The NRA gave us Kyle Rittenhouse

One thing is certain: If Kyle Rittenhouse had listened to Johnny Cash, and left his gun at home, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber would still be alive today.

At age 17, Rittenhouse probably shouldn’t have had a gun at all, though the defense was able to get the illegal gun possession charge dropped on a technicality. Indeed, Rittenhouse should have gone the next step and kept his whole body at home that August night in 2020, as the Antioch, Illinois teenager only made the drive across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin to live out his far-right cowboy fantasies of intimidating Black Lives Matter protesters with his showy AR-15. Instead, the now-18-year-old man is on trial for murder, having found exactly the kind of conflict that’s entirely predictable when you go waving a gun at protesters. And there’s a very chance he will be acquitted — despite the idiocy of his actions — because he’s claiming “self-defense.”

The same can be said of Greg and Travis McMichael, father and son, as well as their neighbor, William Bryan, all of whom are on trial right now in Georgia for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed Black jogger who was chased down by three white men last year. The men filmed themselves arguing with and then shooting Arbery dead. They, too, are now claiming “self-defense.”

McMichael took the stand on Wednesday to claim that he was justified because he tried to “deescalate” the situation, even though he admits he chased Arbery through the neighborhood in a truck and when that didn’t work to get Arbery to acknowledge him, brandished a gun at him. He claims Arbery tried to take his gun, and complained from the stand, “He was all over me, he was still all over that shotgun and he was not relenting.”

Arbery, of course, cannot claim to have been acting in self-defense — because he is dead.

In both cases, the prosecution is arguing that it was not the shooters who were engaging in self-defense, but the victims — that they were trying to disarm dangerous men, who used that as a pretense to kill them. In both cases, the shooters wept on the stand in self-pity, clearly outraged and shocked that they are facing even the possibility of punishment for killing men they should have never tangled with in the first place. They’re banking on what conservative David French notes in The Atlantic is the “narrow nature of the self-defense inquiry” that only looks at whether the person reasonably believes he’s protecting himself from serious harm in the moment. But that defense allows people to “escape responsibility for killings that are deeply wrongful in every moral sense,” French argues, as it erases all the aggressive behavior that caused the conflict to happen in the first place.

The narrow reading of the law aside, in the cultural sense, there is nothing sensible about viewing these killings through the lens of “self-defense.”

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In both cases, white men hopped up on cowboy fantasies went out looking for trouble. When you want trouble, it’s easy to find, especially if you go around chasing people and waving guns at them. These are not situations most people imagine when they think of self-defense, which is where you are minding your own business and someone attacks you. In both cases, if the shooters had not sought out conflict, they would have killed anyone.

Blame the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun industry, which has had a massive assist from the right-wing media. For decades, the gun lobby has fought a battle on two fronts — through law and propaganda — to redefine the American concept of “self-defense” away from the sensible one and towards one that encourages people to seek out violent conflict. They’ve empowered every insecure yahoo in the country to recast himself as a hero in an action movie, who goes out hunting for bad guys under the guise of “protecting” the community. Of course, in the real world, bad guys aren’t as easy to find as they are in the movies, and so there’s the ever-present temptation to round up people who aren’t actually threats — lefty protesters armed with skateboards and Black men out for a jog — into the role of the villain, to make those violent fantasies come true.

We see this most clearly in the spate of “stand your ground” laws that the NRA spent years aggressively lobbying state lawmakers to pass. (About half of all states have some version of this law.) As the gun safety group Giffords explains, these laws “allow a person to use deadly force in public, even if they know they could safely avoid any need for violence by simply stepping away from the incident.” They were passed with bad faith arguments that they would prevent violence, but in fact, they are linked to higher rates of violence precisely because they incentivize starting fights. With these laws, you can start a fight with someone and, if they punch back, you can now claim “self-defense” to justify shooting them. “In other words,” as Giffords notes, “they make it easier to get away with murder.”

This ugly reality was exposed in the 2012 killing of a teenager named Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida. Martin had been out buying candy at a convenience store when Zimmerman spotted him. Zimmerman had a classic case of racist NRA brain, and notoriously had logged 46 calls to emergency services in the years before killing Martin, usually to report “suspicious activity,” such as “children playing in the street,” Black men driving through the neighborhood, Black teens hanging out, dogs sitting outside, and, of course, parties. That night in Florida, Zimmerman called 911 and chased Martin down, even as the 911 operator told him to leave Martin alone. The ensuing conflict led to Zimmerman killing Martin. Because we can never know who technically hit who first, Zimmerman was able to get away with it. (There’s a strong reason to believe that Martin was acting in legitimate self-defense after being followed by a creepy racist, but he’s dead now, so there’s no way to hear his side of the story.) What we can say with absolute certainty is that, if Zimmerman had left Martin alone in the first place, none of this would have happened.

Wisconsin doesn’t have a “stand your ground” law, to be clear. But the laws are just a symptom of a larger problem, where the gun lobby has aggressively promoted flashing guns, using guns for intimidation, and other such escalations and threatening behavior as “self-defense.” That, in turn, empowers people like Rittenhouse, Bryan, and the McMichaels to grab guns and go looking for confrontations. It’s why jackasses like Mark and Patricia McCloskey can come out of their house and wave guns at unarmed people who are merely walking past their house, and somehow argue that they are behaving in “self-defense.”

Gun lobbyists love to claim that guns are frequently used in self-defense, but this argument depends on their definition of “self-defense,” which covers people who instigate and escalate violence. As Harvard researchers have found, most “purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments,” not in situations where one has to fend off an unprovoked attack. Indeed, armed self-defense in an unprovoked attack is incredibly rare, researchers found, and when it does happen, guns prove no better than other forms of self-defense, such as hitting or throwing things at an unprovoked attacker.

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That guns are so useless in real self-defense is no doubt why the gun lobby has been intent on redefining the cultural conception of self-defense to cover people who grab a gun and go looking for people to fight with. It’s hard to get people all excited to spend money on guns, when the chances you’ll ever need to defend yourself are low and throwing a chair at an attacker and running away works just as well, if it does happen. Instead, guns are marketed to people — mostly men, but increasingly women — who are insecure and often incredibly racist, and who enjoy the power fantasy the gun represents.

“If you can arm yourself because you have declared yourself a substitute for law enforcement and then you claim people were grabbing for your weapon so you killed them with it, are you always justified? Must we always assume that the dead victim, who cannot testify, was the aggressor?” Dahlia Lithwick lamented in a recent Slate article about the Rittenhouse trial. She quotes philosopher Renee Jorgensen, who notes that the proliferation of guns at the Kenosha protest created “a kind of a Wild West situation where it’s not unlike armed combatants in war.”

Indeed, the surviving victim of the Rittenhouse shooting, Gaige Grosskreutz, testified during the trial that he also pulled a gun that night, characterizing his behavior as an effort to stop Rittenhouse, who had already killed two people. Unfortunately, Grosskreutz’s gun only served to strengthen the “self-defense” claims of the Rittenhouse defense team, proving Jorgensen’s point: All the guns in everyone’s hands just creates a lawless Wild West situation.

This is no doubt how the gun lobby wants it.

The more people there are out there waving guns and shooting at each other, the more others will start to believe they, too, need a gun to protect themselves. So more guns will be sold. Sure, the result is the ridiculously high murder rate in the U.S. — which is many times higher than that in comparable nations in western Europe — but what do gun executives care? They get their money and their yachts and their expensive designer suits. The cost is borne by everyone else and paid for in blood.

Trump gave $100M for COVID response to agency run by Kushner pal — it spent zero

A federal agency that was led by a longtime friend of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, received $100 million in Pentagon funds to help with the nation’s COVID response — but has yet to spend any of the money, according to a government watchdog.

The Trump administration last year tapped the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), an independent government agency that funds private development projects, to distribute $100 million in loans funded by the Pentagon through the CARES Act to “finance the domestic production of strategic resources needed to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, and to strengthen any relevant domestic medical supply chains.”

Dozens of companies sought those loans to help increase the country’s supply of PPE, ventilators, vaccines and testing supplies after then-President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act under pressure from Congress. But to this day, DFC has not doled out a single dollar from the program despite receiving 178 applications, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, although the agency did spend more than $1 million just going through the applications. The agency has since put its application portal on ice and its authority to lend funds under the program will expire in March 2022.

DFC was created by Congress in 2018 to help fund private development projects overseas. Trump tapped Adam Boehler, who was Kushner’s college roommate and later invested in his brother’s health startup, as the agency’s first CEO in 2019. Boehler, a former health care entrepreneur who had been appointed by Trump for a Health and Human Services position, was one of a group of Kushner friends — dubbed within the administration the “slim suit crowd” — who were tasked with rescuing Trump’s floundering COVID response, albeit without much success. The agency hasn’t had any success doling out the loans since President Biden took office either.

Despite starting the program in June 2020, DFC has struggled to figure out how to review loan applications and still “doesn’t have a plan to evaluate the program’s overall effectiveness,” the GAO report said. DFC officials told the GAO that the process included “more applications and more complex interagency involvement” than the agency expected. The GAO recommended that DFC “develop a plan” to evaluate the effectiveness of the program and complete its methodologies for accounting for program costs. DFC officials “did not concur” with that recommendation, according to the report.

Chelsa Kenney, the author of the report, told NBC News that the failure to provide any loans had created an “expectations gap” in the agency’s performance. She said the agency had “whittled” nearly 200 applications down to eight but has yet to distribute any funds.

DFC disputed the report’s findings.

“While we appreciate the work GAO has allocated to this audit, it inaccurately portrays DFC’s particular role given the program includes management and close participation from multiple agencies across the government,” spokesperson Pooja Jhunjhunwala told NBC. “DFC is neither the lead agency nor provides the loan disbursements to companies.”

In its official response to the GAO report, DFC sought to cast blame on other government agencies.

“While this report is correct in conveying that the DFC CEO has authority over some key operational, administrative and program decision making functions, it must be noted that the most key programmatic authorities, including budget authority over transactions and administrative costs and approval on project eligibility and technical requirements, reside with the interagency partners for this program: DOD and HHS,” acting CEO Dev Jagadesan wrote, according to the NBC report.

Jagadesan took over as the agency’s acting head after it stirred controversy during Boehler’s tenure. Boehler acted as a key liaison between Kushner and HHS Secretary Alex Azar in the early days of the pandemic, playing a major role in the administration’s failed strategy to contain the spread of the virus. He was even on the White House shortlist as Azar’s potential replacement after the secretary was forced to resign.

Boehler helped assemble an ad hoc task force, led by Kushner, which included other young entrepreneur types who drew “resentment” among senior officials who labeled the group a “frat party” that “descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government,” The New York Times reported last year. The group “added another layer of confusion” to the administration’s bungled response while “taking credit for changes already in progress and failing to deliver on promised improvements,” officials complained last spring.

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Boehler downplayed the need for the administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to help increase the supply of life-saving equipment last year. Trump ultimately relented under pressure from Congress and put Boehler in charge of distributing the government contracts.

Boehler’s first announcement under the executive order last summer was a plan to loan Eastman Kodak $765 million to turn the longtime photography company into a pharmaceutical manufacturer. That was after a Kodak executive offered to help boost supplies of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug touted by Trump as a COVID miracle cure but that many studies have found is ineffective and potentially harmful. The deal ultimately fell apart over the company’s lack of experience in drug manufacturing. Though a government watchdog ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing by DFC, New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused the company of insider trading after its CEO bought more than 46,000 shares of Kodak stock while negotiating the contract, and before the share price soared on the news of the deal.

DFC also awarded hundreds of millions in loans to a Connecticut company called ApiJect Systems, which promised to produce more than 100 million prefilled vaccine syringes by the end of 2020 and more than 500 million in 2021. But NBC News reported in the spring, after more than half of adults had already received a vaccine, that the company had not had not produced a single syringe and had not even built its promised plant to produce them. The company told NBC that it had not yet received approval from the FDA to use the syringes with COVID vaccines, and needs to raise nearly another $200 million to secure the $590 million loan it was awarded under the Defense Production Act. A spokesman for Pfizer told NBC that even if the company gets all of its necessary approvals, it “would not have any impact on our output or process.”

Read more on the Trump administration’s chaotic pandemic response:

Mike Lindell claims arrest of Lauren Boebert’s ex-campaign manager part of a plot to derail him

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Tuesday claimed that the investigation into MAGA Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters was part of a deep state plot to derail his purported Supreme Court lawsuit that he believes will reinstate former President Donald Trump.

During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Lindell claimed that the government was making moves to discredit his allies because they feared what his lawsuit would unveil.

“This is to put fear into everybody — look at the timing!” Lindell said. “One week from today, on November 23rd, the states are suing the U.S. government at the Supreme Court! It’s over! This is where it’s all going!”

Lindell proceeded to claim that some Democratic attorneys general had signed on to his lawsuit in favor of overturning the election results, but then declined to name them publicly.

He then went on a long rant about how all media organizations, including Fox News, were not covering his purported Supreme Court lawsuit as part of a plot to fool the American people into believing that Trump will not be reinstated as president.

“It’s propaganda — Hitler did it!” he said. “Goebbels was the best at it back in Nazi Germany! It’s brainwashing! That’s what it is! You brainwash and then you pit people against each other!”

Lindell concluded his rant by reassuring viewers that “we are very blessed because we have all the evidence!”

Watch the video below.

A Thanksgiving cheese basket to cure pre-dinner hanger

That Cheese Plate is a column by Marissa Mullen — cookbook author, photographer, and Food52’s Resident Cheese Plater. With Marissa’s expertise all things cheddar, comté, and crudité — plus tips for how to make it all look extra special, using stuff you probably have on hand — we’ll be crafting our own cheesy masterpieces without a hitch.

When I think of Thanksgiving, I envision a big golden turkey roasting in the oven; warm, thick gravy; creamy mashed potatoes; and tart cranberry sauce. I usually try to save my appetite for dinner, but as these delicious warm fragrances tempt me, I’m usually hungry for an appetizer long before the big meal. Thanksgiving cheese boards are the perfect way to satiate your guests a few hours before the hot dishes are ready. You can pace yourself, create small portions, and opt in for fruit and protein to pass the time.

There are a few different techniques to make your Thanksgiving cheese plate stand out. To start, we need a solid foundation. Why not use a rustic basket? This classic Thanksgiving cheese board is not only festive, it’s also easy to transport! Baskets are a great way to establish a theme, while simultaneously providing a convenient appetizer to carry to your gathering, mess-free. To achieve the look of this creation, I placed a glass round plate at the base of the basket for my stable surface to build on. For another classic Thanksgiving look, you can build a cheese board out of a cornucopia. Layer your cheese and meats to flow out the opening of the cone. I’d recommend building this one on site, so you don’t need to move it. I also love to create a rustic table-scape with different bowls filled with cheesy dips, crudité, and fresh bread. When it comes to decor, you can really amp things up with decorative gourds, greenery, and candles. Let the cheese plate be the welcome party before the big meal.

Gourds and boards

I love elevating my Thanksgiving cheese boards by adding a few gourds. Although pumpkin spice season is quickly fading away, it’s nice to add in some extra autumnal flair with different green, orange, and yellow gourds. You can also add a variety of gourds and mini pumpkins to your table-scape, matching the colors on the cheese board with the colors of the table. On this plate, I have orange Taleggio and dried apricots, so I’ll add some mini orange pumpkins to the table and plate itself. Just make sure your guests don’t accidentally mistake a gourd for cheese.

Cheese picks

On all of my cheese plates, I like to pick a nice variety of cheese to choose from. Think about different milks (cow, goat, sheep, buffalo, even cashew cheese!) and different textures (hard and soft.) On this plate, I stayed away from the decadent and heavy cheeses, like camembert blue, or a triple creme Brie.

I decided to add a lighter cheese, like a soft-ripened goat cheese. I also added a 14-month aged Gruyère and a washed rind cow’s milk cheese (like Taleggio or Epoisses). The goat cheese has nice floral notes, herbaceous overtones, and a clean citrus finish, while the Gruyère has more complex, earthy tones with nutty and caramelly flavors. The washed-rind cheese is the stinky one of the bunch, with a pungent kick and funky notes of cider and hay. Each of these cheeses work wonderfully with sweeter accoutrements, so I included a variety of dried fruits to complement.

Autumnal colors

I tied in the range of orange, red, yellow, and brown tones to incorporate feelings of Thanksgiving. The cranberries and pomegranate seeds add beautiful earthy tones to the board. Additionally, salami di Parma adds a nice pink hue down the center of the plate in a Salami River formation. Salami is an excellent pairing, providing a pleasant tangy complement to the cheese. The dried apricot, washed rind cow’s milk cheese, and mini gourd highlight the orange tones on this plate, while the seeded crackers, dried figs and candied nuts sprinkle in the notes of brown. I also added in some fresh thyme for a pop of green.

Dips and spreads

Another fun technique for a cheesy appetizer is to go beyond the board and build on the table itself. I like to serve a few dips alongside a cheese plate for additional options and pairing opportunities. To add a savory, creamy dish to your table, I’d recommend Lemony Whipped Goat Cheese with Crispy Prosciutto and Pomegranate. This is a light and tangy dip that highlights sweet and savory notes, but won’t leave you too full before the main meal. You could also add a sweet fig cake to the table spread, which makes for a great pairing with a cheese like Manchego or Mahón. For something more savory, try whipping up a Smoky Eggplant Dip with Kefir and Buttered Walnuts. I also love serving these dips with fresh veggies like sliced carrots, celery, and cucumbers, for a refreshing crunch,.

Perfect pairings

Now how do these beautiful colors and flavors all work together? Pairings are largely personal, but there are some different techniques to try. I love pairing salty and sweet items, but you don’t want to overpower your cheese. Try juxtaposing items of similar intensities. I love the soft-ripened goat cheese paired with the fig jam. I also enjoy pairing the pungent washed rind cheese with a sweet candied walnut. Another great savory and salty pairing is aged Gruyère with salami.

Safe serving

To serve your cheese, provide a small plate for all involved. Using cheese knives, utensils, spoons, and forks, encouraging everyone to make their own mini creation out of the bigger plate to avoid cross-contamination. This plate can comfortably feed 6 to 8 people as an appetizer (and fewer than that for an all-day grazing situation). If you’d like to serve it with extra crackers, keep them on the side in an additional basket.

Don’t forget drinks

Although wine and cheese is always a smart move, I love to enjoy a cocktail or mocktail with my Thanksgiving cheese plate. Try pairing an aged Gruyère with a glass of Apple Rye Punch. The apple cider is a great sweet contrast to the salty cheese, while the Rye ties in those subtle caramel notes. I would pair a Mulled Wine Sparkler with the Tallegio on the board, offering spiced mulled notes to match the funk of the wash-rind, with a bubbly Prosecco to cleanse the palate. As for the soft-ripened goat cheese, I would pair the creamy, delicate cheese with a Fall 75, an autumnal take on a French 75. The gin and vanilla bring out the herbaceous notes in the goat cheese, while the champagne adds a nice crisp finish.

***

Recipe: Festive Cheese Basket

Prep time: 15 minutes
Serves: 6 to 8 as an appetizer

Ingredients:

6 ounces (one round) soft-ripened goat cheese
6 ounces Gruyère
6 ounces washed rind cow’s milk cheese, such as Epoisses or Taleggio
4 ounces salami di Parma, thinly sliced
4 ounces dried figs, cut in half
4 ounces dried apricots, cut in half
3 ounces dried cranberries
1 ounce pomegranate seeds
1 box fruit and nut crackers
3 ounces candied walnuts
1 jar fig jam
1 bunch fresh thyme

Directions:

Set your foundation. Place your plate in the basket and add a ramekin and mini gourd.
With a sharp knife, slice the Gruyère into long, thin rectangles. Slice the round of soft-ripened goat cheese in half, and keep the wheel of washed-rind cheese whole (whether it’s a round or wedge). Spread out the different cheeses evenly on the plate.
Fold the salami in half, and in half again. Layer this down the center of the plate in a curved shape to make our “salami river.”
Create “produce ponds” around the plate, filled in with dried figs, dried apricots, and dried cranberries. Once those are on the plate, sprinkle pomegranate seeds over the dried figs to add a pop of color.
Fill in the rest of the empty gaps with the crackers and mixed nuts.
In the empty ramekin, scoop in the fig jam.
Garnish the plate with sprigs of fresh thyme.

The enduring comfort of comida corrida

Ask anyone who visits Mexico City, and they’ll tell you that they’re there for the food. The dishes that circulate the bucket lists for tourists visiting the federal district — the bi-colored pescado a la talla at Contramar, Pujol’s toddler-aged mole, and late-night tacos at Los Cocuyos — are destination dishes in their own right. But I tend to direct inquirers, friends visiting the city, and customers at my restaurant, Cicatriz, in a decidedly different direction: towards an unremarkable, un-Instagrammable plate of rice.

Rice is second in the three-course parade that is comida corrida, a pedestrian set meal offered at thousands of inexpensive restaurants throughout the city. Comida corrida or comida economica, literally “fast food” or “affordable food,” preserves the ceremony of the modern midday break from work while reflecting the popular flavors that reverberate through Mexico City and the country at large.

At the turn of the 20th century, as urban sprawl pushed workers to travel further into the city with little time to return home for lunch, fondas, cafeterias, street stands, and markets became the feeding posts of the populus. Comida corrida joints popped up around factories and commercial centers to offer cheap sustenance to workers in a civil setting, with table service and choice from a menu of the day.

Over time, comida corrida menus have evolved and become a mainstay of restaurants across the city, offered at eateries from high-end fondas to the cheapest comida comunitarias. While a good many are quite lackluster, those with particular kitchen muscle have a 2 p.m. queue of dedicated customers waiting their turn to eat.

Today, the tradition lives on, sustaining the working class during the week. “Comida corrida is really such a lovely thing” Alonso Ruvalcaba, author of “24 Horas de Comida en la Ciudad de México,” told me. “And of course, [it’s] very Chilango, because the city is so large. If a worker has to travel two hours into the city center, they’re not returning home to eat.”

The three-course format of comida corrida allows the customer to choose the direction of the meal within a standardized rubric. The meal starts with soup, a sopa aguada with two types on offer: always chicken consommé, bolstered by a cube or two of Knorr seasoning, with chunks of carrot and chayote waiting at the bottom. The second soup is a wildcard, often a crema, or a puree of zucchini or corn that may or may not be enriched with cream, or sometimes a lentil or fava bean soup. The thinner the soup, the cheaper the meal.

The second course steadies the procesion with carbohydrates, sopa seca,” or “dry soup” — an amusing turn of phrase amounting to rice, fideo seco, or pasta. The rice, oil-slicked and strewn with a confetti of cubed vegetables, is a good gauge of the prowess of the kitchen. There are white, red, and green versions. While rice is a seemingly-simple dish, the layers of technique and a careful hand are needed to produce well-seasoned, individual grains bound by sofrito and just enough liquid — a precision that only comes with years of experience and hundreds of pots of rice. Fideo is a dish with Spanish lineage: vermicelli noodles fried and cooked in seasoned broth until tight and reduced, then topped with sour cream, cotija, avocado, and diced onion. Pasta is a contemporary take on the dish using dried spaghetti, penne, or elbow noodles cooked to death and tossed with a loose tomato or cream sauce and showered in grated cheese.

And finally, a third course, the most substantial, which one selects from an ever-changing roster of guisados and stews. Here, the greatest hits of 20th-century Mexican cooking emerge: chile rellenos fried in an whipped egg-white batter and soaked in liquified tomato; cerdo con verdolagas, pork braised with tart purslane; enchiladas verdes, suizas, or rojos; pollo con mole; thin sheets of milanesa de res fried golden; flautas under a mop of shredded lettuce; the divisive higado encebollado, or liver and onions; regional dishes like cochinita pibil, mixiote, and pozole; and a whole host of stews centered on a particular chile sauce like guajillo, morita, chipotle, rojo, or verde. To appeal to modern tastes, one out of the three guisos is a “vegetarian” option. These often take shape as tortitas, little patties made from broccoli, huauzontle, or potato, bound with egg and fried; or avocado stuffed with tuna salad and flanked by packaged Saltines. And there are dozens more.

“There was one month where we didn’t repeat a single dish!” Juan Avila, the proprietor of El Festín de la Roma, an 11-year-old fonda on a busy Colonia Roma corner told me. “I’d estimate we can produce around 100 different guisados.” The guisos shift and change due to the cooks’ whims, the availability of product, and, most importantly, cost. “You can’t use avocado right now — we just can’t make it work” Avila said, “it’s 70 pesos a kilo.”

Like the thousands of other fonda operators in CDMX, the economic structure of a comida corrida demands selling as many meals as possible, as cheaply as possible. The price for a meal is a barometer for the socioeconomic standing of the neighborhood in which it is located: 50 pesos is standard, but glitzier neighborhoods’ comida corrida can rise to 80 pesos.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BucJRE9HADo/

When I first moved to Mexico City six years ago, I would eat comida corrida at least three times a week. I was trying to finish my dissertation for a PhD in sociology, a path taken up after a decade of line cooking in Brooklyn. Hunkered down in Roma Norte, I would write in the mornings, drinking instant coffee until hunger would overtake me and I would go for my one meal of the day. I would walk around, reading the handwritten menus at mom-and-pop fondas, and dine at whatever restaurants’ menu caught my eye. And regardless of where I’d go, I’d find different versions of the same meal, a comforting continuity.

Like other urban creatures, I found the fondas I liked the best. I was drawn to the corner spot whose rice walloped with garlic and the slightly cheaper menu across the street with a chile de arbol salsa laced with ground peanuts. If Doña Isabel’s sopa de haba was on the menu, made from dried yellow beans with a magnetic funk that could be smelled down the street, I would sit, WhatsApping photos of my meals to my Mexican cook comrades in Brooklyn.

This was not my mother’s cooking. To see Doña Mari and Doña Lilia in the kitchen, frying eggs and checking the consomme, was a comfort offered not by bloodline but by the everyday peregrinations of habit and tiny, banal ritual. To see them was also to receive a daily culinary education.

I learned how black beans taste when cooked with avocado leaf, and that both cilantro and mint are appropriate in the chicken broth. I soaked up the spectrum of green salsas from emerald raw to the deeply acidic army green, cooked down with tomatillo. I noted the little flourishes and customizations one could make to their meal: You can add a fried egg to the rice course, or fried plantains, or fresh banana (sounds out of place, is delicious). And you can always ask for beans with the stew, for free. A head nod towards the other diners and a “buen provecho” is polite practice when getting up at the end of the meal. While the food taught me how to eat, the meal, with its customs and pocket rituals, assimilated me to the city.

For many other city dwellers, a favorite fonda becomes a third place, an anchor of community via routine and repetition. The home-style meals made by women who have lived through economic crashes, earthquakes, and decades of political corruption, offer a brief sense of belonging in a miniature portion of bananas tossed in cream.

Daniel Hernández, a culture reporter for the LA Times and fellow comida corrida enthusiast, agrees. “My family is from the North. I do get the sensation of the memories of my grandmothers, or my tia, when eating certain dishes like albondigas.” Comida corrida is a channel into a style of cooking that has changed little in 50 years, relying on recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation. Most kitchens are led by women, aunties, grandmothers, and sisters, with embodied culinary knowledge and their own unique sazon. “Even for me, as a migrant to Mexico City, a foreigner,” Hernández said, “comida corrida can let [me] tap into that vibe, that familiar experience of eating at home with [my] family, the intimacy.”

I still drift into my local fonda on a weekly basis. When I go, I hope that my migrant friends toiling away in basement kitchens and on delivery bikes in my native city are similarly transported — when they sit down to a plate of red-tinted rice on their days off, 2,000 miles away.

***

Roman, a cook at my restaurant, Cicatriz, makes the best rice to accompany our family meals. Though a simple dish, there’s nuanced technique here: The rice is soaked in water for 30 minutes before being drained to dry out for another 30, then fried in substantial oil for almost another 30 minutes, to achieve a red-flecked hue and fluffy, individual grains. Try with sliced raw bananas.

***

Recipe: Arroz Rojo

Serves 4 to 6 as a side

Ingredients:

500g white rice, long or medium grain
3 T vegetable oil
65g white onion (about 1/4 of a medium onion)
5g garlic, peeled (about 2 cloves)
250g tomatoes (2 small)
20g fine salt
5g cilantro, leaf and stem (a small sprig)
250g water
150g cubed zucchini, carrots, and/or peas (optional)

Directions:

In a bowl, rinse the rice well, pouring off the cloudy water. Let soak in the water for 30 minutes. Drain the rice in a colander and let sit, draining until completely dry, about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, add onion, garli, tomatoes, salt, cilantro, and water to a blender and liquefy. Add more water to complete 1 full liter of liquid.
Get the oil heating up in a small-medium tall-sided pot. It should be ripping hot, almost smoking. Carefully add the drained rice and fry, stirring frequently over medium heat. The rice will start to feel tacky; keep stirring and frying. After 20 to 25 minutes the rice will begin to color slightly. Add in the cubed vegetables at this point, if using, and give them a stir, cook for a minute or two. Pour in the blended liquid, stir once or twice, bring to a simmer then drop the heat to the lowest setting.
Cover the pot foil or a tight-fitting lid and cook for 12 minutes. Remove the lid, give the rice a stir, and let cook for 3 to 5 minutes more over low heat. Remove the pot from the stove, top with a lid and let sit for 5 minutes more to steam in its residual heat. Fluff the rice with a fork, taste and add more salt if necessary.

These no bake fudge squares have 3 ingredients, and one is booze

"The thesis of the book was, how do I make people feel like they're baking something super cool, but make it super easy?" says Jesse Szewczyk, a food stylist, columnist for The Kitchn, and author of your favorite new baking book.

Szewczyk's brilliant new "Cookies: The New Classics" delivers on its title with mind blowing riffs on beloved favorites — that also happen to be entirely approachable to make. His snickerdoodles are made with brown butter and bourbon. His oatmeal cookies have Raisinettes. His cheesecake bars are savory. There are five recipes that you can make in a skillet. Even in the few that call for special ingredients, there are always a few suggested substitutions provided. (Don't want to find malt powder? Try Ovaltine!) And if you do experiment with a novel ingredient, Szewczyk gives you multiple ways to play with it. "A lot of times in the book, when those products are used," he says, "there's notes that say, "And if you have some left over, go to this page or go to this page, and these are great places to use them." In other words, this is a book that will get the people in your life begging for your famous brownies.

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I knew I would fall deeply in love with "Cookies" the moment I saw the chapter titles, with designations for recipes that are Chocolaty, Boozy, Fruity, Nutty, Tart, Spiced, Smoky and Savory. In other words, all the best flavors.

While my initial reaction to "Cookies" was to want to make every single thing in it, all at once, I restrained myself and started on the page with the words "Salted Absinthe Fudge Squares," because there's not a single word in there that I'm not into.

Jesse's recipes are so good, so forgiving already, I almost feel guilty tweaking them a little. By all means, get this book and make everything in it to the letter. But if you want to go a little lower effort here, the microwave does a reasonable job of what melting chocolate over simmering water does. The chocolate turns out a little less glossy, but it also takes all of two minutes to come together. And for my version, the Amaro I had hanging around my kitchen steps in for the harder to find (although wonderful when you can) absinthe.

The result here is a beautifully decadent, truffle-like confection with a mysterious, ever so vaguely vegetal richness. Don't be so shocked — you like mint in your ice cream? Carrot in your cake? Same principle, except this is better because it's alcohol. These would be amazing at a grownup party; they're also exquisite just to have around and nibble whenever.

The chocolate is the main ingredient here so there's nowhere to hide — use a brand you really love.

***

Boozy No Bake Fudge Squares
Inspired by Jesse Szewczyk's "Cookies: The New Classics"
Makes 36 squares

Ingredients

3 1/3 cups (20 ounces) of semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips
1 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk
3 tablespoons of absinthe, pastis, herbsaint, or amaro (I suspect sambuca could also be delicious here)
1/4 teaspoon of sea salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla (optional)
Flaky salt (optional)

Directions

Grease an 8" x 8" square baking ban and line with parchment paper with some overhang on all sides for easy removal.
Add your chocolate, condensed milk, liquor, salt and vanilla (if using) to a microwave safe medium bowl. Microwave on high for one minute. Stir.
Microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring thoroughly, until everything is just melted. It will likely only take another minute, so don't overdo it. It should be thick but a well combined.
Pour into your pan and spread evenly. Top with flaky salt if you like.
Leave uncovered to set at room temperature about 8 hours or so, then slice into 36 squares. I would not turn these down served with pretzels or potato chips.

More no-bake desserts we love:

Matt Gaetz praises Kyle Rittenhouse for “helping the country,” offers him a congressional internship

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., suggested on Wednesday that his office is open to hiring Kyle Rittenhouse as a congressional intern if the accused gunman is acquitted, arguing that the 18-year-old is “not guilty” for the killing of two men during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer.

“You know what, Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a good congressional intern,” Gaetz said Wednesday during an appearance on Newsmax. “We may reach out to him and see if he’d be interested in helping the country in additional ways.”

The Florida lawmaker continued: “He is not guilty. He deserves a not guilty verdict and I sure hope he gets it.”

Thursday marks the third day of jury deliberations for Rittenhouse’s trial, which began on November 1. In August of 2020, Rittenhouse drove from his home of Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, where he apparently sought to defend a car dealership from the threat of looting in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. During an armed confrontation – the details of which were litigated at trial – Rittenhouse fatally shot two men and injured another with an AR-15-style rifle.

Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty, claiming that he acted in self-defense, while prosecutors argue that the then-17-year-old acted like a vigilante. “I defended myself,” Rittenhouse said during the trial last week. The teen faces life imprisonment if convicted.

Over the last several weeks, the televised trial has been closely followed by politicians, pundits, and activists, who have weighed in the proceedings as they relate to racial justice, white privilege, Black Lives Matter, and gun violence.

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In a Fox News interview this week, conservative author J.D. Vance, currently vying to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy for Ohio, called Rittenhouse’s trial a “farce,” adding that “it’s child abuse masquerading as justice in this country.”

“The kind of people who thought O.J Simpson was innocent are the same people who believe that Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty,” echoed right-wing commentator Candace Owens last week. “Facts don’t matter to emotionally-indoctrinated zombies. Only feelings do.”

But those on the left have sung a markedly different tune.

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Rittenhouse’s trial reflects “white privilege on steroids.”

“It is literally impossible to imagine a 17-year-old Black kid traveling to a different state … who shoots three people, kills two – who, right now, isn’t in prison,” Butler told POLITICO.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke about the case with marked candidness for a federal lawmaker, tweeting on Wednesday: “Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.”

Rittenhouse’s defense team has already filed a motion for a mistrial with prejudice, according to CNN, meaning that Rittenhouse would be protected from any state bid to retry the case going forward.

For his part, Gaetz also railed against the recent sentencing of 34-year-old Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman” notorious for breaching the U.S. Senate floor on January 6 while donning a horned fur headdress. On Wednesday, Chansley was sentenced to three years in prison on a single count of felony obstruction of an official proceeding.

“This QAnon Shaman is a relatively harmless, nonviolent vegan and the notion that he has to be in prison for three and a half years to settle some sort of political score defies justice,” Gaetz continued.

Joe Biden still believes — but in the face of deepening cynicism, is that enough?

On Monday afternoon, I stood on the cold and blustery South Lawn of the White House, where President Biden and 800 guests were celebrating the signing of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.

It was a quintessential autumn experience, complete with the sweet smell of rotting leaves and the faint smell, imagined or real, of burning firewood from somewhere in the distance.

As I stood there watching the sunset with my hands in my overcoat pockets trying to keep warm, I saw something I’d never seen there before: a family reunion (of sorts).

Every other reporter had departed and only a few photographers and technicians remained, gathering up their equipment from the recently concluded public event. That’s when I watched the unguarded moment where a man let his hair down (what’s left of it anyway) and enjoyed the company of friends and family. That’s the only way to describe Joe Biden as he spent time with members of Congress while they congratulated him on the most significant achievement of his presidency so far.

I’ve never seen a president look that unguarded and happy in office. Presidents are always guarded — even seemingly in moments of joy or sadness. Each move in the public eye is usually choreographed, planned and controlled, and with Biden more so than with many others. But not on Monday. Instead of the public Biden, I caught a glimpse of how he acts in private.

I was privy to this rare sighting because I was stubborn enough to stick around on the South Lawn as long as he did. Perhaps I should’ve left after the official ceremony was over. Everyone else in the press corps did. But no one shooed me away. Biden stayed for half an hour after the end of the ceremony, not wearing an overcoat and apparently enduring the weather better than those younger than himself, including me. He took selfies with old and new friends from government. Most were congressional friends. Some were from state and local governments. Some were labor leaders. But make no mistake; President Joe Biden looked like he was at a family reunion. He was with his people. He smiled easily, socialized freely and looked like a man who hadn’t a care in the world. Quite frankly I was stunned.

Originally I decided to wait him out because there continue to be questions about the president’s health. He has been seen coughing, and has stumbled on occasion. His appearance in a recent CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper drew criticism and concern — it appeared Cooper had to guide the president back on topic as Biden meandered. Some said he looked befuddled. I saw none of that Monday. The president looked as spry and as energetic as he was when I first covered him in a press scrum nearly 30 years ago. Being among his congressional family apparently gave him strength.

In his public speech on Monday, Biden never wavered and seemed filled with vitality as he explained the significance of signing the infrastructure bill. “The bill I’m about to sign into law is proof that despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results,” he said. Then he showed his mastery of politics by reminding everyone that the Republicans didn’t get everything they wanted and neither did the Democrats — but they worked together to achieve tangible results. “Folks, too often in Washington the reason we didn’t get things done is because we insisted on getting everything we want — everything. With this law, we focus on getting things done. I ran for president because the only way to move this country forward, in my view, was through compromise and consensus. That’s how the system works. That’s American democracy. We compromised. We reached a consensus. That’s necessary.”

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Some 50 years from now, Biden explained, people would point to this moment and say it was when America rose to the challenge of the 21^st century. Retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who spoke prior to Biden, gave Donald Trump some credit for mentioning infrastructure as an issue. But he gave Biden full credit for getting the job done and said that bipartisanship should be “rewarded, not attacked,” reminding us that we have to “work together on big issues.”

Just about an hour and a half earlier, White House press secretary Jen Psaki in her daily briefing acknowledged that the president’s popularity had fallen recently as Biden continues to deal with problems like inflation. She also noted that the president’s policies remain extremely popular among voters. Psaki blamed some of Biden’s falling popularity on the pandemic. “There’s a fatigue from COVID. We see that in poll after poll . . . People are sick and tired of COVID and the impacts on the economy. We understand that; we’re tired of it too. That’s why the No. 1 priority continues to be getting COVID under control,” she said.

But that doesn’t explain the weak poll numbers. Some believe that Biden’s often misunderstood quest for bipartisanship and finding common ground is a weakness, and therefore a big part of the problem. The White House tried to clean that up this week, putting Biden and every other senior member of the administration on the road to preach the significance of the bipartisan infrastructure deal and to push his Build Back Better agenda, which is currently stuck in Congress.

But there are other problems. This week, Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic about the problems of modern autocracies. She said they are supported by “sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services … and professional propagandists.”

This also helps explain why Biden’s poll numbers are falling. Some may suggest this is an indication that Biden is out of touch, while others may say (as his carefree attitude on the South Lawn might imply) that he knows something the rest of us do not. Applebaum, however, touched on an important problem: the continued promotion of autocracy and the way pundits, the media and members of the public too easily accept a false equivalency between Biden and the autocrats.

We all know the biggest promoter of autocratic fascism. It is Donald Trump. While Biden is promoting bipartisanship and unity, Trump is selling T-shirts that say “Let’s Go Brandon,” a none-too-subtle code for “F**k Joe Biden.” He suggested last week that he had no problem with the Jan. 6 mob calling for the hanging of Mike Pence, his vice president at the time. He claims liberals are presiding over the “disintegration of our country.” When Trump isn’t debasing the presidency and the country trying to sell us autographed photos, footballs, T-shirts, hats, Christmas cards and ornaments, he’s still trying to sell us on how crappy our country is and how the Democrats and the press are the enemy of the people.

Trump tells us life in America is horrible — but neglects to take any responsibility for that, even though he was president for four years. He might have better success telling us how great life is because he was president — but he could never say that because his stock in trade is fear, division, rancor, anger and hatred.

A new poll from The Economist and YouGov reports that 28 percent of Republican voters believe the delusion that Trump will be “reinstated” as president by the end of the year — so he has no reason to accept reality. His message reaches millions of people who gladly support his depraved lunacy with contributions to fund his lavish lifestyle.

Then there are Trump’s cancerous second bananas. At nearly the same time Biden was preaching bipartisanship at the White House, authorities took former Trump adviser Steve Bannon into custody for defying a congressional subpoena, as the investigation into the insurrection and attempted coup on Jan. 6 continues. A defiant Bannon didn’t cheer unity or celebrate bipartisanship. He vowed revenge and division — again, saying, “We’re taking down the Biden regime.” He’s doubling down on his long-running attempt to burn it all to the ground, which was exactly what he said he wanted to do when he hitched his wagon to the flaming mess that is Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, it was former national security adviser Mike Flynn who got his turn to tell us what we face. Reportedly, Flynn was part of an effort to get the Pentagon to overturn the 2020 election. He also took a stand against everyone in this country who doesn’t believe in his personal brand of God. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters.

How is it we do not clearly see the binary choice facing us? A plethora of former Republicans have warned us, including but not limited to the Lincoln Project, former Sen. Jeff Flake and former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who has observed that Trump enables and encourages people to become the worst versions of themselves. Still there are pundits, lawyers, publicists and reporters who — as Applebaum suggests — willingly spread the lies and propaganda.

All the punditry and reporting relies on shallow cynicism. We sneer at politicians while contemptuously thinking they are all equally crooked liars and at the same time sucking up to them for access. We don’t trust them and we don’t trust ourselves, because we know how corruptible and contemptible most media companies are.

And here is a president claiming eternal optimism. What’s his Pollyanna game? He speaks of working together and then actually tries to do it. Meanwhile, the GOP wants to expel those in their party who worked with the Democrats. Why? We’re not enemies. We’re all Americans — or so our forefathers taught us.

If there is an ounce of that sentiment left in us, then the choice is easy to make.

In his famous speech on June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln made it clear: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was alluding to scripture, where the Pharisees accuse Jesus of being from Satan because he cast out devils. The irony of that will probably be lost on most evangelicals who support Trump.

Biden remains optimistic that “we can deliver real results for real people,” and that compromise can lead to solutions. “There is no limit to what our nation can do,” he said. “And there is no one thing that I know more than this: It’s never, ever been a good bet to bet against the American people. Never, never, never.”

How can you seriously compare that statement to a man who wants to sell you T-shirts while telling you your brother, sister, friend or neighbor is an enemy just because they do not agree with you? Why do we in the press continue to act as if these are two ideas worthy of equal consideration?

You can certainly criticize Biden’s actions or policies without claiming he’s in any way equivalent to the autocratic fascists who believe in one religion, disavow science, suppress votes, embrace racism and misogyny and call anyone who doesn’t agree with them “the enemy.” In fact it is normal to do so.

There is a lot wrong with the Biden administration. His staff is too protective of him. He doesn’t often explain himself adequately and he hides behind a bravado of optimism while playing his cards close to the vest. His administration often screws up its messaging. He hasn’t had an open press conference at the White House since taking office. (His one press conference was limited to a handful of reporters because of COVID restrictions, and really doesn’t count). He hasn’t adequately explained how he will deal with inflation, the new space race, oil prices or China. His exit from Afghanistan was, at best, awkward.

But these are criticisms of a man who deeply respects our democratic institutions — and who held the largest event I’ve ever attended on the South Lawn to celebrate the accomplishments of a bipartisan Congress. We must stop pretending that we are merely watching two political parties that understand and care about democracy arguing about how to obtain our mutual goals.

All things are not equal. You cannot compare a man who brings two parties together on the South Lawn and preaches inclusion to a party that wants to turn the republic into ashes.

This country cannot be one religion. It cannot be about one-party rule. It cannot condone voter suppression, racism or misogyny. It cannot criminalize a woman’s right to choose. It cannot disparage those who are marginalized and it cannot take joy in hypocrisy, rage and pain.

Everything we face was seen in two distinct events Monday: Joe Biden preaching unity at the White House and Steve Bannon preaching treason while being taken into custody.

Many still want the noble experiment of democracy to succeed. They want the United States to be the citadel on the hill and provide a path to self-government and freedom that the rest of the world can emulate and embrace.

Joe Biden, with his many flaws, shares those ideals. Trump, and the rest of the rats left on the sinking GOP ship, don’t make the cut.

More from Brian Karem on the troubles and travails of the Biden White House:

In Afghanistan, climate change drives an uptick in child marriage

In March of last year, Rabia and her two young daughters were forced to leave their home in northern Afghanistan. While facing the threat of increased violence, their village was also in the midst of a severe drought that strained the water supply and devastated crops. Rabia could no longer raise her sheep, which had provided a steady source of income. She was estranged from her husband and lived with her brother before he was killed in a Taliban attack. She said she depended on his family for additional support. But they were farmers, and without water, wheat, maize, and other crops would not grow. Out of desperation, the entire clan packed up and moved, hoping to find work outside their village.

They eventually settled at a camp for internally displaced persons, Nawabad Farabi-ha located outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. In early August, Rabia sat with her daughters on the mud floor of their current home: a one-room structure with mud walls and a thatched roof. Rabia, who like many Afghans, goes by one name, recalled the months leading up to their journey. “The land dried up, and the violence worsened,” she said, referring to the fighting between the Taliban and Afghan forces. “We had nowhere else to go.”

Rabia and her daughters are among the nearly 500 families at the camp who have fled drought and violence. According to UNICEF, as of October, more than 682,000 Afghans were internally displaced. They left their homes seeking food, work, and safety — but even still, they face fraught decisions. This past February, Rabia’s oldest daughter, 11-year-old Shukria, was betrothed to a man nearly twice her age, in exchange for flour, rice, and cash to sustain her family in the coming years. “I know my daughter is a child, and it was too early for her to be married,” Rabia explained. But without the ability to provide for Shukria and her sister, Rabia said she had no other choice. “It was either her marriage or our funerals.”

Shukria, thin and soft-spoken, did not protest the decision. At the time of the August interview, she was attending a local madrassa in her community to study the Quran. At home, she was learning to cook and sew, she said, “so I can be a good wife.”

Child marriage is not a new phenomenon in South Asia, and despite attempts to legislate against it, the practice remains common across Afghanistan. Reports suggest a spike in such marriages, spurred by the violence that preceded the Taliban takeover, and by the effects of climate change on this agrarian country. Over the past half century, temperatures here have risen nearly twice the amount they have globally, speeding up evaporation and leading to extended droughts. This, experts say, has decreased crop yields and plunged many Afghans into poverty as they are no longer able to make a living from the land. With few viable employment options, some families are turning to a traditional wedding custom known as toyana, whereby money is given to the family of the girl. With little time to spare, these families say, the best available option is a heart-wrenching one: to marry their daughters while the girls are still young.

In exchange for Shukria, the man’s family promised to give Rabia money and goods worth more than $6,000, a princely sum for the starving family. Inside her mud home, Rabia retrieved a small piece of paper, a log of the payments from the man’s family. So far, Rabia said, she had received roughly one-sixth of the toyana in food and medical expenses for her children. “Just basic necessities to survive,” said Rabia. “I won’t give my girl to them until the entire amount is paid.”

***

Child marriages are not usually documented in Afghanistan and data collection is limited. However, several nongovernmental organizations have observed a rise in child marriages, corresponding with increased periods of drought. In 2018, for example, the worst Afghan drought in a decade affected two-thirds of the country and displaced more people than the growing conflict between the Taliban rebels and the Afghan government. A report from UNICEF that same year noted that “drought has exacerbated the practice of child marriage affecting at least 161 children” from two provinces.

In a separate report published this past June, the Norwegian Refugee Council, which operates programs in displaced persons camps across Afghanistan, wrote that drought-stricken families in need of money had turned to child labor and early marriage. Some allowed their children to earn money by joining the fighting. The situation, in other words, was dire. “Parents have reported giving their children sleeping pills to avoid them asking for food,” the report stated.

“Studies show that there has been an increase in the number of drought and flood events, and since Afghans are largely dependent on agriculture, they are directly affected” by changing conditions, said Assem Mayar, a lecturer at Kabul Polytechnic University who studies water resource management. In some regions, precipitation decreased between 1950 and 2010 by as much as 30 percent; meanwhile, Afghanistan’s mean annual temperature increased by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit, approximately double the increase globally over that same period.

“Annual droughts in many parts of the country will likely become the norm by 2030, rather than being a temporary or cyclical event,” warned a 2016 report from the United Nations. “This will mostly be due to higher temperatures leading to higher evapotranspiration and higher crop and livestock water demand.” The International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency that monitors displacement in the region, reports that currently, nearly 3.5 million Afghans are severely affected by drought.

In Shukria’s home province of Faryab, more than 874,000 residents are at risk of displacement due to droughts this year, according to the IOM dataset. “The debt level for households is increasing astronomically,” said Michael Speir, a displacement expert who works at the IOM. These families, he said, “are forced to exercise the worst of all solutions.”

***

Mayar has extensively studied the region’s changing climate, and is a Ph.D. candidate in water resource management at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He says that the impact of water scarcity could be mitigated with better planning and infrastructure. Droughts, he said, “don’t have to result in famines and food insecurity.” Spier agreed that better water management would improve the situation, but the current political context presents a challenge to any infrastructure upgrades. The former government and humanitarian bodies responsible for implementing solutions are now defunct or severely downsized.

“The new administration is not capable of managing this situation,” Mayar said. “Most low-level Talibs believe that God created the people and he will feed them. They don’t concern themselves with the ‘how?’ Meanwhile, the high-level Taliban officials have asked for international support in addressing the droughts. But looking at their financial situation, it is unlikely they will secure funds to manage this,” he said, referring to the sanctions implemented by the United States, as well as other countries and international organizations, in the wake of the Taliban takeover. “They can hardly pay the salaries of their government employees,” he added. “How can they help in water management?”

All of this suggests hard times ahead for many Afghans. “The lack of water forced us to leave our homeland,” said Qudratullah, a village elder from Faryab Province who now lives in the Nawabad Farabi-ha camp. Walking past rows of mud homes and clusters of tent encampments spread across the country’s vast northern plains, he described the situation in his hometown, not far from where Shukria and Rabia once lived.

“There wasn’t even any drinking water left, so irrigation was out of question,” he said. The dwindling water supply placed a heavy burden on women, whose job was to carry water to the village. As wells began to dry up, the women had to walk further, up to 12 miles in a day to get water, said Qudratullah. They started getting sick. Some complained of problems with their menstrual cycles. “Mentally, they were not doing well,” Qudratullah added.

“When the crops started to fail and livestock began to die, younger boys were pulled out of school and sent to work to support the families,” he continued. “Those who had daughters sold them in marriage.” This was his first experience of displacement, Qudratullah said — a rare claim in a country that has struggled with decades of conflict and crisis. “Even the wars of many decades could not make us leave, but the lack of water has forced us to leave our homeland.”

A 1,000-gallon tank in the center of camp serves as the families’ primary source of water. Donated by the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the tank is perched on top of two-story brick columns. “Some NGOs help pay for the water,” Qudratullah said, which is used for bathing and chores. Drinking water, meanwhile, is provided by families within the camp who had set up small businesses. One father-son team, for example, rented a small rickshaw and about 20 canisters to take into the city, where they purchase drinking water to fill their canisters. Once back at the camp, they sell their water at a small profit.

***

Shukria was not the only girl in the camp destined for a child marriage, Qudratullah said. At the time of Undark’s August interview, there were several other cases, but families did not wish to talk. “Many of them are aware that it is wrong to marry girls that young,” he explained. But, he added, people need to survive.

Rabia once held big hopes for her daughter’s future, including getting the girl an education. “But I can’t afford to even feed her — this is was our only option,” she said.

“Besides,” she added, “she will be sent to a good family who can take care of her.”

Yet the prospective groom’s family isn’t much better off. They were also displaced by the droughts, according to the man’s father, Mohammad Ismail. The males in the family worked in nearby brick kilns, Ismail said, earning some savings “so we can marry our son to the girl he chose.” Ismail said his son saw Shukria at the madrassa and fell in love with her.

The water resources expert, Assem Mayar, characterized the global climate situation as fundamentally unfair. Afghanistan produces a very small amount of greenhouse gases, he said, and yet its people — including young girls like Shukria — are bearing the brunt of the world’s emissions.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

The future of work is hybrid – here’s an expert’s recommendations for success

COVID-19 has changed the way we work.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. workforce increasingly relied on remote collaboration technologies like videoconferencing and Slack. The global crisis accelerated the adoption of these work tools and practices in an unprecedented way. By April 2020, about half of companies reported that more than 80% of their employees worked from home because of COVID-19.

That shift was made possible by decades of research into, and then development of, technologies that support remote work, but not everyone uses these technologies with the same ease. As early as 1987, groundbreaking research identified some of the challenges facing women working from home using technology. That included the difficulties of child care, work-home separation and employee growth opportunities.

Since that time, we have learned much more about virtual collaboration. As an associate professor of information systems, I’m interested in what we can expect as we eagerly anticipate a post-pandemic future. One thing stands out: Hybrid work arrangements – that is, employees who do some tasks in the office and others virtually – is clearly going to be a big part of the picture.

One survey from April 2021 shows 99% of human resources leaders expect employees to work in some kind of hybrid arrangement moving forward. Many have already begun. As just one example, Dropbox, the file hosting service, made a permanent shift during the pandemic, allowing employees to work from home and hold team meetings in the office.

The definition of “hybrid” varies in other organizations. Some workers might be in the office a couple days a week or every other day. Other businesses may require only occasional face-to-face time, perhaps meeting in a centralized location once each quarter.

Either way, research does show many companies fail in their implementation of a virtual workforce.

Remote work versus in the office

In-office work promotes structure and transparency, which may increase trust between management and workers. Developing an organizational culture happens naturally. Casual office conversations – a worker walking down the hall for a quick and unscheduled chat with a colleague, for instance – can lead to knowledge-sharing and collaborative problem-solving. That’s difficult to replicate in a virtual environment, which often relies on advance scheduling for online meetings – although that’s still feasible with enough planning and communication.

But if you look at different metrics, in-office work loses out to working from home. My recent research discovered remote workers report more productivity and enjoy working from home because of the flexibility, the ability to wear casual clothes, and the shortened or nonexistent commute time. Remote work also saves money. There is a significant cost savings for office space, one of the largest budget line items for organizations.

Hybrid arrangements attempt to combine the best of both worlds.

It’s not perfect

It’s true that hybrid work faces many of the same obstacles of face-to-face work. Poor planning and communication, ineffective or unnecessary meetings and confusion about task responsibilities happen remotely as well as in-person.

Perhaps the largest issue when working at home: technology and security concerns. Home networks, an easier target for cyberthreats, are typically more vulnerable than office networks. Remote workers are also more likely to share computers with someone else outside of their organization. Hybrid organizations must invest upfront to work through these complicated and often expensive issues.

With hybrid work, managers cannot see the work taking place. That means they must measure employee performance based on outcomes with clear performance metrics rather than the traditional focus on employee behavior.

Another potential pitfall: Fault lines can develop within hybrid teams – that is, misunderstandings or miscommunication between those in the office and those at home. These two groups may start to divide, potentially leading to tension and conflicts between them – an us-versus-them scenario.

Establishing a hybrid environment

Numerous recommendations exist on the best way to develop a hybrid model. Here are a few of the best ideas.

Meeting too often or with little purpose – that is, meeting for the sake of meeting – leads to fatigue and burnout. Not everyone needs to be at every meeting, yet finesse from management is required to make sure no one feels left out. And meeting-free days can help with productivity and allow employees a block of uninterrupted time to focus on complex projects.

[Over 115,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Listening to employees is critical to making sure the hybrid environment is working. Continually seeking feedback, through one-on-one conversations, focus groups or human resources surveys, is important too. So is recognizing and rewarding employees with in-person or virtual kudos for their achievements. Performance incentives, such as financial rewards or tokens of appreciation including food delivery, help develop a supportive culture that increases employee commitment.

Finally: Both managers and employees must be transparent in their communication and understanding of hybrid plans. Policies must be in place to define what tasks happen in the office and remotely. Access to reliable communications is essential, particularly for remote work. All employees must receive the same information at the same time, and in a timely manner. After all, whether in the office or online, workers don’t want to feel they’re the last to know.

Alanah Mitchell, Associate Professor and Chair of Information Management and Business Analytics, Drake University

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

Trump and his regime committed — or at least condoned — mass murder. America just doesn’t care

More than 750,000 people have died from the coronavirus plague in the United States. Epidemiologists and other public health professionals predict that more than a million will die before the pandemic is finally vanquished. Millions more Americans will experience long-term and perhaps lifelong negative health impacts after surviving COVID-19.

By one serious estimate, the coronavirus pandemic cost the American people more than 7 million years of life in 2020 alone. More than 140,000 children have lost their primary caregivers to the coronavirus plague. These estimates do not include any guess as to how many millions of peoples’ lifespans will be shortened because of the psychological, emotional and financial stress and other misery caused by the pandemic.

What do people do with all that pain and loss and resulting emptiness? Where will they put the sadness and anger?

Ultimately, Donald Trump and his regime are responsible for many of the deaths — probably a large majority of them — caused by the coronavirus pandemic. At almost every key moment, Trump and his inner circle, along with other Republican elected officials who followed his lead, made decisions based on personal self-interest, greed and political partisanship, rather than a sincere effort to save American lives.

New reporting in Politico this week details the Trump regime’s de facto acts of democide against the American people, based on the congressional release of “emails and transcripts with former senior CDC officials about the White House’s attempts to sideline the agency at critical moments” early in the pandemic:

The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.

The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.

As was reported last year, also by Politico, staffers at the Department of Health and Human Services sought changes in the CDC’s weekly reports on COVID-19 “to align the summaries more closely with [Trump’s] talking points”:

Christine Casey, one of the leaders of the CDC team that publishes weekly scientific reports … told the House committee that at one point in August 2020 she received instructions to delete an email reflecting political interference.

Casey said Paul Alexander, the former temporary senior policy adviser to the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, instructed her to stop publishing the weekly reports, insinuating her team was trying to make Trump look bad in public.

After conversations with leadership at the CDC, including then-Director Robert Redfield, Michael Iademarco, one of the CDC’s leaders overseeing epidemiology and laboratory services, told Casey to delete the email.

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Dr. Deborah Birx, the former COVID task force coordinator at the Trump White House, recently testified that Dr. Scott Atlas, “a radiologist and White House adviser who frequently disagreed with the CDC, attempted to alter the agency’s testing guidance”:

He pressed the agency to rewrite its guidelines to underscore that only symptomatic individuals needed to get tested. His argument, at the time, was that the U.S. only needed to worry about those individuals who had Covid-19 and were experiencing symptoms such as fever and coughing because those were the people who could more easily spread the virus. …

“This document resulted in less testing and less — less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” Birx said, adding that the change in the guidance was not based on science.

None of this should be a surprise. Trump and his regime committed these crimes against humanity in plain sight. These “revelations” are simply providing more evidence and clearer details of how and when these crimes took place.

In a recent Esquire article, Charles Pierce places the Trump regime’s COVID crimes in a larger context:

The sheer contempt for active national leadership and the sheer disregard for the public health illustrated by this material has no parallel in American history. For the sake of their own public image — which, ironically, was headed for the storm drain anyway — members of the administration abandoned even their most rudimentary obligations as public servants. The country was denied the information it desperately needed because some time-servers and coat-holders were trying to avoid a tantrum from the Oval Office. We are lucky we survived this long.

Some may wonder why Trump and his inner circle were so reckless and bold, acting without apparent fear of any accountability or serious negative consequences? The answer is simple: Donald Trump is a fascist authoritarian and likely a sociopath. To his political cult members and the current Republican Party as a whole, he is essentially a demigod. Trump never intended to leave office. As the events of last Jan. 6 should make clear, Trump was willing to do virtually anything — including literally staging a coup — to remain in power.

There were many public warnings about Trump and the pandemic.

In a May 2020 interview with Salon, less than three months into the pandemic, epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves said this about his controversial use of the term “genocide”:

Trump’s pandemic response is not the same as Nazi Germany. It is not Rwanda. But Trump’s response is something that is well beyond a policy mistake. One hundred thousand people are dead. There are likely to be 150,000 or perhaps even 200,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The estimates are that two thirds or more of the deaths could have been prevented. …

Moreover, it was premeditated. There were people in the White House and elsewhere warning Donald Trump, “People are going to die. We need to do something about this.” And the White House made a concerted policy decision to let people die. Their response to the coronavirus was death by public policy.

We can parse words about whether that is manslaughter or mass negligence. Part of me, in retrospect, feels like using the word “genocide” made it too easy for some critics to deny the reality of the situation. Perhaps I should have said that the Trump White House’s response to the coronavirus was a monumental error and a monumental sin and a monumental human rights violation. What the Trump administration is doing in response to the coronavirus is something we have not seen in the United States in a long time, which is basically wiping out a whole group of people by public policy.

In July 2020, psychologist Dr. John Gartner, a contributor to the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” offered his perspective:

Donald Trump’s behavior with the coronavirus pandemic is intentional. He is malevolent. He is a first-degree mass murderer. This is a plan.

I am a great believer in the principle of Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Trump disbanded the pandemic task force. First, Trump said that the virus was not going to come to America. Then he chose not to do more testing. Trump chose to not use the Defense Production Act to make more needed medical supplies and equipment.

Trump has admitted to trying to slow down the testing for the coronavirus. Trump has undermined the governors’ efforts to protect the public from the virus. Trump even went so far as to encourage astroturf protests to intimidate Democratic governors into reopening for “the economy.” Trump has said that he is against people wearing masks — which is the simplest, cheapest and most efficient way to keep us from spreading the virus.

Trump is trying to open the floodgates. He’s hosting mass gatherings of people at his rallies and other events. He’s doing everything he can to enable the virus.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is going to be the most successful bio-terrorist in human history. Let me repeat myself so there is no confusion. Donald Trump is the most successful bio-terrorist in human history. This is not an accident.

In August 2020, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner expressed the view that Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic could be considered negligent homicide:

Some jurisdictions call this involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide. The lowest level of homicide has three elements to the crime, and Donald Trump satisfies them easily.

The first element is that a person commits an act in a grossly negligent manner. Or there is a duty to perform an act and a person fails to perform it in a grossly negligent matter.

There are many different pieces of evidence which show that Donald Trump has acted in a grossly negligent manner in the way he has handled or mishandled the coronavirus pandemic. Trump had a duty to act as president of the United States and he failed to act — and that failure was a product of gross negligence.

The second element of that type of homicide is that your grossly negligent act, or your grossly negligent failure to act, was reasonably calculated to result in serious bodily injury or death. With a deadly virus, the grossly negligent failure to act is reasonably likely to create serious bodily injury or death in another person.

The third element, which sounds like it is the toughest to overcome, is causation. The causation element says that a person acted in a grossly negligent manner where their failure to perform a duty or conduct or failure to act was reasonably likely to create death or serious bodily injury in another person.

What has the response been to the latest “revelations” about the Trump regime’s acts of democide? Virtually nonexistent. The mainstream news media and the American people as a whole appear exhausted and bored by the Age of Trump and its continuing onslaughts. In the current media climate, new information about Trump and the pandemic barely registered as newsworthy before being discarded for the next controversy of the day.

To wit. Lili Loofbourow of Slate offered a valuable essay this week which highlights how the American people have been hardened into indifference about the country’s escalating democracy crisis and the ongoing Republican coup:

No, people don’t want to know anymore. People already know too much, and the knowledge hasn’t profited them. They know about all the harms that were done to American institutions and American democracy while Trump was president. They also know what the much-ballyhooed Mueller report — each development of which many of them followed attentively — achieved: nothing. Why would the Jan. 6 commission would be any different? This is what happens when the “news” is that a nation’s entire system of accountability is broken: Even the consequences that do get meted out start to feel weightless. Maybe the “QAnon shaman” goes to prison for four years (certainly some of the insurrectionists should). But everyone understands at this point that the actual instigators — including the ex-president and members of Congress who worked with and informed the rioters — are immune to consequences. So why read about it?

America’s collective shrug toward the Trump regime’s acts of negligent homicide are a surrender to the normalization of deviance, another example of how heretofore unfathomable behavior becomes “acceptable” or “normal” to a large segment of the public. Some psychologists describe this collective state as “malignant normality.” Societies so afflicted lose a shared understanding of what constitutes truth and reality, and even a shared concept of time. In practice this means that individuals and groups cannot effectively fight back against the worsening catastrophe. This has made some of the worst crimes of human history possible.

Here’s a thought experiment: If these same events, meaning Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his regime’s numerous other crimes against democracy and human decency, had taken place in another country, how would the American people and news media respond?

Such a country would be labeled as an international pariah. The regime and its leaders would be described as tyrants and criminals. There would be calls for regime change, and many members of the international community would demand that the wrongdoers be brought to trial for crimes against humanity at the Hague.

Thanks to the damaging myopia of American exceptionalism, no such thing will happen. Trump and his cabal will, in all likelihood, never face justice for their crimes against democracy and the American people. Such a thing is simply unimaginable to our national vanity. History indeed has a dark sense of humor, but this time the joke is on us.

E-cigarette maker Puff Bar is facing a probe by North Carolina’s attorney general

Hang out with Generation Z-ers for long enough, and at some point you’re bound to be engulfed by the vapor clouds of Puff Bars. The brightly colored sticks resemble USB flash drives, and unlike other e-cigarettes, leave only the faintest odor upon exhalation. The vapes deliver synthetic nicotine interspersed with flavors like “Blue Razz and “Cool Mint” that sound more like candy varieties than e-cigarette scents.

Therein lies the problem, at least according to one state official. On Wednesday, North Carolina’s attorney general announced he is concerned that the hip descriptions of Puff Bar flavors make them resembles products that could appeal to kids.

“We are actively investigating Puff Bar and other companies at all stages of the distribution chain, from manufacturers to retailers and everything in between to ensure they are not profiting off kids,” Attorney General Josh Stein explained in a statement. “Where I find illegal behavior, I will not hesitate to take legal action.” The attorney general’s probe will not merely focus on Puff Bar but include other companies involved in the supply chain, from manufacturers to retail outlets.

In addition to launching a state-wide investigation into the e-cigarette maker, Stein also revealed that the state is suing Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the co-founders of Juul Labs Inc., a separate e-cigarette maker unaffiliated with Puff Bar. In the litigation, Stein accuses Bowen and Monsees of personally contributing to the company’s policy of marketing its product to children and seeks civil penalties and damages. Since Juul became popular in 2017 and 2018, e-cigarettes have surged in popularity among Generation Z-ers, and has persisted even as the controversy around Juul’s popularity among young people has hurt that specific company. A 2021 study cited in the Wall Street Journal found that 11% of U.S. high school students admitted to using e-cigarettes at least once in the past month.

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Puff Bar is co-owned and co-managed by two friends in their 20s, Patrick Beltran and Nick Minas. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal last month, Beltran and Minas denied any responsibility for underage youths using their product, claiming that they have done “everything” they could to prevent that and blaming the problem on smoke shops and counterfeiters. (The Journal noted that their ownership “couldn’t be independently verified.”)

Puff Bar as a company has been mired in controversy. The company voluntarily halted its sales in July 2020 amidst criticism of its prevalent use among young people, and one week later the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned Puff Bars from the American market. By February, the company figured out how to end the FDA ban: It began producing bars using synthetic nicotine (what Beltran described as a “forced innovation”), which the agency has no power to regulate.

There are a number of health risks associated with vaping. Many of them involve one’s lungs: Vaping uses fluids that have an oily liquid base, and doctors worry that these could get deep into your respiratory tract and provoke an inflammatory response. Vitamin E, for instance, was once a popular agent in the e-liquid found inside e-cigarettes, but it has been found in the lungs of people who have suffered vaping damage. The e-liquids can also contain dangerous substances like formaldehyde, diacetyl and acrolein (which is most often used as a weed killer). While it is unclear if vaping can cause lung cancer (it hasn’t been around long enough to know for sure), its ability to get deep into your lung certainly suggests this could be the case. Vaping has also been linked to popcorn lung, lipoid pneumonia and collapsed lung.

When consumed by young people, Puff Bars can also lead to neurological damage. Being exposed to nicotine at such a young age could harm teenage brains as they are developing, as well as alter nerve cell functioning. Nicotine exposure also changes a young person’s brain chemistry in ways that make them more likely to become addicted not only to nicotine products, but to other substances.

Update: Gregory Conley, President of the American Vaping Association (AVA), spoke with Salon after this article was published. He claimed that the 2019 vaping-associated acute pulmonary disease outbreak was caused by an adulterant known as vitamin E acetate being used in illicit tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) vaping devices. He also challenged the science behind the claims about neurological issues.

Media can’t decide on 2022 midterms: Normal politics or total apocalypse?

Political journalists in our top newsrooms are pursuing two dramatically different story lines — and refusing to do the critically important work of connecting them.

They file the occasional story illustrating how the modern Republican Party has become anti-democracy, race-baiting, violence-inciting, shameless and untethered to reality. They report that its leaders defend the violent Jan. 6 coup attempt and are preparing to invalidate or dispute electoral defeats in the future. They observe the party’s appeals to white supremacy and grievance. They describe Donald Trump as a conspiracy theorist who would be unlikely to respect any limits if returned to office. They sometimes point out that the Republican agenda, such as it is, consists only of legislative hostage-taking, lies, denial, obstruction and division.

The inescapable conclusion is that if this Republican Party wins back control of even one house of Congress, they will grind governing to a halt — and that if they win the presidency again, democracy as we know it may well no longer exist.

Meanwhile, these same political journalists are also handicapping the 2022 and 2024 elections as if things were normal — as if it were still just a choice between two equally legitimate political parties, rather than a referendum on whether the government should be allowed to function, whether the people should be allowed to pick their leaders in the future and whether white Christian nationalism formally replaces pluralism as the country’s organizing principle.

Indeed, they are calmly — even confidently — predicting Republican victories, certainly in 2022, based on polling and historical trends. They take as a given that there will be, as usual, an energetic backlash against the ruling party. They note all the causes for dissatisfaction with Democrats. And they consider it inconceivable that the public might somehow hold Republicans accountable for their transgressions and the threat they pose to traditional American values.

(They certainly don’t consider that the media itself contributes to that lack of accountability – first, by not aggressively pursuing it, then by assuming it will never happen.)

It’s not surprising that our top political reporters aren’t connecting those two story lines; they have a remarkable ability to compartmentalize and to forget their own work when it complicates things.

But here is the lead of the news story they should be writing:

Despite the dangerously anti-democratic extremism of the Donald Trump-led Republican Party, polls and historical trends at this point indicate that voters will return the GOP to power in the House in 2022 — and quite possibly the White House in 2024.

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That, in turn, should lead to an urgent discussion of the many factors at play, including:

The failure – on the part of the Democratic Party and the media – to properly stigmatize Trump and his enablers for their lies, corruption, rule-breaking and incitements to violence, culminating in a violent coup attempt.
The country’s rigid two-party system not offering a palatable alternative for non-racist, pro-democracy conservatives.
Republican tribalism, such that party affiliation and loyalty are defining and unquestioned.
A significant subset of voters who would welcome an authoritarian, white Christian government.
The united front presented by today’s Republican leaders and their lockstep refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing (unlike after Watergate)
Genuine dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s inability to fulfill its promises.
Public and media susceptibility to Republican scare stories.
Negative media coverage of Biden and the Democrats.
Cyclical bitterness toward the ruling party, whichever it is.

The prospect that some combination of these and other factors will lead to the cessation of legislating in 2022 and an emboldened strongman government in 2024 raises a number of questions journalists should be trying to answer. Among them:

What will it take for the greater public to recognize the extremist, radical nature of the current Republican Party?
How can we improve the public understanding of the practical implications of putting Republicans back in power?
Is the public sufficiently aware of how much has changed since Biden and Democrats took office?
Shouldn’t Trumpism break the voters’ historic pattern of alternating party control and favoring a divided government?
How have the supporters of an attempted coup avoided stigmatization, and is it too late?
Given the radicalism of the GOP, is antipathy for Biden and Democrats a rational reason to vote Republican?
What are the alternatives for voters who hate Democrats but love democracy?
Why are Republican voters more energized than Democratic voters, and will they stay that way?
How is possible that the party saying it will steal the 2024 election if it doesn’t win could actually win it without stealing it?

Seeking answers to these questions will not be easy. It will require open-ended and open-minded reporting. That means not looking for people to illustrate a predetermined thesis, but actually listening to people.

To expand on this, may I refer to you the Pope? I kid you not. I thought his recent description of the journalistic mission and how to achieve it was thoughtful, wise and particularly appropriate to our moment.

The Pope, on journalism. Glorious.https://t.co/BK806X8qOt pic.twitter.com/TWQXZF7aEt

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) November 15, 2021

So, for instance, that means not reflexively reporting that some regressive, deceitful, race-baiting strategy seems to have worked, but examining why it may have been effective, what that says about the people who employed it and the people who fell for it, what the truth of the matter is and how to correct the record.

It means looking at polling not to vindicate your poor reporting in the past, but to help you understand what you’re doing wrong, and fix it.

For instance, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll showed generic Republican congressional candidates with the largest midterm lead (51 percent to 41 percent) over generic Democrats in 40 years. It’s an outlier. But it also showed overwhelming support for Democratic legislative initiatives.

You can use that as evidence the Democrats have lost the messaging wars and are cooked. Or you can see that as cognitive dissonance that demands some real reporting.

More from Salon on the impending 2022 battle:

Bill Maher says he’s shocked Trump hasn’t been charged for Georgia election meddling

HBO host Bill Maher appeared on CNN Wednesday to warn that former President Donald Trump was very likely to run again in 2024, and that he even stands a good chance of winning.

Maher noted that Trump has been working to purge Republicans who didn’t go along with his plot to overturn the 2020 election, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“Raffensperger, who he called up and said, ‘I hope you can find me some more votes,'” Maher said. “Can you imagine that? That alone — how is that not a crime?”

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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to pressure Raffensperger to “find” the 12,000 votes he’d need to overtake President Joe Biden in that state, although so far no charges have been filed.

Maher went on to warn that Trump has dedicated his post-presidency so far to “putting people in place who will find the votes” for him if he runs again in 2024.

“That’s what’s so disturbing,” he said. “The next time that happens, I think they are going to ‘find’ the votes.”

Watch the video below:

DeSantis in hot seat after top aide pushes anti-Semitic conspiracy theory

Long before anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists became obsessed with billionaire Democrat George Soros, they were obsessing over the Rothschild family and their firm Rothschild & Co. — which has been around since 1810. Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently claimed that the Rothschilds played a role in the launch of a new COVID-19 vaccine passport system in the country Georgia. Pushaw had a playful, quirky tone, but journalist Jonathan Chait, in an article published by New York Magazine this week, stresses that the comment was nonetheless offensive.

On Twitter, Pushaw posted, “Georgia decided to enact a ‘Green Pass’ system (biomedical security state). Immediately after that, the Rothschilds show up to address the attractive investment environment in Georgia (lol). No weird conspiracy stuff here!”

Chait points out that Pushaw misrepresented what actually happened in Georgia.

“First of all, the timing is completely wrong,” Chait explains. “Georgia did not announce its green-pass system ‘immediately’ after meeting with the Rothschilds. The Rothschild meeting occurred five months ago.”

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Chait continues, “Second, many countries have implemented COVID pass systems. A handful of Asian countries, as well as Europe and, um, Israel, are setting up passport systems that will allow people to gather in public indoor spaces. DeSantis and his spokespeople are furious about this because they believe people who refuse vaccinations should not be denied any privileges, either by a government or a private company. Indeed, this has become DeSantis’ defining agenda.”

The journalist points out that Pushaw is “happy to” pander to the “right-wing conspiracy theorists” who are “an important part of DeSantis’ power base.”

“Pushaw almost certainly stumbled onto this news because some conspiracy theorist in her social network brought it to her attention,” Chait writes. “The anti-vaxx movement is filled to the brim with conspiracy theorists, and conspiracy theorists have a deep attraction to anti-Semitism…. DeSantis is gleefully swimming in a sea of conspiracy nuts, and those conspiracy nuts are inevitably going to include a healthy share of anti-Semites.”

Fear-mongering over the Rothschilds, Chait notes, can be found in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was published around 1902 and promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Many anti-Semites and White nationalists consider it essential reading.

Journalist Yair Rosenberg, in a Twitter thread this week, also called Pushaw out, posting:

For further reading: Why conspiracy theorists always land on the Jews https://t.co/FwbJ4z5ifF

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) November 17, 2021

Paul Gosar retweets AOC cartoon murder video — minutes after being censured for it

On Wednesday, Newsweek reported that Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) retweeted an account promoting his own anime video depicting himself murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — just minutes after the House voted to censure him and strip him of committee assignments for the original tweet.

“Gosar had previously deleted the controversial video, which shows him slaughtering Ocasio-Cortez before turning the blade towards President Joe Biden, refusing to apologize but explaining that he had ‘self-censored’ due to a sense of ‘compassion for those who generally felt offense.’ However, Gosar’s position appeared to have changed quickly after the House voted largely along party lines to censure him on Wednesday,” reported Aila Slisco. “Gosar retweeted conservative podcaster Elijah Schaffer’s tweet of the video within an hour of the House vote. The new tweet was captioned by Schaffer, ‘Really well done. We love @DrPaulGosar, don’t we folks?'”

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Only two Republicans — noted Trump critics Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) — joined Democrats in the vote to censure Gosar for the tweet, which also depicted him brandishing a pair of swords at President Joe Biden.

This controversy comes as lawmakers are facing a new volley of anger and threats, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who was herself stripped of her committee assignments for promoting social media posts advocating the death of Democratic leaders — even posting the phone numbers of Republican House members who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill.

GOP Rep. Andy Harris may lose medical license after pushing bogus COVID treatments

Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist by trade, claimed this week that he may lose his medical license after pushing unproven COVID-19 treatments.

The Maryland doctor said during an October radio interview that he had prescribed at least one patient the anti-parasite drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Ivermectin is often used in developing countries to treat intestinal worms and other parasites, and before recently it was largely used in the United States to treat livestock. It has taken on an almost mythical status in far-right circles, where its proponents refer to it as a cheap cure-all despite the fact that researchers have failed to prove its effectiveness in fighting the coronavirus.

The Food and Drug Administration advises against its use in treating COVID-19, and points out that the medication can be dangerous in large doses.

“Using the Drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 can be dangerous and even lethal,” the FDA said recently. The FDA has not approved the drug for that purpose.”

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” the FDA added in a later tweet.

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On Monday, Harris said during a meeting of the House Freedom Caucus that someone had filed a complaint against him with the state’s medical board over his ivermectin prescription.

“An action is currently being attempted against my medical license for prescribing ivermectin, which I find fascinating, because as an anesthesiologist, I know I use a lot of drugs off-label that are much more dangerous,” Harris said on a video of the meeting that was later shared to Facebook.

The Maryland Board of Physicians keeps any such complaints confidential, so details of the action were not immediately apparent. It also appears the board accepts anonymous complaints given there is “sufficient information,” the Sun reported.

The ongoing scandal also shines a light on Republican radicalization when it comes to spreading medical misinformation — Harris, as a part of a Congressional group called the “Doctor’s Caucus,” spent the spring of 2021 advocating for Americans to get vaccinated, even appearing in a video alongside his GOP colleagues pleading with constituents to seek out the shot.

But as the summer progressed and Republican attacks on vaccination efforts and a number of other COVID-19 mitigation efforts ramped up, Harris did an abrupt about-face, fighting Maryland officials over vaccine mandates on university campuses and questioning the efficacy of masks.

According to NBC News, he even went so far as to encourage a constituent who called into a radio show he was appearing on last month to research alternatives to vaccination promoted by fringe medical group “America’s Frontline Doctors” — the organization led by a conspiratorial Texas physician named Stella Immanuel, who is best known for suggesting that certain ailments may be caused by sperm from sexual visitations from demons and/or alien DNA.

As of Wednesday evening, no disciplinary actions were reported against Harris by the Maryland Board of Physicians.

More like this:

“Food has forever unified people”: How Immigrant Food brings “gastroadvocacy” to the table

Washington, D.C., usually brings to mind thoughts of the White House, Capitol Hill and more government buildings. The hub of all things politics is also home to a growing immigrant community.

Immigrants make up 14% of the District’s population, a number which is expected to rapidly grow. This growth reflects trends in other cities both large and small — and it also speaks to the longstanding history of immigrant culture in the U.S.

Yet this history is also marred by a painful legacy of discrimination, policy arguments, and even violence. In recent years, some immigrant communities reported an increase in discriminatory behavior. Notably, these numbers grew during the Trump administration, a moment in history where anti-immigrant rhetoric was perhaps filled with more hate, false statements and vitriol than any other time in recent memory.

Opening only a block away from the White House in 2019, one District restaurant decided to fight this narrative. Immigrant Food sought to counter pervasive stereotypes and misinformation about immigrants in the U.S. — and it opted to serve really great food while doing so.

“I wanted to create a restaurant that really celebrated and served fantastic and delicious food from some of the largest immigrant groups in the United States but also really celebrated immigration — and did so in a way that includes advocacy for immigrants and their needs,” Immigrant Food co-founder Peter Schechter said.

Co-founded with Venuezluean chef Enrique Limardo, Schechter, a Italy-born foreign policy wonk and food enthusiast, has worked with teammates to create a restaurant that represents the diversity and ingenuity of flavors and spices from immigrant communities around the world. From Filipino rice and grains to noodle dishes inspired by Vietnam and the Caribbean, Immigrant Food has striven to be more than a restaurant. According to Chief Operating Officer Téa Ivanovic, it’s also working to be a center of necessary activism and dialogue.

“Food has forever unified people,” Ivanovic wrote to Salon Food. “For someone unfamiliar with the issues facing immigrants in America, it’s daunting to jump into the complex topic of immigration without a baseline understanding of what immigrants contribute economically, culturally and politically to our country. But it’s a lot less tough to sit down with a group of friends and learn about how your favorite dishes or flavors have come from immigrant cultures across the globe.”

Since opening in the District, Limardo, with the help of fellow Venuzuelan chef Mile Montezuma, has served up flavors from China and El Salvador to Ethiopia and Peru that have impressed numerous diners living in or passing through the nation’s capital. Like most restaurants, the food is central to the mission, but its values and goals extend far beyond what’s on the plate.

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Immigrant Food’s brand of “gastroadvocacy” includes informing patrons about how they can get involved with immigrant advocacy efforts in their communities. The restaurant also uses its platform to talk about the challenges faced by immigrants in this country, including language access issues. It has partnered with organizations like José Andrés’ World Food Kitchen and NGOs, as well as established a think tank to discuss women’s issues — issues which are intersectional with immigrant rights, according to Ivanovic.

“Immigrant rights and women’s rights are deeply intersectional, and it’s difficult to talk about one without addressing the other,” Ivanovic said. “As both women and immigrants, these women face unique challenges related to that identity and pay discrimination.”

Today, Immigrant Food continues to be active in the Washington community. A second location, Immigrant Food+, opened in the recently unveiled Planet World Museum. An elevated version of the fast-casual (or cause-casual, as the establishment defines itself) restaurant, it highlights spices and flavors from the world’s seven continents. With a menu crafted by Limardo, this partnership is part of an effort to demonstrate the evolution of language and how it impacts culture, behavior and beliefs.

While it reflects the ongoing mission of the Immigrant Food to serve meals that keep diners coming back, it also address challenges that impact the country. From amplifying the message and history of the Black Lives Matter movement to talking about food insecurity, no topic is off the table.

“Food is a unifier, but food inequality is also something that needs to be addressed,” Schechter said. “The way that food can be a place of dialogue, a place in which one can sit around the table and resolve issues — it’s truly a tool for change.”

For Ivanovic, Immigrant Food can be the starting point for even greater change.

“Our hope in Immigrant Food is to get people comfortable with just how ingrained immigrant contributions are in their daily lives as a first step and lean into the deeper conversations from there.”

***

Courtesy of chefs Enrique Limardo and Mile Montezuma, this recipe was created to honor Vice President Kamala Harris’ Jamaican and Indian heritage.

***

Recipe: Madam VP’s Heritage Bowl

Chicken Curry

2 1/4 cup oven roasted chicken
1/2 cup water
2 tbsp curry paste
1 1/4 cup coconut milk
1 2/3 cup diced potatoes
3 1/4 cup chickpeas
1 bunch cilantro
1 bunch green onions
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 cinnamon stick
1 star anise
1/2 tsp coriander

Instructions:

Put all ingredients except green onions and cilantro into a pot. Cook until potatoes are tender and the stew is thick. Once off the heat, add cilantro and green onions and take out the star anise and cinnamon stick.

Assemble a bowl with 2 oz. of rice per person, 2 oz. of plantains (fresh/frozen plantains baked in oven), slices of serrano pepper (to taste), and 1.5 oz. spring mix per person. Top with chicken curry and dressing to taste.

Dressing

2 1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbsp parsley flakes
1 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/2 tsp salt
3 1/4 tbsp white vinegar

Instructions:

Put all ingredients in blender and blend until smooth.

Read more “Tastes of Comfort”:

In Netflix’s captivating “Prayers for the Stolen,” life goes on as one digs a grave to stay safe

The opening scene of Netflix’s poignant drama “Prayers for the Stolen” has Rita (Mayra Batalla) and her pre-teen daughter, Ana (Ana Cristina Ordóñez González), digging a shallow grave in their yard with their hands. It soon becomes clear why. Young women in this rural Mexican village are often kidnapped by members of the local cartels who raid houses looking for young, attractive girls. Rita wants to keep her daughter safe, so they create this hiding spot should anyone come looking for Ana.

Ana spends much of her time with her best friends, Paula (Camila Gaal), who is vulnerable to capture, and María (Blanca Itzel Pérez), who is not (she has a pronounced cleft lip). After Ana is caught using makeup, a worried Rita takes Ana for a haircut to make her appear more like a boy. Ana cries during this life-changing moment, but it is for her own protection.

Writer/director Tatiana Huezo, working from Jennifer Clement’s novel, makes a poetic feature debut here (having helmed some shorts and documentaries in the past). Although not much happens as she chronicles the characters’ lives, a palpable threat of danger hangs over almost every scene. Early on a young girl goes missing, and there is repeated talk about poison being sprayed in the area. (An uncomfortable episode, late in the film, has a character covered in the toxic chemicals.) But mostly Huezo’s approach is to provide tender, episodic scenes of the three female friends at school, at play, and at home.

The film, Mexico’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature, is largely plotless, which allows viewers to observe the daily lives of the characters. But it also means the film can be a bit slow at times. “Prayers for the Stolen,” has only a handful of tense moments, such as a duck-and-cover sequences when gunfire erupts in the street. (There is little to no on-screen violence.)

Around the midpoint, Ana, María, and Paula become teenagers, and are played by Mayra Membreño, Giselle Barrera Sánchez, and Alejandra Camacho, respectively. They still have short haircuts, but with their developing bodies, they look less like boys. They attend school in a single classroom, but teachers come and go because the area is so dangerous. There is a nice moment where the students learn to “see things differently” — as when Paula figures out an assignment given by their kindly teacher, Leonardo (Memo Villegas).

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Huezo is showcasing the dignity of these people who are often not depicted as fully realized characters on screen. She shrewdly avoids the typical Cartel narratives in favor of showing the quotidian lives of the innocent people affected by drug operations in the region. Most of the women toil in the poppy fields. The few men in the village work at a local mining operation. (There are some fabulous shots of their chalky faces; the film as a whole is exquisitely photographed by Dariela Ludlow.)

There is also a terrific scene at a rodeo, where María’s older brother, Margarito (Julián Guzmán Girón) rides a bull and later dances with Ana. There is a hint of a relationship developing between Ana and Margarito as he teaches her to shoot a gun (she’s adept), but Huezo does not succumb to such conventional storytelling; she just captures the moments that provide an impressionistic look at the characters and their lives. Another sequence of the three adolescent girls playing in a river is a lovely moment that depicts their close friendship. (Another plus is that the girls are supportive of each other, and never really fight).

As the film progresses, Rita tries to get Ana to go live with her father, because he is far from the village, and it is safer. That Ana has the word “Papa” inscribed on the wall by her bed provides a nice, subtle statement about her relationship with her absent father. But Ana is reluctant to move because she appreciates her life and her friends. She does not want to lose her innocence, which is on the verge of disappearing.

“Prayer for the Stolen,” is absorbing because viewers will care deeply for Ana as she comes of age. And yes, there is a scene where she gets her period, but like the symbolic haircut, it is incorporated well in the story, and not overplayed. Membreño is captivating in the central role. She maintains a real poker face as she sizes up every situation she encounters, determining how to think, or feel, or react. It is a confident performance that draws viewers in because it gets inside her head.

Giselle Barrera Sánchez and Alejandra Camacho lend strong support as María and Paula, while Mayra Batalla makes Rita a steely force — especially in a scene where she has a machete in her hand as she talks to an authority figure who wants to find Ana.

Huezo’s thoughtful film is almost deceptively simple, but like the image of a scorpion that recurs throughout “Prayers for the Stolen,” it ultimately stings.

“Prayers for the Stolen” is now streaming on Netflix. Watch a trailer for it below via YouTube.

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Austin was supposed to be a safe space for my trans daughter. Texas Republicans ruined that

When my family first moved to Austin from a small town in another state, it was to get our daughter away from the boys at her old school who were bullying her because she is transgender. But we found new bullies here. This time, they were also in the state Capitol.

Recently, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term, signed into law a cruel anti-transgender bill banning transgender kids like my daughter from playing sports at school. This comes as Republicans in the Texas state legislature have renewed their years-long attacks on the trans community, filing more than 50 anti-trans bills in 2021 alone.

Three years ago, our 10-year-old told us who she really is on the inside: a girl. As a school counselor of 20 years, I always supported my LGBTQ students, but I’ll admit that my husband and I were terrified at first, not because of who our daughter is, but because of the dangers she will face. Transgender children are at higher risk for attempting suicide, and other kinds of mental health crises are also worsened by the bullying, rejection, and isolation that transgender kids experience. And sure enough, some of my daughter’s classmates couldn’t handle her transition.

Since pre-K, our daughter had grown up with a group of boys who knew her as a boy. She’s played with these kids all her life, but when she simply started to use a different name and wear different clothes, those same boys began bullying her terribly. One boy even pushed her down the stairs at school. The bullying eventually got so bad that we made the decision to move to Austin, a city with an LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance and more welcoming schools for transgender kids.

We had high hopes of making a better life for our daughter in Austin. Unfortunately, Texas Republicans have worked hard to prevent that. The volume and intensity of the GOP attacks make it clear that lawmakers don’t want to acknowledge that our daughter is a person with basic rights. Lawmakers called my daughter a boy in committee hearings and on the Texas Senate floor, they say without any evidence that my daughter is a danger to other kids just for being herself, and they have now passed a law to encourage people to identify and isolate our daughter in school sports. Our children, who are not hurting anyone, feel the target legislators have put on their backs.

Even here in Austin, kids at school see the headlines about the new sports ban and repeat back the dangerous rhetoric that they see these “grown-up” politicians use. When my daughter started at her new middle school, no one knew she was transgender, and she wasn’t bullied. But as she made friends, she slowly began sharing that she was transgender and the word spread. By the end of 7th grade, everyone knew, and the bullying began again. Some kids were relentless, calling her the wrong name, and even denying her humanity by calling her an “it.” The abuse began affecting her schoolwork and her mental health. One day my worst fear came true; she stayed home from school because she said she needed a break, but while she was home, she swallowed a handful of pills. She wanted all the bullying and harassment to just end. Thankfully, she got scared and called her dad, and we were able to get her to an emergency room for medical care.

But our family still lives in fear every day that our child will be taken from us by a cruel environment that tells her she doesn’t deserve the same things as other kids. We are afraid that she will continue to be bullied in school and that she will see in the news, once again, that powerful lawmakers are using her to score political points.

We will go to the ends of the earth to keep our daughter safe, if we have to, but we shouldn’t have to do that. Lawmakers might not understand who our daughter is, but that doesn’t mean they should work to make her less safe. It’s time for all of us to stand up to political bullies the same way we stand up for our kids at school.

If you’ve ever spoken with a teacher to help get support for your kid in class, or if you’ve ever tended to your kid’s scraped knees after a bully pushed them on the playground, you know how important it is to protect your child, and I urge you to take action now, too. Pick up the phone and call your Senator to demand strong nondiscrimination protections, like those in the Equality Act, to put a stop to these state-by-state anti-transgender attacks. My daughter is just a kid. Her safety shouldn’t depend on where she lives, where she goes to school, or what the grown-up bullies in the statehouse say. She deserves better.

Judge warns Charlottesville defendants they’ve already provided ample conspiracy evidence

The jury empaneled to hear a federal civil conspiracy case could find that the defendants devised a plan to come to Charlottesville, Va. “with the idea of provoking a fight and applying an overwhelming response” based on the evidence presented so far, Judge Norman K. Moon told defendants Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell on Tuesday.

Spencer and Cantwell both entered motions to dismiss after the plaintiffs — nine people who suffered physical injuries and emotional distress in a lawsuit brought by Integrity First for America — rested their case on Tuesday.

Judge Moon declined to dismiss the claims against Spencer, a prominent white nationalist leader at the time of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and Cantwell, neo-Nazi podcaster who brought guns, knives and pepper spray to Charlottesville for the rally. Moon told the two men that it will be up to the jury to decide whether they conspired to commit racially motivated violence in Charlottesville.

The judge cautioned Spencer and Cantwell that they seemed to not appreciate how low the bar is for proving a conspiracy.

“If you know that people are planning [racially motivated violence], and you join in with, you don’t have to do much — just join in and be there,” Moon said. “You have a misunderstanding, I’m afraid, of what the law of conspiracy is.”

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As evidence of conspiracy, Moon singled out a phone text exchanged by Cantwell and Spencer in the days leading up to the rally. Cantwell was concerned that the permit for the rally might be withdrawn, and what that might mean for his plans to exercise his permit to carry a firearm. Moon noted that Cantwell wrote that he was “willing to risk a lot for our cause, including violence and incarceration” and that he said he wanted “to coordinate to make sure it’s worth it for our cause.” He also noted that Spencer responded: “It’s worth it, at least for me.”

“That statement, along with other evidence could be taken to mean that Spencer and Cantwell were willing to risk violence for their cause but wanted to coordinate it ahead of time,” Moon said.

Reciting a litany of evidence presented by the plaintiffs, Moon provided a response to Cantwell’s motion to dismiss. The judge noted that Cantwell “admitted he seriously advocated for a white ethno-state and he advocated for violence on his podcast,” while referencing at least two instances in which the defendant promoted the genocide of Jewish people, advocated the use of chemical and biological weapons, and said that immigration made him “want to bash people’s skulls open.”

Moon took note that Cantwell purchased pepper-spray canisters in Charlottesville and assaulted counter-protesters at the University of Virginia on Aug. 11.

“Cantwell marched in a torch march; he pepper-sprayed and beat up someone,” Moon said. “You’ve got an explanation, but there’s no self-defense after you’re not in danger. Because someone hits you, that doesn’t give a right to beat them within an inch of their life.”

Later, when Cantwell put on his defense case, he walked the jury through two videos depicting the torch march, pointing out various counter-protesters whom he assaulted or claimed had threatened him. Cantwell suggested during his testimony that his actions were taken in self-defense.

One of the videos presented as evidence by Cantwell was filmed by Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist.

“This is the transgender person that was filming,” Cantwell said at one point. “I have no interest in causing this person any kind of harm. If this is the kind of thing you’re making it out to be, this person would not be safe in this crowd.”

During cross-examination, plaintiffs’ counsel Michael Bloch reminded Cantwell that he had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and battery in state court related to his conduct at the torch march. One of the victims in the case that resulted in Cantwell’s guilty pleas was Gorcenski.

Spencer took a different tack while putting on his defense case.

Spencer replayed an audio recording capturing him exploding in a rage-filled rant peppered with anti-Semitic and racial slurs hours after the deadly car attack that took the life of Heather Heyer. While Spencer characterized his outburst as being representative of “the worst part of me,” he suggested that it undermined the theory that he went to Charlottesville seeking violence.

“I never imagined that what was going to happen was going to happen,” he testified. “The idea that we planned this chaos is undermined by my visceral reaction at the time.”

In another significant development on Tuesday, Judge Moon instructed the 12 jurors that they should deem as true that two defendants, Elliott Kline and Robert “Azzmador” Ray, entered into an agreement with one or more co-conspirators to engage in racially motivated violence. Moon explained to the jurors that the instruction was the result of evidentiary sanctions against the two defendants because they failed to comply with their discovery obligations.

Ray was a contributing writer for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer from 2016 to 2020, while Kline was a leader of Identity Evropa from April 2017 through August 2017.

The jury also heard new testimony from Cantwell, as well as testimony from Benjamin Daley of the defunct neo-Nazi group Rise Above Movement that helped bring into focus Kline’s role in organizing and promoting violence at Unite the Right.

Daley and three other members of Rise Above Movement — Michael Miselis, Thomas Gillen and Cole White — previously pled guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to riot related to their conduct at the Unite the Right rally.

The factual basis for the plea agreement reached by four men from southern California describes Rise Above Movement as a “combat-ready, militant group” of white nationalists that held hand-to-hand combat training for members “to prepare to engage in violent confrontations with protesters and other individuals at purported ‘political’ rallies.” After clashing with counter-protesters at a rally in Huntington Beach, Calif. on March 25, 2017, Rise Above Movement members traveled to a violent confrontation with leftists in Berkeley, Calif. on April 15 that would later be cited by Jason Kessler as a template for Unite the Right.

In his video deposition, which the jury heard on Tuesday, Daley testified that the Rise Above Movement fighters met members of Identity Evropa, including founder Nathan Damigo, in Berkeley on April 15. After the formal event at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park ended, rally attendees and counter-protesters poured into the surrounding streets. A video of Damigo punching a counter-protester spread earned him fame within the alt-right movement and the praise of Spencer, while Rise Above Movement members punched, stomped, kicked and pepper-sprayed counter-protesters, according to the factual basis for their plea agreement.

Daley committed to attending Unite the Right in late July 2017. He bragged on a Discord server used to organize the rally that he and his fellow Rise Above Movement members were “experienced at these events” and that “all were in Berkeley riots,” according to court documents.

Daley and three other members attended the Aug. 11 torch march at the University of Virginia, and Daley admitted in a 2018 Facebook conversation that he “hit like 5 people,” according to the factual basis document. During his testimony on Tuesday, Christopher Cantwell identified Daley in a video depicting the two men involved in the assault on counter-protesters who were surrounding the Thomas Jefferson statue.

The Rise Above Movement members showed up in downtown Charlottesville on the morning of Aug. 12 with their hands wrapped in athletic tape. Pushing through a group of counter-protesters to get to Emancipation Park, “RAM members collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot” according to the factual basis document. Daley acknowledged by signing the factual basis document that he grabbed, punched and kicked four different counter-protesters during the melee. In one instance, Daley grabbed a counter-protester, and he and Kline together threw her off the sidewalk.

“Was there a moment on Aug. 12, when you choked a counter-protester and you and Elliott Kline threw her off the sidewalk,” plaintiffs’ counsel asked Daley after showing him video of the incident.

Daley invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination.

“She has blood streaming down the side of her face,” plaintiffs’ counsel said.

“It would appear so,” Daley agreed.

The plaintiffs’ counsel asked Daley if he agreed that “the violence that you were a part of” at Unite the Right “was not self-defense.”

“I’m required by the terms of my plea agreement to say this, and yes, it is true,” Daley replied.

During his testimony, Cantwell played a video that he recorded of a so-called “leadership meeting” prior to the Aug. 11 torch march, highlighting his efforts to promote cooperation with law enforcement. In the video, Kessler can be heard informing the group that news of the planned torch march had leaked, and they should decide whether they wanted to go through with the plan.

“If we’re going to do it at all, I want the cops involved,” Cantwell said.

Cantwell’s recording of the leadership meeting and Gorcenski’s livestream video of the torch march — both offered as evidence by Cantwell — captured Kline giving the marchers instructions for volunteers to form an outside “security” flank on either side of the torch march. If they saw counter-protesters, Kline instructed, the security volunteers should move between them and the torch marchers.

During cross-examination, Cantwell identified Kline giving another set of instructions during the leadership meeting.

“At five o’clock we’re going to start bussing people over,” Kline said. “Anyone who is a fighter needs to be here at 5 a.m.”

Defendants are expected to finish making their case tomorrow, and the parties agreed they will give closing arguments on Thursday. The trial is scheduled to run through the end of the week, and Judge Moon expressed concern that the jury might not have enough time to deliberate.

“I don’t want the jury to rush through to get through this thing on Friday,” he told the parties. “I think the jury’s going to be tired and want to get out of here.”

The plaintiffs agreed to cut their closing argument down to two and a half hours to keep the trial on schedule. The defendants will have three and a half hours, to be divided between five lawyers, along with Spencer and Cantwell as the two pro se defendants.

Alluding to the way the defendants have undercut one another during the trial, Cantwell complained that the allotment of time puts the defendants at a disadvantage.

“I don’t think all the defendants are similarly situated as the plaintiffs,” he said.

Judge Moon disagreed, noting that the plaintiffs have to talk about individual damages.

“They have one theory to pursue,” Cantwell said.

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

Although Philip Roth passed away in 2018 at the age of 85, his career has much to teach us about today’s cancel culture wars. As with contemporary provocateurs such as Dave Chappelle, many wanted to shut the scandalous novelist down (and up). Roth’s response to all that outrage, equal parts petty and mesmerizing, foreshadows how Chappelle and other besieged artists handle cancellation controversies.

By “cancellation” I refer to a tactic through which individuals, organized groups, or both, attempt to punish an artist who has offended them (or their allies). The aggrieved parties may try to have the artist and/or their creative work(s) deplatformed. A related goal might be boycotting the transgressor, potentially terminating their career.

Conservatives source this tactic to their boogeypersons, “woke Leftists” and “social justice warriors.” Yet the will to banish expression we dislike mushrooms up in every quadrant of the nation’s political soil. The growth is certainly more lush and invasive in some ideological environments, but there is no one, unitary “cancel culture.” Instead, there are “cancel multicultures,” some louder and more organized than others.

Trans activists complained about comedian Dave Chappelle’s jokes; MAGA followers tried to end Kathy Griffin’s career for tweeting a picture of herself holding Donald J. Trump’s severed head. Certain feminists protested Louis C.K.’s “comeback” after he admitted to sexual misconduct; Republicans raged against Taylor Swift for supporting liberal causes. Lawmakers on the left mobilized to have “Huckleberry Finn” removed from syllabi for racial insensitivity; Virginia’s GOP endeavored to banish Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

Roth’s career confirms that the impulse to cancel is not confined to one political persuasion. The author was lambasted by conservative Rabbis in the 1960s for his dirty-laundry depictions of Jews in “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Five Short Stories.” In the 1970s, liberal feminists lit him up over his portrayals of women in “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “My Life as a Man.”

Roth’s renown, however, steadily increased. His many rebounds remind us of an Iron Law of today’s controversies: in a free society, attempts to cancel a profitable artist, regardless of the moral merits of the intervention, are counterproductive. Whether cancellations of less popular figures are effective, is an open question.

Chappelle is enmeshed in rancor for nasty slights directed at the LGBTQ community, but his huge following assures his financial future is rosy. Louis C.K., as one critic observed, will “be doing 48 shows in 30 different cities. Not bad for somebody who’s been ‘canceled.'” Griffin wasn’t as much canceled as she was delayed. Her tour, initially postponed after the fallout from her Trump-as-Medusa tableau, eventually took place. As Ositwa Nwanevu argued in “The Cancel Culture Con” many of the allegedly canceled have done just fine.

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This is not to deny that the ordeal of cancellation may be harrowing for both the entertainer and those they offend. Yet in a society as politically polarized as our own, artists who probe cultural issues will always have a “base,” if you will. In fact, a new generation of attention-seeking performers might be perversely incentivized to get cancelled – a strategy employed by various content creators on YouTube and TikTok.

Roth, for his part, virtually pioneered a response to the outrage he provoked: he used his own art to ponder (and ding) people who disliked his art. In “The Anatomy Lesson” Roth’s stunt double, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, cheekily contemplates the fury his fiction aroused among feminists. Zuckerman references a piece titled “Why Does This Man Hate Women?” This happens to be nearly exactly the name of a real article written about the real Philip Roth by the real critic Vivian Gornick!

This “meta move” has become commonplace. Kathy Griffin’s special, “A Hell of a Story,” is part documentary about her travails and part stand-up routine assailing her critics. “Everytime I come on stage,” sighed Chappelle in “The Closer,” “I be scared. I be looking around the crowd searching for knuckles and adams apples.” At once vulnerable and insulting, reflecting on his comedy as he performs it, Chappelle is a master of meta.

For critics, the meta move changes everything. “Separate the artist from the art!” we were told. But Roth warned that such a tidy division was impossible. He wrote novels about writers whose complex personal lives, grievances and psychic turmoil seeped into their stories. One’s Art was saturated with one’s Life (and vice versa).

If Roth was correct – and Chappelle, Griffin and C.K.’s responses sustain his point – it means the cycle of hostilities will intensify. Singed by social media snark, artists will use their art to retaliate. More broadly, it means that while “cancellation” is wildly overhyped, there is an interest, an aesthetic precedent, and most importantly, a market for endless cancel culture warfare.

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

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., rallied his caucus to near-unanimously oppose a censure vote against Rep. Paul Gosar for his anime-style video depicting the Arizona Republican killing his colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, R-N.Y.

On Monday, McCarthy claimed that he called Gosar and was reassured that the violent film was not a direct threat or meant to incite violence, but rather to connect with young supporters. “I called him when I heard about the video, and he made a statement that he doesn’t support violence, and he took the video down,” McCarthy told CNN, his first comments since the video’s release last week. “He took the video down and he made a statement that he doesn’t support violence to anybody. Nobody should have violence [against them].”

McCarthy, of course, stopped short of condemning Gosar’s conduct. On Wednesday, he led his GOP caucus in a vigorous defense of Gosar on the House floor against a Democratic resolution to censure Gosar over the video.

Kevin McCarthy's defense of Gosar is pure whataboutism pic.twitter.com/1vRfJH6MUK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 17, 2021

“The video was idiotic and immature and childish and stupid, but I don’t think it was a threat. I think it was in very poor taste,” Rep. Tom Rice told CNN.

Only two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger Illinois, joined all Democrats in the House in a 223-207 vote, with Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, voting “present.”

Cheney, who the Republican Party of Wyoming voted this week to no longer recognize as a member of the GOP, slammed her party’s failure to condemn Gosar after the vote.

“The glorification of the suggestion of the killing of a colleague is completely unacceptable. And I think that it’s a clear violation of House rules. I think it’s a sad day. But I think that it’s really important for us to be very clear that violence has no place in our political discourse,” she told reporters. “And that is his actions were completely unacceptable and demanded center.”

“It’s a real symbol of his lack of strength, the lack of leadership in our conference right now, and the extent to which he and other leaders seem to have lost their moral compass,” Cheney said of McCarthy last week.

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called for multiple ethics probes into the video, suggesting that the “horrific” video should be investigated by law enforcement. Many Democrats have likewise rebuked the Arizona Republican.

Gosar, for his part, has mostly sought to downplay the since-deleted video, telling CNN that he finds the “faux outrage infantile and the hyperventilating and shrill accusations that this cartoon is dangerous to be laughable or intentionally hyperbolic.” In a statement last week, Gosar said that “the video depicts the fight taking place next week on the House floor and symbolizes the battle for the soul of America when Congress takes up Mr. Biden’s massive $4 trillion spending bill that includes amnesty for millions of illegal aliens already in our country and was not meant to depict any harm or violence against anyone portrayed in the anime,” he added.

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Over the past several years, Gosar – a six-term congressman first elected in 2010 – has become widely known as an ardent Donald Trump supporter, backing the president’s election fraud conspiracies and defending him against accusations of inciting the January 6 Capitol riot.

Back in February, the GOP congressman attended a white nationalist conference, rubbing elbows with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist who was permanently banned from YouTube for violating the platform’s hate speech rules. In April, he joined with fellow far-right Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to call for a new GOP caucus that promotes a “common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”

Kristi Noem’s daughter surrenders real estate appraiser’s license amid conflict of interest probe

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s (R) daughter has decided to quit the real estate appraisal business amid speculation of conflict of interest.

In a letter to South Dakota Secretary of Labor Marcia Hultman, which has been obtained by The Associated Press, Noem’s daughter Kassidy Peters criticized a legislative inquiry into her application and the news reports detailing the situation. According to U.S. News, lawmakers were focused on the timeline of the Republican governor’s meeting with her daughter and top officials within the government agency; the same decision-makers who played a role in denying Peters’ application days earlier.

“I am writing you today to express my disappointment and anger that my good name and professional reputation continue to be damaged by questions and misinformation concerning the Appraiser Certification Program,” Peters wrote to Hultman in the letter.

She also agreed to surrender her appraiser’s license by the end of the year. “I’m angry and I can acknowledge that this has successfully destroyed my business,” she added.

Peters’ decision follows a document request from the state’s Republican-led Government Operations and Audit Committee. The committee requested confirmation of Hultman’s claims insisting “that state regulators had already decided to give Peters another chance to win her appraiser certification prior to the meeting in the governor’s mansion.”

“The details of that agreement were discussed and in place prior to that meeting,” Hultman told lawmakers during a meeting back in October. However, the signed agreement conflicts with the claim about the timing of the meeting due to its date: “after the July 27, 2020, meeting.”

Around this time, after Peters’ initial license application was denied, Sherry Bren —the former director of the Appraiser Certification Program— was also pressured into retirement. Months later, Peters received her license and Bren filed a discrimination lawsuit. The state ended up paying her a $200,000 settlement.