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24 best gin cocktails to shake, stir and sip

Gin cocktails can range from refreshing sips featuring mint leaves, tonic water, and lemon simple syrup to the bold and bitter, like a Negroni made with dry gin, dry vermouth, and Campari. In this roundup of 24 essential gin cocktail recipes, we’ll start you off with the basics — a classic (and a frozen!) gin and tonic — before diving into the frothy, fizzy, and everything in between.

Best gin cocktail recipes

1. Frozen Gin and Tonic

Frozen cocktails aren’t just reserved for margaritas. This big-batch classic cocktail is exactly what we want to drink poolside. Or on the balcony of a cruise ship. Or sprawled out on a big picnic blanketon a hot summer day. Or maybe tucked into a blanket on the couch, imagining those things.

2. Gin Fizz with Cointreau, Orange Juice, and Orange Flower Water

Four kinds of orange flavor — Cointreau, fresh orange juice, orange flower water, and an orange twist — bring the flavor of Florida sunshine to this creamy cocktail inspired by the 19th century Ramos Gin Fizz.

3. Frozen Peach Lemonade with Gin

“Sweet-tart lemonade and juicy, ripe peaches are summer classics, so why not combine the two for an ultra-refreshing cocktail? A quick honey syrup brings the sweetness, but you can dial the amount up or down depending on how sweet (or tart) you like your drinks,” writes recipe developer Erin Alexander.

4. The Gin Hound

This four-ingredient citrus cocktail pairs gin, lemon juice, freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, and vermouth. Our team likes using Hendricks for its subtle notes of refreshing cucumber, but choose your favorite.

5. Gin Martini

With this recipe, you won’t only learn how to make a gin martini. You’ll learn how to make the bestgin martini using the right ratio of gin to vermouth and the right temperature of alcohol.

6. Grapefruit Tarragon Gin and Tonic

Tart grapefruit juice is a surprisingly good pairing for earthy tarragon in this delicious twist on a gin and tonic.

7. Gin Spritz

It doesn’t take much to make a spectacular spirit like gin even more special. In this case, a little bit of lime juice, fresh mint, sugar, and a splash of something bubbly go a long way.

8. The Fall 75 – Fall Champagne Cocktail

From Halloween parties to harvest festivals to Thanksgiving, this festive fall cocktail made with vanilla berry syrup, blood orange juice, gin, and champagne is the ultimate way to celebrate.

9. Rhubarb and Rose Ramos Gin Fizz

Gin and tonics are lovable and drinkable year-round, but the addition of rose water, rhubarb syrup, and equal parts lemon and lime juice bring this cocktail into spring territory.

10. Gin Rickey

Is it bad to drink before noon? With a refreshing cocktail like this in hand, we don’t see how anyone could wait until 5 o’clock.

11. The Written Word

“A riff on the classic pre-Prohibition era cocktail, The Last Word, this drink seamlessly blends the citrusy flavors of the Cointreau (which replaces the traditional maraschino liqueur) and lime juice with the herbal notes from the gin and green Chartreuse,” says our editors.

12. Bowie Knife Cocktail

Combine equal parts gin and lemon juice, plus simple syrup, in a shaker with ice and then top with sparkling rosé.

13. Kiss the Ring (a riff on the French 75)

As the name implies, this refreshing cocktail is a summery twist on the French 75. Pair gin with Cointreau, fresh-squeezed blood orange juice, and Prosecco for a celebratory cocktail.

14. Ramos Gin Fizz

To make one of the world’s classiest gin cocktails, combine gin, half-and-half, simple syrup, lemon juice, lime juice, orange blossom water, and egg white in a cocktail shaker. Shake as hard as you possibly can to get a very frothy, foamy consistency.

15. Cucumber-Fennel Fizz Cocktail

“The cucumber is the standout flavor with a hint of fennel in the background. The lime juice and vinegar add a nicely sour edge. The fizz makes everything livelier,” write our editors.

16. Italian Sparkler: A Gin Amaro Cocktail

The more bitter the amaro, the better for this gin and prosecco cocktail.

17. Salty Dog Cocktail

Rebecca Firkser developed this recipe for a staple gin cocktail. A salty dog is a greyhound (that’s roughly one part vodka or gin to roughly four parts grapefruit juice, served in a rocks glass over ice) with a salted rim, she explains.

18. Blood Orange French 75

A classic French 75 is made with gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and champagne. You can enjoy a nearly timeless version by using blood orange juice in place of lemon.

19. Southside

“The Southside is a fantastic cocktail to exhibit the transformative power of mint. At its heart it’s basically a fresh gin gimlet with some mint in the shaker,” writes recipe developer Erik Lombardo. It dates back to the mid-19th century but has stayed relevant more than 150 years later.

20. Minty Orange Gimlet

Think beyond lime juice for the perfect gin cocktail. Muddled mint leaves, sliced oranges, and, yes, lime juice perk up gin and a splash of seltzer.

21. Bowery Punch

Our team assures every host or hostess out there that this gin cocktail recipe will appease drinkers who prefer something lighter and brighter, and those who crave something more robust.

22. French 52 Cocktail

Preparing this aromatic wine syrup requires a little extra effort, but it’s well worth it for this extra-special gin and Prosecco cocktail.

23. Tom Collins

Timeless and always appealing, this four-ingredient cocktail tastes like a gin-kissed lemonade.

24. The Perfect Negroni

Take a sip of the Italian countryside in the form of this simple, three-ingredient cocktail.

How I became the keeper of my mother-in-law’s spinach rice recipe

Good food is worth a thousand words — sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

* * *

I started a pandemic kitchen notebook in April 2020, three weeks into California’s first lockdown. “What We Ate in Covid Quarantine,” I wrote on the inaugural page, adding a jaunty swoosh under the title. Each day, I’d record our meals: cobbled-together leftover lunches, mother-son baking adventures, ambitious holiday projects, and obligatory sourdough experiments.

My notebook was meant to be a temporary artifact, an amusing chronicle to look back on once life returned to normal in a few months. But somehow, almost incomprehensibly, a year came and went, and I was still recording what we were cooking and eating. The notebook had become part of my daily routine, a familiar anchor in an uncertain time.

Flipping through its pages now reveals, among other things, my family’s wild, varied, voracious appetite. It also tells me that there are some firm favorites in our household. Exhibit A: Spinach rice. I see it appear in my impatient scrawl over and over, at least every other week. My kids would say it’s one of my signature dishes, and they’re probably right. But thinking of its origins always makes me smile.

I grew up in Chennai, the land of keerai masiyal, the mashed spinach tempered with red chile and mustard seeds that is a mainstay of the average Tamilian’s diet. To my childhood self, it was the south Indian equivalent of green peas from the classic American TV dinner: the prerequisite something-green on the plate, the unpopular party guest somehow included on every guest list.

It was only once I turned 22, moved continents to North America, and began cooking for myself that I realized how multifaceted spinach could be. Residual memories of keerai masiyal still lingered, but I couldn’t help noticing how often hosts on the Food Network — an entire TV channel devoted to cooking, a revelation for this new immigrant! — reached for spinach to add heft, texture, and flavor to a range of dishes. In just minutes, it seemed, you could turn a few ounces of tender green leaves into the base for a vibrant salad, a speedy side wilted down with garlic and cumin, or a punchy pasta filling when combined with ricotta and lemon. I was smitten.

These days, finding a bag of prewashed spinach in our refrigerator is still pretty much guaranteed. And while I’m happy to throw a handful of it into everything from pasta to casseroles and quesadillas, odds are that sooner rather than later, I’m adding it to rice.

* * *

My mother-in-law taught me the recipe for spinach rice 15 years ago, when my husband and I were still in the somewhat-newlywed stage. At the time, I worked as a fifth-grade teacher, and we lived in a small one-bedroom apartment just outside San Francisco. It was a June afternoon, summer break just a few days away. This meant it was teacher gifting season, that endearing time of year when students troop into the classroom with tokens of appreciation, handwritten notes, and homemade treats. I was squatting on the floor methodically inventorying my bounty to help streamline thank-you-card writing when my mother-in-law, who was visiting from Chennai, beckoned me over to our galley kitchen.

“Let me make dinner today,” she said. “I think you’ll really like this rice. Help me get started?” She handed me a red onion to chop.

I come from a long line of accomplished, passionate home cooks. Things many Tamilian families would gladly buy at a store — pickles, masala podis, snacks, time-consuming desserts — were prepared by my mother and grandmother at home, from scratch. Their marble-floored kitchen was a workhorse, with three stoves, open shelving, and two ceiling fans to keep the hot Chennai air moving. The bulk of their day was spent in meal planning, preparation, and consumption. I arrived at married life a culinary novice, but I was armed with a notebook full of recipes from three generations of the Sreenivas family and a pantry full of spice blends flown in from my mother’s kitchen.

The trouble was: I had barely put a dent in these supplies. My first few years in the States had been a whirlwind of trying new cuisines, and I was enamored by the ingredients and possibilities suddenly afforded to me. Traditional south Indian food was something I craved now and then, but it was also time-consuming and mercurial, so I devoted my energy elsewhere.

My mother-in-law, much like my mother, was a fantastic cook. Her specialty was the food of our heritage: Her rasam and vetha kozhambu were legendary. She could sense my trepidation around these dishes, my fears that my attempts would never quite measure up. And so, on her visits, we stayed in our lanes. She’d cook lunch, usually traditional Tamil food, and I’d make dinner, each meal a foray into food cultures or flavor profiles she found novel and exciting.

This was what made my mother-in-law’s seemingly small gesture that June afternoon feel so significant. It was the first time I was going to learn a recipe from her. We could both see this occasion for what it was: a hand outstretched, a culinary drawbridge lowered.

The recipe was straightforward enough, but it had a few surprises built in. After tipping the red onion I’d just chopped into the pan, the next set of ingredients was a blend of cilantro, fresh coconut, green chile, and lemon juice, something that resembled a traditional Indian chutney. When this purée hit the hot oil, the entire apartment filled with the most enticing aroma: bright and verdant, but with the rounded notes that would ultimately become the backbone of the entire dish.

By the time my mother-in-law added a pile of chopped spinach leaves, my mouth was watering. “So that’s the entire mixture, right? Can we add the rice yet?”

She laughed. “Be patient. Look at the spinach: It’s wilted but still too wet. It’ll show you when it’s ready.”

Dinner that night was a runaway success. The flavors felt simultaneously familiar and new, and I knew immediately it was a recipe I’d return to.

It would be a couple of months before I made spinach rice on my own. I had fretted that the results would somehow not live up to the memories, but my mother-in-law had been right: The spinach showed me when it was ready. Emboldened, I began to play around, adding new ingredients to the original: crisp cubes of potato, tiny bits of paneer, roasted cashew, a handful of corn or peas, a finishing touch of homemade croutons.

As much as it can be dressed up for a more festive menu, spinach rice needs little more than raita to complete a weeknight meal. I started with the most obvious suspect: a mixed vegetable raita, a true Indian classic. A version with grated carrots and cilantro came next, inching closer to rightness but still somehow lacking. I dumped a bag of boondi (savory pearls of fried chickpea flour) into whisked yogurt along with some chopped scallions, which felt like an acceptable placeholder as I continued to experiment.

A few years into tinkering, I finally got my answer. Of all the raitas that could serve as an accompaniment, one made with beets was the clear standout. The sweet undertones of the beets perfectly complemented the herbaceous rice. Chaat masala offered just the right lift. The fact that the colors looked beautiful together on the plate didn’t hurt either.

Spinach rice became my standard contribution to potlucks, initially because I wanted to share a dish we loved as a family, and later by popular demand. It always worked, gaining fans with its combination of punchy flavor and straightforward preparation. I held impromptu cooking demonstrations in our California kitchen and emailed the instructions to friends. During one of her visits from Chennai, my mother, newly enamored by the rice, asked for the recipe. It was the first one she had ever asked me for, a unique reversal of our roles as teacher and student.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the stewardship of this dish changed hands, when it stopped being my husband’s mother’s dish and became mine. But a decade after teaching me, in a surprising full-circle twist, I was on the phone with my mother-in-law when she asked for the recipe. She now associated spinach rice with me, she said, and no longer remembered the exact proportions she had used. Besides, she added, my preparation was an improvement on the dish of her memory. Somehow, in embracing her dish so completely, I had adopted it as my own, paying the best kind of homage to my mother-in-law.

We’ve moved homes many times since the day I first learned to make spinach rice. It’s traveled with me wherever I go, and become one of those dishes that will always taste most like home. On days when I don’t have the energy for creativity or exertion in the kitchen but want something that fills hearts and bellies, I automatically reach for the bag of spinach and the beet I know will be waiting in the crisper drawer. I set a pan of basmati rice to cook, and my shoulders immediately relax. My body knows the way from here.

***

Recipe: Spinach Rice with Beet Raita

Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 40 minutes
Serves: 4

Ingredients

Spinach Rice

  • 2 tablespoons unsweetened coconut, freshly grated (thaw if frozen)
  • 1 small green chili, roughly chopped (I use Thai birds eye chilies, but 1/2 jalapeno or serrano will also work)
  • 1 cup tightly packed chopped cilantro leaves and stems
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 1 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
  • 2 tablespoons ghee or neutral oil
  • 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
  • 1/4 cup raw cashew halves
  • 1/4 cup red onion, finely chopped
  • 6 ounces bag baby spinach leaves, roughly chopped
  • 1 cup long grain basmati, cooked (at room temperature)
  • 1 handful green peas (optional)
  • 1 handful corn kernels (optional)
  • 2 ounces paneer, cubed (optional)

Beet Raita

  • 1 tablespoon neutral flavored oil
  • 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
  • 3/4 cup beet, grated (using the large holes of a box grater)
  • 1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder
  • 1/4-1/2 teaspoons red chili or cayenne powder
  • 3 cups plain whole milk yogurt
  • Fine sea salt, to taste
  • 1/2 teaspoon chaat masala, or to taste

Directions

Spinach Rice

  1. Using a food processor or blender, pulse the coconut, cilantro, green chili, lemon juice, sugar, and 1/2 tsp of salt until they form a smooth, thick paste, using a teaspoon or two of water if needed to get the ingredients moving. You should end up with approximately 1/4 cup of paste.
  2. In a large saute pan, heat the ghee or oil of your choice over medium heat. Add the cumin seeds and cashews, and stir for a minute or two until the cumin sizzles and the cashew pieces turn golden. 
  3. Add the chopped red onion, season with ½ tsp salt, and saute until the onion softens and begins to brown around the edges, about 3-5 minutes. 
  4. Add the coconut-cilantro mixture, another ½ tsp of salt, and saute for 1-2 minutes until the blended paste turns a darker green and most of the liquid evaporates. 
  5. Add the chopped spinach, a handful at a time, letting it wilt before adding more. Increase the heat to medium-high and saute for another 2 minutes, until any excess water from the spinach evaporates. If you’re using any of the optional add-ins, add those now. Give the mixture a few final stirs, then turn off the heat. 
  6. Allow the mixture to cool for a few minutes. Add the cooked basmati rice to the pan and gently fold it in. 
  7. Taste the spinach rice and adjust for salt. 

Beet Raita

  1. In a small skillet, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the cumin seeds and let them sizzle. 
  2. Add the grated beets, turmeric, red chili or cayenne powder, and 1/2 tsp salt. Cover and cook for 2-3 minutes, then uncover and cook for another minute so the beets can give off some moisture. Turn off the flame and set aside to cool completely. 
  3. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk the yogurt with a few tbsp of water until smooth. 
  4. Add the cooled beets and 1/2 tsp chaat masala, and swirl it all together. Taste to check if you’d like more salt or chaat masala. 
  5. Serve beet raita with spinach rice.

Salon hires two award-winning journalists, Alison Stine and Kathryn Joyce

Salon has hired two award-winning writers to fill full-time positions, editor in chief Erin Keane announced today. Culture writer Alison Stine, a journalist and essayist and the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of two acclaimed novels, joins the staff on December 1. Investigative reporter Kathryn Joyce, author of two indispensable reported nonfiction books on the American Christian right, will join the News & Politics team on January 3.

“Alison Stine and Kathryn Joyce are both gifted journalists whose reporting skills and critical acumen will add crucial context and nuance to our writing on the most significant issues, people, and movements in culture and politics today,” Keane wrote in an announcement to staff this week.

“Kathryn’s vital reporting on right-wing politics, and especially its intersection with conservative Christian power, adds another urgently important layer to our in-depth coverage of the American right,” Keane continued. “Alison’s a triple threat: she’s an astute culture critic, an experienced journalist covering poverty and health justice issues, and, as her compelling novels show, she knows how to write a damn good story.”

Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” and “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption,” will join Salon from Political Research Associates, a think tank dedicated to research and analysis of far-right movements and ideology, where she serves as editor of the quarterly magazine The Public Eye. She has been a contributing editor at The New Republic, and her freelance writing has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon and other publications. Her investigative reporting often focuses on how conservative religious and political movements overlap, from the rise of the “radical traditionalist” Catholic Right to right-wing attacks on public education and public health.  

A 2011 Knight-Luce Fellow in Global Religion Reporting, Joyce has also been awarded residencies and fellowship support by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bellagio Center. Her awards include a Wilbur for best magazine writing about religion and a Maggie for reproductive rights reporting, and she has been a finalist for the Livingston Award.

Stine has been a contributing editor at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the associate editor of state and regional reporting at Rewire.News. She has written for the New York Times, VQR, and The Guardian, as well as for Salon, where she has contributed critical essays on the film adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy,” the TV series “Only Murders in the Building” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” She has also covered culture through a disability lens in stories for Catapult, The Washington Post and Food52.

A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a reporting grant from National Geographic to write about issues faced by the deaf and hard of hearing during the pandemic, Stine was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism for her story, “The Last Days of Appalachian Poverty Tour,” published in Topic. Her first novel “Road Out of Winter” won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award, and her latest, “Trashlands,” is out now from MIRA/HarperCollins.

Other recent changes in the newsroom include Nicole Karlis‘ promotion to senior writer for health and science, and Mary Elizabeth Williams stepping away from directing Salon’s on- and off-site community platforms to return to writing full-time on food, health and science, as well as hosting “Salon Talks,” Salon TV’s flagship show.

Food banks are struggling to fill their shelves, and it’s not just supply chain issues

In Tampa, Florida, a food bank is giving away what they’re calling “paper turkeys” — gift cards — instead of real turkeys. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, one food bank doesn’t have cranberry sauce or stuffing. In Alameda County, California, another is swapping out turkey for chicken.

This holiday season, food banks across the United States are struggling to fill their shelves due to supply chain issues, labor shortages, price inflation, and the effects of climate change on our food systems. 

“What happens when food prices go up is food insecurity, for those who are experiencing it, just gets worse,” Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer of Feeding America, told the Associated Press. Feeding America is the largest food relief organization in the country and works with more than 200 food banks. 

The strain on food banks and pantries started at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. As farms, production lines, and shipping systems shut down or operated with limited labor, food production and availability declined. This coincided with a jump in food insecurity as America’s workers were laid off. But now, more than a year and a half into the crisis, despite the rebounding economy and vaccinations, the shortages persist. Experts warn the food crisis will likely continue well past the holidays — and some community pantries are saying they won’t be able to keep up. 

“I’ve been with the food bank for 16 years, and I’ve always seen the supply up and down, up and down, up and down,” Peter Del Toro, director of the First Step Food Bank in Marion County, Florida, told the Ocala Star-Banner, “but I’ve never seen it like this.”

To manage, food banks have taken more from their budgets and food reserves or received money from the federal stimulus package. But some are saying there are limits to how far these measures can stretch, with one food bank director in Missouri telling the St. Louis Dispatch, “It can’t go on forever.” 

According to Transnational Foods Inc., canned foods like pears and oranges are stuck overseas due to a lack of shipping containers. Food banks are receiving less donations than usual. First Step Food Bank, for example, reports receiving just a third of the food it usually does from stores and distributors. Many community pantries are also paying double what they did last year for the same foods — inflation is the highest it’s been in three decades. 

In 2021 to date, food prices have increased by 2.8 percent compared to 2020. The increase could be as high as 3.5 percent by the end of the year, according to estimates from the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2022, food prices are expected to increase by another 1.5 to 2.5 percent. 

Partly behind all this is climate change. Extreme weather is having an impact on everything from wheat to spinach to potatoes. As the Northeast and Midwest regions experience earlier warm days, fruits are budding sooner. An early bud date for fruits like cranberries, apples, and cherries makes them more susceptible to frost damage. On the West coast, heat waves are stressing crops like wheat, while wildfires are destroying vineyards. The Southeast is afflicted with flooding and sea level rise, causing some livestock farmers to seek higher ground for their animals. 

Basically, climate change is putting pressure on an already stressed food system.

“Every consumer packaged goods company is feeling it — no matter what their business is,” Janis Abbingsole, a vice president for King Arthur, one of the nation’s largest flour companies, told the Washington Post. “Mother Nature bats last.” 

Food experts warn price gouging may also be at play: Nearly two-thirds of the biggest publicly traded companies in the U.S. had significantly higher profits this year than they did in 2019, before the pandemic. In September, the White House accused the four biggest meat producers of “pandemic profiteering” for raising prices while making record profits. Tyson Foods, for example, doubled their profits in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to 2019. It’s not just meat companies though: PepsiCo profited an extra $4 billion this year, compared to 2019. Mondelez, owner of brands like Chips Ahoy, Honey Maid, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese, had a profit increase of almost $1 billion. 

All of these factors are hitting food banks hard as they head into the critically important holiday and winter months. Pantries are often families’ last resort during times of struggle, and between rising food prices and energy costs, this winter could be a challenging one for many households. “This pandemic is going to take a long time to climb out of for many families,” Carlos Rodriguez, president of the Community FoodBank in New Jersey told a local newspaper, northjersey.com. “Especially as they face the same increased costs in goods and housing.” 

Investigative reporter David Neiwert: Rittenhouse verdict a “green light for right-wing extremists”

Democrats are being encircled by a radicalized Republican Party increasingly committed to fascism. Instead of organizing their forces and launching a coordinated counterattack, the Democrats are fighting many battles at once — and losing most of them.

Donald Trump and his followers launched a coup against American democracy and the rule of law on Jan. 6. It may have slowed or stalled after the assault on the Capitol, but it definitely has not ended. Trump, the planners of the attack and their other high-level allies and collaborators have not been punished or in any way held accountable. This outcome almost guarantees that the Republican-fascist movement will attempt another coup the next time it loses a national election.

Fascist militias and other right-wing paramilitaries are growing in strength and numbers. Domestic terrorism experts are warning that the U.S. may experience a prolonged violent right-wing insurgency. Some observers have suggested that such right-wing extremist violence could even escalate into a second American civil war.

Republicans are systematically restricting Black and brown people’s right to vote, with the apparent goal of creating a new apartheid Jim Crow-style system where the Democrats will effectively never win “free and fair” elections. This plot against democracy involves voter exclusion, voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, the Big Lie and intimidation of election officials on the local level. 

Republicans are also deploying their street thugs and other foot soldiers to disrupt civil society, targeting school board meetings, library oversight boards and other ground-level government bodies. These attacks involve both violent intimidation and a proactive strategy to infiltrate local government and weaponize it in service to the Republican fascist movement. 

The Republican fascists and larger “conservative” movement are continuing their “culture war” attacks. Their newest weapon is the right-wing moral panic about “critical race theory,” against which Democrats have been largely defenseless.

Donald Trump and his movement command an extensive propaganda and disinformation machine. Its power is so great that it has effectively created an alternate reality for the tens of millions of Americans and others who have surrendered to it. The Republican fascist movement is successfully attacking truth and reality, and once again, liberals and progressives have no remotely equivalent propaganda machine.

Here the Democrats are at another disadvantage: The mainstream news media is a de facto ally and enabler of the Trump movement, having consistently normalized its excesses through chronic both-sides-ism and cynical horse-race journalism.

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

Instead of leading a counterattack and rallying his supporters, Joe Biden has sought consensus. This may be a historically dreadful decision. A new essay at Politico elaborates:

With the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law, Democratic lawmakers and party leaders say Biden needs to relentlessly hammer GOP lawmakers for opposing his economic priorities and hampering progress on the pandemic and inflation….

But Biden has largely shied away from leveling broadsides at Republicans on Capitol Hill, though he’s been less sparing with his predecessor and GOP governors who’ve stood in the way of federal aid to combat the pandemic. Long-time Biden observers and confidants aren’t sure that the attack dog role suits him, or that he will commit to it.

“It’s not [Biden’s] style” to lambast Republicans, said John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff and founder of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. “I think for the president it’s not where he’s comfortable.”…

Behind closed doors, Biden does not mince words about his frustration with the Republican party, which he believes, due to Trump’s grip, has become a threat to the nation’s democracy itself. But he has warned off both [chief of staff Ron] Klain and the White House communications shop from too many direct swipes at the GOP …

Biden’s infrastructure bill is likely to improve the lives of the American people substantially, but no one will feel its impact immediately. Time is not on the side of the Democrats in their defense against the Republican fascist assault(s).

In all, Biden and the Democratic leadership have not fully committed to defending American democracy against the fascist insurgency, and unless they do that, all their grand ideas and transformative legislation will come to nothing.

As shown by their behavior and language, Republicans and their supporters are prepared to fight a life-and-death battle to end multiracial democracy in America. In response, Democrats are giving stern lectures about proper comportment and the importance of so-called democratic institutions. It would be laughable if it were not tragic. 

As political scientist Lee Drutman recently told the New York Times, American democracy is in the midst of an existential crisis and near a tipping point: “I have a hard time seeing how we have a peaceful 2024 election after everything that’s happened now,” he said. “I don’t see the rhetoric turning down. I don’t see the conflicts going away. … It’s hard to see how it gets better before it gets worse.”

RELATED: QAnon expert: Unhappy believers are now being lured into far-right extremist groups

David Neiwert is an investigative journalist and expert on the right-wing extremist movement. He is the author of several books including “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” and “The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.” His latest book is “Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us,”

In this conversation, Neiwert argues that Republicans and their paramilitary supporters are escalating their preparations for a civil war against Democrats, liberals, progressives and other “enemies.” In his view, last week’s verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial will further encourage right-wing terrorism and other acts of political violence, because it will be perceived on the right as permission or encouragement for white vigilantism.

Neiwert warns that the Democrats and many of their supporters, along with the mainstream news media, consistently underestimate the extreme danger to American society posed by right-wing militias and the larger “Patriot” movement.

At the end of this conversation, Neiwert shares his concerns that right-wing political violence in America is almost certain to escalate and that too many Americans, especially liberal political elites, remain in a state of profound denial about what will probably follow.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Given the state of America and the climate of escalating political tension and violence, why were so many people surprised by the Rittenhouse verdict?

It would seem that they were not paying attention to the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman case, where there was a very similar dynamic. The Rittenhouse case also had the added distinction of an incredibly biased dynamic in the courtroom. The Rittenhouse judge put his big fat thumb on the scales of justice and held it down throughout the trial.

But even before that, I was concerned there was not going to be a chance for a fair trial because the judge had precluded the most relevant evidence in this case, which is that Kyle Rittenhouse was deeply radicalized by far-right propaganda about militias and their support of vigilantism. The militia that he joined up with in Kenosha was a boogaloo outfit, and these guys believe they are getting ready for a civil war.

Rittenhouse clearly had a predisposition in that direction, in terms of his thinking and reasoning for going to Kenosha. The judge excluded all that. The judge would not allow discussion about the nature of this militia — it was just called “a militia” during the trial. Moreover, that normalized the idea that militias in America are an ordinary thing. The reality is that militias, which are more accurately described as private armies, are illegal in all 50 states. We just don’t have any state governments with enough courage to stand up and force the existing laws to stop this kind of vigilante organizing.

What is the Rittenhouse verdict an example of?

The larger context really has me concerned. If you spend much time online monitoring right-wing extremists, like I do, then you would be acutely aware that the main topic of conversation for the past year and longer has been civil war.

These right-wing extremists have waiting for a chance to start shooting “leftists” and “communists” and “liberals” and Black Lives Matter, antifa or other groups they target as the “enemy”. These right-wing extremists do not see a difference between Joe Biden and antifa. For the right-wing extremists, any and all of these individuals and groups are all the same, something evil. The unifying and most important thing is a yearning for civil war.

A few weeks ago in Idaho, a young man stood up at a Charlie Kirk event and said, “When do we get to use the guns?” and “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” That video went viral and faded pretty quickly. There was an Idaho legislator who responded to that question as though it was something reasonable.

This desire for a civil war and other political violence is not just coming from the open white nationalists and neo-Nazis and  racists. It is also coming from what I would call the “Patriot” right. These are the Trumpians — the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, the people who believe COVID is a Chinese hoax.

This isn’t an unusual conversation in these circles. Unfortunately, not enough people are paying attention to what is happening among these people. They are all polishing their guns and getting ready.

The Rittenhouse verdict is going to be a big green light and beacon for the right-wing extremists, and especially the Patriot right. It’s just a big signal: You can do this and get away with it. You can gun down leftists at these protests.

The white right and other neofascists are celebrating the verdict. They are full of joy about what it represents.

The verdict is confirmation that they were right all along. The Rittenhouse verdict has given them permission to do what they’ve been craving to do for a long time. The situation is going to become very fraught, very soon. Any time there is a protest, I believe there are going to be guns out. It is going to be dangerous.

Too many among the Democrats, liberals and progressives are eager to mock the right-wing militias and similar groups. The mainstream media does that too, with its tone of dismissiveness. These right-wing paramilitaries and  fascist street thugs are killing people. Law enforcement continues to disrupt their plans for mass-casualty attacks. How can we warn the public about this extreme danger? 

The local level is where they are very active right now. The radical right, particularly the neofascist elements such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, the street-brawling thugs and militiamen who show up in body armor and with weapons, are doing exactly what Kyle Rittenhouse did, but on a larger scale.

These groups, for the most part, do not live in the cities where protests are taking place. They travel to these cities and organize acts of thuggery against the residents who live there. There is a perfect storm here in America where the corporate news media does not do accurate reporting on these events and instead engages in both-sides-ism.

How do the Republican fascists and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber see the world? What is their narrative?

Liberals and progressives do a poor job of understanding their enemy. Liberals and progressives are up against forces that are very formidable, and not to be dismissed or laughed at.

There is this caricature where the average militia member is this potbellied oaf who runs around and spouts all sorts of nonsense. Obviously that caricature has a basis in reality. But in this case, the caricature is based upon the hapless foot soldiers. By comparison, the leaders of these right-wing militias and adjacent or allied groups are very skilled and sophisticated. Yes, most of them are scam artists — but these are scam artists who actually believe their propaganda and other narratives.

These are the folks who are out there radicalizing a large segment of the population. It is my opinion that people who live in cities have a really hard time understanding just how deep and widespread the “Patriot” and “constitutionalist” militia beliefs have become out there in rural America. Such thinking is deep and widespread.

All of these years, we’ve been getting interviews with Trump voters in rural cafés. We’re way overdue for some stories talking about the liberal Biden voters who are trying to survive in these red rural areas where the hostility is just incredibly intense. There we see these huge, modified pickup trucks flying giant flags that say, “Fuck Biden.” That’s what the reality is for people in rural America right now.

I was recently in Boise, Idaho, which isn’t that rural. I saw multiple “Fuck Biden” flags, and of course they were flying alongside the Trump flag. I also saw the black American flag, which basically signals that they’re prepared for civil war and have no intention of showing mercy.

RELATED: Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists’ latest threatening symbol

How do we convince the American people that the threat from these neofascists is real and not to be minimized or downplayed?

Let’s be clear. Many of these people are one, incompetent, and two, totally incapable of ever pulling off what they’re talking about doing. Moreover, such people are cowards who mostly like to bluster and threaten and intimidate, but when push comes to shove they are going to shrivel up and do nothing.

But the reality is also that there is a percentage of those people out there who are armed and who are competent, who have military training in many cases and sometimes law enforcement training. These more serious ones are also capable of handling deadly weapons. Those people are the real threat. When they feel that they have been pushed too far they are going to respond.

We do not know what will trigger the response. It could be any number of things. For example, consider the guy who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. He was triggered by Fox News and Donald Trump and their obsession with the migrant “caravans.” All that fear-mongering about Hispanics, and then blaming the whole situation on George Soros, which has an antisemitic component to it. Instead of being explicitly antisemitic, the right wing’s language is to call Jewish people “globalists.”

When one looks at the whole spectrum of these various elements, on one end there are the neo-Nazi terrorists who are out there plotting, currently being arrested by the FBI for plotting acts of terrorism. They want to escalate the level of chaos and then to replace liberal democratic society with an authoritarian one. The American people need to wake the hell up — and that includes all these journalists who do not understand the real state of the crisis.

Donald Trump and the larger neofascist movement are creating heroes and martyrs to “the cause.” Isn’t this another way of encouraging the followers to obey the Great Leader, because through sacrificing their lives a type of immortality will be achieved.

One of the essential traits of a fascist society is that everyone one is educated to be a hero. That is one of the reasons why the right wing spends so much energy on creating new enemies — some concocted enemy that is exaggerated and summoned up as a monster and existential threat to America.

Every single right-wing extremist I’ve ever known and spent any time interviewing, or have observed closely, conceived of themselves as a hero in some sense. The need to feel heroic is really a key driver to this. The hero myth and fantasy are key to right-wing extremism because of how that helps to radicalize and recruit new members. When they can sell themselves with, “You have a chance to be a hero if you join up with us,” it is really powerful.

Isn’t this also a lucrative money-making machine?

I’ve never encountered a right-wing extremist operation that wasn’t a money-making operation. It is fundamentally all about raking in money from the rubes. There are a lot of people who are extremely gullible for this, especially those who are caught up in right-wing conspiracism.

The right-wing machine is going to emphasize Rittenhouse’s so-called heroism. He is going to make the rounds on all their talk shows. Donald Trump will probably have an official medal ceremony for Rittenhouse or something of the sort. There will also probably be a “Kyle Rittenhouse day” at the next Republican National Convention.

What does the mainstream news media, and the Democratic Party’s leadership, not understand about how the Republican fascists and the global right use popular culture as a weapon?

These are obvious failures of the news media. The edited “Attack on Titan” anime that Paul Gosar tweeted out has a really powerful fascist subtext.

RELATED: Republicans rally to Paul Gosar’s side, refuse to support House vote to censure

People often forget or do not know that 4chan was originally an anime forum. Anime is one of the main ways that white nationalists and neo-Nazis have, over the last 10 years, been leveraging popular culture as a radicalization tool. “Attack on Titan” is incredibly popular on the radical right.

The video isn’t a dog whistle — this is a straight-out clarion horn to the people on the radical right. It announces, “I’m one of you. I’m not only one of you, but I actually sympathize with your visceral hatred of AOC and desire to kill her.” Gosar’s video has very deep ramifications, and there’s very little reporting on that at all.

The Republican fascists, the global right and neofascists in their various forms have a profound understanding of how to weaponize culture in service to their larger strategy and goal. This points to another advantage that they have over the Democrats, liberals, progressives and other “centrist” voices: The right wing is fighting a battle of ideas and identities and emotions. Too many Democrats, liberals, progressives and so-called leftists believe that material appeals and technocratic discussions of public policy will defeat the neofascists and global right. They will not.

These are some of the worst people on the planet, and dealing with them is incredibly ugly business. It is actually soul-scouring. Having to think about such people is not something many of us really want to do, and that includes the Democratic Party. The American people are in for a really difficult road ahead.

RELATED: Democrats and the dark road ahead: There’s hope — if we look past 2022 (and maybe 2024 too)

In addition to not wanting to deal with it, there’s also a powerful investment on the part of not just Democrats, but just about everybody in society. Most Americans pay zero attention to politics. They don’t want to think about these horrible things and don’t want to have to deal with it, partly because they are deeply invested in the belief that things still are normal.

Liberal Democrats in particular are extremely invested in presenting an image of, “We’re going to just keep going on. Everything’s just going to keep working the way it always has.” I’m here to tell you that normal is gone and it is not coming back for a really long time. And it will not come back until we recognize that we have this powerful force attacking our democratic institutions and basically the heart of what America is. We can’t fight it if we don’t recognize it.

Is it even possible to convince the American people as a whole, the DemocratS, the mainstream media and others invested in “normal politics” that the neofascist movement is deadly serious? The levels of denial run deep.

I am of the mind that that there has to be some kind of world-shaking tragedy for the American people to wake up. Even then I am not sure such a horrible thing would be enough to wake people up. Here in this country we have developed an incredible reflex for normalizing the crises and dangers.

I believe the American people need to be ready for mass civil violence, particularly whenever there is any kind of protest. The right-wing types we are talking about are going to show up with guns and they’re going to kill people. Again, the Rittenhouse verdict is a signal for a lot of these guys that now they get to use their guns. Do I think this can be stopped? It is wired in. I don’t know how we can stop it.

Democrats dine in luxury while families struggle — it’s a recipe for electoral Armageddon in ’22

As we hang our holiday lights for a media-programmed return to “normalcy,” it appears we’ve become nonchalant about a pandemic that’s still killing 1,000 Americans a day. The corporate news tells us we care less about this once-in-a-century mass death event, and the gross social inequities it has laid bare, than we do about the price per gallon at the pump or the price per pound for turkey.

The way things are now aligned, with inflation firmly established as the only issue voters care about, Democrats are on a glide path to disaster in 2022 with the restoration of Trump-style white minority rule in Congress.

The Democrats’ wounds that will make this possible have been largely self-inflicted.

Consider New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s near-political-death experience and the down-ballot losses that shrank his party’s majorities in the state legislature, including the defeat of State Senate President Stephen Sweeney, a political titan in the Garden State.

Former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli came close to beating Murphy after the onetime Goldman Sachs partner opted to take his family to their exclusive Italian villa in August, even as the State Department was advising Americans not to travel to that country over concerns about the global pandemic.

Barack Obama’s foundation cheerfully accepted a gift of $100 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose company was charged by the National Labor Relations Board with illegally retaliating against employees it fired after they tried to organize a union.

RELATED: Sinema’s giant flip-flop: She once campaigned on issues she now wants dropped from Biden’s plan

Then there’s President Biden, who has been portrayed (fairly or otherwise) as being out of touch with the average American family’s sticker shock for groceries and fuel.

Where does he go to spend Thanksgiving? To the $30 million Nantucket estate owned by private equity billionaire David Rubenstein, co-founder of the notorious Carlyle Group. According to the Center for Public Integrity, this global colossus pioneered in investing in defense contractors who profit off the proliferation of armed conflict around the world.

Luxury island

As Fox News correctly pointed out, Nantucket was identified as one of four counties in Massachusetts that saw projected food insecurity rates for struggling families increase by more than 70 percent, according to the Nantucket Community Health Needs Assessment. Overall, according to the same report, Massachusetts was projected to see an 81 percent increase in food insecurity statewide.

That assessment is published by the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, the island’s vital health care facility. Its “Mind the Meal Gap” 2020 report flagged that one in four of the food-insecure children on the island were living in “homes that are ineligible for public assistance programs” because one or more residents are undocumented.

Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is the obscene nature of our growing wealth divide reflected more starkly than on Nantucket Island, 30 miles off Cape Cod. Sixty percent of the island’s land has been set aside for conservation and the median home price is $2.55 million. Many houses are held as investments or legacies by some of the nation’s wealthiest families.

Close to 70 percent of the island’s housing stock is usually vacant, while 90 percent of the people who live there year-round, often service workers for the super-wealthy, can’t afford to buy a home. Half that population struggles to pay their rent, according to a 2015 analysis.

“Not surprisingly, COVID-19 was a primary health concern for communities and exacerbated underlying inequities and social needs,” reported the Nantucket Cottage Hospital in its 40-page health needs analysis. “The pandemic brought to light the capabilities and gaps in the healthcare system, the public health infrastructure, and social service networks.”

The hospital’s analysis notes the squeeze play so many of Nantucket’s year-round families face, citing an Economic Policy Institute family budget calculator that found “a two-parent family with one child would need an annual income of $101,224 — not including savings or discretionary spending. High costs often translate into lower-income families having to balance between rental payments or food purchases or result in residents sacrificing sleep to take on a second or third job to cover housing costs.”

Shifting the blame

Beltway Democrats will blame their likely 2022 drubbing on the rise of right-wing racist reactionaries and the Fox News/One America News propaganda calliope. Yet in reality, they will have no one else to blame but themselves. When there was a choice to make about flipping or inverting America’s oppressive tax pyramid, which has crushed working families for decades while enabling the creation of vast dynastic wealth, the Democrats instead picked their donors, those who nest atop the pyramid’s pinnacle.

That was accomplished when they opted to downsize Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better agenda to the current anemic iteration at less than half that amount. All it took was for the campaign donor class and their Wall Street wealth managers to push back against the White House’s initial strategy to raise hundreds of billions in new revenue by taxing the nation’s largest fortunes at the moment when they pass from one generation to the next.

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The cover story was that conservative Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as well as Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, were concerned that Biden’s initial Build Back Better was too ambitious and required too much government spending, which risked accelerating inflation and derailing the alleged economic recovery.

As reported by the Intercept and the Guardian, the Democrats who aligned themselves with this anti-progressive faction were rewarded with millions of dollars in campaign cash from the very interests that want to keep the great American wealth pyramid intact.

It’s just as plain as that. Folks who are already in a privileged position, because they were elected by the people, use their position to amass ever greater wealth.

This betrayal of tens of millions of poor or working families, the population the Rev. William J. Barber II refers to as a “sleeping giant,” comes as study after study confirms the linkage between pandemic devastation in communities of color and our nation’s accelerating wealth inequality and health care disparities.

Perhaps Nantucket Island’s gated privilege portends what lies ahead for an entire nation where wealth concentration continues to accelerate unabated, while prominent Democrats continue to do the bidding of their donors.

Budgets tell us what we value

“As Democrats negotiate the Build Back Better bill from $3.5 trillion (over ten years) down to $1.75 trillion over ten years, priorities like paid leave, free community college, and Medicare expansion for affordable prescriptions, dental, and vision care are all on the chopping block,” wrote Lindy Koshgarran for the National Priorities Project. “Meanwhile, over the past ten years, the U.S. has handed over $3.4 trillion (or $3.7 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms) to Pentagon contractors without headline-making congressional negotiations. It’s part of the larger $7.2 trillion (2021 dollars) that we’ve handed over to Pentagon contractors almost unquestioned since 9/11.”

Koshgarran’s analysis continues: “For that money, the U.S. has gotten many copies of a supposedly cutting-edge military plane that has spontaneously caught fire at least three times, has heavily subsidized average CEO pay of $17.7 million at the top military contractors, and allowed corporations to rake in profits even while they failed wildly in the effort to reconstruct Afghanistan.”

“The spending on contractors continues today at the same rapid clip, accounting for more than half of average Pentagon spending each year,” according to the National Priorities Project blog post. “And with Congress poised to approve a $778 billion one-year spending package (that would be around $7.8 trillion over ten years, even without further increases) for the military, the contractors stand to gain again.”

Meanwhile, we will hear from “fiscally conservative Democrats” that we simply can’t afford paid family leave policies or free community college.

Bending over backward to protect America’s dynastic fortunes will cost us all dearly.

More on the Democrats’ struggles ahead of a difficult midterm election:

GOP sinks to a murderous new normal

The case of Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted in the 2020 murders of two men amid chaos on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, is ominous for the peaceful resolution of political disagreements. The sense of menace arises less from the utterly misguided 17-year-old shooter, or his complete escape from justice, than from the celebration by Republicans and “conservatives” of Rittenhouse and even of the killings he perpetrated.

This telling moment heightens the feeling of apprehension provoked by recurring threats and incidents of actual violence emanating from the far right and then justified, usually with indignant enthusiasm, by Republican elected officials at the highest level. The anger and hatred that have long simmered within that party are rapidly devolving into homicidal rage.

Consider the matter of Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who posted a video that depicted him murdering his colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and attempting to kill President Joe Biden with swords. Gosar’s fantasy bloodbath resulted in his censure. (This offensive cartoon wasn’t even original, ripping off an identical 2016 meme that showed “Donald Trump” attacking “Hillary Clinton.”)

While Gosar’s own siblings warn that he is mentally ill, their diagnosis doesn’t excuse him, or Republicans who voted to shield him from censure. No public official in this country is entitled to promote deadly mayhem against his or her opponents, even as “symbolism” or “humor,” without being held accountable.

All but two House Republicans voted to excuse Gosar’s glorification of political violence. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy remained silent for several days, until he finally issued a weak statement claiming that he had spoken with Gosar, who “took the video down and made a statement that he doesn’t support violence to anybody.”

Not only did McCarthy fail to utter a word condemning Gosar’s behavior, but he promised the day after the censure vote that if Republicans win the House majority next year, both Gosar and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apostle of barbarism, on the lookout for Jewish space lasers, will be restored to the committee seats forfeited by their gross misconduct. “They may have better committee assignments,” said McCarthy.

With his courting of white nationalists and adoption of neo-Nazi symbols, Gosar is a figure whose extremism would have embarrassed Republican leaders not so long ago. Only two years ago, in fact, McCarthy was sufficiently shamed by the actions of Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who openly sympathized with neo-Nazis, that he stripped King of committee rank almost as soon as he succeeded Paul Ryan as Republican leader in January 2019. He basked in the praise of those who had excoriated Ryan for ignoring King’s appalling record, which McCarthy gladly then described as “reckless … wrong … and nothing associated with America.”

What has changed in the past few years is the accelerating acceptance of violence among Republicans since the defeat of former President Donald Trump and his encouragement of sedition and insurrection by his followers, who now form the Republican Party’s boiling base. For McCarthy, it is no longer possible to act with decency and principle against the neo-fascist element in his caucus if he ever wants to be speaker of the House.

That is why the minority leader, at first humiliated and infuriated by Trump’s instigation of the Capitol riot, has refused to cooperate in the Congressional investigation of that grim and terrifying day. McCarthy is a leader only in one respect: he leads in Republican cowardice.

The signals of peril flash constantly: At a public event in Idaho, where a man asked when he could “kill these people,” meaning Democrats, and was applauded loudly; at school board meetings across the country, where “concerned parents” threaten to murder public officials and their families; at the homes of election officials who answer the phone at night and hear obscenely menacing words.

Far worse than the hateful conduct of the Republican rabble, however, is the justification of it by Republican officialdom — and their attacks on officials who seek to investigate and discourage those threats. They have in the front of their minds the example of Mike Pence, the former vice president whose execution by a ravening mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” seemed entirely possible on January 6 — and the recent remarks by Pence’s old boss, who justified the cries to hang him by his beloved mob as “common sense.”

When political violence becomes the new normal, it will come for them too. But that’s what accounts for Kevin McCarthy’s cowardice. For all the bluster and the filibuster, he’s sweating with fear. So, trying to protect himself, he joins the mob. It is a familiar story that never ends well.

“Triumph for democracy”: Socialist candidate takes commanding lead in Honduran election

Leftist presidential candidate Xiomara Castro took a decisive lead in Honduras’ election on Sunday, setting her up to defeat the right-wing incumbent party’s candidate — though progressive observers stressed the need to remain vigilant as ballots continue to be counted and reactionary forces ramp up misinformation following an apparently unsuccessful attempt to suppress voting.

A victory by Castro would represent a repudiation of U.S. intervention in Central America. Honduras’ potential next president is the wife of Manuel Zelaya, the country’s former progressive president who was deposed in a Washington-backed coup in 2009 — after which narco-violence surged under the watch of an authoritarian neoliberal regime installed by the Obama administration and supported by subsequent administrations.

If she wins, Castro would be the first Honduran president to be democratically elected on a socialist platform, as well as the first woman to lead the country. With just over half of ballots processed, the Libre Party’s Castro had garnered 53.6% of the vote, compared with 34% for Nasry Asfura, the candidate from the right-wing National Party, which has ruled the country for the past dozen years.

Castro “hopes to restore diplomatic relations with China, legalize abortion and same-sex marriage, and defend the interests of the poor and working class,” according to Telesur.

Calling the 62-year-old democratic socialist’s solid performance a “triumph for democracy over corruption and election irregularities,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in a statement that “Xiomara Castro’s likely victory is a testament to the will of the Honduran people to have their voices heard and their votes counted.”

RELATED: Cubans definitely want change — but not necessarily regime change

“Democracy remains very fragile in Honduras,” Weisbrot warned. “This is a country that saw the military kidnap the president at gunpoint and fly him out of the country just 12 years ago, and there was very strong evidence that the elections of four years ago were stolen” by the ruling National Party.

Indeed, Castro’s current lead materialized despite the best efforts of the incumbent right-wing government to suppress participation.

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

Progressive International (PI), whose new observatory to protect democracy sent delegates to Honduras to monitor the electoral process, drew attention to reports that the ruling National Party was attempting to buy votes.

On Sunday morning, Salvador Nasralla — a former presidential candidate who led Honduras’ 2017 election by five percentage points with 57% of votes counted before a 30-hour delay and other “technical failures” ultimately resulted in a National Party victory — said that the website of the National Electoral Council (CNE) had been “intentionally taken down” and that right-wing officials were giving voters inaccurate information about polling places.

Hours later, CNE announced that its server had been attacked, which PI said “has prevented voters from locating their polling station,” causing long lines to form.

With polls still open and before a single ballot had been counted, the incumbent right-wing government said on Sunday afternoon that Asfura had won — in violation, Telesur reported, of “national electoral law prohibiting the premature claiming of victory before the competent authorities release their preliminary results … which the CNE did just after 8:00 pm local time.”

Journalist Denis Rogatyuk warned that “the party that turned Honduras into a narco-state will be unlikely to relinquish power peacefully.”

The ruling National Party’s alleged vote-buying and premature victory claims, along with the yet-to-be-resolved attacks on the CNE’s website, weren’t enough to deter hundreds of thousands of Honduran voters from casting ballots for the opposition Libre Party. Turnout was over 60%.

“Hondurans flocked to the polls in near-record numbers to decide the successor of the deeply unpopular current president, Juan Orlando Hernández,” the New York Times reported. “Hernández’s presence was palpable at the polls after his government spent the past eight years dismantling the country’s democratic institutions and allowing corruption and organized crime to permeate the highest levels of power.”

As the election progressed, Castro also declared victory. Once the preliminary tally showed Asfura falling behind by a significant margin, she told “jubilant supporters at her campaign headquarters on Sunday night that she would begin forming a government of national reconciliation starting on Monday,” the Times reported. 

“We have turned back authoritarianism,” Castro told the crowd in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. “Out with corruption, out with drug trafficking, out with organized crime.”

Although Castro has taken a commanding lead, it could take days for results to be finalized. In the meantime, electoral observers have emphasized the need to remain vigilant in the coming hours.

Earlier this morning, for instance, a Honduran newspaper shared a misleading graph that suggests Asfura is winning even as he trails Castro by roughly 20 percentage points. Jumping at the chance to use a pun, PI general coordinator David Adler described the chart as an example of “graphic violence.”

While Castro’s advantage is much larger than the opposition’s early lead in 2017, making it more difficult for right-wing forces to subvert the election, The Guardian noted that a close outcome four years ago “led to a contested result and deadly protests after widespread allegations of irregularities.”

According to Telesur, “Fears of the military and business elite repeating a similar scenario to the one from 2017 in which electoral fraud and manipulation stole the presidency from liberal candidate Salvador Nasralla (who has backed Castro) and gave it to the right-wing narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández have, until now, not materialized, with Hondurans proving ready to fight for the integrity of their democratic process in the streets and with their life, if necessary, as recent history has shown.”

As Weisbrot noted, “The U.S. government supported the 2009 military coup in various ways, and so it will be good if members of Congress who favor democracy will make sure that the executive branch here respects democracy in Honduras more than they have in the past.”

“On the positive side,” said Weisbrot, “members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have taken steps to hold the OAS accountable for its role in the 2019 military coup in Bolivia, so there are pro-democracy forces in Congress.”

“The international community,” he added, “should be on guard and ready to defend Honduras’ democratic institutions, and the will of its people, against any extra-legal efforts to destabilize or overthrow the new government.”

More from Salon on international relations and the comeback of socialism:

Capitol rioter busted after friend accidentally uses his real name on InfoWars call-in show

A 26-year-old California man is facing federal charges over his participation in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, The Orange County Register reports.

Edward Badalian and Daniel Rodriguez are facing charges that include conspiracy, obstruction, entering a restricted building and theft and destruction of government property.

In a group chat they created on Telegram, Badalian and Rodriguez encouraged others to attend the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol riot. In one message, Badalian allegedly wrote “we need to violently remove traitors and if they are in key position rapidly replace them with able-bodied patriots.”

Prosecutors say the Telegram chat group was used to “advocate violence against certain groups and individuals” who “supported” the results of the 2020 presidential election.

During the riot, prosecutors allege that Rodriguez threw a flagpole at police, set off a fire extinguisher toward them, and then used a “small, black electroshock weapon” on the back of an officer’s neck.

In the days after the riot, Badalian appeared on the right-wing InfoWars program using the pseudonym “Turbo” to discuss video footage that allegedly showed him fighting someone he claimed to be “Antifa” who was disguised as a Trump supporter.

Later in during the call-in program, another person discussing the same video footage referred to him as “Ed” instead of “Turbo.” Prosecutors say Badalian and Rodgriguez later went to the home of the person who blurted out Badalian’s first name and warned them against using his actual name when discussing the riot. They also told the person to delete photos that showed them participating in the riot.

As it turns out, the person who mistakenly said Badalian’s first name was salon owner Gina Bisignano, 52, who went viral for spewing homophobic slurs and other hateful rhetoric during an anti-lockdown protest back in December of last year. She was also arrested for participating in the Capitol riot.

Top Missouri paper calls on Senate to investigate Josh Hawley over his Jan 6th actions

On Sunday, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called on the U.S. Senate Ethics Panel to investigate Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., over any possible involvement he may have had in the Jan 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Hawley, whose political future will be haunted by a photo of him giving a raised fist to insurrectionists as they stormed the halls of Congress has been excoriated by the paper’s editors multiple times, but Sunday’s call for an investigation ramps up their attacks on the home state senator.

According to the board, “Ten months after a group of Senate Democrats lodged ethics complaints into the conduct of Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas regarding their roles in sparking the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Senate Ethics Committee has shown no sign of movement.,” with the editors saying it is “long past time” to take a hard look at both Republican senators.

“Jan. 6 wasn’t a fantasy; it was real, and the culpability of these two senators must be determined,” they wrote. “Hawley and Cruz were the only two senators to object to certification of Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 election results, citing (with zero evidence) supposed concerns about the election’s integrity. That was the same baseless, toxic nonsense then-President Donald Trump had been spewing since before the election. Such talk whipped up the mob of Trump loyalists to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Adding, “Even after the violence, he persisted in voting with just five other senators to continue promoting Trump’s big lie that Biden’s win was illegitimate,” the editors wrote, “If he had an ounce of honor, he’d have heeded our Jan. 7 call for his resignation (we certainly weren’t alone on that). But at this point, why even talk about honor?”

Writing that, “Just because there’s a mechanism in place allowing senators to object to election results doesn’t mean it’s OK for Hawley to abuse that process for crass political gain,” the editorial concluded, “Hawley and Cruz have the right to defend themselves from the allegations — but so far, they haven’t even had to. The Ethics Committee should stop sitting on this.”

You can read the whole piece here.

“14 Peaks” and “Torn” deliver intense, brutal yet ultimately rewarding mountain-climbing experiences

With the success of films like “Free Solo” and the popularity of the “Reel Rock Film Festival,” and the recent release of “The Alpinist,” climbing films have developed into a full-fledged genre. Two new documentaries about mountaineering are being released back to back this week.  

Netflix’s “14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible” showcases the remarkable accomplishment of Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal (“Nims”) Purja to climb all 14 mountains with peaks higher than 8,000 meters in seven months. This is dangerous; the “Death Zone” is the elevation above 8,000 meters, where cold, wind, and avalanches can kill, and oxygen is scarce. Nims’ is taking supplementary oxygen as protection after reaching the 8,000-meter mark. (Alpine style climbing is done without oxygen.)

Fun Fact: Reinhold Messner, who is interviewed in the documentary, was the first person to achieve this feat; it took him 16 years. Jimmy Chin, (“The Rescue”) explains that a normal expedition takes two months to complete. So yes, this is ambitious, to say the least. 

RELATED: Why explorer Vanessa O’Brien left the corporate world to climb the world’s tallest peaks

Nims is not necessarily self-interested; his goal is to promote Nepali mountaineering, acknowledging it is teamwork and leadership that generates success. And he pays tribute to the Sherpas who are essential for doing the work. But the mission, dubbed “Project Possible,” is risky, some even call it “crazy.”

“14 Peaks,” directed by Torquil Jones, chronicles Nims’ climbs, which are done in three phases — in Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet/China. The climbs themselves make up too little of the film, which is disappointing for armchair enthusiasts. The breathtaking visuals are compensation, though, and it is thrilling to see the mountaineers use a ladder to cross a crevasse, or to watch the team scale up a snowy face.

 Much of the first half of the documentary profiles Nims, who has a “driven” personality. He talks about losing his belly fat (and is seen exercising to do so). He describes his Gurkha training and work for the U.K. special forces (cue video of him parachuting out of an airplane). An animated sequence depicts a close call with death he experienced. Nims’ wife, brother and mother, (the latter is in ill health), are also interviewed, suggesting the film could have been retooled as a profile of him and been just as interesting.

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There is some drama on the peaks., Nims does one climb, up Kangchenjunga, while hungover — and in one day, rather than in stages. But he experiences high-altitude cerebral edema on the way down, meeting — and rescuing — another mountaineer who suffers from the same condition. Nims also slips on his way down another peak (shown in animation) that emphasizes his mantra that the mountains do not discriminate; the only rule is: You give up, you die.

It is this inspirational aspect to Nims’s story that makes “14 Peaks” worthwhile. He helps a handful of climbers stuck at base camp on K2 realize their dream. He has an infectious personality and is quick at troubleshooting when things do not go as planned — as when his window to scale a particular peak is limited, or even closed. 

It is not a spoiler to reveal that Nims achieved six mountaineering records climbing all 14 peaks. What would be unfortunate is if Nims had not dared to dream — or do this at all. And if the uplifting “14 Peaks” motivates viewers to get off the couch and go climb a mountain, well, that’s a win.  

Watch the trailer for “14 Peaks” below, via YouTube.

In contrast, Nat Geo’s “Torn,” about the late mountaineer Alex Lowe, is an intimate, intense, and emotional documentary. The film, directed by Alex’s eldest son, Max, has a three-act structure, which starts by introducing Alex, an esteemed climber who achieved celebrity status long before he died, tragically, at age 40. Footage of him swinging from a cliff face shows his unbridled joy and calculated risk. 

Significantly, Alex was one of the few men in the climbing community who had kids. He was particularly conflicted about pursuing his passion and being a husband to his wife, Jenni, and father to his sons, Max, Sam, and Isaac. Max juxtaposes a Christmas concert Alex missed with a scene of Alex singing a carol while in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. Lowe also nicely uses family slides to create side-by-side images of Alex with and apart from his family and others — such as his best friend Conrad Anker (who was in the 2015 climbing doc “Meru.”) 

Anker plays a critical role in the story. He was with Alex on the fateful Shishapangma trip in 1999 when an avalanche took Alex’s life and also killed cameraman David Bridges. Anker, who went in a different direction from the two men, survived and suffered from tremendous survivor’s guilt, even having suicidal thoughts. A lengthy recording of footage from the expedition is seen in “Torn,” and it is painful to watch.

However, Lowe uses the aftermath of this event to show how both Alex’s family and Anker processed their grief together. While those in the climbing community are likely aware of how everyone coped, viewers unfamiliar with the story will find “Torn” to be quite poignant — especially as the film enters its third act. In 2016, Alex’s body is found along with Bridges’ by a climber. The discovery allows the Lowes and Anker to experience a unique kind of closure and catharsis.

While “Torn” is specific to Alex’s family, the power of the film is its universal theme. Lowe shows how one can find a healing power in familial love, as well as the strength to overcome loss. Yes, the situation Max faces is unique to him — and he is using the film to interrogate his family (and Anker) about their feelings and experiences. That may be selfish, or self-serving, but this form of cinema-therapy is ultimately rewarding for both Lowe and viewers.

“14 Peaks” is currently streaming on Netflix. “Torn” is in theaters Friday, Dec. 3. Watch a trailer for the film below, via YouTube.

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“Sex Cult Nun” author on recovering from a cult: “You get to write a new story”

“I own me.” This sentence, comprised of three short words, seems inarguable. But when attorney and author Faith Jones says them aloud, as she does in her 2019 TED Talk and in her new book, “Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult,” they symbolize a lifetime of experience, learning and healing.

Jones was born into and raised within the powerful Children of God, later known as the Family, a religious group founded by her grandfather David Berg. She, like her parents and everyone else in their peripatetic community, was expected to be obedient and to distrust outsiders. It was, perhaps inevitably, a climate rife with abuse and exploitation. That Jones struck out on her own, attending Georgetown University and eventually becoming an attorney, is a testament to her internal strength and resolve. That she has since made it her mission to empower other women to similarly claim ownership of their lives is remarkable.

Salon spoke to Jones recently about her memoir, and her lessons in creating healthy boundaries and recovering from the unimaginable.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I want to start with this mantra of yours, this mission of yours, that you discuss in the book. What does it mean when you say, “I own me?”

“I own me” is recognizing that I have a property right in my body. My body is my sole property, which means like other property, nobody gets to tell me what to do with it. Without my express permission, nobody gets to access it. Nobody gets to enforce their will on me without my willing, free, unpressured permission. To me, that was such a revolutionary concept because I had grown up being told directly my whole life that my body was not my own. That it belonged to God, but really they meant it belonged to the group, and they got to tell me what to do with it. When I figured this out, that was the key for me to understand what had gone wrong in this group and in so many of these organizations, whether religious or family or governmental, where they try to take away our right of ownership in our body.

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The way that you discuss the difference between what you were told but what your gut was telling you is something that not just people who grew up in cults can relate to. Being told that what you feel is not right. “Don’t trust yourself, we’re going to tell you what you feel.” Talk to me about how you came to that understanding, and the people along the way who helped you trust yourself.

Learning to trust yourself is a continuing journey for all of us, especially for people who’ve experienced abuse and exploitation. That’s one of the hardest lessons that we have to come to terms with, trusting ourselves. That is one of the reasons why this framework is so powerful because I believe it gives us the tools to understand and to trust that, if I’m feeling pressured, if I’m feeling a certain way, then I already know that’s a red flag, that this is a violation. Something is happening here.

That’s critical, because we’re so used to being told that what we feel isn’t true. So we try to keep trying to dismiss it instead of accepting it. One of the biggest issues we have is creating healthy boundaries when you’ve grown up without having boundaries, or when those boundaries have been violated. That’s really what this framework is about — helping us who are recovering, but helping society in general, because these are the foundational principles of all society.

Later on in the book, you step back and look at your parents to get clarity on where they were coming from — because of what they brought to their parenting experience in this really, really strange environment. To see these patterns and where they come from, and to know that they don’t come out of nowhere is important. How do you get to that place, though? Particularly for those who are survivors — to distinguish between understanding and distancing — because you’ve had to set those boundaries.

I’ve been on this journey of healing for many years, and there were certain things that were key turning points for me in that. One of the things that I read was Alice Miller. She’s a psychologist, and she wrote a great book called “The Drama of The Gifted Child” and other work like that, where she looks at the effects of this type of abuse and where it comes from and how it persists generationally. Oftentimes abusers are people who have also been abused. That enabled me to take a step back and look at that, and say, “I can see where they’re coming from, but I don’t want to continue that pattern.” That is the key responsibility of each of us, to step up and say, “Okay, I see what happened. I see my parents and the maybe abusive patterns that they had. It probably came from their parents and so on, but I am my own person and I get to step forward and say, it stops here. I get to work on the change in myself.”

Writing this book, I spent hours interviewing my parents and other people to make sure my memories were accurate and details were correct. That was one of the interesting things I learned writing this book, just hearing more of the background stories to some of these things that happened. It gave me an even clearer understanding of things that I didn’t really understand about them, their past experiences, what it was like for them in the moment they were going through. For instance, with my mother had basically left me for two months when I was a baby.

I was like, “How could you do that? How could anyone do that to their baby?” Understanding what had happened to her and how she had been threatened she could lose me if she didn’t submit to this helped shift my mindset. Oftentimes, we’re trapped in the narrative we know. Taking that time to explore it more can also bring us a kind of release because our reality is our story, the story we tell ourselves.

[RELATED: “Nobody joins a cult. They join a group of friends”: What went down in the “Sarah Lawrence cult”]

Your story is so unique, and yet, the scale was shocking to me. The number of people involved, the global scope of it, was huge.

Yes. Something like over 10,000 members, but thousands more moved in and out of the group over forty, fifty years. But it’s much bigger than that. I talked to so many of my friends, men and women, who grew up in normal society and many, many have experienced child sexual abuse. Many have experienced some form of sexual assault, rape, sexual harassment, control. So many have experienced abusive beatings from their fathers or father figures.

The cult didn’t start this. The cult took things that existed in society and it created a microcosm and an isolation and a validation that allow people to take it more to an extreme. But this stuff exists throughout society, which is why I’m so passionate about saying these are the principles we need to get really clear on and understand. That’s the only way we can kind of inoculate people against these type of cults and anywhere in society where we say, “Hey, are they trying to get you to give over your body, your free will? Are they using manipulation? Are they trying to get you to give over your creations and saying you don’t own this? Are they violating these principles?” Red flag, right?

People involved in these cults at the higher levels, or involved in these power dynamics in abusive relationships as the antagonists, don’t see themselves as villains. The question that a lot of people reflexively ask of the victims or of the survivors is, “Well, why did you stay?” without understanding the escalation. Without understanding, “This was also the person who was caring for me. This is also the person who I was dependent upon.” That’s a crucial element, whether it’s a cult or a marriage or a job.  

You said something really important. These people don’t see themselves as that. In fact, they see themselves as very, very good. “I am this great, good person. I am this prophet. I am hearing from God.” They have this vision of themselves. Most people in the world, they don’t see themselves as bad or evil, even murderers and serial killers have this vision of somehow, “I’m doing this for a greater, a better, higher purpose.” Which is why you need a standard and principles. Because when you can take it, you can say, “Hey, I’m hearing from God, and God tells me to do this thing.” If it’s a violation of one of these principles, you already know, I’m in the wrong boat right away.

What happened to my mother, for instance. She joined this group. It wasn’t a sex cult when she joined. It was this biblical missionary group that was out to save the world. It demanded extreme sacrifice and loyalty from its followers. But the sex stuff came in quite a few years later. It was seeded in slowly into the indoctrination of the people by my grandfather. He didn’t just change overnight. He presented all of these letters, preparing his followers’ minds over a year to get them into a place, prepping them for this.

I interviewed cult survivor Daniel Barban Levin recently, and he said, “Nobody joins a cult. They join a group of friends.” Nobody signs up for an abusive relationship either. Nobody says, “I’m going to start a relationship with this person because this seems like someone who will really, really hurt me.”

So let’s talk about those principles. Whether you are in a group or in a one-on-one relationship, there are some of these red flags that you need to be thinking about and have top of mind.

It’s first stating, “I own my body. It’s my sole property.” Therefore I own what I create with it, whether it’s my services or products or invention. And then once I create something — and this is a constitutional right — I have the right to contract. I have the right to make a deal to exchange.

I think one of the main things that gets violated is there are five elements of any good exchange or contract. One of the main elements of this is something called no undue pressure. Because what is blackmail? It’s blackmail when you apply undue pressure to somebody. For instance, in the group, I was subjected to pressure to have to have sex with other members where I really didn’t want to, but I was told that I had to for God, or to avoid punishment basically.

When you coerce somebody into doing something through either implicit or direct threats, that is not a free choice. That is not a free exchange. You violated one of those principles. In that particular case that could even be considered rape. And then the final element is the effect. What is the impact? How much responsibility do I bear for impact beyond my direct control? My grandfather, how much responsibility does he bear, not just for the children that he molested himself, but for espousing those ideas in such a way that other people did that as well.

[RELATED: Lauren Hough on her new book, our underpaid workforce and how “every American” can relate to cults]

So that principles, and the red flags are: They put it always in very noble terms, that your body is for service or instead of saying, “You own you. You get to choose. You have free choice, and as long as your choice is not violating other people’s rights, that’s fine.” Nobody gets to tell you who you are and what you need to do. That is your choice.

There’s another thing, how vulnerable you make yourself in this story and your realization that, “What happened to me, that’s called rape.” For a lot of people, when they have that dawning, it’s not necessarily because someone has jumped out of a bush in a dark alley. It’s well after the fact. It’s so important for someone reading that to understand that’s often what it’s like.

I think that’s true. I think people who experienced child abuse are the same, they don’t realize it until much later what happened to them and what was taken from them. As to how I get through it, there’s a few resilience techniques which really helped me to come through it in a different way, that I used without realizing what I was doing. But also I didn’t just sit around. I went after healing and happiness like a bulldog.

I was like, “I’m not going to suffer. This is not what life is for. Life is to grow.” So yeah, bad stuff happened to me and I’m going to figure out how to heal in myself. That’s what I did. I talk about some of the most powerful techniques that I used to heal and to recover. I wrote a guide for women called, “I Own Me.” Talking about those experiences, talking about this framework and how learning to see ourselves and our bodies in a different way, really helps. There are certain psychological techniques that I used. I was helped with therapy to do certain healing processes that really helped to clear out I think some of the residual trauma locks that were in there.

Even after recognizing what had happened to me, I did not think of myself as a victim. That wasn’t the role I wanted. That wasn’t the part I wanted to play. I could say, “This bad thing happened to me, but here I am taking control of my life. This is my life now.” I wasn’t going to live in that story. I didn’t talk about it all the time. In a healing process, it’s one thing to bring it up and go through it, which you need to do, to access it. Some people don’t do the healing because they’re too afraid to access it, but you don’t have to keep living in that story. You get to write a new story. And that’s what I decided.

Going back and writing this book was tough, because you don’t only have to write your most painful experiences once. You go over them a hundred times because you edit them and then edit them again and then edit them again. Every time I was like, “Oh no, I do not want to read that chapter again.” I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t that I had a bigger purpose in this. This is really just a vehicle to express what happens when we, as a society, as a group, as individuals don’t have clarity on what are these fundamental principles of human integrity.

What’s the phrase you used? “Twenty-three years of in indoctrination doesn’t disappear in an instance.” I love that line, because it’s true. Tell me a little bit about what it looks like now that you’re doing this work and you’re living within your own identity now.

The thing is, I think we get to change identities. I’ve done it a number of times in my life. We get to write our own story and our identity. When I initially thought about writing the story, I had thought, “We just had such a crazy life, it would be kind of interesting to write the story.” I was more thinking of it from a perspective of wanting to show people who didn’t have much that they could still achieve and do well. I became a lawyer and I work for some of the top law firms, and I wanted them to show them that path didn’t have to be their story.

But as I grew and developed and healed and learned, I created the framework and began this journey of writing this book. All of these stories that I didn’t think I was going to tell or write, especially not in such detail, were really the story that needed to be told. Even now, it’s daunting because I’ve always been a very private person. But I think if it can help people to reconcile some of their own experiences, then it’s worth it to me.

At the end, you make it clear that the other members of your family have made different choices and gone on very different paths. There isn’t just one story from an experience like this, you can go in so many different directions from it.

That was why I tried to really stick to my story and my experiences, because each person who goes through this is affected differently. Each person has their own journey, their own story. My own family members, fortunately are all in their own stages of recovery from this, but they have learned and grown. My parents have as well. My mother, when I taught her this framework, had a lot of really good conversations. It gave her a lot more clarity on what had happened to her in the family. what some of those practices were, clearly defining what was wrong with them. When you don’t have that framework in your mind, it’s going to be hard to define exactly what was wrong.

Until you have the language to really articulate your experience, it is very, very hard to identify it. That’s what this book is about. It’s a very personal story, but it is also a guide for other people who are looking at their experiences and going, what is the word for this? What is the language for it?

This is why I want to get these principles taught in schools and to young people and in colleges and to people who’ve experienced abuse, because it does give them the language to express themselves. To say, “No, this is not what I want.” To have a conviction that they are right. And also to say, “Well, this happened to me and it was wrong because…” It gives us the language to communicate about these topics and even gives us the language between men and women to communicate about these topics in a way that men appreciate. It allows us to talk about it. I think that’s very important, whether it’s in the corporate environment, talking about sexual harassment, but also in our schools, to teach children these principles so that they have the words.

What do you hope now for this book? Where do you want to see this book go in terms of who’s going to read it and who’s going to learn from it?

I hope that each person who reads it, if there’s somebody who suffered some kind of abuse like this, that it can give them strength and insight. And if they haven’t, that it will give them insight into what other people go through and then understanding perhaps things that have happened to friends or relatives. I hope that this is a door and a gateway to helping us to have bigger conversations about this stuff, particularly things like child abuse.

I think women and sexual harassment, while this is not solved, it’s been brought much more to the forefront of human consciousness. But still a lot of stuff about children and how they are treated as property is not really discussed I think in the way it could be. My own personal work I’m doing now is both to help people achieve emotional independence and freedom through understanding these principles and other types of techniques.

A big part of what I am teaching now as well is, how do we create economic stability and freedom? My mother left the group for a while when I was a child and we were basically homeless for some time. She couldn’t support us. So often the reason that people stay in bad environments, relationships, controlling groups, is they don’t have a way economically to care for themselves outside. You both need to have the emotional freedom and understanding of what is true, and then you need to have the economic tools to be able to take care of yourself. Those are the two pillars that I’m working on, helping to share with people who are coming out of experiences like this.

More cult news and stories: 

CNN’s Chris Cuomo leveraged his sources to help brother Andrew through pandemic, assault allegations

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo reportedly took advantage of his own sources in order to help advise his brother, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, through his handling of the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and while the elder Cuomo was facing allegations of sexual harassment. 

Texts uncovered by a state probe and transcript of Chris Cuomo’s interview with investigators reveal that Chris Cuomo played a much larger role in the behind-the-scenes effort to preserve his brother’s reputation than was previously known. 

According to a CNBC report, Chris Cuomo was in direct communication with his brother’s former top aide, Melissa DeRosa, as early as March, when new allegations were continuing to make headlines.

“Please let me help with the prep,” Chris Cuomo wrote to DeRosa in a text message dating back to March 3.  

In another exchange, DeRosa reportedly wrote to Chris Cuomo about a “rumor going around from politico” regarding “1-2 more ppl coming out tomorrow,” an apparent reference to Andrew Cuomo’s soon-to-be accusers. 

“No one has heard that yet,” Chris Cuomo responded to her. 

Days later, Chris Cuomo sent DeRosa an apparent draft of a statement that was to be read aloud by his brother addressing the allegations: 

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“I understand why they have to say what they are saying. I understand the political pressure I understand the stakes of political warfare, and that’s what this is. … And I understand the conformity that can be forced by cancel culture.”

Chris Cuomo also told investigators that he leveraged “sources” who had unique insights into allegations that had not yet been made public. “I would – when asked, I would reach out to sources, other journalists, to see if they had heard of anybody else coming out,” he told investigators.

RELATED: Chris Cuomo’s insulting sexual harassment apology shows just how little he thinks of women

One source, Chris Cuomo added, speculated that a Cuomo accuser, Anna Ruch, “had been put up to it,” suggesting that Ruch’s allegations were part of an inside job. 

Back in August, Chris Cuomo claimed that he advised his brother to resign, adding that he played no hand in his network’s coverage of the scandal. 

“I never misled anyone about the information I was delivering or not delivering on this program. I never attacked nor encouraged anyone to attack any woman who came forward,” Cuomo stated. “I never made calls to the press about my brother’s situation. I never influenced or attempted to control CNN’s coverage of my family.”

Responding to the newest allegations on Monday, a CNN representative said the network will be having conversations and seeking additional clarity” from its lead primetime host. 

Andrew Cuomo officially stepped down on August 10. 

RELATED: “I did urge my brother to resign”: CNN host Chris Cuomo reacts to brother Andrew Cuomo’s resignation

From Fox News to CNN, House Republican slammed for vaccine whiplash

In two different interviews on Sunday, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., was caught flip-flopping on vaccines depending on who she was speaking to. In an interview with Fox, Mace encouraged viewers to get COVID to obtain “natural immunity” rather than get vaccinated. But in an interview with CNN on the same day, Mace said she was a “proponent” of vaccines and masks. 

Speaking to Fox News, Mace criticized the CDC and policymakers for not “taking into account what natural immunity does.” 

“In some studies that I’ve read, natural immunity gives you 27 times more protection against future COVID infection than a vaccination,” said Mace, despite evidence to the contrary.

“Governor DeSantis is seeing the fruit of that labor today,” said Mace, attributing Florida’s recently low COVID numbers to natural immunity, rather than the state’s 61% vaccination rate, higher than the national average of 59%. 

However, hours later in an interview with CNN, Mace highly encouraged viewers to get vaccinated and wear masks.

“I’ve been a proponent of vaccinations and wearing masks when we need to when we had the Delta variant raging in South Carolina, I wrote an op-ed to my community and I’ve worked with our state department of health,” said Mace, as a video of her getting vaccinated played in the background. 

“I’ve run ads encouraging my district to go and get vaccinated and when we have these variants and we have these spikes, to take every precaution from washing our hands to wearing the N95 and K95 masks more than the medical masks, there is a statistically significant number of people protected from COVID when they wear those masks,” continued Mace, showing much stronger support for vaccines and masks compared to her interview with Fox. 

Mace has shown to flip-flop before in politics. After the January 6th riot where a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, Mace was one of nine Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump. Later she was known to be a heavy critic of Trump, at one point saying Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped out.” 

Today however, she has refused to mention Trump by name and has continually promoted common Republican talking points, promoting “natural immunity” and saying Republicans need to “stop fighting with each other in public.” 

Molly Jong-Fast, writer for The Atlantic and Vogue, reacted to Mace’s comments on Fox before she went on CNN, writing on Twitter, “This is so depressing, Nancy Mace can’t possibly believe this.” 

Ilhan Omar hangs up on Lauren Boebert after anti-Muslim attack

House Democrats are expected to begin pushing for freshman Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado to be stripped from her committee assignments. The controversial right-wing lawmaker lashed out at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in an anti-Muslim Twitter tirade last week. Boebert has since doubled down after several of her Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives rallied to her side over the weekend. 

On Monday, Boebert reached out to Omar privately after publicly apologizing for her incendiary remarks on Twitter. “Instead of apologizing for her Islamophobic comments and fabricated lies,” Omar said of her call with the Colorado Republican, “Rep. Boebert refused to publicly acknowledge her hurtful and dangerous comments.”

“She instead doubled down on her rhetoric and decided to end the unproductive call,” Omar added. 

According to CNN reporter Melanie Zanona, Omar reportedly pressed for an apology, to which Boebert responded that Omar should apologize to the American people. Boebert then took to Twitter to publicize the call and attack Omar again. 

The development stems from an appearance that the Colorado conservative made during Thanksgiving break in her home district, where she recounted a story about taking an elevator with Omar. “I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers,” Boebert told a crowd, “and I see a Capitol police officer running to the elevator. I see fret all over his face … I look to my left, and there she is: Ilhan Omar. And I said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine.'”

Boebert also alleged that she directly told Omar that she is a member of the “Jihad Squad.”

RELATED: Ilhan Omar fact-checks Lauren Boebert’s “made up” “jihad squad” story

On Friday, Omar publicly disputed that the incident ever took place, tweeting that Boebert “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,” the progressive added. “Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”

Multiple members of the Democratic House leadership have since come forward to issue firm rebukes against Boebert’s comments, calling on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to take disciplinary action.  

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“Leader McCarthy and the entire House Republican Leadership’s repeated failure to condemn inflammatory and bigoted rhetoric from members of their conference is outrageous,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., in a joint statement. “We call on the Republican Leadership to address this priority with the Congresswoman and to finally take real action to confront racism.”

Multiple conservatives have come to Boebert’s defense.

Fellow freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, tweeted over the weekend that “[Omar] and the Jihad Squad are all three and are undeserving of an apology.” 

“Never apologize to Islamic terrorist sympathizers, communists, or those who fund murder with our tax dollars,” Greene added without any explanation.

Pueblo County Republican chair Robert Leverington, who represents Boebert’s district, likewise said in an interview with KRDO that “Boebert probably expressed the sentiment of many Americans.”

Former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who is notorious for his history of racism, also joined the chorus this past weekend, tweeting: “Pelosi changed House rules for @IlhanMN to allow her to wear her turban on the floor. First day, a Member said to me, “Four pounds of C-4 under that would wipe out half of Congress.'”

Boebert’s remarks are part of a larger pattern of Republicans using anti-Muslim sentiment to rile up their base over the past decade. 

Back in 2010, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and neoconservative commentator Bill Kristol – both of whom are expressly against Donald Trump – played a hand in crafting an ad that demanded former Attorney General Eric Holder to reveal the identities of seven Justice Department officials who represented Guantanamo detainees, according to NPR. 

“Tell Eric Holder, Americans have a right to know the identities of the al-Qaeda 7,” the ad stated.

Hubble’s enormous, ambitious successor is poised to change our understanding of the universe

Folded like a $9.7 billion piece of metal origami and nestled into the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will, in late December, be sent nearly one million miles from the surface of the Earth. Once it reaches its destination — a region of space with open views, where the sun and Earth’s gravity counterbalance each other — the Hubble telescope’s bigger, grander successor will spend the next decade answering questions that are as scientific as they are existential. 

“How did we get here? What is the universe? And how did it come into being?” said David Hunter, a project manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “With something like the JWST, you actually have a tangible way of finding answers.” 

Over two decades of work — totaling 100 million hours of labor from more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians — went into the development of this next-generation space telescope. For their efforts, Webb will be able to peer into distant corners of the universe, using infrared detection to penetrate clouds of dust, survey the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, and look backward in time over 13 billion years, picking up faint light emitted by galaxies formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

Yet this sci-fi-seeming agenda wasn’t possible when JWST was first imagined. 

“At the beginning, [NASA] identified the technologies that would be needed,” explained Hunter. “They went through a development program, looking at all of the parts of the observatory that needed to be built. They figured out which ones we couldn’t do yet, and how to advance the engineering capability to do that.”

The telescope’s signature feature — 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, reaching over 21 feet in diameter, resembling a giant honeycomb — also posed one of its greatest engineering challenges. The mirrors had to be lightweight, yet sturdy enough to hold firmly in place, and capable of folding down to fit into the nose of the carrier rocket. Beneath the mirrors sits the sunshield, another marvel, composed of 5 micro-thin layers of a resilient film called Kapton which will unfurl to the size of a tennis court, protecting the observatory from solar heat. In outer space, deploying the telescope will take a total of 29 days, an intensely nerve-racking window in which hundreds of discrete release mechanisms need to fire in perfect succession. 

Transporting the telescope to the verdant European Spaceport in French Guiana was an ordeal in itself. It arrived on Oct. 12, following a late-night police escort through the streets of Los Angeles and a 16-day, 5,800-mile sea voyage through the Panama Canal on a custom carrier ship. During transit, controversy over the telescope’s name boiled over from the pages of academic journals into the public sphere. Articles in The Washington Post and NPR detailed a posthumous investigation into the career of James Webb, a former leader at NASA and the telescope’s namesake, who stood accused of discriminating against LGBTQ government employees in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. But a NASA investigation concluded that the name will stay. 

“NASA’s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,” NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox told the Washington Post in a statement. “They also talked to experts who previously researched the topic extensively… NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope.”  

The JWST has already been a source of news, controversy, and anticipation, but the real headlines, said Hunter, will come once it settles into its stable orbit a million miles from Earth. 

“The big stories are going to emerge once we get into regular operations,” he said. “It’s what we’ve all been building it for — for the discoveries it will make, which will tell us things we didn’t know about the universe.” 

Thanksgiving leftovers and your waffle iron are a match made in holiday heaven

One of the results of cooking fairly often is that, every few months, I become freshly enamored with a piece of cookware or a kitchen gadget. For a stretch, it was my Dutch oven; there was a lot of braising, I became a “soup person” anew and even bugged J. Kenji Lopez-Alt about the secrets to making a crispy no-knead loaf in one. Over the summer, it was my mandolin for all-shaved everything, from peppery wisps of radish to the kind of simply dressed summer squash that could inspire a sort of epiphany. 

But when Billy, a family friend (who also happens to be a tremendous woodworker) asked me the other day how I was planning on using up the inevitable leftover odds-and-ends of Thanksgiving leftovers, I had two words for him: waffle iron. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Thanksgiving leftovers go-tos almost as much as the meal itself. 

RELATED: The best ways to use up leftover sweet potatoes

A turkey sandwich on thick, white bread, stacked high with random bits from the fridge and a smear of cranberry mayonnaise, provides one of the best first bites of the year. While living in Kentucky, I learned to love a Hot Brown, a mess of an open-faced sandwich that’s smothered in velvety mornay sauce and topped with a single ruby slice of tomato. Turkey soup is a seasonal comfort, while a leftovers-packed burrito is a stoner’s delight (though, if you have the wherewithal, you really should pickle your leftover cranberries for a relishy-salsa accompaniment). Writer Maggie Hennessy’s updated turkey rice supreme sounds divine. 

However, one of my absolute favorite uses of Thanksgiving leftovers is simply asking, “Will it waffle?” 

Most folks know this, but your waffle iron is multi-use beyond breakfast. As long as you make sure your waffle maker is well-oiled, most carby things tend to crisp up really, really well; I like using PAM nonstick spray for baking, which uses both oil and flour. 

By the way, this guide first appeared in The Bite, Salon Food’s weekly food newsletter. If you want early access to special essays, recipes and holiday guides, be sure to subscribe. 

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Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes 

Mashed potatoes, sweet or regular, can be whisked together with an egg, a little flour and a few add-ins — crumbled bacon, shredded cheese, minced onion and garlic — to create crisp, almost latke-like potato waffles. Top them with gravy, some leftover cranberry sauce or serve them alongside sour cream with some chopped chives. 

Stuffing and Macaroni and Cheese

Whether cornbread or sourdough-based, the stuffing is the Thanksgiving side I look forward to most each year. It’s also one of the better leftovers because it reheats pretty well, though is all the better when done so in the waffle iron. Want to immediately up your leftover sandwich game? Top it with a disc of crispy stuffing. The same goes for macaroni and cheese. Is it a little extra? Sure, but after weathering the holidays, you deserve it. 

Cranberry Sauce 

So, cranberry sauce itself decidedly does not waffle. It’s a fabulous mix-in for standard waffle batter.

Leftover Pie Dough 

Leftover pie dough, however, does waffle. Roll out a round of pie dough to fit your waffle iron and sprinkle it with brown sugar and a generous amount of cinnamon. Top it with another round of pie dough and cook it. It’s amazing as-is, but if you want to be a little extra, serve them alongside some cream cheese icing. 

Fried Rice 

This isn’t so much a suggestion for transforming your leftovers, per se, as it is for a vehicle for serving said leftovers. Leftover rice — which is bound with whipped egg, some soy sauce and sesame oil — can be cooked in a waffle iron until crisp. Use that as the base for your open-faced leftovers sandwich. Gravy and crispy rice? Another umami match made in heaven. 

More ideas for Thanksgiving leftovers: 

Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper sues Pentagon for censoring his tell-all book

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper filed a lawsuit on Sunday accusing the Pentagon of wrongly censoring his upcoming book about his time in the Trump administration.

Esper, who was fired by former President Donald Trump days after losing the 2020 election, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington alleging that the Defense Department is blocking him from revealing a “full and unvarnished” account of his tenure. The complaint claims that the Pentagon “arbitrarily redacted” unclassified portions of his book without clearly specifying why.

“Significant text is being improperly withheld from publication in Secretary Esper’s manuscript under the guise of classification,” Esper’s attorney Mark Zaid, who represented the whistleblower who triggered Trump’s first impeachment, wrote in the lawsuit. “The withheld text is crucial to telling important stories discussed in the manuscript.”

RELATED: Trump’s top general feared all-out nuclear war with China in final days, new book alleges

Esper’s book, “A Sacred Oath,” is scheduled to be published next May. The book’s publisher said Esper’s manuscript “reveals the shocking details of his tumultuous tenure while serving in the Trump administration” and includes “events and moments never before told.”

The lawsuit says the book includes Esper’s recounting of a Pentagon transformation and a “White House seemingly bent on circumventing the Constitution.”

Esper expressed dismay that the Biden administration has apparently decided to block portions of the memoir.

“I am more than disappointed the current administration is infringing on my First Amendment constitutional rights,” he told The New York Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “And it is with regret that legal recourse is the only path now available for me to tell my full story to the American people.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told the outlet that the agency is aware of the complaint.

“As with all such reviews, the department takes seriously its obligation to balance national security with an author’s narrative desire,” he said. “Given that this matter is now under litigation, we will refrain from commenting further.”

While it is standard practice for former administration officials to submit manuscripts for prepublication review to ensure that books do not include any sensitive national security information, the process is “not supposed to be used to smother embarrassing or politically damaging information from becoming public,” the Times’ Maggie Haberman noted.

The Trump administration was accused of using the review process to block the release of former national security adviser John Bolton’s memoir, which included numerous revelations Trump wanted to keep hidden amid his first impeachment proceedings. The Justice Department admitted in a lawsuit that a career official reviewed the book and found that it contained no classified information, but Trump allies intervened in the process and sought to block the book’s contents. The DOJ filed a lawsuit seeking Bolton’s profits from the book after he published it anyway, but under the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland dropped the case in June.

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Esper worked closely with the review office for months but found that the process was taking an unusually long time, according to the lawsuit. He wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in May, saying he was sure the manuscript did not contain sensitive information. But when he received the reviewed manuscript last month, “multiple words, sentences and paragraphs from approximately 60 pages of the manuscript were redacted,” according to the lawsuit. “No written explanation was offered to justify the deletions.”

Esper said that in subsequent conversations officials were unable to confirm that “the redacted items contain classified information or compromise national security.” Some of the redactions, he said, “asked me to not quote former President Trump and others in meetings, to not describe conversations between the former president and me, and to not use certain verbs or nouns when describing historical events.”

Esper said he was also instructed to delete his views on conversations with foreign officials and global events that had been “widely reported” and in some cases “were even published by the D.O.D.”

Esper asked the department to justify its redactions, but the lawsuit says the office then informed him it had completed its review.

In an email to Austin earlier this month, Esper said that senior officials urged him to meet with review officials in an effort to “try to find compromise language.”

“While I appreciate their efforts, I should not be required to change my views, opinions or descriptions of events simply because they may be too candid at times for normal diplomatic protocol,” Esper wrote, according to the lawsuit. He argued that his “constitutional rights should not be abridged because my story or choice of words may prompt uncomfortable discussions in foreign policy circles.”

Esper also alleged in the suit that some of the stories included in his manuscript started to appear in news reports.

“At least one story, which was more than a year old and known to only a small handful of senior D.O.D. officials, had not previously been publicly discussed, and the timing of the appearance appears suspicious,” the suit says.

The complaint adds that the Pentagon “has failed to demonstrate the existence of substantial government interests that would enable it to prohibit the publication of unclassified information within Secretary Esper’s manuscript.”

Esper, a former lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon, served as Trump’s secretary of defense from the summer of 2019 until shortly after the November 2020 election, when Trump purged Pentagon leadership amid an apparent campaign by the former president’s allies to involve the department in their scheme to undo or overturn Trump’s election loss. A memo obtained by ABC News’ Jon Karl shows that senior Trump aide John McEntee advocated for Esper’s dismissal over “sins against Trumpism,” including that he “barred the Confederate flag” on military bases, opposed “the president’s direction to utilize American forces” to respond to racial justice protests last year, and was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion.'”

Read more:

With new Omicron variant looming, Republicans are now bribing people to avoid vaccination

Little is known at this point about the Omicron variant of COVID-19 that is causing worldwide panic and last week’s stock market crash — except that it’s a reminder of the importance of people getting vaccinated. Vaccination can help prevent such variants from evolving in the first place, and vaccinated people are probably still much safer than unvaccinated people in the face of the variant. As President Joe Biden’s office told the press, his top infectious disease advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci “continues to believe that existing vaccines are likely to provide a degree of protection against severe cases of Covid.” 

Vaccines save lives and are the best path forward to ending the pandemic and returning to normal. Despite this — or really, because of this — Republicans not only continue to sabotage efforts by the Biden administration to get the public vaccinated, but are doubling down on the sabotage.

RELATED: Biden beware: GOP sees opportunity in new COVID variant

As Axios reported Monday morning, the concerted efforts to keep shots from going in arms have escalated in red states, with Republican politicians now openly bribing constituents not to get vaccinated. “Republican officials around the country are testing a creative mechanism to build loyalty with unvaccinated Americans while undermining Biden administration mandates: unemployment benefits,” the short piece explains. “Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have changed their unemployment insurance rules to allow workers who are fired or quit over vaccine mandates to receive benefits.”

Since early spring, a number of commentators — including myself — have been pointing out that Republican politicians and media are deliberately undermining Biden’s pandemic response by convincing their base to reject the vaccines. The reason isn’t particularly mysterious. Republicans understand that if death rates remain high, the economic recovery remains stagnant, and unpleasant mitigation measures like mask mandates and school shutdowns continue into 2022, a pandemic-weary public is going to start blaming the guy in charge for not doing more to fix the situation. 

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But still, there are many who simply refuse to believe that Republicans could be that sinister, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In August, Jonathan Chait of New York magazine scoffed that “Republican covid denialism is idiocy, not a plot.” He continues to insist on this take, tweeting Sunday that to argue otherwise is overrating “the intelligence of the Republican party base.” This is an incoherent argument, as Crooked Media editor Brian Beutler pointed out, as it requires believing that gullible people are somehow impervious to manipulation, when “easy to manipulate” is literally what defines gullibility. 

But even the New York Times, which has a long-standing habit of refusing to accept the depths of depravity Republicans will sink to, is facing up to this grim reality. Last week, Jonathan Weisman reported that “Republicans have hit on a new line of attack” — blaming Biden for the pandemic — even though it’s Republicans who “spent months flouting mask ordinances and blocking the president’s vaccine mandates.” 

Breaking things and then blaming Democrats for things being broken is a long-standing GOP political strategy. It works because, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently explained, voters “tend to support the incumbent party when things are going well, oppose it if things are going badly.” So, when the GOP is out of power, they do what they “can to make bad things happen,” knowing Democrats will be blamed. So it has been on the economy, and so it is on the pandemic. 

RELATED: Biden didn’t “fall short” of July 4 vaccination goal — he was sabotaged by Republican trolls

Now there’s a scary new variant that could prolong the pandemic, and many Republicans can barely hide their glee.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas continues to bash Dr. Fauci, tweeting on Sunday that he’s “an unelected technocrat who has distorted science and facts in order to exercise authoritarian control over millions of Americans,” and spreading a repulsive conspiracy theory insinuating that Fauci somehow had a hand in creating the virus. “I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying,” Dr. Fauci said in response to GOP conspiracy theories about him — theories clearly meant to undermine his authority when he continues to advocate for vaccination. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also doubled down on vaccine discouragement in response to the Omicron variant, insisting that the horse deworming drug ivermectin is the real solution. She even encouraged her followers to sue hospitals for COVID-19 deaths because doctors won’t prescribe this useless drug. That’s the modern GOP in a nutshell: First, get people killed by telling them to refuse vaccines, and then blame the only people who actually tried to save those lives for the deaths. 

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That this is a deliberate strategy and not just idiocy was confirmed yet again over the weekend through the actions of Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who gave two separate interviews — one on Fox News and one on CNN — where she offered extremely different claims about the vaccine. For her Fox New audience, Mace claimed “natural immunity gives you 27 times more protection against future COVID than a vaccination.” On CNN, while trying to hoodwink the Jonathan Chaits of the world into thinking Republicans aren’t that bad, she claimed she wanted people to get vaccinated. 

And Donald Trump Jr., always ready to be the sweaty id of the GOP, went on Fox News and praised the anti-vaccine rioters in Europe, claiming they’re standing up for “freedom.” In reality, it has little to do with freedom and more to do with far-right groups in Europe spreading the same conspiracy theories about the vaccine as the right in America does. 

This is the same GOP that has supported Donald Trump despite his attempted coup and instigating a violent riot on the Capitol. Indeed, this is the same party that, inspired by Trump, is rewriting election laws and reorganizing election boards to make it far easier for Trump to succeed when he tries to steal the 2024 election. They care not one bit about this country or its people, just their own pursuit of power. So of course the emergence of a new COVID-19 variant, which could kill way more people, isn’t giving them any pause.

The Republican strategy now is what it has been for months: Encourage the base to reject vaccination and to spread COVID-19, with the hopes that a weary public will blame Democrats and punish them at the ballot box in the 2022 midterms. The frightening thing is the GOP’s nakedly pro-COVID strategy may very well work, especially if this new variant draws out the pandemic for that much longer. 

Our 6 favorite IPAs for hoppy, hazy sips

It’s no secret: craft beer drinkers love IPAs. Since the early days of the pioneering Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to the current trends of hazy and milkshake styles, the beer category continues to be popular no matter what form it takes.

As a quick reminder: IPAs, or India Pale Ales, are “a type of amber-colored ale that gets its flavor from hops, a cone-shaped flower related to cannabis,” according to author Brette Warshaw. As the story goes, the brewing style was popularized in the 1800s, when the British East India company would ship it over in droves to trading outposts throughout the Indian subcontinent. The flavor profile of an IPA can vary widely based on the region where it’s been brewed, plus the particular variety of hops used during the process and when they’re added to the mix. However, “bitter,” “citrusy,” “spicy,” and — yep — “hoppy” are often words you’ll hear used to describe the style as a whole.

With all this said, below are some of the best IPAs you can try, ranging from the more traditional west coast IPA to today’s turgid hazy options. Some are very easy to acquire, while others require you to visit the brewery to grab a can or pint. But I can assure you, these beers are well worth traveling for.

Our 6 favorite IPAs on the market

1. Bell’s Brewery’s Two Hearted Ale

There’s a reason the American Homebrewers Association has named Two Hearted Ale IPA the best in America numerous times: it’s a pinnacle of the American IPA. The Pacific Northwest is where many of America’s hops are grown, and Two Hearted uses Centennial hops grown in the region in this beer to give it a combo of pine, grapefruit, and floral flavors. The malt forms a biscuity backbone, and each flavor jumps in and out at you delicately.

2. Russian River Brewing Company’s Pliny The Elder

If you go on any random day to pick up this beer in California at Russian River Brewing Company, you may find that a line has already formed. Such is the popularity of Pliny the Elder. There is good reason for the cult following: Pliny the Elder is rife with citrus fruit flavor and has a pleasant, soft piney finish. The demand for the beer over the years has remained consistent, and Russian River has even released some variations of the beer, including Pliny for President (a double dry-hopped version with new hop varieties), and Pliny the Younger (a triple IPA version).

3. Toppling Goliath Double Dry Hop King Sue

Toppling Goliath may be in the small Iowa town of Decorah,” but it hasn’t stopped it from rising to become one of the largest brands in craft beer: Beer nerds everywhere often instantly recognize the name “Pseudo Sue” and “King Sue.” The brewery’s fame was mostly built upon its IPA offerings, and the best one Toppling currently makes is the double dry-hopped version of King Sue. What you’ll notice immediately is the heavy citrus and catty (think: black currant) aroma wafting from what looks like orange juice thanks to the Citra hops. The flavor follows with overripe mango, grapefruit pith, orange, and pineapple. It’s brimming with fruit flavor but balanced by that hint of pith.

4. Tree House Brewing Company’s Julius

When drinking this one, if you didn’t know you were being handed beer, you’d be forgiven for thinking someone handed you fruit juice. Julius is Tree House’s flagship beer, and while the mouthfeel is light and fluffy, the flavor in this American IPA is intense. It is a passion fruit, orange, peach and tropical fruit combo. But there is also just enough of a lingering bitterness in the finish to keep it from being boring after the initial slight sweetness. It’s intense but nuanced. Bitter but slightly sweet. This is another one that is typically sold at the brewery only; you’re likely going to have to wait in line to grab some cans, but it’s well worth it. A much more limited version, King JJJuliusss, is also worth trying if you like what is essentially boozy orange juice.

5. Alchemist Beer’s Heady Topper

Heady Topper is often credited as the original hazy IPA. When the brewing team set out to make this IPA, they had no idea what a hazy IPA was. They just wanted to make something they liked, and what they made has become one of the most popular and tastiest IPAs in the world. This beer has remained popular for 18 years thanks to six hop varieties (and a secret yeast) that combine to showcase delicate fruit flavors. Flavor-wise, it contains a bit of guava, orange, melon, and a sweet marshmallow and pine finish.

6. Hill Farmstead Brewery’s Double Citra

A common theme in popular IPAs is the use of Citra hops. They can provide so many different flavor layers in hoppy beers and have been a longtime staple in the craft beer scene. One name that pops up a lot when it comes to the best hoppy beers is Hill Farmstead, and this Citra-hopped beer is a favorite. The key here is balance: There are no astringent notes, just a combination of grapefruit, tangerine, lemon, melon, and a touch of resin.

My most popular soup recipe was also my most disliked — until now

Once upon a time, I wrote a weekly column here, a project called “Twenty-Dollar, Twenty-Minute Meals.” It was a catchy idea in support of my first cookbook that inspired me to consider whole food grocery products — cans of beans, cartons of stock, jars of sauce — as shortcuts to flavor and cooking time. The column stretched my imagination of where real food can come from, like an enormous feature in a magazine I had grown accustomed to writing. Since then, my projects since have been more personal and focused on storytelling, but creativity and good home cooking remain at the center of all I do.

Now, eight years later, I am known as “Soup Lady” first and “Caroline” second among some of my friends, which is an accurate depiction of my identity, if you ask my husband. I have fallen into a life where I make an absolutely ridiculous amount of soup every week for nine months of every year — the rainy months in Seattle, referred to as “soup season” in my house, where “souping” is also a verb — for the past three years. (As you read this, I’ve just started my fourth.) I don’t want to digress too much, but suffice it to say that this soup-obsessed life found me and my ties to it are profound and emotional. I am not exaggerating when I say I believe it saved my life.

So, that I have an ancient (as far as the digital world is concerned) soup recipe floating around on this very site that is both popular and very much disliked makes the soup lady in me deeply uncomfortable. Incidentally, the recipe as I originally conceived it defies what I’ve learned from all of my years of souping. So I set out on a grand mission: to create a “redo stew” that would surpass the community’s expectations — and, more importantly, my own.

Upon examining Soup V1 with my new lens, the first thing I noticed was the broth, a dead giveaway that this recipe was written by my soup-rookie self. I categorically do not use broth in my soup anymore, despite having believed for years it was a rule that required following in order to make the result most delicious. I decided to simply try breaking this rule in order to maintain my sanity, after only once making a kiddie pool’s worth of broth only to return it to the very same pots as an ingredient in soup. Infuriated by the volume of dishwashing, I vowed that day I would never make soup in order to make soup again. (I haven’t.) What I learned in giving up broth was that there were so many more ways to build flavor in a soup, ways that effectively allowed me to have more control over the brew that resulted, ways that allowed the flavor of the vegetables to really sing. (Cue Soup Lady and control-freak Caroline high five here.)

Next, I gathered a few tricks from the arsenal I developed while writing down my soup club recipes for its cookbook: I included nutritional yeast (a funky favorite, my new “rule” in building savory vegan flavor), pulled the sage-salt method and the pinch of fresh nutmeg from my Thanksgiving soup, swapped canned beans for dried for better texture, and added lemon juice to finish. I fluently wrote the recipe for the Instant Pot, as I’d done for every stovetop recipe in my book, and finally it looked like a recipe I’d recognize among the pages of my new cookbook, Soup Club.

The soup, still speedy but now vegan, came from almost the same ingredients but I knew it was different. Because I was different. I am the Soup Lady, now, after all.

Recipe: Soup Lady’s “Redo” Chickpea Stew

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 50 minutes
Makes: 2 1/2 quarts (about 8 bowlfuls)

Ingredients

  • 1 small bunch sage leaves (6 to 8)
  • Kosher salt
  • 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 (15-ounce) can pure pumpkin purée
  • 1 bay leaf, fresh or dried
  • 2 cups dried chickpeas
  • 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, plus more to taste
  • 1 cup dried rotini pasta (gluten-free or traditional), chopped or broken into small pieces

Directions

  1. Make the sage salt: Combine sage and 1 tablespoon salt in a mortar; use a pestle to smash and grind salt and sage together until it forms greenish grit. 
  2. In the metal insert of an Instant Pot or multi-cooker, heat oil in the metal insert until prompt indicates HOT, and add onion and carrots. Cook, stirring often, until onion has softened (about 10 minutes).
  3. Stir in reserved sage salt, nutritional yeast, nutmeg, pumpkin purée, bay leaf, chickpeas, and 4 cups (1 quart) water until combined. Press CANCEL. 
  4. Close and lock the lid; seal valve (set to SEALING). Set to PRESSURE COOK with setting on HIGH. Set time to 20 minutes. When timer rings, press CANCEL; follow manufacturer’s instructions to release pressure.
  5. Stir in pasta. Return lid to pot and let stand until pasta has softened (about 20 minutes). Stir in lemon juice. Season soup with additional salt and lemon juice to taste. Remove bay leaf before serving.

Biden beware: GOP sees opportunity in new COVID variant

Americans woke up on Black Friday this year to more than a food hangover and big crowds at the malls. Along with the rest of the world, we were greeted with news of a frightening new COVID variant that appears to have characteristics that may make it more dangerous than the previous strains. After the stock market fell out of bed, the news networks went on full “breaking news alerts” all day, before governments around the world reacted with travel bans. Within hours, the World Health Organization named the new variant Omicron, B.1.1.529, and put it into the category of “variant of concern” citing the possibility that it has greater potential to escape prior immunity. Great. Just what we need.

Over the weekend, things calmed down a bit as the experts weighed in and told everyone to be patient and wait for real evidence before panicking. Most seemed to think that the vaccines would still have at least some effect and there were even those who suggested that the news that 10% of people testing positive in the Netherlands following flights out of South Africa, where the mutation is believed to have originated, may mean that Omicron is actually less virulent than those that came before.

The fact is that we just don’t know much at the moment.

Quite a few public health experts sounded alarms that the U.S. and other countries are needlessly banning people from certain African countries, arguing that it unfairly punishes them even though the virus doesn’t respect borders or passports in any case. As critics noted, there are already Omicron cases in Europe and Asia — and it’s almost assured that it’s in the U.S. already.

Still, as Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times points out in an excellent piece on Sunday, a time-limited travel ban buys a little time for countries to prepare for this new strain if it does turn out to be a major setback. She offers a number of suggestions, from mass rapid testing (apparently, this new variant can easily be detected by the standard PCR test which is a lucky break) to getting vaccine manufacturers working on a specific vaccine immediately. In fact, Pfizer put out a statement that they could get a new vaccine online in about three months. Her point is that this early warning will be of little use if all countries do with it is offer what she calls “pandemic theater” instead of a tangible response that’s flexible enough to pull back quickly if this fizzles out. That seems like sound advice and we’ll find out soon enough if all this is going to be necessary.

But the fact is that you can’t divorce politics from this problem.

For all the concern about punishing countries with travel bans, I don’t think there is a lot of choice in moments like these. As public health expert Dr. Leana Wen told CNN, “imagine the counterfactual if the Biden administration did not at this point and there were a major spike in cases due to this variant, what would we have said? We would say they should have taken action much more promptly.”

All you have to do is look back to last week to see how perilous the politics of COVID have become. Consider the Wall St. Journal editorial that ripped the Biden administration for failing to contain COVID as it passed the milestone of more deaths in 2021 than 2020. (This is a fatuous complaint, of course. The virus didn’t take off until April of 2020 and the worst spike, so far, began peaking in January of 2021, just as Biden was taking office.) The editorial excoriated Biden for running on the promise of dealing more effectively with the crisis than Trump did and now it turns out that people died in great numbers anyway.

This is an old Republican trick. They leave the country in shambles when they are voted out of office, obstruct the Democrats every step of the way when they try to fix it and then blame them for failing to fulfill their promises. And they’re doing it again:

The Times’ David Leonhardt recently laid out the tragic consequences of this cynical strategy:

 The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened…

The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.

That’s a hell of a thing to do just to make Biden look bad but, apparently, there is nothing Republicans and their propagandists in the right-wing media won’t do to secure power in Washington again.

And lest anyone forget, the Trump administration’s record on the pandemic was nothing short of horrific. From his obsession with not testing in order to “keep his numbers down” to pushing snake oil cures and sabotaging public health measures, his performance was an epic failure that ended up persuading his own followers that they should ignore the experts and listen to quacks and con artists instead. The results speak for themselves. They would rather die than get life-saving vaccines.

The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which is chaired by Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., has been holding hearings and releasing documents showing that it was even worse than we knew in real time. Trump senior officials repeatedly leaned on the Centers for Disease Control to keep the public uninformed about the pandemic for political reasons. David Corn of Mother Jones reminds us of this horrific data point:

As researchers from UCLA noted in March 2021, the United States could have avoided 400,000 COVID deaths if the Trump administration had implemented a more effective health strategy that included mask mandates, social distancing, and robust testing guidelines. [Dr. Deborah]Birx made a similar statement at that time.

Blaming President Biden for the ongoing COVID tragedy when efforts to contain it have been sabotaged at every step of the way by Republicans is predictable. It’s what they do. And anyone who says that this is not something that the administration has to consider when they try to fashion responses to the crisis, whether it’s desperately trying to persuade these anti-vaxxers to save their own lives or reacting to a possibly dangerous new variant, are not living in the real world.

This obscene dynamic is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and the stunning fact that despite our advanced health care system and easy access to life-saving vaccines, we have still lost more people in this pandemic than any other country in the world. You cannot blame the administration for acting with an abundance of caution under these circumstances. 

Former “Anonymous” Trump aide Miles Taylor: Let’s unite to make politics boring again

Miles Taylor was chief of staff to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the Trump administration. Under the name “Anonymous,” Taylor published the widely discussed 2018 New York Times op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

In that article, Taylor attempted to assure those Americans horrified by the Trump regime that there were true patriots at the highest levels of the administration avidly trying to rein in the president’s worst instincts, and by doing so to rescue the country and the world from calamity.

Taylor’s op-ed made him into Donald Trump’s personal enemy and the target of a political witch hunt. Like other Trump administration officials who have spoken out against the destructive personality cult around the twice-impeached former president, Taylor has received numerous death threats. He describes the aftermath of that article, and his subsequent book “A Warning,” as equivalent to a “self-detonation” of his personal life. Taylor’s most recent op-ed, “Inside the fight for the GOP’s soul,” recently appeared in the Deseret News.

In the first part of his conversation with Salon, Taylor expressed the view that Trump’s coup attempt on and after Jan. 6 (which continues) and attack on the Capitol was entirely predictable given his temperament and values — and that Republican leadership and Trump regime insiders had feared such an outcome for years. Taylor also warned that today’s Trump-led Republican Party and larger neofascist movement are the country’s most serious national security threat.

In this second part of his conversation with Salon, Taylor explains why he chose to speak out against the Trump administration — and why his peers, for the most part, have remained silent. Extreme fear of Trump and his enforcers, Taylor says, compelled other senior members of the administration to offer little or no resistance, even though they too could see the immense harm Trump was doing to the country. 

Finally, Taylor issues a grim prediction: Even if Donald Trump himself is conclusively defeated or removed from public life, the damage done by Trump and his movement have done may take decades to heal.

RELATED: Former Bush lawyer Richard Painter on the Jan. 6 cover-up: “Like the mistake Weimar Germany made”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Millions of Republicans apparently support Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and are willing to accept political violence to remove Joe Biden from office. The Republican Party has become a personality cult built around Trump. Any Republican who dissents from the personality cult is purged. How did the Republican Party go so horribly wrong?

The scenes of the chaos that we are now seeing were sown before Donald Trump decided he was going to enter the presidential race.

The GOP civil war consists of three phases. Phase one is open hostilities. That was when the Tea Party movement rose from the far right as a “small-L” libertarian insurgency. It was an ideological movement that eventually morphed and became the cult of personality around Trump. It emerged and went to war with the center of the GOP. These would be the Paul Ryans and the John Boehners. That period of open hostilities ended, over the course of almost a decade, with Donald Trump essentially commandeering the far right and transforming it to his benefit.

Leading into the second period of the civil war is what I call “submission”: Trump wins, he forces the more moderate side of the GOP into submission or into silence, and then governs for about four years with little to no internal opposition.

We’ve entered the third phase, which I call “rebellion.” It happened toward the end of the Trump administration, with a number of people who had served around Donald Trump. His former chief of staff, John Kelly. His former national security adviser, John Bolton. His former secretary of defense, Jim Mattis. They rebel. They come out publicly and they basically say, “This is a very bad, terrible, dishonest man.”

There was the nascent rebellion, of course, in the form of the never-Trumpers who all along had warned against Trump.

I call it a rebellion because they represent only a fraction of the Republican Party. The party is still commanded by pro-Trumpers who are willing to directly follow his orders. Now, that’s not hyperbole. Kevin McCarthy flies down to Mar-a-Lago to get Trump’s orders.

It is unclear how the rebellion ends.

It’s a really different environment. This is because of Trump in many ways. Trump is the person who has given a permission slip to the people who want to inject violence into American politics as a means of intimidation, to silence the opposition.

There is a possibility that a rational insurgency can counterbalance this. I think it will take several cycles. I think it would take us perhaps 10 years to rebalance the GOP toward that side of rationality and away from the radicals. And it’s tough to predict where it will end up. I think the roots of this were back in the Obama administration and began with a failure to make progress.

The Tea Party movement was allowed to rise because they thought Republican leaders were not getting things done and were weak. That’s probably because there wasn’t as much cooperation as there should have been with the Obama administration. The fault lies on both sides there. I believe that the Obama administration did not work nearly as hard as they could have to reach across the aisle to Republicans, and vice versa. Ultimately, I see the roots of the present discord in the Republican Party planted in that moment, well before Trump’s rise. Donald Trump merely took advantage of what he saw as a volatile situation that he could commandeer to his benefit.

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I would locate the origins back in the post-civil rights era white backlash and the Republican Party’s embrace of the Southern strategy. How was Barack Obama ever going to be able to deal with a Republican Party that literally thought he was a black usurper? And who are these “rational” Republicans? How would you define them, compared to the party as a whole?

There are likely some decent human beings who are leaders and elected officials that still belong to the Republican Party. But as a group, Republicans in Congress voted in support of Trump’s policies almost 100 percent of the time. If these “rational” and “respectable” Republicans actually oppose Donald Trump, then why support his policies? I believe we need an alliance to defeat Trump and the larger neofascist movement, but those Republicans who helped to create this disaster need to be held accountable.

Behind the scenes, and some will also say this publicly, they will say, “Yeah, I supported this agenda legislatively most of the time, because on most of the issues that came to us, his White House, his administration, his departments and agencies were governing to the right.” They were governing as conservatives. It was a confluence of interests. That does not mean that they necessarily supported Trump’s belligerent brand of politics.

But that’s why there should be, I think a second rating when it comes to these things. Did they support Trump’s agenda? Well, that does not necessarily mean they supported Trump, right? There was clearly some ideological alignment. Trump did, in some ways, govern as a conservative. I would argue, however, that Trump actually did not govern as a conservative in the way many people claimed he did at the time. In many ways, Trump was the antithesis of a conservative.

RELATED: Escape from TrumpWorld: “Anonymous” White House aide Miles Taylor on post-Trump trauma

I believe there has to be a separate measure of how Republicans supported the agenda — but what did they do about the man? Because in some ways, the man is a more important concern than the bill that they’re voting on.

I thought that in the best case, Trump would govern as a conservative and we’d get some good policies out of this. He might be a lunatic, but we’d make it out unscathed. But as the weeks wore on and we spent time with him in person, it was clear, just from a very basic level, if you met a regular person like this as a bank teller, you would say, “This person’s mentally unstable, I’m going to get back in line and go to a different teller.” But Trump was the man with his button on the nuclear codes.

Donald Trump is not just a bad conservative. He is an anti-conservative. That is what differentiates him from these rational Republicans. The Republicans who still have their eyes open say, “Here were the values of the party of Lincoln. This man quite clearly does not meet the mark and we’ve got to move on.” But unfortunately, when you put that question to most of these people, their values clash with their self-interest — or what they perceive to be their self-interest. Thus they’re afraid to come out and go against Trump, they just hope that they can outlast him.

And that’s what most of these people like Kevin McCarthy think, who I saw up close as he was grappling with Trump’s rise. Most of them felt like, “We’ll just wait it out. We’ll ride it out.” And a lot of people, early in the administration, said, “We’ll just ride it out.” But it was way worse than that. There’s no riding this out. What Trump represents has now infected the country’s politics. Trump could disappear tomorrow and forever, but we would still be grappling with the problem for a whole generation.

How did you make the choice to speak out against then Trump and what he was doing to the country? Why did so many others within the administration choose to remain quiet?

Fear is the answer. Alex Vindman told me, “Look, the objective of intimidation is to silence, and it tends to work on most people. The only way to counter it is to not be silent.” It sounds very simple, but that’s kind of the ethic that both he and I were raised with. You have to cross that threshold, get past intimidation about something that’s standing in your way, and vocalize the truth. Most adults, like the children hiding under the bed, are inhibited from doing the right thing out of a sense of fear. The important question for us to ask ourselves is, “What do people who have not spoken out about what they know to be true about Donald Trump fear? What are they so afraid of?”

I’ve spent so much time with these people in the administration, trying to convince them, even in year one, to start publicly opposing the president. If I start publicly opposing the president from my position, that’s not going to mean anything. But on certain issues, issue for issue, I was like, “Look, we’ve got to go out there and just say he’s wrong, publicly.” But people were afraid.

In that instance, they were afraid of losing their jobs in the administration. I weigh that type of decision-making very unfavorably. Look, this issue is more important than you and your job. As time went on, and it became clear how obsessed Donald Trump was with the politics of personal destruction, that fear started to morph a little bit. People became concerned that by opposing the president, he would come after them personally. It wouldn’t just be their job. It would be their future career prospects that would be at stake if they opposed him.

That fear evolved, toward the end of Trump’s administration, into a much more visceral fear of potential violent retribution. And I’m talking about former Cabinet secretaries, sitting members of Congress and others who personally confessed to me, “I don’t think I can join you in rising up against this guy because I’ve got to worry about my family’s safety.” I didn’t see it going there with those people. I didn’t anticipate how much I was going to hear that as a response. They would say to me, “Look, I’ve got kids and this is too crazy right now.”

Trump has been successful in wielding fear to silence his opposition. There’s a much larger opposition to Donald Trump out there, and they are largely still silent because he’s shown so effectively that he will go after his enemies. I anticipated this when I wrote the op-ed in the Times, but I didn’t anticipate how fast it would happen.

When the original “Anonymous” op-ed was published, that same day Trump tweeted in all caps, “TREASON?” Then he demanded that the Justice Department reach out to the New York Times and tell them they needed to hand me over for “national security” reasons. Trump is medieval. That sends a signal to any other potential dissenters. 

There are plenty of other examples besides my own. Trump makes examples out of people and that fear works, it intimidates them and it silences them. The only way around it is to look it in the eye and say, “OK, I’ll deal with those repercussions. But this is more important.”

How would you convince someone — for instance, someone on the left who always loathed Trump — to trust you and join together in an alliance with other anti-Trump Republicans and conservatives to save the country?

We are all unified by the same sentiment. We want to make politics boring again. That is true whether you agree or disagree with me on the moral decisions, or any of the decisions that I had to make, or that other people who quit in protest or who didn’t support Trump had to make.

That may be true of Republicans in general, even if you question their morality. If you are not a MAGA person, what probably unites us is that you just want politics to be boring again. You want it to work. You want it to not be terrifying. You just want it to be boring. Moreover, that does not mean that good things can’t happen — that can happen in a boring way too.

One of the best ways to explain why Donald Trump wasn’t a conservative is that his government got so big. It was in your life every day, it was in your head every single day. There’s not a person I know in my extended friends and family group who didn’t, on a daily basis, have to encounter the tumult of the four years of Trump. It was mentally and physically exhausting for this country.

We may disagree on the role of government in society, on our politics and on federal spending levels. But most of us agree, a silent majority, that we’re exhausted, and we want to move past it and go back to the golden days of arguing with each other about policy. I would love to go back to the period where Barack Obama’s khaki suit was a controversy. Can we make that our lives again?

If someone subscribes to that viewpoint, my response to them is, “All right, let’s team up.” We both want that. We may disagree about how we got here, we may disagree about where we’re going, but we agree that to get out of this mess, we’ve got to make politics boring again. Let’s get rid of the people who want to make it violent. Let’s get rid of the people who want to wield it for personal gain and benefit. Let’s get rid of the people who support a man who makes it all about personality and not about principle.

How to build flavor with edible flowers and herbs

One of the great things about being the director of sustainability at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) is working with the produce from our hydroponic garden. It’s really wonderful when all the flowers and herbs in the garden are in full bloom.

When I started at ICE, one of my first tasks was to help create curriculum that provides students with more opportunities to interact with the farm. Now they are planting, harvesting and learning more about growing. Students also get a chance to taste their way through the plants they harvested and ones that we grow, practicing how to think about creating and building flavors.

As a chef, I love being exposed to so many different flavors that I can use for my dishes. I’m exploring how to use some of these esoteric herbs, flowers and plants that we grow in the garden. Here are just a few that I have used so far:

Marigolds

The first time I tasted these leaves and flowers, my mind went right to oranges. Marigolds have a beautiful, sweet, citrusy flavor that is also floral. Marigolds are fantastic in wild striped bass crudo with fresh orange zest and juice. I add a little lemon juice to help with the raw fish. These flowers are also tasty and colorful additions to salads.

Marigolds from ICE are featured with wild striped bass crudo and oranges at Oceana. (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Culinary Education)

Huacatay

When I heard about this herb, I knew exactly how I wanted to use it. Known as Peruvian black mint, it is traditionally used in a soup or a cream salsa served with grilled meats. I  pair it with a ceviche and aji dulce pepper, chopping the leaves fresh, which works beautifully. All the flavors are indigenous to Peru. It goes to show you that where things grow together, they typically work together.

Oxalis

Tasting these purple leaves and flowers makes me immediately think of sorrel. These have a very similar sour (“oxalis” actually means sour), herbal flavor that I knew would work with any dish that uses sorrel. I’ve done a play on a vichyssoise soup with sorrel and salmon.

Oxalis from ICE’s hydroponic garden is served with vichyssoise soup and salmon at Oceana. (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Culinary Education)

Epazote

This is an herb I knew about before working in the farm. I had seen it a while ago in a Mexican dish of beans, so I was familiar with one application and was glad to see it available. It’s uniquely-flavored, very distinct and pungent herb. It has notes of oregano, mint, citrus and anise. You can use the leaves and stems, if they are tender, which is great for infusing flavor into a dish. I wanted to do a play on posole by cooking it with hominy, which added flavor well. Then I added some fresh epazote in right before serving the soup to give it an extra boost, pronouncing its flavor.