021 that give state legislatures more power over election administration and certification, or impose criminal penalties on election officials. More were proposed but not passed, including an Arizona bill that would have given the state legislature power to undo the certification of presidential electors by a simple majority vote, right up until the inauguration. Looking ahead, at least 100 restrictive bills have been pre-filed for the 2022 legislative session or will carry over from 2021. 

These state law changes will lay the groundwork for Republican legislatures to challenge and discredit any 2022 and 2024 election results with which they disagree. And it won’t take many states passing election subversion laws in order to tip the scales in 2024. In his hamfisted legal efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, Trump and his team focused on just six states to flip the results: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His efforts failed, but not necessarily because Republican state legislators weren’t supportive. The real problem was that those states’ laws didn’t give the legislatures the authority to jettison the votes and go their own way. Republicans learned this lesson, and are pursuing state legislative action now, to tee things up for election subversion or reversal whenever they need it. 

But would such state laws be constitutional? Can Republicans really engineer their way into power by rigging the rules? The conservative machinery has anticipated this potential objection, and has also prepared a legal strategy that would further imbue their efforts with the veneer of legal respectability. 

Once a stealth effort in right-wing legal circles, the Independent State Legislatures doctrine is rising in prominence as a result of election-related litigation in state supreme courts and the federal courts, much of it related to the “Big Lie.” This doctrine argues that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the sole authority to set all election rules — including the assigning of Electoral College votes — independently and with no possibility of judicial review. This means that election laws set by state legislatures would supersede any rights provided in state constitutions, or even ballot initiatives passed by voters. It effectively concludes that there can be no possible checks and balances on state legislatures’ authority over election law. While this might sound like a fringe belief, four justices on the Supreme Court have already indicated some level of support for this doctrine — and Amy Coney Barrett has yet to weigh in. 

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We ignore what is happening in our state capitals at our democracy’s continued peril. As we reflect on a year since the Jan. 6 riot, we must be clear-eyed about the dangers to our democracy ahead, and the outsized role that state legislatures will play in the looming battle. Next time the call will be coming from inside the state house. But it’s not too late. We can and must invest heavily in pro-democracy state government actors and advocates. This year’s midterm elections offer us one last chance to oust MAGA-faction legislators and instead build progressive, pro-democratic power in our state legislatures, particularly in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where newly redistricted state legislative maps may be fairer. And we must support year-round state-based power-building organizations that are doing the hard work of community organizing around progressive, pro-democracy candidates and issues. But time is running out. Will we heed the call and invest in our states — or once again be surprised to discover it’s too late?

Read more on the state-level fight to save voting rights:

Trumpism is rooted in twisted visions of medieval Europe

When we think about medieval Europe, we tend to think about kings ruling with iron fists, about Christian crusaders purifying Jerusalem with the blood of the unbelievers, or about Greek and Roman thinking cast into darkness.

It wasn’t so. According to The Bright Ages, a new book by Matt Gabriele and David Perry, kings often worried about their legitimacy, the crusaders were pragmatists, and Greek and Roman learning and culture carried on, not because Muslim scholars preserved it, but because Rome never really fell.

Among a welter of stunning revelations, the book offers this too: democracy is not the product of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. It was not revived after the Middle Ages forgot the glory of Athens. It has probably been practiced for as long as groups of people struggled with each other, and with themselves, over power and resources. Even some aristocrats voted!

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After reading The Bright Ages, I got in touch with Matt Gabriele, because so much of our current politics, especially overt white supremacy, seeks to legitimize itself by calling forth visions of some kind of noble white past. Again, not so. Matt is a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech as well as a contributor to the Editorial Board. We started by talking about cities.

John Stoehr: Near the end of your book, you talk about cities. Wherever they are, there’s some form of democracy. That not only rewrites our understanding of the “dark ages,” but also puts our current malaise in a more optimistic light.

Matt Gabriele: One of the core arguments about the “fall of Rome” has been de-urbanization – that Europe moved from a primarily urban, Mediterranean civilization to a rural, agricultural one. There’s a kernel of truth there, but it tends to obscure that cities continued, especially where they had been, but also in new places.

In those cities, older forms of government persisted – ones in which people voted on things. Certainly, as we note, those who could vote were a very limited subset, but the idea that all government was autocracy is not true.

I take your point that cities are and can be laboratories for democratic experimentation. Groups like to vote on things. Even the Crusades were often led by councils who voted. The First Crusade in 1095-1099, for example, had a group of nobles who collectively led the expedition. The Fourth Crusade of the early 13th century had a council that voted on almost everything, including who should be the new emperor of Constantinople!

Americans tend to think democracy began with us, or anyway with the Enlightenment. But your history shows it being much older. Your book notes that the earliest “national” democracy might have been Iceland.

Perhaps. Some “Viking” (Scandinavian) communities were organized around communal decision-making. Iceland (which wasn’t really a “nation” in the central Middle Ages, but more a collection of loosely-connected communities) was one of them. Part of the reason behind their collective governmental organization, though, was precisely because there was no one powerful enough to claim power over the rest of the groups.

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In other words, collective decision-making in medieval Europe was often very practical. Even the Carolingians – an imperial family in the 9th century – were deeply reliant on the nobility as councilors and power-brokers. The age of absolute monarchy is an early-modern thing, not a medieval thing.

It seems kings not only sought ways to legitimize power but also the consent of those they ruled over. By “those,” I’m guessing elites, but also anyone with influence socially. Consent might be too strong a word.

Yeah, I think that’s fair. Kings couldn’t unilaterally decide to do something and then do it, or at least if they did, they risked serious repercussions.

For example, the Carolingians in the 9th century. Charlemagne ruled an empire covering almost all of continental Europe, was crowned Roman emperor in Rome by the pope, and traded emissaries with the Byzantine ruler in Constantinople and the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad.

Yet he was on the throne because his father, Pepin, engineered a coup to overthrow the ruling dynasty. Charlemagne himself faced several very serious coup attempts, his son Louis was deposed twice by nobles, and then the empire disintegrated after Charlemagne’s death in the next generation.

Medieval kings needed to keep the nobles happy, because although the title of “king” may have adhered to a family, it sure didn’t adhere to a person. There was always a brother or son or cousin who could take power or whom the nobles could rally around if they weren’t getting what they wanted.

It turns out the “clash of civilizations” didn’t start after 9/11.

The idea of the “clash of civilizations” is indeed a modern one (though not one that post-dates 9/11). A lot of it derives from Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis [authors of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published 1996]. But then it was retconned onto the medieval world after 9/11 to show a lineage (unbroken or simply “interrupted”) of violence between Christianity (“the West”) and Islam (“the East”).

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But what we try to show in the book is that this story is really problematic. The initial expansion of what would become Islam out of Arabia was by conquest, yes, but they were at times greeted as liberators in places like Egypt and the province of Palestine. The emperors in Constantinople, even though fellow Christians, were seen by many in those areas as oppressors.

In Europe, Jerusalem didn’t really matter to them for a very long time. It represented a sacred past (the city of Jesus), but had no relevance until the end of time when the events of Revelation would kick in. This began to change towards the beginning of the 11th century for complicated reasons, but it’s telling that the First Crusade in 1095, for example, was indeed large but also that so many people did not go. No kings, no emperor, some middlingly important nobles and one papal legate led the expedition.

After the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians – and even during the conquest – they were more than happy to make pragmatic alliances with Islamic rulers they encountered, playing Aleppo off against Damascus for instance, or allowing traders to pass back and forth, even across military lines in the middle of ongoing crusades. In other words, in the end, the violence of the period between religions was defined, yes, by religious identity, but it wasn’t dogmatic. It was flexible and shaped by circumstances.

On a related note, you discuss two views. One conservative – that Islam and Christianity are antipodes. One liberal – that everybody got along just fine when given half a chance. You say that it’s far more complex than either. Can you explain? You use a non-English word that’s escaping me.

Convivencia. (It just means “living together.”)

Convivencia is often taken to mean everyone got along by living with each other. Sometimes that’s true. But they also “lived together” by hating one another at times, by asserting their group’s power over other groups. In other words, individual relations between adherents of different traditions varied among individuals, and group dynamics varied from year to year.

For example, we talk in the book about the taking of Toledo by Christians in 1085. Shortly afterwards, the king converted the mosque into a new cathedral, even after assuring Islamic residents he wouldn’t. Yeah, he did that to punish Muslims and assert Christianity’s dominance. But he also did it to spite some of the city’s Christians, who had been until then using another church as their cathedral. It was as much about asserting his own power as an outsider (against civic community), even if there was a religious element.

This is the complexity we’re trying to show. Yes, people killed one another because of religion all the time. But there were moments when it didn’t happen, when they made other choices – sometimes in ways that seem humane to us and sometimes because they were better served by doing so.

I want to talk about slavery, especially the creation of racial difference. You say in the book that that comes from Europeans living with “the other.”

First, let me say we’re really in debt here to amazing scholars like Geraldine Heng (especially) as well as Sierra Lomuto, Cord Whitaker, Dorothy Kim and many others. Until they began their work, really in the last decade or so, this was a marginal topic of conversation in medieval studies.

As a practice, slavery was common in Europe through the entire Middle Ages. The categories of who could be a slave, however, were not always coded by skin color, but rather by political or cultural identity (a conquered people) or religion (Christians in Islamic lands, Muslims in Christian lands). Its practice in Viking society and in Mediterranean society was also quite different in how enslaved people were treated and what status they had in society.

The creation of racial difference is a different matter, one that began (and this is an oversimplification) to emerge as religion became essentialized into the body, when, for example, Jewish identity could be carried by “blood” and so conversions (especially if forced) were thought by political and religious authorities to be fundamentally insincere and subject to “backsliding.”

It’s not that people didn’t notice that people looked different from one another. They did! It’s that the primary way medievals tended to separate themselves from each other was not by color (until perhaps towards the end of the period). You could have an “African” leading a monastery in early medieval England and he was revered for his learning! You could have an Ethiopian saint (Maurice) as a patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire!

Medieval Europeans would notice that people looked different from one another, but the primary way groups distinguished among themselves cut along different lines. Skin color could be a part of it but it was only a part.

From the Bundys to the Rotunda: How allowing far-right terrorism to fester led to the Capitol riot

The sight of violent Trump supporters invading the Capitol a year ago may have been shocking but it was not surprising. It was the direct result of the government allowing right-wing political violence to smolder for years until it burst into a conflagration on Jan. 6.

While far-right terrorism is the story of America — Native genocide, slave codes, Klan terror, anti-Asian pogroms, racist mass shooters today — there was a specific path to Trump’s coup that might have been avoided if the government had taken the threat seriously.

That path runs through the Bundy family. They incubated Jan. 6 by bringing together key actors who joined in the insurrection, showing the government was reluctant to confront right-wing terrorism, and proving that terrorism could work.

The deadly virus has spread with 40 percent of Republicans supporting violence for political ends. This genie can’t be put back in the bottle. But right-wing terrorism can be eliminated root and branch by using the full force of the state. That was the mistake with the Bundys, which lead to the Jan. 6 insurrection. They were allowed to foment political violence with little pushback.

The story starts in April 2014 when the Bureau of Land Management tried to enforce court-ordered penalties on patriarch Cliven Bundy. He owed $1.2 million in fees for illegally grazing cattle on federal lands for 21 years, so BLM officials seized hundreds of them. But Cliven, driven by messianic Mormonism and a fringe interpretation of the Constitution that he has a divine right to the land and Washington almost no rights to the land, called for a “range war.”

Hundreds of armed militiamen responded. They came from extremist groups that had grown by 600 percent after the election of the first Black president. In a foreshadowing of Jan. 6, the BLM was ill-prepared to deal with such a complex operation despite Cliven’s threats he was “ready to do battle.” Confronted by the militia, the feds stopped the roundup to lower tensions. That was a mistake, one being repeated with the kid-gloves treatment of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Leniency emboldened the Bundys. They surrounded the feds with snipers, one of whom stated, “I’ve got a clear shot.” The feds retreated, the Bundys unlawfully retrieved their cattle.

The first effect of the Bundy standoff was images that thrilled anti-government extremists. It showed viral clips of right-wing violence were effective recruiting tools. The far-right realized not only could they play war against the government, but they could also reap followers and political gains. The lure of viral fame helps explain why so many Jan. 6 rioters posted their illegal exploits on social media, leading to their arrest.

The second effect was the Bundys acted as accelerants of far-right terrorism. Among those who flocked to Bundy were Jerad and Amanda Miller, who expressed an eagerness for violence against federal agents. The two were kicked off the ranch, but weeks later went on a killing spree. They gunned down a bystander and two cops, sticking a note on one cop saying “the beginning of the revolution,” and tossing a swastika on the second, before killing themselves.

Trump threw gasoline on the terrorism fire: in Portland, Charlottesville, among mass shooters, “Boogaloo extremists,” anti-BLM killings, an epidemic of ISIS-style car attacks encouraged by the GOP, all of which led to right-wing hero Kyle Rittenhouse.

A third effect of the Bundy standoff was to catalyze events that led directly to Jan. 6. Among those who traveled to Nevada in 2014 were the Oath Keepers and militiamen associated with the Three Percenters, which functions more like a network.

The two militias were all over the Capitol on Jan. 6. Twenty-one members of the Oath Keepers allegedly “played a critical role” in the insurrection, and four men affiliated with the Three Percenters have also been charged in connection. (Another 30 members and supporters of the fascistic Proud Boys have been arrested for involvement in Jan. 6, including four leaders.)

Both militias reek of white supremacism. The Oath Keepers have rallied with ACT for America, an anti-immigrant hate group, promoted racist Great Replacement-style conspiracies, and are anti-Black Lives Matter. Three Percenters provided security for white nationalists during the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. The next year the leader of a Three Percenter affiliate masterminded a Mosque bombing in Minnesota.

Racists gravitated to the Bundys because they are unreconstructed racists. Days after sending the feds packing, Cliven mused that Blacks were “better off as slaves.” In his holy vision, white men have “ancestral rights” to the land, not the Shoshone Nation that has a treaty claim to nearly all of Nevada, including the land on which he illegally grazes his cattle. While fils Bundy are savvier than père in posing as defenders of freedom for all, Ammon removed his mask after a bit of praise for BLM. He now calls it “a wicked, Marxist, communist organization that deceives its members and destroys Black people’s lives.”

The infernal combination of militias, white supremacy, and frontier justice that coalesced at the Bundy ranch was the mood on Jan. 6. Foremost it came from Trump. Bellowing “take back our country,” he repeated falsehoods that the election was stolen from him by non-citizens before he directed his mob to storm the Capitol.

Trump presided over a white-nationalist hate orgy: Confederate flags, a noose, rioters hurling N-words and flag poles, a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. One prominent face at the Capitol was Nick Fuentes, usually described as a white nationalist, but when combined with his Holocaust denialism, love of dictators, opposition to “race-mixing,” and participation in Charlottesville, makes him hard to distinguish from Nazis.

The onslaught on the Capitol is a companion to the Bundy standoff in that both spring from the view that as white people alone own the land and the institutions, they can break any laws, commit any crime to secure them.

The fourth effect was Nevada created a model for right-wing violence. After the 2014 standoff, the Bundys and the militias took their show on the road. First, Ryan Bundy joined forces with a Utah county commissioner and backed by the sheriff, to lead a convoy of ATVs into Recapture Canyon, where they are banned because the area is rich in ancient Native American sites. Then rifle-toting Three Percenters and Oath Keepers descended on a mining site in Southern Oregon after the owners had a minor dispute with the BLM over their plans. In the summer of 2015, the two militias joined by the Pacific Patriot Network established a new front in Montana to confront the National Forest Service in another trivial beef over a mine.

The next incident delivered the drama the Bundys sought. On Jan. 2, 2016, nearly five years to the day before Trump’s coup, Ammon, Ryan and a dozen heavily armed men seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon. They claimed to be defending a father-son pair of ranchers who had been sentenced to five years in jail after years of criminal behavior and violent threats against federal employees and their families. But the takeover was just another battle in their range war.

I was in Malheur for a week, reporting for The Raw Story until the feds nabbed the Bundys. I sat in Ryan’s pickup truck, across from magazines of .223 ammo nestled in cup holders, as he held forth for hours on his fringe constitutional views. That inspired their revolt to take back land for the people, even if the people save a few in nearby towns rejected them. When questioned, Ryan did not deny they aimed to overthrow the federal government. Toward that end, they invited in a self-appointed judge who tried and convicted local officials in star chambers and planned to remove them from power.

By making themselves the law, the Bundys foreshadowed Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government by whatever means he wished, martial law, suspending the Constitution, the Insurrection Act, or a violent conspiratorial mob.

The Bundys were sidelined for a couple of years by their arrest. But they emerged victoriously. The brothers were acquitted in the Malheur occupation after the jury allegedly demanded an absurd level of proof for a charge of conspiring to prevent refuge employees from doing their jobs. The feds’ hands-off approach, allowing the Bundys to turn the refuge into a media circus for more than a month, also apparently led jurors to believe their presence was not illegal. Then in 2018, a judge in Nevada dismissed all the charges against all three Bundys in relation to the 2014 standoff because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Ammon Bundy found a new cause to spread his gospel of violent Christian nationalism: Covid. In April 2020, Ammon launched People’s Rights, an anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-lockdown movement. Bundy talks of freedom and liberty, but he is building an army of anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, militia members and members of violent white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

This is the fifth effect of the Bundys: The violent, conspiratorial white nationalist fringe is becoming the Republican mainstream. FOX News greeted the 2014 standoff enthusiastically, and the Bundys garnered support from a few obscure elected officials. The cross-organizing among militias and white nationalists in Nevada was hardly a lovefest, however, with rival groups reportedly pulling guns on each other. But as the Bundys kept provoking confrontations and Trump blew open space for white nationalism, they helped turn the GOP into a big tent of violent extremists.

Prior to the Jan. 6 Capitol invasion, there were five attacks on state Capitols. Ammon Bundy was in the forefront of the August attack on the Capitol in Boise. In Malheur, there was little support for Trump, but five years later, in December 2020, Ammon encouraged supporters to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. On the day of the invasion, Cliven took to Facebook to lend unabashed support for Trump’s coup.

The Bundys themselves are for the most untouchable. Ammon is running to be the Republican nominee for governor of Idaho. In a state where the GOP is so extreme it is Taliban-like, it has nonetheless spurned Ammon. But that is of no matter to him. As shown by the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, he and his family have held the line. It’s Trump and the Republicans who’ve rushed toward the Bundys.

Jon Stewart said Harry Potter goblins are Jews, but adds, “I do not think JK Rowling is antisemitic”

Jon Stewart wants us all to calm down. 

In a December episode of his podcast “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” the comedian and host poked fun at J.K. Rowling for her antisemitic characterization of the franchise’s goblins of Gringotts Wizarding Bank. Following the Jan. 1 premiere of HBO Max’s 20th anniversary “Harry Potter” reunion special, however, those comments quickly came back to haunt him.

A media storm broke out, pitting Stewart against Rowling, implying that he had called her antisemitic.

On Wednesday, in response to those stories, Stewart clarifies that his original comments were all part of “a lighthearted conversation amongst colleagues and chums,” according to Variety. He further explains that the discussion of the film’s goblins were meant to illustrate “how some tropes are so embedded in society that they’re basically invisible, even in a considered process like moviemaking.”

“I do not think J.K. Rowling is antisemitic. I did not accuse her of being antisemitic,” Stewart says in a video posted on Twitter. “I do not think the ‘Harry Potter’ movies are antisemitic. I really love the ‘Harry Potter’ movies, probably too much for a gentleman of my considerable age.”

RELATED: “Harry Potter” & the problematic creator

Here’s what Stewart said in his December podcast episode: “Here’s how you know Jews are still where they are. . . . Talking to people, what I say is: Have you ever seen a ‘Harry Potter’ movie? Have you ever seen the scenes in Gringotts Bank? Do you know what those folks who run the bank are? Jews!”

“Let me show you this from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ I just want to show you a caricature and they’re like, ‘Oh look at that, that’s from ‘Harry Potter” and you’re like, ‘No, that’s a caricature of a Jew from an antisemitic piece of literature,'” he continues. “J.K. Rowling was like, ‘Can we get these guys to run our bank?’ and you’re like, it’s a wizarding world. It’s a world where the train station has a half a thing and no one can see it and we can ride dragons and you’ve got a pet owl. And who should run the bank? Jews. Yeah, I mean, it’s like, ‘Yeah they look like Jews but what if the teeth were sharper?'”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a volunteer-led charity group based in London, later took to Twitter to issue its own statement on the matter, attesting that Rowling has been “a tireless defender of the Jewish community in its fight against antisemitism.” In recent years, the “Harry Potter” author has been mired in controversy after posting a slew of transphobic tweets and spewing TERF rhetoric. According to Entertainment Weekly, Rowling was invited to participate in the cast’s recent reunion — called “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts” — but opted out after her team decided that the writer’s previous comments made for a sufficient appearance. Ultimately, Rowling was only featured through archival footage.

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“I cannot stress this enough. I am not accusing J.K. Rowling of being antisemitic,” Stewart added. “She need not answer to any of it. I don’t want the ‘Harry Potter’ movies censored in any way. It was a lighthearted conversation. Get a f**king grip.”

Listen to Stewart’s full clarification below, via Twitter

More stories to read:

This impossibly cheesy one-pot copycat Hamburger Helper belongs in your winter recipe rotation

When I was burned out and tired of cooking, figuring out how to make the perfect copycat Hamburger Helper got me excited about being in the kitchen again. 

I then recounted my monthslong journey of trying to recreate this iconic packaged food, which was the best thing for my cooking in 2021. 

“Is it fine dining?” I wrote for Salon Food. “No, but amid a constant flurry of promises from recipe writers and food TikTokers — sheet pan dinners, five-ingredient fixes, no-mess food prep — here was the platonic ideal of the one-pot meal, and I wanted to make it my own.” 

Related: My year of cooking quick and dirty: How I lowered the bar and set myself free

The essay detailed my attempt to create a 100% homemade version of Hamburger Helper that captured the nostalgia inherent to this boxed brand but was made from scratch with whole supermarket ingredients. I previously detailed my process and the lessons I learned (like how buttermilk powder is a superhero ingredient, for instance), but a number of readers reached out for something more: the recipe. 

You asked, I answered. This recipe takes a one-box convenience meal and turns it into a multi-ingredient dinner. Packed with surprising punches of flavor, it belongs in your winter recipe rotation. 

***

Recipe: Copycat Hamburger Helper

Yields: 4 to 6 servings
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients 

  • 16 ounces of elbow macaroni, reserve 1 cup of pasta water
  • Olive oil
  • 1 pound of ground beef
  • 1/2 white onion, minced
  • 2 to 3 cloves of garlic, minced 
  • 4 tablespoons of tomato paste 
  • 2 tablespoons of butter
  • 2 tablespoons of flour 
  • 2 cups beef stock 
  • 3/4 cup heavy cream or half-and-half 
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons of buttermilk powder
  • 3 teaspoons of smoked paprika 
  • 2 teaspoons of dried thyme 
  • 2 teaspoons of dried oregano 
  • 12 ounces of grated sharp cheddar cheese 
  • Salt and pepper to taste 
  • Scallions for garnish 

Directions 

1. In a large oven-safe pot, cook the elbow macaroni according to the package directions. Drain, reserving 1 cup of pasta water, and set aside. 

2. Add a glug of olive oil to the pot and proceed to cook the ground beef, which has been seasoned with salt and pepper. Sauté until brown, then drain the excess grease and remove the beef from the pot. Set aside. 

3. Add another glug of olive oil to the pot, and over medium heat, add the white onion and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion and garlic have softened and browned, about 4 minutes. Reduce the heat and add the tomato paste. Over medium-low heat, cook the tomato pasta until it has darkened in color slightly and begins to get fragrant, about 5 minutes. 

4. To the same pot, add the butter. Stir until melted and quickly follow with the flour. Stir until the contents of the pot have formed a thick paste. 

5. Add the beef stock, stirring continuously. It should produce a thick, almost gravy-like sauce. Add the cream and increase the heat until the mixture begins to simmer. Continue to whisk the sauce and add the buttermilk powder, smoked paprika, thyme and oregano. 

6. While continuing to whisk, add 8 ounces of the grated sharp cheddar cheese to the mixture. Reduce the heat and stir it until the mixture is completely cohesive, free of lumps and smooth. 

7. Fold the cooked pasta and ground beef into the mixture. Season generously with salt and pepper and add pasta water to the mixture 1 tablespoon at a time until the sauce has taken on a sleek, velvety consistency. 

8. If finishing in the oven, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and cover the pasta with the remaining 4 ounces of shredded cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and started to gently bubble and brown. 

9. Allow the pasta to sit for about five minutes, then divide into bowls. Top with scallions and enjoy! 

Chef’s note: I really appreciate the bubbling-cheese crust that comes from putting this one-pot meal into the oven. However, if you want to keep things super easy, it comes out beautifully using only the stovetop. Just disregard step eight when doing so. 

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More super simple weeknight meals: 

Joe Rogan’s latest controversy: YouTube scraps controversial podcast episode with anti-vax scientist

Joe Rogan is back in the headlines again — this time, for an inflammatory New Year’s Eve interview with infectious disease scientist-turned-anti-vaccine provocateur Dr. Robert Malone, who claims to have helped create the mRNA technology used in Pfizer and Moderna’s shots yet rose to prominence recently after a series of interviews with right-wing outlets in which he spread false information about the jabs and sought to undermine the government campaign to vaccinate Americans. 

Online video giant YouTube removed clips from the episode (No. 1757 of the Joe Rogan Experience) this week following online backlash, particularly over Malone’s comparison of U.S. public health authorities and the German Nazi Party during its rise to power in the 1930s and ’40s. Youtube has not publicly released a reason for its takedown, saying simply that it violated the platform’s “community guidelines.”

Malone was also banned from Twitter last week for repeated violations of its COVID-19 misinformation policy, which also claimed the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Needless to say, the “censorship” did not sit well with Rogan’s audience, which rushed to decry Big Tech for the perceived infringement.

Right-wing Texas Rep. Troy Nehls even submitted the entire transcript into the Congressional Record Monday, writing on Twitter: “Big tech wants to restrict your access to this information- but they cannot censor the Congressional Record.”

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During the episode, Malone seemed to suggest that public health authorities and pro-vaccine messaging were driving Americans “barking mad” — while referring multiple times to the FDA-approved shots as “experimental” vaccines. 

“Our government is out of control on this and they are lawless,” Malone said. “They completely disregard bioethics, they completely disregard the federal common rule, they have broken all the rules that I know of that I’ve been trained on for years and years. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal.”

He attributed Americans’ rush to embrace vaccines to “mass formation psychosis,” an academic-sounding term that nonetheless appears to have little discernable scholarship behind it.

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it,” Malone said. “And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.”

RELATED: Joe Rogan walks back controversial anti-vaccine comments: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a f**king moron”

According to an analysis from Forbes looking into Malone’s assertions, “mass formation psychosis” does not appear anywhere on PubMed, a database of medical scholarship maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The phrase itself appears to be an amalgamation of “mass formation,” which describes a type of mob psychology that can lead individuals to do strange things when part of a larger group, and “psychosis,” a term describing a loss of contact with reality.

The entire theory, according to Fox News, stems from assertions made by a little-known Belgian professor named Mattias Desmet, who despite millions of deaths worldwide continues to insist the pandemic is largely “psychological” in nature. 

Malone’s comments tracked with his questionable past assertions — made on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and other right-wing media — including the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines make symptoms of the virus much worse.

A profile of Malone in The Atlantic this August outlined this history of misinformation, and delved into his claims of ownership over the methods underpinning mRNA vaccines. “Whether Malone really came up with mRNA vaccines is a question probably best left to Swedish prize committees, but you could make a case for his involvement,” Tom Bartlett writes, due to Malone’s pioneering research done in the late 1980s and early ’90s on RNA and DNA injections into mouse muscle cells, among other things. 

RELATED: Joe Rogan calls out right-wing media for cherry-picking clips of interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta

He left academia to work at a private pharmaceutical company called Vical, but in recent years has become angry and bitter at the company and others for not properly attributing their success to his research. Bartlett continues:

The process of achieving major scientific advancements tends to be more cumulative and complex than the apple-to-the-head stories we usually tell, but this much can be said for sure: Malone was involved in groundbreaking work related to mRNA vaccines before it was cool or profitable; and he and others who believed in the potential of RNA-based vaccines in the 1980s turned out to be world-savingly correct.

In response to his “censorship” from multiple online platforms, Malone simply claimed the bans and takedowns proved his “mass formation psychosis” theory.

“What the media doesn’t understand is that you can’t suppress information,” he said. “It’ll find a way to be free.”

Following the brouhaha, Rogan called for a boycott of Twitter — instead calling on his more than 7.9 million Twitter followers to follow him to the alternative social media site GETTR, run by former Donald Trump aide Jason Miller. 

“Just in case shit over at Twitter gets even dumber, I’m here now as well. Rejoice!” Rogan wrote in his first post on the platform. It’s a big get for the upstart site, which despite some early success as a conservative alternative to Twitter, has nonetheless been plagued by hackers and spam posts, as well as shoddy security measures. 

Miller later claimed in an interview with Insider that “more than 171,000 people signed up for GETTR” after Rogan’s announcement, the site’s biggest day since launching last year.

In South Africa, COVID cases fall as fast as they rose — suggesting the omicron wave could be brief

As goes South Africa, so goes the rest of the world.

That sentiment might capture the hope of the health care community as they observe the infection pattern of omicron variant in the Southern Hemisphere nation of nearly 60 million people. When cases of the newly discovered COVID-19 mutation skyrocketed in South Africa in November and December 2021, the world took notice, fearful that it would soon reach the shores of all nations. After scientists learned that the SARS-CoV-2 strain was more transmissible than other viruses which cause COVID-19, political leaders like President Joe Biden began preparing their nations for the worst.

But now, merely a month since cases began spiking in South Africa, numbers have dropped precipitously. Indeed, recent COVID-19 case numbers in South Africa resemble a very steep mountain — an incredibly fast spike, followed by an equally fast fall. 

Now, as South Africa emerges from the other side of its omicron wave, observers hope that the rest of the world will also find itself in better shape at the end of this chapter of the pandemic than it was during other variant phases. 

Fortuitously, researchers in South Africa have found that people in that country who were infected with the omicron variant were much less likely to be hospitalized, at least compared with previous variants. Just as notably, people who become sick after getting infected with omicron seem to recover more quickly than patients who were infected with other SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Experts in the country believe the omicron surge there has already peaked, with the government issuing a statement on Dec. 30 explaining that there had been a 29.7 percent decrease in the number of confirmed new cases for the week ending on Christmas Day, compared with the number from the previous week (from 127,753 down to 89,781 cases).

“All indicators suggest the country may have passed the peak of the fourth wave at a national level,” the statement added, noting that there were only two provinces that reported increases in cases (the Western Cape and Eastern Cape). Officials also noted that, although the variant remains highly transmissible, hospitalizations have not increased as much as during previous COVID-19 waves. “This means that the country has a spare capacity for admission of patients even for routine health services,” they pointed out.

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As a result of the rapid decline in COVID-19 cases, the South African government has loosened some of its earlier restrictions. This includes allowing establishments that serve alcohol to revert back to full license conditions, lifting all curfews and allowing gatherings of up to 1000 people indoors and up to 2000 people outdoors (or no more than 50 percent capacity if a venue is too small for those restrictions to be practical).

This does not mean that the news from South Africa is entirely auspicious. The government still warns that the virus is highly transmissible and has led to both severe hospitalizations and death. Because the South African population has a lower vaccination rate than the United States and has endured previous dramatic COVID-19 spikes, the likelihood is that much of the population already had some level of pre-existing immunity due to previous exposure. Omicron may lead to more severe cases among populations that have had less exposure, including in the United States.

Despite these concerns, experts agree that the situation in South Africa offers hope to the rest of the world. If the omicron variant is less harsh than initially anticipated where it was first discovered, they think, this could be a good sign for everyone else.

“When you start to see different kinds of data all pointing in the same direction, you begin to feel more confident that it’s going to hold up,” Dr. Jessica Justman, a Columbia University Medical Center epidemiologist, told Fortune Magazine. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told the publication that “we’re now in a totally different phase. The virus is always going to be with us, but my hope is this variant causes so much immunity that it will quell the pandemic.”

Gandhi expressed similar views to Salon last month, explaining that although she expected omicron to cause a new wave of infections because of its high transmissibility, “there is now evidence that Omicron is less severe than previous strains.” What scientists do not yet know, she added at the time, is “if this is because of increasing cellular immunity in the population in December 2021 versus an inherent property of the strain that makes it less virulent.”

One of the most puzzling details about omicron is that its origins remain mysterious. Though it was first detected in Botswana, the earliest direct relative that scientists were able to locate is a SARS-CoV-2 virus that existed in mid-2020. This means that it could have incubated in an immunocompromised patient, reinfected humans after an earlier SARS-CoV-2 antecedent infected an animal, or that it arose in one of the many areas of the world where COVID-19 vaccines and treatment have been sub-standard due to poverty. Regardless of its origins, its very existence strongly suggests that there will be future SARS-CoV-2 strains that similarly emerge from left field. 

The rise of the omicron variant:

Gal Gadot finally acknowledges her viral, pandemic cover of “Imagine” was in “poor taste”

Almost two years after its debut, the infamous video of Hollywood A-listers singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” is making headlines once again, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The video’s ringleader — “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot — admitted in a recent InStyle  issue that the star-studded rendition had “pure intentions” but was ultimately “in poor taste.”

The video, which was shared on Instagram during the peak of the ongoing pandemic in March 2020, was accompanied by the caption: “We are in this together, we will get through it together. Let’s imagine together. Sing with us. All love to you, from me and my dear friends.”

“You know, this virus has affected the entire world. Everyone. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from — we’re all in this together,” Gadot said before singing the opening lines of the 1971 hit. The mic was later passed to Kristen Wiig, Jamie Dornan, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Zoë Kravitz and more.

RELATED: Gal Gadot confirms that Joss Whedon threatened her career

The video, which was meant to be uplifting, immediately sparked backlash after viewers deemed it as performative and called for celebrities to use their wealth to provide pandemic relief and aid.

According to Insider, a few comments urged the stars to “open your wallets” or “donate to resources that can actually help people out.”

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In October 2021, Gadot jokingly sang “Imagine” after taking the stage to accept her award at Elle’s 2021 Women in Hollywood event. “Might as well,” the actress explained to InStyle. “They had a mic there.”

“I was seeing where everything was headed,” Gadot also said in the interview. “But [the video] was premature. It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?

Watch the video of the full cover below, via Gadot’s Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B95M4kNhbzz/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=85a31017-64d5-41da-8cc3-96ce62534f75

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Reports of Norman Mailer’s cancellation have been greatly exaggerated

Journalist and author of “Fire and Fury” Michael Wolff claimed on Monday that writer Norman Mailer had been dropped by his longtime publisher Random House, after “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro.'”

Mailer, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, was the author of multiple books, articles, plays, and screenplays. His 1968 book “The Armies of the Night,” described as a “nonfiction novel,” won the Pulitzer Prize along with the National Book Award. His true crime novel “The Executioner’s Song” also won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize. Along with writers such as Joan Didion, Mailer was considered to be a leader at the time in the New Journalism movement, utilizing tools of creative writing and fiction to tell a true story, often, in Mailer’s case, with hyper-masculine bravado and, as Chris Barsanti writes in The Millions: “Spiky with overblown metaphors and heavy with luxuriantly dark language.” 

RELATED: From Philip Roth to Dave Chappelle, how an artist’s “meta move” fuels an endless cancel culture war

In 1960 at a party, Mailer stabbed his wife, the writer and painter Adele Morales Mailer, less than a year after she had given birth to their second child. Morales Mailer was his second wife, and Mailer stabbed her through her chest, just missing her heart. She nearly died. When a friend attempted to intervene as Mailer stabbed Morales Mailer again in the back, Mailer was reported to have said, “Let the bitch die.” Convicted of assault, Mailer served a suspended sentence of probation, no jail time.

Sexual violence was a theme in Mailer’s work, where his fictional characters sometimes physically resembled his wives. Domestic violence was a theme in his life. His fourth wife (out of six) accused him of beating her. In 1982, SCTV ran a skit featuring Eugene Levy as Mailer in a fake “Tyde” commercial, stabbing Gore Vidal at a party, then using the detergent to try to get the blood stains out. 

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Mailer also publicly expressed homophobia, blaming the existence of gay men on the loss of “faith in the notion of one’s self as a man. When a man can’t find dignity in his work, he losses virility.” Racism toward Black and Asian people is another Mailer theme on full display in books such as “The Armies of the Night.” The contested Mailer essay was criticized by James Baldwin for its hypersexualization of Black people, among other issues.

Wolff’s “junior staffer” comment led some in the writing world to wonder if the phrase was code for something else, a staffer of color, perhaps. But the power of any lower ranked employee in the publishing world is limited. As an actual Penguin Random House junior staffer told The New Republic: “The idea that any objection to the essay by a junior staffer could be taken so seriously that they’d pull the book is absurd.”

Wolff’s claims of “cancellation” were disputed both by Mailer’s literary agent and, according to the New York Times, Random House. The essay in question comes from a Mailer anthology that Random House is not scheduled to publish, but another publisher is, in 2023: Skyhorse Publishing. The Mailer anthology will soon have a home alongside books by Woody Allen and a biography of Philip Roth by Blake Bailey. 

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After Chicago public schools cancel classes, conservatives lash out over COVID restrictions

Right-wing pundits have been in a frenzy since the Chicago Public School (CPS) system canceled all classes on Wednesday after the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted to suspend in-person instruction, instead opting for remote learning amid the recent upsurge in coronavirus cases throughout the country. 

The move, which applies to 360,000 students and staffers throughout the city, was largely driven by fears around COVID-19 safety. On Tuesday evening, the teachers union held an emergency meeting to address the district’s apparent failure to accommodate for COVID-19 concerns, prompting an official delegate vote. Roughly 73% of the union’s 25,000 members supported a return to remote learning.

The union has said that the in-person learning will resume when COVID cases subside or when it can agree upon conditions for in-person schooling with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, according to CNN.

RELATED: Fast-spreading omicron variant drives up pediatric hospitalizations in parts of U.S.

“Educators of this city want to be in buildings with their students. We believe that classrooms are where our children should be,” the union said. “But as the results tonight show, Mayor Lightfoot and her CPS team have yet to provide safety for the overwhelming majority of schools.” 

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Lightfoot, for her part, has ardently opposed the union’s vote, saying during a Tuesday presser that “there’s no public health reason to shut the entire system down.”

“The worst thing we can do is to shut the entire system down,” she added. “What we need to be focused on is working together. What I’d love to see CTU do is not force an illegal work stoppage. What I’d love to see them do is work hand-in-glove with us to get kids and their families vaccinated.”

However, CTU argues that CPS has exhibited a longstanding pattern of neglecting concerns staffers’ COVID fears, namely by failing to provide adequate testing and improved masking. 

“I am so pissed off that we have to continuously fight for the basic necessities,” Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s vice president, told NBC Chicago. 

RELATED: The US broke its single-day case record for omicron — but not all regions are affected equally

“The teachers are being put in the unfortunate situation where we’re trying to keep people safe. We’re trying to run school, and we’re not being given the tools to do it,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey echoed. 

According to The Chicago Tribune, the move comes on the heels of months of negotiations between CTU and CPS. Last week, CTU proposed the use of daily health questionnaires; universal PCR testing for students; KF94, KN95, or N95 mask provisions; and a mandatory transition to remote learning if over 20% of its staff were in isolation. 

CPS, however, responded with slightly looser restrictions, suggesting that the transition threshold be set to staff absences of 40%. 

Numerous public figures and writers came forward on Wednesday to criticize the union’s vote, suggesting that more remote learning was “anti-student” and “anti-science.”

“The Chicago Teachers Union should be ashamed of itself,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., in a statement. “The simple fact is remote learning is a joke and does more harm than good for our children. But when it comes to keeping kids in the classroom, it seems the only people who don’t understand this are the teachers unions.” 

“If Democrats ever end the filibuster, at first switch to GOP control – which looks to be 2024 – teachers’ unions should be dissolved by federal statute within a month of the new Congress and president sitting, along w/ cancelation of the absurd benefits packages,” echoed right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt.”

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called the the CTU “ignorance when it comes to the science.”

“If you don’t want to teach, don’t teach,” he said during a Wednesday broadcast. “Quit. Just stay at home and stop teaching children, okay?”

COVID cases in Chicago are at or near record highs in Chicago, reported the The Chicago Sun Times. State data indicates the city is seeing a daily average of nearly 5,000 new cases, with a cumulative case count around 440,000. 

Anti-vaxxers are already trying to co-opt Betty White’s death to spread disinformation

On Dec. 31, 2021, the final day of the year, news broke that 99-year-old comedian Betty White passed away. A beloved multi-talented actor with a 91-year history in show biz, White’s death was mourned by friends, fans and fellow entertainers alike. 

Then, tragically and perhaps predictably, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists began to exploit her death to push disinformation.

Only a day after White’s tragic passing, social media posts surfaced spreading anti-vaccine propaganda claiming that White died after getting a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot. These posts linked to an article titled “Betty White: I’m lucky to still be in good health,” from a website called Crow River Media; the original link to the story is now broken, but the text was archived before deletion.

Though the article made no mention of Betty White receiving a booster shot, viral posts circulated with a link to the story and a fake quote from White alleging she said, in the story: “Eat healthy and get all your vaccines. I just got boosted today.”

Screenshots of the article link, with the quote (which was not actually in the story) superimposed, circulated on both Facebook and Twitter. The alleged quote about getting “boosted” is nowhere to be found in the article on Crow River Media’s site, nor in the original People magazine interview with White on which it was based.

White’s agent, Jeff Witjas, has spoken to multiple outlets affirming that White died of natural causes — not a booster shot.

RELATED: Betty White on “The Golden Girls” taught me queer self-acceptance

“Betty died peacefully in her sleep at her home,” Jeff Witjas, told People. “People are saying her death was related to getting a booster shot three days earlier but that is not true. She died of natural causes. Her death should not be politicized — that is not the life she lived.”

“I can absolutely, 100 percent say Betty did not pass because of the booster, she did not pass because of COVID, she never had COVID,” Witjas told ET. “She passed, with my understanding, of natural causes. Being 99 years old, unfortunately, you know. But there was no outside disease.”

Fact-checking site Politifact debunked the claim, too.

Naturally, the saga raises the question as to why would someone try to weaponize White’s death and turn it into anti-vaccine propaganda. 

Imran Ahmed, CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), told Salon this is a classic anti-vaxxer strategy— to hijack the news, and reframe it to support the message they’re trying to promote, which is that vaccines are dangerous.

“Anti-vaxxers are experts on hijacking any event — they’re essentially parasitic on the energy generated by current events,” Ahmed said. “And their core narrative is really simple: vaccines are dangerous, you can’t trust doctors, COVID isn’t dangerous, and so they have jumped onto the death of Betty White because it’s in the news, and they’ve used it to push their propaganda to undermine doctors.”

Ahmed said the move was quite “predictable.”

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For the record, booster shots are very safe. Pfizer released a study of 10,000 participants; half of them received a booster dose and half a placebo. In terms of safety, there were no reported new adverse events.

As the Center for Countering Digital Hate explained in their “Anti-Vaxx Playbook,” which analyzed and contextualized narratives pushed by anti-vaxxers, research continues to prove the safety of the vaccines.

“The simplest way of ‘pre-bunking’ this argument from anti-vaxxers is simply to emphasize that vaccine candidates have already been used by thousands of trial participants,” the report explains. “Many of whom are frontline health workers, and that they have proven to safely protect them from Covid.”

Still, it is unlikely this will be the last time anti-vaccine propaganda will latch on to a celebrity death.

“Everything is a pivot back to their core messaging,” Ahmed said. “They’ve used it to push their propaganda; Why? because they seek to undermine doctors and to sell them their own false narrative and to bring them into content ecosystems where they can monetize them.”

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