How did Uncle Sam become a symbol for the United States?

Most Americans easily recognize Uncle Sam as a symbol of the United States or a national nickname. Typically portrayed as an older white man with a long white goatee and a top hat, he’s almost always decked out in red, white and blue attire.

His image represents the U.S. government in political cartoons, or as a stand-in for the American people everywhere from soccer games to political rallies.

He has come to represent a patriotic ideal in popular culture. In the Marvel Universe, Captain America‘s costume resembles what Uncle Sam wears. That character is not only strong, but compassionate.

The most familiar Uncle Sam image of all time is an Army recruiting poster designed by James Montgomery Flagg in 1917. In it, Uncle Sam proclaims “I WANT YOU,” while sternly pointing directly at the onlooker.

That World War I publicity campaign worked so well that the government used the image again to recruit soldiers and other members of the armed forces during World War II.

“Columbia” and “Brother Jonathan”

Uncle Sam isn’t the only symbol that U.S. artists and illustrators have used to convey political issues of the day.

One of the earliest symbolic stand-ins for the United States was “Columbia,” a female icon usually dressed in a toga.

In one famous depiction, she’s seen mourning President Abraham Lincoln, joined by Britannia, another female character who personifies England, and a formerly enslaved person whose plight remains unclear.

So where did Uncle Sam’s name come from? According to a resolution Congress approved in 1961, it originated with meat supplier Samuel Wilson of Troy, New York. During the War of 1812, he marked his materials for military use with “U.S.” Workers at the time would tell a joke along the lines that “Uncle Sam” Wilson was feeding the Army.

Perhaps not coincidentally, two African-American Marvel superheroes are named Sam Wilson: “The Falcon,” who goes on to become Captain America following Steve Rogers’ retirement, and Samantha Wilson, who assumed the role of Captain America in the recent Spider-Gwen series.

But there was another figure resembling Uncle Sam called Brother Jonathan who emerged earlier.

That personification of the United States was possibly modeled on John Trumbull, a Colonial Connecticut governor who opposed British rule during the War of Independence. Brother Jonathan may have morphed into Uncle Sam around the time of the Civil War, before fading away.

In an 1876 advertisement, this young, slender man who symbolized the nation wore clothing that echoes the American flag. He looked a lot like a younger and cleanshaven version of Uncle Sam.

It’s possible that the lankiness and facial features that Uncle Sam inherited from later depictions of Brother Jonathan were a tribute to President Abraham Lincoln.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Paul Bruski, Associate Professor of Graphic Design, Iowa State University

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

Pennsylvania deserves better than Dr. Oz

I just can’t shake the fear that one day in the not-so-distant future we’ll be living under a GOOP administration. It seems weirdly possible, now that physician, erstwhile “Jeopardy!” host and world’s biggest fan of unproven medical “miracles” Dr. Mehmet Oz is running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

Oz, who is running as a Republican, threw his hat in the ring this month after Trump-endorsed candidate Sean Parnell withdrew in the wake of domestic abuse allegations. In his announcement, Oz struck his trademark authoritative tone, writing in the Washington Examiner:

During the pandemic, I learned that when you mix politics and medicine, you get politics instead of solutions. That’s why I am running for the U.S. Senate: to help fix the problems and to help us heal. COVID-19 became an excuse for the government and elite thinkers who controlled the means of communication to suspend debate. Dissenting opinions from leading scholars were ridiculed and canceled so their ideas could not be disseminated…. Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside, and the arrogant, closed-minded people in charge closed our parks, shuttered our schools, shut down our businesses, and took away our freedom.

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In his accompanying video statement, he echoed this sentiment, saying, “Washington got it wrong. They took away our freedom without making us safer.” And in a move that can only be interpreted as shameless endorsement thirst, he also noted the pandemic’s “moments of brilliance, such as the gift to the world of mRNA vaccines made possible by President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.”

If it seems strange for a doctor who thinks that mixing medicine and politics is a bad idea would suggest that the solution is for him to run for office, that’s the exactly kind of contradiction that has made Mehmet Oz a star. From his earliest breakout stardom as one of Oprah’s “experts,” to his lengthly run on his eponymous daytime show, he has parlayed folksy charisma into dubious credibility. Oz, after all, has Ivy League cred up the wazoo — educated at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, residency and career at Columbia — yet positions himself as an advocate against “elite thinkers” (with yards!). He never lets you forget he’s a man of medicine, the director of Columbia Surgery’s Integrative Medicine Center, all while gently suggesting that you, average person, are the real expert here. In other words, he’s a perfect representation of the overconfidence that characterizes our age of misinformation.

He’s also a classic American success story of failing upward. Long ago, he was, perhaps, just another very smart doctor practicing at a very good hospital. He was even my father-in-law’s heart surgeon back when he was still better known for his cardiac work than as one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive. But over the years — at least in many legitimate medical circles — Oz’s celebrity began to eclipse his credibility. Yet with every controversy, every challenge to his incredibly dubious claims, he seems to become more influential.

In 2012, Oz opened up his show to a “debate” on conversion therapy, asking, “Is there a gay cure?” and welcoming an “expert” from the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (now known as The Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity). He has in the past also given a platform to quackadoo extraordinaire Joseph Mercola, disagreeing with some of his ideas but praising his penchant for “defying convention and thinking largely outside the box.” He has in the past said he’s “rethinking tanning beds” after considering “a value of UVB radiation, not just for vitamin D but for other sources as well.” Interestingly enough, the show’s “gay cure” and Mercola content appear to have been quietly scrubbed from its site, just like the notorious episode on the “miracle” green coffee bean diet. (The “miracle” was based on a study the authors later had to retract. “Dr Oz” guest Lindsey Duncan later agreed to pay $9 milliion to consumers over false weight loss claims.)

His hyperbolic affinity for miracle cures and “the key to feeling decades younger” have landed him, repeatedly, in serious ethical trouble. In 2011, he was called out by the Food and Drug Administration after he claimed that five popular brands of apple juice contained arsenic. In 2014, he appeared before Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, who told him, “People want to believe they can take an itty-bitty pill to push fat out of their body. I know you know how much power you have. I know you know that.” In 2015, ten of his peers — physicians, surgeons and professors — sent a letter to the dean of medicine at Columbia University expressing how they were “surprised and dismayed that Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons would permit Dr. Mehmet Oz to occupy a faculty appointment, let alone a senior administrative position in the Department of Surgery,” asserting that Dr. Oz “has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops. Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Yet Mehmet Oz never stops, never slows down. He may sometimes have to stop touting one particular piece of questionable information, but there’s always plenty more where that came from. To that end, the pandemic has been a real jackpot for him — he’s been a vocal promotor of a “self-reported” hydroxychloroquine clinical trial, and in 2020 shocked viewers when he said on Fox that if “the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality… it might be a trade-off some folks would consider.” (He later claimed he simply “misspoke.”)

His role as the darling of the conservative, medical freedom-fighting movement was carved out for him back in 2018, when Donald Trump gave him an appointment on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. But it’s one thing to have a standing invitation on Fox News, it’s another to actually get elected to political office. And while America has never lacked for physicians in government — or physicians pretty much unqualified for public service — Oz may find himself caught between an ideological rock and hard place now that he will have to answer to voters on his seemingly very fluid beliefs.

In a recent interview for WGAL News, Oz, whose campaign site says “he has literally held a beating heart in his hands. He knows how precious life is and is 100% Pro-Life,” qualified his position by saying, “I’m pro-life, with the three usual exceptions, especially the health of the mother, but incest and rape as well.” In 2019, he was even more expansive, talking to the Breakfast Club about Alabama’s abortion restrictions and saying, “I’m really worried about it… It’s two weeks past your last period you’d have to decide by…. This whole thing about heart beating. There are electrical changes at six weeks, but the heart’s not beating.”

It’s a similar story on gun rights. Oz calls himself “a firm believer in the Second Amendment and our constitutional right to bear arms for protection,” yet has in the past had guests on his show discuss “Red Flag” laws and had fellow doctors talk openly about the “public health crisis” of gun violence. He claims he’s “tough on China,” but his merch is made there.

Dr. Oz has, for a very long time, been a source of exasperated fury for multitudes of Americans who care about things like medical ethics and public safety. But it’s those moments in his career when he has spoken as someone who understands at least a little about science and humanity that may prove his political Achilles heel. You can’t just delete your former statements from the public record. And all voters, regardless of their ideologies, deserve candidates who are honest about their positions — not to mention where they actually live. But Oz, a man noted by his own fellow doctors for his “egregious lack of integrity,” has long reveled in his broad appeal, of being an icon to the yoga moms and MAGA hats alike. Now he has to decide, it not who he truly is, who he wants voters to believe he is. And while there is no shortage of charlatans succeeding in politics, “America’s doctor” may soon discover that’s good enough to be Pennsylvania’s senator.

More celebrities in politics:

How to make macaroni and cheese without a recipe

Ah, macaroni and cheese. How do we love thee? Let us count the ways: We love you from a box, preferably in SpongeBob or superhero shapes. We love Grandma’s homemade version that she plunked down on the Thanksgiving table, right next to the green bean casserole. And don’t tell me I’m the only one with a weak spot for the Velveeta version where you squeeze neon-orange goo out of a silver packet onto your shells, best consumed while watching The Magic Schoolbus. Haters may hate — that stuff was (and, by all accounts, still is) delicious.

Let me back up: For as long as I can remember, macaroni and cheese was my birthday dinner. My mother made Martha Stewart’s version, and I would always sneak some of the butter-drenched croutons before we all sat down to dig in. Over the years, I adapted it to whatever whims and ingredients I had on hand and even started to make baked mac and cheese. Blue cheese and bacon? Sure. Greens and peas? That seems healthy. A topping of crumbled Cheetos? Yes, I did — and yes, it was just as good as you imagine.

I became known for my homemade mac and cheese. If there was milk and pasta and butter and sharp cheddar cheese lying around (and when isn’t there?), you better believe I would mac and cheese-ify it. The ability to transform such refrigerator and pantry staples into a knock-your-socks-off dish of cheesy baked pasta is nothing to sniff at. In fact, it’s a pretty valuable skill — and one I’m going to teach you today. Here’s how to make homemade macaroni and cheese.

The Pasta

The most popular types of pasta for traditional stovetop macaroni and cheese are generally elbow macaroni or medium shells. When it comes to baked mac and cheese, I like using a corkscrew-shaped pasta that has a lot of texture, such as cavatappi, gemelli, or campanelle. All of the nooks and crannies in these fun pasta shapes hold the sauce really well and get extra crispy when baked or broiled.

No matter which type of pasta you choose for mac and cheese, the key is to undercook it. As a rule of thumb, shave off two minutes of the box cook time for al dente pasta. Once you add the hot mornay sauce (aka the cheese sauce), the pasta will continue to cook as it absorbs some of the moisture and steam from the sauce. If you cook the pasta to the package directions and then add the sauce, you’ll end up with cooked macaroni that is a little sad and soggy, and no one wants that.

The Sauce

Every cheese sauce for homemade mac and cheese starts with a bechamel sauce, which is one of the French mother sauces. It starts with a roux, in which a combination of unsalted butter and flour are whisked together and cooked until it forms somewhat of a paste. Whole milk is added and the three ingredients continue to cook together until the milk has thickened and the roux has dissolved completely.

Now comes the fun part: the cheese! “We really want to highlight the flavor of the cheeses to create a rounded flavor profile. Focus on cheeses that melt well and will create an emulsified sauce that isn’t leaching out fat or becoming overwhelming. I really love to create a blend of cheeses that melt well together, so my go-tos are rich cheddars that are sharp but not aged, a nutty cheese like Comte or Gruyere, and then a more robust cheese like Fontina or Raclette,” explains Clare Malfitano, Head Chef for Murray’s Cheese Bar. She also recommends adding a little something funky, like blue cheese, goat cheese, or something flavored like truffle or spicy pepper to build flavor and texture.

Assembly

OK, I know I said the fun part was adding cheese to the bechamel sauce, but honestly, the fun part is getting to eat the finished mac and cheese! Once the pasta and cheese sauce have been combined, add nutmeg, salt, and pepper for warmth. From here, you can either eat it stovetop-style or transfer the mixture to a casserole dish, top it with buttery breadcrumbs, and bake until bubbling and golden brown.

How to Make Macaroni and Cheese

Step One

First, make a béchamel sauce, which we discussed above. For a whole box (one pound) of pasta, I recommend melting 1/2 cup of butter over medium heat and whisking in an equal amount of flour to make a roux. Then start whisking in your dairy — I used whole milk, but you could also substitute some of it for heavy cream for a richer sauce. For however much butter you used, add in eight times as much milk or cream. So if you used 1/2 cup of butter, you’ll need four cups of milk or cream. Whisk in your liquid gradually, then stand over the pot, stirring, until it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 8 to 10 minutes.

Once your béchamel is thick, add in some seasonings: Salt and pepper are classics, but I also like to add in a dollop of mustard for pucker, about a teaspoon of paprika for smokiness, a shake of cayenne pepper for spice, and a few grates of nutmeg for a little *je ne sais quoi*. If you like spice, you could up the heat with more cayenne or a dash of hot sauce. At this point, go ahead and preheat your oven to 375° F.

Step Two

Next, it’s time to add your grated cheese. I went with two parts Gruyère to one part sharp Cheddar, but you should march to the beat of your own drummer. Want something akin to the boxed dinners of your youth? Go with 100% Cheddar. Want something a bit funkier? Add some diced creamy blue cheese or smoked Gouda, or even a little crumbled goat cheese. I recommend steering clear of any non-melty cheese like feta or Parmesan — try sprinkling those over the top of your chef d’oeuvre instead for a crunchy, golden lid. “Parmigiano and other such cheeses have amazing flavor, but they tend to contribute too much oil to a sauce, so it’s best to only add minimal amounts. A sauce is likely to break if a large portion of drier, aged cheeses is used and we want to aim for a very creamy and well-emulsified sauce to coat the pasta,” says Malfitano.

In terms of quantity, only you can tell when to say when. I went with about three cups of cheese for a béchamel made with one stick of butter. The more cheese you add, the denser and gooier your mac and cheese will be. If you add less cheese, the end result will be creamier and looser. Stir the cheese into the hot béchamel until the consistency is relatively smooth and most of the cheese is melted. Don’t forget to reserve a half cup or so of your cheese to sprinkle over the top!

Step Three

Now it’s time for the add-ins. Think of this step like taking a trip to your favorite frozen yogurt shop or pick-n-mix candy store, only instead of mochi or gummi bears you can add in chopped, hearty greens, cooked meats, roasted vegetables, or shredded crab or lobster meat. I went with chopped spinach, kale, and bacon, because the greens add a level of heft and “health” to the macaroni, and everyone loves bacon. If you don’t partake in meat, try adding some depth with sautéed mushrooms or caramelized onions.

Step Four

While all this is going on, cook your noodles in generously salted water for 2 minutes or so less than the box’s recommendation for al dente. Fold your cooked pasta into the béchamel mixture. I recommend starting with only 3/4 of the pasta you cooked; less pasta = more sauce = goopier macaroni and cheese. More pasta = less sauce = more block-like wedges of mac that you can cut out of the pan and sauté in butter. But that would be over the top, don’t you think?

Step Five

Pour the macaroni mixture into a buttered pan. If you live for crispy, caramelized noodles, you could even spread the whole thing out on a sheet pan (this is peak comfort food, in my opinion). Sprinkle your reserved cheese over the top. I like to cover my macaroni and cheese with some chopped, toasted bread for crunch — you could go with anything from large cubes of bread to blitzed, sandy crumbs. I recommend toasting the bread in a bit of melted butter or oil before sprinkling it atop your macaroni, because we’re already going that direction.

Step Six

Bake your macaroni and cheese for about 30 minutes, or until the top is golden and bubbling with cheesy excitement. Invite over your closest friends, the ones you really, truly love. Or, do as I do, and attack the thing with a fork until sated, wrapping up the remainder in individual portions and freezing until the need for comfort hits.

Inside the 38-page PowerPoint TrumpWorld circulated to justify election subversion

As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot continues its work, reports suggest it is closely scrutinizing a PowerPoint document filled with conspiracy theories and several plans to overturn the 2020 election results.

The 38-page file turned over by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” and was circulating “on the hill” in the days prior to Jan. 6, according to a letter Rep. Bennie Thompson, the select committee’s chairman, sent to Meadows’ attorney earlier this week.

The document is part of the reason the committee is so interested in speaking with Meadows more extensively, Thompson said, which leaves him “no choice” but to bring Meadows up on contempt of Congress charges after he stopped cooperating with the committee.

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Both the Guardian and The New York Times report that a different, 36-page version of the PowerPoint circulating online is similar to the one received by the committee. Both include plans to declare a national emergency in order to delay the certification of the 2020 election and the outlines of a wild conspiracy that the country of Venezuela had taken over voting machines in a large number of important states, among other debunked and unverifiable allegations.

Though it remains unknown who first created the document, the Times notes it bears striking similarities to the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, which the paper describes as a “Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor.”

Meadows’ attorney, George J. Terwilliger III, told the committee that the ex-Trump aide turned over the PowerPoint to the committee after receiving it via email and that he had not done anything with it.

“We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” Terwilliger wrote.

But the Times reports that Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and one of the key propagators of Trump’s Big Lie, apparently circulated the document among influential lawmakers, holding several briefings for Senators and House members on Jan. 4 and 5, respectively. Waldron, who reportedly cites a history of involvement with “informational warfare,” told the paper that he hadn’t given Meadows a copy but wasn’t surprised it found his way to Trump’s chief of staff.

“He would have gotten a copy for situational awareness for what was being briefed on the Hill at the time,” he said.

It’s unclear Meadows’ continuing involvement with Waldron around Jan. 6 — though Waldron told The Washington Post that he met with Meadows and others at the White House just a few weeks earlier, around Christmas, to discuss investigative avenues, and held another meeting with Trump and several Pennsylvania legislators in the Oval Office on Nov. 25.

Former New York City Mayor and personal attorney to Trump Rudy Giuliani has also talked openly about receiving information from Waldron for his legal campaign to overturn the 2020 election, the Post reported, often serving as a go-between for Meadows and the retired Army colonel.

Shortly after turning over the document — and thousands of other emails and texts — Meadows decided to stop cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee. The drawback sets up an escalating legal battle that entered a new phase this week, with Meadows suing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Jan. 6 committee in the hopes a judge will block the subpoenas.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also recently poked a hole in Trump’s argument that he be allowed to keep documents from the Jan. 6 committee, writing that Congress has a broad mandate to Congress investigate any attacks launched against it.

“The January 6th Committee has also demonstrated a sound factual predicate for requesting these presidential documents specifically,” the court writes. “There is a direct linkage between the former President and the events of the day.”

More news from the Jan. 6 committee:

“A Guide to the Labyrinth” is a portrait of Jim Morrison, the writer, in his own words

For fans of the music of the Doors, “A Guide to the Labyrinth: The Collected Works of Jim Morrison” is a must-read. Exquisitely illustrated, the anthology was published by Morrison’s siblings in collaboration with famed Genesis Publications. And the results are simply breathtaking — and you don’t have to be a Morrison or Doors devotee to understand why.

“A Guide to the Labyrinth” offers a staggering portrait of an artist on the cusp of greater things. Indeed, Morrison’s untimely death at age 27 in July 1971 found him at a crossroads. He was the lead singer of a band that had reeled off a spate of artistically complex albums. But as “A Guide to the Labyrinth” so powerfully demonstrates, he was increasingly besotted by the language of poetry, an avocation he had pursued since his early teen years.

During a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, Morrison wore his ambitions on his sleeve. When asked, “Do you see yourself going more towards print?” Morrison admitted, “That’s my greatest hope. That’s always been my dream.”

As the pages of “A Guide to the Labyrinth” reveal, the self-styled Lizard King was on the verge of a brilliant literary career. His poems and notebooks find him making steady progress as a keen thinker about the world, as well as a gifted practitioner. A passion project of his surviving siblings Anne and Andy, Morrison’s collected works is a testament not only to the genius behind the Doors, but a top-drawer mind in rapid fire engagement with a changing world.

Andy Morrison fondly remembers growing up with brother Jim, whom the world has painted in the decades since his death as a larger-than-life rebel. But for Andy, Jim was an “intellectual rebel” more than anything else — the sort who hung around with the smart set in high school, innately loved to read and write, and yet always had time for a young brother just coming into his own myriad teenaged problems.

Like Andy, Anne was determined to see the long-lost brother that they knew emerge from the pages of the anthology. For five decades, our understanding of Jim Morrison has been shaped by an evolving rock history that rightly describes him as an artistic giant, while often losing sight of the nuance that made his lyrics so unique. “I wanted the book to be about Jim, rather that everybody telling us who Jim was and what they that about him,” Anne told me.

Instead, she wanted to see Jim come to life through the power of his own words as opposed to others’ preconceptions of him via his celebrity. With “A Guide to the Labyrinth,” she was determined for him to be understood as “an active writer and thinker,” a highly literate person who often had his nose in his journal, sifting through one idea after another, and working out the problems associated with the serious task at the heart of writing.

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In her fondest dreams, Anne hopes that the anthology will attract new, uninitiated readers to her brother’s life and work. They surely won’t be disappointed. “A Guide to the Labyrinth” has been lovingly curated with hundreds of unpublished photographs and drawings, as well as reproductions of Morrison’s handwritten poems and notes. In one masterstroke, Jim Morrison’s siblings have succeeded in affording lovers of music and poetry with an entryway into one of the twentieth century’s most enduringly fascinating minds.

More stories from pop music scholar Kenneth Womack:

Raekwon opens up about life before and with the Wu-Tang Clan

“I met my father once.” Hip hop icon Raekwon begins his memoir, “From Staircase to Stage,” with this line. The talented lyricist and cofounding member of the ’90s mega-group Wu-Tang Clan, known on stage as The Chef, didn’t have a relationship with his father. When we sat down recently for a conversation about his book, music, career and life, he talked about how his desire for male camaraderie, informed by that absence, impacted his journey into music.

Raekwon is opening up now about his upbringing for his fans and a younger generation, some of whom have been introduced to him through “Wu-Tang: An American Saga,” the Hulu series loosely based on the group’s early days, now in its second season.

“I went a little bit more in depth with things that I would’ve wanted to be in the series, but it might have just been a little bit too hard or too grimy or too much,” he said of his book, now available from Gallery. “The most important thing was to do it and let it be from the heart. Something that’s real, but at the same time, something that gives these youngsters some hope.”

Hope is all Raekwon had. Born Corey Woods in Brownsville, New York, in 1970, Raekwon had a loving mother, extended family and a community who cared for him dearly, but that didn’t protect him from the societal ills that Black men born in the ’70s and ’80s in underserved urban communities faced. Police brutality, poor housing, poor schools, food deserts, limited opportunities, racism, gang violence, and fatherlessness — all fell on Raekwon’s head before middle school.

When he was six years old, a big cousin said to him, “We are taking you to see your father today.” Happily, Raekwon followed him for two blocks to his father’s home. His dad walked out, gave Raekwon a giant hug, and said, “You want to meet your grandma?” Raekwon walked another block or so behind his father to meet his grandma.

It was an exciting day of firsts –– a day that could’ve changed the trajectory of Raekwon’s life. He’d have a grandmother to add to the love he already had at home, plus a dad to teach him the streets — how to navigate the blocks, the shooters, the users, the peer pressure, the cops and every other trap waiting impatiently to bind up Black inner-city kids. Raekwon’s dad represented hope, but that hope didn’t last. While Raekwon sat with his grandma in the kitchen, his dad said he was heading to the bathroom, then slipped out the door and out of his life forever.

“I always wanted to have a male figure to talk to and emulate what they were doing,” Raekwon said. “My mom had to work, and she left me to be in the streets, around whatever was outside, so you know, once you walk out that door, you learn everything according to the streets”

Raekwon’s verse on the single “C.R.E.A.M,” from Wu-Tang’s 1993 debut album “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” blew him into mainstream. The streets almost instantly took to Wu-Tang’s unorthodox style of gritty street raps cut with clips of kung fu and karate flicks.

“Wu-Tang came at a time where things wasn’t the way they are now,” Raekwon said. “You had to work a little harder. The crew was tighter. It was something about having a team back then. If you had a team, y’all was strong. You wanted to represent and see all your brothers win. You had groups out there before us, but not nine dudes.”

Method Man, who had released his eponymous hit single a few months before the album came out, was clearly the group’s break-out star. But it was the hustlers, the slicksters and money-getters alike who saw themselves in Raekwon and connected most to him.

It is important to know if you weren’t there, and to remember if you were, that the aesthetic of the early ’90s was dusty. The dustier you were, the more positive attention you received. This was the uniform in most east coast urban areas: baggy carpenter jeans that swallowed scuffed Timberland boots, or Timbs — mainly the wheat-colored Buttas, or Beef and Broccolis, the brown and green. Tops were Polo, Nautica, Hilfiger — CHAPS if you were cheap, or broke and needed something new. These items came brand new from department stores, out of the back of a booster’s Chevy Blazer or straight from your homeboy’s closet.

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The drink was Colt 45 or Old English or Bud Ice or Seagram’s Gin or E&J; Hennessy or Remy if you had some extra money. The blunts were Philly or White Owl, the weed was called Arizona and always seemed to have small traces of buzzed orange hair in it, the snacks were Cheetos and Now and Laters and Laffy Taffys, and the combination of all — the big clothes, the hard booze, the tattered boots, the sticky snacks, the harsh weed, the blunt guts and everything else was dusty. 1994 was dusty. Raekwon managed to shine like diamond, and that set him apart.

Wu-Tang wasn’t dirty, but that’s what the early ’90s was. The RZA performed in dark army gear and stocking caps; Method Man shot a video with half of his braids undone; Ol’ Dirty Bastard, wielding 40s of Olde English, had it right there in his name. But not Raekwon. While many in the group excelled at griminess in a grimy era, Raekwon sported 360-degree waves, clean Timbs or fresh sneakers, and a bright gold and diamond figaro link chain that sat on top of his crisp Nautica shirts. Raekwon came on the scene clean, and he knew it.

“A hustler don’t stack his money, he shows it on himself for the world to see,” Raekwon writes of his early success. “I started making the rounds at different stores too: Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Barneys.”

In the book, Raekwon reflected on the group’s evolution as a crew and as individuals as they saw massive success. “As we got on, things start to transition. Egos, money issues, family issues, things of that nature, being a businessman, putting that hat on. Something totally different from being in the streets just a couple of years before that.”

In “From Staircase to Stage,” Raekwon writes about his adolescence growing up in the Park Hill section of Staten Island: “A beautiful place, but also a dangerous place,” full of experienced street dudes who specialized in crack sales, robbing and murder. The beautiful parts of Park Hill allowed and even challenged Raekwon to fall in love with hip hop culture, to connect with future Wu-Tang members, to hone his craft, to see himself as being more than a street guy caught up in a drug game — and to dream outside of Park Hill. The dangerous parts of the same neighborhood slam-dunked Raekwon right into the middle of the drug trade where he warred with other blocks, drug crews and the NYPD during his turbulent adolescence.

“Everything we learned was basically through older dudes in the hood,” Raekwon shared with me. “Some hustlers and stick-up kids, but they loved us, they embraced us, they wanted the best for us.”

It was Park Hill where Raekwon left his mother’s home, when her boyfriend made fun of him because of his lack of formal education and how he hung around in the streets all day. Instead of being a father figure and sharing survival skills, his mother’s boyfriend took the opportunity to chastise Raekwon for not having the guidance he needed. Raekwon challenged his mom, asking her to take up for him, but she saw that as disrespectful and ended up kicking him out.

In this moment the rapper dived deep into the spiral of pain, hopelessness, and violence that made up the content of most of his early raps. Those stories and pain still resonate with many fans. His rhymes speak to the deep pain of the fatherless generation. In “From Staircase to Stage,” Raekwon bravely takes readers on his emotional journey, beyond what we think we know, right into the center of the reality of a kid who was not supposed to make it.

Twenty-eight years later and Raekwon is revered as one of the most distinctive voices in rap and a standout member of the Wu-Tang Clan. At 51, he’s a platinum-selling artist, a record executive, owner of Licataa wine company and founder of Ice H2O records. He is a sought-after collaborator, appearing on tracks with the some of the biggest acts in hip hop, including OutKast, Nas and Kanye West. He is recognized as a pioneer of the Mafioso Rap style, where his thick, tangled lyrics, full of luxuries and gangster references, syrup over tracks in a way that was so real, so poignant, that it’s still mimicked to this day.

But the question is, how did he do it? How did he make it this far from poverty without a dad or stable household? The answers to that question and more lie in between the pages of his memoir, a harsh, but honest account of the other side of musical fame. Those moments include the time a guy who was jealous of Wu-Tang’s success shot at them, hitting U-God’s son; the group member who slept with a fan he met on the road and woke up to his money and Mercedes missing; and the tour when their bus was raided by racist Canadian Mounties in a way that was “unusual for musicians coming into Canada” because they were young Black men.

“I had never been a guy that really just let people into my private life like that,” Raekwon told me. “But being that we have so much history in the game, when I think about this young generation, I think it’s important that guys such as myself write a book about our stories and our times of being out there in the street, dreaming for this kind of platform.”

More interviews with and about the Wu-Tang Clan:

The lessons “Moby Dick” has for a warming world of rising waters

As an environmental historian and scholar of the 19th century, I spend a lot of time thinking about how the past can help us confront our current crises – especially climate change.

And there’s a lot of help to be found in the 1800s, from the appreciation of wildness in Henry David Thoreau’s famous “Walden,” to the rise of ecology, the science of interdependence. “We may all be netted together,” Charles Darwin scribbled in his notebook.

But my nomination for the most helpful climate manual ever written might be a surprise: “Moby-Dick.”

Herman Melville’s epic novel about life aboard a wayward whaling ship, published 170 years ago this month, does not have a reputation for being particularly pragmatic, unless you’re looking for tips on swabbing the decks or hunting creatures of the deep. And no, I’m not suggesting that we go back to burning sperm oil.

What makes “Moby-Dick” especially relevant right now is that it offers a spur to solidarity and perseverance. Those are qualities societies may need to stock up on as we face the overwhelming threat of climate change. The novel has no straightforward moral, but it does remind readers that we can at least buoy each other up, even as the water swirls around us.

Existentialists at sea

Climate change touches on time scales and planetary systems that humans aren’t wired to fathom. But at the same time, it can be seen as just another challenge we’ve brought upon ourselves through societal failings.

Perhaps it’s more helpful, then, to think about climate change not as a brand-new “existential threat,” but as the kind of age-old crisis that is tailor-made for existentialism – a philosophy, as the scholar Walter Kaufmann put it, that is all about “dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness.” The basic idea is to recognize how treacherous and unknowable your path is, and then to continue on anyway.

“Moby-Dick” is clearly an existentialist text, though it was published almost a century before the term was coined. One of the founders of modern existentialism, Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus, explicitly acknowledged Melville as an intellectual forebear. And two of the main characters in “Moby-Dick” are near-perfect existentialists: the narrator, Ishmael, and his friend, Queequeg, a harpooner from the fictional isle of Kokovoko.

From the beginning of his tale, Ishmael makes clear his obsession with the horror of the human condition. He’s bitterly depressed, angry, even suicidal: “it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” he says on page one, and he finds himself “pausing before coffin warehouses.” He hates the way modern New Yorkers seem to spend their days “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” All he can think to do is go to sea.

Of course, it’s not long before he has a near-death experience on the open water. He and a few crewmates get chucked out of their small boat in the midst of a squall after failing to nab the whale they were after. Queequeg signals with their one faint lantern, “hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.”

Immediately after they’re saved, Ishmael interviews the most experienced of the crew and, confirming that this sort of thing happens all the time, goes below decks to “make a rough draft of my will,” with Queequeg as his witness. The “whole universe” seems like “a vast practical joke” at his expense, but he finds himself able to smile at the absurdity: “Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction.”

No man an island

Again and again, “Moby-Dick” forces readers to confront despair. But that doesn’t make it a grim read, or a paralyzing one – in part because Melville himself is such an engaging companion, and much of the book imparts a powerful sense of fellowship.

Literary critic Geoffrey Sanborn writes that Melville meant for “Moby-Dick” “to make your mind a more interesting and enjoyable place.”

“It’s about the effort,” Sanborn he writes, “. . . to feel, in the deepest recesses of your consciousness, at least temporarily unalone.”

When Ishmael stops by the Whaleman’s Chapel before his fateful journey, “each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.” But once aboard his ship, he finds all the crew members suddenly “welded into oneness,” thanks to their shared sense of purpose and their awareness of the dangers ahead. And he sees the same kind of unity in “extensive herds” of sperm whales, as though “numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection.”

That’s the sense of interconnectedness human nations need today. When I picked up “Moby-Dick” earlier this month, I almost immediately thought of the climate change negotiations in Glasgow – and Queequeg’s small island home. I could easily imagine the harpooner as an eloquent representative of a nation in danger of being swallowed up by rising waters.

“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians,” Ishmael imagines Queequeg saying at one point in the novel. “We cannibals must help these Christians.” That’s a startling line, emphasizing Melville’s suggestion that Queequeg, whom many characters dismiss as a “heathen,” is actually the most ethical character in the book.

But in Glasgow, it seems, wealthy nations’ recognition of the need for mutual aid fell short. Though their disproportionate greenhouse gas emissions are largely to blame for poorer countries’ disproportionate suffering, their funding for developing nations to weather the storm is far below what’s needed – and eventually, that may come back to bite everyone.

Queequeg’s interdependent relationship with Ishmael is at the very center of “Moby-Dick.” Their fates are interwoven; Queequeg is Ishmael’s “inseparable twin brother.” In one scene, the harpooner dangles over the water, attached by a cord to Ishmael, so that “should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more,” our narrator would go tumbling into the sea as well.

At the end of the novel, all the whalemen except Ishmael sink to rise no more. The narrator is saved by a coffin Queequeg had carved for himself, then given to the First Mate to replace a lost lifebuoy. Much about “Moby-Dick” will always remain murky, but this symbolism is clear: To ponder death and prepare for the worst are age-old survival strategies.

Queequeg’s culture led him to confront the hardest realities of life. As Ishmael notes admiringly, the harpooner had “no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits,” no tendency toward denial. He had thoroughly enjoyed carving his coffin, and when he lay down in it to check the fit, while suffering from a life-threatening fever, he had shown a perfectly “composed countenance.” “It will do,” he murmured; “it is easy.”

Queequeg’s existentialist determination in the face of dread, his willingness to sacrifice, his caring forethought, made all the difference. And maybe that could be an inspiration. The key to addressing climate change won’t be some abstract injunction to save the planet; it will be about acknowledging interdependence and commonality and accepting responsibility. It will be about returning Queequeg’s favor.

Aaron Sachs, Professor of History and American Studies, Cornell University

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

The disturbing door-to-door vigilante campaign in support of Trump’s 2020 election lies

Election vigilantes still pushing former President Donald Trump’s “big lie” are reportedly going door-to-door filming their interrogations of homeowners as they ask about their vote in the 2020 presidential election.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Matt Longley, a registered Democratic voter, recalled his encounter with election vigilantes when three women knocked on his door back in September. According to Longley, they asked multiple questions about his household and how many individuals residing in the home actually voted.

“They reiterated, several times, that they did not want or need to know who [we] voted for,” Longley said. “They were asking for how I voted (by mail) and were interested to know if I thought my vote was actually counted (I did). I told them that there was a website that one could go to confirm receipt of their vote. I got a look at one of their clipboards and saw an e-mail address that ended in ‘nebraskaguardians.com’. I thought it was odd and it was pretty obvious what kind of agenda they had, but they did seem nice enough, and they seemed oddly insistent that they not know who I voted for.”

While voters find election vigilantes to be weird, they believe their is purpose in their efforts.

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After multiple, bizarre conspiracy theories and repeated failed attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election, Trump loyalists believe their latest canvassing tactic could produce the results they are seeking, according to The Beast. However, critics suggest otherwise.

During an interview with the publication, Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director at the Brennan Center For Justice’s Democracy Program, weighed in on the problematic aspects of vigilantes’ efforts.

“This lie that the election was rigged has already done a great deal of damage and continues to do damage in a number of different ways,” Morales-Doyle said. “Going around door-to-door and continuing to spread this misinformation can only do more harm.”

He went on to discuss the broader perspective of the threats that this type of canvassing imposes. “What’s most frightening to me is not that it’s a rallying cry for people to go out and vote for a certain candidate, but that it’s a rallying cry for actions that undermine democracy,” he said.

He added, “This is the lie that justified a wave of passages of restrictive voting laws across the country, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations. This is the lie that motivated people to go attack the Capitol on January 6.”

Modern American sex education is lacking. Please, take a page from the Dutch

One night in first grade, my mom came back from the video rental store with a surprise. Her usual token rental was a “Care Bears” or Disney VHS tape; this time, she instead arrived home bearing a cheesily-animated movie whose art style resembled the “Cathy” comics. Yet unlike Cathy, whose main concerns were her own neuroses, this animated film was all about the birds and the bees.

As a relatively with-it first grader (or so I thought), I had this theory that babies happened when a dad pushed a sunflower seed inside a woman — not too far-off for a seven-year-old. But this video gave a pretty good, albeit pared-down version of the hanky-panky, complete with a naked couple with resplendent (animated) pubic hair on display. My five-year-old sister and I watched it, and then rewound and watched again. (As an adult, I figured out that VHS was called “Where Did I Come From?“)

My mom’s decision to screen this for her young children was perhaps unorthodox, at least for our community. Indeed, I am positive that, if they knew I learned about sex in first grade, most of my friends’ parents at the time would fly off the handle.

But they shouldn’t. Numerous studies show that despite the malevolent efforts of the deeply religious and Republication-leaning, teaching comprehensive sexual education continually starting at a young age doesn’t turn middle schoolers into sex-craved deviants full of crabs and zygotes. Rather, it curbs pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

The Dutch, a society that sociologists consider the gold standard for sexual education, begin formal sex ed in primary school. And yes, that means with 4 or 5-year-olds. In turn, the Netherlands has a low teen pregnancy rate, better sexual communication, and fewer teen STIs.

Indeed, comparative studies confirm that young people who complete comprehensive sexual education experience a lower rate of pregnancy than peers who get their information from abstinence-only (or no) sex education.

Certainly, American sex ed today has come a long way since the ’50s, when teachers shared how plants reproduced and hoped students would catch on. Yet sex ed is still lacking.

In the 1960s, sex ed in public schools truly started to garner support. Today, state policies vary, and many are left up to school districts. However, for the last several decades, public education has become more abstinence-focused. And not all states even require sex ed to be taught.

“Thirty states and the District of Columbia require public schools teach sex education, 28 of which mandate both sex education and HIV education,” according to the State Policy National Conference of State Legislatures. Recently, the Guttmacher Institute noted that only 18 states require medically accurate sex education. Nebraska recently made news when some parents complained about a newly revamped state-wide sex education program that included gender identity and expression.

Regarding my own aforementioned sex ed journey: despite my imperfect childhood, my parents did a fairly decent job at making sure my education covered most of the bases. Indeed, my Dutch grandparents would be proud. Let me walk you through it.

At public school in suburban Cleveland, I came of age as part of the D.A.R.E. generation. I was first exposed to formal sexual education in school in fifth grade, where we basically learned about anatomy and given primitive period education after we were split into boy/girl groups. I remember it being a mix of what I probably ought to have been learning and some weird stuff too, like being essentially forced to sign an abstinence agreement by a woman who came to speak one day in the music room. I definitely had no sex drive at the time, though I felt certain that my classmate Joey was cute.

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Recently, in another (more bourgey) suburb of Cleveland, parents’ uproar over a senior College Credit Plus class (meaning an advanced high school course where students get college credit) class using a supplemental writing prompt book that included exercises in which students were to write sexual fantasies. The uproar became local news. Of course, the spineless school district apologized over what was a perfectly safe age-appropriate writing exercise.

Dutch law actually mandates sexuality education in primary school, and doesn’t just focus on STI and pregnancy prevention, but includes sexual diversity and sexual assertiveness. So perhaps it’s no surprise ex ed in primary school curbs unwanted pregnancies, maternal deaths, unsafe abortions and STIs, according to a Georgetown University study.

As a poll conducted by Planned Parenthood found, sex ed is “widely supported by the vast majority” of Americans. Their survey found that 93 percent of parents supported having sex education taught in middle school, and 96 percent of parents supported having sex education taught in high school.

During middle school, my own parents enrolled us in Unitarian Universalist Sunday School where how they brought in real-life lesbians as part of sex ed — which sounds funny now, but at the time was pretty woke. Then I got to touch a condom and a never-popular ladies dental dam, live and in person.

Unitarian Universalists, who basically have no exact belief system other than being a good person and respecting the Earth, offer a comprehensive sex ed program, used by other faith and secular organizations, called Our Whole Lives. Although I no longer identity as a U.U., I am forever grateful for the education and attitude the people there helped me cultivate.

I don’t remember much of what my ’90s public middle school taught me, but I don’t think we learned about sex every year. For middle-school-age children in the Netherlands, sex ed focuses on sexual orientation and contraceptive options.

In high school during the 2000s, my friends fell into one of two categories: curious experimenters or those who had never even experienced a first kiss. (For most of high school, I was the latter.) My formal public school sex ed teachings included our gym teacher showing a VHS that we all thought was scandalous because it included a baby being ejected from a vagina. I think we only really had sex ed for one year. My school was semi-woke to be the first in the area to have a LGBT (this was before the Q) alliance.

Meanwhile, my mom kept it real with her realistic (and sage) advice: “Wait until college until you have sex, and hopefully it’s with someone you love, or like.”

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey from 2017 found that nearly 40 percent of all high school students report they have had sex. I did not.

Then and now, public schools mostly fail to teach much about other sex acts past vaginal penetration, or anything more than surface-level about LBGTQ sex or identities. I also think we could have learned more on consent, female pleasure, and flinger-flicking fun. Yes, some of these hot topics were eventually taught to me vis-a-vis friends, but they didn’t always get it right.

As far as the land of the wooden clogs: A Rutgers WPF study found that when Dutch adolescents did have sex, nine out of ten of them used contraceptives the first time. Moreover, Dutch teens are among the most avid users of the birth control pill. And the World Bank says that the teen pregnancy rate in the Netherlands is among the lowest in the world.

It wasn’t until college when I took a human sexuality class that actually had the breadth and nuance most teens need and most adults could use. Additionally, college is where I finally did lose my literal virginity. Curiously, my sister and I had sex for the first time on the exact same day (Valentine’s Day), on the same campus — though, luckily, not to the same guy — a fact she casually brought up during her maid of honor speech at my wedding.

Even though Dutch and American teens lose their virginities around the same age (17-18), teen births, although on the decline in recent decades, are still five times the rate of Dutch teens (who also have fewer abortions).

Why do the Dutch excel not only in cooking up delicious stroopwafel, but also in having lower rates of all the problematic sexual outcomes?

Evidently, it’s because sex education and access to contraception matter. Since comprehensive sex ed curbs teen pregnancy, youth who are privy to only abstinence-only or no real sex education are more likely to do all the things that those who think they shouldn’t learn don’t want them to do.

The Guttmacher Institute also noticed a decline in birth control education, especially in the rural parts of the United States. “The share of rural adolescents who had received instruction about birth control declined from 71% to 48% among females, and from 59% to 45% among males,” the research organization noted. Their white-paper also noted that “only about half of adolescents (57% of females and 43% of males) received formal instruction about contraception before they first had sex,” and only “about four in ten (46% of females and 31% of males) received instruction about where to get birth control.”

Again, the Dutch, on the other hand, are already doing it right (in more ways than one.) The Guttmacher Institute reports that “as of 2015, fewer than six percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students aged 13–21 reported that their health classes had included positive representations of LGBT-related topics.” Education aims to reduce stereotypes, beef up sexual confidence, and help people know what a health relationship looks like.

Beyond that, Dutch teens say they enjoyed their first time more often than American teens, whom 66% of say they regret their first sexual encounter. Dutch teens are also less promiscuous, better communicators, and report higher levels of sexual satisfaction.

Maybe it was my liberal-minded upbringing that helped instill healthier attitudes in me. I’ve never had an STI. I’ve been pregnant exactly one time and had one child, on purpose.

That’s not to say everyone who receives a comprehensive sex education makes “more healthy” choices all the time. And that’s certainly not to say that those who make less than ideal choices in the moment don’t need to be supported with plentiful resources.

If I could make a change tomorrow in the American education system, I’d offer free (no insurance, no questions asked, no parental permission needed) birth control for all students on demand in schools.

We have to teach more than just the surface of sex education. Other beneficial goals, beyond reducing disease spread and unwanted pregnancies, must include teaching kids tools that ultimately reduce rape, LGBTQ harassment, positive sex experiences and beyond.

At the very least, America needs to institute age-appropriate sex ed into the curriculum of all grade levels. Sexuality is not just something that happens sporadically, and needs to be taught more than every few years. Every school district and every child nationwide needs comprehensive education that is gender inclusive and covers all the other nuances we miss in so many cities throughout the country.

More on American sex ed:

Court ordered Biden to restart Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” — but he didn’t have to make it worse

The Biden administration said its hands were tied after a court ordered it to restart the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that prevents asylum seekers from crossing the border. But President Biden didn’t just bring back the program, he expanded it — and while the reasons why are not entirely clear, they may have more to do with politics than with humane immigration policy.

Biden trashed former Donald Trump’s policy on the campaign trail last year, vowing to undo his predecessor’s “inhumane” immigration crackdown. During a debate last fall, Biden called out Trump over the “Remain in Mexico” policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which has forced nearly 70,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed, leaving many to stay for months in makeshift tent camps along the border.

“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that [said] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country,” Biden said at the time. “That’s never happened before in America. … They’re sitting in squalor on the other side of the river.”

Biden did order an end to the policy right after taking office, but then a federal court ordered the administration to restart the program until it increases its capacity to hold migrants inside the U.S. That ruling came after the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Missouri sued the new administration for not consulting with state governments on how to handle the inflow of asylum-seekers.

The administration last week reached a deal with Mexico to revive MPP and began returning asylum seekers to the country on Wednesday. But Biden didn’t simply restart the program, he actually expanded it. Under Trump, only Spanish speakers and Brazilians were covered by the policy. But Biden’s policy includes citizens of all countries in the Western Hemisphere, meaning that asylum-seekers from countries like Haiti can also now be sent to Mexico even though most do not speak Spanish. Haitian migrants in particular have faced a wave of racial discrimination and violence in Mexico. Immigration advocates like Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, observed that Biden’s didn’t just bring the MPP policy back, he “made it even worse.”

“The Biden administration was not ordered by the court to expand Remain in Mexico to new populations,” Ursela Ojeda, senior policy adviser for migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told reporters last week. “They are going well above and beyond good faith compliance that’s required of them to make this policy more cruel and more deadly.”

The administration has not explained why it expanded the program.

Under Trump, nearly 70,000 migrants seeking asylum were sent to Mexican border towns where many endured unsanitary and overcrowded conditions and faced gang violence. The nonpartisan organization Human Rights First in February found “at least 1,544 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping” and other violent assaults targeting migrants who had been forced to remain in Mexico.

The Biden administration said it is including new exemptions in the policy, which will cover families, elderly people and people with disabilities. And border agents will now interview migrants to determine if they have a “reasonable possibility” of facing danger in Mexico. But all such decisions will be left to the discretion of individual border agents.

The union for asylum officers tasked with screening migrants subject to MPP issued a statement last week objecting to the “resurrection of this irredeemably flawed program.”

“While the administration has taken measures intended to mitigate some of the most egregious elements of MPP’s prior iteration, a program that requires asylum seekers to remain in one of the most dangerous parts of the world while their cases are pending in U.S. immigration courts cannot guarantee their protection from persecution and torture, as required by U.S. law,” the statement said.

The Biden administration has also said it will process every asylum claim within six months. The Trump administration made a similar claim but could not honor it. Some cases dragged on for years and the Biden administration still faces a massive immigration court backlog and a shortage of immigration judges.

The administration has also said it will coordinate with Mexican officials to provide “safe and secure” shelters, but shelter directors along the border recently told Reuters that they are already overwhelmed.

“We categorically reject the Biden administration’s claims that it can administer the Remain in Mexico program in a more humane manner,” Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council, said in a statement. “The longer the administration delays terminating this unlawful and cruel policy, the more people will suffer,” he added.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo in October reiterating the administration’s commitment to ultimately ending the program.

“MPP had endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and did not address the root causes of irregular migration,” he said in a statement. “MPP not only undercuts the Administration’s ability to implement critically needed and foundational changes to the immigration system, it fails to provide the fair process and humanitarian protections that individuals deserve under the law.”

But a senior DHS official told BuzzFeed News that the “expansion to the whole Western Hemisphere seems to belie the argument that we don’t want to implement MPP.”

The administration’s claims that it will pursue a more humane policy have only further angered immigration advocates who feel stung by the return of the program.

“Under this new expansion, even Haitian nationals who don’t speak Spanish will be forced to wait in Mexico,” Loweree said. “This disparate impact on Black immigrants comes on the heels of administration’s mass disappearance of thousands of Haitians in Del Rio and cannot be ignored.”

Loweree was referring to the September mass deportation of Haitian immigrants being held in Del Rio, Texas, which was carried out despite warnings from the DHS civil rights office that it could violate the administration’s civil and human rights obligations, according to a memo obtained by BuzzFeed News. Daniel Foote, the administration’s special envoy to Haiti, resigned in protest of the “inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees.” State Department adviser Harold Koh soon followed Foote out the door, slamming the administration’s “illegal” forced removal of Haitian migrants.

The Haitian migrants were deported under Title 42, a Trump-era public health order allegedly masterminded by immigration hardliner Stephen Miller that, again, the Biden administration has kept in place. The policy allows border officials to turn away nearly all asylum seekers at the border. A federal judge in September ordered the administration to stop using the rule to turn away migrants in response to a lawsuit from civil rights groups that called the policy “cruel and lawless.” But the Biden administration appealed the order and an appellate court allowed it to resume expulsions while the case is litigated.

Immigration was a critical election issue for Biden, who along with a chorus of Democrats repeatedly called out Trump for separating families at the border and holding “kids in cages” at detention facilities. But the new administration seemed to reverse course in dramatic fashion after coming under fire over a surge of border crossings in the first months of Biden’s presidency.

While the president and top advisers have continued to preach a more “humane” immigration system and advocate rebuilding the mess that Trump left behind, the White House rushed to counter right-wing attacks blaming Biden for the surge and stoking fears of so-called migrant caravans by making forceful statements warning Central American migrants against traveling to the U.S., reopening the same temporary detention facilities Democrats previously decried as “cages,” and quickly deporting thousands of Haitian migrants despite human rights concerns.

As the administration prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan, Biden slow-walked the evacuation of thousands of refugees in danger of being killed by the Taliban, reportedly concerned that conservative critics would conflate the inflow of refugees with the surge at the southern border. But increasingly strict border measures have not stopped frequent attacks by Republican elected officials and right-wing media commentators over his handling of the border. Nor has it helped his plummeting poll numbers. A CBS News poll last month found that 92% of Republicans and 61% of independents think Biden is “not tough enough” on immigration.

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Some centrist Democrats have also been in Biden’s ear about getting tougher on border policies.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., earlier this year called for Biden to “do more” and “take bold action” to address the border “crisis.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, arguably the most consistently conservative Democrat in the House, told the Washington Post earlier this year that he has been urging the administration to crack down at the border since Biden’s first week in office, calling the White House messaging on the issue “terrible.” He also advocated against lifting Title 42, suggesting such a decision would incentivize more migrants to come to the U.S. “”They’re just giving the Republicans ammo against Democrats,” he told Politico in September.

Some Democratic operatives have also urged Democrats to use tougher rhetoric on immigration in an effort to hang onto middle-ground swing voters. David Shor, a data scientist and veteran of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign who has urged Democrats to focus on economic issues and stay away from culture-war topics, has suggested that Democrats’ rhetoric on border crossings and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants are polarizing among Hispanic voters, which the party worries it is increasingly losing to Republicans. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Hispanic voters are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“Our immigration system is a humanitarian crisis, and we should do something about that,” Shor told New York Magazine earlier this year. “But the point of public communication should be to win votes. And the way that you do that is to not trigger ideological polarization.”

Some inside the administration have also favored tougher deterrence strategies at the border, according to The Wall Street Journal, including White House chief of staff Ron Klain, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and senior adviser Cedric Richmond. These advisers have expressed concerns that persistent news about illegal border crossings will hurt Biden among moderate voters. Some have advised against admitting more refugees while the number of border crossings remains high. It seems clear that such immigration hard-liners have clashed with more progressive members in the administration. Shortly after internal discussions began about administration began about reviving MPP, National Security Council official Andrea Flores, who oversaw the administration’s initial efforts to end the policy, resigned in protest.

The policy now in place has alarmed some congressional Democrats. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Biden’s expansion of the policy is “far beyond a good-faith implementation of the court’s order.”

“We have a moral obligation to do everything possible to swiftly and permanently discard this policy, along with the many other remaining Trump-era policies that were willfully designed to deter immigrants with cruelty. We cannot externalize our asylum system and abandon our obligations as a beacon of hope and opportunity,” Menendez said in a statement, calling on the administration to end “this xenophobic and anti-immigrant policy for good.”

Biden officials has repeatedly rejected criticism of the administration’s immigration policies, arguing they are still working to undo the damage caused by four years of Trump’s destructive and inhumane policies. efforts to gut the immigration system. But that rhetoric seems increasingly at odds with Biden’s evident decision to expand on Trump’s policies.

“The administration has a moral obligation to stop perpetuating the dangerous restrictionism of the Trump era, which has become the deeply disturbing centerpiece of its own immigration policy,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of the largest nonprofits helping to resettle asylum-seekers, said in a statement. “Our values and our global humanitarian leadership demand bold solutions that end the refoulement [i.e., forcible resettlement] of vulnerable people and restore protections mandated by U.S. and international refugee law.”

Read more on Biden’s bewildering immigration policies:

In the fight against climate change, China is doing more than you think – but still not enough

When it comes to climate change, no nation is more important than China. It consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined, and it is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for nearly 30% of global emissions.

Unless China takes rapid steps to control its greenhouse gas emissions, there is no plausible path to achieving the Paris climate agreement aim to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F), or even the less ambitious target of “well below 2 C” (3.6 F).

So, what is China doing to help the world avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and is it doing enough?

China’s record is mixed. Over the past year, China has signaled that it intends to continue on its well-worn path of making modest, incremental contributions to combat climate change, an approach inadequate for achieving the Paris goals. Yet, as an expert in environmental diplomacy who has followed China’s actions for years, I see reasons to think China might increase its efforts in the coming years.

China’s measured approach to climate change

A common misconception is that China either lacks climate policies or fails to implement them. The reality is that China has a robust set of climate and energy policies and a strong track record when it comes to fulfilling its pledges to the international community.

Driven by a desire to reduce air pollution, enhance energy security and dominate the industries of the future, China has been the world’s leading investor in renewable energy since 2013, and it has been buying up raw materials those industries need, such as cobalt mines in Africa. It has three times more renewable energy capacity than any other country, and its electric vehicle use is growing. As of 2019, about half the world’s electric vehicles and 98% of electric buses were in China.

Overall, China achieved nine of the 15 quantitative targets in its 2015 climate commitments ahead of schedule. Over the past decade, coal has fallen from about 70% to 57% of its energy consumption.

In September 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping indicated that China will stop financing overseas coal power plants. This is likely to lead to the cancellation of much of the 65 gigawatts of coal power plants it had planned in Asia, roughly three times the annual emissions of Bangladesh. And unlike the U.S., China has also established a national emissions trading system for the electricity sector, though it lacks a hard cap on emissions.

When it comes to China’s approach to climate change, the problem is not lack of policy implementation but rather a lack of policy ambition. China’s climate policies are admirable for a middle-income country that only recently escaped the ranks of the poor, but, like most of the world’s nations, it is still not doing enough.

This is evident both in China’s revised commitments presented at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021 and in its current Five-Year Plan (2021-2025). Both represent piecemeal improvements but will make it difficult to keep global warming well below 2 C.

For instance, China aims to have its carbon dioxide emissions peak before 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060. These soft targets reflect a Chinese tendency in international negotiations to underpromise so that it can overdeliver. To be consistent with the Paris Agreement aims, China will need to set a cap on emissions and move forward its peak dates.

Current policy and recent history have also raised concerns that China’s coal use will not decline fast enough over the 2020s to achieve the 1.5 C target.

Three times in the past four years China responded to either an energy shortage or economic slowdown by allowing coal production and consumption to surge. In 2020, it added almost 40 gigawatts of new coal capacity, roughly equal to the entire coal fleet of Germany, the world’s fourth-largest industrial power.

Reasons for cautious optimism

There is still a chance that China will enhance its contribution to the fight against climate change.

It is worth noting that China is still developing the policies that will guide its approach to climate change over the next decade. It has released two overarching documents for reaching carbon neutrality and an emissions peak in 2030. Over the next year or so, it intends to release 30 sector- and province-specific documents to guide industries such as steel, cement and transportation.

Two key developments at Glasgow could also nudge China to do more.

First, a considerable number of countries increased their climate pledges, which ratchets up pressure on China.

More than 100 nations pledged to cut emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, by 30% by 2030. India pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2070 and, more importantly, indicated it would potentially get half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. There were also multicountry pledges to end deforestation, phase out coal and cut international funding for fossil fuels.

Like any country, China’s climate actions are driven primarily by domestic political considerations. However, over the past three decades Chinese policy has responded to — and been shaped by — external forces including diplomacy, advocacy and scientific exchange.

Developing countries, in particular, can influence China’s approach to climate change. Because China has long positioned itself as a leader of the developing world and is sensitive to its international image, it can be hard for Beijing to resist pressure from other developing countries. The fact that several countries, such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam, made bolder-than-expected pledges at Glasgow could induce Beijing to offer more aggressive targets for controlling emissions.

The second key development is that the United States and China achieved a much-needed thaw in their relationship at Glasgow and laid a foundation for future cooperation.

Although there is some debate about whether the climate benefits more from Sino-American competition or cooperation, there was concern that hostility between China and the U.S. could derail the talks.

Therefore, it was a welcome relief when late in the summit China and the U.S., the second largest greenhouse gas emitter, released a joint declaration outlining their shared commitment to combating climate change.

They agreed to establish a “working group on enhancing climate action in the 2020s” and to meet early in 2022 to address methane emissions. China also indicated it would release a national action plan for methane. This is significant because China did not sign the Global Methane Pledge and has not traditionally included noncarbon greenhouse gases – about 18% of China’s total emissions – in its commitments.

Will developing country pressure and U.S.-China cooperation be enough to persuade China to take more aggressive action? Only time will tell, but Glasgow may have been the crossroad where China and the rest of the world chose a more sustainable path.

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Phillip Stalley, Endowed Professor of Environmental Diplomacy & Associate Professor of Political Science, DePaul University

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

Abortion rights should be protected under the First Amendment

To say that America is divided on the abortion question is to say that Americans are divided in their beliefs. These beliefs are held with great passion and they are asserted as certainties. But the certainties oppose one another, and it is the diversity of sincerely held beliefs that needs protection from the Court.

Three points merit attention.

First: At stake on the question of non-therapeutic abortion are beliefs about fetal humanity. While species membership is in fact established at the moment of conception, fetal humanity is a philosophical and moral question, not a question science is competent to decide. That a certain point in biological development determines fetal humanity will always be a matter of belief, not science, and such beliefs will be arbitrary beliefs at that.

Second, people of goodwill disagree on questions related to fetal humanity, so such beliefs, as is often the case, will reflect a diversity of viewpoints. On this issue the diversity pertains to the point when the moral community decides to confer on a developing form of life a right to life.

Third. The beliefs about fetal humanity are either explicitly religious or otherwise grounded in non-scientific beliefs akin to religious beliefs. As such they deserve protection under the First Amendment.

In the current challenge to abortion rights, the original Roe decision is very much front and center. The Roe decision presents in a short space a diversity of philosophical and religious opinions on the question of fetal humanity, including stoic beliefs and a diversity of views on the possibility of abortion within Judaism and Christianity. Rarely mentioned in discussions about Roe is the strain of humility that runs through Justice Blackmun’s review of these religious and philosophical viewpoints. For that one must turn to this comment: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

At this point the Court turned away from trying to decide the philosophical and even theological issues associated with fetal humanity and focused attention on the pregnant woman and the need to protect her health, rights and interests. Appealing to privacy, Roe concluded by offering those protections to the pregnant woman until the third trimester, when relevant interests expanded to include the state and the developing form of human life.

Constitutional conservatives lambasted Roe for its appeal to privacy when the Constitution takes no explicit note of it. There are more explicit constitutional grounds for endorsing abortion rights, however, and they are to be found in the two religious clauses of the First Amendment: the non-establishment of religion and the free exercise of religion.

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The Roman Catholic magisterium is on record opposing all abortions and hold to the view that a fertilized egg is sacrosanct and cannot be destroyed. Not all Catholics hold to this view: consider the group Catholics for Choice. Orthodox Jews would oppose abortion, but Reconstructionist and Reform Jews generally support abortion rights. Protestant Christians can be found both affirming and denying choice.

What this diversity indicates is that religious people hold beliefs about fetal humanity that both support and oppose abortion rights. Those beliefs are integral to essential religious affirmations. If the Supreme Court were to hand down a decision that sanctioned in law fetal humanity at some point prior to viability, the Court would be taking governmental action to establish a belief that contradicts those who in the free exercise of their religion deny that belief. The Court in effect would be establishing a religious belief in violation of the establishment clause while at the same time preventing the free exercise of religion.

The religious protections housed in the First Amendment provide a strong and explicit constitutional foundation for abortion rights (and even for privacy claims since citizens have a right to keep religious beliefs private). The strongly held beliefs avowed with certainty on both sides of the abortion debate are not scientific facts but philosophical, theological and moral viewpoints that must compete in the marketplace of ideas. Were the religious protections of the First Amendment to ground abortion rights societal peace might be forthcoming on this most divisive of issues.

More stories about the fight to preserve abortion rights:

Mystery of Florida’s “ghost” candidates grows: Major energy company linked to GOP scheme

Back in March, Frank Artiles, a former Republican Florida state representative with strong financial ties to the utility industry, was arrested on suspicion of orchestrating an election fraud scheme that helped oust one of Florida’s most prominent climate advocates, former state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, a Democrat.

According to investigators, Artiles reportedly paid an auto salesman with the same surname as Rodríguez to run as a third-party “ghost” candidate against Rodríguez and his then-Republican challenger, state Sen. Ileana Garcia. Farcical as it sounds, it worked. The auto salesman, despite never campaigning, likely siphoned off 6,300 votes from Rodríguez’s re-campaign to ensure Garcia’s victory.

Now new revelations suggest that Artiles, the alleged mastermind, may have just been the tip of the iceberg.

This week, the Orlando Sentinel reported that there was likely an entire ecosystem of corporate and political entities propping up sham candidates in the 2020 Florida state Senate races. Records reviewed by the Sentinel indicate that Florida Power & Light (FPL), the country’s largest electricity company, helped coordinate three separate ghost candidates – one of whom was Rodríguez – in order to bolster its own business interests in the state legislature. From 2016 to 2020, FPL reportedly made a series of transactions totaling over $3 million to Denver-based dark-money nonprofit “Grow United,” whose name was changed from “Proclivity” last year. In October of 2020, Grow United gifted two Florida political committees – “The Truth” and “Our Florida” – with $550,000 to finance the mass delivery of political mailers supporting three unaffiliated candidates in three districts. Thousands of these mailers – all of which featured identical language blasting “party line” politicians as “puppets,” according to Politico – bombarded voters.

It was “a coordinated dark money effort to siphon votes from Democratic candidates,” Anders Croy, a Democratic caucus’ spokesman, told The Miami Herald.

According to the Sentinel, a printing company with ties to Florida GOP strategist Alex Alvarado was in charge of producing the mailers themselves. Incidentally, Alvarado’s data intelligence firm was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by political groups with ties to Associated Industries of Florida, a business lobbying group that represents FPL.

Alissa Jean Schafer, a research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute (EPI), a utilities and energy watchdog, told Salon that FPL’s presence in this opaque web of nonprofits, companies, and political committees is completely unsurprising.

“It’s a huge opportunity for FPL, given the political landscape, to flex their political power on spending, important relationship-building, and direct political contributions before you even get to the stuff where it’s a little bit more shady and buried in levels of political committees,” Schafer said in an interview. “If you look at the comments that the company makes, for example, in their quarterly reports, they talk about Florida as being a friendly regulatory environment. And that is very intentional. It’s a result of the work that they have done to control the political environment.”

Schafer, who has been following FPL’s apparent skullduggery for several years now, noted that the company has several levers of power when it comes to keeping Florida’s legislature on the side of businesses rather than consumers.

One lever is exerting influence over the Florida Public Service Commission (FPSC), a five-member panel tasked with regulating the business practices of utility and telecommunications corporations throughout the state. A large part of FPSC’s job is to keep FPL in check because the company has a monopoly on the state’s utilities market. This is why the FPSC decides what rates the company is allowed to fairly charge its customers – a process that involves extensive accounting of the company’s yearly costs.

Throughout 2019 and 2020, the FPSC approved numerous rate increases for FPL, Tampa Electric Co., and Duke Energy. Just this week, the FPSC likewise voted to let FPL collect an additional $810 million from customers in 2022 to account for the increasing cost of natural gas nationwide. According to The Daily Herald, FPL intends to increase the cost of electricity for its customers by roughly 20% over the next four years.

While there have been some instances in which the commission sides with consumers, it’s hard to argue that the FPSC is insulated from corporate interests. After all, its five commissioners are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate, which makes its composition a product of politics, Liz Veazey, Policy and Rural Energy Director at Solar United Neighbors, told Salon.

“When you’re solely focused on profits over people, there’s no limit to what utility companies will do to preserve their energy monopoly,” Veazey told Salon by email. “The substantial influence that FPL and Duke Energy have over the state legislators and the governor … reduce[s] the ability of the government to fulfill its oversight role.”

On top of lobbying, companies like FPL can also launder their interests through more public channels of campaign finance. For instance, while Florida prohibits utilities companies from donating directly to candidates, they can contribute to political action committees that align with business-friendly candidates.

According to The Sentinel, in 2018 alone, FPL made $8 million in campaign contributions to political action committees. But donations like these, Veazey said, “are often only half of the story, and fail to include all of the monies creatively funneled through political committees, political parties and even charitable donations.”

FPL, for its part, has vehemently denied any suggestions that it financially supported ghost candidates.

“Neither FPL nor our employees provided funding, or asked any third party to provide funding on its behalf, to Grow United in support of Florida state-level political campaigns during the 2020 election cycle,” company spokesperson David P. Reuter told the Sentinel. “Any report or suggestion that we had involvement in, financially supported or directed others to support any ‘ghost’ candidates during the 2020 election cycle is patently false, and we have found absolutely no evidence of any legal wrongdoing by FPL or its employees.”

Veazey told Salon that she found Reuter’s statement “elitist” and “absurd.”

“Their claim of ignorance of how the money was being spent is not an acceptable excuse for their funds being used to wreak havoc on the democratic process,” she added.

It isn’t the first time that FPL has come under scrutiny for indirectly financing alleged sham candidates.

In 2018, Florida state Sen. Keith Perry, a Republican, won re-election against Democratic challenger Kayser Enneking, largely due to the candidacy of independent Charles Goston. According to the Sentinel, FPL donated $14.15 million to a political ad nonprofit whose consultants were affiliated with a group that paid for ads supporting Goston.

As curious as FPL’s charitable decisions are, it’s not hard to see why an electricity retailer would get involved in political funding. FPL is facing a push for rooftop solar. Earlier this year, state Democrats introduced a bill that would have saved schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations from paying millions of dollars in up-front costs associated with solar installation. Solar United estimated that bill would have added 25,000 new jobs with $4 billion in economic growth. In the end, however, the measure didn’t even receive a hearing in the Republican-controlled legislature.

FPL and solar advocates have also locked horns over net metering, a billing mechanism that allows solar users to collect credits for energy they generate but do not use. Currently, net metering is legal in the Sunshine State. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from waging disinformation campaigns that overstate the costs associated with solar. “Utilities are also actively working to spread disinformation about the benefits of solar, imposing outrageous interconnection fees, misrepresenting community solar, imposing unfair minimum-monthly bills on solar customers, and blocking policies that keep solar affordable and accessible,” Veazey explained.

Part of the problem with holding utility companies accountable, Schafer said, is that they’re playing the long game. Thus connecting something like FPL’s stance on net metering to their alleged support of ghost candidates involves untangling convoluted political projects spanning years.

“The process of putting [the] pieces together and understanding this web of dark money non-profits and entities shuffling money back and forth – that is very challenging to keep track of,” Schafer said. “A lot of people say, ‘I don’t get that stuff, that’s why I don’t like politics.’ But that sentiment right there is one of the things utilities companies are counting on. They know that it’s confusing. They know that it’s overwhelming. Most people just want to switch the light switch and have their lights on.”

Jan. 6 committee releases new subpoena targets — including Trump-endorsed congressional candidate

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot released a new round of subpoenas Friday, seeking documents and testimony from former aides to President Donald Trump — including a current congressional candidate.

“The Select Committee is seeking information from individuals who were involved in or witnesses to the coordination and planning of the events leading up to the violent attack on our democracy on January 6th,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.

“Some of the witnesses we subpoenaed today apparently worked to stage the rallies on January 5th and 6th, and some appeared to have had direct communication with the former President regarding the rally at the Ellipse directly preceding the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Select Committee expects these witnesses to join the hundreds of individuals who have already cooperated with our investigation as we work to provide the American people with answers about what happened on January 6th and ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”

The new round of subpoenas hit Trumpworld figures like former White House director of political affairs and current Kevin McCarthy aide Brian Jack, as well as Trump-endorsed Ohio Congressional candidate Max Miller, who filled a number of roles within the former president’s Administration.

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Miller was also accused of abusing his then-girlfriend, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, and has had several other run-ins with the law over the years, as outlined in a 2018 Washington Post piece.

In response to the news that he had ben subpoenaed, Miller promised to disband the committee if elected.

“Upon taking office, I will make sure one of my first votes is to disband this partisan committee that has weaponized its powers against innocent Americans,” he wrote on Twitter. “Ohioans are tired of watching D.C.’s witch hunts and political theater while the country burns.”

Sadly, it’s the only card the Democrats can play, because their policies are destroying our nation. I will accept service of this subpoena, but I will defend my rights just as I will defend the rights of my constituents when elected.
2/2

— Max Miller (@MaxMillerOH) December 9, 2021

The other subpoena targets include “Stop the Steal” organizers Bryan Lewis and Ed Martin, as well as “Moms for Trump” head Kimberly Fletcher and Trump aide Robert “Bobby” Peede, Jr., who Thompson says met with both Trump and Miller in the White House on Jan. 4 to talk about the Jan. 6 rally that ultimately preceded the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol building.

More on the Republican Party’s post-Capitol riot fallout:

Kanye West publicist attempted to pry bogus fraud confession out of Georgia election worker: report

Ruby Freeman, a Georgia election worker who became the target of an apparent right-wing disinformation campaign in the weeks following the 2020 election, had her life upended when several conservative media outlets claimed baselessly that she and her daughter, Shayne Moss, used their positions to manipulate ballots in favor of President Joe Biden.

The conspiracies quickly spread after then President Donald Trump himself called them out by name last December — mentioning Freeman at least 18 times during his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The harassment that followed was swift and unrelenting, and the pair even abandoned their home for two months on the advice of FBI agents after receiving dozens of credible death threats from hardcore supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to a lawsuit they filed recently against far-right site The Gateway Pundit.

The campaign against Freeman even veered into the bizarre: According to a new report from Reuters, she was visited at one point by a Chicago-based publicist for Kanye West, who offered to help handle her media presence and pressed her to confess to the bogus accusations.

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The woman, Trevian Kutti, apparently showed up at Freeman’s door on Jan. 4, 2021, but never disclosed her association with the Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer. Instead, she said she had been sent by an unnamed “high-profile individual,” Reuters reported. Freeman, by then wary of strangers due to the volume of threats she’d received, called 911 and later agreed to meet with Kutti at a nearby police station.

The pair’s conversation was caught on video thanks to a police bodycam, which was later shared with Reuters.

Kutti’s message was simple: Cop to the charges, or “unknown subjects” would show up at her door within “48 hours.”

“I cannot say what specifically will take place,” Kutti tells Freeman, according to the recording. “I just know that it will disrupt your freedom,” she said, “and the freedom of one or more of your family members.”

“You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” Kutti added.

Later in the conversation, Kutti even attempted to call someone named Harrison Ford — not the actor with the same name — claiming this person had “authoritative powers to get [Freeman] protection.”

It was around then that Freeman ended the conversation, saying, “The devil is a liar,” before leaving the station. At home, she researched Kutti’s background and discovered her background as a high-profile Trump supporter.

At least one of Kutti’s predictions did end up coming true: a group of Trump supporters did gather outside Freeman’s house two days later on Jan. 6, just as a larger group stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to stop the 2020 election certification process, according to the lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit.

Police told Reuters that they did not investigate Kutti’s involvement any further. It’s unclear whether she was acting on behalf of West, who changed his name in October to “Ye,” or anyone else — both refused requests for comment.

On its final run, “The Expanse” serves a last supper for we who continue fighting for our humanity

In the opening seasons of “The Expanse,” Earth and Mars are at war with each other, placing Earthers James Holden (Steven Strait) and Amos Burton (Wes Chatham) and the asteroid belt-born Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) in opposition to Martians like Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams). Clarissa Mao (Nadine Nicole), the daughter of one of the solar system’s wealthiest families, held more power than any of them and swore to kill Holden.

Years later, a moving scene depicts them sitting down together for dinner.

This is not some stately feast served at a negotiating table. It’s a humble meal prepared by Clarissa, whom Burton has nicknamed Peaches, and it’s a remarkably convivial and calm pause before the crew heads into what could be a suicide mission.

Last suppers are a common before expansive battles with enormous stakes. Still, this one impresses upon the audience its hard-earned significance. These people met as enemies, but they’re ending this story as a family, the crew of a neutral vessel called the Rocinante.

Past seasons of “The Expanse” emphasize the political machinations contributing to tensions between Mars and a United Nations-governed Earth led by an increasingly powerless Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Now, as the story makes its last stand, showrunner Naren Shankar steers us back to the basic plea for all of us recognize our shared humanity.

The interpretation of family in James S.A. Corey novels is key to that, since the term has specific and legally binding meanings. Blood relations are a main definition, of course. There are also a marriage co-ops, blended units of choice made up of people who form a unit to gain financial security for themselves.

Pirate fleet commander Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) assumes the lead of a polyamorous family that crews her ship, the Dewalt, lending an extra weight of faith and trust to everyone’s duties.

Conversely Naomi’s regrettable bond to the solar system’s greatest threat, the Belter terror Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) is genetic. Their son Filip (Jasai Chase-Owens) allies himself with his father, who shows off his heir while treating him as a hostage when it suits the situation.

Finding parallels between Inaros, Filip and corrupt families grasping for power in our own reality isn’t difficult. Indeed, the sixth season amplifies Inaros’ despotic, abusive nature and the way he twists his son’s psyche.The same dynamics play into the relationship between the 45th president and his inept, dull-witted children.

But Shankar is drawing from a fictional history established before that leader took office, following the playbook of any number of charismatic dictators along with storylines drawn from Corey’s 2016 novel “Babylon’s Ashes.” At the same time, the season examines the puzzle of trying to do the right thing in the face of raging evil.

“Was I trying too hard to be good when I should have been ruthless?” Avasarala wonders. Surely viewers will have their own opinions about that. We’re not in the room with her – Bobbie is. “I still think we’re the good guys,” Bobbie bellows, “and I’d rather do a little less soul-searching and lot more fighting back!”

Thoughtful, gorgeously rendered sagas like this don’t come along often in the realm of science fiction TV, not when streamers are trying to replicate the success of speculative works like “Squid Game” or land the next “Game of Thrones.”

The irony is that the TV adaptations of Corey’s novels were supposed to achieve that for Syfy, which launched the show as its attempt to recapture the magic lost by the departure of “Battlestar Galactica” before it moved to Prime Video. That show has Cylons; this one has a protomolecule that transforms space travel and leads to a mad rush for control of resources and police the network of gates to other parts of the universe opened by its discovery.

Each is plain machinery. Mars and Earth wage war, then find a common cause in defeating the extremist threat posed by Inaros and his Free Navy. Inaros’ faction weaponizes asteroids, firing them at Earth, Mars and the Belter colonies under those planets’ control, murdering millions.

Avasarala watches her grand plans to feed the Earth’s population crumble as the same defenses preventing asteroids from hitting Earth contaminate the air with toxic debris, degrading the environment. Inaros writes off anyone who isn’t with him as enemies loyal to the “Inners,” and in the way of all autocratic goons he abandons sworn allies when it is convenient.

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This returns “The Expanse” to its core vision as a parable about humanity’s resilience and the insurmountable flaws in our coding, something Marvel Cinematic Universe tales swipe at broadly but rarely manage to tap with such concision.

Inaros brings out the worst in those he claims to be avenging and encourages his followers to view his opponents as less than human. Aghdashloo’s regal world leader knows she has blood on her hands too, but can’t entirely subscribe to the wisdom of remaining on the high road.

One exhausted civilian points out that the battle isn’t between the Inners and the Belt. “It’s the who want more hate and the ones who just want to live,” he says. “I’m so tired of the hate. Just tired. I can’t even wash my hands. There’s no water.”

“The Expanse” maintains the poetry in its scripts and plotting even as the last episodes wrap up too neatly, climaxing by solving of an impossible conundrum with a strategy that strains credibility. Shankar also makes the odd choice to splice in a subplot that adapts the novella “Strange Dogs” which never logically integrates with the main plot. Perhaps its an attempted backdoor pilot for a sequel, or a bit of fan service, but it plays out as the narrative equivalent of a vestigial limb.

Happily even this is unnecessary detour is a treat for the eyes and doesn’t take anything away from the main action on the Rocinante, or Drummer’s ferocious rebellion, or Avasarala’s chastening.

Politics will always be what they are, but the final lesson of “The Expanse” is an old one. Salvation doesn’t come from governments or industry, but from individuals standing together against the darkness, for a simple chance to sit together at a table and share a portion of peace.

The sixth season of “The Expanse” premieres Dec. 10 on Prime Video, with new episodes debuting on Fridays until Jan. 14.

Watch a recap of seasons 1-5 on YouTube:

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Despite a steely performance, Sandra Bullock’s dreary film of life after prison is “Unforgivable”

“The Unforgivable” is Netflix’s dreadful and dreary melodrama about Ruth Slater (Sandra Bullock), a convicted cop killer, who is released from prison after serving 20 years. Ruth is as gray as the jacket she wears, and her hard expression belies her relentless mission — she only wants to find the younger sister she left behind when she was incarcerated.

The film, a remake of Sally Wainwright’s 2009 British miniseries, “Unforgiven,” is certainly of interest for addressing issues of trauma, loss, and redemption, but director Nora Fingscheidt sabotages the performances and waters down the impact of the story by overly complicating the multiple narrative strands.

The direction is clumsy from the opening moments as Ruth is seen reentering society. The film intercuts flashbacks while also showing Ruth’s (now adult) sister, Katherine (Aisling Franciosi) getting into a car accident. It is so poorly edited that one could think Ruth hit and killed Katherine, which is why she went to jail. But that is not the case. Moreover, given that Katherine is said to have been five when Ruth was incarcerated for 20 years, she should be at least 25 now, but Katherine appears to still be a teenager living with her overprotective adoptive parents, Michael (Richard Thomas) and Rachel (Linda Emond). This is the least of the film’s many problems.

Ruth is dropped off at a halfway house in the Chinatown section of Seattle by her kindly parole officer, Vince (Rob Morgan) and tries to get a job in carpentry. (Cue “rebuilding” metaphor!) She ends up working at a fish factory where she meets Blake (Jon Bernthal) who takes an interest in her. She also visits the house where the murder she was convicted for occurred. It is now owned by John (Vincent D’Onofrio), who, conveniently, is a lawyer, and his wife, Liz (Viola Davis). Ruth hopes John can help her navigate the system to reconnect with Katherine. Meanwhile, Steve (Will Pullen) and Keith (Tom Guiry), the two sons of the cop Ruth killed, plan to exact revenge on Ruth when they learn she has been released for good behavior.

These interconnecting storylines rise and converge, but they generate more unintentional laughs than suspense or emotion. There are scenes that border on the ridiculous such as an outburst Ruth has when she meets Katherine’s adoptive parents in John’s office. One over-the-top scene has a frustrated Ruth wrecking the workspace where she found a part-time carpentry job. Moreover, there are coincidences galore, and a silly, unnecessary romantic triangle involving Steve, Keith, and Keith’s wife, Hannah (Jessica McLeod).

Fingscheidt simply cannot find the right tone for the film. A scene where Blake surprises Ruth at her carpentry job uses dramatic music to build suspense as Ruth carries a large weapon to confront the mystery intruder. This red herring is as hollow as another sequence involving a coworker at the fishery who beats Ruth up and threatens her when she finds out about the ex-con’s crime. Even an exchange Ruth has with Keith, who worms his way into Ruth’s workspace to fish for information, should crackle with tension, but it feels slack.

Ruth’s efforts to be treated with compassion having served her time is one of the more interesting aspects of “The Unforgivable,” but this idea gets raised and largely ignored. Another sticky question the film raises involves whether Katherine should know the truth about her sister. Katherine tells Emily (Emma Nelson) — Michael and Rachel’s biological teenage daughter — that she does not want to know about her past, despite her persistent nightmares and lack of knowledge about “what happened.” (Katherine is also not taking her meds.) Katherine’s choice not to confront her trauma prompts the plucky Emily to investigate. She learns about Ruth’s interest in contacting Katherine and reads all the letters Ruth sent (without being discovered, of course). When Emily secretly reaches out to Ruth and arranges to meet with her, it leads to an over-the-top climax that involves Keith targeting Emily — whom he thinks is Katherine — to get back at Ruth. It also leads to a “surprise” revelation that plays into Ruth’s bid for redemption. Alas, all this feels far more contrived than satisfying.

The deglamorized Bullock is all steeliness in what is, arguably, an Oscar-baiting performance. One of her best moments has her admitting her criminal past to Blake over breakfast. Bullock confesses in a thin voice and, stunned by Blake’s reaction, leaves the restaurant. However, Fingscheidt includes clunky flashbacks that trigger Ruth’s emotions — e.g., pancakes being served to young Katherine — that are meant to create depth and add meaning that is revealed later, but such tactics backfire. They destroy a potent moment that uses silence to convey Ruth’s despair.

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The supporting cast is not given much to do, but that may be because their characters are so thinly drawn. Vincent D’Onofrio and Viola Davis are wasted in their weak roles. John and Liz each mistrust Ruth only to turn on a dime and help Ruth after some simple pleading. Richard Thomas and Linda Emond play concerned parents well, but they are merely puppets in the narrative. Will Pullen and Tom Guiry portray Steve and Keith as idiots, rather than menacing young men out for retribution, which is a drawback. Emma Nelson only registers because Emily figures into the plot more than Katherine does. Aisling Franciosi plays the piano more than she does a character. At least Jon Bernthal and Rob Morgan provide some flintiness during their all-to-brief screentime.

Despite Bullock’s noble efforts to play against type, “The Unforgivable” is largely forgettable.

“The Unforgivable” is now available to stream on Netflix. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories to read:

Kyle Rittenhouse claims he’s going to Arizona State — but the university says he hasn’t applied

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old who was found not guilty recently for the fatal shooting of two Black Lives Matter protesters during the summer of 2020, says he’ll attend Arizona State University in-person this spring as a pre-law undergraduate student.

The only problem? ASU says he hasn’t even applied.

The Illinois native said on the stand during his trial last month that he was enrolled in several online courses offered by the University as a non-degree seeking student, and added later in an interview with NewsNation that he was on “compassionate leave” during his trial.

But in a statement to Forbes Friday, ASU spokesperson Jay Thorne said: “Mr. Rittenhouse withdrew from the two online courses for which he had signed up; he is welcome to apply for admissions and will be treated as any other applicant would be if and when he does.”

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After news of his ties to the university were made public during the proceedings, students at ASU flew into an uproar, staging protests and chanting things like “Killer Kyle off our campus.” Rittenhouse supporters also flocked to campus in an attempt to defend the teenager, according to the Associated Press.

Rittenhouse contested the school’s statement Wednesday during an appearance on far-right political commentator Steven Crowder’s podcast “Louder with Crowder.”

“They came out with a statement saying oh, no no no no, he’s not enrolled at ASU anymore,” Rittenhouse said. “I’m like, I’m enrolled, I’m just not in any classes. I’m admitted, I have a student portfolio.”

It appears Rittenhouse is too late to submit an application for the spring 2022 semester — the admission deadline was Nov. 1, according to the university’s website. Though a spokesperson for the university said he can always apply for the fall semester — or at any time in the future.

”Any qualified individual can apply for admission,” Thorne told the Arizona Republic.

Additional Salon commentary on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict:

Celeste Headlee on “Speaking of Race”: “Don’t feel bad, just say something”

“So what do you do at a traffic light?”

When Tomi Lahren blithely informed Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” five years ago that “I don’t see color,” he retorted with a question that wasn’t just clever, it was true. We do see color. And it’s disingenuous at best to say otherwise, because if you don’t see color, how can you see racism?

Celeste Headlee wants us to see color. And she wants us to get used to talking about it. As the author of “We Need To Talk: How To Have Better Conversations” and “Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving,” she’s passionate about helping us forge clearer, deeper, more meaningful relationships with ourselves and with each other.

“I spent many years worry about whether I was allowed to call myself Black,” she writes in her newest book, adding, “I’ve been lectured about color by both Blacks and Whites.” As a self-identified “light-skinned Black Jew,” Headlee has “thought about bias and race nearly every day” of her life. Yet when she was approached about writing a book on the subject, she was initially reluctant. Fortunately, she changed her mind.

Just in time for those holiday family gatherings, “Speaking of Race: Why Everybody Needs to Talk abut Racism — And How to Do It” is a practical guide to having more honest, empathetic conversations around the table.

Salon talked to Headlee recently about awkward encounters, cognitive dissonance, and why we can’t just ignore our racist aunt at Christmas this year.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’m so glad that you wrote this. Why don’t we start by you just telling me why this book, and why now?

My editor from Harper Wave that came to me when George Floyd was murdered and said, “Hey, you’re the voice that’s missing on this.” I said, “Nope.” Not doing that. No thank you. I had absolutely no interest into entering this conversation. There’s really good research that shows every single time you write about race, especially as a journalist, all the hate that gets directed back at you. There’s also a danger that once you begin to write about race, you will not be asked to write or speak about anything else.

It was also just so traumatic. It has been for everybody, but journalists, when you’re constantly having to watch those videos and have been since Michael Brown, you just get to the point of saturation. As the months went on and I saw how badly the conversations were going, I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw Black people who had reached the point of just throwing up their hands, you know? I saw white people who in the recent years have finally opened their eyes and come to realize the reality of racial discrimination in this country and sincerely want to do something but kept mucking it up, kept saying the wrong thing, kept reaching out in the wrong way. I said, “This actually is something I can help with. This part, I know how to fix.”

I wrote back to my editor and I was like, “It would be cowardly of me after the whole history of my ancestors fighting for these issues to sit back and be like, ‘Nah, I have this opportunity from a major publisher to write something on this issue but no thanks.'”

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One of the things that makes you so compelling as a writer is that you have been able to move pretty fluidly in a lot of different worlds. You have this identity, this history, this family upbringing, where you don’t just tick off one box. What does that change about the conversations I imagine you have gotten to hear because you’re not the darkest person in the room?

I have had to hear a lot of things that are upsetting and I take very, very personally. I mean, you’re talking about my family and people that I love. Then it makes it one step even worse because when I say, “I’m Black”, people either rush to say, “Oh no, I’m not racist” and then try to prove how not racist they are, or they get mad at me, as though I’ve tricked them into saying something racist by pretending I was white or something.

That’s upsetting. At some point, you have to either just constantly get upset by it or you have to figure out a way to make your way through it, because, for me, with as light-skinned as I am, I’m not going to get around it. This issue is going to come up all the time.

In terms of making my way through the world and finding a racial identity . . . I would watch people like Colin Powell, who was about the same skin tone as I am, but everyone calls him Black. In our hyper-racialized world, it’s not considered acceptable to acknowledge his non-Black ancestry, and I always wondered to myself if that’s what he wanted. It’s perfectly okay if that’s how he wanted to be identified. But I remember working at radio networks, as soon as leaders and managers found out that I was Black, the only show I hosted on NPR, for example, any more was “Tell Me More.” I became the Black host.

I don’t think it’s intentional. I think that as soon as there’s a question in people’s mind, this urgency they feel is to categorize me first. That’s where that question, “What are you?” comes from. As soon as I say I’m Black, I could say the rest of it going forever and ever and ever, I could give my entire background, but the only thing they will remember is Black. In their minds, that’s the category where I belong now.

Very early on in the book, you use this quote: “Racism is real, race is not.” That is hard for people to think about on many levels. It’s hard to say, “That’s my culture, these are my ancestors, these are my people, this is my identity — which is different from my race.” Tell me what that means.

I’ll give you an example. The difference between a Black American growing up in rural Mississippi, whose family ancestry is all centered around farmland perhaps, what cultural ties do they have with the kid who grows up in Oakland? We’re talking about a super different cultural experience. Possibly very, very different traditions.

What ties them together is that they both have the experience of being Black in America, and being subject to that kind of racism and the white gaze in the United States and the danger of being a Black American just living your life. That creates a cultural touchstone for them.

In terms of their race itself, you can’t investigate their DNA and say, “This person is a Black person from the United States and this is a Black person from Africa.” It’s not possible. Believe me, scientists tried. They tried really, really hard to find a scientific justification for racism. Racism had been invented to justify slavery. “Now we just need to find the science to back it up, to justify our cruelty.” Yeah. It’s been tried. It’s just not there.

I absolutely honor our traditions. Nothing is going to remove the history that those two people share regardless of how different their cultures are, their upbringing, their experience, their traditions. They both have this shared history of being descended from slaves in the United States or from experiencing the racism and hardship of racism in this country. That bonds them together, even though their cultures might be very, very different, even though, they may eat different things over the holidays.

Culture is real. Communities are real. Traditions are real. But race doesn’t exist. History is real. We’re never going to be able to erase the history of racism. That’s part of what ties together a Chinese American with another Chinese American. The race itself? It’s a figment of our imagination.

You write about the problem of white liberals and the unique pitfalls and minefields of white liberalism. I think a lot of that has to do with the, frankly, self-centeredness of some white liberalism and the, “I need to prove that I am a good person” of it. But I want to ask you what white liberals get wrong, and what can be done to fix that.

I can’t speak for white liberals, having never been one. But what I sense is an honest sincere desire to do the right thing. I think that’s what makes the fear of being called racist or making a mistake so intense.

We have to think of this in terms of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is extremely uncomfortable for the human brain. We really hate it and we will immediately and very forcefully work to resolve cognitive dissonance when it occurs. Here you have this white liberal who thinks of themselves as being fair-minded and inclusive and anti-racist, sincerely, and then they say something that a person of color goes, “Wow. That was pretty racist.” There’s cognitive dissonance. This thing that they said and the reaction to it does not match the image they have of themselves, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable.

They can do one of two things. They can say, “Obviously, there’s unconscious biases leaking out. I’m so sorry. I’m going to totally work on that.” They can do that. That’s rarely the response that people have. The other thing they can do is say, “No, no, no. That’s not how I meant it. I was just joking. I’m not racist. You’re being over-sensitive.” That allows them to resolve the cognitive dissonance. They’re not racist, they didn’t do this racist thing, because it wasn’t racist. Ha ha, I’m still a great person.

Sadly, that second reaction doesn’t help. It helps you in that moment but it means you’re never going to address the unconscious biases that live inside your subconscious, that are there right now, and will leak out.

For the chapter on making mistakes, the first sentence is that there are two types of people in the world, those who have said the wrong thing about race and those who will. I think that especially for white liberals, you have to accept that you will say the wrong thing, you will do the wrong thing, you will make a bone-headed mistake like putting up a black square [on social media] and have Black people react and go, “How does this help us? Thank you for the effort, but how is this helpful?” That makes you feel bad and it makes you feel like, “Oh, I’m not the anti-racist I thought I was.” At that moment I want you to take door number one and say, “I need to rethink how I’m going about being an anti-racist person. What are the choices that I make? Are there things that I could do every single day to move the needle even a tiny fraction of a distance toward progress?” The answer is, yes, you can but you have to open yourself up. You have to make yourself vulnerable to your own mistakes.

And then I don’t get that rush of dopamine that comes from “I did a virtuous thing.” It’s, “I have to sit with my own discomfort.” That is such a huge part of why there is this intense, emotional, visceral response to critical race theory. It’s, “You’re going to make my children feel bad about themselves” — which is not what it is at all. But the fear that you might make your child uncomfortable is so powerful. What do we do about that? It’s really hard to sell discomfort, Celeste.

Except that if you look throughout all of nature, discomfort is what reaps rewards. I don’t want to diminish it down to the oyster and the pearl, but that’s what childbirth is, that’s what all kinds of the most productive and fertile forces of nature are. They’re a result of discomfort and, in some cases, pain. The pain and the effort is what makes it valuable.

Comfort is not an exciting state. Comfort is the enemy of innovation and growth. If what you’re looking for is comfort, that’s a pretty awful, namby-pamby life. The discomfort, which is going to be temporary, is worth it because of what you get at the end.

This whole thing of striding towards comfort, I get it. I too after a long day want to put on my sweats, put my feet up, and watch Netflix. But that’s what we’ve been doing for generations. We need to be honest with ourselves and say all of these things we’ve been trying for generations are clearly not working, and it’s not just in race. The World Economic Forum says that if we continue at our current rate of progress, we will not reach gender equity for almost one hundred years. I won’t see it, you won’t see it, our children won’t see it. Are we comfortable with that?

What is it you’ve made yourself comfortable with? Are you sure you want your self and your children to be comfortable with what’s actually happening in the world right now? Do you have no optimism that it can’t get better? Don’t you have hope that you can make this better?

This hope and optimism is why we want to have these conversations around tables or even via Zoom, not just this holiday season but going forward. But it feels so hard, people think, “I don’t even know how to start.”

I keep getting this question as we head into the holiday seasons of, “I’m sorry, I get what you’re saying but I have this racist aunt and I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I don’t even want to let her speak. It’s not okay. On principle, it’s not okay to even let her say those things.”

I’m like, “Except she is saying those things. Maybe not in your presence but when she leaves that holiday dinner, she’s going out into the world and inflicting those views and that hatred onto the people of color all in the world.” That’s number one. You are not preventing her from causing harm to others.

The other thing is, if all you have is five minutes, five minutes on Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate, if that’s all the tolerance you have, then put in the five minutes. Change doesn’t happen immediately. It happens over time, five minutes each time you see this racist aunt, five minutes up until you say, “You know what? I’m starting to get worked up. Let’s change the subject.” Eventually, if there’s any hope of her changing, it will be because of that constant drip of water, which will eventually erode the stone. Isn’t it worth it to put in that five or then minutes every now and again if there’s a chance that you might make a difference? That that’s the one data point.

It’s like when you talk about white guilt, I don’t see it as white guilt at all. I see it as this incredible opportunity for white people, because statistics show that you’re the most convincing on these issues. If people of color could fix racism, it would be fixed at this point. We can’t. But the people who can fix it are white people, especially white men. Studies going back decades show that the most persuasive, the most perceived as credible on these issues, are white people and white men especially. That means you have power, maybe more power than you realize to really make a difference.

I was in the park a couple of months ago, with some of my friends and neighbors. I don’t remember how it came up but one of the women there said, “I don’t even see color.” I waited a moment and I looked around, and nobody said anything.

Later on one of my friends says, “I felt so bad. I should have been the one speaking up.” Next time, don’t feel bad. Just say something, because you I have more leverage than I do. You’re more believable than I am. I need you to be the one that says something instead of always me, instead of always your friend who is a person of color. Don’t let the silence ring and then look at the one Black person in the room. Reach out towards the person of color and say, “If you don’t mind, let me say something” and then say, “Hey, that may sound like an anti-racist thing to say. I even used to believe that was a good thing to say but here’s what I found out, that’s actually super wrong,” or however you’re going to phrase that.

White people, I really, really hope that we can disrupt this idea that conversations about race are designed to make whites feel bad. They should make you feel great because you have the power to change it.

If there’s one phrase I hope people take from, this book, it’s, “Don’t rush.” I love that you say that. Don’t rush. We didn’t get in this pickle overnight.

It’s literally been centuries. This is one thing I want people to think about. I want people to ask themselves when was the last time I had a disagreement with someone and at some point in that conversation, the other person said, “I’m completely wrong. You’ve absolutely convinced me. I am wrong. You are right. Thank you.” This never happens. Yet we keep going into conversations expecting that to happen. We enter these conversations expecting that. That’s our goal, and yet it’s never happened.

In the history of conversation.

Think about this for a second. Why do we keep approaching these conversations as though that’s possible? Maybe we should try something else instead.

You talk in the book about patience. It feels so much right now like you are supposed to have a reaction and you have to have it right away. But being reactive is not productive. You talk about approaching people with an assumption of good, an assumption of respect.

The first thing is, don’t have these conversations at all on social media. Period. This is one of the reasons I spend a good amount of time in the first portion of the book putting people through some mental exercises to acknowledge mistakes they’ve made, and to acknowledge the discomfort they feel when they’re surrounded by people of a different race.

If you’re going to study woodworking, the best person to take those classes from is someone who has been woodworking for a really long time, because they have made every mistake possible and they’re going to be more patient with your own. They’ll most likely be like, “Yeah. I used to do that too. Here’s how I fixed it for myself.”

This is why I want us all to get in this mindset of, “Yes, I’ve been there,” and honest rather than defensive thinking that racism is some kind of inoculation you can take against and then I’m done.

We can approach this from a sense of, “Let me help you. This is hard. It’s not a catastrophe. I want to help,” instead of, “You’re wrong and I’m going to prove how great I am by showing just how wrong you are in comparison,” which never works, by the way. That’s not always going to be the case. Sometimes you’re dealing with a bad actor, but that’s really rare. That’s much more rare than people think.

We think that’s common because we’re on social media all the time and when we’re on social media, we’re basically central casting of the woke liberal and the racist conservative. We just slip right into those personas. Don’t have the conversation on social media. Be a human being, and have the conversation offline.

More stories on how to have better conversations on tough topics:

Jussie Smollett, former “Empire” star, found guilty of lying to police about hate crime

Jussie Smollett, former “Empire” cast member, has been found guilty on five of the six charges against him stemming from his claims of being the victim of a hate crime, reports Variety.

In 2019, Smollett shocked the country by coming forward with details of a homophobic, racist attack that left him bloodied and with a noose around his neck in Chicago. He claimed that the men that attacked him yelled “This is MAGA country” as they beat him. After a lengthy investigation, during which Smollett was interviewed on “Good Morning America” about the attack, the Chicago Police Department announced that they had found the people who committed the attack, and that they had been paid off by Smollett to do it.

The two men, brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, said that Smollett had given them $3,500 to attack him on the night of January 29, 2019, and said that he had given them money for the supplies, and told them not to hit him “too hard.”

Smollett faced six counts of “disorderly conduct,” for lying about the attack to the police. The charges come with a potential for a maximum of three years in prison, but will most likely result in probation. No date has been set for sentencing at this time.

Special prosecutor Dan Web said that the case was “complete vindication” for the Chicago PD, which he claimed was damaged by the false report. He said that Smollett continued to lie on the witness stand, and that that will be brought up at his sentencing.

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Throughout the trial, Smollett has maintained his innocence and insisted that there was no hoax. He added that his professional reputation was ruined by the attack, with his character being written off of “Empire,” FOX’s hit musical series co-created by Lee Daniels. Smollett’s lawyer said that the actor is focused on clearing his name, and that, “Unfortunately we were facing an uphill battle where Jussie was already tried and convicted in the media and then we had to somehow get the jury to forget or unsee all the news stories that they had been hearing that were negative for the last three years.”

More stories to read:

Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” mocks Fox News’ over-the-top reactions to Christmas tree fire

After a Christmas tree was set ablaze outside Fox News’ New York City headquarters, network hosts were quick to blame the culture war for inciting the incident — labeling it as part of a much larger war on Christmas – and on Fox News specifically.

The juxtaposition of the over-the-top coverage with Fox hosts’ dismissal of other dangerous situations, including the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, was not lost on “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, who took aim at the network in a satirical video posted to Twitter.

“Remembering Pine-Eleven: The Attack on the Fox News Christmas Tree,” he wrote.

In the clip, dramatic instrumentals play behind clips of Fox hosts and commentators lamenting the loss of “America’s tree” – the 50-foot-tall artificial tree that sits just outside of the NewsCorp. building in Manhattan. The network has only been putting up the tree since 2019.

“It’s about evil!” proclaims conservative host Jeanine Pirro in one of the clips, referring to the burning of the tree. “It’s about good versus evil! Period.”

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The video then takes a hopeful turn, as hosts and guests announce that the network will rebuild the tree. Ainsley Earhardt, co-host of Fox & Friends consoled viewers, promising that the network would “build it back better,” borrowing the phrase from the Democrat-led economic recovery bill that Republicans have been trying to kill for months.

The video closes with a black and white shot of the tree, ablaze, with “Pine-Eleven, Never Fir-get,” written over it.

Watch the full video:

Remembering Pine-Eleven: The Attack on the Fox News Christmas Tree pic.twitter.com/0ENN2ljlqs

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 9, 2021

The suspect behind the fire, 49-year-old Craig Tamahana, was arrested at the scene. He was later charged with arson, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and trespassing, among other charges, and placed on supervised release, according to the New York Police Department.

Notably, the NYPD has said it found no indication that the arson was politically motivated — but that hasn’t stopped Fox News from reporting it as such.

“Apparently lighting a Christmas tree on fire is not a hate crime,” said Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy to his co-host Brian Kilmeade.

“But it is!” Kilmeade replied. “Who says it’s not a hate crime against us – against Fox News?”

Kilmeade also tried to link the incident to Democratic policies – in particular to the idea that the country is facing a nationwide crime surge in which “no person is safe” and “no city is safe.”

“There is so much crime in places that were always safe, including 48th and Sixth here,” he said. “This is emblematic of these cities out of control, defame and defund the police, and this bail reform that has these men and women, these assailants, these suspects out before they can even finish the paperwork.”

“This is what you get when you have these left-wing D.A.s…running these cities,” he added. “You get chaos.”

On Fox Business, Stuart Varney echoed the sentiment, saying that the fire is “just another example of [Democrat-run] big cities” being “out of control.”

Tucker Carlson took the symbolic meaning of the tree burning even further, labelling it as “an attack on Christianity” and an “assault on religious observance.”

“This isn’t just a matter of people setting fire to balsam firs,” said Tucker Carlson on the night following the fire. “A Christmas tree is a symbol.”

In a company-wide memo, Fox News Media CEO, Suzanna Scott, condemned the arson and announced the tree’s replacement.

“We will not let this deliberate and brazen act of cowardice deter us,” she said. “We are in the process of rebuilding and installing a new tree as a message that there can be peace, light and joy even during a dark moment like this.”

The new tree was put up on Thursday, less than 48 hours after the original tree was torched.

The problem isn’t Democrats losing white voters — it’s Republicans winning them over with lies

Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn’t already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross “woke wars” going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren’t focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don’t like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like “Latinx” and “pregnant people.”

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that “Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals.” (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that “working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics,” and that many political strategists believe “Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues.”

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani’s newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. “Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions,” he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

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None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over “wokeness.” I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they’re mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn’t need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn’t skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollett guilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO’s opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of “gotcha” attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. The bad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett’s victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn’t matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man’s bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn’t real, and that it’s just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett’s fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a “hate crime,” as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn’t comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as one Fox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on “mothers who rape their daughters.” But that didn’t slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

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No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it’s naive to think that it’s really due to anything either of those women say or do. It’s because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let’s face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.

Which isn’t to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There’s nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won’t work. It won’t stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won’t stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people’s worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about “critical race theory” took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. “Critical race theory,” at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe’s campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about “threats to traditional marriage” for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It’s certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it’s a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

“F**k him”: Trump not speaking to former ally Bibi Netanyahu — because he congratulated Biden

Former President Donald Trump said he has cut ties with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because the Israeli leader congratulated President Biden after his election victory.

Trump has accused his former close ally of disloyalty after Netanyahu called to congratulate Biden earlier than other Trump allies like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

“He was very early — like, earlier than most,” Trump told Israeli journalist Barak Ravid in an interview published Friday by Axios. “I haven’t spoken to him since. Fuck him.”

Ravid, who interviewed Trump twice for his upcoming book, wrote that Trump “repeatedly criticized” Netanyahu, who was notably close to the twice-impeached former president and even closer with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a longtime Netanyahu family friend. The only real point of disagreement between the two deposed leaders appears to be that Netanyahu accepted the results of the election while Trump continues to push false claims of fraud 13 months later and has begun laying the groundwork to potentially overturn future elections.

“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump claimed. In fact, Netanyahu was not the first leader to call Biden and did not congratulate him for more than 12 hours after the election was called. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid criticized Netanyahu for the delay at the time, calling it “cowardly and shameful.”

Trump argued that he had helped Netanyahu survive politically amid corruption charges but is now angry that Netanyahu did not reciprocate in kind. He was particularly incensed about a video Netanyahu released congratulating Biden as president-elect.

“I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty. The first person to congratulate Biden was Bibi. And not only did he congratulate him, he did it on tape,” Trump said, adding that Putin and Bolsonaro held off because “they felt the election was rigged.”

Trump also said he had begun to sour on Netanyahu before the election, concluding that “Netanyahu didn’t really want peace with the Palestinians and was using [Trump] on Iran,” according to Ravid. But after that detour, Trump launched into another rant about Netanyahu congratulating Biden.

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“For Bibi Netanyahu, before the ink was even dry, to do a message, and not only a message, to do a tape to Joe Biden talking about their great, great friendship — they didn’t have a friendship, because if they did, [the Obama administration] wouldn’t have done the Iran deal,” Trump continued. “And guess what, now they’re going to do it again.”

Trump took credit for helping Netanyahu survive politically, citing his decisions to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and recognize the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel.

The Golan Heights decision came “right before the [Israeli] election” in 2019, when Netanyahu was trailing in the polls, Trump said. “He would have lost the election if it wasn’t for me.”

Although Netanyahu survived that election, it produced no clear winner and a new government coalition under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett finally ousted him after another election earlier this year. He still faces criminal charges of corruption, bribery and fraud.

Trump blamed Netanyahu’s defeat, somewhat implausibly, on his decision to congratulate Biden.

“I can tell you that people were very angry with him when he was the first one to congratulate Biden,” Trump told Ravid. “The video was almost like he’s begging for love. And I said, ‘My, my how things change.’ So, you know, I was disappointed. That hurt him badly with the people of Israel. As you know, I’m very popular in Israel. I think it hurt him very badly.”

In another excerpt published by the Israeli news outlet Ynet, Trump even took credit for the fact that Israel still exists.

“I’ll tell you what — had I not come along I think Israel was going to be destroyed. Okay. You want to know the truth? I think Israel would have been destroyed maybe by now,” Trump declared. (There is no realistic scenario under which that could have occurred.)

Journalist Michael Wolff previously reported that Netanyahu drew the brunt of Trump’s fury after his election loss. “It was startling to aides, however much they were anticipating an eruption, that Trump’s wrath fell on Bibi Netanyahu,” Wolff wrote in his book “Landslide.”

“As in all Trump reactions, a variety of grievances welled up here,” Wolff wrote. “There was his belief that he had singularly done more for Israel than any American president — and that therefore he was owed. And now sold out.”

Trump ranted to aides, Wolff added, that Netanyahu congratulating Biden was the “ultimate betrayal.”

Read more on Donald Trump’s right-wing allies around the world:

20 easy cookie recipes for simple (yet show-stopping!) bakes

Christmas time is here! Whether you’ve already finished their Christmas shopping, or you’re running around buying gift cards on Christmas Eve (no judgement here!), the one thing everyone wants to get a head start on is baking and eating cookies. Even people who deny having a sweet tooth can’t resist a slice of shortbread or an adorable gingerbread man served alongside a cup of hot cocoa. Ahead, we’re sharing 20 easy Christmas cookies that you can bake in a flash, no experience required.

1. No-Bake Chocolate Peppermint Cookies

No-bake anything is always a win in my book, especially when it comes to the holiday season. In the midst of shopping for and wrapping gifts, attending holiday parties, and navigating holiday travel, it’s always nice to have a low effort dessert to rely on. And this festive four-ingredient Christmas cookie recipe is one I’ll bookmark and come back to on December 24th.

2. Stress-Free Vegan Holiday Gingerbread Cookies

You can’t have a platter of Christmas cookies without gingerbread men. You just can’t! The beauty of this easy recipe is that you can make the dough in advance (it comes together in five minutes flat) and then a day or two later, roll it and shape it into cute gingerbread boys and girls.

3. Chewy Sugar Cookies #2

What makes these soft sugar cookies so easy is that you can make the dough and then immediately form the dough into individual balls and bake them. No need to chill for hours and hours in the fridge, and no pesky rolling or cutting either.

4. Royal Icing for Cookie Decorating

Did you think we’d forgotten about the royal icing for the aforementioned sugar cookies and gingerbread men? Royal icing sounds fussy (like Kelly, what’s wrong with just “regular people icing”?) but I promise it’s neither fussy nor expensive to make. The hardest part is securing meringue powder, which is to say not hard, so long as you live near a craft store or have access to a big box retailer.

5. Proper Shortbread

The beauty of baking shortbread during the holiday season is that it requires minimal ingredients (only three in this recipe!) and hardly any baking skills. Plus, you’ll be nibbling on a fresh slice within the hour.

6. Cream Cheese Cookies

“The cookies couldn’t be easier to make, which makes them ideal for last-minute bake sales or houseguests. The cream cheese gives the cookies a nearly unidentifiable tang that keeps you reaching for just one more,” writes Food52 co-founder Merill Stubbs.

7. Holiday Crinkle Cookies

Crinkle cookies come in many different forms and flavors during the holiday season, but you can’t go wrong with this old-school cocoa-based version.

8. Peanut Butter Peppermint Chip Cookies

Hear us out. While peanut butter and peppermint may seem like a strange combination, they’re also two essential ingredients for holiday baking, so it kind of just makes sense. You get all the festive flavors of the season rolled up (and then flattened) into one adorable cookie.

9. No-Bake Dark Chocolate Almond Butter Bon Bons

When you want to bake for the holidays on a whim, turn to this recipe, which only requires basic pantry ingredients (almond butter! Chocolate chips! Powdered sugar! Butter! Graham crackers!). Plus it’s great for anyone with minimal kitchen equipment as you can get away with making the dough entirely in the microwave.

10. Mexican Wedding Cakes II

Whether you know them as Russian Tea Cakes or Mexican Wedding Cookies, there’s no denying that nutty treats covered in powdered sugar are a staple during the holiday season.

11. Pretzel Shortbread Cookies

Give your beloved shortbread cookie a little bit of salt and crunch with Molly Yeh’s recipe, which calls for homemade pretzel flour (it’s so much easier to make than you’d think!). Drizzle each cookie with a little bit of melted chocolate, because why not?

12. Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies with Rainbow Fennel Seeds

“I love the malted nuttiness that candied fennel seeds give to cookies, not to mention their bitter aniseed flavor,” writes Eric Kim.

13. Double Chocolate Espresso Cookies

There’s nothing specifically holiday focused about these chocolate cookies, other than that they are so fudgy and so delicious. Two tablespoons of instant espresso powder brings out the intense chocolate flavor.

14. Cornmeal Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies

These are no ordinary chocolate chip cookies and that’s a good thing. “These cookies offer just enough of a riff on a classic chocolate chip cookie: cornmeal for crunch, toffee bits for flavor, and sea salt to offset the sweetness,” writes Posie (Harwood) Brian.

15. Meyer Lemon Pizzelle

Pizzelle cookies are a staple in Italian culture and their delicate texture and intricate pattern is a work of beauty. This recipe calls for the zest of aromatic Meyer lemons and pure orange extract, which brings lovely citrus flavor to every bite.

16. Pistachio Cookies (Pastine di Pistacchi)

Pistachios are far underrated when it comes to baking, but they’re really worth their while come the holidays. They have a subtle nuttiness and pale green color that nods towards the season without asserting themselves too much, like the unwanted guest who shows up unexpectedly to your house on Christmas Day.

17. Jeweled Butter Cookies

Think of this recipe as fruitcake in the form of butter cookies. But you know how no one actually likes fruitcake? Everyone will LOVE these chocolate-covered cookies.

18. Ginger Spiced Dark Molasses Sugar Cookies

These gingery, spicy, molasses cookies are the ultimate Christmas cookie because it’s a 2 for 1 deal; you get the texture and chewiness of a classic sugar cookie with the flavor of your favorite gingerbread men.

19. Chocolate Sprinkle Cookies

“This cookie dough would yield exceptional cookies on its own: fudgy and brownie-like inside but still cakey and chewy enough to qualify as a cookie. But rolling each ball of dough in sprinkles takes it over the top, in looks and texture and taste,” writes recipe developer Posie (Harwood) Brian.

20. Matcha Butter Cookies

Matcha not only gives these classic Christmas butter cookies a natural vibrant green hue, but it also adds a deep, bitter tea flavor that is a staple in many Japanese desserts.