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Police unions vs. vaccine mandates: The workers drawing a line in the COVID battle

Police unions, among several other professional labor unions, across the country are fighting back against possible vaccine mandates in Democratic-led states, many of which are considering a requirement for all city employees – including police officers – to be inoculated against COVID-19. 

The head of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some ​​355,000 members, recently compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany – now a notable a right-wing talking point that several conservative lawmakers and pundits have employed over the past couple months. 

“We’re in America, G-ddamn it,” union president John Catanzara told the Sun-Times. “We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi f—ing Germany, [where they say], ‘Step into the f—ing showers. The pills won’t hurt you.’ What the f–k?” 

“Nobody knows what the long term side effects could possibly be,” he added. “Nobody. And anybody who says they do are full of s–t.”

Catanzara’s remarks come largely in response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s decision to advance a October 15 vaccine mandate for all city employees, according to the Sun-Times. Lightfoot has yet to establish a clear policy addressing employees who might refuse to get the jab. 

Strong resistance has also been seen in New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio this week mandated that all New York City school employees get inoculated by September 27. 

In response, the Police Benevolent Association, the Big Apple’s largest police union of about 24,000 members, told its members that it would fight tooth and nail against any such requirement for police, according to The New York Post.

“If the City attempts to impose a vaccine mandate on PBA members, we will take legal action to defend our members’ right to make such personal medical decisions,” President Patrick Lynch wrote over email on Wednesday.

About 47% of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers are currently vaccinated, even though 60 of the force’s members have died from COVID-19 over the course of the virus, according to the Post. Back in April of last year, at least 20% of the NYPD was out sick due to the virus. 

Police unions in the Pacific Northwest have also mounted their opposition to any impending vaccination mandates. 

According to NBC News, San Jose city officials are currently mulling a vaccine mandate for all city employees effective on September 30. But Sean Pritchard, president of the San Jose Police Officer’s Association, told the outlet that the association wants to keep the city’s present policy in place, which would simply require weekly COVID-19 tests.

Urging a “vaccinate or accommodate” rather than a “vaccinate or terminate” policy, Pritchard told CBS Local: “We believe this proposal really strikes the right balance in helping maintain safety and reducing the spread.”

Roughly 125 officers and staff members within the San Jose Police Department are currently refusing to get the jab. “If the city moves to get rid of these officers … that would absolutely decimate this police department,” Pritchard said. 

In Seattle, where Mayor Jenny Durkan announced an October 18 mandate earlier this month, the city’s largest police union has also spoken out, citing concerns that the policy would hollow out the department. 

“I can tell you right now, we could potentially have a lot of officers that could be terminated by this mandate,” Mike Solan, president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, said on his podcast, “Hold the Line with Mike Solan.”

According to Crosscut, over a 20 day period in August, 29 officers tested positive for COVID-19 – an approximate 30% spike in Seattle Police Department cases since the start of the pandemic.

A stream of misinformation over the past year has downplayed the danger of the coronavirus and disputed the efficacy of the vaccine. Back in June, AP News reported that roughly 0.01% of all patients hospitalized by COVID throughout the U.S. were vaccinated. About 0.8% of COVID-related deaths, meanwhile, were Americans who have been vaccinated. 

Shannon Sarna refers to herself as a pizza bagel

I’m a pizza bagel (or a “matzo-rella” stick, depending on your preference), by which I mean I am Italian and Jewish — specifically, Sicilian and Eastern European Ashkenazi — which heavily influences everything I do in the kitchen. Italian- and Jewish-Americans (and especially those of us from New York) have much in common: guilt, family, tradition, and of course, a passion for food.

While no food writer speaks for an entire culture, it’s important to note that “Jewish food” in particular is not a monolith. My family hails from Poland and Ukraine, which influences my palate and cooking style. And while many Americans are most familiar with Eastern European-inspired Jewish food, the Jewish people have lived in or been exiled to wide-ranging lands all over the world, including Syria, Tunisia, Lithuania, Yemen, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Iran, and Mexico — just to name a few. Much as I love matzo ball soup, pastrami sandwiches, and babka, there are so many other uniquely Jewish-American dishes, and stories, to tell.

My own background and the desire to tell the diverse, ever-evolving story of Jewish food inspired me to launch The Nosher in 2011, which is now the largest, most wide-reaching Jewish food site on the internet. Creating a space for Jews of diverse backgrounds to connect to their identity through food spoke deeply to my own experience; and educating a wider audience about the multitude of Jewish culinary traditions is paramount to what we do.

But let’s not forget about my incredibly delicious Italian side. My mom taught me to slice up eggplant, salt it lightly and lay it out on brown paper bags to remove the excess moisture before frying for eggplant parmesan, to cook and taste small piece of meatball before the whole lot to make sure they were seasoned properly, to slowly stir the alfredo sauce in order to decadently coat a steaming pile of tortellini. And it definitely wasn’t a holiday at my house without a big white box tied with red string full of mixed Italian pastries. My mother’s meatball-rolling lessons actually inspired how I roll my matzo balls, a trick which makes them incredibly light and fluffy.

My dual heritage inspires so much of my day-to-day cooking, and I know this is a narrative with which many Americans can relate. Combining our past and where we come from through recipes — and sharing those experiences with our loved ones — simultaneously roots us in our history and inspires new food traditions.

Here are the pantry items I absolutely cannot live without in my kitchen, helping me churn out matzo balls, meatballs, and lots of deliciousness in between.

* * *

My 7 Jewish-Italian-American Pantry Essentials

1. Streit’s Matzo Ball Mix

I’ll start with matzo ball mix because, for many American Jews, myself included, matzo ball soup is the ultimate comfort food (they don’t call it Jewish penicillin for nothing!). It may seem like a controversial choice to use boxed matzo ball mix, as opposed to making it from scratch. But the truth is matzo ball mix, Streit’s in particular, is my ultimate secret weapon for making fluffy, flavorful matzo ball soup each and every time. I realize there are quite a few bubbies or savtas who swear that you must whip them up from scratch using matzo meal, chicken fat, and seltzer for them to be truly good, or “real” matzo balls. But I am a firm believer in the magic, ease, and perfection of that little blue box.

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2. Tomato Paste

Let’s pivot for a second over to the Italian side: I cannot live without tomato paste, especially the kind that you squeeze from a tube. Tomato paste is typically found in cans, but increasingly you can buy it in tube form, which means you can use just a little, screw on the lid like toothpaste, and put it back in the refrigerator without opening an entire can then forgetting about it for months only to find it growing mold. (Not that I’ve ever let a can go to waste.) Tomato paste goes in everything in my house: stew, brisket, tomato sauce, shakshuka, and sauteed veggies — to name just a few.

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3. Lipton Onion Soup Mix

This little packet of salty goodness is tried and true for good reason: It’s versatile, and it makes things taste great (there’s soy sauce, sugar, and onion powder among the salty and sweet seasonings inside a packet!). Sure, use onion soup mix (I like Lipton!) how it was intended: make it into a dip to nestle alongside some veggies and ridged potato chips. But in my kitchen, it most frequently gets added to stews, brisket, and roast potatoes, which the box has printed right on the back.

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4. King Arthur Bread Flour

I bake challah weekly for our Friday night family dinners. Pre-COVID, this was sometimes a more formal Shabbat dinner, with other guests and a larger meal. These days, it’s just my family of five. There are rituals and songs, but it’s a bit more casual. Still, there will be challah, and I just cannot live without good quality, high-gluten flour, specifically King Arthur (which I used exclusively when testing recipes for my first cookbook, Modern Jewish Baker). Whether you are a sourdough baker, focaccia lover, or challah aficionado like me, it’s a fantastic, top-tier quality flour to have on hand.

5. Seed and Mill Tahini

Another specific ingredient I cannot live without is Seed And Mill’s tahini. Their product is superior to many others because of the quality of sesame seeds they use, and its freshness. You can even pop into their Manhattan store and get some freshly ground. But if you cannot find Seed And Mill, of course grab whatever tahini you can find, taking care to look for one that is smooth, not chunky, in texture and doesn’t have a layer of oil sitting on top, which can indicate that it isn’t fresh (this is where it differs from, say, a natural peanut butter). I love making a quick tahini sauce by combining about 1/2 cup tahini with the juice of half a lemon, a good pinch of salt, and around 1/4-1/3 cup cold water, whisking until combined, adding more cold water until it’s liquidy enough that it can be drizzled (or thicker if you prefer). Serve with roasted vegetables, grilled lamb, meatballs, or on top of shakshuka.

6. Pomegranate Molasses

Another Middle Eastern ingredient used a lot in Israel and by Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews (but also gaining momentum here in the U.S.) is pomegranate molasses, which is essentially pomegranate juice that is cooked down and reduced to a syrup. It’s sweet and tart, just like pomegranate, and it imparts a nice punch of brightness. I love drizzling it on top of roasted vegetables (with some tahini sauce too!), adding it to a cocktail, making salad dressing with it or, my favorite use for it, finishing stewed meat dishes like my pomegranate-braised pot roast. You can find it in some grocery stores, Middle Eastern food markets or online.

7. Schmaltz

Last, but far from least, is schmaltz, or chicken fat. Schmaltz could also take the form of rendered duck fat or even goose fat. Rendered fat is a beloved, quintessential ingredient in Jewish cooking, speaking to the frugality that many Jewish people needed when they were poor in Eastern Europe. For Jewish kitchens that are Kosher, it is against the laws of kashrut to combine meat and dairy, meaning you cannot cook a meat-based dish with milk, cheese, or butter. Schmaltz makes an excellent replacement for butter for its fat content and flavor. You can’t make matzo balls without melted schmaltz, and it’s also fantastic as the fat used in potato kugel or instead of oil in salad dressing . . . and maybe also just drizzled on top of some fresh French fries.

***

Recipe: Pomegranate-Braised Pot Roast

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 4 hours 35 minutes
Serves: 4 to 6

Ingredients:

  • 1 4-pound chuck roast (boneless)
  • 2 large yellow onions, roughly chopped
  • 3 to 4 medium carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
  • 3 to 4 celery ribs, chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
  • Fine sea salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 Tbsp neutral oil, such as canola oil, vegetable oil, safflower oil
  • 1/4 cup tomato paste
  • 1 1-oz packet onion soup mix
  • 2 cups chicken stock, beef stock, or water
  • 1 cup red wine
  • 1/4 cup pomegranate molasses
  • Pomegranate arils for garnish (optional)
  • Rice pilaf, couscous, or mashed potatoes, for serving

Directions:

  1. Pat the chuck roast dry with paper towels on all sides. Season all over with salt and pepper.
  2. Heat the neutral oil in a large Dutch oven or large heavy bottom pot over medium-high heat.
  3. Sear the chuck roast on all sides until a golden-brown crust forms, around 4 to 5 minutes on each side. Remove from the pan and set aside, and reduce the heat to medium.
  4. Pour off all but about 2 tablespoons of the rendered fat into a heatproof bowl. When cool, discard. 
  5. Add the onion, carrot, and celery to the same Dutch oven or pot. Sauté over medium heat until softened, around 6 to 7 minutes. Add the garlic and tomato paste and cook for another 2 minutes, until combined. 
  6. Add the stock, red wine, onion soup mix, and pomegranate molasses. Bring to a low boil, and return the chuck roast and all juices to the pot.
  7. Reduce the heat to low and cover the pot. Cook for 3 to 4 hours, until the meat is completely tender. Check periodically to ensure heat isn’t too high, and when the meat is easily shredded, it’s done cooking. Season with salt to taste.
  8. Remove the meat from the pot and place on a cutting board. Break apart the meat into pieces (I like roughly 4-ounce pieces, but you can go larger or smaller depending on your preference) and transfer to a serving platter. Spoon the sauce over the meat. Serve alongside rice pilaf, couscous or mashed potatoes.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. As an Amazon Associate and Skimlinks affiliate, Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

Miles Teller gets COVID after allegedly refusing vaccine & halts “Godfather” spinoff filming: report

Miles Teller isn’t exactly the good guy in most of the movies he features in, and well, it turns out he might not have been acting.

Teller, star of the forthcoming Paramount+ series “The Offer,” has tested positive for COVID, the Daily Mail reports. Teller, who is allegedly against vaccinations, has thus brought production of the show on the making of “The Godfather” movies to a halt, according to the Mail.

A source told the outlet, “Miles Teller is not vaccinated. He wouldn’t even get the test. Now he’s brought the virus to the set and the whole set had to shut down.” However, Teller’s publicist disputed the claim, telling the Mail their facts were “incorrect” but declining to say more.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we have temporarily halted production . . . We will continue to follow all safety protocols and monitor the situation closely,” a spokesperson for Paramount Television Studios told Deadline over the weekend. The Mail’s report potentially sheds new light on what caused this halt in production.

In “The Offer,” Teller plays Al Ruddy, the filmmaker behind the “Godfather” movies in a dramatized portrayal of Ruddy’s behind-the-camera work. The allegedly COVID-positive star actually took over the role of Ruddy from Armie Hammer earlier this year, shortly after several women accused Hammer of rape and sexual misconduct. Giovanni Ribisi, Collin Hanks, Matthew Goode, Juno Temple and Dan Fogler are also cast in the project.

The “Whiplash” star‘s alleged anti-vax stance is just the latest in a cesspool of celebrity drama around COVID and the vaccine. Last month, Jennifer Aniston stoked the ire of anti-vaxxers when she recounted ending friendships over the vaccine with people who endangered others by refusing to get it. Around the same time that Aniston interview came out, country music legend Carrie Underwood stoked controversy by “liking” a tweet that condemned mask mandates on Twitter. 

Trump says COVID booster shot “not for me” after calling it “money making operation”

Former President Donald Trump gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal this week where he said that he’ll likely forgo booster shots for COVID-19.

“I feel like I’m in good shape from that standpoint—I probably won’t,” Trump, who is fully vaccinated, said. “I’ll look at stuff later on. I’m not against it, but it’s probably not for me.”

Trump’s comments come after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the additional shot for people with weakened immune systems. An extra dose for all three COVID-19 shots administered in the U.S. should be approved by the FDA in mid-September, the Journal reported.

Trump has previously suggested that booster shots were a “money-making” scheme.

“You know what, that sounds to me like a money-making operation for Pfizer, okay, think of the money involved. That’s tens of billions of dollars,” Trump told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo in August. “If you’re a pure businessman you’ll say, ‘You know what, let’s give them another shot, $10 billion of money coming in,’ the whole thing is crazy.”

“You wouldn’t think you would need a booster,” he added. “When these first came out, they were good for life. Then they were good for a year or two. And I could see the writing on the wall, you could see the dollar signs in their eyes.”

“Citizen Ashe” gives a spry look at the evolution of a legendary tennis great on and off the court

The inspiring new documentary, “Citizen Ashe” is as elegant and as agile as the tennis great it profiles. Directors Rex Miller and Sam Pollard focus largely on Arthur Ashe’s evolving political consciousness, which the athlete developed over the course of his life and career. The approach is astute because Ashe’s iconic status as the first Black man to succeed in the very white world of tennis not only captures the heroic/role model image of Black athletes, but it punctures the myth of Black athletes being “all brawn and no brains.” 

The film shows that Ashe was extremely savvy and calculated in his efforts, not just to be the “Jackie Robinson of tennis,” but also to speak out against racism and inequality only after he won top prizes and earned respect. There were risks with Ashe doing things “his way,” ranging from being called an “Uncle Tom” for not speaking out like other Black athletes — e.g., his contemporary Mohammad Ali — but also health issues from internalizing all of the pressure to achieve in the face of racism. Ashe’s behavior throughout his career had to be above reproach; he did not want to be ejected or shame the family name.

Miller and Pollard recall Ashe’s sterling character through interviews with Ashe as well as talking head commentaries by tennis greats including John McEnroe, Billie Jean King, and Lenny Simpson; activists Andrew Young and Harry Edwards; and Ashe’s wife Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and his younger brother Johnnie. The filmmakers also use photographs, home movie footage, and (perhaps unnecessary) reenactments to illustrate Ashe throughout his life. 

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“Citizen Ashe” presents a condensed version of Ashe’s history. He grew up in Richmond, VA, literally on a Blacks-only playground in the late 1950s. (His disciplinarian father was a caretaker for the playground, so the family’s house was there.) He took up tennis eventually getting mentored by Dr. Walter Johnson, who ran a development program (Johnson also coached Althea Gibson) that paved the way for Ashe’s career. 

But as he was playing in events like the Davis Cup (he was the first Black man to do so), Ashe was reluctant to assert his activist nature and felt cowardice for his behavior — not boycotting games or calling attention to racial discrimination. A montage seen early in the film shows various Black athletes speaking out — or deliberately keeping silent — effectively illustrating the tradition of protest in sports in general, and, more importantly, how these messages are not being fully heard. 

Ashe eventually became a spokesperson for social change, and “Citizen Ashe” shows how he was especially motivated in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, which is also the year Ashe won the U.S. Open. There are interesting episodes in the film that recount Ashe’s support of Kennedy, as well as Nelson Mandela. Ashe’s protesting apartheid in South Africa complicated his efforts to play in Johannesburg; he was repeatedly denied a visa before being allowed to enter the country to play, and not talk politics. 

The film includes plenty of footage of Ashe playing tennis, including the South African games, but the best sequence is his 1975 victory at Wimbledon against his rival Jimmy Connors. Ashe had never defeated Connors before this, and making matters worse, Connors filed a libel suit against Ashe in the days before their match. “Citizen Ashe” doesn’t reveal that the suit was later dropped; however, the film does shows how Ashe, ever the consummate athlete, changed the way he played in order to beat Connors. It is truly thrilling to watch. What is more, hearing Ashe’s brother Johnnie’s emotional account of watching Arthur’s achievement magnifies a noble sacrifice Johnnie described earlier that enabled Arthur, who was enlisted, to play tennis.

“Citizen Ashe” eventually shifts to its subject’s third act, where he develops more sensitivity toward gender equality and meets his wife Jeanne. As he ages out of playing tennis, he coaches the Davis Cup team and 19-year-old John McEnroe. McEnroe’s brash style clashes with Ashe’s cool demeanor, but as Ashe observes, McEnroe had the “emotional freedom” to misbehave that was denied to him, a Black man. It is a very telling moment. 

The documentary ends by addressing Ashe’s health issues. He suffered a heart attack in his mid-30s, and developed toxoplasmosis, which lead to his AIDS diagnosis from a blood transfusion. Ashe was “forced to go public” with his status. But he championed AIDS awareness and was an activist for other causes, such as Haitian refugees.

“Citizen Ashe” may present a virtuous portrait of its subject, but the film shows Ashe was always a class act. What is more, his legacy continues. Tennis players including Coco Gauff and Venus and Serena Williams advocate for racial and social justice in sports and the world as do so many other athletes, including Colin Kaepernick, and LeBron James. Ashe’s contributions to the sport, as recounted in this spry documentary, show how he left tennis better than it was when he started playing.

“Citizen Ashe” opens in select theaters in New York on Dec. 3, and in Los Angeles on Dec. 10.

“Shang-Chi” is an unapologetically Asian triumph about an unapologetically Asian superhero

Simu Liu, the Chinese-Canadian actor best known for starring in the unapologetically Asian sitcom “Kim’s Convenience,” famously tweeted his brand new role as the latest Marvel hero into existence. In 2014 and 2018, he tweeted at the studio, first inquiring about when we would get our first Asian-American hero, and next shooting out a simple, pithy, “OK @Marvel, are we gonna talk or what #ShangChi?” 

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is now in theaters with Liu in the starring role. So, who says #KeyboardActivism can’t spark major representational change? In this latest MCU project, we’re finally introduced to a brand new Avengers-tier hero, and Liu’s Shang-Chi is worth the wait. 

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (“Just Mercy”), the film is rife with edge-of-your-seat action, jaw-dropping visuals (think: dragons and magical, man-eating forests), and fun cameos of beloved Asian stars and previous Marvel fan-favorites alike. The martial arts masterpiece is the first of its kind for the MCU as we’re presented with a new kind of hero, with the heart — and kung fu mastery — to begin filling the void left by the late Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and Natasha Romanoff.

When we first meet Shang, he goes by the name Shaun, a charming if unassuming young man working as a San Francisco hotel valet with his childhood best friend, Katy (Awkwafina). The pals seem uninterested in pursuing more in life than what they’ve got — parking rich people’s cars by day, and partaking in drunken karaoke bashes by night. But on a particularly fateful bus ride to work one morning, Shang’s past catches up with him, propelling them both on a quest home to China. 

There, Shang reunites with his long-lost sister, the formidable and rebellious Xialing (Meng’er Zhang). Together they uncover ancient secrets, subdue the ruthless agenda of their father Wenwu (Tony Leung) and of course, save the world. Shang must also reckon with who he really is by revisiting the clandestine Ten Rings Organization that trained him – reminiscent of Black Widow’s notorious Red Room – while confronting some of his deepest regrets.

“Shang-Chi” is at its most thrilling when it emulates the authentic fighting styles, creative choreography and sage wisdom of the classic kung fu movies. In a couple cases, this means that we get to witness Hong Kong greats like Leung and Michelle Yeoh return to their elegant, wuxia-inflected roots – while letting their personalities highlight their moves. However, the film is also teeming with aggressively fun and modern fights as well, letting the new wave of action stars step up. One of the most thrilling set pieces includes an adrenaline-fueled bus brawl packed with endless kicks, flips and martial arts tricks against a rather intimidating and enhanced opponent. Also, immediately upon arriving in China, Shang is caught in a fight to the death on the bamboo scaffolding of a skyscraper. These are merely a handful of the many exhilarating encounters in the movie that is wise to present a range of styles and tones, unlike some martial arts projects that revisit the same well over and over again.

But “Shang-Chi” is also tenderly grounded through the warm and humble comedy of its leads. Liu and Awkwafina effortlessly riff off each other about the struggles of being the children of Asian and immigrant parents with high expectations, and often defend the valiant, underappreciated profession of valeting. Their lighthearted exchanges and palpable chemistry lightens the mood when the film wanders into dark places. And while their sweet friendship may seem prosaic it’s unheard of, even monumental, to see an Asian superhero whose daily routine includes a dim sum breakfast with his best friend’s family while simultaneously dodging their overly familiar questions

In contrast to that warmth, Leung brings his decades of playing smoldering leads for Wong Kar-wai and in action flicks to deliver an intense, eerily convincing performance of an all-powerful mob boss. And since this is a movie that delves into the messiness of family, he’s even more fearsome as Shang and Xialing’s stern, unimpressed father. In Wenwu, we see a man whose all-consuming grief has morphed him from a loving family man into a stone-cold killer. 

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Yeoh comes full circle from when she first showed up on America’s radar as an action star. Her most recent roles – as the stern but loving “Crazy Rich Asians” matriarch and badass on “Star Trek: Discovery” – somewhat meld together here. As Jiang Nan, the siblings’ ethereal aunt and a martial arts master herself, Yeoh rebrands from a mama bear trying to protect her family business to a formidable guardian of a lost city trying to protect the world. 

And not to be outdone by her more established co-stars, Zhang as Xialing firmly stands her ground to round out the cast. She presents as an unflinching yet compassionate fighter, who can more than hold her own in the male-dominated martial arts scene. 

Where “Shang-Chi” stands in Marvel’s transitional Phase 4 and greater future remains to be seen. But many are already clumsily comparing it to the triumph of 2018’s “Black Panther.” Besides being reductive about leads of color, the comparison feels awkward and not fully earned — Liu doesn’t quite evoke the generational charisma or on- and off-screen regality of the late Chadwick Boseman. Nor does “Shang-Chi” confront political realities like imperialism and the undying conflict between reformists and revolutionaries like “Black Panther” does. Still, Liu and Shang are both perfectly likable characters and entertaining fighters who adeptly usher in a fun, new dimension of Marvel storytelling.

“Shang-Chi” presents a riveting tale that’s at times heavy on flashbacks, but unwavering in its fundamental conflicts and revelations on trauma and loss, on family and regret. It’s an unapologetically Asian story about an unapologetically Asian superhero, but Shang’s core struggle with his mixed emotions toward a family member that’s harmed him is fundamentally relatable. 

Like any other Marvel hero, Shang has a past he’d rather forget, but can’t seem to shake off. And he may be the first, major Asian Avenger-like hero, but Shang is also a beneficiary of significant male privilege, which he awakens to over the course of his journey. In this way, the movie is a multidimensional tale of identity and power. It’s a historic first with a degree of self-awareness that so many more barriers remain waiting to be broken.

“Shang-Chi” is also a triumph in subverting western stereotypes of grand eastern mysticism. Longtime Marvel fans will be delighted by the film’s callback to a particular storyline from “Iron Man 3” involving one of Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) antagonists. Nearly 10 years later, “Shang-Chi” relentlessly pokes fun at the west’s casual racism. Its arresting visuals also convince audiences of the vast beauty and charm of the east’s oh-so-scary, foreign lands. Here, there are colorful and beautiful mystical creatures aplenty, rivers and fields seem to glitter in silver and gold, and the traditional elegance of martial artists’ garb gets a luxe, dragon-scaled makeover.

Off-screen, “Shang-Chi” has notably been the subject of several minor controversies, including important criticism of its inclusion of Awkwafina despite accusations of her using “blaccent” and appropriating Black culture to advance her career. Liu himself has sparked internet debate over his disappointing comments on “radical” politics in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” Disney CEO Bob Chapek has been publicly and righteously called out by Liu and Marvel fans for comments dubbing “Shang-Chi” an “interesting experiment” with its theatrical-only release, seeming to treat the first Marvel film with an Asian lead as expendable. 

These conversations are certainly important, but feel distant from the magic that unfolds onscreen. The movie is a universal story of family, and how complicated familial ties can be; it’s a universal story of grief, and how the ones we love never really leave us. And in a post-“Endgame” world in which half of all life can be wiped out with a snap, “Shang-Chi” is a story of new heroes, who must rise up and face a precarious but infinitely magical reality. Wherever Shang’s journey through a rapidly expanding multiverse takes him next, fans can only hope his sister and best friend — and hopefully more epic dragon rides and bus-breaking martial arts demonstrations — will follow.

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” is currently in theaters.

Elon Musk loves Texas’ right-wing “social policies” — at least that’s what Greg Abbott says

Elon Musk is leaning into the hardline right-wing policies of his new home state — or at least that’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) says.

On the same day that a controversial near-total abortion ban took effect in the state, Abbott drew on support from Musk for Texas’ “social policies” to make the point that he did not expect a backlash from the business community over the law. 

“We continue to see a massive influx of these employers coming to the state of Texas because — candidly — not only do they like the business environment . . . You need to understand that there are a lot of businesses and a lot of Americans who like the social positions that the state of Texas is taking,” Abbott said during a Thursday interview with CNBC.

“Elon Musk — who I talk to frequently — he had to get out of California in part because of the social policies in California,” Abbott continued. “Elon consistently tells me he likes the social policies in the state of Texas.”

Rather than disagree, the Tesla CEO responded on Twitter by simply saying, “I would prefer to stay out of politics.”

“In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness,” Musk added. 

Despite Musk’s statement, the high-profile businessman hasn’t exactly been silent on issues of politics as of late.

Tesla sued California’s Alameda County in May of last year after it enacted a shelter-in-place rule that was intended to combat rising COVID-19 caseloads and stave off the total collapse of an already strained healthcare system.

Musk later cited the incident as the “last straw,” which ultimately forced him to move out of the Golden State. 

On the foreign policy front, Musk made sure to tweet “we will coup whoever we want” after a left-wing party took power in Bolivia last October. His comments sparked fierce backlash online.

The controversial CEO has largely stayed mum on the issue of taxes, though his move to Texas could potentially save him billions because the state has neither capital gains nor income taxes.

Not that it would matter much, apparently. A bombshell expose released by ProPublica earlier this year revealed that Musk paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes between 2015-2017 and exactly $0 in 2018  — putting him at an astronomically lower tax rate than the average American, regardless of income level.

Musk accomplishes this through an arrangement in which he foregoes his salary as Tesla CEO and lives off loans taken out against his massive equity in the company.

He also appears to be embracing the “social policies” of his new home state just as Tesla attempts to corner the market on electric trucks. 

Pickups are the No. 1 bestselling vehicle type in America, and Tesla’s brand-new cybertruck has the potential to be a huge moneymaker for the company if it can capture even a small chunk of the market for truck buyers. It’s no coincidence that Musk is embracing Texas, either, given that more than one out of every six pickups sold in the U.S. is bought there. 

It appears that Musk’s canny marketing for the vehicles might be working, too. Reports suggest that Tesla has received more than 1 million preorders for its cybertruck. 

Production was originally slated to start this year, though it was ultimately pushed back to 2022 last month. 

The mystery behind the Mike Lindell Foundation’s miraculous funding of the evangelical movement

One of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell started his charity, the Lindell Foundation, in 2012, to help addicts and substance abusers.

It was dissolved and then born again in 2013. It relaunched in 2015. In January 2018, Lindell told Don Imus that he was getting ready to start to launch and in October 2018 told Laura Loomer, “We’re not completely launched.”

This week, Lindell told TYT he hasn’t done anything with the Lindell Foundation in four years. The Lindell Foundation URL redirects to his personal site. But tax records show it was still taking in money — and distributing it to evangelical causes — as of 2019, its most recent filing.

As TYT reported, insiders from The Family have been involved with the Lindell Foundation since 2016, the year Lindell attended his first National Prayer Breakfast. As his connections with The Family deepened that year, traditional lines between Lindell’s politics, religion, commerce, and philanthropy began to fade.

Related story: How Mike Lindell Found Jesus Christ…and Donald Trump

Against internal advice, Lindell turned MyPillow explicitly political. He began to see his company as a platform to do what he believed to be God’s work — including supporting Donald Trump. Then, after Trump won, Lindell writes,

“I began to understand what God might intend for the ‘platform’ He had provided, and that the Lindell Foundation and our focus on helping people might be a vessel for that. Throughout 2016, I had asked myself why a guy like me would be invited to participate in high-profile, nationally watched events. Now I was beginning to think that maybe God had opened those doors in order to expand whatever good the Lindell Foundation might do.”

Tax filings show that, after The Family got involved with the Lindell Foundation, the charity’s focus shifted from addiction toward evangelism. When Imus asked him in 2018 about helping addicts, Lindell responded, “No, no. That was originally what I was gonna do.”

(Lindell has maintained some focus on addiction elsewhere. Another philanthropy, the Lindell Recovery Network, allows addicts to view videos pertinent to both their age and substance use.)

In Lindell’s media appearances, however, the Lindell Foundation has provided him with valuable publicity. Christian actor Stephen Baldwin got Lindell an award for the Lindell Foundation’s work.

Related story: Stephen Baldwin’s Other Family

Lindell tells interviewers he’s put $6 million of his own money into the foundation, to cover overhead, so that every dime donated goes to the beneficiaries. In 2017, Lindell’s niece told the city of Chaska, MN, MyPillow’s headquarters, that the foundation had committed $2 million for housing.

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But Lindell Foundation filings show no sign of any such expenditure. And the charity’s total revenues since it was formed add up to only $2.6 million, well below the $6 million Lindell says he donated. Its total expenses, including employee salaries, grants, and charitable distributions, total only $2.6 million.

In 2017, the charity reported having 12 employees — but only disclosed $201,211 in salaries and compensation. Subtracting the $55,385 paid to its president, that would leave the remaining 11 staffers making an average salary of $13,257.

Lindell has said he wanted donors to select their recipients. In 2018, Lindell told Imus, “You’re gonna go on [the site] and you’re basically gonna be able to pick your need, like pick your square. You’ll hear a story about whatever it is, and then whatever you wanna give, even if it’s five dollars…you’ll hear back from them online the difference you made.”

As Lindell told TYT, however, he hasn’t done anything with the Lindell Foundation in four years. Someone apparently has, though. Because although the foundation’s footprint shrank, it has continued funding evangelical causes under the leadership of Family insiders and friends.

Family Values

By 2017, three Family insiders or allies were helping to run Lindell’s charity: Lindell Foundation Pres. Wilfred Job and board members Bob Dees and A. Larry Ross. With The Family’s hands on the wheel, Lindell’s charity went in a new direction, that included the Philippines.

Ross is both a board member of The Family’s legal entity, the Fellowship Foundation, and its spokesperson. In December 2016, Ross and Lindell flew to the Philippines on “matters related to the Lindell Foundation,” according to Lindell’s book.

The foundation’s filings indicate having no one working outside the United States, and Lindell says only they were “invited” to go, not by whom. But The Family had connections in the Philippines. While they were there, Lindell and Ross met with Pres. Rodrigo Duterte, who had been invited to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast prior to becoming president.

Just a mayor at the time, Duterte had been invited to the breakfast by a Pennsylvania real estate developer named Todd Hendricks, a Family insider who has invited scores of people to the breakfast. Hendricks had his own Philippines connections — he attended a 2015 meeting there with Family members and Filipino leaders. And although Americans are told that it’s Congress that invites foreign leaders, Filipino politicians knew to thank Hendricks and Job by name for their invitations. Job, the Lindell Foundation’s new president, also had connections to the Philippines.

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Lindell, however, told TYT he “had no idea” who Wilfred Job was. Asked about the salary the Lindell Foundation reported paying Job, Lindell said he was not aware of that. Lindell added, “Go to jail. Go somewhere and find yourself a nice jail cell, because that’s where you’re going to end up. Goodbye.”

During the brief call, Lindell several times referred to the reporter as a “scumbag” and at one point said, “Where do you get these lies?”

Job’s position and his salary are listed on the Lindell Foundation’s 2017 tax filing. According to the filing, Job worked five hours a week for the foundation, and received $55,385 in compensation.

Lindell, Job, and Ross are also listed in Texas business filings as directors of two other charities. Giving Grace Church was formed in July 2016, while Encircle was formed in March 2017. It’s not clear whether Lindell is even aware of these entities, as he denied knowing Job, the filings have Texas addresses for Lindell, and both entities were short-lived.

Although Lindell’s book says Ross was on the board of the Lindell Foundation in 2016, the first time the foundation discloses the existence of a board is 2017, the first year Family involvement is documented. That same year, the filing says, the Lindell Foundation’s mission expanded beyond addicts to include the “homeless, poor, [and] veterans.” The foundation would do this, in part, by funding evangelical organizations.

The Lindell Foundation’s 2017 beneficiaries included:

  • Detroit Blight Busters ($10,000 to “help those in critical need”)
  • Togetherworks ($25,000 to “help those in critical need”
  • Somebody Cares America ($15,000 for “displaced families”)
  • One Mission ($15,000 for “displaced families”)
  • Fellowship of Christian Athletes ($5000 for “displaced families”)

Like most charities, the evangelical organizations funded by the Lindell Foundation do good work, helping people who need it. Many, however, view a personal relationship with Jesus as a fundamental need, and incorporate proselytization into their work to meet that need.

One Mission, for instance, builds homes in Mexico, but has also supported missionaries. Somebody Cares America, a part of Turning Points Ministries, also proselytizes. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) has been banned from some schools for coercive proselytizing — “illegal,” according to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The FCA also reportedly prohibits same-sex relationships among its staff and volunteers.

Detroit Blight Busters builds and renovates homes, but also razes homes seen as blights on their neighborhoods. “Get the city safe, get the city clean,” its founder told The Guardian. “The capitalists will take care of the rest.”

Then there’s Togetherworks. The Georgia charity got $25,000 from the Lindell Foundation in 2017. Bob Dees, the Lindell Foundation board member and Family friend, joined the Togetherworks board that same year.

Lindell met Dees and Ben Carson — who had recently made Dees his campaign manager — through The Family, at the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast. Dees, a retired Army major general, was active across a constellation of right-wing Christian organizations.

Dees is also the founder of Resilience God Style (RGS), a program to build individual and national resilience through the communication of “Biblical truth.” RGS endorsers include Franklin Graham, Col. Oliver North (Ret.), and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), who compares Dees to Robert E. Lee.

When Dees joined the board in 2017, Togetherworks reported that he did 25 hours of work per week, and received compensation of $9000. Dees told TYT that the money was “reimbursement for goods and services provided in conduct of the Resilience God Style (RGS) conference and speaking ministry.” Togetherworks had also started funding RGS directly in 2016 and continued to do so, before drastically cutting its funding for Dees’ program in 2019.

The Lindell Foundation, however, appears to have begun funding RGS directly. In 2018, the Lindell Foundation reported a $10,000 “scholarship” for something called RGS Emmanuel. The tax ID number for RGS Emmanuel is the same as the tax ID for Emmanuel College, a small, Christian college in Georgia that made Campus Pride’s list of “absolute worst” colleges for LGBTQ students.

Dees, however, said Emmanuel College had nothing to do with it. (A spokesperson for Emmanuel College said the college had no such scholarship.)

Instead, Dees explained, the money was part of a scholarship funded by the Lindell Foundation in 2018 and 2019 to send a Liberian student named Emmanuel to study at Liberty University.

The Lindell Foundation filing does say that the nonprofit “donated toward education through Liberia 2 Liberty, an approved 501(c)3.” The IRS, however, has no record of a charity called Liberia 2 Liberty. No such entity appears in Virginia state records.

In an email, Dees said, “The flow of the Lindell donation went to Together Works (501c3)- Resilience God Style (RGS) Project Liberia2Liberty (or what [the] Lindell 990 calls ‘RGS Emmanuel’). Subsequently, Together Works used the donation proceeds to sen[d] to Liberty University for academic costs for [the student],” who “has now returned to serve in her home country.”

The Lindell Foundation did not disclose why it donated to bring a student from Liberia to attend Liberty University, the second-largest online school in the country, with 85 percent of its students remote in 2017. Liberty University did not respond to a request for comment, but awarded Lindell an honorary doctorate in 2019. Liberty, another school on Campus Pride’s worst list, was sued earlier this summer for policies that allegedly make sexual assault more likely.

And it wasn’t just evangelical charities now getting Lindell money.

In 2017, the Lindell Foundation paid $18,000 to Development Services Group — a Christian, anti-abortion company — for fundraising consulting (Lindell Foundation revenues went from $950,125 that year to $497,801 in 2018).

By 2019, the Lindell Foundation’s board had changed somewhat. Wilfred Job isn’t listed on any filings after his first year there. Dees and Ross, by now a Lindell spokesperson, remain, however, and they’ve been joined by another Family friend.

Paul Lavelle was a military veteran who ran a Christian program to help troubled veterans. It was Lavelle’s program, Operation Restored Warrior, that got Mike Lindell to drop to his knees and surrender to Jesus in 2017. In 2019, Lavelle became the treasurer of the Lindell Foundation.

Other foundation leaders at this point include Lindell, his niece, and a Minnesota Republican named Doug Wardlow. Wardlow, also general counsel for MyPillow, who reportedly had worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is known for its opposition to LGBTQ rights, including banning trans children from using the restrooms where they feel most comfortable.

Wardlow, Lindell said, “worked for this Christian organization that backs my Christian beliefs.” Wardlow also reportedly once bullied a gay classmate to the point of attempting suicide.

By this point, the MyPillow executives who once sat atop the Lindell Foundation were long gone — although it appears MyPillow employees continued to perform administrative duties for the nonprofit.

Today

Lindell’s claim that his foundation hasn’t done anything for four years has some truth to it. It reported having fewer employees in 2018, just five, and none in 2019. Nevertheless, even in 2019, with zero employees, the Lindell Foundation still reported $60,000 in expenses. And somehow, whether Lindell knew it or not, money kept flowing, miraculously, to evangelical organizations.

Until its 2021 tax filings are released, we won’t know what the Lindell Foundation spent its money on, if anything, during Lindell’s post-election crusade to restore Trump to the White House. Nonprofit expenditures in political areas can potentially violate the law, but Lindell has frequently blurred the lines between his various endeavors.

Like much of The Family, Lindell dismisses the separation of church and state as an absurdity. When God’s will is clear, checks and balances are literally against God. Lindell has applied that same thinking to virtually all of his endeavors, including the Lindell Foundation.

Of the three board members of the Lindell Legal Offense Fund, the nonprofit entity for his “election integrity” efforts, two also sit on the Lindell Foundation board: Lindell himself and Lavelle.

Another Lindell Foundation board member, Doug Wardlow, is also very much engaged in the election issues. In his capacity as MyPilow general counsel, Wardlow must fight the legal battle that arose from Lindell’s false election claims — because MyPillow pushed them. And Ross, the Family board member, doesn’t just represent Lindell and his foundation, he also represents MyPillow.

As TYT reported earlier this year, a number of Family leaders and financial backers were early supporters of the Big Lie — donating after Election Day to Trump and other Republicans actively trying to convince millions of Americans that Joe Biden had stolen the election. Three weeks after that report, Biden delivered the traditional presidential speech at the breakfast anyway

Just a month after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Biden said in a video address to the breakfast’s remote attendees, “We know now we must confront and defeat political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism.”

Calling this “a dark, dark time,” Biden asked, “So where do we turn?” His answer: “Faith.”

Juliette Binoche on playing a catfishing 50-year-old: “She cannot accept being abandoned”

Juliette Binoche‘s luminous face is first seen underwater in “Who You Think I Am,” a fascinating character study of a 50-year-old woman who is troubled by love. The Oscar-winning actress seems to excel at playing women disappointed by men. (See her fantastic turn in “Let the Sunshine In” as the ne plus ultra of that genre). 

In this new film, Binoche’s character Claire is smarting after being ghosted by her younger lover Ludo (Guillaume Gouix). This, after her husband Gilles (Charles Berling) left her for a young woman. To get back at Ludo, she poses online as Clara, a 20-something fashion intern. She does this to befriend Ludo’s handsome pal Alex (François Civil). Alex falls for Clara, and Claire is invigorated by their lengthy chats. (They even have phone sex.)

“Who You Think I Am,” however, wisely does not play this catfishing game as farce. Director and cowriter Safy Nebbou (adapting Camille Laurens’ bestselling novel) seeks to explain why Claire behaves this way. She recounts the relationship to a new therapist, Dr. Catherine Bormans (Nicole Garcia). Moreover, Claire may be an unreliable narrator. What makes the film so engaging is how she dispenses different bits of information as the story unfolds. 

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This approach allows Binoche to play two characters, Claire and Clara, in different time frames, past and present, and the actress delivers a rich, multi-layered performance. “Who You Think I Am” offers both the pleasures of Binoche being a cougar while also playing a woman of a certain age processing her anger at men who don’t see value in older women. (Claire even tries to bond with Dr. Bormans over this). What makes the film so great are moments such as when Binoche watches Alex at various rendezvous points while he looks right past her. Her gaze is captivating — sizing up the man Claire loves in non-physical ways. 

Binoche talked with Salon about making “Who You Think I Am.” 

The film is, as even the title suggests, about being seen, about being looked at. Dr. Bormans even asks Claire at one point if she likes being looked at. As an actress, and a spokesmodel (for Lancome), you are often “on display.” What are your thoughts about this?

I never felt I that was on display. The challenge for an actor is to start with the “within” world. What you do is connect with your being, going through the lines and connecting with other people — the actors and the director. There is a courage that an actor has to have to expose the character’s story, emotions, thoughts, and feelings. But I used myself — my sensibility, experiences, and my body to convey the story I have to tell. 

Lancome was a different story. You are trying to be human, even though it is more difficult because it is a picture; it tells a different story. In a film, there is an arc, a transformation. It’s a different deal; it’s not an image, it’s a story, and you want to reach people and their humanity. That’s the game. It’s a movement between you and the audience.

Likewise, Clara allows Claire to “live another life,” which is something you do as an actress. Can you talk about getting into character, fleshing out the lives of the women you play?

I start with my sensibility. As in the film, she’s creating a profile using a picture she’s choosing that is not her. She is deciding: what would attract a young man? As an actress, I try to understand the needs of the character I have to play. It comes from a different place. In a film, it’s deeper. You’re not creating a profile in a film. You’re using a scriptwriter’s sensibility and continuing the writing into life through words, and working with other people: the director, the actors, and the whole crew. The involvement is different.

What do you think about how we construct personas online and in real life to try to show who we want others to see us as, rather than who we are? You could say we’re doing that now in this very interview if you want to get meta.

I’m trying not to! [Laughs!] I’m trying to be as real as I can! We have an expression in French, “To lie as an actor, or fake, like an actor,” and for me, it’s always been the contrary. For me, acting is me saying the truth through the words of the writer, of who I am through this story, and the character I’m creating with the director, and the writing I have. I’m trying to be as truthful as I can with the medium I have. Just as I am talking on a telephone with you.

There is a scene in the film where Claire chats with her friends about being a cougar but there is no term for men who have relationships with younger women. (They are just called “men.”) What observations do you have about the older woman/younger man dynamic?

In the film, the way it is told, is a middle-aged woman who is feeling abandoned by her husband who has a relationship with a younger woman, so she consequently decides to go with a younger man [Ludo] and feels mistreated — not loved; it’s not a satisfying relationship. Until she creates this avatar [Clara] and that amuses her, and she plays with it and starts believing in it. What touched me in the film is that she realizes with her therapist, that she cannot accept being abandoned. It’s difficult for her, especially since she’s given so much of her life to her ex. A lot of women are in that position of being dumped because men are freaking out as they are approaching death, or unable to make love. They reinvent their life to continue this illusion. Facing this feeling of abandonment, she says, “I’m OK to die, but not be abandoned, because that’s unbearable.” It was interesting to go into this question about abandonment that we all have to face one day. 

Likewise, there is a freedom Claire has in being selfish. What can you say about her agency and independence? 

She cannot stand feeling abandoned. She’s been abandoned by husband and then by this young man. She invents this story to survive, but it doesn’t work, and she goes into deeper depression. She is not liberated yet. She was in a conventional life — married and had two kids, and was a teacher at university, and all was well. It was a perfect standard family. Then her husband leaves, and she feels betrayed. How do you deal with betrayals? No one is ever prepared for that. Do you face the truth or lie to yourself so you can survive it? The more you lie to yourself, the harder it is to face. 

She’s not liberated ever. She’s trying to survive. It’s not easy for her to go with a younger man. She’s playing when she creates this avatar/Facebook identity, but it is a reaction, rather than a liberating choice. Her belief system is different. She takes off with this idea of this relationship. People [chatting] online can feel high having those kinds of exchanges. But there is no reality because it goes through a medium that is not real. 

You have worked with some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. What observations do you have about the opportunities you’ve had in your career to deliver some indelible performances?

I live in the present time, so every time it’s challenging and feels like a first film and it’s difficult. It never gets easy. But I am still very passionate about what I do. It never goes away. What I love is entering into a new world and working with new people. Even when I am working with the same director, it always feels new — because it’s a new character, or a new configuration with other actors. With Bruno Dumont, or making “High Life” and “Let the Sunshine In” with Claire Denis, they are very different kinds of films. I feel very lucky, and I feel [I’ve gained from] working a lot as well. It comes from work and praying to my good stars.  

What I enjoyed most in your performance was a scene in which Claire dances with reckless abandon at a party. She is free and happy for what probably has been the first time in a long while. (It was more captivating than the phone sex scene which expressed the same emotion, perhaps). What can you say about letting go and playing comedy, which is, as they say, harder than drama? 

I never feel that I’m choosing a film to be serious. It doesn’t matter to me. It is just that maybe the story interests me more, or I love working with the director. I made “How to Be a Good Wife,” which is a comedy, and I love comedies. It’s is a lot of work. It’s not as easy as it appears. 

“Who You Think I Am” has a storyline that sounds like a farce, but it is actually very serious. 

You try, as an actor, to give depth. Even in comedy, you try to have a grounded place so people can relate in a real and truthful way. If it’s not grounded in an emotional place that is truthful, you can’t laugh about yourself. It’s too superficial. This film is a tragedy. How tragic is it to be dumped by a partner you have been living with for 20 years? All of a sudden you are alone! It’s Greek tragedy! If I was not going to give it the depth it required, you don’t believe it. 

“Who You Think I Am” opens in select theaters on Sept. 3 ,followed by a national rollout.

Bans on abortion, homelessness and critical race theory: Texas Republicans push 666 radical new laws

Exactly 666 new laws went into full effect in Texas on Wednesday – a decisive victory for the state’s Republican-led legislature, which worked tirelessly this year to repeal progressive legislation and steamroll any Democratic pushback. 

The legislature, currently in a special session, is still discussing a number of laws expected to be passed later on this year, including measures related to voting rights, transgender restrictions, redistricting, and bail. Still, the wave of the news laws covers a lot of ground policy-wise, making substantial revisions to the state’s policies around public safety, law enforcement, and K-12 education.

Arguably chief amongst the rash of new measures is the state’s new abortion law, S.B. 8, which bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy – by which time embryos have no heartbeat. The new law also deputizes private citizens to sue on anyone who aids and abets in the violation.

Another law, H.B. 1927, now allows Texas residents ages 21 or older to carry handguns without permits, so long as the carrier does not have a legal exemption preventing them from doing so. The measure, known as a “constitutional carry” law, is opposed by most of the state’s residents, according to an University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll from April, which found that 59% of Texans do not support allowing their fellow citizens to carry firearms without licenses. According to KSAT, many police unions actually opposed the law upon its introduction.

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Texas also implemented a statewide ban of homeless encampments. The measure, H.B. 1925, places a $500 fine on anyone who temporarily resides under some form of shelter without a permit, making the violation a class C misdemeanor. The law, which garnered 58% approval from Texas voters, precludes Texas localities from being able to opt out. According to Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, there are around 2,000 people currently living unsheltered in Austin alone.

Other laws apparently aim to combat the rise of “wokeness” in the state’s public institutions. 

For instance, Texas passed H.B. 3979, which places restrictions on the ways in which public school teachers can discuss race and history with their students. “A teacher,” the law says, “may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The measure also outlaws teaching the concept that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” CNN reported that many teachers are already changing their curricula “out of caution,” even when the bill’s real-world implications remain hazy. 

In this same vein, the Texas legislature also provided funding for its “1836 Project,” an apparent conservative antidote to 1619 Project, which reframes American history through the lens of slavery. The 1836 Project sets out to provide Texas residents with a “patriotic education” about the state’s war for independence from Mexico and “increase awareness of the Texas values that continue to stimulate boundless prosperity across this state.”

Additionally, Texas passed a number of bills related to law enforcement amid the national progressive push to defund the police. The state’s H.B. 1900 ensures that municipalities with over 250,000 people will effectively be punished for reducing their law enforcement budgets, with the state threatening to reduce sales tax revenue and increase property taxes.

The spotted lanternfly is invading the Northeast. The consequences will be dire if they take over

Like many people, I try to avoid killing insects or spiders unless it is absolutely necessary. Yet according to officials, this nonviolent stance towards insects could end up being a threat to the ecosystem of the Northeast. Indeed, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is asking citizens to declare all-out war on one particular insect: the spotted lanternfly. Dispensing with any pretense of bureaucratic detachment, the state’s website is admirably blunt:

“Kill it! Squash it, smash it…just get rid of it.”

In areas of Pennsylvania like Northampton County (where I live), spotted lanternfly are not hard to find. Despite being only an inch long, the moth-like insect has a beautiful pattern once it spreads its wings. You are greeted with bright red and black spots, similar to a ladybug shell, in sharp contrast to the drab gray, yellow and black-and-white patterns that cover the rest of it. It is hardly the most memorable insect, but it does make an impression.

More to the point, they are everywhere. And if they take over the American northeast, it is going to be a very, very big deal.

“If they go unchecked, they will continue to spread throughout the American northeast as well as to other regions of the US and also potentially to other countries as well,” Julie Urban, an associate research professor of entomology at Penn State University, told Salon by email. Urban is the author of “Perspective: Shedding light on spotted lanternfly impacts in the USA,” a scholarly article in Pest Management Science that offered projections on what will occur if spotted lanternfly continue to spread through the region. Both in the article and while speaking with Salon, Urban detailed how spotted lanternfly could destroy both lives and the landscape. One reason is that of the two plants that spotted lantern flies have been documented to kill via feeding, one of them — grapes — is a vital crop.

“It has killed grapevines, which of course has direct negative economic impacts for growers,” Urban told Salon. “However, it also has caused growers to increase the number of insecticide applications they make to try to control [spotted lanternfly] (which still is not sufficient to allow them to overcome the damage caused by waves of [spotted lanternfly] coming into vineyards, particularly in mid-September), and more insecticide sprays cost more money.”

The bugs also harm local tourism economies, especially when they destroy the experience of touring vineyards, hosting events like weddings and holding wine tastings.

All of this is already happening in southeastern Pennsylvania and could occur in areas like Long Island, the Hudson Valley and the Erie regions of both Pennsylvania and New York. The insects have recently been observed in New York City. 

Agriculturally speaking, the spotted lanternfly problem is not limited to grapevines. Urban reported that Christmas tree growers and nurseries have also had issues with spotted lanternfly partially damaging their stock. Beyond that, it is expensive to try to keep the insects away from their products, which they must do by monitoring for every stage of the animal’s life cycle — from egg masses through every development stage until they reach adulthood. Every occasion when spotted lanternfly are found within a plant — even if they are dead — must be reported, and offending businesses could receive fines and harm their business reputations. Urban also pointed out that other businesses could be impacted precisely because spotted lanternfly are not indigenous to our ecosystem, and are therefore unpredictable.

Melody Keena, a research entomologist at the United States Forest Service, added that the insects can also be a problem for ordinary people just trying to rest in their homes.

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“[Spotted lanternfly] are a nuisance pest of homeowners,” Keena explained by email. While scientist are unsure about their long-term impact on landscape trees, they produce “copious quantities of sticky honeydew when they feed and black sooty mold will grow on it.” These byproducts can make for slippery surfaces and can be a tripping and slipping hazard.

Some of the gross fluids produced by spotted lanternfly directly contribute to their invasiveness. Their egg masses are covered with a gray waxy material that helps them stay attached to smooth surfaces like tree bark, cinder blocks, stone, shipping pallets, rail cars and automobiles.

Experts believe that the spotted lanternfly entered the United States from its native Asia (particularly China, Vietnam and Bangladesh) after an egg mass attached to a shipment of stone arrived in the Berks area of Pennsylvania. Since then, it has continued to spread as the bugs have dispersed, reproduced, and taken advantage of their reproductive cycle to avail themselves of human transportation corridors.

“This makes human aided transport likely, and this has contributed to its spread both nationally and internationally,” Keena explained.

Going forward, ordinary Americans are being asked to be on the alert for spotted lanternfly in order to halt the invasion. 

“There is an active effort underway to reduce [the lanternfly’s] populations,” Erin Otto, National Policy Manager, in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), told Salon by email. “It may not have as many natural predators here as it does in its native habitat, but APHIS, state departments of agriculture, and U.S. residents are working to contain and manage the pest.”

Matthew Helmus, an assistant professor of biology at Temple University, told Salon by email that this will include supporting funding for programs that survey for spotted lanternfly, removing trees of heaven from their properties (this is the other plant that they are known to kill in order to eat), and learning how to identify the spotted lanternfly when it is on one’s property.

And if you happen to spot one? Well, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s website tells you exactly what you should do next.

How preparing crawfish became a shared meditation

My cousin used to refuse to eat grapes unless they were peeled. “It takes too much time and trouble to peel it,” he’d say. “I would rather not eat it than peel it.” We’re in an era of peak food convenience — with all-hours food and grocery delivery, fast-casual dining and a dizzying array of pre-packaged cuisine — so it’s not an unfamiliar argument. 

I, however, have always loved food that takes a little extra effort to eat — especially crawfish. Ever since I was young, I found the complicated process of cracking open crawfish claws for meat to be attractive. My Chinese relatives were confused: “It doesn’t have much meat and it takes you so much time.” 

In their view, the end is to eat and food preparation is just a means to that end; the easier process, the better. I was too young to fully communicate why I so enjoyed the ceremony surrounding eating crawfish, but as I grew older, I realized that I liked exerting the extra effort. 

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This is probably because I try to have the same attitude towards life: I am more excited to do things that require challenge and perseverance. Eating complicated food strengthens my will; I face difficulty, conquer it and enjoy the result. I’ve kept that in mind as I’ve spent many years abroad, not all of which have been easy. I know that I will conquer any difficulties I face, however, like I conquer the peeling crawfish. 

It’s a meditative experience. Peeling crawfish requires my eyes to observe, my brain to think and my hands to process. It’s almost animalistic the way that I use my teeth and I find myself satisfied by the ability to control my body with such precision. 

There’s also something inherently social about foods, like crawfish, which take some extra preparation. When I was an undergraduate in Toronto, I used to eat at The Captain’s Boil, a seafood chain, with a friend of mine where we’d order a seafood basket. Looking back, he counts it as some of our best experiences during those years. 

“When both parties are forced to get messy, and show themselves not as a perfect, polished being, the distance between people is closer,” he says. 

And sure enough, having both hands occupied with the task of pulling meat from tiny crawfish claws forced us to put down our phones and, in turn, concentrate on each other. While many of my relatives may still prefer convenience food as a means to an end, I still like enjoying the journey to get there.

 

How MyPillow guy Mike Lindell came to Jesus — and to Donald Trump

One of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

Perhaps as much as former President Trump himself, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has become the public face of the Big Lie. Like the Jan. 6 Capitol attackers, Lindell is brandishing openly theocratic, Christian beliefs to secure a Biblically based autocracy led by a man he sees as divinely anointed.

Lindell wasn’t always this way. But over the past several years, people with ties to The Family have played key roles behind the scenes in Lindell’s radicalization, religiously and politically.

Family insiders and allies, for instance, have dominated the boards of Lindell’s nonprofits. One man associated with The Family was part of Lindell’s “legal offense fund” to challenge election results.

Lindell’s faith journey often features in his speeches. As he tells it, God orchestrated a series of events that changed him from a casual Christian into the hardcore, autocratic evangelical who called for the U.S. military to install Trump in a second term.

“What gave [Lindell] the certainty he was looking for was evangelical Christianity,” one Republican operative told Politico. “He was born again.”

That religious certitude has proved infectious. A MyPillow employee told Politico, “There’s a lot of people calling and saying Mike is a disciple of God.”

Lindell’s certainty rests on his conviction that God had a hand in key moments in his life. That conviction, he explains, arose from his inability to see any other explanation for those events. He called his memoir, “What Are the Odds?”

What Lindell appears not to know, however, is the full extent of Family involvement in the events that so profoundly changed him.

Publicly, Lindell has only addressed his Family ties in relation to one incident: The 2016 National Prayer Breakfast. And even there, he elides important details that we can now fill in. He has never said, for instance, who invited him or why. 

Cue Stephen Baldwin

Lindell met actor Stephen Baldwin at a New York radio station. “I’d felt led to visit the station in early 2014, though at the time I wasn’t sure why,” Lindell wrote in his book. “Now I know it was to meet Stephen, who became like a brother to me.”

In a brief call this week, Lindell told TYT how he came to attend the 2016 prayer breakfast: “I was invited at the last minute by my friend Stephen Baldwin.” The Christian actor also attended that year’s breakfast.

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Baldwin, a Trump supporter, would be at Lindell’s side for a number of important events. But, according to an internal Family document, it was not Baldwin who invited Lindell to the breakfast; at least, not directly. (Baldwin and others with ties to The Family did not respond to requests for comment, unless noted otherwise.)

The year before Baldwin met Lindell, the Christian actor and movie producer started his own religious endeavor: Friends of Stephen Baldwin Ministry. All three principals of Baldwin’s nonprofit have had ties to The Family. 

One of the three principals was Margie Frank, connected by court records to a Texas oil inheritance. A six-figure donor to conservative causes, including reducing reproductive rights, Frank more recently has backed Republicans pushing the Big Lie.

Frank’s husband, Jonathan, was quoted in Philippine media as a spokesperson for the National Prayer Breakfast, in relation to boxer Manny Pacquiao’s attendance in 2015. The religious, right-wing fighter ostensibly was invited by Congress, but the invitation reportedly was delivered by a Texas pastor named Wilfred Job.

Job, whose church had a significant Filipino population, was the second Family affiliate running Baldwin’s ministry. The third principal at Baldwin’s ministry was a Pennsylvania real-estate developer named Todd Hendricks. Both Job and Hendricks are connected to The Family.

A source close to The Family told TYT that Job did virtually nothing without Hendricks. Internal Family documents support this: The two men are listed as collaborating to invite 29 people in 2016. Job invited no one on his own.

(Job’s nine other invitations were submitted in conjunction with two then-leaders of The Family: Doug Coe, now deceased, and former South Carolina governor David Beasley, now head of the UN World Food Programme.)

By contrast, Hendricks appears to have had more autonomy. Hendricks submitted names on his own for both 2016 and 2018. Aside from Coe, no individual submitted more guest names for the 2016 event than Hendricks did: 109. He had at least 59 people attend in 2018.

Three years after joining Baldwin’s ministry, it was Job, with Coe’s sign-off, who invited Baldwin’s new friend, Lindell — best known back then as TV’s pillow pitchman — to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast, along with his girlfriend. According to the same internal Family document, Hendricks invited Baldwin and Pacquiao.

Asked about Job, Lindell said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Asked whether he was aware that the Lindell Foundation listed Job as its president on its 2017 tax filing, Lindell said, “No.” Pressed for details, Lindell said, “Go to jail. Go somewhere and find yourself a nice jail cell because that’s where you’re going to end up. Goodbye.”

Whether or not Lindell knows Job and Hendricks, that’s how TV’s pillow guy — not yet very religious, let alone political — ended up at the National Prayer Breakfast. It was at the breakfast where he would meet Dr. Ben Carson, and hear a prophecy that would change everything.

The prophecy

Although the president’s Thursday morning speech is the public highlight, the National Prayer Breakfast is actually a four-day event. It’s in breakout rooms and prayer sessions where the real work gets done.

The night before the breakfast, Lindell met retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees. Dees told TYT he has attended a number of breakfasts over the last decade and “various other events with Fellowship members,” but has “no direct association with the Fellowship Foundation.”

A source close to The Family agreed with that characterization, saying Dees had ties to The Family, but was nowhere near the inner circle. Dees had, however, just started working very closely with someone who was in the inner circle.

Carson, a future Trump cabinet member, was already a Family star — having ripped into then-President Obama during a speech at the 2013 breakfast. Now, Carson himself was running for president. Dees was running Carson’s campaign. And the campaign had just brought on a Family board member to head up communications.

Dees declined to reveal some specifics about his discussions with Lindell, but did share a few. “I can offer that we had a far-ranging discussion in a breakout room the day prior to the prayer breakfast,” Dees said.

Lindell is only slightly more expansive in his book. “I talked with [Dees] for over an hour,” Lindell writes, “in a discussion about the direction of the country.”

Now the president of Resilience Consulting, Dees has worked with a wide range of conservative Christian organizations, including Liberty University and Military Ministry, which strives to convert members of the armed forces. He has also drawn scrutiny for his LGBTQ positions and views on Islam.

After the breakfast, Lindell says, he and Baldwin were “randomly” invited to a breakout room where a dozen would gather for prayer, including Ben Carson. Lindell doesn’t say who picked him.

And it’s not clear how random it was. Dees told TYT, “After the prayer breakfast, the NPB leadership asked me to bring Dr. Ben Carson to a small room for follow-up prayer with a small group of perhaps 15 individuals, including Mike Lindell.” 

Dees wouldn’t say who asked him to bring Carson to meet Lindell and the others. “From my perspective,” Dees said, “it was simply a courtesy to put a man of Dr. Carson’s prominence together with a seemingly randomly selected group of NPB attendees.”

Baldwin, however, apparently already knew Carson, because Lindell says it was Baldwin who introduced him to Carson in the breakout room. And Carson’s communications director, A. Larry Ross, was also at the breakfast.

Whether Lindell knew it or not, Ross is also The Family’s spokesperson and a key leader. A Texas public relations man who long worked for Billy Graham, Ross has been on the board of the Fellowship Foundation, The Family’s legal entity, since 2011. If Job and Hendricks brought Lindell to the starting gate, it would be Ross who eventually got Lindell to the finish line.

It’s in the breakout room after the breakfast that Lindell hears the prophecy. He loves the story enough to have told it many times since, but not enough to tell it consistently. 

In June, Lindell told it this way:

[I]n that room we were praying, the, a guy in there prophesied in there. He said, “Two of you in this room are gonna become great friends and change the course of history.” And Ben and I are great friends! And he said, and I’m sitting there, though, as they’re praying and he’s saying that, I go, I go, “If one of them’s me, who would the other one be?” and this, things started happening to me.

In his 2019 book, he tells the story differently. It’s not just two of them, and the prophecy isn’t directed specifically at him. “Two or three of you in this room are going to become great friends,” the unnamed prophet says. “And you will be part of a great change in our nation.”

Either way, the prophecy hit Lindell like a thunderbolt with his name on it. What he may not have known was that The Family throws the exact same thunderbolt at pretty much everyone, even printing it on breakfast literature.

It’s based on Matthew 18:20: Where two or three of you gather in my name, there am I with them. As Coe put it to journalist Jeff Sharlet, “Two, or three, agree? They can do anything.” 

What they would do was also a topic of discussion at the breakfast breakout room. And it wasn’t just faith.

“I suddenly found myself surrounded by people talking about God and politics,” Lindell says in his book.

The dozen people in the room gathered in a circle and began talking about the critical importance of the 2016 election. We agreed it was going to be a real spiritual turning point for the country. One path could lead us toward national renewal. The other could lead us down a dark path from which there might be no return, a path that had begun with the removal of God from the public square.

Lindell’s discussion in the breakout room — with Carson, Dees, Baldwin and others — he writes, “opened my eyes to the impact of politics on ordinary people.”

After dropping out of the Republican presidential race in March 2016, Carson tells Trump about Lindell, who then gets invited to meet with Trump on Aug. 15. The day before their meeting, Lindell donates $2,700 to Trump’s campaign, $17,300 to the Republican National Committee, and $20,000 to Trump Victory. (Trump Victory was later accused along with state party committees of circumventing donation limits. The first federal donation of Lindell’s life had been $527.27 to the Republican Party of Virginia on May 25, the day Trump Victory was formed.)

The Family had helped to open Lindell’s eyes to Trump, but his soul still needed work. Within a year, though, Lindell would be on his knees.

The operation

In the months after bringing Baldwin and Lindell to the prayer breakfast, Family insiders expanded their sphere beyond Baldwin and his nonprofits to Lindell’s.

Why the interest in Lindell — who wasn’t yet an evangelical?

The source close to The Family said they weren’t aware of the relationships with Baldwin and Lindell, but had heard of tensions between Hendricks and Job and the internal team, including Beasley, that oversaw much of the breakfast logistics. 

Referring to Hendricks and Job specifically, the source told TYT, “Those guys were always hunting a big fish like a Mike Lindell that would support their stuff.”

The source said, “If you can convince him, ‘Oh, we’re doing this amazing work,’ he might just be the kind of guy that gives you $10 million. Or he might be the kind of guy that puts you on his charitable foundation board and gives you a salary.”

Baldwin’s ministry never filed any federal tax forms, so it’s not clear whether anyone got paid. The Lindell Foundation, however, is another story.

Tax filings for the Lindell Foundation don’t list any board members for 2016, but Lindell writes that Ross joined the board that year. The following year, the Lindell Foundation lists six people as officers or directors — half of them tied to The Family.

In addition to Lindell’s niece and a lawyer from Texas (where Ross and Job are based), the four other people named are three board members — Lindell, Ross and Dees — and a new president: Wilfred Job, who takes home $55,385 that year.

Asked about Job by TYT, Lindell said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” 

In 2018, Lindell brings on a right-wing Republican from his home state, Doug Wardlow — a former intern of Family friend Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — who soon becomes MyPillow’s general counsel and is now enmeshed in the company’s Big Lie legal battles. Job doesn’t appear on the filings anymore.

Ross, however, the Family board member and former Carson spokesperson, expands his role in the Lindell-verse.

How much Ross’s communications company makes from his work we don’t know, but Ross ends up serving as a spokesperson for Baldwin, Lindell, the Lindell Foundation and MyPillow. And helping Lindell get Trump elected.

Three days before the Trump/Clinton matchup, Manny Pacquiao stepped into the ring with Jessie Vargas for the WBO welterweight championship. Lindell was ringside, along with The Family.

Lindell and Baldwin had flown to Las Vegas for the fight at the invitation of a “group of [Baldwin’s] friends,” Lindell writes. He doesn’t name these friends, but says, “One of the men in our party was a prominent Democrat I’d met at the National Prayer Breakfast.”

Wilfred Job — who had delivered Pacquiao’s 2015 breakfast invite — reportedly traveled with Baldwin on at least two occasions. Ross was also in town and joined Lindell for a big group dinner.

During the meal, the Trump campaign called: They wanted Lindell back in Minnesota the next day to join Trump for a rally two days before the vote. The only problem: No flights.

The group — apparently all Trump supporters — start hunting online for tickets. “Suddenly,” Lindell writes, “Larry called out, ‘Got it!’ … Larry hustled me out of the restaurant, and we jumped in a car for McCarran.”

At a meeting of the Lindell Foundation board that same month, Ross comes to Lindell’s aid again. He encourages Lindell to attend a program for military veterans. The program, Lindell writes, had helped hundreds of veterans “come to a place of freedom by locating primary points of pain in their pasts, and inviting God in to heal them.”

Operation Restored Warrior (ORW) has multiple connections to The Family. Ross had participated in the program, as had retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, now a vice president at the Family Research Council.

The man who ran Operation Restored Warrior was Paul Lavelle, who had met Lindell at the 2016 breakfast. Like Dees, the source described Lavelle as well outside the inner circle, but having ties to The Family.

One of ORW’s funders had invited Lavelle to the breakfast (along with six people from Compassion International, a Ross client that has been accused of trying to proselytize the vulnerable children it serves). At the breakfast, Lindell later wrote in his book, Lavelle “felt led” to invite Lindell to ORW. 

Pressed by both Ross and Kendra, his girlfriend, Lindell agrees to go to ORW, but he’s still reluctant about it. That changes at his second National Prayer Breakfast. 

There, he writes, he was inspired by the “powerful, jaw-dropping message” of Senate Chaplain Barry Black. Lindell doesn’t give specifics, but in his speech, Black argued for the existence of an interventionist God, still active in the matters of humanity, who takes action in response to prayers.

Three months after Ross’s suggestion and just weeks after Black’s speech, Lindell flies to Colorado and delivers himself up first to Lavelle, and then to Jesus. 

“I went in there with hope,” Lindell later told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “I said, ‘God please, show me you’re real, show me, you know? I want that personal relationship,’ And on the second day, on Feb. 18, 2017, I did a full surrender on my knees.”

“I can now,” Lindell says later, “talk about Jesus Christ in the same way I used to talk about a pillow.”

Today

As TYT reported earlier this year, a number of known Family leaders and backers have donated to Trump and other Republicans after they began telling Americans the election was stolen. Future reports will identify others, in addition to those named here.

Much as many Family leaders reject separation of church and state, Lindell observes few distinctions between his personal, commercial, philanthropic, religious and political pursuits. Ross has continued to represent not just the Lindell Foundation but Lindell himself and MyPillow, which has been an active participant in Lindell’s Big Lie crusade..

On March 17 of this year, Lindell created a new nonprofit: The Lindell Legal Offense Fund. Its purpose: “Advancing legal efforts regarding election integrity issues …”

The three-man board includes Lindell and lawyer Kurt Olsen, a lawyer and special ops veteran whose assistance to Lindell included last month’s disastrous election-security summit. The third man is Paul Lavelle.

Despite the summit’s outcome — which Lindell blamed on outside forces — his faith remains steady, his political convictions unshaken. 

A report this summer by the conservative outlet The Dispatch says that Lindell starts most of his days on the phone with his prayer group. But it doesn’t say who they are.

With additional research and reporting by TYT Investigates News Assistant Zoltan Lucas and Intern Jamia Zarzuella.

Democrats announce probe into potential “abuse” of Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., announced on Friday that his panel will review Supreme Court’s recent ruling in favor of Texas’ abortion ban, suggesting that the court’s “shadow docket” maneuver may have been “abused.”

“The Supreme Court must operate with the highest regard for judicial integrity in order to earn the public’s trust,” Durbin said in a statement. “This anti-choice law is a devastating blow to Americans’ constitutional rights — and the Court allowed it to see the light of day without public deliberation or transparency.”

“At a time when public confidence in government institutions has greatly eroded, we must examine not just the constitutional impact of allowing the Texas law to take effect, but also the conservative court’s abuse of the shadow docket,” he added. 

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court failed to rule on the constitutionality of a Texas law prohibiting the practice of abortions six weeks or later into pregnancy, effectively putting an end to the watershed 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade – which established a constitutional right to abortions with limited federal oversight. Because an estimated 85-90% of women in the U.S. obtain abortions after six weeks into gestation, which is typically only two weeks after a missed period, the law just about spells the end of abortion in the Lone Star State. 

Apart from its constitutional haziness, the court handed its decision down through a shadowy judicial maneuver known as a “shadow docket,” a process that skirts around oral arguments and is thus reserved for highly-time sensitive rulings. Throughout the Trump administration, however, the so-called shadow docket was increasingly leveraged to issue a number of right-wing rulings on issues like the Centers for Disease Control’s eviction moratorium and the White House’s “remain in Mexico” immigration policy, Salon’s Igor Derysh has reported. 

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All three liberal justices on the bench – including Associate Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – have repeatedly dissented from the court’s willingness to use the shadow docket in lieu of traditional judicial proceedings. 

“Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s ‘shadow-docket’ decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process,” Kagan wrote in a dissent on the court’s abortion ruling. “The majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily.”

Congressional Democrats have broadly railed against the court’s ruling, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., already gearing up to introduce a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in federal law. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Justice Department was “evaluating all options to protect the constitutional rights of women, including access to an abortion,” according to CNN. Though it remains dubious that Democrats currently retain enough seats over the House and Senate to fight against the court’s ruling.

Texas abortion ban should wake Democrats up: A dystopian hellscape awaits without filibuster reform

This week, the Supreme Court functionally overturned Roe v. Wade, rolling out the red carpet for every GOP-controlled state in the country to pass similarly dystopian laws that rely on self-appointed misogynistic bounty hunters to police women’s bodies. Tellingly, they did it in the most cowardly fashion possible, by using the “shadow docket” to issue an unsigned ruling in the dead of night. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her very-much-signed dissent, the court’s decision was “unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.” 

The lily-livered nature of the Roe overturn suggests that the conservative justices know full well that abortion rights are broadly popular with everyone who isn’t a bug-eyed, Bible-thumping lady hater. A 2019 Perry Undem poll showed 73% of Americans do not want Roe overturned, which fits into a larger trend of growing support for reproductive rights. As Dan Pfeiffer notes in his Message Box newsletter, abortion rights are especially popular with the “influx of college-educated voters to suburban areas” that are “one of the main factors making Texas a battleground state.”

Republicans understand that being openly anti-abortion is bad politics. That’s why both Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh pretended, during their confirmation hearings, that they had no intention of overturning Roe — and why shifty Republican politicians like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine pretended to believe them. And it’s why GOP pundits have resorted to gaslighting the public about this decision.

The “it’s not technically a Roe overturn” lament is flatly contradicted by the multitudes of patients who had abortions scheduled this week and were just told they can’t have them because the procedure is banned in Texas. 

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As Roy Edroso wrote on his Substack, “today’s conservatives are loud and proud about nearly all of their insane and vicious beliefs,” but on the Roe overturn, “they’re staying so quiet about it — and, to the extent they acknowledge that it’s happening, trying to make it look like something else.” Fox News largely ignored the court order, and when Tucker Carlson finally talked about it, he lied, denying that it’s a “radical” imposition on women’s rights. 

Republicans don’t like talking about their unpopular views on reproductive rights. But the party leaders also did nothing to stop Texas from implementing this radical abortion ban. On the contrary, the party has done everything in its power to make this happen, from stacking the courts with right wing ideologues who don’t care about law or precedent, to backing the theocratic politicians who are passing these laws. Republicans aren’t worried about a voter backlash in 2022 or 2024. They believe that they’ve successfully engineered it so that the will of the voters doesn’t matter anymore. 

And they’re right to believe it, because they are being helped by two Democratic senators who, either out of stubborn ignorance or trollish spite, are the best possible friends Republicans could have in their quest to wind down democracy: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Whatever their motivations, both senators have refused to vote to end or even reform the archaic and anti-democratic Senate filibuster. And with the Senate as closely divided as it is, unless those two holdouts change their minds, almost no Democratic legislation can get past Republican obstruction. 

That the filibuster is the problem is obvious in the most immediate sense.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has already promised a vote this month — which will pass — on the Women’s Health Protection Act. The bill would fulfill President Joe Biden’s promise to sign a law to codify Roe v. Wade and make the Texas law illegal. But Republicans in the Senate will simply use the filibuster to keep that bill from ever getting a debate, much less a vote, on the Senate floor. 

But really, the problem is much broader than that, because Senate Republicans are using the filibuster to block necessary voting protections and democracy reforms. Unless Manchin and Sinema wise up really fast, and allow bills like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to pass, Republicans on the state level will be able to use tactics like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright election tampering to make sure that the will of the American majority has no impact on who is actually holding power in this country. 

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Texas has been trending bluer in recent years, but Republicans in that state have already found their fix for the “problem” of voters being able to choose their leaders. On the same day that the state’s abortion ban kicked into action, the Texas state legislature passed a draconian anti-voting law that targets urban voters, especially voters of color, making it much harder to cast a ballot. The Democrats in the Texas legislature put up a hell of a fight, even fleeing for weeks to deny Republicans quorum, but ultimately their message was aimed at Manchin and Sinema: We need an end to the filibuster, so that voting rights can be protected. Manchin took a meeting with the Texas group, but continued to defend the filibuster, before jetting off to a fundraiser hosted by GOP-linked energy interests. 

Republicans believe, with good reason, America is easing into a post-democracy state, where the will of the majority will be overruled by a right wing minority that has successfully destroyed any avenue of democratic accountability. First, they captured the federal courts. Now the Supreme Court is using the “shadow docket” to pass a far-right agenda — including this abortion ban — without answering to the public at all. And while Democrats technically control the federal government right now, with the help of Sinema and Manchin, that will soon be over. Republicans will be able to manipulate elections so they “win” the White House and Congress without actually persuading a majority to vote for them. 

This abortion ban is the first taste of what life under the GOP’s permanent minority rule will be like. It’s a reminder that the people who stand to gain the most are fundamentalist Christians who are rapidly declining in number, but nonetheless feel entitled to force their patriarchal, bigoted, joyless worldview on the rest of the country. Secularism and freedom of religion are directly in their rifle sights. Banning abortion, which is absolutely about forcing a theocratic view of reproductive rights on the public, is likely just the first move. LGBTQ rights, birth control, and other secular freedoms we’ve come to enjoy are also on the chopping block, once democratic accountability stops being an obstacle for the right. And, as this abortion ban shows, fundamentalists are so close they can taste it. And all because Democratic dum-dums like Manchin and Sinema are going to stand by and let the right steal our democracy. 

Bias, theocracy and lies: Inside the secretive organization behind the National Prayer Breakfast

For nearly 70 years, and even in this moment of surging Christian nationalism, Democrats and Republicans have set aside their differences once a year to join in an event for fellowship and reconciliation: The National Prayer Breakfast.

The breakfast and the secretive religious group behind the scenes, popularly known as The Family, have been the subject of scandal over the years. Most notably, journalist Jeff Sharlet exposed the group’s theocratic, anti-labor origins, and revealed The Family’s role in Ugandan capital punishment legislation for gay people. More recently, the FBI caught Russian operatives using the breakfast to pursue back-channel connections with U.S. politicians.

But despite its dealings with international powers, The Family still enjoys the invisibility to which it attributes its influence. We’ve never had a full accounting of who works for The Family or even just who gets to attend the National Prayer Breakfast, let alone who decides. Until now.

Earlier this year, The Young Turks obtained a list of the 4,465 people invited to the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast. The document identifies guest connections to The Family and names virtually everyone who works for The Family, as well as numerous volunteers and allies. It also identifies which Family insiders submitted each invitee’s name.

Since then, TYT has been researching individuals named in that document and in others (including a list of 2018 breakfast attendees obtained last month). With assistance from organizations including the international journalism collective Bellingcat, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics, TYT is assembling what amounts to an X-ray of The Family, and a map of its connections and endeavors around the world.

Although more remains to be learned, we can now draw some conclusions and begin reporting on what we are finding. (This is an ongoing project and we invite journalists and advocacy groups to contact us if they are interested in conducting research of their own.)

The prayer breakfast is, we’ve been told, an ecumenical, nonpartisan event for leaders of every stripe, run by prayer groups in the House and Senate. None of that is true.

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The National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) is not run by Congress. The Family controls it, uses the breakfast for its own ends, and can do so thanks to the bipartisan fiction maintained by its remaining Democratic allies. (Democratic protectiveness of the breakfast may have its roots in the weekly congressional prayer meetings, which appear, like the breakfast, to offer members moments of genuine bonding and connection.)

Only a few congressional Democrats are even tangentially involved in the NPB. A handful of congressional Republicans play significant roles. But the breakfast itself is overwhelmingly a production of The Family. The event’s only significant financial backer is a well-known right-wing theocrat.

The Family’s congressional defenders have served up portraits of the NPB that could never be refuted because they wouldn’t release the invitation list. (It has never been clear why an event ostensibly produced by Congress would be shrouded in such profound secrecy.)

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., The Family’s most prominent Democrat, said earlier this year that the breakfast “has brought together religious, political and cultural leaders from all over the world.” But many attendees are not leaders at all; they are fellow travelers and friends of The Family. Others springboard off the breakfast to build anti-LGBTQ, anti-democratic networks in their home countries. International media portray the breakfast invitations as coming from Congress or the president, boosting the standing of the Family-allied politicians who get invited.

It’s not just Democrats who perpetuate this. The Family operates in a penumbra of secrecy formed by the overlap of lax IRS disclosure laws and law enforcement squeamishness about scrutinizing organizations that appear even remotely religious.

And the diversity implied by Coons’ role doesn’t apply to the delegations of guests from multiple countries. The breakfast is neither nonpartisan nor ecumenical.

The politics of the breakfast — its attendees and those who choose them — are a far cry from Coons’ claim. For instance, of the 20 individuals who invited the most guests in 2016, TYT was able to assess the politics of 13, using voter registrations and political donations as gauges. Of those 13, only one was a Democrat: Grace Nelson, a former Family board member and wife of former Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. The top five inviters whose politics could be ascertained were all Republicans.

The Republicans who got to pick the most attendees are overwhelmingly Trump supporters. Their ranks range from a Chick-fil-A franchisee (who invited 38 guests) to former South Carolina governor David Beasley, a Republican and Trump supporter whom Trump later appointed to run the UN World Food Programme. Many Family insiders are now actively supporting Trump’s election lies, the Christian nationalist movement undergirding those lies and the movement’s leaders.

Two of the top inviters had no U.S. political footprint because they don’t live in America. One of them has ties to theocratic, anti-LGBTQ organizations. He invited 30 people to the 2016 breakfast.

The invitation list categorizes 253 invitees as “non-entertainment media.” Those include a lot of local Washington-area on-air people — including traffic and weather reporters. But the political media are overwhelmingly conservative: The Daily Caller, The Blaze, the Washington Times, Newsmax, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner CEO’s assistant, Rush and David Limbaugh, Stephen Hayes, Laura Ingraham, etc.

Five media people are specifically noted on the list as Fox News (TYT identified at least 22 others connected to Fox News). Democratic media figures invited are likely to have appeared on Fox. CNN is mentioned in connection to one guest; MSNBC not at all.

Invited writers from mainstream outlets are often conservative pundits or cover a religion beat. Liberal and progressive names seldom appear, even from major outlets, let alone progressive media counterparts to the Daily Caller or the Blaze.

Sitting members of Congress are automatically invited, but of former members, The Family invited 20 Democrats and 38 Republicans, almost twice as many, plus former Democrat Joe Lieberman.

The invitation list reflects recurring religious discrimination, too. In nations TYT has looked at, a clear pattern emerges among who gets to choose the guests and, not surprisingly, among the guests they invite.

Christianity is favored over non-Christianity, Protestantism over Catholicism, and evangelicalism over non-evangelicalism. Non-evangelical leaders are vastly outnumbered by evangelical non-leaders.

What the documents do not show is intentional discrimination. If anything, The Family appears un-strategic in its operations, at times to its own detriment. The autonomy its associates enjoy mirrors the laissez-faire economic philosophies that helped give rise to The Family.

This makes it difficult to infer intent or to apply sweeping generalities to The Family or the breakfast. The organization is relational; if you’re friends with a Family insider, you might get an invite. Disparities in who gets invited arise less from a conscious plan and more from the vagaries of who becomes friends with someone inside The Family. Which, of course, is a textbook recipe for systemic bias. In some cases, invitations also appear to be tied to whether invitees might provide financial support for Family associates (who raise their own funds that are then administered by The Family).

It can be startling at times to come across the online ministries of Family associates. In blog posts and videos, they project inclusivity, joy and distinctly un-Trumpian gentleness, humor and even vulnerability.

They seldom resemble servants of an angry God or the cartoons of televangelism. The modest fundraising conducted by Family associates appears largely untouched by modern marketing. By any measure, they appear genuine in their compassion and desire to do good. They “have a heart for Africa,” many say. Some literally spend their lives overseas in conditions materially wanting but spiritually rewarding. They dedicate themselves to helping others.

But their compassion is intuitive, not strategic. Few are experts or rely on experts to determine the best way to do the most good. God leads them.

As it turns out, God seldom leads them to assist the elderly or the sick. More often, Family missionaries are led to help those whose responses happen to be the most rewarding.

So you will find Family associates working with impoverished children or remote villages in Africa, southeast Asia or Latin America. They build schools and they teach. Typically they teach lessons premised on belief in Jesus. If you believe Jesus is the answer to all problems, after all, what solution would not include Jesus?

Kids are taught English, for instance, by learning songs about how Jesus loves them. They learn the language, but also the love … as The Family sees it. It’s a love based on surrender, accepting God’s will and Biblical authority — including condemnation of homosexuality and even, for some, the subordination of women. The Family’s students learn to speak that language, too, overseas and at Christian schools in the U.S. where scholarships bring them.

Because how unsatisfying would it be to make the world a better place by doing volunteer accounting in the back office of some bureaucratic (but effective and professionally run) monolith with exacting, quantitative standards? Family associates can be found instead at the low-profile, sometimes one-person nonprofits that proliferate on the IRS website like weeds in a vast orchard of Christian charities. 

Some Family members have anonymous benefactors, wealthy enough to support mission work that jibes with their political inclinations. The politics matter, because The Family tasks its missionaries to bond with the leaders of their host nations — leaders who know full well, as Sharlet documented, that these bright-eyed missionaries have the ears of the Americans who hold the wallets and bombs of the U.S. government. These missionaries use their access to local leaders to help stand up miniature versions of both the prayer breakfast and The Family — iterations that share or even exceed the homophobic or theocratic leanings of their model.

Ironically, one could argue that The Family does not use its influence enough. In accordance with their famous slogan of “Jesus Plus Nothing,” The Family asks little of the leaders they minister. As we’ll report, The Family enjoys proximity to local and national leaders that entails virtually no accountability for their political decisions and accepts virtually any policy that can be seen as Jesus-based. 

To The Family, accountability starts with Jesus; they seldom champion the checks-and-balances accountability that transparency brings. As one source close to The Family told me, its leaders might counsel a senator to work on his marriage, but remain silent on matters such as encouraging violent upheaval of American democracy. During a conversation with notorious Republican operative Lee Atwater, Doug Coe, the late Family leader, reportedly condemned adultery only when pressed.

And so these smiling missionaries, even those preaching inclusivity and love for sinners and enemies, end up arm in arm with unsmiling politicians feverish to squeeze voting rights or reproductive rights. A smaller group inside the ranks of The Family flares with anger when LGBTQ rights are framed as an affront to religious freedom.

Historically, The Family’s rationale for serving leaders unconditionally is that reducing evil means engaging with it. Who needs prayer more, after all, than the worst among us?

As Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y., another Family ally, said this year, “the Prayer Breakfast reminds us to both love our neighbors and even the more challenging love our enemies.” It was an irrefutable defense, right up until we could check whether The Family engages its own enemies as fervently as it engages the enemies of others.

Now, however, Suozzi’s high-minded aspirations are hard to reconcile with the 2016 invitation list. The names present, and those omitted, suggest that enemies of human rights may come and break bread, but enemies of Republicans get left out in the cold.

The Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and William J. Barber II — some of America’s top religious leaders on the left — are all absent from the 2016 invitation list. Business leaders, however, appear in abundance (although yesteryear’s captains of industry have been replaced by today’s regional managers of industry).

Non-religious leaders who advocate for the disenfranchised are hard to come by. The late AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, invited by Beasley, was one of the rare labor leaders on the list.

Still, participating Democrats claim the breakfast somehow can foster reconciliation, regardless of the short supply there of LGBTQ people, socialists and baby-killers with whom to reconcile. “After a very divisive time in our nation’s history,” Coons said in February, “it’s my hope that this year’s breakfast offers Americans of all faiths and backgrounds the strength and courage to unite as a nation and tackle the challenges we face together.”

Except now we know that Americans of all faiths and backgrounds aren’t at the breakfast. In fact, as our first report will show, the breakfast — and some Family leaders — helped fuel our current divisions. And their secret work today is at the heart of the challenges we now face. 

With additional research and reporting by TYT Investigates News Assistant Zoltan Lucas and Intern Jamia Zarzuella, and assistance from members of the TYT Army.

15 not-boring spinach salad recipes

Spinach salads may make you think of a health food craze lacking in flavor or creativity. But they can be so much more than that — the earthy, slightly bitter taste of spinach can add oomph to any salads. I’m here to give you 15 delicious ideas for not just eating spinach, but actually enjoying it! Some recipes let you be in the driver’s seat, picking and choosing between feta cheese or goat cheese, bacon or grilled chicken, and balsamic vinaigrette or champagne vinaigrette. Others are more like a GPS, telling you exactly which way to go for the best result. Whether you’re the type of person who wants to see where the wind will take you or you prefer a little more direction, we have spinach salad recipes that will satisfy everyone.

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Our best spinach salad recipes 

1. Melon, Bacon and Spinach Salad with a Melon Vinaigrette

This colorful spinach salad has a little bit of everything. Funky blue cheese, sweet cantaloupe, thinly sliced red onion, crispy bacon, and a fruity salad dressing for a lovely summer side dish or main course.

2. Rice Noodle Salad with Spring Vegetables and Tahini-Lime Dressing

Rice noodles are a beautiful blank canvas for so many flavors, but recipe developer Elizabeth Stark’s spicy tahini dressing with lime and fish sauce is up there with the greats. In addition to the dressing, the noodles are tossed with shiitake mushrooms, spinach, and fresh green herbs.

3. Warm Salmon and Lentil Salad with Herbes de Provence

Looking for a heartier spinach salad that you can have for a main course lunch or dinner? This nourishing combination of wild-caught salmon, green lentils, baby spinach, and nuts is a protein-packed winner.

4. Strawberry and Ricotta Salad

Spinach and strawberries are a classic combination of ingredients for a salad that balances the sweetness of berries and the sharp, slightly bitter flavor of the greens. Although this recipe calls for baby arugula, feel free to swap baby spinach in place and dress it all in an elegant champagne vinaigrette.

5. Molly Wizenberg and Brandon Pettit’s Red Wine Vinaigrette

There’s both red wine vinegar and actual red wine in this dressing that pairs so well with a strawberry spinach salad. Using both ingredients is chef Brandon Pettit’s trick for making the vinaigrette just a touch fancier.

6. Wilted Spinach Salad with Balsamic Caramelized Red Onions

Recipe developer coffeefoodwrite has taken this savory spinach salad with bacon on a lighter spin by cutting out the crispy pork and substituting it with caramelized onions. A drizzle of olive oil and lemon juice, and a sprinkle of flaky sea salt and pepper are the only additional ingredients you need to build flavor.

7. Salad Dressing

Take any spinach salad to the next level by skipping bottled salad dressing and making your own at home. This one is made with two kinds of balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, and one unexpected ingredient: Worcestershire sauce.

8. Peter Miller’s Lentils Folded Into Yogurt, Spinach, and Basil

Recipe developer Peter Miller calls this lentil and spinach dish a “nod to pesto and a salute to yogurt.” And he offers two different versions based on whether you’re cooking at home or bringing it to the office.

9. Spinach Bacon Salad

You won’t find bacon crumbled atop the salad, but rather in the form of a bacon dressing, which is drizzled over spinach, button mushrooms, and hard-boiled eggs.

10. Sushi Salad

Inspired by the flavors and ingredients found in everyone’s favorite one-bite meal, this brown rice salad features avocado, edamame, crispy seaweed, and baby spinach, all of which are tossed in a sesame-miso dressing.

11. Zuni-Inspired Grilled Chicken Salad

Our all-time favorite grilled chicken salad couldn’t be simpler or more delicious. Just grill chicken breasts until they’re cooked through, slice ’em, mix ’em with a lemony aioli, and serve with baby spinach.

12. Moro’s Chickpeas and Spinach (Garbanzos con Espinacas)

Okay, it’s not exactly a spinach salad, but it’s just as healthy and filling, so you can certainly treat it like one. The concept is simple — chickpeas and sautèed spinach. But when cooked in olive oil, garlic, cumin, oregano, and chile powder, the dish becomes totally new and exciting once again.

13. Tadka Salad Dressing

If you’re feeling bored and uninspired by another basic spinach salad, whip up this flavorful salad dressing with black mustard seeds, tahini, lime juice, Dijon mustard, and honey. Toss it with the greens, plus maybe some mandarin oranges, toasted almonds, and goat cheese, and suddenly, it’s not so bland.

14. Buffalo Chickpea Salad with Vegan Ranch

Grant Melton challenged himself to create a salad that would be delicious, hearty enough to be a meal and surprisingly vegan. He far exceeded his — and our! — expectations.

15. Make-Your-Own Spring Chopped Salad

Consider this spinach salad recipe a lesson in choosing your own adventure. Start with your favorite greens and herbs, add some blanched veggies, legumes, meat and cheese, dried cranberries or raisins, and dig in.

Supreme Court sanctions GOP’s vigilante strategy to stay in power

In the wee hours of November 9th, 2016, I sat slumped in front of my computer trying to gather my thoughts to write my piece for Salon that was scheduled for later in the morning. The feeling I had, as did millions of others, was one of utter shock and despair that my country had somehow elected an ignorant brand name in a suit named Donald Trump to lead it. Having observed him closely during the campaign, writing about him nearly every day, I knew his presidency was going to be a trainwreck of epic proportions. This was depressing on every level but the prospect of a GOP-led Supreme Court majority, with special thanks to the Machiavellian machinations of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was downright terrifying.

Within just a few weeks that terror was made manifest as millions of women and their allies took to the streets for the first Women’s March on January 21, 2017. The massive gatherings were a protest against everything Donald Trump and the Republicans stood for but the main issue that brought all those people together was the knowledge that the Supreme Court was now very likely going to end abortion rights in America. Donald Trump had made an explicit promise to appoint only anti-abortion judges who were committed to overturning Roe vs. Wade and there was little doubt the GOP base would hold him to it.

When Justice Anthony Kennedy cynically retired the next year so that the Republicans could solidify their hard core majority by installing a political hack by the name of Brett Kavanaugh, it was all over but the shouting. The 5-4 majority to overturn Roe vs Wade was on the court.

This week we saw the beginning of the end. Texas passed a draconian anti-abortion law that banned the procedure after 6 weeks. Since most people don’t know they are pregnant that early in pregnancy, it effectively bans the procedure for all but a very few. This wasn’t the first of what they call “fetal heartbeat” laws that states have tried to pass, but it is the first to go into effect despite Roe v. Wade still standing. This is because the Texas legislature came up with a devious way to circumvent federal jurisdiction, by taking enforcement out of the hands of the state altogether and putting it into the hands of private citizens, also known as vigilantes.

Abortion rights advocates had petitioned the Supreme Court to block the implementation of the law but they allowed it to go forward, the Trump majority writing that the laws novel scheme was just too complicated for them to contemplate so they just had to let it stand. It’s absurd, of course. The court exists to untangle complicated legal questions.

But everyone knows that this was not the real reason the five ultra-conservatives let this law stand. The justices are fully aware that the scheme was devised to circumvent their authority and they are happy to let it. This gives them a chance to let the air out of the balloon a little bit in anticipation of the full overturn of Roe vs Wade in the next session when they hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case that has been chosen as the vehicle to deliver the coup de grâce. As my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte expressed with visceral emotion, no matter that we knew it was coming, it’s still devastating to finally see it happening.

It’s worth taking a closer look at the law Texas passed and how it came about just to see where else we may be headed in the era of the Trump Court.

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This law’s novel approach to enforcement, essentially removing the state and using what amounts to vigilantes and bounty hunters (under the promise of $10,000 for every abortion aider and abettor they bag) is essentially a form of legal secession from the U.S. Constitution. By removing the state and putting this into the realm of civil law, they can circumvent Americans’ constitutional rights by making them impossible to exercise. Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented from the majority opinion, concedes that the vigilante scheme is a problem writing:

“I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante — before the law went into effect — so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

The mind boggles at the possibilities for this idea to be used in other realms. Imagine if California were to ban guns but only allow private citizens to sue people who knowingly or unknowingly helped them obtain them? Or how about outlawing MAGA hats with the same scheme? But let’s be serious. The Trump Court will only allow these means to be used for ends with which they agree. And they can do that. There is no appeal after all.

This court majority is signaling loud and clear that they have abandoned all pretense of impartial justice. They have joined the rest of the far-right in their quest to retain power and achieve their ends by any means necessary. All they need for “legitimacy” is the power they have — and it is immense.

The fact that hardcore, anti-democratic, right-wingers like the Trump Court have apparently decided that state-sanctioned vigilantism is a valid law enforcement mechanism should not surprise us. As the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg pointed out, this is now mainstream thinking on the right:

Today’s G.O.P. made a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man charged with killing two people during protests against police violence in Kenosha, Wis. Leading Republicans speak of the Jan. 6 insurgents, who tried to stop the certification of an election, as martyrs and political prisoners.

Last year, Senator Marco Rubio praised Texas Trump supporters who swarmed a Biden campaign bus, allegedly trying to run it off the road: “We love what they did,” he said. This weekend in Pennsylvania, Steve Lynch, the Republican nominee in a county executive race, said of school boards that impose mask mandates, “I’m going in with 20 strong men” to tell them “they can leave or they can be removed.”

Their leader Donald Trump himself has encouraged vigilante violence, praising insurrectionist Ashli Babbit as a martyr, issuing statements like “when the looting starts the shooting starts”, “Liberate Michigan” and famously telling his ecstatic fans that he will pay their legal fees if they beat up protesters, among a hundred other provocative comments.

Goldberg points out that in Texas, the “pro-life” crowd is ready to start hunting down their enemies quoting one of their leaders, John Seago, saying “One of the great benefits, and one of the things that’s most exciting for the pro-life movement, is that they have a role in enforcing this law.” That’s certainly very exciting for all of the MAGA fans out there. 12 other states have passed laws similar to Texas’. A little tweaking to take state enforcement out of it and put anti-abortion bounty hunters in and they’re good to go. No doubt there will be a lot of pain and suffering but that’s pretty much all there is to the GOP agenda these days. 

“The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw” is the live album we didn’t know we needed

Marshall Crenshaw’s latest album — an in-concert retrospective of a life and career well-lived — is the LP we didn’t even know we needed. As we mercifully kiss the summer of 2021 goodbye, with an increasingly uncertain COVID-inflected autumn in the offing, “The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: Live in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century” is the free-wheelin’, good-time rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack that might just see us through.

Over the years, Crenshaw has developed into one of our finest rock composers. Modeling his work after such all-time greats as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, Crenshaw’s music roils with energy and bravado. A self-described “reluctant songwriter,” Crenshaw has long considered his songs as a kind of “means to an end” and “a vehicle for performance.”

With “The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw,” the performance is everything. A 40-year review of Crenshaw’s stage work, the two-disc album neatly bisects his remarkable career. The first disc is drawn from his 1983 stints for syndicated radio shows, while the second disc surveys the past 25 years.

Love a deep dive into a legendary musician’s career? Subscribe to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

And it’s all here — rollicking versions of “Someday, Someway” and “There She Goes Again,” rounded out by “Cynical Girl” and “Whenever You’re on My Mind.” When it comes to live performance, Crenshaw has occupied a vital place in American popular music since the 1980s, and “The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw” makes this aspect of his work indubitably clear.

For Crenshaw, the live set has afforded him with a welcome sense of nostalgia. “The whole intrigues me now,” he recently observed. “I wish I could know, for instance, what guitars I’m playing at these shows. Back then, I had a Guild Thunderbird that I wish I still had, and a 1962 Gretsch that I still do have. Anyway, whatever it is, I’m sounding really good — the whole band is — it sounds like kids having fun.”

And, of course, it was. But the mature Crenshaw is just as charming. As he prepares to perform a cover of Richard Thompson’s “Valerie,” the showstopper on disc two, a patron bellows out a request for Crenshaw’s 1985 single “Little Wild One (No. 5).” At first, he shrugs it off — “oh, we don’t know that one.” But then he thinks for a moment, saying, “But really, thanks for asking. I’m not kidding. I wish we could play it, I really do.”

Crenshaw’s boyish sincerity is one of the LP’s finest moments — almost as powerful and affecting as the songs themselves. When he listened to the contents in advance of the album’s release, he was struck by the ways that the songs put a “big dumb grin on my face.” With any luck, we’ll all be sporting big dumb grins of our own. I know I could use it.

Do US teens have the right to be vaccinated against their parents’ will? Depends on where they live

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends COVID-19 vaccines for everyone aged 12 and up. And yet, 12- to 15-year olds are the least vaccinated age group in the country, with 1 in 3 having received one dose and just 1 in 4 being fully vaccinated – about half the rate of the population as a whole.

In some states, minors can legally decide for themselves whether they would like to get vaccinated. In Tennessee, for example, state law allows teens 14 and older to make medical treatment decisions without parental consent. But earlier this summer, state health officials fired their vaccination director after she wrote a memo explaining the law to state medical providers.

I teach vaccine law, so I know the principle that certain minors may be vaccinated without parental consent is woven into our country’s history.

It is also in line with the recommendations of the medical profession in general. In 2013, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine advocated “policies and strategies that maximize opportunities for minors to receive vaccinations when parents are not physically present.”

However, there’s no federal law mandating this right in the United States. Instead, there’s a state-by-state patchwork of widely varied regimes. In some, parental consent is always mandatory. In others, there are laws that establish the conditions under which minors can decide for themselves – although, as the Tennessee situation shows, even this right can cause controversy.

Parental consent is the norm

Generally, parents or legal guardians have primary legal authority to make health decisions for their children, including vaccination decisions. When a state legally allows parents to request exemptions for legally mandated childhood vaccinations, these laws universally require that the parents are the ones to take steps to obtain it.

When minor children disagree with their parents’ opposition to vaccination, they must look to statutes or case law for assistance, and may find it lacking.

As of 2021, roughly one-third of U.S. states have passed laws establishing the “mature minor doctrine”: a legal framework allowing minors to independently obtain health care without parental consent, within specified limitations. Some, but not all, specifically include vaccination.

In other states, minors may still be able to make their own medical decisions thanks to state court rulings establishing the mature minor doctrine.

The 1928 Mississippi case of Gulf & S.I.R. Co. v. Sullivan is one of the earliest of these rulings. In this case, the parents of a 17-year-old railroad employee sued his employer, alleging that a smallpox vaccination administered by the company physician had injured the teen. The parents had neither consented nor objected to his employment by the railroad or the vaccination, but later claimed that their consent was needed for the smallpox shot.

The Mississippi Supreme Court disagreed, finding that in possessing the intellectual maturity to get the railroad job, the teen also “was of sufficient intelligence to understand and appreciate the consequences of the vaccination.”

In 1967’s Smith v. Selby, the Washington State Supreme Court similarly upheld a minor’s right to make their own medical decisions – in this case, of a married teen to consent to his own vasectomy due to a medical illness.

Since then, courts in a number of other states have established the mature minor doctrine as well – including Tennessee, where the state supreme court’s 1987 ruling in Cardwell v. Bechtol allows teenagers aged 14 to 18 to consent to medical treatment so long as the treating physician finds the minor to be “sufficiently mature to make his or her own health care decisions.”

Mature minor laws can vary considerably from state to state.

Some examples:

In Alaska, Arkansas and Idaho, minors of any age may choose their own medical care when their doctor deems them capable of meeting standards of informed consent.

In Alabama, minors may consent to health care at the age of 14, in Oregon at 15 and in Kansas and South Carolina at 16. Montana provides this right to minors who have graduated from high school.

Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have statutes permitting minors to make their own medical decisions based on a variety of factors, such as gaining legal emancipation from their parents, being married – or divorced or widowed – being pregnant or a parent, or enlisting in the military.

A smaller number of states have statutes specific to vaccination. In New York, for example, minors of any age may consent specifically to vaccinations related to sexually transmitted diseases. In California and Delaware, those over the age of 12 can receive such vaccinations. In Minnesota, minors of any age may consent to the hepatitis B vaccination.

Not just an abstract legal question

When a child disagrees with their parents’ opposition to vaccination, it can deeply strain family bonds.

In 2019, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, an Ohio teenager named Ethan Lindenberger described how online misinformation about side effects frightened his mother to the point of refusing to let him get vaccinated.

“Her love and affection and care as a parent was used to push an agenda to create a false distress,” he said.

That left Lindenberger vulnerable to a number of preventable illnesses until he turned 18 and could decide for himself.

Lindenberger gave his testimony amid one of the worst measles outbreaks in the United States in decades. According to the CDC, 2019 saw 1,282 cases of measles in the U.S. – nearly four times higher than 2018 and the highest since 1992. The “majority of cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles,” according to the CDC.

Unvaccinated teens can also be vulnerable financially. Shortly after the publication of my book “Vaccine, Vaccination and Immunization Law” in 2018, I met a student at Florida International University with a similar experience. By the time the student had turned 18 and chose for themselves to be vaccinated, they were too old to be covered by the federally funded Vaccines For Children program. This student told me they were unable to afford the cost of the numerous recommended series of vaccines.

Minors’ medical rights in limbo

Not all efforts by states to pass laws expanding the ability of minors to seek vaccination have succeeded. Recently, these measures have met strong opposition from the anti-vaccination movement, and history suggests that this will only increase in the face of COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy.

In 2020, a Maryland bill to permit minors over the age of 16 to consent to vaccination was withdrawn. New York lawmakers also proposed a bill that year to further expand the ability of minors over the age of 14 to consent to vaccination. So far, the bill appears to be stalled.

In the District of Columbia, a lawsuit has been filed challenging legislation passed in 2020 permitting minors of any age – as long as they are capable of meeting standards of informed consent – to receive any vaccination recommended by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

It now appears that anti-vaccination sentiment has stalled expansion of the mature minor doctrine. I am not aware of any current court cases involving minors seeking vaccination over parental objections, nor of any cases of minors traveling to other states to receive vaccinations under this doctrine.

Even in states where the mature minor doctrine is established, most teenagers are probably unaware of their rights. And as recent history in Tennessee shows, efforts to educate them about those rights may prove controversial.

Brian Dean Abramson, Adjunct Professor of Vaccine Law, Florida International University

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

Lack of a vaccine mandate becomes competitive advantage in hospital staffing wars

In the rural northeastern corner of Missouri, Scotland County Hospital has been so low on staff that it sometimes had to turn away patients amid a surge in covid-19 cases.

The national covid staffing crunch means CEO Dr. Randy Tobler has hired more travel nurses to fill the gaps. And the prices are steep — what he called “crazy” rates of $200 an hour or more, which Tobler said his small rural hospital cannot afford.

A little over 60% of his staff is fully vaccinated. Even as covid cases rise, though, a vaccine mandate is out of the question.

“If that becomes our differential advantage, we probably won’t have one until we’re forced to have one,” Tobler said. “Maybe that’s the thing that will keep nurses here.”

As of Thursday, about 39% of U.S. hospitals had announced vaccine mandates, said Colin Milligan, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association. Across Missouri and the nation, hospitals are weighing more than patient and caregiver health in deciding whether to mandate covid vaccines for staffers.

The market for health care labor, strained by more than a year and a half of coping with the pandemic, continues to be pinched. While urban hospitals with deeper pockets for shoring up staff have implemented vaccine mandates, and may even use them as a selling point to recruit staffers and patients, their rural and regional counterparts are left with hard choices as cases surge again.

“Obviously, it’s going to be a real challenge for these small, rural hospitals to mandate a vaccine when they’re already facing such significant workforce shortages,” said Alan Morgan, head of the National Rural Health Association.

Without vaccine mandates, this could lead to a desperate cycle: Areas with fewer vaccinated residents likely have fewer vaccinated hospital workers, too, making them more likely to be hard hit by the delta variant sweeping America. In the short term, mandates might drive away some workers. But the surge could also squeeze the hospital workforce further as patients flood in and staffers take sick days.

Rural covid mortality rates were almost 70% higher on average than urban ones for the week ending Aug. 15, according to the Rural Policy Research Institute.

Despite the scientific knowledge that covid vaccinations sharply lower the risk of infection, hospitalization and death, the lack of a vaccine mandate can serve as a hospital recruiting tool. In Nebraska, the state veterans affairs’ agency prominently displays the lack of a vaccine requirement for nurses on its job site, The Associated Press reported.

It all comes back to workforce shortages, especially in more vaccine-hesitant communities, said Jacy Warrell, executive director of the Rural Health Association of Tennessee. She pointed out that some regional health care systems don’t qualify for staffing assistance from the National Guard as they have fewer than 200 beds. A potential vaccine mandate further endangers their staffing numbers, she said.

“They’re going to have to think twice about it,” Warrell said. “They’re going to have to weigh the risk and benefit there.”

The mandates are having ripple effects throughout the health care industry. The federal government has mandated that all nursing homes require covid vaccinations or risk losing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, and industry groups have warned that workers may jump to other health care settings. Meanwhile, Montana has banned vaccine mandates altogether, and the Montana Hospital Association has gotten one call from a health care worker interested in working in the state because of it, said spokesperson Katy Peterson.

It’s not just nurses at stake with vaccine mandates. Respiratory techs, nursing assistants, food service employees, billing staff and other health care workers are already in short supply. According to the latest KFF/The Washington Post Frontline Health Care Workers Survey, released in April, at least one-third of health care workers who assist with patient care and administrative tasks have considered leaving the workforce.

The combination of burnout and added stress of people leaving their jobs has worn down the health care workers the public often forgets about, said interventional radiology tech Joseph Brown, who works at Sutter Roseville Medical Center outside Sacramento, California.

This has a domino effect, Brown said: More of his co-workers are going on stress and medical leave as their numbers dwindle and while hospitals run out of beds. He said nurses’ aides already doing backbreaking work are suddenly forced to care for more patients.

“Explain to me how you get 15 people up to a toilet, do the vitals, change the beds, provide the care you’re supposed to provide for 15 people in an eight-hour shift and not injure yourself,” he said.

In Missouri, Tobler said his wife, Heliene, is training to be a volunteer certified medical assistant to help fill the gap in the hospital’s rural health clinic.

Tobler is waiting to see if the larger St. Louis hospitals lose staff in the coming weeks as their vaccine mandates go into effect, and what impact that could have throughout the state.

In the hard-hit southwestern corner of Missouri, CoxHealth president and CEO Steve Edwards said his health system headquartered in Springfield is upping its minimum wage to $15.25 an hour to compete for workers.

While the estimated $25 million price tag of such a salary boost will take away about half the hospital system’s bottom line, Edwards said, the investment is necessary to keep up with the competitive labor market and cushion the blow of the potential loss of staffers to the hospital’s upcoming Oct. 15 vaccine mandate.

“We’re asking people to take bedpans and work all night and do really difficult work and maybe put themselves in harm’s way,” he said. “It seems like a much harder job than some of these 9-to-5 jobs in an Amazon distribution center.”

Two of his employees died from covid. In July alone, Edwards said 500 staffers were out, predominantly due to the virus. The vaccine mandate could keep that from happening, Edwards said.

“You may have the finest neurosurgeon, but if you don’t have a registration person everything stops,” he said. “We’re all interdependent on each other.”

But California’s Brown, who is vaccinated, said he worries about his colleagues who may lose their jobs because they are unwilling to comply with vaccine mandates.

California has mandated that health care workers complete their covid vaccination shots by the end of September. The state is already seeing traveling nurses turn down assignments there because they do not want to be vaccinated, CalMatters reported.

Since the mandate applies statewide, workers cannot go work at another hospital without vaccine requirements nearby. Brown is frustrated that hospital administrators and lawmakers, who have “zero covid exposure,” are the ones making those decisions.

“Hospitals across the country posted signs that said ‘Health care heroes work here.’ Where is the reward for our heroes?” he asked. “Right now, the hospitals are telling us the reward for the heroes: ‘If you don’t get the vaccine, you’re fired.

Mike Lindell paid millions to “cyber experts”; allegedly bought luxury home for accused fraudster

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s alleged net worth of $300 million may be dwindling rapidly, thanks in large part to the team of blundering operatives, advisers and self-appointed cyber experts who have convinced Lindell to pay them big bucks for their thoroughly unsuccessful work to help him reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

According to interviews with sources close to Lindell and documents reviewed by Salon, the bedding magnate has paid more than $3 million to various advisers and his team of “white hat hackers.” They produced the supposed “packet-capture” evidence, which Lindell has promised for months would prove the election had been hacked, and were also paid to ensure its “safety” between the November election and Lindell’s much-hyped “cyber symposium” last month in South Dakota. 

On Thursday, Josh Merritt, a former member of Lindell’s “red team” at the South Dakota event, told Salon that the $3 million was split among a group of Lindell’s “cyber experts.” Most of the money, he said, went toward the purchase of a luxury Florida home for Dennis Montgomery, a discredited former government contractor with a checkered history who has become central to Lindell’s operation. 

Merritt said that in the “red team room” he heard Lindell and an employee discuss “that being the house that Dennis Montgomery lived in. Lindell had stated many times he had paid Montgomery and others over $3 million, and he had spent a total of over $15 million” on his claims of election fraud.

“Lindell is who has been funding Dennis Montgomery since Nov. 3, 2020,” Merritt said, adding that the mysterious home was a key point of Lindell’s operation leading up to the South Dakota symposium, which Lindell claims only failed because it was hijacked by antifa insurgents. 

The home in question is a Naples, Florida, property acquired through a financial trust called Gray Horse, Merritt said, suggesting it was purchased through a pro-Trump lawyer and Lindell sidekick. “Gray Horse was just the trust name,” Merritt said, “common practice when hiding and protecting an owner.”

The $1.5 million luxury home in Naples, which has four bedrooms, a large swimming pool and palm trees, was reportedly where four hard drives that Lindell claimed were full of 2020 election “data” — specifically, the “Scorecard and Hammer” data much coveted by election truthers — were being stored ahead of the August cyber symposium. It was also where Dennis Montgomery had set up housekeeping. 

Salon obtained a Florida Department of State document filed on Aug. 23, showing that Montgomery registered his company, “Blxware LLC,” at that address last week.

No financial disclosures about the purchase of the property have yet appeared in Collier County, Florida, land records. It appears the purchase was completed on July 12, weeks ahead of Lindell’s South Dakota event — which Montgomery did not attend, saying he’d suffered a stroke.

Montgomery did not return a Salon request for comment for this story. 

Those who spoke to Salon describe the house purchase as evidence that Montgomery had successfully negotiated payment from Lindell for his work on the election fraud claims, well before the South Dakota event. They believe the Naples property was either purchased by Montgomery with Lindell’s money or purchased for him by Lindell through a third party. 

Reached for comment on the matter using a previously unblocked number, Lindell hung up. He has previously described this reporter as an antifa activist, and on Thursday evening made vague threats against Salon. “We’re still investigating Salon, we’re still looking into that,” he said during his internet broadcast. 

“This is somehow the saddest part of this whole story,” said reporter Khaya Himmelman of the Dispatch, who attended Lindell’s South Dakota event. “It’s so obvious Lindell was taken for a ride. I’m not surprised about Montgomery’s involvement, but I couldn’t have guessed a house in Florida was involved. I’m only left wondering how Lindell fell for it.”

Earlier this week, Salon exclusively reported that Lindell had recently sold one of his private planes as he faces a daunting legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems, which has filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against him, along with former Trump-related lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. On his “Frank Speech” website Thursday, Lindell did not deny he had sold the plane, but described the Salon article as part of a mass “coverup.” 

The QAnon crowd looks familiar: Right-wing cults have long plagued American politics

The latest white guy going on a rage-bender before being “respectfully” taken into custody for “mental health evaluation” was at the Miami airport, an incident that broke the internet last week. 

Since Trump began his campaign of self-centered, self-entitled whining, preening and racist “straight talk” in 2015, hate crimes and violence against women have exploded by around 20 percent. 

Meanwhile, “conservatives” have created a “watch list” of college professors suspected of teaching “liberal” climate science or the actual racial history of America; fossil fuel billionaires and their buddies, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, have corrupted Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and the entire GOP; and school boards, teachers and election officials receive daily harassment and even death threats.

All across the internet, we’re hearing weird theories that Trump and his followers have stolen some obscure idea from Roy Cohn and Roger Stone or are trying to reinvent German Nazism in an American wrapper. 

But the misogyny, hate and intimidation that the newly-Trumpy GOP have embraced since 2015 isn’t new, and certainly isn’t unique to America; indeed, it’s played a huge role throughout the centuries of our history. 

Today’s “proud boys,” for example, are just a modern version of the New England “churchmen” of the 1700s, the Klan riders of the 1800s, and Joe McCarthy’s fervent followers of the 1950s. Our sold-out “conservative” anti-“critical race theory” politicians are just this generation’s versions of white supremacist John C. Calhoun, fronting for morbidly rich “plantation” owners in the mid-1800s. 

Historically these bullies lose, but in the process they cause extraordinary pain and disruption to our nation. We must revisit, and learn from, history.

When authoritarian men seize power, they always go after advocates for broader democratic rights and even modernity itself. And they particularly go after objective science, women and minorities of every sort.

The Catholic Church went after Copernicus and then promoted repeated wars — “crusades” and pogroms — against Jews and Muslims. Authoritarians throughout history, motivated by deep-seated fears and ignorance, similarly hate science, egalitarian values and those who think or look different from them. 

Benjamin Franklin was one of the most influential of the Founders when it came to the shaping of the Constitution and our nation, and he was horrified by the power that right-wingers (rationalizing their largely economic and political power grabs with religion) had seized in his birth state of Massachusetts and nearby New Hampshire. 

As a teenager, he fled the state for Philadelphia, where there were no religious tests and people weren’t required by law (as they were in most of Massachusetts and New Hampshire) to tithe and attend church every week.

“Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age,” he wrote in his first autobiography, “when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of revelation itself.” 

Today, churches and radio/TV/YouTube preachers are the second largest vehicle for promoting anti-democracy behaviors and protests, behind social media. Franklin knew that even when their style of threats and violence were used to “enforce morality,” it was really about power and political control. 

This knowledge led him to campaign against authoritarianism and in favor of “free thinking” for much of his life. As his peer Joseph Priestly wrote of him, “It is much to be lamented that a man of Dr. Franklin’s general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity and also have done so much as he did to make others unbelievers.”  

Louise and I used to live just a short drive from Dover, New Hampshire, the fourth-largest city in the state, near the Maine border and the Atlantic seacoast. Generations ago, right-wing politicians and preachers were enforcing social control, and John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “How the Women Went from Dover” tells the tale of three young women who dared to challenge that day’s powerful men, that early generation of what today we would called Trump followers. 

Whittier’s poem begins:

The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall
Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!

The three women were Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose, and their crime was adhering to and promoting peace-promoting Quaker beliefs in a rabidly right-wing town.  

This so enraged the minister of Dover’s Congregational church, John Reyner, that he and church elder Hatevil Nutter (yes, that was his real name) lobbied the crown magistrate, Capt. Richard Walderne, to have them punished for their challenge to Reyner’s authority. 

It was a bitter winter when Walderne complied, ordering the three women stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, then dragged through town while receiving 10 lashes each. As Whittier wrote:

Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.

A local man, George Bishop, wrote at the time, “Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them, whilst the priest stood and looked and laughed at it.” 

It was a start, from the Rev. Reyner’s point of view, but hardly enough to scare the residents of the entire region from which he drew his congregation. So he got the young women’s punishment extended to 11 nearby towns over 80 miles of snow-covered roads, all following the same routine. 

So into the forest they held their way,
By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,
Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat
Of the winter sea at their icy feet.

The next town was Hampton, where the constable decided that just baring them above the waist wasn’t enough. As Sewall’s “History of the Quakers” records, “So he stripped them, and then stood trembling whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped again.” 

Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.

Whipping, beating, stoning, hanging, nailing, being pilloried (publicly clamped to a post through neck and wrist holes, often naked and sometimes for days at a time), dragging, burning, branding and dozens of other techniques were employed by religious and government authorities in the early American colonies to enforce thought and behavior. 

Trump and his “boys” who strut around with T-shirts celebrating General Pinochet’s practice of throwing “liberals” out of helicopters in Chile in the 1970s would bring it back if they gained power again.

If her cry from the whipping-post and jail
Pierced sharp as the Kenite’s driven nail,
O woman, at ease in these happier days,
Forbear to judge of thy sister’s ways!

On July 17, 1658, for example, Massachusetts Puritans seized Quakers Christopher Holder and John Copeland and chopped off each man’s right ear. They were then imprisoned and brutally whipped “on a set schedule” for “nine weeks straight.” 

Expelled from the Massachusetts territory, Holder and Copeland were told that if they returned, their left ears would also be cut off and a hole would be bored through each of their tongues with a hot poker. 

In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Scarlet Letter,” set in Puritan Boston, which dramatized how rule-breakers were stigmatized in Massachusetts. In Hawthorne’s telling, Hester Prynne was forced to wear a scarlet “A,” stigmatizing her as an adulterer.

It’s why there was debate about admitting Massachusetts to the new United States if it wouldn’t drop its laws supporting hard-right religion; the state finally, after massive debate and over the objections of multiple churches, complied and agreed to ratify the Constitution with its hated free speech and freedom from religion clauses.

So this generation of democracy-hating, bizarre-religious-cult-QAnon-believing right-wingers are really nothing new. 

Instead of public whippings to humiliate their enemies, they use social media or truck caravans with semiautomatic weapons and giant flags, and pick fights in airports and public parks. 

Instead of denying that the Earth goes around the sun, they deny the dangers of COVID and global warming. 

Instead of closing schools, they force teachers to expose themselves to disease while harassing and threatening them if they dare teach science or actual American history.  

Instead of requiring the payment of church taxes to vote, they require elaborate proofs of citizenship and purge “undesirable” people from voting lists with a nod and a wink from the Supreme Court. 

From Ben Franklin’s time to today, every generation of Americans have confronted right-wing authoritarians bent on maintaining violent white male supremacy using the twin levers of religious fanaticism and concentrated wealth. 

It’s probably beyond the power of human nature to prevent this from ever happening again, but we must not resign ourselves to another authoritarian movement now rising to power in America. 

Heeding Steve Bannon’s call, GOP election deniers organize to seize control at local level

One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”

When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”

Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.

After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.

In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.

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“We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.

ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”

Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

While party officials largely credited Bannon’s podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it’s impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.

The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama’s election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate’s faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.

What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.

“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”

It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what’s already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.

In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that’s now in court.

In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia’s sweeping new voting restrictions.

And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible” misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona’s top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.

When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you’re going to see to it this doesn’t happen again is if you get involved,” Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman.”

Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.

“They’re not going to be welcomed with open arms,” Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?” he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?”

Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon’s far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.

That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon’s podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz said. “I can’t guarantee you that we’ll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We’ll lose it if we conservatives don’t take over the Republican Party.”

Bannon endorsed Schultz’s plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables” to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.

Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.

The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win,” Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him.”

Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke.” Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this,” host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.

Schultz’s strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun” the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level.”

Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission” for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization’s website. The group’s parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history.” Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.

Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”

By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian” that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade’s deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.

“Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat,” Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”

The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman,” quoting the term used on Bannon’s podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas’s term for the position is “precinct chair.” Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off,” Barnes said.

For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We’re trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process,” Albert said.

Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real,” county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest.”

Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy’s pick, citing an “extraordinary” public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee” that’s lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We’re all about voter and election integrity,” Swain said in an interview.

In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon’s podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district’s member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.

“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That’s right,” the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”

After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages,” someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one.”

Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. The “audit,” conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.

“Because we’ve got the audit, there’s very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened,” said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn’t. “I don’t care,” she said.

One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” Petsas said. “That attitude can’t prevail.”

As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP’s audit.

“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what’s going on, and they get lambasted by our own party,” Petsas said. “That’s a problem.”

This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz’s precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives’ goal was to secure enough delegates to the party’s state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.

Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon’s podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776.” On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole,” but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your ‘facts’ are either false or misrepresent the truth.” He declined to cite specifics.

Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner,” according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood’s faction captured the county’s other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county’s votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover,” Connett told ProPublica.

In Greenville, the state’s most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood’s faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina’s biggest delegations.

Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.

“It’s a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse,” Bannon said on his podcast.

Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood’s challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump’s endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.

Wood’s rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump’s stolen election myth. Some said they’d resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.

Wood’s campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood’s supporters “a fringe, rogue group” and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony” by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.

But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.

Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county’s longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.

In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP’s few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?” Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve.”

Stutts’ group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.

The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone’s attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs’ first meeting as the county’s party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house” in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs’ courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.

In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today,” Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair.” After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.

Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP’s devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn’t know what to expect.

“There’s so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia.”

Of the field’s two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia’s new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud,” he wrote in response to a local newspaper’s candidate questionnaire.

Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing,” she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county.”

Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon’s podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers’ candidacies, saying they weren’t officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.

The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.

“You can’t build a movement on a lie,” Smith said.

In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump’s loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They’re directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.

Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First” and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.

“We are reclaiming our party,” Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We’re building an ‘America First’ army.”

Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That’s because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.

Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.

Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor’s veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can’t be vetoed.

State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.

“This empowers them,” Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It’s important to get them focused on change that can actually impact” future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020.”

Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law’s evidence did not meet “any standard of proof,” and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.

This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state’s largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts’ team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.

In Law’s case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.

Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no,” Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I’m going to take the presidential stance.”

The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren’t allowed to vote.

Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!” some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.

At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I’m done covering for you awful people,” he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He’d had enough.

“They want to create mayhem,” Sajdak said.

Soon after, Law’s faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump’s futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law’s “fraudulent, rogue election.” The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.

To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there’s no mechanism for overturning an election.” Asked if Law’s allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It’s a scary thought, isn’t it.”

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