How to store pomegranate seeds during peak season

Although winter means cold temperatures in most parts of the country, desolate green spaces, and mugs of hot chocolate and hot toddies, there is an upside: It’s pomegranate season! When you choose pomegranates in the grocery store, don’t go for the one that is an invigorating deep red hue; instead, choose pomegranates that feel heavy for their size. You’ve selected the perfect pomegranate — one that feels slightly soft to the touch and has squared-off sides, two signs that pomegranates are ripe. Now you may be wondering, how do I store and remove the seeds?

How to store pomegranate seeds

Pomegranate arils are perishable, plain and simple. These delicate, ruby red gems start to go bad as soon as you crack open a whole pomegranate and remove the seeds. “An unopened pomegranate can last up to one month at room temperature or up to two months in the refrigerator. If you don’t happen to finish all the juicy arils inside upon opening, don’t fret; the arils can be refrigerated in an airtight container for an additional week, ” said Stacey Anker, director of marketing for POM Wonderful.

If you buy packages of pomegranate arils from the grocery store, there should be a best-by date printed on the container. Reference that date to determine whether or not the arils are still good. And like all produce, the nose knows; if the arils smell sour or funky, compost or discard them. “The arils will appear mushy and turn slightly brown. You may also notice some bubbles in the juice forming at the bottom of the container, which means that the arils are starting to ferment, giving off an alcohol-like scent,” says Anker.

How to remove pomegranate seeds

According to Kathleen Bryant of University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension, the first thing to do is wear gloves and an apron. Opening pomegranates and removing the arils can be messy, as the reddish brown juice can spray . . . everywhere. Next, cut off the crown end of the pomegranate and score vertically into several segments. Place the sliced pomegranate in a bowl of water (a large measuring cup will also work) and carefully break the segments apart. The arils will sink to the bottom of the bowl while the peel floats to the top. Remove the unwanted peel from the top of the water and drain arils in a colander.

Can you freeze them?

In short, yes! If you have pomegranate seeds that are about to go bad, or you just want to extend their shelf life, you can freeze them. To do so, line a baking sheet. Spread the arils out in a single layer and freeze, then transfer them to an airtight container or freezer bag and store in the freezer for a few months. To thaw, put them in the refrigerator overnight and strain any excess juices as needed.

HBO’s Adrienne Shelly doc is a loving, wistful tribute to the filmmaker whose life was cut short

The tragic 2006 murder of Adrienne Shelly cut short the promising career of a talented actress, writer and director. She had just completed directing “Waitress,” a film she wrote and costarred in when she was slain; a few months later, it would premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It would later become a hit Broadway musical.

“Adrienne” is Andy Ostroy’s bittersweet, admiring documentary about his late wife, who was the mother of their daughter, Sophie, who was age 2 when Shelly was killed. Ostroy uses interviews, film clips, archival footage, diary entries, and more to trace the all-too-brief life and career of Shelly.

His highly personal approach may appear to be self-indulgent — and at times it is — but it is more of a benefit than a drawback. Ostroy recounts the horror of discovering his wife’s body, hung in the shower of her Greenwich Village office. He insists that her death was not a suicide as it appeared to be, but murder. After additional investigation, the cops find the culprit, Diego Pillco, an immigrant construction worker.

One of the many subplots in “Adrienne” has Ostroy contacting Pillco in prison and asking to meet. He wants to learn the details of his wife’s murder, and to share who Shelly was with the man who killed her. This section of the film addresses issues of grief and closure, as well as touching on why Pillco committed a crime he regrets. (Pillco’s explanation provides an understanding, not an excuse for his actions, which is another tragedy). Significantly, Ostroy never forgives or absolves Pillco — and he does not need to — but given his process and coping with trauma, he is advocating for resentment’s virtue.

Most of the film’s focus is on Shelly, and her luminosity. Her career began when she quit college in her junior year to find work as an actress in New York. She succeeded admirably in her early collaborations with Hal Hartley in “The Unbelievable Truth,” and “Trust.” Eventually, Shelly made other films, including “Big Girls Don’t Cry . . . They Get Even,” and “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,” that capitalized on her quirky combination of intelligence and fragility. But as a clip from Rosanna Arquette‘s documentary, “Searching for Debra Winger” shows, Shelly bristled at her casting being determined by her ability to be “f**ckable,” and the lack of respect she and every actress endures.

“Adrienne” shows that it was her frustration with the industry that prompted Shelly to start her own theatre company to maintain control of her projects. She started writing and directing shorts and features. But a critic’s negative response to her work disheartened the filmmaker. Meanwhile, her friends and colleagues marveled at her ability to get funding for projects, suggesting in many ways, she had a charmed life, which only compounds the tragedy of her untimely death.

This is why Ostroy’s film is so poignant. There are memories of Shelly being sloppy, which are amusing, and Paul Rudd describes Shelly “ethereal.” She was treated as a doll in magazine covers when she was an up-and-coming talent. Sadly, when Ostroy interviews folks in line for the musical, “Waitress,” no one he talks to knows who Shelly was.

The documentary does provide some insight into Shelly’s life before she was famous. Ostroy interviews Shelly’s mother, and there are multiple discussions about Shelly’s father’s sudden, untimely death, from a heart attack, while the 12-year-old Shelly was at camp. (A revealing story recounts how she learned about her father’s death). Shelly cites her father as her creative influence, and “Adrienne” suggests her experience with trauma with his death at a young age was why Shelly found humor in things that were painful. A terrific clip illustrating this has her discussing the connection between her breakups and a restaurant that kept changing hands. Her cockeyed outlook on life was endearing. One of the most interesting clips in the “Adrienne” showcase the filmmaker’s project on happiness.

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

Ostroy does not go much for tear-jerking, but he does pull at the heartstrings when the film considers his daughter Sophie’s life without her mother. A series of animated segments in the film show how Ostroy explained to his young daughter that her mother was dead, and not coming back. These are sentimental episodes, but they are laudable as a teaching tool. Better are the scenes of Ostroy talking to his now 15-year-old daughter about the mother she never had. Letting his daughter read her late mother’s letters and diary entries, showing Sophie where he proposed to Shelly in Paris, and letting Sophie process her grief at missing Mother’s Days, or acknowledging the anniversary of Shelly’s death are moving episodes.

If nothing else, “Adrienne” will make viewers in general, and fans in particular, wistful that she is still not living and working. Ostroy’s film is a loving tribute to his late wife.

“Adrienne” premieres Wednesday, Dec. 1 at 8 p.m. on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories you might like:

Will Supreme Court conservatives overturn Roe? Their casual contempt for women is not a good sign

Despite all the legalese about “stare decisis” and “reliance interests,” the abortion rights hearing held at the Supreme Court Wednesday morning came down to one question: Can women’s rights simply be disappeared, with the ease of shaking an Etch-A-Sketch?

Unfortunately, 6 out of 9 members of the Court seemed to strongly believe that yes, it’s time to hit the reset button on that whole “treating women like full human beings” experiment after nearly 50 years, since Roe vs. Wade, of women having full human rights.Through the two hours of questioning in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, one word came to mind to describe the stance of the conservative judges: Contempt.

Wednesday’s oral arguments were full of contempt for women’s lives, contempt for women’s intelligence, contempt for women’s privacy and contempt for women’s very humanity. To be sure, Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer Julie Rikelman and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar repeatedly emphasized that women are complex human beings who have as much a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness as anyone. But it was like talking to a brick wall of misogyny offered by the Republican appointees on the bench. The Court now seems almost certain, as was requested by Mississippi Attorney General Scott Stewart, to overturn Roe v. Wade next year.

Perhaps the most repulsive moment of the morning came courtesy of Justice Sam Alito, who is always ready to act like the biggest mansplaining creep in the highly competitive field of GOP-appointed judges. In response to Prelogar’s argument that American women have come to rely on abortion rights, Alito sneeringly argued that the South had also come to rely on “white supremacy” after Plessy v. Ferguson, but that didn’t stop the court from overturning it in Brown v. the Board of Education. Yes, you read that correctly: Alito compared a woman’s right to control her own body to upholding Jim Crow.

And this was far from the only bad faith comparison offered by the conservative justices.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

At one point, Justice Brett Kavanaugh ran down a long list of cases he felt like overturned historical precedent, in the way he clearly would like to overturn Roe — including Brown and, more recently, Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage. Prelogar did her best to rebut this claim, pointing out that these decisions to overturn precedent expanded human rights, and overturning Roe would take them away. But the conservatives don’t seem inclined to view women as humans with rights, and so ignored this crucial point.

Those were the most egregious, but the inability of the conservatives to imagine women as real people behaving in discernibly human ways defined most lines of questioning during Wednesday’s arguments. At one point, Chief Justice John Roberts explored the possibility of setting the national abortion limits at 15 weeks, which is the current Mississippi law under debate, instead of overturning Roe entirely. He dug into Rikelman about how 15 weeks should be enough “opportunity for choice” for women seeking an abortion, even though it’s actually only about 11 weeks since the missed period. The implication, of course, is that anyone who needs that long is somehow too lazy or stupid to deserve rights. (Though apparently not to lazy or stupid to be a mother!) But, as Rikelman pointed out, poverty and other abortion restrictions often drive women to spend weeks trying to find the time and money to abort. In addition, a huge number of medically indicated abortions happen after the 15-week mark.

Amy Coney Barrett, the token Aunt Lydia of the 6 conservative judges, kept circling around the argument that women don’t need abortion rights, because “in all 50 states, you can terminate parental rights” after giving birth. It was a question that only makes sense if one assumes women are merely ambulatory uteruses, with no feelings or internal lives at all. In the real world, however, pregnancy is a difficult process, not just physically, but emotionally. Pregnancy isn’t a houseplant you stick in the corner of your house and ignore until someone comes to pick it up. You carry it with your body. People ask you about it — indeed, as anyone who has been pregnant can tell you, it’s basically all people can talk to you about when you’re showing. It causes all sorts of hormonal and emotional reactions, and giving up a baby your body has created is notoriously wrenching, even for those who are ready to do it.

Barrett, who has kids of her own, should understand this. But other women don’t seem to register as people to her. She even snickeringly compared forced childbirth to vaccination, as if a 3 second, risk-free shot has anything in common with the permanently life-altering experience of pregnancy and childbirth.

Realizing they weren’t going to get very far with their conservative colleagues with arguments about women’s humanity, the liberal justices largely focused on the issue of the court’s reputation. The conservative justices have been openly defensive about (entirely correct) accusations that they are “partisan hacks,” as Barrett unconvincingly swore she was not earlier this year. So the liberals centered much of their questioning around concerns that overturning Roe would further degrade the court’s reputation in the public eye.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked at one point.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

But it’s hard to imagine six justices are going to be that worried about being criticized in this way. They don’t take women seriously as people, so it’s unlikely they care much more for the opinions of people who do view women as full human beings. As with Kavanaugh whining and crying because he had to deal with a sexual assault accusation from Christine Blasey Ford, they are all likely to double down on their sense of grievance that they even have to waste time with the women-are-people crowd. Erasing women’s rights will be as easy for them as stepping on ants.

Do you feel like a sullen teen again when you visit your parents for the holidays? You’re not alone

It doesn’t matter how old you are. An extended visit to your parents’ house can transform anyone into an angry teenager again.

I would know, as I was among the 52 percent of millennials living with their parents during the pandemic. My now-husband and I saw our lives in flux before our wedding; as a result, we moved in with my mom for a few months.

Given how close I was to such a major adult milestone, I was surprised at how my living situation changed my psychological disposition. Suddenly, I was visibly losing my patience with my mom, complaining to my fiancé how annoyed I was with her, and often taking walks just to get out of the house.

It wasn’t until I was venting to a friend that I realized this feeling was all too familiar in a very uncomfortable way. I felt like I was regressing to a 15-year-old version of myself again. To be clear, I have a very good relationship with my mom. But, we both agreed that we cohabitated a little longer than either of us could tolerate.

The experience I’m describing isn’t an abnormal one, and it often happens as many people pack their bags and spend days or weeks with their parents during the holidays. These reunions generally start off cordially; but at a certain point, after the niceties have passed, a family may find themselves regressing to versions of themselves they’d prefer to forget.

That’s not only true of adult children. Parents often regress to a state where they feel as though they’re parenting a teenager or child again, instead of a 20-something, 30-something, or even 40-something adult. Why does this happen?

According to Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of “Joy From Fear,” a childhood home can be a trigger for “old dynamics.”

“Many people assume that psychological growth naturally matches chronological growth, but unless a person works to individuate from a family of origin in healthy ways, returning to a childhood home can certainly trigger old dynamics — especially the unhealthy ones,” Manly said. “Moreover, parents often unconsciously assume pre-existing authoritarian roles when their adult children return home; this can create difficult challenges for the adult child who wants to be seen and treated as an adult.”

Indeed, when a person goes back in time mentally and emotionally — in the sense that memories are triggered by a specific place, like a childhood home — that can change everyone’s behavior. Dr. Mark Borg, co-author of the upcoming book, “Making Your Crazy Work for Y ou,” agreed that an environment can trigger old habits and patterns, but noted the environment isn’t always a physical home.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

“The primary caretaker, or caretakers, is the environment,” Borg said, adding that the relational patterns we develop with our parents and siblings when we are young often repeat themselves throughout adulthood. What we learn about ourselves and others in our early life becomes “a blueprint” for how we expect things to be, Borg added. “It creates a tendency (it’s been called a ‘compulsion’ ) to seek, find and recreate in future relationships familiar elements from the most salient and influential times in our history.” Borg explained that “the influence is mutual. . . that is, children are heavily influenced and transformed by their parents, and their parents are, in turn, influenced by their role as caretakers.”

Borg said the holidays are “particularly salient for such repetition.”

“They are already so heavily imbued with profound and irrepressible memory and emotion,” Borg said.

Another reason this regression can happen is because both the adult child and the parents don’t know these newer versions of themselves.

“The parents often do not know the adult versions of their children as well as the child versions; they may also still see their adult children as ‘kids,'” said Rebecca Tolbert, a therapist in Washington DC. “The adult children have set beliefs about what their childhood home and parents are like; both parties fall into what is ‘typical’ instead of addressing the situation and intentionally building something new.”

Tolbert said to think of it like an athlete who has routinely practiced a sport for years.

“You’ve spent 18 years with your parents every single day in a specific dynamic, and if you are an athlete and you’re practicing something all the time, that’s the routine and the rhythm that is going to be established,” Tolbert said. “So when you come back to your parents’ house, they know this person that they’ve spent 18 years with every single day as a specific person, maybe you’re 40 years old, but they still have spent all of that time with that version of you than they have with this adult version.”

Clinical psychologist Forrest Talley said regression can happen in both healthy and unhealthy parent-child relationships.

“Interestingly, this often occurs even in healthy relationships,” Talley said. “But the regression is much less intense, and the impact on the visit is transitory at best.”

Tolbert suggested families talk about this before the holidays to avoid regressing to an unpleasant dynamic, and recommended Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication strategy as a way that people can have these conversations.

“I would recommend families sit down and have honest conversations about expectations from each other,” Tolbert said. “Understanding expectations and boundaries can help change the dynamic into one that is most beneficial for everyone.”

New Republican conspiracy theory: Omicron is a Democratic plot to win the midterms

Far-right Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas has received a great deal of criticism from Democrats — and some Never Trump conservatives as well — after posting a tweet claiming that the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 is a plot to help Democrats steal the 2022 midterms. And Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives, CNN’s Jake Tapper laments, have remained silent about Jackson’s over-the-top claim.

On November 27, Jackson tweeted, “Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”

Jake Tapper lambasted Jackson on CNN, saying that as a physician, he has tossed aside the Hippocratic Oath.

Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we're not going to let them!

— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) November 27, 2021

“It seems incredibly irresponsible for a doctor of note like Dr. Ronny Jackson to pretend this is a manufactured crisis,” Tapper commented. And Ramesh Ponuru, a senior editor at the conservative National Review, agreed with Tapper — saying, “It’s irresponsible for a doctor. It’s irresponsible for a political leader. It manages to be irresponsible in both ways at the same time.”

Tapper went on to slam House Republicans for not calling Jackson out.

“Not one Republican leader has denounced Ronny Jackson,” Tapper told the panel.

Anti-vax televangelist dies after using “protocols” his TV network promoted to treat COVID

The founder of the world’s second-largest Christian TV network, which has persistently spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, died Tuesday after contracting COVID.

Daystar Television, which reaches over 100 million American households and more than two billion people around the world, on Wednesday announced that founder Marcus Lamb had died at 64. Lamb had spent months railing against the COVID vaccine and his network hosted hours of interviews with anti-vaxxers. His network has frequently featured anti-vaccine guests like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and Simone Gold, the founder of American Frontline Doctors, which promotes and profits from bogus COVID treatments. Lamb’s network previously promoted Donald Trump’s campaign and his election lies, and Lamb himself was a member of Trump’s faith advisory board.

“It’s with a heavy heart we announce that Marcus Lamb, president and founder of Daystar Television Network, went home to be with the Lord this morning,” the network said on Twitter. “The family asks that their privacy be respected as they grieve this difficult loss. Please continue to lift them up in prayer.”

The network did not mention Lamb’s battle with COVID but his son Jonathan discussed his illness earlier this month, calling it a “spiritual attack from the enemy.”

“As much as my parents have gone on here to kind of inform everyone about everything going on to the pandemic and some of the ways to treat COVID — there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that,” he told Daystar, according to Relevant Magazine. “And he’s doing everything he can to take down my dad.”

Lamb’s wife, Joni, said on the network Tuesday that her husband, who also had diabetes, “got the COVID pneumonia.” She said the treatments promoted on Daystar failed to save her husband.

“We were trying to treat the COVID and pneumonia with the different protocols we use, including the ones we talk about on Daystar. We used those — I myself used them and had breezed through COVID,” she said. “It caused his blood sugar to spike and a decrease in his oxygen. He 100% believed in everything that we’ve talked about here on Daystar. … We still stand by that, obviously.”

The Lambs have repeatedly touted ivermectin, which the Food and Drug Administration warns is not a “safe or effective” COVID treatment, and hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug embraced by Trump that has repeatedly been shown to be ineffective against the coronavirus and potentially dangerous to users. Joni Lamb and others at the network have railed against not just COVID vaccines but also flu and HPV immunizations. The network recently filed a lawsuit over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, calling it a “sin against God’s Holy Word” and arguing that making employees get immunized would “potentially cause them to sin.” The network’s website calls vaccines “the most dangerous thing your child could face.”

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

The Lambs are among a large number of televangelists who have spread misinformation about COVID. White evangelicals are the least likely religious group in the U.S. to be vaccinated, according to a September Pew study, with only 57% receiving at least one dose of a COVID vaccine.

Numerous conservative broadcasters who have spread misinformation about COVID or vaccines have died after contracting the virus in recent months, including Denver pastor Bob Enyart, Christian radio broadcaster Jimmy DeYoung and Florida radio hosts Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel.

Lamb had also come under scrutiny over his business dealings. An NPR investigation in 2014 found that Daystar gave away just a fraction of the $35 million a year it received from viewer donations. One employee told the outlet that although the IRS considers the Christian network a tax-exempt “church,” it functions more like a “business making money.”

Lamb last year returned $3.9 million in taxpayer funds from the Payroll Protection Program, which was intended to help small businesses survive and pay workers during the pandemic, after Inside Edition found that the network bought a multimillion-dollar private jet just two weeks after receiving the funds. Lamb denied that he used the government funds to buy the jet.

“They got millions of dollars from the government,” Pete Evans, an investigator at the church watchdog group Trinity Foundation, told the outlet, “and then they spent millions of dollars on a private jet.”

Read more on evangelicals and the pandemic:

Republicans now stand for nothing except trolling, vigilante violence and death

The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: One right-winger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats, saying on Telegram, “The left won’t stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood.”

On Facebook, right-wing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of nine to one.

The parents of Anthony Huber, shot dead by Rittenhouse as Huber tried to disarm him, put out a public statement that said, in part:

Today’s verdict means there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son. It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.

A right-wing militia group in New York celebrated in the streets and then put a punctuation mark on their disdain for the law and simple rules of a civil society by entering the New York subway system through emergency exits, bypassing the turnstiles. “Rules don’t apply to us!” they seemed to be shouting, along with, “You can’t stop us!”

Trump wannabes in public office who are still trying to capture the white supremacist and white nationhood vote have doubled down on his strategy of fear, hate and vigilantism.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed legislation that gives legal protections to people who drive their cars into protesters in the street, and defines everybody in any protest as a criminal felon if anybody in that protest breaks a window or engages in other illegal activity.

With DeSantis and other Republican governors pre-exonerating people like the driver who viciously killed Heather Heyer, as well as vigilante protest shooters like Rittenhouse, many are worried that we’re entering a new era where vigilante shooters and drivers-into-crowds will become normalized and accepted, just as Amy Vanderpool documents how normalized daily mass shootings have become in America.

Laws similar to Florida’s have been passed or are pending in numerous Republican-controlled states, presumably in anticipation of citizen protests when those states use their newly passed laws to overturn the will of voters in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Object to your politicians handing an election they lost to themselves? You go straight from the streets to the jail, just like in tinhorn dictatorships.

There’s always been a fringe movement of violent white supremacist vigilantes in America, particularly since the end of the Civil War, but they’ve never before been embraced by or succeeded in capturing a political party. Today, astonishingly, that’s the case in our country.

So, what’s motivating today’s vigilantes and the police who often aid and support them, as in the Rittenhouse case?

Centuries ago, as white people fanned out across this continent to occupy land stolen from Native Americans, it usually took years or decades for stable government institutions to be created, including local police forces. Therefore, communities would organize their own forces, called “vigilance committees” whose job was to be “vigilant” to protect their own homes and communities.

That sort of “classic vigilantism” pretty much completely disappeared in the U.S. after the Civil War, however, when the Southern states’ slave patrols were merged into those states’ militias (what we call the National Guard) and professional police forces, state and local, took over.

Modern post-Civil War violent vigilantism, therefore, doesn’t usually emerge because the government is failing to protect citizens and therefore communities field their own equivalent of police forces.

Instead, these days it’s almost always a conservative response to cultural change that creates a vigilante backlash.

Virtually the dictionary definition of “conservative” is “opposed to rapid change in society.” That’s why, as America becomes more diverse and states like Texas have become less than 50% white, racist “conservative” factions that have had a home in the GOP since 1968 are turning to violence to try to maintain the absolute dominance of straight white men in American society.

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

When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, for example, those who were opposed to that change in our society, symbolized by the Roe v. Wade decision, organized vigilante groups that threatened women outside abortion clinics, followed and harassed women seeking health care and people who worked in the clinics, and murdered multiple doctors and bombed multiple clinics across the nation.

In the 1980s, conservative billionaires who supported Reagan helped impose neoliberal austerity on America, so for 40 years the country has been in steady decline as jobs went overseas, wages fell so badly the middle class sagged below 50% of Americans by 2015, and a general rage began to build across the country.

Much of that rage was channeled into “anti-government” movements that were encouraged by Reagan, who told us that government was the problem and not the solution. Neoliberal billionaires backed Republican politicians who kept their taxes low while openly and proudly obstructing any government efforts to help working class people.

The GOP also revived Nixon’s “Southern strategy” in 1980, using open appeals to racism with Reagan warning about “strapping young bucks” and Black “welfare queens” taking white people’s tax dollars. George H.W. Bush put it on steroids in 1992 with his “Willie Horton” television advertisements against Michael Dukakis, charging the Democrat wasn’t doing enough to protect Massachusetts from violent Black criminals.

By this time the GOP had totally embraced neoliberalism and stopped proposing any sort of policies that would lift up America. Instead, their efforts went to subsidizing billionaires with tax cuts and increasing profits for polluting industries via deregulation.

Working-class white people continued to fall behind, particularly in rural areas, as wealthy CEOs and trust-fund billionaires made out like bandits, pouring their surplus cash into the campaigns of politicians because five right-wingers on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010.

The Republican answer to the growing white angst in the country was to start a movement against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s, calling it “reverse racism,” reviving the old saw from the 1950s that “Black people want to take your job!”

Women, since the 1970s, have also been successfully competing for jobs formerly held by white men, building misogynist frustration and rage among lower-income and lower-education white men, and turning “incels” murderous.

Much of this white male rage was channeled in the 1990s into the fringe “white nationalist” movement, which got their martyrs with Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, where heavily armed white supremacists shot it out with the feds and lost terribly.

That provoked Tim McVeigh to follow the “Turner Diaries” script for creating “a race-based civil war by provoking the government to seize guns so we can fight back,” blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco in 1995, killing 168 and injuring 860.

He, however, was condemned by both political parties and ultimately put to death by a Republican president. The GOP had not yet fully turned toward embracing fascists, vigilantes and terrorists in the 1990s.

Modern race-based vigilantism with the support of the GOP took a big step forward after 9/11, when multiple Republican leaders used that crime as an excuse to vilify Muslims specifically and brown-skinned Arabs more generally. Most famously, Donald Trump perpetrated the lie that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating in the streets the afternoon of 9/11.

George W. Bush took that anti-Muslim energy and amplified it as he pushed a revenge-based war against Afghanistan and Iraq, another Muslim country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Following Bush’s presidency, a Black man whose middle name was Hussein became our president, creating a frenzy of bizarre conspiracy theories on the Fox Propaganda Channel and across right-wing internet and social media outlets.

Was Obama a “real” American? Was he really a secret Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent? Was he trying to flip America communist with his radical Obamacare program? Trump and Republicans asserted that those were all true claims.

With the hard right now empowered by these conspiracy theories on Fox and talk radio, in 2014 Cliven Bundy challenged the authority of the Obama administration to restrict him from grazing his cows on public federal land without paying a fee. Obama flinched and backed down, giving Bundy and armed, anti-government white men a huge national PR victory (as well as getting his cows back).

Two years later Cliven’s son, Ammon Bundy, occupied another federal facility, this time the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon near the Idaho border. His armed vigilantes pointed their weapons at federal officers on live television, and again the Obama administration backed down.

Bundy’s 2016 “victory” animated white supremacist vigilantes across the nation and made him enough of a media figure that he’s now running in the Republican primary for governor of Idaho.

Things really stepped up throughout the Trump administration when the new president openly welcomed white nationhood militias and neo-Nazis into the GOP and praised them from the presidential pulpit, something no president had done since Woodrow Wilson hosted the debut of the Klan recruiting film “Birth of a Nation” at the White House in 1915.

Trump invited vigilantes to the southern border to “help” with the problem of brown-skinned refugees trying to enter the country, and sucked up to police, encouraging them to be even more brutal with (presumably minority) criminal suspects.

His presidency marked a turning point for American politics, with the GOP abandoning any pretense of caring about policy debates to full-on embrace fear and hate of racial, religious and gender minorities as their core political position and strategy going forward.

As a result, NBC News chronicles, threats against federal officials reported to Capitol Police have about tripled since Trump’s first year in office, reaching more than 9,000 incidents so far this year.

When we’ve seen these kinds of things happen in other countries, we’ve historically called them out as naked assaults on democracy; now Trump and his armed Republican faction have turned America’s moral and political standing in the world on its head.

International observers have issued repeated alarms about the state of democracy in America since Trump’s 2016 election. In 2017, the U.S. was downgraded by The Economist magazine’s Intelligence Unit: instead of being a “full democracy,” we are now a “flawed democracy.” The international think tank IDEA just reported that we’re now a “backsliding democracy.”

Today, while the Democratic Party is working hard to secure benefits to all Americans, the Republicans have only two responses: Block legislation and support armed white nationhood vigilantes.

All the Republican Party has left, now that they’ve abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, is hate, fear and death.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 inaugural address about an earlier generation of Republican obstructionists: “They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

And if we don’t return to sanity, our democracy could perish as well.

More on the Rittenhouse aftermath:

Trump’s COVID bombshell: He was symptomatic three days before debate with Biden

Donald Trump tested positive for COVID-19 just days before he was slated to debate with then-nominee Joe Biden, according to a forthcoming memoir by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

In the book, obtained by The Guardian, Meadows claims that Trump tested positive for the virus less than 72 hours prior to the first presidential debate, a result that would have disqualified the former president from appearing onstage. Shortly after, however, Trump was administered another test, which came back negative.

“Nothing was going to stop [Trump] from going out there,” Meadows describes.

The former president denied ever having COVID just ahead of the debate, saying in a statement that “the story of me having COVID prior to, or during, the first debate is Fake News. In fact, a test revealed that I did not have COVID prior to the debate.”

But Trump first received a positive test three days before the debate, on September 26 of last year, according to Meadows’ account. On that same day, the former president attended a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, which is widely thought to have resulted in 12 infections amongst attendees due to a lack of COVID health precautions, according to CNN.

Following the event, Meadows recounts, Trump “looked a little tired” while en route to a rally in Pennsylvania. And later that night, Meadows was informed that the former president had tested positive for coronavirus.

“Stop the president from leaving,” Trump’s physician, Sean Conley, allegedly told Meadows. “He just tested positive for COVID.”

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

“Mr. President,” Meadows later told the president over the phone, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for COVID-19.”

Later, Meadows alleges, Trump was tested with a newer model kit, which led to a negative result. Meadows recalls hearing a “‘Thank God’ that echoed through the cabin of Air Force One. According to The Guardian, Meadows wrote that Trump used the negative result as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened,” but Meadows instructed his staff to remain cautious.

In the days following, Trump carried on with his schedule, visiting Gold Star families at a White House reception, holding an indoor press briefing, unveiling a new COVID-19 testing strategy at the White House Rose Garden, and more.

On September 29, the day of the debate, Trump reportedly arrived at the event too late to be tested, forcing organizers to rely on the honor system, said debate host Chris Wallace. Three days later, on October 2, Trump publicly announced that he and his first lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive for the coronavirus. In the days following, Trump and the White House reportedly downplayed the severity of his condition, according to The New York Times. Trump’s blood oxygen level was reportedly extremely depressed, with many officials believing that he needed to be put on a ventilator.

On Tuesday, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol announced that Meadows had reversed course and agreed to cooperate with their investigation.

What’s really driving inflation? Corporate greed

The biggest culprit for rising prices that’s not being talked about is the increasing economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few giant big corporations with the power to raise prices.

If markets were competitive, companies would seek to keep their prices down in order to maintain customer loyalty and demand. When the prices of their supplies rose, they’d cut their profits before they raised prices to their customers, for fear that otherwise a competitor would grab those customers away.

But strange enough, this isn’t happening. In fact, even in the face of supply constraints, corporations are raking in record profits. More than 80 percent of big (S&P 500) companies that have reported results this season have topped analysts’ earnings forecasts, according to Refinitiv.

Obviously, supply constraints have not eroded these profits. Corporations are simply passing the added costs on to their customers. Many are raising their prices even further, and pocketing even more.

How can this be? For a simple and obvious reason: Most don’t have to worry about competitors grabbing their customers away. They have so much market power they can relax and continue to rake in big money.

The underlying structural problem isn’t that government is over-stimulating the economy. It’s that big corporations are under competitive.

Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. The result is a transfer of wealth from consumers to corporate executives and major investors.

This has nothing to do with inflation, folks. It has everything to do with the concentration of market power in a relatively few hands.

It’s called “oligopoly,” where two or three companies roughly coordinate their prices and output.

Judd Legum provides some good examples in his newsletter. He points to two firms that are giants in household staples: Procter & Gamble and Kimberly Clark. In April, Procter & Gamble announced it would start charging more for everything from diapers to toilet paper, citing “rising costs for raw materials, such as resin and pulp, and higher expenses to transport goods.”

Baloney. P&G is raking in huge profits. In the quarter ending September 30, after some of its price increases went into effect, it reported a whopping 24.7% profit margin. Oh, and it spent $3 billion in the quarter buying its own stock.

How can this be? Because P&G faces very little competition. According to a report released this month from the Roosevelt Institute, “The lion’s share of the market for diapers,” for example, “is controlled by just two companies (P&G and Kimberly-Clark), limiting competition for cheaper options.”

So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that Kimberly-Clark announced similar price increases at the same time as P&G. Both corporations are doing wonderfully well. But American consumers are paying more.

Or consider another major consumer product oligopoly: PepsiCo (the parent company of Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Quaker, Tropicana, and other brands), and Coca Cola. In April, PepsiCo announced it was increasing prices, blaming “higher costs for some ingredients, freight and labor.”

Rubbish. The company recorded $3 billion in operating profits and increased its projections for the rest of the year, and expects to send $5.8 billion in dividends to shareholders in 2021.

If PepsiCo faced tough competition it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. In fact, it appears to have colluded with its chief competitor, Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%.

And on it goes around the entire consumer sector of the American economy.

You can see a similar pattern in energy prices. Once it became clear that demand was growing, energy producers could have quickly ramped up production to create more supply. But they didn’t.

Why not? Industry experts say oil and gas companies (and their CEOs and major investors) saw bigger money in letting prices run higher before producing more supply.

They can get away with this because big oil and gas producers don’t face much competition. They’re powerful oligopolies.

Again, inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases. Corporate power is driving them.

Since the 1980s, when the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.

Monsanto now sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn.

The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks, of which JPMorgan is the largest.

It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to four today, which now control 80 percent of domestic seating capacity.

It let Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merge, leaving America with just one major producer of civilian aircraft, Boeing.

Three giant cable companies dominate broadband [Comcast, AT&T, Verizon].

A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry [Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck].

So what’s the appropriate response to the latest round of inflation? The Federal Reserve has signaled it won’t raise interest rates for the time being, believing that the inflation is being driven by temporary supply bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Biden Administration officials have been consulting with the oil industry in an effort to stem rising gas prices, trying to make it simpler to issue commercial driver’s licenses (to help reduce the shortage of truck drivers), and seeking to unclog over-crowded container ports.

But none of this responds to the deeper structural issue – of which price inflation is symptom: the increasing consolidation of the economy in a relative handful of big corporations with enough power to raise prices and increase profits.

This structural problem is amenable to only one thing: the aggressive use of antitrust law.

Forget the Steele dossier: Mueller report release shows why Trump-Russia inquiry was required

The last few weeks we have seen the media work itself into something of a frenzy in an attempt to force a “reckoning” on the matter of the Steele Dossier, the opposition research document prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele about then-candidate Donald Trump. I’m sure I don’t need to go into detail about that chapter in the Trump era. You’d have to have been in a coma not to have heard more about it than you ever cared to. Suffice to say that it was the source of the rumor about the infamous “pee tape” which offered many a late night comedian an uproarious punchline.

It’s hard to know exactly what precipitated this sudden desire to have the media don a hair shirt over their coverage of the dossier, but it seems to stem from a recent ABC interview with Steele and the recent indictments of a handful of people by Special Prosecutor John Durham for lying to the FBI about it. Durham’s inquiry into what Trump called “the oranges of the investigation” has been going on for years now with very little to show for it and according to those who have followed the cases closely, like journalist Marcy Wheeler, there is every reason to believe that the probe will end up being a dud.

Nonetheless, there has been quite a back and forth among news organizations over whether they were too credulous in reporting the dossier and if it was ethical to publish it in the first place. Overlooking the mountain of evidence that had nothing at all to do with the dossier and the bizarre behavior by Trump both before and during his presidency when it came to Russia, the result of all this “reckoning” is that suddenly there seems to be some belief even in mainstream quarters that the whole Russia scandal was overblown and perhaps not worth the resources and time put into reporting it.

Naturally, no one is more pleased by this than Donald Trump:

"Schiff now admits that he knew the Dossier was fake. He should be admonished or impeached along with the other scoundrels that also knew! – President Donald J. Trump

ICYMI: "Rep. Adam Schiff: ‘I don’t regret’ hyping discredited Steele dossier"https://t.co/FmCIgIohKl pic.twitter.com/Vgy9sGYzD3

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) November 15, 2021

No doubt there was some histrionic coverage of the Steele Dossier. But the truth is that virtually every news outlet that reported it made clear that it was unsubstantiated and no one reported that it was the only reason for the Russia investigation. Trump and his campaign’s suspicious behavior was more than enough to set off alarms all over the world.

Trump had been seeking to do business in Russia for years and was found to have lied throughout the campaign about that, saying that he knew Vladimir Putin, that he didn’t know him, that they were “stablemates,” that he couldn’t comment because it would betray Putin’s confidence all the while heaping over-the-top praise on the Russian leader. During the course of the Russia investigation, it was revealed that Trump had elaborate plans for Trump Tower Moscow, which he had assigned to none other than his personal lawyer and his daughter Ivanka. He lied repeatedly about this too, even in one of the presidential debates in the fall of 2016.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team found that they could not prove a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in regards to the interference in the 2016 election and the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He indicted a bunch of people, including Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for passing campaign data to a Russian operative associated with an oligarch to whom he owed a lot of money. There were strange fringe players all over that campaign including the famous “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos who were also indicted by Mueller and confirmed by the bipartisan Intelligence Committee report to have been the one who actually tripped the investigation by the FBI. His loose lips to an Australian diplomat about Russian activities on behalf of Trump happened months before anyone had heard of Christopher Steele’s dossier.

The Senate’s report made clear that the dossier was not the source of the government investigation. The Mueller Report did not rely upon it in any way. It was a side-show, at best, which had zero bearing on the findings of those two huge investigations which concluded that the Trump campaign’s suspicious activities, including the numerous overt attempts to cover up and obstruct justice, were more than enough to justify the investigations that plagued him throughout his term.

All of these things and much more actually happened, including meetings overseas in which Donald Trump openly sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies. It wasn’t just some made-up scandal. We had a president who was either so corrupt, so reckless or so vulnerable to blackmail that he spent his entire term essentially justifying the suspicions about his relationship with the Russian government with his bizarre behavior.

One of the most damning charges against the Trump campaign (which also had nothing to do with the Steele Dossier) was reported by the New York Times in July of 2017, revealing that Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had met with a Russian attorney who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Russian government. According to the Senate intelligence report, the Russian government saw that as a signal that they were willing to play ball, particularly when Trump explicitly asked Russia to release Clinton’s emails in a public press conference shortly afterward. That very night there was an attempt to hack the Clinton campaign and within a month, a cache of emails was released by Wikileaks on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

In a somewhat surprising decision, on Tuesday a federal appeals court reversed a lower court ruling that kept certain redactions in the Mueller Report in place pertaining to Donald Trump Jr’s involvement in the investigation and the Mueller team’s reasoning for not charging him and others with campaign finance violations. The government’s insistence on keeping that under wraps was absurd since much of the information was already public and its reasoning that it would cause “reputational or stigmatizing harm” made no sense. (They will not unredact the parts which explain why Mueller chose not to charge for false statements which really would be interesting, unfortunately.) The decision won’t offer any new revelations but at least it strikes a small blow for transparency.

As he has his whole life, Trump has escaped direct accountability for any of it. I doubt the Russia investigations had anything to do with his loss in 2020 and Mueller’s decision not to say directly that Trump obstructed justice because it might harm his reputation (while also making it clear that he could be prosecuted for that crime after leaving office) was tragically naive. But that is no reason for the media to signal its even-handedness by flagellating itself over the Steele Dossier and help Trump persuade even more people that the Russia scandal was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt. It was not. And one can’t help but wonder if it might be more fruitful for the media to have a little “reckoning” over their “but her emails” coverage during the 2016 campaign, a truly egregious error in judgment that led to the nightmare that followed. At the moment there is every reason to believe that could easily happen again.

Organizations tied to Sidney Powell subpoenaed by federal prosecutors

Federal prosecutors subpoenaed financial records for multiple organizations launched by controversial pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell following the 2020 election, The Washington Post reports.

“The grand jury subpoena, issued in September by the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, sought communications and other records related to fundraising and accounting by groups including Defending the Republic, a Texas-based organization claiming 501(c) 4 nonprofit status, and a PAC by the same name, according to the documents and a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the probe,” the newspaper reported. “The subpoena reviewed by The Post was signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston, who is also handling politically charged matters related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including contempt of Congress charges brought against former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon for refusing to testify in front of the House committee investigating the pro-Trump riot.”

Prosecutors sought records going back to Nov. 1, 2020.

“Her fantastical claims formed the basis of lawsuits she filed on behalf of voters and Trump electors challenging the results in multiple states. The lawsuits failed to convince judges, who dismissed each as groundless,” the newspaper noted. “In the meantime, Powell was soliciting contributions from Trump supporters to help fund her efforts. She began asking for donations as early as Nov. 10, 2020, a week after the election, telling viewers of the ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’ show on Fox Business that she had started a website called ‘defendingtherepublic.org’ where they could donate.”

The organization spent $550,000 on the controversial audit of the votes in Maricopa County, Arizona.

NEWS- Federal prosecutors have demanded financial and other records related to Sidney Powell's fundraising groups as part of a criminal investigation.

Scoop with @emmersbrown @PostRoz https://t.co/t0xm4d2Mje

— Isaac Stanley-Becker (@isaacstanbecker) November 30, 2021

Paul Gosar’s death-threat video is no joke — it’s part of the Republican terror strategy

When someone threatens to kill you, believe them. It is not a joke or hyperbole or just “heated words.” It is not mere partisanship, symbolism or a game.

Earlier this month, Rep. Paul Gosar, a far-right Republican from Arizona, shared a clip from a Japanese anime video on social media that had been edited to show a version of him, first killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then attacking President Biden. This is part of a larger pattern of violence in which Republican elected officials (and their voters) threaten Democrats with physical harm, or incite others to do so.

On Nov. 17, the House of Representatives voted to censure Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. All Democrats supported this resolution. Only two House Republicans voted in support of it. Predictably, Republicans are claiming that Gosar’s death threats are a matter of “free speech” and therefore should not be “censored.”

Republicans also claimed that Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats in general are too “sensitive” in their response to Gosar’s supposed attempt at humor. This is the logic of abusers and terrorizers: The victim is somehow always to blame.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, correctly summarized Gosar’s dangerous behavior and the near-unanimous Republican support by saying, “In any workplace in America, if a coworker made an anime video killing another coworker, that person would be fired.”

The Republican leadership has vowed to seek revenge against Democrats if (or rather when) they return to power after the 2022 midterms. Moreover, Kevin McCarthy, who would then become speaker of the House, has promised, at a minimum, to return Gosar to the committees from which he was removed.

Gosar, in an obvious act of defiance and contempt, retweeted his terror video after the censure vote. He has of course claimed that he is the victim of persecution and that the censure vote could somehow inspire terrorism and other acts of violence.

Addressing her colleagues and the American people the day before the House censure vote, Ocasio-Cortez gave an eloquent speech about democracy, violence, civility and the rule of law. Unfortunately, such oratory will not stop the Republican fascists and their campaign of terror, intimidation and violence against the Democrats and the American people.

In a recent essay for Daily Kos, investigative reporter David Neiwert, an expert on the right-wing extremist movement, observed that Gosar may primarily have intended the video “as a ‘gotcha’ that would ‘trigger the libs.'” But its real significance goes deeper:

But the video itself, apparently created by his staff, was also a dog whistle signal to the white-nationalist audience that Gosar has been cultivating in the past year and longer.

The anime series and manga comic book that is the source for the video’s scenes, Attack on Titan, is in fact one of the white-nationalist alt-right’s favorite manga. That’s because the series is ripe with fascist themes and ill-concealed antisemitism, particularly in its storyline about a nefarious race of overlords manipulating human conflict.

The scenes in Gosar’s video show the series’ chief protagonist — his face replaced by Gosar’s — attacking the evil, mindless “titans” that are ravaging human civilization, their faces replaced by Ocasio-Cortez’s and Biden’s. The video is interspersed with news footage of immigrants at the U.S. border and Border Patrol officers engaging in various enforcement activities.

Attack on Titan has become a favorite of the white-nationalist crowd because, in addition to its extreme violence, its extended storyline is an unmistakable metaphor for classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, with an elite cabal called the Marleyans overseeing the genocide of a persecuted race of humans called the Eldians. In the world of the alt-right, where anime is a predominant form of entertainment, the response has been unabashedly enthusiastic….

This is another example of how the global right is engaging in a full-spectrum assault on pluralistic democracy. To that end, they are experts at weaponizing popular culture — especially in the digital space — to advance their fascist-authoritarian agenda. The American news media, for the most part, has failed to understand and explain this strategy to the public. Even more worrisome, the Democrats have also surrendered that space (and the larger “culture war” strategy) to the Republican fascists and the global right.

Gosar’s terror video is one more example of how today’s Republican Party is attempting to replace normal politics, in which disputes are resolved through deliberation and compromise, with a form of politics where violence is always an option — and at times may be the preferred means of obtaining and keeping power.

This is the core of fascism.

Within the worldview of today’s Republican Party and the global right, fascist violence becomes moral, legitimate and even necessary because “Western civilization” (nearly always coded as white) is fighting a war for “survival” against an array of supposed enemies: Black and brown people, Jews and Muslims, LGBTQ people, feminists, socialists, “secularists” and “globalists” (essentially right-wing code words for Jewish people) and other bogeymen such as antifa, Black Lives Matter, “cancel culture”, “political correctness” and so on.

In total, the Republican fascists are working to create an American version of what the pro-Nazi German legal theorist and philosopher Carl Schmitt described as a state of “exception,” in which the Constitution and the rule of law no longer apply. Once that occurs, a fascist leader and his followers can act without restraint to impose their will on the larger society.

Fascist violence is a distinguishing feature of the Age of Trump and America’s accelerating democracy crisis.

The most obvious example, of course, came last Jan. 6, when Trump and his followers attempted a coup intended to nullify or reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election.

During Trump’s presidency, the U.S. experienced a large increase in hate crimes. White supremacists and other extremists have committed mass shootings, and other mass-casualty terror plots have been disrupted by law enforcement.

We also see an escalating nationwide pattern of violent threats by Republican fascists and their agents targeting prominent Democrats, local and state election officials, school board members, library staff and others seen as obstacles to the fascist agenda. The goal of these tactics is to disrupt democracy and civil society on the ground, as a way of preparing the political battlefield for a national insurrection.

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election has helped create a highly combustible situation in which tens of millions of white Americans are potentially willing to support political violence aimed at returning Donald Trump and his allies to political power.

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

Kyle Rittenhouse was recently acquitted on all charges for shooting three men, killing two of them, during the civil unrest that followed the police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the summer of 2020. While many reasonable observers see Rittenhouse as a vigilante who eagerly sought out an opportunity for lethal violence, he has, predictably, been declared a hero by the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right. After the verdict, he was summoned to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump and also featured in a lengthy interview on Fox News.

Civil rights organizations and domestic terrorism experts are warning that white supremacist groups and fascist militias understand the Rittenhouse verdict (correctly) as tacit legal endorsement and permission for acts of white right-wing vigilante violence. The crucial point here is that Republican fascists are moving beyond the use of stochastic terrorism, with its coded appeals and “dog whistles,” toward naked and explicit threats of violence.

Here is Mark Follman at Mother Jones:

As the former president further seeks to rewrite January 6 and stoke incendiary far-right grievances, veiled tactics and plausible deniability are no longer in the equation, according to another expert among those last fall who called out Trump’s tactics. “So much commentary still seems uncomfortable or coy about stating what Trump is doing,” says Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama and currently directs national security research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “He’s not hinting, whistling, or luring these extremists anymore. He’s providing an owner’s manual. I will never understand why we are being so polite about describing this.”

Kayyem’s observations are especially resonant given that the mainstream news media continues to avoid telling the full truth about the country’s extreme democracy crisis. The Republican Party is not “flirting” with or just “tempted” by fascism and violence. These things are not “impending” or “on the horizon.” There is no serious prospect that “respectable” conservatives will force a “turning point” in an epic struggle for the “soul” of the Republican Party, which will surely end up “distancing” itself from Trump or shedding him as an unwanted “burden.”

Too many voices in the mainstream news media and among the country’s larger political class refuse to accept the simple, obvious, ominous truth: The Republican Party has become an authoritarian-fascist movement. It is committed to white supremacy, misogyny, hatred and sadism, and increasingly inclined to violence. Many Americans have convinced themselves they are like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” and can return to normalcy and safety just by clicking their heels.

Serious journalists and commentators should tell the American people the truth, even about unpleasant and even terrifying things. Placebos and distractions will not save democracy and freedom. America’s fascist reality is not coming at some indeterminate time in the future — it is right here, right now.

More on the fascist decay of the post-Trump Republican Party:

“What voter suppression looks like”: Rejected ballot requests up 400% after new Georgia voting law

Georgia election officials rejected absentee ballot applications in the state’s municipal elections this month at a rate more than four times higher than during the 2020 election cycle, in large part as the result of new restrictions on voting passed by Republican state lawmakers.

Election officials rejected 4% of absentee ballot applications ahead of the Nov. 2 elections, up from less than 1% in 2020, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Most of the absentee ballot applications rejected last year were duplicates of applications that had already been submitted, often because voting groups or local governments sent out multiple forms to voters.

The new Georgia law, SB 202, requires absentee ballot applications to be submitted at least 11 days before the election, while the previous deadline which was the Friday before Election Day. Data shows that 52% of the rejected applications were denied because they were submitted too late under the new law. Another 15% were rejected because of missing or incorrect ID information under the new law.

Most of those people ended up not voting at all. Only about 26% of people whose ballots were rejected because of the deadline voted in person on Election Day, according to the AJC analysis.

“This is what voter suppression looks like,” charged state Sen. Michelle Au, a Democrat.

Though full voter file data will not be released by the state until next year, 19% of people who requested an absentee ballot did not submit one before the polls opened on Election Day, according to the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a voting rights group. Based on 2020 trends, the group estimates that 13% of people who requested an absentee ballot ended up not voting at all this year, nearly double the 2020 rate, Aklima Khondoker, the group’s chief legal officer, told Salon.

The data shows the “voter suppression law working as intended,” tweeted former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Georgia Republicans passed the law after Joe Biden carried the state last November and Democrats won both U.S. Senate runoff races amid an expansion of absentee voting during the COVID pandemic. A record 1.3 million Georgia voters cast absentee ballots in the 2020 election, with two-thirds of them voting for President Joe Biden.

The law also restricts ballot drop boxes, imposes new ID requirements and includes provisions that critics say could allow Republican lawmakers to subvert elections.

Local election officials have also expressed concern that voters could be disenfranchised by the new deadline.

“The 11-day deadline is too far in advance of Election Day to adequately serve voters, particularly when there is no provision for voters with unforeseen circumstances who learn shortly before Election Day that they cannot vote in person,” Tonnie Adams, who oversees elections in Georgia’s Heard County, said in an affidavit supporting a challenge to the law.

More than a half-dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging the law, including a suit filed by the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in June that the Georgia law was enacted with the “purpose of denying or abridging” the rights of Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

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

“In the November 2020 general election, Black voters were more likely than white voters to request absentee ballots between ten and four days before Election Day,” the DOJ suit says. “In addition, of the absentee ballots requested during this period, those that were successfully cast and counted were disproportionately cast by Black voters.”

Khondoker called out Republican lawmakers for rushing through the bill without a “racial impact analysis,” arguing that the increased rejection rates “show just how damaging that kind of negligence can be to communities of color.”

“Since we know that Black voters in Georgia were more likely to request absentee ballots than white voters in 2018, 2020, and the January 5th [U.S. Senate] Runoff, restrictions to voting by mail clearly impact those voters at disproportionate rates,” Khondoker said in a statement to Salon. “In a crucial swing state that was decided by 12,000 votes, this kind of seemingly boring or technical administrative burden that the state legislature placed on voters of color could swing the entire nation’s trajectory.”

Some absentee voting advocates backed the law, arguing that the previous five-day deadline was too short to allow many voters to return their ballots.

“The way it was before, you almost were setting voters up to fail,” Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, told AJC. “That’s actually a best practice to cut it off so that voters are actually receiving the ballot with enough time to get it back.”

But McReynolds wrote on Twitter that because the Georgia law also restricted drop-off options, the 11-day cutoff should be “revisited” to set an “appropriate deadline to ensure voters have enough to time receive, vote & then return their ballot.”

Georgia State Election Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat, said the deadline should be between five to seven days before Election Day.

“Far too many voters end up being disenfranchised,” she told AJC. “It leads to many voters getting their applications rejected and not able to access their ballot otherwise.”

Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who filed a lawsuit challenging the law, said that the increased rate of rejections is a “feature” of the law, “not a flaw.”

“This law wasn’t designed for ‘election integrity’ as Republicans have claimed — it was designed to make it harder for voters to reach the ballot box,” Elias’ voting advocacy group, Democracy Docket, said in a statement.

Kristin Clarke, the first Black woman to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, alleged at a press conference earlier this year that many of the law’s provisions were “passed with a discriminatory purpose” at a time when the state’s Black population and Black voters’ share of ballots cast by mail continues to increase.

“The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at every step of the process, pushing more Black voters to in-person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines,” Clarke said. “SB 202 then imposes additional obstacles to casting an in-person ballot.”

Georgia is just one of a growing number of Republican-led states that passed restrictive voting laws this year amid a torrent of baseless conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s election loss. Garland vowed to go after “laws that seek to curb voter access” in other states but acknowledged that the Justice Department has limited power unless Congress passes the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore a Voting Rights Act requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear any electoral changes with the DOJ. The bill has stalled in Congress after Republicans filibustered the bill and Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have resisted calls to reform the filibuster rule to pass voting rights legislation.

“If Georgia had still been covered” by the pre-clearance requirement, Garland said, it is “likely that SB 202 would never have taken effect.”

More on the voting rights battles of 2021:

Kyrsten Sinema takes a victory lap on infrastructure — but Arizonans say not so fast

President Biden’s signing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was an important victory for his administration and our nation. And, yes, for Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who represents our state. But Sinema’s subsequent media victory lap obscures the bigger truth.

Taken as a whole, Sinema’s tenure as senator is defined by obstructing the change that Arizonans need and that Americans elected a Democratic congressional majority and a Democratic president to deliver.

Consider.

Every single good thing in the bipartisan infrastructure bill (also known as the BIF) could have been passed by Democrats alone via budget reconciliation. In fact, it could have been passed along with so much more that has been left to the uncertain fate of the Build Back Better Act. And it could probably have been passed months ago.

The only thing the BIF actually adds to what Democrats could have already passed on their own is this: a symbolic show of bipartisanship. That has some value for a nation riven by violent polarization, true. And it burnishes Sinema’s cherished brand. But at what cost?

Splitting President Biden’s agenda has delayed it, and risks decimating it. As the New York Times has showed, the BIF represents a fraction of Biden’s original proposal. Allowing Sinema and a tiny group of conservative Democrats to separately advance their preferred items with Republican help has enabled them to undercut everything else: extending the child tax credit; universal pre-K; paid family leave; expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing; extending Medicaid to cover millions more uninsured people; and much larger investments in creating good union jobs to build a clean energy economy. In fact, Sinema has single-handedly removed or drastically curtailed two of the most popular parts of Biden’s plan: prescription drug price reform and making the rich pay their fair share in taxes.

And then there is the overarching crisis of Sinema’s obsession with protecting the arcane Senate rule that Barack Obama called a “relic of Jim Crow” –– the filibuster –– at the expense of so much that her constituents need.

If it weren’t for Sinema’s (and Joe Manchin’s) defense of the filibuster, here are the benefits Arizonans could already be experiencing or expecting soon: a $15 minimum wage, the PRO Act, gun violence prevention reform, measures to secure women’s rights, the Dream Act and broader immigration reform, anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws, and –– most importantly in a constitutional democracy –– protections to ensure free and fair elections in which everyone has the freedom to vote. Measures on every one of these issues have passed the House and have all (or nearly all) 50 Democrats on board. Only the filibuster stops them from becoming law.

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

On voting rights –– a right that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized in his “Give Us the Ballot” speech in 1957, empowers the realization of all others –– Sinema’s betrayal is especially inexplicable and urgent for Arizonans. The same Arizona Republican Party that embarrassed us all with the baseless, taxpayer-funded 2020 election “audit” has pushed through legislation to subvert our elections and reduce Arizonans’ access to the ballot. And the same Republican U.S. Senate caucus that failed to hold Trump accountable for inciting a violent attempt to overturn our election on Jan. 6 has used the filibuster three times this year to block the Senate from even debating compromise voting rights legislation. It is clear that the only way to deliver federal protection for this most basic constitutional right is to remove the filibuster as an obstacle.

Yet Sinema stands in the way.

For someone who, like Sen. Sinema, claims the great John Lewis as a personal hero, the very notion of indulging in celebratory satisfaction with one’s service while simultaneously obstructing the urgent defense of the sacred right Lewis shed blood to protect is simply disgraceful.

We can appreciate the important good in the bipartisan infrastructure act without ignoring how much more good Sinema’s obstruction has stymied.

It’s undeniable: when we zoom out from the headline of the moment, the vast range of life-changing benefits and protections that Sinema is obstructing vastly outweigh those she has helped deliver. That’s not cause for a victory lap for Sinema. It’s cause for an about-face.

Don’t be fooled by the hype. Arizonans deserve much better from Sen. Sinema.

More from Salon’s coverage of the lightning-rod Arizona senator:

“The Simpsons” episode mysteriously censored in Hong Kong

“The Simpsons” has caused controversy in the past with its depictions of foreign countries, including Australia and Brazil. A couple nations even banned the series for various reasons. But this time, it’s Disney+ that decided to hold back one key episode.

In “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” the eponymous cartoon family tours Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, but the Season 16 episode can’t be found on the newly launched Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong, according to Variety.

The crux of the episode focuses on the Simpson family’s travel to Beijing, where they attempt to cheat the adoption process and hoodwink an adoption agent. Shortly after their arrival, the family visits the mummified body of Mao Zedong, whom Homer hails as a “little angel who killed 50 million people.” Zedong, who honed his overbearing power with the inception of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, also oversaw years of mass political violence that killed approximately two million Chinese civilians.

In another scene, the Simpsons pass through Tiananmen Square, where a marker touts: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.” They also confront a Type 59 Tank in an overblown display that mocks the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacres, where student-led demonstrations were violently countered by armed military and loaded tanks.

The episode’s censorship comes a year after Beijing’s passage of a stringent national security law, according to The New York Times. Hong Kong, which came under China’s jurisdiction in 1997, has since experienced decreases in civil freedoms and increases in censorship across news outlets and within the arts and entertainment scenes.

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

It’s still unclear whether Disney+ willingly excluded the episode from its platform or was asked to do so by government officials. The episode is still available across parts of Asia and in Hong Kong by individuals using a virtual private network.

More stories you might like:

Keep your ugly sweaters – Hanukkah isn’t Christmas and doesn’t need to be

Hanukkah is not a Jewish Christmas. It never was and shouldn’t be treated like it is. So pay attention retailers: knock it off. Stop trying to sell us dumb products.

Christmas is its own billion-dollar industry. Nothing can compete with the behemoth that is Christmas. And that’s OK! However, within the last two decades, retailers have realized they had been ignoring a similar, yet untapped market: Jewish holidays, Hanukkah specifically.

Although many large corporations have begun catering to their Jewish clientele, unfortunately, because the options have been limited for so long, we’re expected to be satisfied that companies are acknowledging us. Not just satisfied, but grateful. Willing to reward a token of inclusivity with our money.

So why do so many corporations produce wrong, ignorant items for sale? Because they don’t care about getting things right – just about getting things sold, although I don’t know who is buying these things. It’s also a great way to tout inclusivity without actually demonstrating it.

Isn’t it better to be acknowledged? you might wonder. Something is better than nothing. Not in this case. When it comes to selling holiday products, Jews are often an afterthought. You shouldn’t just repackage a Christmas item as a Hanukkah one – it usually doesn’t even make sense. It’s so easy to get things right that it’s offensive when products are wrong. Not truly offensive like when Shein tried to sell a swastika necklace, but demoralizing for sure.

We don’t need a Mench on a Bench or a Shmelf the Hannukah elf to compete with your Elf on a Shelf, although they might be useful for Interfaith families. We don’t need the same thing you’re selling, just tweaked for one holiday instead of another. Our holidays aren’t remotely similar to Christians’ holidays; they only occur around the same time because one affects the other. Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover seder. Because of that, although they are not comparable, Easter and Passover are linked. And while Hanukkah and Christmas both occur near the Winter Solstice, they celebrate vastly different things.

An eight-night long celebration, Hanukkah commemorates that the oil from a destroyed temple lasted for eight nights instead of one. Is this a very simplified explanation? Of course. But it demonstrates it has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus’ birth – what Christmas celebrates.

The worst of the bizarre mash-ups? The Christmas Sweater. You know it. You love and / or loathe it. The Ugly Freaking Christmas Sweater.

Beginning around 1950, women began to knit “Jingle Ball Sweaters” to give people a festive look for a holiday that was becoming more and more commercialized. They were an expression of love. Of itchy, uncomfortable, unfortunate, ill-fitting love. By the 1980s and ’90s, people were finally realizing that the Christmas sweaters were the great equalizer; a dutiful expression of love. Because they were hideous. And as they fell out of favor, hipsters recovered them, as they are wont to do. The first Ugly Christmas Sweater Party was held in 2002, and nearly 20 years later, they’re still going strong all over the country.

What began as hipster irony somehow turned a corner a few years later and it, the ugly sweater, became its own commodity. No longer ironic, it was something to laugh with, not at. It displayed your faith in a silly way and the bigger, the brighter, the sillier the better. This is all pretty charming and interesting; I wonder if any other garment has been able to do such an about face.

But for Hanukkah . . . what? No. That’s OK. Keep this 70-year tradition strictly for Christmas. Why do we need to get in on this? I’ve bought my share of Hanukkah-themed shirts for my sons and my nephews, but come on; that isn’t edging in on a uniquely Christmas tradition. And you know what? That’s OK! Of all things, Jews don’t need this.

For me, the biggest question is why holidays must be pitted against each other. Or at least compared. Perhaps it’s the easiest way it can make sense to people. If your experience is centered, everything else is “other” and different. It’s hard to understand things outside your realm of personal experiences. Maybe a comparison is the only way to bring them together. While comparing puts them in the same universe, there is not a base truth they both adhere to.

Incorrect symbols and phrases occur so often on Jewish items for sale that Rachel Kenneth created the Instagram account @HanukkahFails which documents the ridiculous, inappropriate, nonsensical fails when it comes to Hanukkah merchandise – including the Bed Bath and Beyond pillow that didn’t quite get its Jewish holidays straight.

Missing the mark so egregiously is actually more insulting than offering us nothing. Corporations are telling us, their potential customers, they know there is a market for Jewish related holiday décor, yet they don’t care enough to spend two minutes on Google to see if matzo was a food eaten at Hanukkah. Even if a person had heard both of those words, they should still take the time to see if they were in any way related.

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

I don’t want to give my money to a company that can’t be bothered to pretend a single Jewish person was a part of designing, creating, marketing, or selling an item. But don’t worry, it’s an easy fix! Within one or two minutes of research, you too can learn if an item is incorrect or inappropriate. Or, even easier: ask a Jew. Literally, anyone who was raised Jewish can tell you if there is something wrong with your product. When it comes to ensuring an article or book is not offensive, sensitivity readers will work with authors. Maybe it’s time to hire sensitivity consumerist researchers.

While we’re on the topic of reading and writing, there’s one holiday topic that is a bit more open to interpretation. Kenneth happens to spell Hanukkah like I do, but if you’ve wondered why it seems like there are as many spellings for the holiday as nights, it’s because Hanukkah isn’t an English word; it’s a transliteration from a Hebrew one. Because of that, there is no correct spelling for the holiday. There is nothing wrong with spelling Hanukkah in multiple ways – Hanukkah, Hannukah, Chanukkah, Chanukah – as long as you’re not using Chaka Khan, you should be good.

More stories for your holiday reading cheer:

Thanks, Marie Kondo: How fear of disorder nearly ended my marriage

Netflix’s most beloved organizer is back, with a twist: the eponymous professional’s show, “Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo,” has shifted its focus from internal tidiness to external tidiness — a category that includes business, relationships and community. For those viewers who, like myself, experience literal anxiety in the presence of abject disorganization, a television show that turns chaos into order in 45 minutes flat is nothing short of a dream come true.

Indeed, while Kondo’s teachings have an obvious mass appeal, there is one particular demographic that is especially drawn to these types of home organization shows: Those who, like me, suffer from a condition called ataxophobia.

The word ataxophobia is derived from the Greek word ataxo–, which means “without order.” Specifically, ataxophobia is a type of phobia in which the sufferer becomes overwhelmed and anxious in the presence of disorder. You can see how watching Marie Kondo transform a house from disaster to spic-and-span might instill feelings of relief in those of us who suffer from ataxophobica.

The reasons vary as to why one might develop ataxophobia, but the root cause almost always includes a history of trauma, where the sufferer experienced emotional distress paired with a messy environment. These viewers flock to the happy endings of “Sparking Joy” with the visions of color-coordinated storage units sparkling in their eyes.

From as early as I can remember, my family’s kitchen countertops were stacked so high with papers and miscellaneous objects that there wasn’t any room to make a sandwich. The stench of cat urine emanated from closets; dog hair caked the blue carpet, and sometimes even appeared inexplicably in my food. I was mortified at the thought of inviting friends over. Sometimes, I’d get so fed up with the mess that I would clean the entire house myself, only to watch it quickly return back to its state of chaos facilitated by my parents.

I wasn’t the only one disturbed by the mess. It frustrated my parents so much that it would induce bouts of rage that compelled them to purge everything via a big black garbage bag, which they filled with whatever was within grabbing reach while listening to music at an ear-splitting volume.

The soundtrack accompanying these periodic purges was burned into my mind to the point that upon returning home after school, and hearing that music playing, I’d quickly reroute and go anywhere else.

The nightmares persist to this day. Periodically, I wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, to a dream of a house, which is always overflowing. Sometimes it’s jam-packed with other people’s things, sometimes it’s overflowing with my stuff. Regardless of the details, the urge to run away is still the same.

But instead of giving into that urge, I would settle myself down for a HGTV marathon and live vicariously through the lives of those on home improvement shows. Which, paradoxically, made my anxiety even worse.

In lieu of dealing with their trauma, many ataxophobics, like myself, are drawn to the unrealistic solutions proposed by reality television. Thanks to mirror neurons in our brains, as we watch chaos turn order, we actually feel like our own environments are being transformed like those that we are witnessing on the television.

Mirror neurons, according to researcher Anna Napolitano, are cells in the brain that constitute the neural basis of imitation, learning, and empathy. In essence, while you are watching someone’s closet being emptied, organized, and redecorated, your brain imagines that your closet is the one undergoing the makeover.

The problem is that these transformations are highly edited and scripted. They create unrealistic expectations, including speed of achievability. “When consumption of these narratives outweigh(s) everyday experiences they can begin to shift our expectations of what is ‘real,'” says Dr. Brendan Rooney, psychologist at the UCD School of Psychology in Dublin, Ireland.

Over time, our brains collect these experiences and formulate a warped foundation of expectations around cleanliness and organization.

Expectations of cleanliness can be the pivot point on which relationships survive or fail. In fact, according to a 2021 article published in a Harvard Business Study, upwards of 25% of divorces are due to discrepancies in household chores.

Paul and I met in graduate school. Being the artistic type, Paul kept stacks of sheet music on the floor next to his piano, and being the ADD type, his apartment was wallpapered with Post-it notes, half-finished projects, and dishes in varying states of cleanness were stacked on the countertops.

He was raised in his parents’ motel, and promised himself he’d never make another bed as long as he lived, and I could live with that. But I did give him an ultimatum: If you want us to ever live together, the Post-it notes have got to go. And no more week-old dirty dishes.

Three weeks before our wedding, I went to Paul’s townhouse to greet him on his return from a week-long trip. I arrived before he did and let myself into the door by the kitchen. But something was very wrong. To my left, the kitchen sink was filled to the brim with dirty dishes, soaking in stagnant water. Bugs bounded over the top delighted by their new habitat, and I felt my brain short circuit. A familiar panic filled my lungs and my blood boiled with rage.

Once I started yelling, I couldn’t stop. And in the end, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I gave in to the urge to run away. With my fiance’s dismayed expression in the rear view mirror, I escaped the nightmare that had narrated so much of my adult life, knowing that Paul and I had essentially reached a fork in the road. And it wasn’t a fork that a vicarious tidying-up show could fix, even if we were somehow lucky enough to be the subjects of it.

Years later, I have come to see this as a learning moment for myself. The first takeaway is that we have to do deep inner work. And I don’t mean the mental masturbation of logic, organization, and negotiating expectations. I’m talking about inner work, as popularized by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, which emphasizes going beyond the behavior — in this case organizing and cleaning — and examining the deeper reasons for what we think and how we feel.

Until you do the inner work, you will, like Sisyphus, continue to find yourself climbing a never-ending mountain, attempting to quell the overwhelm and stress through endless cleaning, organizing and redesigning, but never fully purging the feelings of anxiety and panic when another mess appears.

My method of doing inner work was to try a type of therapy called EMDR (short for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). Research has found that EMDR Therapy is one of the most effective treatments for phobias, and its effects can be quick and profound.

This therapeutic process helped me to realize that the moment I saw those week-old dishes in the sink, I no longer saw Paul for who he was: a distracted and busy person who deprioritized cleaning over his other responsibilities. Instead, in his place was a representation of the life I had promised I’d never go back to. Over the next few weeks of therapy, my anxiety lessened, and I was even able to go to bed without doing the dishes first.

Secondly, Paul and I needed to get back on the same page. Typical solutions for relationship discord often emphasize clarifying expectations, opening the doors to communication, and effective problem solving. But, according to the research of Susan M. Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Couples and Family Therapy (EFT), you will have a better chance of staying out of that 25% divorce (due to cleaning differences) statistic, if you do the work to understand how your partner feels and thinks about things — including cleaning styles. That means realizing that just because you didn’t consider a dirty dish a big deal doesn’t mean it isn’t a big deal to your partner.

By gaining understanding of my story — how my younger self felt out of control and claustrophobic in the presence of disorder — Paul began to prioritize cleaning the dishes in the sink. Conversely, I found myself better able to acknowledge that Paul had grown up in a motel and spent most of his childhood cleaning rooms, thus enabling me to release the judgment that he was a messy, selfish slob.

While being a home improvement–obsessed ataxophobic almost ended my relationship, the process of going deeper, transforming my trauma, and working with my husband, wound up making my relationship with myself and my partner a whole lot better in the end.

And staying away from shows about tidying up also helped.

Want more mental health and psychology stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

Prosecutor requests Supreme Court to review ruling that overturned Bill Cosby’s conviction

In June, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned Bill Cosby’s sex crime conviction in a surprise ruling. Now — months after Cosby’s release — the Pennsylvania district attorney, who first found the disgraced comedian guilty of multiple counts of sexual assault, is appealing to the United States Supreme Court to reinstate Cosby’s conviction, according to Variety.

Montgomery County District Attorney, Kevin Steele — who presided over Cosby’s 2018 arrest — branded the Pennsylvania court’s ruling as “a dangerous precedent” and penned a petition to the Supreme Court. According to a press release outlined by Variety, Steele further argued that the ruling raised “issues under the Constitution’s due process clause.”

“Where a prosecutor publicly announces that he will not file criminal charges based on lack of evidence, does the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment transform that announcement into a binding promise that no charges will ever be filed, a promise that the target may rely on as if it were a grant of immunity?” Steele asked in the release.

In 2018, Cosby was sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia home in 2004. Constand first reported the assault on January 2005. That same year, Cosby struck a deal with former Montgomery County District Attorney, Bruce Castor, who fuddled the case after deciding not to file charges against Cosby.

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

In 2015, when Steele assumed his position as district attorney, Cosby was officially charged after numerous women echoed Constand’s reports and alleged that Cosby had also drugged and sexually assaulted them. Three years later, Cosby was convicted. But the conviction was subsequently overturned in 2021 due to Castor’s previous promises to not prosecute Cosby — which still held precedence years later.

“There is no merit to the D.A.’s request which centers on the unique facts of the Cosby case and has no impact on important federal questions of law,” said Andrew Wyatt, Cosby’s spokesman. “This is a pathetic last-ditch effort that will not prevail. The Montgomery County’s D.A.’s fixation with Mr. Cosby is troubling to say the least.”

To this day, Cosby has managed to keep a low-profile and stay out of the public eye. Perhaps this upcoming petition will change that.

More stories to check out:

This 5-ingredient cream chicken with rich, tomato gravy is a winter weeknight must-have

An aroma and flavor that immediately conjures nostalgia — and hunger — is my mother’s “cream chicken,” which was passed down from her mother, my Nana. The dish is the epitome of simplicity: boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a few cans of plain tomato sauce, some milk, and a bounty of soft, pliant egg noodles. It takes no time at all and is made with hardly any ingredients, but is much more than the sum of its parts.

Cream chicken is homey, comforting, and iconic — a steaming bed of freshly boiled egg noodles, the curlicues dancing on the plate, topped with chunks of tender chicken and a blanket of a creamy, rich sauce, the color slightly reminiscent of the Italian-American vodka sauce, but with the flavors of Eastern Europe. It is best eaten in a large bowl, the sauce suffusing each nook and cranny of the chicken and noodles. It’s a meal that epitomizes the notion of comfort food with each bite and is especially delicious on a cold night. Bonus points if it’s snowing!

When my mother cooks this meal, it is muscle memory: she knows precisely when each ingredient needs to be added, how much seasoning is called for, when to boil the egg noodles, etcetera. This dish is a take on the standard chicken paprikash, although my family’s version eschews the paprika and some of the other common inclusions. While many recipes call for garlic, onions, sour cream, and other ingredients, our simplistic version is all that I can ask for when it comes to this restorative, memorable meal. It comes together using five ingredients, not including cooking oil and salt and pepper, making it an ideal budget-friendly weeknight dinner, too.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food’s newsletter.

Paprikash is a traditional Hungarian dish, which became a part of our family due to my Nana’s Slovak roots. (She would be immensely displeased if she heard me lend credence to Hungary — she was adamant that her heritage was 100% Slovak, through and through.)

According to Taste Atlas, chicken paprikash, also called paprikás csirke, is actually “considered by some researchers as one of the four staple dishes of … Hungarian cuisine.”

If I were to gussy up the iconic cream chicken dish even just a bit, I’d maybe add some melted butter, salt, and chopped parsley to the egg noodles. But truly, there’s no reason to gild the lily, so I think I’ll go on making it just as my Nana and my mom did — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

***

I asked my mom to dictate this recipe to me for this story: she is by no means a gourmet chef, but she took this exercise very seriously. She was exacting and precise, envisioning and recounting her step-by-step process and the tactile cooking experience that she’s become so accustomed to after years and years of cooking this storied dish.

For her — and for my nana — I hope that this dish can become a part of your family dinner repertoire, too.

RECIPE: Nana’s Cream Chicken
Serves 4

Ingredients

2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into large chunks
2 to 3 small cans of plain tomato sauce
¼ cup whole milk milk
¼ all-purpose flour
1 pound egg noodles (the broader, the better)
Kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper

Directions

1. Warm oil in a large, deep pot over medium heat. Add chicken, season, and cook until browned, turning frequently. (You’re mainly looking to get some color on the chicken in this step, not cook the breasts through entirely.)

2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil.

3. Add cans of tomato sauce to pot, along with the equivalent amount of cold water (my mother would always just refill the can with water once or twice and then pour it into the pot). Stir well, ensuring that the tomato and water is mixed and the chicken is submerged.

4. Turn heat to low and cook for 20 to 30 minutes, until chicken is cooked through.

5. Add flour and milk to a small bowl, whisk until fully homogeneous and there are no lumps, and then add to pot. Turn heat to medium-high, stir immediately to blend the thickening agent into the cooking liquid, and let it heat through and thicken.

6. Add egg noodles to boiling water and cook according to package instructions. Drain.

7. Adjust seasoning and add more tomato or water — if need be — depending on the thickness of the resulting gravy.

8. To serve, fill a large bowl with a bed of hot noodles and top with chicken and a copious amount of gravy.

More by this author:

Marjorie Taylor Greene picks a fight with fellow House Republican in defense of Lauren Boebert

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter Tuesday morning and set off the latest round of a public intraparty squable, attacking fellow freshman Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina over her criticisms of Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert’s anti-Muslim attacks on Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

On at least two separate occasions, Boebert tells two slightly varying stories about an encounter she claims she had with Omar on or near a Capitol elevator. In the latest version of her retelling, Boebert told a crowd last week that a Capitol police officer once came running towards the elevator with “fret all over his face.” When she saw Omar, Boebert exclaimed, “Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine!”

Over the Thanksgiving break, Lauren Boebert said she was recently in a Capitol elevator with Ilhan Omar when a fretful Capitol police officer ran up.

Lauren Boebert said: “Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine.”

Boebert then called Ilhan Omar, “jihad squad.” pic.twitter.com/Y7f0nFbnud

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 25, 2021

In September, Boebert said: “One of my I staffers, on his first day with me, got into an elevator in the Capitol. And in that elevator, we were joined by Ilhan Omar.” She adds her kicker to laughter from the crowd: “She doesn’t have a backpack, she wasn’t dropping it and running so we’re good.”

The evolution of this dangerous tale is frightening. Trying to come up with the most bigoted ways to traffic Islamophobic tropes is the brand of the Republican party.

It should be clear by now that there needs to be real consequence for this hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric. Enough! https://t.co/QoZXBud3zH

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 30, 2021

In both versions, Boebert said she referred to Omar as “the Jihad Squad.”

In an appearance on CNN Newsroom this past weekend, Mace said she “100 percent” condemned Boebert’s comments and called on all members of Congress to “lower the temperature and try to work together.”

“I have time after time condemned my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for racist tropes and remarks that I find disgusting and this is no different than any others,” she told Kaitlan Collins of Boebert’s racist remarks.

So Greene took to Twitter to air out her complaints, referring to Mace as “trash in the GOP conference.”

“Never attacked by Democrats or RINO’s (same thing) because she is not conservative, she’s pro-abort,” the Georgia Rep. said in the tweet. “Mace you can back up off of [Boebert] or just go hang with your real gal pals, the Jihad Squad.”

“Your out of your league,” concluded Greene. She later quoted the tweet, saying Mace is “[s]o trashy not worth a spelling correction.”

.@NancyMace is the trash in the GOP Conference.

Never attacked by Democrats or RINO’s (same thing) because she is not conservative, she’s pro-abort.

Mace you can back up off of @laurenboebert or just go hang with your real gal pals, the Jihad Squad.

Your out of your league.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 30, 2021

Mace quickly shot back with a series of corrections – both grammatical and political. “What I’m not is a religious bigot (or racist),” she wrote. “You might want to try that over there in your little ‘league.'”

*you’re

And, while I’m correcting you, I’m a pro-life fiscal conservative who was attacked by the Left all weekend (as I often am) as I defied China while in Taiwan.

What I’m not is a religious bigot (or racist). You might want to try that over there in your little “league.” https://t.co/nIbqjiJaFH

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) November 30, 2021

This is what 🦇 💩 🤡 looks like. https://t.co/nIbqjiJaFH

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) November 30, 2021

Following the video of Boebert, Omar quickly responded to the “made up” story and condemned the racist tropes. “Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny & shouldn’t be normalized,” she wrote. “Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”

Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.

Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny & shouldn’t be normalized. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation. https://t.co/S1APT7RbqW

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 26, 2021

On Monday, Boebert and Omar held a phone call in which Omar hoped for a “direct apology” for the false claims. However, Omar promptly ended the call when it proved that Boebert was simply doubling down on “outright bigotry and hate.”

“Instead of apologizing for her Islamophobic comments and fabricated lies, Rep. Boebert refused to publicly acknowledge her hurtful and dangerous comments,” wrote Omar in a statement. “She instead doubled down on her rhetoric and I decided to end the unproductive call.”

She also called on Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to “hold his party accountable” following his silence on the matter.

There is only so much grace we can extend to others as humans before we must learn to cut our loses or hang up on someone in this case. 🤷🏽‍♀️ https://t.co/bTro64opTu

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 29, 2021

Boebert followed up the call with a video posted to Twitter, in which she claimed that she would “never want to say anything to offend someone’s religion” and called on Omar to “make a public apology to the American people.”

It seems there was an error uploading this video to Twitter.

Here is my full statement regarding my call earlier with Ilhan Omar: pic.twitter.com/DLLtp54gAF

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) November 29, 2021

“Make no mistake, I will continue to fearlessly put America first, never sympathizing with terrorists,” Boebert said. “Unfortunately, Ilhan can’t say the same thing. And our country is worse off for it.”

The omicron variant is spreading rapidly — but doctors note cases so far are not severe

Though it is a truism in biology that most mutations are detrimental, once in a while a mutation comes along that helps a biological agent survive. In the case of a virus like SARS-CoV-2, these successful mutations often make the virus more transmissible, or improve its ability to evade the vaccine. Case in point: The delta variant, which has become the dominant strain just about everywhere on Earth, and is slightly more vaccine-resistant than previous variants.

Delta spawned fear of a second wave of the pandemic, and further fears that subsequent mutations might flourish. And while more mutations have indeed surfaced, including the mu variant and one subsequent delta mutation known as delta plus, none have been able to outcompete the highly transmissible delta variant.

Until now. In the last week of November, scientists believe that viable competitor to delta has perhaps arrived. It is known as B.1.1.529, or the omicron variant. If it outcompetes delta, it could usher in a third wave of global business closures, booster shots, and changes to everyday life for humans around the world.

Ever since the World Health Organization (WHO) designated omicron as an official “variant of concern,” many countries — including the United States — have closed borders to nations where the variant has been identified. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also strengthened its recommendation that citizens get booster shots, although the variant has yet to be detected in the United States. Currently, all individuals over the age of 18 are urged to get a booster shot either when they are 6 months after their initial Pfizer or Moderna series or 2 months after their initial Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“The recent emergence of the omicron variant (B.1.1.529) further emphasizes the importance of vaccination, boosters, and prevention efforts needed to protect against COVID-19,” CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. “Early data from South Africa suggest increased transmissibility of the omicron variant, and scientists in the United States and around the world are urgently examining vaccine effectiveness related to this variant.”

Indeed, as Walensky alluded to, these are preventative measures.

While it is possible that such actions will save the world from another deadly outbreak akin to what happened with the delta variant, scientists tell Salon that it is possible that this variant won’t result in a major worldwide outbreak.

“There is so much we don’t know, so I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions,” said Joseph Fauver, a genomic epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “But I can say pretty confidently the reason why folks are ringing alarm bells over this is the really high number of mutations in the mutational profile.”

Across the entire genome of the variant, there are 50 mutations; 32 are in the spike protein, which is implicated in the virus’ ability to attach and gain entry into human cells. These mutations are shared with other variants of concern, Fauver said.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

“It has a few mutations that are common in other ones, but there are new mutations that appear to be unique to omicron,” Fauver said. “Seeing these recurrent mutations pop up, together, is what’s concerning.”

Fauver described a mutation in part of the virus, known as the “501 position,” that could make the virus more efficient at infecting cells.

According to a study not yet peer reviewed, a separate mutation that omicron shares with mu and alpha may help the virus replicate faster.

Most of the current vaccines train the human body’s immune system to recognize a specific spike protein on the coronavirus, which is how we build protection against the virus overall. However, many modifications to the spike protein could result in the body no longer being able to recognize the spike protein vis-a-vis the current vaccine — hence, the potential for re-infection among the vaccinated. If that proves to be the case, vaccine-makers may have to re-engineer the way that their vaccine works.

Still, it is not known yet if this will be necessary, as there is a difference between observations of the genomic makeup of a variant and observations of its behavior in the real world.

“The 32 mutations across the spike protein doesn’t mean that it evades immunity, but it is the most [mutations] we’ve seen,” said Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco. “It also seemed like in one region in South Africa, cases [of omicron] are going up really fast — it’s really just dominating the screens there — and that made some people say, ‘it looks like this is really transmissible’ because we thought that delta was the pinnacle of being transmissible right now.”

Indeed, the rise in COVID-19 cases in South Africa is disconcerting. On November 16, 2021, there were 136 daily recorded cases in South Africa. By November 25, 2021, that number had reached over 1,200.

Researchers estimate that the R-number was 1.47 for South Africa as a whole, but was 1.93 in the Gauteng province — which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria — where nearly 80 percent of the new cases were clustered. The R-number, which is considered a measure of a virus’ infectivity, is a measurement of how many new people are infected from each case, on average; for instance, an R-number of 1 would imply about 1 additional person is infected for every new case. If an R-number is below 1, a virus will eventually die out. The most infectious diseases have very high R-numbers; measles’ is about 15.

The R-number for coronavirus has increased throughout the pandemic as the virus has mutated. Notably, the R-number for SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of the pandemic was estimated at around 2.5. The highly transmissible delta variant is estimated to be around 5.

The rapid rise in cases in South Africa prompted researchers to investigate and identify the omicron variant, which appears to have emerged in Botswana.

“The Ministry of Health and scientists in South Africa acted quickly on this information to target genome sequencing of positive samples from people who were PCR test positive in Gauteng province,” said Sharon Peacock, a Professor of Public Health and Microbiology, University of Cambridge, in a statement. “This identified a new variant B.1.1.529, which has a very unusual constellation of mutations and a mutation profile that is different from known variants of concern.”

As of November 30, 2021, omicron has now been identified in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, according to CNN.

In Portugal, 13 cases of the omicron variant were tied to the Belenenses soccer club after a player returned to Portugal from South Africa. Before a game on Saturday, 17 players and staff members of the Belenenses club tested positive for the COVID-19; at the time, it was unclear whether those cases were a result of the omicron variant. Reports state that all the players were vaccinated, meaning they were breakthrough cases.

Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a South African doctor treating omicron variant patients, told CNN that her patients are experiencing “mild to moderate” cases of COVID-19. Coetzee said the symptoms appearing in patients include fatigue and a scratchy throat.

As health experts have warned before, the end-game of the pandemic is likely endemicity — meaning that the coronavirus will ultimately be like the common cold or flu.

While an increase in transmissibility for omicron will be a cause for concern, that detail remains unclear.

“I think we’re still waiting to hear more about virulence, and is omicron transmissible everywhere — or is it more transmissible in a very low vaccination country?” Gandhi asked, noting only 25 percent of South Africa is fully vaccinated. “I think we’re not positive that it outcompetes delta, because if we really look at what happened with delta plus, in India and the UK there were clusters of cases that seemed to be rising. It appeared to be more transmissible, but then it wasn’t able to outcompete delta.”

But can omicron evade vaccine-induced immunity? Researchers still don’t have an answer to that either.

“We have to give a little more time to the scientific community to do testing,” said Sasan Amini, founder and CEO of Clear Labs. “Over the next couple of days or so we should have a lot more clarity around the infectiousness, and also the immune evasion.”

Ghislaine Maxwell’s and Elizabeth Holmes’ fake feminist defenses are an insult to #MeToo

In the midst of all the tumult over the pandemic and other ongoing political disasters, it’s easy to overlook the other historically remarkable moment happening right now: Ghislaine Maxwell and Elizabeth Holmes, the defendants in the two most high profile trials in the country this week, both happen to be women.

The crimes the two are charged with are, to be clear, very different. Maxwell’s alleged victims are innocent teenage girls who she is accused of sex trafficking for her boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein. The alleged victims in the Holmes case, on the other hand, are less sympathetic — wealthy investors who were seemingly snookered due to their own arrogance and poor character judgment. (Holmes’ company, Theranos, also harmed ordinary people who got false tests showing results like breast cancer or HIV, but they are not technically the victims in the government’s fraud case.) But in a society where men are three times as likely to be charged with a crime than women, it’s notable that what the two most famous alleged criminals on trial right now have in common is their gender.

To be certain, they have other things in common, as well.

Both are white women from high-class backgrounds. Their alleged crimes played out in the world of famous and wealthy people. Both seem to have a peculiar charm that they are accused of using to manipulate people. And most disturbingly, both have legal defenses that are relying on a glib and phony form of feminism.

Whether it works or not, feminists should be alarmed by this defense strategy, as it has the potential to confuse the public about what feminism is and what it isn’t — and whether or not women should be treated like true equals of men, even if that means holding them equally accountable for their behavior.

“Ever since Eve has been blamed for tempting Adam with an apple, women have been blamed for things men have done,” Maxwell’s lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, said during her opening statements on Monday. She called Maxwell a “scapegoat,” and added, “She is not Jeffrey Epstein. She is not anything like Jeffrey Epstein.”

On the stand this week, Holmes finally unveiled a defense that her legal team has been hinting at throughout the trial: That she is not accountable for fraud, because she’s the hapless victim of male abuse. On Monday, Holmes first testified that she was a rape victim in college, suggesting that is the reason she dropped out of Stanford at 19 in order to start Theranos. Prior to being charged with defrauding investors, however, Holmes had portrayed her dropping out in purely positive terms. She was routinely equated with other Silicon Valley figures— most notably her hero, Apple CEO Steve Jobs — who had dropped out because their purported genius could not be contained by the tedium of traditional education.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Holmes then got into the meat of her defense, accusing her business partner and then-boyfriend, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, of being controlling and abusive. “Holmes testified that Balwani, 20 years her senior, coached her to adopt a rigorous daily schedule, dictated how she should control her body movements and behave as a business person, and forced her to have sex with him, ‘because he said he wanted me to know that he still loved me,'” NBC News reports.

All this may be true, though Balwani denies it. But as an explanation for why Holmes repeatedly appeared to mislead investors, it leaves a lot to be desired. Instead, as with the opening statements in the Maxwell case, the defense appears to be leaning heavily on sexist assumptions that women simply don’t have the agency to be true criminal masterminds, and that all responsibility for that kind of behavior must lay with men. Worse, in both cases, this sexist assumption is being repackaged as a kind of feminism in the #MeToo era.

It’s frustrating because it is true that a lot of women in prison for various crimes probably don’t deserve to be there because their crimes are a direct reaction to abuse or the result of being coerced by abusive men. But those kinds of crimes, such as drug use or prostitution, are often victimless crimes. In other cases, women are in prison for literally trying to defend themselves against abusive men.

Maxwell, on the other hand, is accused of procuring underage girls for Epstein’s sexual exploitation, and even participating herself. Holmes is accused of lying to investors about what Theranos medical devices are capable of doing. These are not situations where someone is using drugs to cope with trauma or being forced into sex work. There’s a deliberation to their behavior over literal years that simply can’t be squared with the idea that they lacked agency and were under some kind of male control.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

These kinds of defenses aren’t really any kind of feminism, despite the trappings. They owe more to long-standing sexist beliefs that paint women as simply incapable of making any kind of decision, good or bad, and instead assuming all female choice-making is secretly controlled by men. While that stereotype may benefit these two women in their defenses, on the whole, it’s very bad for women. The refusal to treat women as legitimate choice-makers, for instance, is used to deny women reproductive rights, job promotions, or even a chance to be political leaders. Allowing that women have the ability to make choices means accepting that sometimes, they make bad ones — or even criminal ones.

Holmes, in particular, has shown an adeptness at manipulating both feminist hopes and sexist stereotypes to get what she wants. She dressed and carried herself in a self-consciously masculine manner when she was allegedly defrauding investors, leaning into sexist assumptions about what “smart” and “capable” look like. Now that it benefits her to look less competent, however, she has adopted a more feminine style of hair and dress. Similarly, Maxwell is accused of using her gender and assumptions about women being “safe” to lure in Epstein’s victims.

Both cases definitely underscore feminist arguments about how gender is more of a performance than a biological reality. But both defenses are depending on jurors not getting that, and instead assuming that women are inherently less capable than men.

Will it work?

Time will only tell, but there’s good reason for feminists to hope it won’t. Women’s equality doesn’t just mean accepting that women are equal to men in intelligence and competence. It also means accepting that a small percentage of women, like a small percentage of men, use those skills for bad purposes. Feminism is not well-served by the stereotype of women as hapless children who can’t be assumed responsible for their own behavior. The trials of Holmes and Maxwell will serve as an interesting test of whether or not this more nuanced view of what women’s equality truly means has sunk in with the public.

Fox Nation host compares Dr. Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele

Fox Nation host Lara Logan on Monday compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor widely known for conducting inhumane experiments on prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

“This is what people say to me, that he doesn’t represent science to them,” Logan said of Fauci during a Fox News interview. “He represents Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this.”

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1464784937010155523

Asked about the Omicron variant by host Pete Hegseth, Logan said that “there is no justification for putting people out of their jobs or forcing vaccine mandates for a disease that ultimately is very treatable.” So far, doctors across the globe have warned that there is not enough data to draw any strong conclusions about the virulence or transmissibility of the new variant.

“What is happening over time is that the entire response to COVID and everything that we were told about it from the beginning is being exposed. And it’s falling apart,” Logan added.

Logan’s comment drew a wave of scorn and mockery from critics online.

“It’s the first full day of Hanukkah, and Fox news host @laraloga just equated Dr. Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele,” tweeted John Scott-Railton, Senior Researcher at Citizen Lab. “Is there no shame?”

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

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., called it “anti-Semitic to trivialize the Holocaust by making stupid ass comparisons.”

“A doctor who makes recommendations on how to mitigate the COVID pandemic is not the same as a doctor who tortured Jews and administered gas in the systematic slaughter of Jews,” Lieu added.

“Never forget that Lara Logan tanked her once-serious career in journalism by running actual fake news on 60 Minutes,” echoed Huffington Post editor Andy Campbell. Back in 2013, long before her foray into conservative media, Logan was forced to take a leave of absence as a correspondent on CBS’s “60 Minutes” show after admitting that a large swath of her reporting on the 2012 Benghazi attack was uncredible.

Last week, as cases of Omicron were first detected in South Africa, President Biden quickly banned travel to and from eight African countries, in a bid to buy the U.S. time for what will likely be a domestic outbreak. As of Tuesday, no U.S. cases have been detected, though Canadian officials confirmed that the virus has made its way to North America.

Globally, COVID-19 has taken the lives of roughly 5.2 million people, around 777,000 of which were from the U.S.

Right-wing moms group wants to use Tennessee’s “critical race theory” law to ban MLK Jr. book

A Tennessee chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty has tried to use the state’s new law aimed at banning “critical race theory” in school to ban a book about Martin Luther King Jr.

Tennessee Republicans earlier this year passed a law in response to the conservative panic about “critical race theory,” barring the teaching of certain concepts in classrooms including “teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes to a specific race or sex; that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist or that a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist,” according to The Tennessean. Critics argue that Republicans in Tennessee and around the country are trying to ban the teaching of history they don’t like.

The first complaint filed to the state came from Robin Steenman, chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Williamson County, just south of Nashville. The 11-page complaint claims that the state’s widely used Wit and Wisdom literacy curriculum has a “heavily biased agenda” that makes kids “hate their country, each other and/or themselves.”

The complaint took issue with several books in the curriculum, including Frances Ruffin’s “Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington” and the autobiographical “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story.” The complaint also cites “photographs of white firemen blasting Black children to the point of ‘bruising their bodies and ripping off their clothes.'”

“The classroom books and teacher manuals reveal both explicit and implicit Anti-American, Anti-White, and Anti-Mexican teaching,” the complaint said. “Additionally, it implies to second grade children that people of color continue to be oppressed by an oppressive ‘angry, vicious, scary, mean, loud, violent, [rude], and [hateful]’ white population and teaches that the racial injustice of the 1960s exists today.”

Steenman alleged earlier this year that the Wit and Wisdom curriculum has “traumatized” dozens of children. In her complaint, she argues that the curriculum spends weeks focusing on “very dark and divisive slivers of American history” without “highlighting the positive achievements, like unity and the overall improvement of the country.”

The state declined to investigate the allegation because the complaint did not comply with the new rules, while leaving the door open for the group to file another complaint. The Tennessee Department of Education said in a letter to the group obtained by The Tennessean that it is only authorized to investigate allegations regarding events beginning during the current school year and that the complaint did not comply with the timeline outlined in the guidance adopted by the department. Steenman is also personally ineligible to file the complaint, since her child attends private school to avoid COVID mask mandates, according to Reuters.

“Please note that in declining to investigate these claims, the department has not made a determination regarding the merits of these allegations. We encourage you to work with the Williamson County School District to resolve the issues and concerns related to your complaint and ensure compliance with state law,” Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn wrote to Steenman.

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

A Williamson County committee is separately reviewing complaints from parents about the Wit and Wisdom curriculum.

The curriculum “is in full compliance with Tennessee state law,” stressed Sydney Norton, a spokesperson for Great Minds, a D.C.-based company that produces Wit and Wisdom.

“Wit & Wisdom is a K-8 curriculum building knowledge, skills and character that features much-beloved, award-winning books from both contemporary and established authors, many of which parents will remember from their own childhoods. The books, which introduce kids to facts about U.S. history, the arts and sciences, and values including strength, compassion and resilience, are chosen to match different ages and grade-levels,” Norton said in a statement to Salon. “At a time when U.S. elementary reading scores need improvement and reading for fun is less common among kids, these time-tested and commonly used materials instill a love of the written word, build general knowledge, and prepare young learners for future schooling and careers.”

Williamson County School Board member Eliot Mitchell told Reuters that Steenman’s complaint is “misguided,” and that teaching about racism in American history is not the same as teaching “that one particular race is intrinsically racist.”

Williamson reading teacher Angela Mosley added that “the bottom line is, we’re teaching facts, and how anyone internalizes those facts … we don’t have any control of that.”

Black residents have argued that the district wants to avoid reckoning with its own past. The area features former slave plantations that are now open to tourists, and the public square in Franklin, the county seat, features a Confederate monument on the site of a former slave market and Ku Klux Klan lynching site, according to Reuters.

“Overall, it’s a beautiful community,” Tizgel High, a Black mother of three, told the outlet. “But these battles, they get tiresome. You’re sort of constantly fighting for your humanity.”

Read more on the conservative critical race theory panic: