How we got COVID: We did everything right — and still got breakthrough cases

We’ve had quite an August. We got married, dodged a hurricane and came down with breakthrough COVID. While I would happily recommend the first two, I wouldn’t wish the last on my worst enemy.

It hit completely out of the blue. One night last week, I fixed a nice supper — Italian sausage pasta with fresh tomato sauce — and sat down to eat and my appetite just disappeared. I didn’t feel anything else, just a complete loss of the desire to eat. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I’d had a late lunch — maybe that was it. So we finished dinner, watched an episode of something on Amazon and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up with a fever of 100.5 degrees. I was weak, having trouble breathing, headachy – it felt like a case of the flu, and not a light one. I took some ibuprofen and by noon my temperature was normal. But just to be on the safe side, I called my doctor and made an appointment for later in the day. Between the time I called the doctor and the time we left, I was too weak to drive, so Tracy drove.

The doctor took my vitals — which were normal — but she gave me a COVID test as a precaution. By the time we got home, the news was showing Hurricane Henri heading straight for us out here on the east end of Long Island. Full moon tide, three-to-five-foot storm surge, 75-mile-an-hour winds, the whole thing. We live only a few feet above sea level with one of our doors at the lowest point of the entire property.

Somehow, with a surge of adrenaline, we pulled ourselves together to prepare. We got our sump pump ready, and backed it up with a power inverter we could hook up to the car if the electricity went out.

We were already well-provisioned with bottled water and food, so on Saturday we settled down to wait out the coming storm that never came. Henri took a right turn at Montauk Point and headed off to New England and we were thankfully spared, because my COVID test came back positive right in the middle of everything.

How did this happen? For 18 months I’ve been writing about this disease and taking every precaution. Hell, I went out and got masks and latex gloves from the hardware store back in March of last year, before the CDC was even recommending them, and we wore them everywhere. I remember being the only person in a mask in the supermarket. We wore masks and gloves at the gas station, at the local deli, even walking down the street around other people, all of whom at the time were unmasked.

We didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t travel. We didn’t have anyone over to the house. Like millions of others, we just hunkered down. Then in the spring came the opportunity to get vaccinated and we were among the when they set up mass-vaccine points out here. Although the vaccine gave us some sense of security, we still wore our masks everywhere we went indoors, following CDC guidelines.

We got married on Aug. 9, outdoors in the presence of a few of our friends. Because we were all vaccinated, we didn’t wear masks, and afterwards we had dinner outdoors, well-spaced away from others at a restaurant. None of the people in our wedding party have come down with the disease, so that wasn’t it.

The only time I didn’t wear a mask was at a local outdoor farmers market. Once. But looking back, I remember being in line for a moment to pay, with a few people in front of me and behind me. No one at the farmers market was masked, so that must have been it.

Outdoors, for a grand total of maybe two minutes without a mask in the presence of others. If you needed evidence of the virulence of the delta variant, there it is.

Tracy’s test was positive, of course, and both of us have been laid low all week. Lots of coughing, no sense of taste or smell, fatigue — and by this I mean hardly being able to move your arms and legs — shortness of breath, everything you would expect, and more. But as we began to recover, it wasn’t bad enough to necessitate another trip to the doctor, much less to the hospital, for either of us, thank goodness. We’ve been eating fruit and homemade chicken soup with rice, as much of it as we could stand. The symptoms started to subside a day ago, and we knew we were on the way back when we both laughed at something last night and at that moment realized we hadn’t laughed for almost a week. Who knew that COVID took your sense of humor too?

I’ve been looking for a lesson in all of this beyond the obvious one — wear your mask even when you think you don’t have to, even when you’re around people you know are vaccinated. The only place we’re not going to mask-up from now on will be inside the house and in our yard. That’s how careful I think we’re going to have to be.

We’ve known for at least a couple of months that being vaccinated won’t protect you from contracting COVID, and I’m here to tell you that Tracy and I are walking, talking evidence of that. I’ve been recounting the statistics for this disease for more than a year, but never have those numbers seemed more ominous to me than when we became two of them. We have both been on the phone with the New York State Department of Health’s contact tracing unit. They are incredibly thorough and efficient, so when I tell you that the national seven-day average of new cases is 156,300, I can assure you that number is as accurate as it can be, at least with respect to New York State. But the number that’s truly staggering is the average number of daily deaths over the last week, which is 1,233 – with 2,210 having died on Thursday alone.

It now seems nearly beside the point to break down COVID statistics between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. It could be that whoever exposed me was vaccinated but showing no symptoms. I’m certain I was positive without symptoms for several days before I came down with a fever and was first aware that I was sick. I feel lucky that I didn’t expose anyone during that time because I didn’t go anywhere and I wasn’t around anyone.

It was the politicization of this disease right from the beginning that has gotten us where we are, with statistics for new cases, hospitalizations and deaths approaching the highs they hit in January of this year. Insane opposition to imposing mask mandates in states like Florida and Texas and others are making things worse, and we’re just getting started when it comes to the reaction that’s sure to come with vaccination mandates by localities, businesses and entertainment venues. Irrationality has been the hallmark of this disease and it shows no signs of letting up.

I have to admit that during the past year I have joined in what Paul Krugman called in a recent column in the New York Times “the quiet rage of the responsible.” But I must tell you that having contracted COVID, I have a whole new idea about what being responsible means, because it means us: Tracy and me. Even though we acted responsibly in getting vaccinated and wearing masks early on and throughout the pandemic, we still came down with this terrible disease.

I have reluctantly concluded that over time, practically everyone is going to get sick with the virus. It’s going to be a part of our lives the way the weather is. We’re going to have to learn that while there will be times it is warm and sunny, we’re going to have to endure not just one winter of COVID, but many. COVID is well on its way to moving from pandemic to endemic. It is going to be with us for a very long time. We have to come to grips with the fact that while vaccines will protect us, there is no immunity to this disease. Living with it will mean more than just taking care of ourselves. It will take respect for others and the patience and endurance of all of us.

Bat pups babble and bat moms use baby talk, hinting at the evolution of human language

“Mamama,” “dadada,” “bababa” – parents usually welcome with enthusiasm the sounds of a baby’s babble. Babbling is the first milestone when learning to speak. All typically developing infants babble, no matter which language they’re learning.

Speech, the oral output of language, requires precise control over the lips, tongue and jaw to produce one of the basic speech subunits: the syllable, like “ba,” “da,” “ma.” Babbling is characterized by universal features – for example, repetition of syllables and use of rhythm. It lets an infant practice and playfully learn how to control their vocal apparatus to correctly produce the desired syllables.

More than anything else, language defines human nature. But its evolutionary origins have puzzled scientists for decades. Investigating the biological foundations of language across species – as I do in bats – is a promising way to gain insights into key features of human language.

I’m a behavioral biologist who has spent many months of 10-hour days sitting in front of bat colonies in Panama and Costa Rica recording the animals’ vocalizations. My colleagues and I have found striking parallels between the babbling produced by these bat pups and that by human infants. Identifying a mammal that shares similar brain structure with human beings and is also capable of vocal imitation may help us understand the cognitive and neuromolecular foundations of vocal learning.

Vocal learning in other animals

Scientists learned a great deal about vocal imitation and vocal development by studying songbirds. They are among the best-known vocal learners, and the learning process of young male songbirds shows interesting parallels to human speech development. Young male songbirds also practice their notes in a practice phase reminiscent of human infant babbling.

However, songbirds and people possess different vocal apparatus – birds vocalize by using a syrinx, humans use a larynx – and their brain architecture differs. So drawing direct conclusions from songbird research for humans is limited.

Luckily, in Central America’s tropical jungle, there’s a mammal that engages in a very conspicuous vocal practice behavior that is strongly reminiscent of human infant babbling: the neotropical greater sac-winged bat, Saccopteryx bilineata. The pups of this small bat, dark-furred with two prominent white wavy stripes on the back, engage in daily babbling behavior during large parts of their development.

Greater sac-winged bats possess a large vocal repertoire that includes 25 distinct syllable types. A syllable is the smallest acoustic unit, defined as a sound surrounded by silence. These adult bats create multisyllabic vocalizations and two song types. The territorial song warns potential rivals that the owner is ready to defend their home turf, while the courtship song lets female bats know about a male bat’s fitness as a potential mate.

Of particular interest to me and my colleagues, the greater sac-winged bat is capable of vocal imitation – the ability to learn a previously unknown sound from scratch by ear. It requires acoustic input, like human parents talking to their infants, or in the case of the greater sac-winged bat, adult males that sing.

The only other non-human mammal that scientists have documented babbling is the pygmy marmoset, a small South American primate species that is not capable of vocal imitation. The greater sac-winged bat offered the first possibility to study pup babbling in detail in a species that can imitate the vocalizations of others. But just how similar is bat babbling to human infant babbling?

Hundreds of hours of bat babbling

To answer that question, I monitored the vocal development of wild pups in eight colonies. During the day, S. bilineata find shelter and protection in tree crevices and outer walls of buildings. They’re very light-tolerant, and adults like to stay several centimeters apart from one another, making it easier for us to observe and record particular individuals.

To be able to recognize specific bats, I marked their forearms with colored plastic bands. I followed 20 pups from birth until weaning. Starting around 2.5 weeks of age, and continuing until weaning around 10 weeks old, pups babble away between sunrise and sunset in the day roost. It’s very loud, audible even to the human ear because some babbled syllables are within our hearing range (others are too high for us to hear). For each pup, I recorded babbling bouts – some of which lasted as long as 43 minutes – and the accompanying behaviors throughout their entire development. In contrast, adult bats produce vocalizations that last no more than a few minutes.

Scientists have known for a while that pups learn how to sing by vocally imitating adult tutors while babbling. But our new study provides the first formal analysis that their babbling really does share many of the features that characterize babbling in human infants: duplication of syllables, use of rhythm and an early onset of the babbling phase during development.

Just as human infants produce sounds that are recognizable as what are called canonical adult syllables – those with mature features that sound like what an adult speaker produces – bat pups’ babbling consists of syllable precursors that are part of the adult vocal repertoire.

And just as human babbling includes what are probably playful sounds produced as the infant explores their voice, bat babbling includes so-called protosyllables that are only produced by pups.

Moreover, pup babbling is universal. Each pup, regardless of sex and regional origin, babbled during its development.

The pup (on the right, with darker fur) sits beside the mother bat and engages in babbling behavior in the day roost. Credit: Michael Stifter

Baby talk, from mom to pup

During my first field season, I noticed that during babble sequences, mothers and pups interacted behaviorally and vocally. Mothers produced a distinct call type directed at pups while babbling.

We humans alter our speech depending on whether we are addressing infants or adults. This infant-directed speech – also known as motherese – is a special form of social feedback for the vocalizing infant. It’s characterized by universal features, including higher pitch, slower tempo and exaggerated intonation contours. The timbre – the voice color – also changes when people speak “motherese” compared to when talking to other adults. Timbre is what makes a voice sound a bit cold and harsh or warm and cozy. Could it be that female bats also changed their timbre, depending on whom they directed their calls to?

The results were clear: For the first time, we’d found a non-human mammal that changes the color of voice depending on the addressee. Bats also use baby talk!

Our results introduce the greater sac-winged bat as a promising candidate for cross-species comparisons about the evolution of human language. Babbling is like a behavioral readout of the ongoing vocal learning happening in the brain. When pups babble, they imitate the adult song – and provide us with insight about when learning is taking place. It offers the unique possibility to study the genes that are involved in vocal imitation.

And since bats share their basic brain architecture with people, we can translate our research findings from bats to humans. I’m fascinated that two mammal species that are so different share striking parallels in how they reach the same goal: to acquire a complex adult vocal repertoire – namely, language.

Ahana Aurora Fernandez, Postdoctoral Researcher in Behavioral Ecology and Bioacoustics, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

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

GOP may be getting “greedy” in redistricting war — but Democrats are “unilaterally disarming”

With the release of data from the 2020 U.S. census, which is used to draw districts for seats in Congress and state legislatures, officials in state after state have launched a mad dash to begin redistricting ahead of next year’s elections. But while Republican-led states are considering extreme means to maximize their gains, some Democrats worry that their party shot itself in the foot before the process even began.

Republicans used redistricting following the 2010 census to carve out near-impenetrable majorities in state legislatures and congressional delegations in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. The GOP again has an advantage this year because the party has total control of the map-drawing process in 187 congressional districts while Democrats have full control of the process in just 84 congressional districts. One reason for the major gap is that some Democratic states are “unilaterally disarming,” some Democratic lawmakers say, by shifting power to independent redistricting commissions or even cutting deals with Republicans to shrink potential gains.

Republicans, meanwhile, have alarmed even other members of their own party with aggressive plans to shrink Democratic districts and “crack” blue cities in red states, including Louisville, Kentucky; Omaha, Nebraska; Nashville, Tennessee; and Kansas City, Missouri. That tactic involves slicing urban areas up into multiple districts in an attempt to eliminate Democratic seats as much as possible. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has warned against such a plan and some Republican lawmakers have urged their party’s state legislatures to consider the consequences. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., warned that getting too “cute” with the maps could “end up in a lawsuit.” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., warned his party against getting “too greedy” because if “you have a bad election … instead of losing a couple of seats, you lose four or five.”

Still, lawmakers like Reps. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., should be “very nervous” about being drawn out of their seats, David Daley, the former Salon editor who now serves as a senior fellow at the nonpartisan advocacy group FairVote, said in an interview.

“The advantages that Republicans engineered in 2010 and 2011 are very much still with us,” he said. “In states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Ohio, those gerrymanders held for a decade.” Although Democrats were ultimately able to claw back some seats and won critical gubernatorial races in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to give them veto power over the most extreme maps, the party’s “options are more limited” this redistricting cycle, Daley added.

“The map is just brutal for Democrats,” he said.

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

Democrats who support the shift to independent commissions and have long decried aggressive (and sometimes illegal) Republican gerrymanders argue that the party is simply putting its money where its mouth is and practicing “good government.” But with a razor-thin majority in the House and aggressive Republican plans to maximize their potential victories, those principles could also cost Democrats control of Congress. Republicans need a net gain of just five seats to recapture control of the House — and might be able to pick up that many through redistricting Florida alone. The GOP could easily stand to gain six to 13 seats overall through redistricting efforts in Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina. Of those four states, only Georgia failed to gain congressional seats from the census results while blue states like New York, California and Illinois all lost seats.

On the other hand, if Democrats had not shifted power to independent commissions in three states — California, Colorado and Virginia — they would have controlled more districts than the GOP, according to Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Democrats are particularly alarmed about their prospects in Virginia, where the party sunk millions to win a majority of seats in both chambers of the state legislature under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam. But then nine Democrats in the House of Delegates voted with Republicans to advance a ballot initiative to create a bipartisan redistricting commission, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters last year. The 16-person commission will include eight state lawmakers from both parties and at least two Republicans must approve the final map, effectively giving the party veto power. If the commission fails to reach an agreement, the state’s conservative Supreme Court would decide the new districts.

“We Democrats are cursed with this blindness about good government,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., told Politico. “In rabid partisan states that are controlled by Republicans, they’re carving up left and right. And we’re kind of unilaterally disarming. But having said that, I still come down on the side of reforming this process because it’s got to start somewhere.”

Though Virginia has steadily trended blue for years, some state legislators worry that the commission could imperil their newfound majority.

“I fully support, and voters absolutely deserve a fair, transparent, and most importantly, nonpartisan approach to redistricting,” said Democratic state Del. Lashrecse Aird in a statement to Salon. “But the heavy-handed partisanship and disproportionate influence from lawmakers that’s unfolding in Virginia is precisely why I was so opposed to the constitutional amendment that created our commission. The inability of this commission to remain neutral and act in the best interests of voters means Virginia’s GOP-appointed Supreme Court will almost certainly determine new districts.”

In Colorado, another blue state that gained a seat in the census, the Democratic-led House joined the Republican-led Senate to advance an amendment to create a nonpartisan commission that voters overwhelmingly approved. “We’re fucking idiots,” a Democratic state lawmaker told the Colorado Sun. Republicans, meanwhile, see the independent commission as their best shot at recapturing power in the increasingly blue state. Republican Senate Minority Leader Chris Holbert publicly called it “the first step toward achieving the Senate majority for Republicans.”

Though the commissions are nonpartisan, some analysts are concerned that they may ultimately disadvantage Democrats, whose voters are typically concentrated in urban areas.

“Even if you’re not trying to gerrymander on behalf of Republicans, the fact that Democrats are concentrated in cities and in the inner-ring suburbs means that it is easier to accidentally gerrymander on behalf of Republicans,” Matt Grossmann, head of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, told the Associated Press.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group founded by former Attorney General Eric Holder, has pushed independent commissions as fairer alternatives to partisan redistricting processes.

The NDRC did not respond to questions from Salon. Kelly Ward Burton, the group’s president, told Politico recently that they simply “want fairness, and we put our money where our mouth is.”

“We have pushed for fairness in the states where we have control or influence,” she said. We’re even doing it at the national level. The Republicans are not, because they intend to manipulate the maps to hold on to power.”

The NDRC also vowed to pursue legal action against partisan Republican gerrymanders.

“We will fight tooth and nail in the states with every tool at our disposal to prevent them from locking in gerrymandered maps,” Ward Burton told Politico. “We will sue them. We fully anticipate being in court. And that will be the battlefront on which we fight for fair maps. We’re ready for that.”

But those legal challenges will face more hurdles than usual after the Supreme Court effectively barred federal courts from weighing in on partisan gerrymanders, leaving the issue in the hands of state courts. Though courts have previously struck down Republican gerrymanders in states like Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and Democrats have already filed preemptive lawsuits in several states in hopes of getting courts involved in the process, legal experts doubt there will be drastic reversals this time around.

The Supreme Court decision has effectively given state legislatures “a green light and no speed limit as far as the extreme gerrymanders that they will be able to engineer and implement,” said Daley, the author of two books on redistricting.

A majority of states where Democrats have full control of government will have maps drawn by commissions. But in certain states, like New York and New Mexico, the Democratic-led legislatures can reject the commission maps and draw their own.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed on her first day in office to use her influence to help the Democrats expand their congressional delegation through the redistricting process. Some New York Democratic operatives believe the legislature can flip as many as five of the state’s eight Republican districts, according to Dave Wasserman, an election analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political report.

The New Mexico legislature can also override the maps created by its advisory redistricting commission. State House Speaker Brian Egolf earlier this year questioned why “Democrats want to unilaterally disarm and give advantage to the people who are trying to make the world a dirtier place, take rights away from people, make it harder to vote — all the things that we oppose.”

Egolf told Salon he has “confidence” in the redistricting committee but said the legislature would “review” their recommendations to ensure the maps are fair.

“They are gathering robust public input at meetings all over New Mexico, and I am hopeful that they will use public input, census data and their knowledge of New Mexico’s communities of interest to draw district maps that reflect the geographic and demographic diversity of our state,” he said in a statement. “Come December, the legislature will carefully review the Commission’s maps to ensure that the voting strength of Native American voters and communities of color remains strong. We will also make sure that the maps are fair to communities of interest throughout New Mexico. This is a new redistricting process, but it is one that rightly takes into account the many diverse communities and voices of our state, and that’s always been my priority as Speaker.”

Democrats have opportunities to expand their gains in other states as well.

In Illinois, Democrats are planning to roll out a party-drawn map that is “very likely” to gut the exurban Chicago district of Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger and significantly change the district of Rep. Rodney Davis, another Republican, according to Politico. The state lost a seat in the census and Democrats, who now control 13 of the state’s 18 districts, are expected to draw a map that will likely give them a 14-3 advantage.

Maryland Democrats, who control seven of the state’s eight congressional seats, toyed with the idea of drawing an all-Democratic map in 2010. The party ultimately decided against it but, with the House majority at stake, could face significant pressure to significantly redraw the district of Rep. Andy Harris, the delegation’s lone Republican.

Oregon, one of the few reliably blue states that gained a seat in the census, was expected to add a Democratic seat to its congressional delegation, where the party already controls four of the state’s five seats. But Democratic House Speaker Tina Kotek stunned colleagues by agreeing to a deal with the state’s Republican lawmakers that effectively gives the GOP veto power over the state’s new district map in exchange for an agreement by Republicans to stop fleeing the state and using other obstructive tactics to block legislation. Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers of the Oregon legislature.

If the legislature fails to agree on new districts, the redistricting power would shift to Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, but Oregon’s congressional Democrats are distinctly unhappy with Kotek’s deal. Rep. Peter DeFazio called the move “abysmally stupid.” Rep. Kurt Schrader said it was “like shooting yourself in the head.”

Kotek’s office says she is focused on making “real progress for Oregonians who desperately needed support” after the effects of the COVID pandemic and a historic wildfire season. “She remains committed to ensuring Oregon has a fair, transparent, and constitutional redistricting process,” Danny Moran, a spokesperson for Kotek, said in a statement to Salon.

But while Democrats have ceded power to nonpartisan commissions in certain reliably blue states, the real reason Republicans hold such a significant edge is that they have been able to capture legislatures in purple states, which makes it hard to “see what Democrats can do if they wanted to do the same thing,” said Daley.

“The long-term solution here can’t be aggressive Democratic gerrymanders in Illinois and New York. That is a losing battle for the Democratic Party, it’s a losing battle for democracy, it’s a losing battle for the American people,” he said. “It’s a horrible idea. And the map is not in their favor, anyway, even if they went down that road. So you not only squander any high ground, any appeal to fairness, but you set yourself up at a political disadvantage.”

It’s ludicrous to describe Democrats as “powerless” given that they control both chambers of Congress and the White House, Daley observed. “If they want to put an end to partisan gerrymandering, they could pass a law.”

Democrats have proposed a ban on partisan gerrymandering and a nationwide shift to nonpartisan redistricting commissions in the For the People Act, but Republicans used the filibuster to block the bill and in any case Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the Senate’s “moderate” fulcrum, opposes the legislation. Manchin has thrown his support behind the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the pre-clearance requirement for electoral changes by states with a history of racial discrimination, including new district maps.

But while Manchin and President Biden have repeatedly suggested that they can ultimately convince moderate Republicans to support voting rights legislation, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has backed the John Lewis bill, meaning that there are not nearly enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have ruled out eliminating the filibuster and to this point Biden isn’t on board either.

But Congress could also pass a more limited law aimed only at restricting partisan gerrymandering, which Daley predicted would have the support of nearly 75% of voters. “The Democrats did not have this power in 2011. They have it now. If they squander it, they will pay for it,” he said. “They know full well what’s going to happen to them now. And if they do nothing to protect against the worst excesses of partisan gerrymandering, shame on them.”

Wisconsin governor asks judge to make Trump ‘personally’ pay expenses for failed election lawsuit

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is asking U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig to make former President Donald Trump personally the state’s legal expenses related to the multiple failed lawsuits he and his campaign filed in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Law and Crime reports that Evers attorney Jeffrey Mandell wrote a 17-page legal brief to Ludwig outlining exactly why Trump should reimburse the state for all the resources it had to expend to shoot down his “audacious” lawsuits.

“Trump provides no legitimate defense of litigation conduct that went beyond mere procedural missteps, constituting a deliberate abuse of the judicial process and attempt to overturn the votes of 3.3 million Wisconsinites,” the brief states.

The brief also cites an opinion issued this week by U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Michigan that opened the door for the disbarment of Trump attorneys such as Sidney Powell, whom she accused of “undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”

Given that the lawyers behind the Trump lawsuits are facing personal punishments, writes Mandell, why should Trump escape the same fate?

“Nearly a month after losing re-election and having the results confirmed via recount, Trump prosecuted a lawsuit, devoid of factual or legal support, in an attempt to subvert the voters’ will, pushing bad-faith election litigation to new lows,” the brief states. “His actions warrant sanctions under the Court’s inherent authority.”

Chris Wallace shuts down Fox host for suggesting Biden officials are not communicating enough

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace lectured one of his colleagues on-air on Friday about the Biden’s administration’s communications efforts during the Afghanistan airlift.

It started when Sandra Smith paraphrased Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX) as saying, “he appreciates the updates, but why are we getting spokespeople?”

“And it’s a fair question,” Smith argued.

Wallace explained the situation to her.

“We had the president for the better part a half an hour yesterday,” Wallace said. “Not only making a very heart-felt statement, but also taking a number of questions.”

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

“They can’t be giving speeches all of the time, they’ve got to be doing their job,” he added. “Look, anybody can criticize what they want, but this week we’ve had the National Security Advisor, earlier this week we had the Secretary of State, we had the president yesterday for half an hour. I think we’re getting most of the answers we need.”

Wallace then told Smith about a mantra that was said during his time as a White House correspondent.

He said, “I spent six years in that briefing room and we used to say, ‘You don’t tell us how to cover the stories, we won’t tell you how to do your communications strategy.'”

Elijah Wood on playing the “best friend” of Ted Bundy: “He continues to endure as a fascination”

Elijah Wood gives a serious, arresting performance in his latest film, “No Man of God,” which is now in theaters and on demand.

In this intense drama that Wood also produced, the actor plays noted FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier, who develops a “friendship” with Ted Bundy (Luke Kirby), during the latter’s imprisonment. Director Amber Sealey’s film, which is “inspired by FBI transcripts, recordings, and recollections of Bill Hagmaier,” offers several fascinating exchanges between these two men as they discuss topics such as: Could you commit murder?

Wood’s performance is very much one that involves Hagmaier listening and mostly not reacting to what Bundy says during their one-on-one interviews, and these lengthy scenes are almost seductive. One late in the film where Bundy recounts a story to Hagmaier while grasping his arm is particularly effective and affecting.

But the actor calibrates his expressions that viewers know exactly what Hagmaier is feeling — from his excitement to know more to his disgust at what is being said. As “No Man of God” charts their meetings between 1984-1989, there is pressure for Hagmaier to get Bundy to confess to the extent of his crimes after the Florida state Governor gives him seven days until execution.

Wood spoke with Salon during the Tribeca Film Festival about playing Hagmaier, his thoughts on Ted Bundy and making “No Man of God.”

Did you speak with the real Bill Hagmaier about playing him? If so, what insights did he give you about himself?

Well, before I spoke to Bill, there was a fair amount of background information at our disposal, such as the interviews he had [given] about his relationship with Ted. We had audio to go through, as well as the script itself. When I had the opportunity to speak with Bill — and had we not shot during COVID, I would have spent more time with him — but speaking to him on the phone was hugely helpful. It was really specific questions that I had. There was so much I understood about what transpired. For me, it was more about subtle things like, Were you anxious before your first meeting? What kind of research did you do prior to that first meeting to prepare you for it? Did you speak to a number of individuals prior to meeting Ted to gauge how to talk to him?

What did he reveal about Ted Bundy?

As we show in the film, Ted really distrusted law enforcement and made himself not available. He would just toy with people and really not open up at all. I was curious about those things: What was [Bill’s] preparation, and what were you feeling? He was really forthcoming and so helpful. He availed himself to the entire production — to Luke [Kirby] to provide further information about Ted, and to Amber [Sealey] about tiny little details, like what color tie he was wearing at the second meeting. He was really happy to provide this, which was so lovely and generous.

We actually shot somewhat chronologically. That was helpful in terms of where Bill was in that first meeting, which is different than the second. I wanted to be bolstered with a sense of confidence that I was doing the right things playing an FBI agent. But it is also about his humanity — and what sets him apart from his peers, specifically the ones that deal with Ted —cand you get this when you talk to him — that there is a quiet calm, and kindness, and openness that makes him easy to talk to. Then you realize that’s why Ted so frequently and easily gave information away and was comfortable to talk. There is something incredibly disarming about Bill — getting that essence and applying that. Everything you thought about and prepped for takes on a life of its own.

What can you say about the relationship between Hagmaier and Bundy, and developing the scenes with Luke?

At the end of Ted’s life, he considered Bill to be his best friend and willed his last earthly possessions, what little he had left, to Bill. Which indicates what Ted felt about Bill — and it wasn’t what Bill felt about Ted. There was a humanity there. Bill would say that they did connect as human to human, and in some ways, they had to for that relationship to be fruitful in regard to the information Bill needed for the families of victims and for profiling. There had to be some understanding. Two people can’t be sitting in a room without there being some common ground. That is explored throughout the film. What’s interesting about those conversations are the layers of what’s being said, and a series of layers of what’s not being said. And in terms of what both are wanting out of any given moment. Ted infrequently referred to himself in the first person when recounting these stories of murder. He would often talk in the third person, as if he didn’t do it. But occasionally, he would slip up out of comfortability. Both of them are kind of playing a game to a degree, and there are real things being expressed as well. As actors, we could dive into it and find nuance, and make discoveries and play in that space. Having the parameters of four walls, a table, and two chairs was great, and freeing, actually.

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

Are you interested in true crime? And why do you think we as a nation, culture, society, have a fascination with serial killers?

I’ve always been fascinated by true crime and serial killers, too. It’s multilayered, in one respect, it’s about the psychology, because it’s so alien to the way, hopefully, that all of us think. I don’t think any of us have murderous impulses, so it’s fascinating to understand psychologically, what would make someone want to do those things? I also think as it pertains to Ted specifically, and others, that there is play to the media and they perpetuate a mythologizing of these individuals. It’s certainly the case with Manson, and with Ted as well. He was an active participant in that. And as it pertains to Ted, he is so different, and remains a massive curiosity because he managed to live a pretty successful double life. Most serial killers or people of their ilk are not successful members of society. They were the shut-ins, or the meek neighbor that no one ever really saw. They are not typically attractive, they are often insecure or meek, I suppose, not always, but that tends to be a profile. The thing about Ted is that he wasn’t that. He was intelligent, though maybe not to the degree that he claimed he was. He engaged in local politics and studied law. He worked at a crisis hotline center and actually saved people’s lives. He was very attractive and charismatic. He had all of these qualities that on the surface, you would never imagine that that person was capable of what he was capable of. I think that’s why he continues to endure as a fascination. It doesn’t make sense — more than any other serial killer I can think of.

Do you think — as Ted even suggests in the film — that you could have switched places, and played Bundy? I do enjoy your performances as mischievous characters.

[Laughs] I don’t know, man. I don’t think I’m the right person. What Luke went through was not altogether pleasant. It’s not pleasant to spend time in that headspace with that ugliness. [Laughs]. It played out the way it was supposed, which is not to say that I don’t want to play dark characters. I just don’t know that I was the one to play that particular person for a variety of reasons. What I love about that question, which is so central to the interior thesis of the movie, is, Could you kill? And moreover, if we switched places, could I do what you do? The reality is Ted probably could have been a successful member of the bureau. It was firsthand knowledge that provided him the ability to profile psychologically. He was intelligent enough; he probably could have done it if he was living a straight and narrow life.

You produced “No Man of God.” What can you say about the decisions you make regarding your work and the projects you back?

The projects we engage in, we have a heart response to something and it’s different for every project. “Mandy,” for instance, was seeking Panos [Cosmatos, the director] out after seeing “Beyond the Black Rainbow.” We wanted to make whatever he wanted to make next. With this, it was a piece of material that presented a story about Ted Bundy that we’d never heard before. I’d never heard of Bill Hagmaier. There’s a reason for that. He didn’t write a book and profit off the back of Ted Bundy. The story was so fascinating; it provided an opportunity to engage in a story that isn’t about glorifying Ted Bundy. It’s about the internal dialogue between these two people — the effect that that man had on Bill and the journey he goes on. It was undeniable. And knowing that it was based on transcripts and recollections was so incredibly fascinating. It wasn’t the loud courtroom drama, or a man stalking his victims.

Can I ask you a question Bundy asks Hagmaier in the film? What brings out your aggression?

For me, I don’t really get aggressive, but what angers me is injustice, when people are treated poorly or not treated fairly. People who lack respect and care for their fellow man. I don’t harbor a lot of anger. Not a lot gets me angry, to be honest. I let a lot of things roll of my back. I don’t hold on to grudges.

“No Man of God” opens Friday, Aug. 27 in theaters and on demand.

“Vacation Friends” is a happy buddy comedy in a world where race doesn’t matter. That’s a problem

Buddy comedies are basically arranged marriages between stars people want to see together. That’s what makes the genre such reliable crowd-pleasing fare: besides knowing that everything will end well regardless of how each person feels about the other when the movie starts, it gives the audience a chance to see whether favorite actors of the moment share chemistry.

Tossing an interracial component into the mix generally changes the tone, though – unless, as in “Vacation Friends,” the filmmakers ignore it entirely.

Clay Tarver’s harmless flick marries the dual appeals of John Cena and Lil Rel Howery into a comedy of misread intentions and substance-fueled mishaps that begins at a Mexican resort and ending at a destination wedding at a lodge and spa on the outskirts of Atlanta.

Cena’s Ron and his girlfriend Kyla (Meredith Hagner) are a couple of hedonists who cross paths with Howery’s Marcus and his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji of “Insecure“) on the vacation during which Marcus intends to pop the question. Marcus plans every moment of his life meticulously, making his and Emily’s crash into the devil-may-care Ron and Kyla both a blessing and a curse.

Ron is a gigantic goof who either doesn’t read body language well or ignores it entirely, overpowering the smaller, meeker Marcus with his gigantic personality and boundless acts of kindness.

This is how he and Kyla insinuate themselves into Marcus and Emily’s vacation, forcing them to toss all plans to the end and rip through their week in a crazed binge of drugs and alcohol. At the end of their trip Ron and Kyla think they’ve made new forever friends, which Marcus and Emily don’t disclaim. That’s how temporary vacation relationships work. Except in buddy comedies.

The Mexican vacation half of “Vacation Friends” operates on a framework employed in any number of films placing the buddies in question and their devoted partner (in Emily’s case) or willing sidekick (which describes Kyla) in unfamiliar locations and, therefore, on a playing field that’s more or less even. If you’ve seen classics like 1987’s “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” or 1991’s “What About Bob?” you have some notion of how this plays out.

Cena makes Ron a lovable Labrador with inexplicably deep pockets, the kind of confident guy who talks Marcus and Emily into precarious situations and gets Marcus comfortable enough to let go. Marcus steers into a few disasters in the bargain but everything turns out fine, largely because nothing matters. They’re all Americans in a Mexican tourist town whose denizens cater to their rowdiness.

It’s when the film picks up seven months later at Marcus and Emily’s wedding – which Ron and Kyla crash, figurative and actually – where the social dynamics get peculiar. That is, if you think about them, which is contradictory to the point of a buddy comedy.

But why shouldn’t we? After all, one of the reasons interracial buddy comedies are a standard is because they create a fantasy of friendship between a white male protagonist and a Black male protagonist, let alone a white guy from Oregon and Black man who lives in Georgia, that in the real world would be highly unlikely. The women in these films are secondary figures, which is unfortunate. Orji is a wonderful comic actor whose talent is criminally underutilized here, while Hagner’s bubbly slapstick, reminiscent of Goldie Hawn in her heyday, is overshadowed by Cena.

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

The “Vacation Friends” writers (Tom Mullen, Tim Mullen, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley and Tarver) up the ante by making Ron and Kyla the minorities at an Atlanta-based wedding where the bride’s family is significantly wealthier and more bourgeois than the groom’s – and Emily’s father Harold (Robert Wisdom) won’t let him forget it.

Harold demonstrates a strain of WASP-y assimilationism that even his younger relatives can’t quite get behind, including insisting that everyone embark on a formal fox hunt and then critiquing Marcus for not having the proper number of buttons on his jacket.

Ron, meanwhile, shows up looking like an actual hunter in camouflage and drabs. Nobody says a word, largely because he’s already ingratiated himself with Harold by revealing that he served in the military.

After that (and before, actually) nothing Ron or Kyla say or do that’s odd or tasteless is attributed to their whiteness, not even in jest. If their actions make them the center of attention, which frequently happens, everyone simply goes with it. Then again, the reason everyone likes them is because regardless of how loud or déclassé their behavior is, they’re deferential and sweet to the family elders. Most never witness the times Ron oversteps his boundaries with Marcus, which is what all clowns do to the straight man of the pair in these movies.

Race never comes up. Not once. Whether that’s a point of celebration or criticism depends what a person expects from a movie like this.

“Vacation Friends” has been in development since 2014 and was originally supposed to star Chris Pratt and Anna Faris in the roles Cena and Hagner play. This alone explains why the teaming of Cena and Howery comes across as energetically lopsided.

Less believable is the presentation of Black folks mounting a fox hunt, with hounds, in the woods, in Georgia, as, you know, something that happens at Black weddings. (This is not to say there isn’t a Black family in existence with such traditions, but let’s just say it’s the first time I’ve seen it in a movie.)

Consider a few other factors, too. “Vacation Friends” represents the friendship subgenre of the interracial buddy comedy formula as opposed to the cop version immortalized in the likes of “Cop Out,” the “Lethal Weapon” series, “48 Hours,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” or “Running Scared,” to name a few.

In that sense it’s more dependent on audiences perceiving the onscreen friendship to be more comfortably good-natured, especially in the current era. Next to the crackling chemistry Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor shared onscreen, Cena and Howery are bland as saltines. Then again, many of the gags Wilder and Pryor pulled in their movies wouldn’t fly today. Hell, some of the racial humor in Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart’s comedy “Get Hard” aged badly, and that movie was released in 2015.

However, here we are in 2021 with a perfectly serviceable comedy about Black people and white people mixing harmoniously with no problems whatsoever, written by white men for a cast that’s mostly Black.

It’s natural to take comfort in the simple humor of “Vacation Friends” without pondering everything its subtext implies, the positive and the questionable.

The affection fueling the friendship Ron assumes that Marcus shares comes from a touching place that, again, has nothing do to with race. Indeed, revealing that detail underscores the idea that Ron only sees Marcus’ beautiful spirit and solid character. That’s lovely.

But that does not match the current social atmosphere, and it doesn’t trust Cena’s and Howery’s abilities to speak honestly and humorously about their very obvious differences in terms of upbringing, class and yes, race, and how those traits impact the way the world sees and treats each of them. These actors are audience favorites, evidenced in the number of summer movies they’ve showed up in lately. They could pull this off. It’s a shame nothing in the script gives them a chance to do so.

Instead, “Vacation Friends” holds in place the idyll of a comfortable fantasy predicated upon the thinking that if nobody acknowledges the very real prejudices Ron and Marcus would have to overcome in order to forge a true friendship, even if only for a moment, then nobody else does either.

No movie is supposed to solve all these problems, and certainly not a dumb, fun dog days of August comedy release. The simple pleasure of buddy comedies rest in the way they allow us to forget our problems for about two hours and simply laugh our asses off at, say, Cena’s Ron and Howery’s Marcus tripping balls in a field while a crunchy Beastie Boys track bounces in the background.

But in the ways I’ve mentioned, “Vacation Friends” joins a long list of such comedies that promote the fantasy that the racial strife between white people and Black people is a matter of perception, not reality.

In that view to be honest about the realities of the world these characters purport to travel and live in would be a downer. So instead of bringing candor and humor into this mix and trusting talented and able comic actors to handle such societal obstacles with grace and levity, they don’t address them at all.

Instead what we get is a film with a mostly Black cast that assumes a level of racelessness as some white people imagine it – a wonderful comedy about Black and white friendships for people who see no color, and love an opportunity to ignore their troubles and retreat from it all.

“Vacation Friends” is currently streaming on Hulu.

The Jan. 6 select committee just revealed its next targets

House select committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has served notice to executives at the top social media platforms to turn over relevant records of users’ comments about overturning the 2020 presidential election as well as those expressing plans or strategies for the Jan 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Parler, 4chan, Twitch, TikTok, and several other social media outlets have two weeks to respond to the request.

“The letters to the social media companies seek a range of records, including data, reports, analyses, and communications stretching back to spring of 2020,” Thompson said in a statement on Friday. “The Select Committee is also seeking information on policy changes social media companies adopted—or failed to adopt—to address the spread of false information, violent extremism, and foreign malign influence, including decisions on banning material from platforms and contacts with law enforcement and other government entities.”

Politico’s Nicholas Wu reports, “Federal prosecutors have leaned on records obtained from social media companies to build criminal cases against hundreds of participants in the Jan. 6 riot. One company, in particular, Parler, was a hotbed of pre-insurrection activity. The site, popular among conservatives, was delisted from Apple and Google’s app stores in the aftermath of the attack, and Amazon also ended its hosting service for the platform, ” before adding, “The committee’s new request underscores the breadth and urgency of its nascent investigation, which includes questions about former President Donald Trump’s White House and its connection to the riots. The panel is also expected to send records requests to telecommunications companies asking them for phone records related to the attack, including those of members of Congress — a rare step that is already straining long-fractured relations on Capitol Hill.”

Liberty University’s COVID spike causes campus-wide quarantine

Liberty University announced that it was instituting campus-wide quarantine on Thursday amid a recent surge in the school’s COVID-19 cases.

The temporary policy is set to last until September 10, according to the school’s Office of Communications.

“We are taking the necessary steps and actions to lighten the burden to our medical service providers, the local hospital resources, and to do our part to keep our community safe,” said Keith Anderson, executive director of Liberty’s Student Health Center and Wellness Initiatives. “We understand the severity of the pandemic and desire to act swiftly to ensure the health and safety of our campus.”

“All residential classes will switch to an online platform and all large indoor gatherings have been suspended during this period,” the office added.

According to Lynchburg, Virginia’s college COVID-19 tracker, Liberty – which includes 5,000 students and 5,000 faculty members – currently has 159 active cases of COVID-19, a marked spike from 141 last September. The vast majority of these cases are students.

The recent surge appears to stem from policies put in place this week. The school removed restrictions on mask-wearing, social distancing, and building capacities. The school does not require its students or faculty to be vaccinated, though it encourages the practice.

Outdoor events are expected to go on without interruption, and worship services are set to be relocated at a nearby stadium.

Liberty made headlines in March of last year when it allowed some students to return to campus after Spring break – a move that contravened nearly every college and university in the country. “I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. told The News & Advance at the time.

In April of that year, the school charged a New York Times photographer and ProPublica reporter for trespassing on campus while covering the development.

Liberty, once described as “the bastion of the Christian right,” is a private evangelical Christian university founded in 1971 by Falwell’s father. It expressly prohibits practices that run against evangelical Christian ideology, including premarital sex, cohabitation, alcohol consumption. In 2015, Liberty revised its Honor Code to allow students to watch R-rated movies.

This is what New York City will look like after climate change

The video is surreal. New Yorkers huddle at the 157th Street subway station in Washington Heights, Manhattan, staring down into the depths of the subway. But the underground facility is flooded, the water waist-deep. Those brave enough to wade inside find that the water comes up to their knees, or even higher. Someone passes around trash bags to serve as makeshift tarps as hapless New Yorkers clumsily hop around to minimize the discomfort of wading through the frigid murky depths.

If climate change goes unchecked, that haunting visual will prove to have been a glimpse into the future of New York City.

“In a worst case scenario, much of Manhattan would be submerged by 2300” if current greenhouse gas emission rates are not curbed, Penn State University climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann told Salon. “That future isn’t all that far off if we don’t get our act together,” Mann added.

New York City is often thought of as the capital of the world, and for good reason. The city itself is home to more than 8.3 million souls, far greater than any other American city, and the metropolitan area has more than 19 million inhabitants. The so-called Big Apple is one of the leading financial, cultural, scientific and political centers in the world. Wall Street, the United Nations, Broadway and numerous institutions of higher education are all there. If New York City were to vanish, it would be more than a tragedy. Its sudden loss would profoundly alter the fabric of not just America, but the entire world.

Climate change could make that happen.

Dr. Andra Garner, an environmental scientist at Rowan University whose expertise is in climate change, studied New York City’s future in her Ph.D. work. Garner and her colleagues created scientific models that incorporated what we know about rising sea levels and possible changes in future hurricane paths. They found that, although New York City used to only have flooding of 7.4 feet or more every 25 years, that could start happening every five years as early as 2030. It also predicted a 5-to-11 inch sea level rise in New York City between 2000 and 2030. If that happens, you can expect far more occasions of subway flooding. Many other roads and buildings will also get flooded, particularly those along the coast. Imagine historic sites ruined by water damage and large sections of the city suddenly becoming uninhabitable, and you get the idea. (And that doesn’t even take into account how heat waves and increased precipitation will change New Yorkers’ lives.)

One way that New York City is trying to prepare for this is by building the Rockaways–Atlantic Shorefront project, envisioned as a six-mile-long armored dune with stone groins perpendicular to the shoreline that would protect New Yorkers from storm surges, trap sand and reduce beach erosion. That project alone will cost $336 million, but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is going even farther, pushing for a sea wall that would cost $119 billion and may still be too low for rising sea levels. Still, the city cannot afford to dismiss costly proposals, for the simple reason that geography makes it extremely vulnerable. Thirty-seven percent of lower Manhattan will be vulnerable to storm surges, which reflects the global reality: Forty percent of the human beings alive today live in a coastal area.

“The future is still very uncertain for a number of reasons, but assuming we were really to not do much at all to try to mitigate climate change or adapt to a changing climate, I think certainly by the middle of the century we’ll be seeing things like sunny day flooding happening lot more often,” Garner told Salon. She noted that this has already started to become a problem in coastal communities along the eastern seaboard.

“We’ll see flooding happening just more and more frequently, which of course becomes a major hassle to people in any community, but certainly in a densely populated area like New York City,” Garner explained. “Those floods, whether it’s just from a high tide or whether it’s from a storm, I think would be very detrimental to the region.”

There are four factors from climate change that could potentially impact the physical life of New York City, according to Mann. If the ocean’s so-called “conveyor belt” slows down, as some scientists fear is already starting to happen, that on its own could cause as much as a foot of sea level rise along parts of the Atlantic coast. There could also be multiple feet of sea level rise if the major ice sheets in the western Antarctic and Greenland collapse, something that (again) scientists are already observing starting to happen.

“The uncertainty is associated with what amount of warming triggers these threshold-like responses,” Mann told Salon. “The science has increasingly moved toward us being closer to that threshold than we believe a decade or two ago.”

In addition to melting ice sheets and slowing ocean currents, Atlantic coast sea levels may also rise by fractions of a foot due to factors like thermal expansion of the ocean with warming and melting glaciers that aren’t ice sheets.

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

Dr. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University and New York City Panel on Climate Change, spoke with Salon about another major climate change concern facing America’s largest metropolis — rising temperatures. As greenhouse gasses continue to trap heat in our atmosphere, we can expect the planet to gradually warm up. That means that, depending on where you live, the infrastructure around you could actually make your experience worse than might otherwise be the case. Imagine a slug spending its summer in a meadow, and then that same slug spending a summer stuck on a sidewalk, and you’ll get the picture.

This is because of a phenomenon known as the Heat Island Effect, wherein the densely-populated parts of a city that are covered in asphalt and concrete become much hotter than the less populous areas. As Dr. Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Salon in January, “the temperatures inside the central parts of a city resemble an island, surrounded by a cooler ocean in the surrounding more rural areas.”

Predictably, the consequences of this development do not strike everyone in the same way.

“This is where inequality matters, where that really starts to hit home,” Wagner told Salon. In wealthier neighborhoods of Manhattan, the streets are lined with trees and people can afford air conditioning. While they will still suffer as temperatures spike due to climate change, they will not experience the intensity of living in a figurative heat island nearly as much as their less affluent civic neighbors, who tend to lack those same advantages. Poor people are “much more exposed” to all of the consequences of climate change: the storm surges, the rising sea levels (since many low-income New Yorkers live near costs) and the excessive heat.

Declet-Barreto, who recently co-authored a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. on extreme heat in Northern Manhattan (including Washington Heights, Inwood, Central Harlem, West Harlem and East Harlem), elaborated on how these inequalities wind up arising. For instance he and his fellow researchers found that Inwood, which is on the northern end of Manhattan just north of Washington Heights, registered some of the highest surface temperatures. Declet-Barreto also found that hotter areas were also those with the least amount of “green spaces, shading visitation, other parks and the higher amount of heat retaining surfaces like roadways, cement, asphalt, dirt logs and so on.”

He noted that, in his study, he also found that extreme vulnerability to the effects of climate change was high especially among people of color and people living with low incomes.

“When we’re looking at the distribution of extreme heat in New York City or specifically in Northern Manhattan, we can see from surface temperature maps that it is very unevenly distributed,” Declet-Barreto added.

As Wagner mentioned earlier, the New York City government is aware of this problem, and has created the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency to address it.

“The purpose of our resiliency strategy is to prepare New York City to withstand the climate impacts of the present and the future,” Jainey Bavishi, director of the program, told Salon by email. “We are doing everything from constructing massive flood protection infrastructure projects along the coast to implementing climate-smart building codes to planting thousands of trees in our most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods.”

While these programs may help New York City, the fact remains that four of the city’s five boroughs are either islands or part of islands, and therefore the policies that may save New York are not automatic fits elsewhere. The broader lesson in terms of New York City is that people need to start being aware of climate change and adopt a proactive attitude toward addressing it.

“I think it’s also really important just to remember that there’s a lot of hope there too,” Garner told Salon. “In recent years we’re seeing plenty of reason to hope, whether it’s the youth climate movement really bringing issues to light or really starting to see governments start to agree to things like the Paris Agreement.”

She added, “I think we just need to maintain that hope and realize that we are the problem here. Our emissions are warming the planet, but that means we can be the solution too.”

Wisconsin school board pilloried for halting free meals program citing concern of “spoiled” children

The Waukesha School District board opted out of a federal program providing free meals to all students in the district regardless of family income, cementing itself as the only school district that eschewed the aid throughout the entire state of Wisconsin.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ensured that every school in the U.S. would be given free meals through June of 2022 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The move was a boon for thousands of public schools experiencing financial straits amid a sharp, COVID-19-related decline in tax revenue. The program, dubbed the Seamless Summer Option, ensured that school children were on a more level playing field when it comes to having access to nutritious food.

But on June 9, the Waukesha School District board voted to return to pre-pandemic federal assistance levels over fears that free meals would cause families to “become spoiled” or develop an “addiction” to the service.

“When you compare last summer’s number of meals served to the current summer’s level of participation, it is down 40%. This indicates a lowering in the demand for this program,” the board said. “When looking at the free breakfast program, especially at the high school level, each student was handed a meal as they walked in the door. This led to a significant amount of uneaten food and meal-related materials ending up in the trash.”

The board further noted that there had been a 60% decline in families enrolling in the permanent free and reduced-price lunch program.

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

The decision has sent shockwaves throughout the district, sparking particular ire amongst parents whose kids have benefited from free lunches.

Chrissy Sebald, a soccer coach and foster parent, told The Washington Post that universally-free meals eliminated the stigma associated with the provision, helping her kids feel a stronger sense of belonging amongst their peers.

“Kids called [my children] out for getting the different meals and asked them, ‘Why do you get lunch every day?'” Sebald explained. “When it was free for everyone, you never had to have that conversation because everyone had access to it. So I really appreciated that it evened out the playing field in a way.”

Dave Dringenburg, another Waukesha parent, said that the move was “out of touch with the community’s needs.”

“We’re determined to make Waukesha as good as it can be, starting with something as easy as feeding kids,” he told the Post. “This is a way to not only connect to other parents but also of realizing that change is possible — it’s just a matter of being together to do it.”

According to the Post report, the Alliance for Education in Waukesha, a social media group of around 900 parents and teachers in the district, has since June been fighting to reinstate the program, citing concerns around financial hardships associated with COVID-19.

The benefits of the Seamless Summer Option are backed not just anecdotally but statistically.

According to the Waukesha County Food Pantry Executive Director Karen Tredwell, participation in the federal aid program jumped by 37%, with a 136% increase in the free breakfast program. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction reported that about 36% of the district’s student body qualified for free and reduced-price meals from 2018 to 2019.

WUWM noted that the district could opt back into the free lunch program at any time in the future.

Millions at risk after Supreme Court overturns eviction ban in latest “shadow docket” ruling

Millions of Americans are at risk of eviction and homelessness after the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s eviction ban extension on Thursday.

The court issued an unsigned eight-page opinion saying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded their authority by issuing an eviction moratorium extension, which was aimed at areas with “substantial” COVID spread.

“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened,” the opinion said. “Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination. It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”

The court said “if a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it.”

The court’s three liberals dissented.

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

“The CDC targets only those people who have nowhere else to live, in areas with dangerous levels of community transmission,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “These people may end up with relatives, in shelters, or seeking beds in other congregant facilities where the doubly contagious Delta variant threatens to spread quickly.”

The opinion was part of the court’s “shadow docket,” where the justices hand down largely unsigned short opinions without going through standard hearings, deliberations, and transparency. Such cases had been mostly limited to uncontroversial petitions or rare emergencies but the shadow docket has dramatically grown under the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, alarming legal experts. “If (the justices) can make significant decisions without giving any reasons, then there’s really no limit to what they can do,” David Cole, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told Reuters.

Breyer in his dissent argued that the questions about the eviction moratorium were too big for the shadow docket.

“These questions call for considered decisionmaking, informed by full briefing and argument,” he wrote. “Their answers impact the health of millions. We should not set aside the CDC’s eviction moratorium in this summary proceeding. The criteria for granting the emergency application are not met.”

The court’s ruling effectively allows eviction proceedings to resume, putting more than 7 million Americans who have fallen behind on rent at risk.

The Trump administration first issued the ban last September after Congress failed to extend the moratorium included in the first round of pandemic relief. The Supreme Court allowed the moratorium to continue in June after conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the deciding fifth vote, said the CDC likely exceeded its authority but let the ban stay because it was set to expire last month. The Biden administration planned to let the ban expire before calling on Congress to extend it amid pressure from lawmakers. House moderates ultimately killed a last-minute effort to pass an eviction ban, which would have been doomed in the Senate regardless, prompting the CDC to issue a revised extension more tailored to areas hardest hit by COVID. Biden acknowledged at the time that the extension may not hold up but “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

But the distribution of rental assistance has been woefully slow. Congress approved $46 billion in rental aid since December but just $5.1 billion was distributed through July, according to the Treasury Department. With only 11% of the funds distributed, the federal government has tried to pressure state and local officials to move faster and issued new rules to make it easier for applicants to seek aid. But many state and local governments have struggled to set up a system to distribute the funds and some landlords have balked at accepting the aid because it requires them to agree not to evict the tenant for another year.

The eviction ban has provided a lifeline to struggling families since the pandemic began.

“Over the last 11 months, while this eviction moratorium has been in place, we estimate that there have been at least 1.5 million fewer eviction cases than normal,” Peter Hepburn of the Princeton University Eviction Lab told NPR. “This has really helped to keep an extraordinary number of families in their homes.”

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

The Biden administration said it is “disappointed” in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“As a result of this ruling, families will face the painful impact of evictions, and communities across the country will face greater risk of exposure to COVID-19,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who slept on the Capitol steps earlier this month to protest the expiration of the earlier moratorium, said the court “failed to protect” millions of people from “violent eviction in the middle of a global pandemic” and again called on Congress to act.

“We already know who is going to bear the brunt of this disastrous decision,” she said, “Black and brown communities, and especially Black women.”

Trump’s Supreme Court just showed why court-packing is necessary to save U.S. democracy

As a pair of Supreme Court decisions from the Republican majority showed this week, they feel free to do exactly what they were appointed to do: Impose their far-right ideology on an unwilling public.

The most recent, unsigned opinion was part of the court’s “shadow docket,” which, as Salon’s Igor Derysh explains, is “where the justices hand down largely unsigned short opinions without going through standard hearings, deliberations, and transparency.” Typically reserved for uncontroversial or emergency petitions, Derysh reports that “the shadow docket has dramatically grown under the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, alarming legal experts.”

For a brief, shining moment early in Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a flurry of talk about the exciting possibility of resizing the Supreme Court in response to Donald Trump, despite losing the popular vote, still getting to appoint three justices — one into a seat illegally held open by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But that chatter quickly got destroyed by Democratic dream killers Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom apparently love the filibuster more than human rights.

University of Wyoming law professor Stephen Feldman, however, thinks now is the perfect time to revive the discussion, arguing that court-packing is a vital necessity to save our democracy.

In his new book “Pack the Court!: A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion,” Feldman argues that not only is court expansion politically wise, it also fits in with a long history of seeing the courts not as separate from politics, but working within a political system. Feldman spoke with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte about his new book and why it’s not time to give up on the dream of a better Supreme Court.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

People talk about the Supreme Court as if its size and makeup is practically ordained by God — or at least the founding fathers. You argue that it’s not so, and historically there’s been a lot of flexibility around the size of the Supreme Court. Can you tell me more about that?

Number one, the Constitution itself doesn’t say anything about the size of the Supreme Court. The part of the Constitution talking about the federal judiciary is very sparse, with almost no detail in there. It was basically left to Congress to set out the court’s size and to some degree, its jurisdiction. And the fact is that Congress, particularly for the first hundred years or so, was fiddling with the size of the court. The first Judiciary Act established the court, at that point at six justices. But Congress started fiddling with it, within just a few years, like around 1800. And around that time, the Congress tried to shrink the court by one justice. And then there was an election, where power changed and they changed the size of the court again.And that continued all the way up through 1860s. It was very volatile decade in terms of, of trying to manipulate the number of justices on the court. So it changed multiple times all the way up to 10 and then back to nine and then it’s been stuck at nine. Well, for the most part since then.

I would say that when the Republicans refused to consider President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland for the court, that was de facto changing the size of the court. Right? They didn’t pass a statute, but they, in effect changed the size of the court for about a year.

Why do you think now is a good time to start talking about court-packing again? Why should the Democrats, who control the White House and Congress, consider doing such a thing?

There are three elements to the argument. Number one is the history: The court does not have to be set at nine justices, and the fact that it has been for a number of years doesn’t mean it needs to be that.

Second, if you really look at the court’s decision-making, what becomes evident is the actual process of deciding cases is infused with politics. The notion that we have to keep politics out of the Supreme Court just doesn’t hold up. Not only with regard to the size of the court but also with regard to the nomination and confirmation processes, which are obviously political, right? Who the President chooses to send the court and whether Congress confirms that individual, the actual decision-making process by the justices is a combination of law and politics.

I call it the law-politics dynamic.

Law and politics dynamically interact in the decision-making process. If you have two justices from different sides of the political spectrum, they’re reading the First Amendment free speech clause. They’re likely to read it differently, right? And vote differently to decide a particular first amendment case. But it’s not because either justice is lying or being disingenuous. They look at the text and they read it from their particular political perspectives. You cannot get away from the fact that their political horizons and their cultural backgrounds, their religious backgrounds are going to influence how they interpret the text. That’s simply inherent in the interpretive process. So politics is always part of it.

The third part of the argument is just looking at the politics of the Roberts court. The Roberts court is extremely conservative and that’s even before Justice Ginsburg passed away and the Republicans rushed through the confirmation of Justice Barrett. They keep handing down very conservative decisions, one after another. And really the only way to counter that is the court-packing.

Let’s say somehow the Democrats did pass some type of voting rights protections, a new statute protecting voting rights. The odds are extremely high that this court would find some way to strike down that voting rights legislation.

Both Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett presented themselves, when they were getting confirmed, as impartial judges, just calling balls and strikes. They claimed not to be political ideologues.

Every Supreme Court nominee needs to say something along those lines, right?

“We’ll just call balls and strikes, just by following the law, my politics will never matter.”

They’ll say that and in some ways it’s true. What I’m saying about how politics influences Supreme Court decision-making, doesn’t mean that it’s purely politics. I think that in most cases, not every case, in most cases, the justices sincerely try to interpret the relevant legal texts and constitutional text or a statutory text, whatever, in the best way possible. They tried to give it the best interpretation. But again, that the way each individual justice uses the text or what they think is the best interpretation, is infused with their political-cultural backgrounds.

Legal interpretation is not like arithmetic. It’s not two plus two equals four, right? It’s never like that. One’s politics will always come into play. The justices themselves might good faith say, yes, I will sincerely interpret the constitutional text. They very well might be totally honest about that and they might continue doing that when they are on the court, but nonetheless, their politics influence how they read or interpret texts.

The Democrats don’t look like they’re in any hot hurry to change the size of the court, but if they were going to, what would that look like? What would you think would be the best way to go about that?

All they need to do that is pass a statute, which means of course, that both chambers of Congress need to approve a bill and then the President needs to sign it and that would change the size of the court. And then the President can nominate new justices, depending on how many seats there are and it would go to the Senate for confirmation.

The President appointed this commission. I don’t know what they might recommend. The odds that they would recommend straightforward court-packing, I don’t think are extremely high, but it’s possible. There are all sorts of proposals that have been suggested over the last couple of years for sort of more stylized types of court expansions. There’d be various plans to put term limits on the justices or expand the court.

I don’t think anything is likely to happen right now unless the filibuster were eliminated. What needs to happen is the filibuster needs to go. Then there needs to be court-packing and then there to be protection for voting rights.

If you don’t have the filibusters there’s unlikely to be any type of court-packing. Right? And unless the court makeup is changed through court-packing, voting rights protections are likely to be struck down as unconstitutional and really much of any progressive agenda that could possibly get through Congress would be endangered in front of the Supreme Court.

People who criticize calls for court-packing say that the problem is Republicans will retaliate and add more justices themselves, next time they have power. What’s your answer to that?

Well, I think the politics of the situation is that you can’t have court-packing, unless you have control.

Democrats have control of the House, the Senate and the White House. If there’s protection of voting rights that the Supreme Court would not strike down, then I don’t think the Republicans, as currently constituted, could sweep the House, the Senate and the White House. The Republicans exercise outsized power right now, because of gerrymandering, because of the electoral power. But in 7 out of the last 8 presidential elections, the Democrat has won the popular vote. The Republican party would not have the popularity to sweep and implement court-packing. When the Republican party might actually sweep, it won’t be the same Republican party that we have today.

The 30-second nightly cleaning routine I never skip

Years ago, when doing research for an article on cleaning the kitchen, I watched a video of Melissa Maker, of Clean My Space, deep cleaning a sink, and one thing in particular that she said has stuck with me every single day since. She mentioned that once you maintain the habit of keeping your own sink clean, you’ll start to notice when sinks are dirty in other people’s homes.

This was truly enough to keep me up at night. The thought of people coming into my home and noticing anything dirty is one of my biggest fears, so ever since then, I’ve been fastidious in my sink cleaning. Until then, I’d been the type to let dishes linger for a day or two (I know, I know), and even when the dishes were done, I wouldn’t necessarily leave extra time for the sink itself. This is a surefire way to let your sink get out of hand in a hurry, and considering how much food and yuckiness ends up in the sink, it’s not a good scene.

So take it from me, a reformed sink neglector: wiping it down every night after doing the dishes is the only way to keep it sparkling clean. Luckily, once you’re in the habit, it’s an easy (almost mindless?) task that makes the whole kitchen feel cleaner by association.

* * *

My essential sink scrubbing tools

To start, let me tell you about some of my favorite supplies. Sure, a regular sponge and some baking soda would work, but these are the all-stars of the sink-cleaning world.

Scrub Daddy

I’ve been singing the praises of Scrub Daddies for years now, but there was a time when I too, was too creeped out by the name and perma-smiling face of the sponges to use them. After giving in one day in my parents’ kitchen, I finally understood their merits: they’re very tough (they won’t ever get pilly or broken like regular dual-sided sponges), they’re pliable in hot water and firm in cold for extra scrubbing power, and they never, ever hold onto lingering odor. They’re the ultimate kitchen sponge, in my opinion.

Bar Keeper’s Friend

I’ve hacked away at the sink with dish soap enough times to know that it never fully removes the stuck-on crud on the drain stops, and never really rids the stainless steel of its . . . ahem, stains. Bar Keeper’s Friend is the best product for tackling both of these tricky tasks that I’ve ever tried, and I always keep a canister under the sink for stubborn sink messes.

Dish soap

This one’s a given, because it’s the sink, of course, but lately I’ve been loving Dawn Pomegranate and Rose Water dish soap. It’s got the unbeatable suds-per-drop ratio of classic Dawn, but a really lovely scent. It almost, almost makes doing dishes a little treat.

Paper towels or sponge cloth

Last but not least, I’ll always need a paper towel or sponge cloth to dry the sink after washing.

* * *

My nightly routine

First, of course, I load up the dishwasher and hand wash all the delicate dishes, and leave them to be washed or drip dry.
Once that’s done, I perform my least favorite task of all time — scooping out food bits from the drain stopper and putting them in the trash. I don’t have a garbage disposal, so any leftover food would just sit in the drain or be washed away into the abyss — not ideal.
If the drain or drain stopper is particularly nasty (this will happen without regular cleanings), I sprinkle some BKF (you know the acronym now, right?) on them and let it sit for a minute or two. Then, using a damp (not soaking wet) Scrub Daddy, I go at it to remove the crustiness. If you’ve never used BKF before, you’ll be astounded by the results, I promise.
Most times, though, just wet the whole sink down with the sprayer and wash it with soap and hot water. This includes (always!) the faucet, the handles, the sprayer, and the outer lip of the sink. All of these parts can build up food particles and general nastiness, so don’t skimp out.
Once everything has been thoroughly cleaned, I rinse the sink down with the sprayer and wipe everything dry. You might be surprised how much lingering gunk comes off with the final wipe, too, so this is a crucial step. Plus, not only does this prevent water stains from settling in, but it also prevents water from creeping out onto other parts of the counter, and eliminates the ability for bacteria to form in pools of moisture.

And if you’re interested in a knock-down, drag-out sink deep cleaning? We’ve got you covered below.

How to Deep Clean Your Stainless Steel Sink

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

Former militia member apologizes for plot to kidnap Michigan’s Gov. Whitmer, vows to “deradicalize”

A Michigan militia member was sentenced to more than six years in prison on Wednesday after admitting to participating in a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over COVID restrictions.

Ty Garbin, a 25-year-old airplane mechanic, was sentenced to 75 months in prison and a $2,500 fine after pleading guilty to taking part in the plot. His sentence was well below federal sentencing guidelines that called for more than 17 years in prison after prosecutors said he provided a “wide-ranging insider’s view of the conspiracy,” according to NBC News.

Garbin, who said he joined the Wolverine Watchmen, an anti-government militia, over frustration with pandemic business restrictions imposed by Whitmer, is the only one of six defendants facing federal charges in the plot to plead guilty. His attorney told the court that he would be a “star witness” in the prosecutors’ case against the other alleged conspirators, who will face a federal trial in October. Eight others face state charges in the alleged plot.

“I don’t think that that cooperation can be understated in a case like this,” defense attorney Gary Springstead told the court. “He is going to be a star witness” and “by all accounts has been truthful, honest, and totally cooperative with the government.”

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

Prosecutors, who asked that Garbin be sentenced to nine years, agreed that he had provided vital information and potentially put himself at risk. Garbin’s cooperation resulted in additional charges against three of the men in April, according to the New York Times. He was moved to a different jail from the other defendants after cooperating with the investigation.

“Garbin willingly put a target on his back to begin his own redemption,” prosecutors said.

“He would come out and say, ‘We planned to do this and I was knowingly a part of it.’ He sat for hours answering all of our questions,” prosecutor Nils Kessler said, according to the Associated Press.

Garbin at his sentencing hearing apologized to Whitmer, who was not present.

“I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her family,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on my actions, and I never realized what my actions would have caused to her, but also her family. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of stress and fear her family members felt because of my actions, and for that I’m truly sorry.”

Garbin said he also did not realize the “emotional effect” his actions would have on his family and friends and vowed to continue to “deradicalize” himself and help others who have been radicalized by extremists.

Judge Robert Jonker said he handed down a light sentence because of Garbin’s cooperation.

“That’s what’s more impressive to me here, and not just the words of Mr. Garbin that he’s abandoning this path, but the things he’s done, concrete things he’s done, to demonstrate that he means it,” the judge said. He added, “He’s changed his behavior, for sure. I think he’s changed his heart and mind, too. And I think he is an excellent prospect to walk law-abiding paths once he’s finished paying for these very serious mistakes.”

Prosecutors said the six federal defendants plotted to kidnap Whtimer and participated in “field training exercises” that included target practice and how to breach buildings. The men allegedly also surveilled Whitmer’s summer house and discussed planting explosives on a bridge to stop police from catching them. One of them, prosecutors said, proposed holding a show “trial” for Whitmer.

Federal investigators used an undercover source to track the group and arrested the suspects last October. While the informant provided investigators with key information on the plot, prosecutors said Garbin “filled in the gaps in the government’s knowledge” about events and conversations that did not include their informant.

Prosecutors said that Garbin and most of the others were inspired by the far-right “boogaloo” movement.

“Such accelerationist groups are widespread and proliferating,” they said in a court filing.

Whitmer last year in part blamed former President Donald Trump for the plot, citing his support anti-lockdown protesters that stormed the state capitol.

Whitmer, in a victim impact statement, told the judge that “things will never be the same.”

“Threats continue,” she said. “I have looked out my windows and seen large groups of heavily armed people within 30 yards of my home. I have seen myself hung in effigy. Days ago at a demonstration there was a sign that called for ‘burning the witch.'”

Whitmer said that the threats have “taken a toll” on her and her family but acknowledged Garbin for “taking responsibility, accepting the consequences of his action and assisting in bringing others to justice.”

“To reunite as Americans, we must find a way to bring those who have lost their way back from the brink, to remind those for whom violence represents an acceptable strategy that it is a path that will ultimately, and possibly irrevocably, divorce us from the founding principles of our nation,” she said. “Their imagined defense of liberty is what most endangers liberty itself. Lies, radicalization and violent extremism are an existential threat to what we value. Now, more than ever, it threatens our future and the future we envisioned for our children.”

Canned chickpeas are better than soaked ones

I’m all for growing your own food and making meals from scratch, but if you’re looking for a convenient dinner alternative that’s healthier than boxed mac and cheese, I think it’s about time we give canned chickpeas the standing ovation they deserve.

Chickpeas, when enjoyed in their crispy grandeur, can not only elevate a meal as a side, but they can also be the focal point. These crispy, light balls are a blank slate for your favorite savory spice. Personally, I love mine sauteed for 15 to 20 minutes on the stovetop in a drizzle of olive oil on a medium heat, topped with Himalayan pink salt, pepper, dried rosemary, thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes. I’m also down for switching up the spices some nights and eating sauteed chickpeas with sage and marjoram. No spices on hand? No problem. Salt and pepper will do just fine. Make it a full satisfying meal by putting said chickpeas on top of a handful of greens and hummus, and top them with a fat square of feta cheese, and a drizzle of lemon juice. I usually make this recipe with two, sometimes three, cans of chickpeas so I can enjoy them for lunch the next day. The perfect combination of crunchy, spicy and savory of this dish would never give away the low effort and cost behind it— in case you use this to entertain.

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

My love for canned chickpeas started when I was a vegetarian. While I eat meat again, I consume this canned chickpea dish at least once a week. Not because it’s so easy and requires very little clean-up, but because my taste buds crave it. Even as I write this, they’re yearning for those golden, crispy balls to pop and let me know they’re ready to be devoured. Unlike other types of canned beans, chickpeas — also known as garbanzo beans — can obtain a dry and crunchy texture, and sometimes nut-like taste. Plus, aside from the convenience of them, they’re super healthy as they’re packed with plant protein and fiber.

They’re the kale chips of beans, not the potato chips of beans.

Another benefit, you might ask? Chickpeas could be key to saving and feeding the world as climate change wreaks havoc. First, chickpeas don’t rely on chemical fertilizers. In contrast, they release nitrogen into the soil enriching the soil it grows in. If farmed properly, they can be part of a farm system that sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Chickpeas can also tolerate drought conditions. As Amanda Mull wrote for The Atlantic in 2019, “In the Future, Everything Will Be Made of Chickpeas.” And I can’t wait. Chickpeas have played a critical role in human history. Archeological evidence suggests they were domesticated during the ancient Mesopotamia era. They’re often a staple in Middle Eastern meals, and have only recently become popular in the United States.

Now, you may have noticed that I emphasize canned chickpeas here. Raw chickpeas need to be soaked for eight hours or overnight. Part of what I love about canned ones is that they just need to be opened and rinsed. If soaking beans isn’t your forte, don’t let that stop you from leaning on chickpeas for an easy-to-make dish. Canned chickpeas are just as good.

Trump has good reason to be triggered by Jan. 6 commission: Records request suggests a real probe

There is so much going on at the moment between the massive spike in COVID due to millions of intransigent holdouts who refuse to get vaccinated and the excruciating events unfolding in Afghanistan that one important story got lost this week: The House January 6th Committee sent letters to eight different government agencies demanding documents and communications regarding administration strategizing to overturn the 2020 election results.

Considering what happened on January 6th and all the open discussions by former President Trump and his allies prior to that date, it’s very reasonable to suspect that this evidence exists. But what has surprised people is the sheer scope of their records requests. Here are some examples:

“Documents and communications pertaining to “planning by the White House for legal or other strategies to delay, halt or otherwise impede the electoral count.”

“Any documents and communications relating to instructions to stop or delay preparations for transition of administration.”

“… communications discussion the recognition of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election.”

“All documents concerning the potential invocation of the Insurrection Act”

“From November 3, 2020 to the inauguration January 20, 2021, all documents and communications related to martial law.”

“All documents and communications concerning Federal law enforcement or military personnel during voting in the 2020 election.”

And that’s just for starters.

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

There are requests for documents going back as far as April of 2020, prompting MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to ask Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Ms, what lawmakers were looking for. His reply? They have information that he can’t go into but which is credible enough that they are seeking evidence to prove it. Recall, April 2020 was about the time that Trump was starting to rail against mail-in voting, following up on his 2016 strategy by laying the groundwork to reject the results of the election unless he was declared the winner. Perhaps Thompson believes this strategy may have been more formal than it seemed?

The committee is looking at Trump himself and dozens of his closest associates, including his children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, as well as close confidantes such as Roger Stone, along with political friends like Chris Christie. It appears they suspect at least one top GOP congressional aide is involved in publicizing the “Stop the Steal” rally which turned into a violent insurrection. They want information about the Trump henchmen who were placed in important positions throughout the government after the election as he set about invalidating the results. And they are demanding all documentary evidence regarding the planning and funding of the January 5th and 6th rallies and any other plots to slow down the confirmation of the electoral vote.

They also demanded a lot of information from the Pentagon, including documents pertaining to the delay of the transition and any discussion of the potential use of the military to impede the transfer of power. They even asked why the DOD denied that Michael Flynn’s brother, Lt. General Charles Flynn, participated in the January 6th meetings about the response to the attacks. Michael Flynn, after all, was intimately involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement.

Probably the most important requests are for information from the Department of Justice, which former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal characterized as serving as “a blank check” throughout the Trump presidency. The DOJ finally said “no” when Trump tried to make them help him declare the election corrupt. “How significant must the demands have been for even them to say no to Donald Trump?” Katyal asked Joy Reid on MSNBC.

It’s a comprehensive set of demands investigating whether Trump planned to invoke various executive powers and strategies to remain president despite losing the election. In other words, they are seeking the documentary evidence of Donald Trump’s coup attempt.

This comes on the heels of news that the committee plans to require phone companies to preserve all their electronic data around January 6th, including for members of Congress and others who were in communication with Trump on that day or involved in the planning.

Most of the government requests will be answered by the National Archives which keeps all official records. It will be very interesting to see whether members of the administration made “memos to the file” of these events in case this ever came back to haunt them.

Needless to say, Trump was not amused. In fact, he had something of a temper tantrum, putting out this statement:

“The Leftist “select committee” has further exposed itself as a partisan sham and waste of taxpayer dollars with a request that’s timed to distract Americans from historic and global catastrophes brought on by the failures of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Unfortunately, this partisan exercise is being performed at the expense of long-standing legal principles of privilege. Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my Administration and the Patriots who worked beside me but on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our Nation. These Democrats only have one tired trick—political theater—and their latest request only reinforces that pathetic reality.”

All of this seems even more necessary in light of NBC’s Lester Holt’s interview on Thursday night with the Capitol police officer who shot insurrectionist Ashlie Babbitt as she broke through the door that separated the mob from the trapped officials they were hunting on January 6th. He had not been officially identified but felt it necessary to come forward and tell his side of the story and it was compelling, particularly when he pointed out that he would have done the same to protect the life of the president and his family if the same thing happened when they were in the capitol. The right-wing crazies have been calling for his head for weeks, led by Trump who is working overtime to turn Babbitt into an innocent martyr and raise suspicions about this officer whose name is Lt. Michael Byrd, a 28-year veteran of the Capitol Police and who also happens to be Black, which I’m sure had nothing to do with Trump’s eagerness to portray him as a crazed gunman.

If you want to see how the right-wing media is handling this, Tucker Carlson is a good example:

Tucker Carlson repeatedly says Michael Byrd "executed" Ashli Babbitt (Babbitt in fact was part of a mob that was trying to lynch members of Congress) pic.twitter.com/hYxPFTff0V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 27, 2021

Whether a former president can legally claim executive privilege on evidence that he fomented a coup is a complicated question but either way that’s going to take time. The good news is that this investigation is going to be serious and thorough by looking at what happened on January 6th from a very wide perspective which, for the first time with Donald Trump, may succeed in actually getting to the bottom of what he did.

How to store potatoes so they last for months (yes, months!)

They’re not always trendy, but they’re dependable. They’re comforting, versatile, and always crowd-pleasing. No, we’re not talking about a pair of sneakers. We’re talking about potatoes. This root vegetable has a pretty long shelf life, and even longer when stored properly. The key is to store potatoes in a cool dry place, like in the cabinet of a pantry, in a paper bag or cardboard box. It’s important to keep potatoes at the cool, ideal temperature (but not, surprisingly, the fridge) to prevent them from turning green, getting soft spots, or pre-maturely sprouting. Once this happens, it’s a sign that they’re past their peak. But we’ll get into all of that ahead a little later. For now, learn about the conditions that cause potatoes to ripen and how to prep them for long term storage.

The science behind the spuds

Though potatoes are certainly, well, cut off upon harvest, they continue to breathe (spooky, right?) and, in a way, live on the shelves of grocery stores and in your home. As oxygen from the environment combines with the sugars in patats, it gets respired from the roots as carbon dioxide and water. Storing potatoes in a cool, dark (but not forgotten) place hugely decelerates this inevitable decomposition, protects against sprouting, and, to some degree, sweetens the tubers.

It’s also important not to store potatoes and onions together. Though they seem like two peas in a pod as they’re often both called for in the exact same recipes. However, storing them both together actually does more harm than good. Both of these root veggies contain a lot of moisture, which can lead to faster spoilage. Combined, they produce an ethylene gas that will speed up the ripening process. Instead, keep them apart in an area that has good air circulation to maintain their long shelf life.

How to store potatoes

Although you shouldn’t put potatoes in the fridge, potatoes will still keep the longest when stored in a cool, dark place — specifically somewhere that has a cold temperature of about 50°F and 90 to 95 percent humidity, like, you know, a temperature- and humidity-controlled root cellar. You know the one that’s right next to your massive wine cellar? So just toss them down there, along with your turnips, onions, and carrots, and call it a day. They’ll be good for weeks, if not all winter long.

Oh wait, I don’t have a root cellar (do you?). Have no fear: Here are four of our best storage tips — root cellar not required — for happy, sweet, and dry taters.

1. Keep them out of the sunlight (but not out of sight)

Don’t store potatoes out in the open on the countertop. Keep them in a drawer, in a basket, in a closet, in a paper bag, or in a bamboo vegetable steamer — anywhere that’s dark — and they should last for one to 2 weeks. A clear plastic bag, like that kind that potatoes are packaged in, are actually not ideal for storing spuds. Potatoes are plants, after all. If they see sunlight, they will do their photosynthesis thing and turn green, and eventually wrinkle and rot.

And remember, out of sight, out of mind — keep them in a trafficked-enough part of the pantry so you don’t forget about them.

2. Make sure they still have airflow

Either transfer your potatoes to a paper or mesh bag, like the Five Two Organic Cotton Reusable Produce Bags or a well-ventilated container. (They will be releasing carbon dioxide and water in the form of vapor, so things can get a little too damp.) If you’d like to keep them in the plastic bag they came in, make sure it’s well-perforated and that the top isn’t tightly sealed.

3. Don’t store them next to your onions

We touched on this earlier, but let’s get into the nitty gritty. It’s tempting to toss both your potatoes and onions together in a basket in your pantry and be done with it — after all, they both like to be stored basically the same way. But resist temptation, because keeping them together (along with potatoes and avocados, potatoes and bananas, and potatoes and apples) might encourage your potatoes to sprout.

4. Avoid warm spots

Even if you don’t have a cooler storage location than your kitchen, take care to avoid the warmest spots in the room: Don’t store your potatoes next to the oven, under the sink, or on top of the fridge.

When warmer than their ideal storage temperature, potatoes will start to sprout, but colder isn’t necessarily better either. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee explains that when kept at colder temperatures (i.e. your refrigerator), “their metabolism shifts in a complicated way that results in the breakdown of some starch to sugars.” This means potatoes stored in the refrigerator will taste sweeter over time, and when cooked they are more likely to come out an unappetizing shade of brown.

Signs that potatoes have gone bad

There are a few easy things to look for if you’re wondering, “have my potatoes gone bad?” Mold, black spots, and soft spots are easily tells. Dr. Benjamin Chapman, an associate professor and food safety specialist at North Carolina State University, also recommends avoiding consuming potatoes that are wrinkled, soft, or shriveled. It’s not necessarily harmful to eat, but think of it like eating any other rotten fruit, such as bananas or apples. The flavor and texture will not be at their best and it’s just all-around unappetizing.

As for green potatoes, Dr. Chapman says that’s a sign that the spuds have been exposed to too much light and will give off a bitter flavor and can even be irritating to the digestive system.

Now that you’re a pro at storing potatoes, check out a few of our favorite recipes below.

Our best potato recipes

1. Homemade Potato Chips

The next time you need that satisfying, salty crunch of a potato chip, whip up a homemade batch using this tried-and-true recipe.

2. The Best Pan-Roasted Potatoes

If over 70 glowing reviews are any indication, this is the best darn pan-roasted potatoes recipe out there — and it’s extra easy, to boot.

3. Diane Morgan’s Classic Mashed Potatoes

Whether you’re hosting Thanksgiving, a holiday party, a big dinner with friends, or just want something creamy and comforting all for yourself, these classic mashed potatoes are what you should make.

4. Hasselback Potato Skillet Bake

Put your knife skills to work on this hasselback potato skillet bake, which has all the crispy edges and crackly potato skin you could ever dream of.

5. Garlicky Roasted Potato Salad

A summer staple, this contest-winning roasted potato salad is packed with punchy garlicky flavor, as well as lemon juice and Dijon mustard.

6. Potato Salad with Celery and Hard-Boiled Eggs

There are so many different ways to make potato salads, but this particular recipe is about as classic as it gets. Red potatoes and hard-cooked eggs are tossed with mayonnaise and a touch of whole grain mustard, chopped dill pickles, chives, celery, a little squeeze of lemon juice…and that’s pretty much it! Picnic, perfected.

Trumpists live in an alternate reality — but they believe in it, and that’s terrifying

I had not seen my mother for two years, for reasons we all understand too well. Several weeks ago, I was finally able to journey home.

It was wonderful to see my mother again. Blessed are those who can experience unconditional love, even if for only a few days. As I sat in that old, crooked, comfortable lounge chair in the den I noticed all the friendly “ghosts,” those memories that populate a home.

I was sure I saw the ghosts of our two dogs who passed away almost 10 years ago. I am even more sure I heard one of them bark in the middle of night. He always protected my mother. I’m sure he still is.

A home also consists of the objects that accumulate there. As I always do when I come back home, I hunted through the closets. I found a picture of my father, then 19 or 20-years-old, wearing his World War II U.S. Army service uniform.

His Colt M1911 service pistol rests in a box nearby along with some ammunition. My father rarely talked about the war. But if prompted he would humbly brag that he was lethal with that pistol, an “A-plus” as he would explain it. Once I asked him to watch “Saving Private Ryan” with me. A few minutes into the film he said, “I saw stuff like this in person” and that there was no purpose in him watching it on TV. My father stood up and walked out of the room. I didn’t bring up the war again.

I am not sure if we have truly forgotten those things which we “find” in our childhood homes. It seems more likely that our minds “forget” so that we can have the joy of rediscovering those objects again.

After 40 years, my father’s employer “advised” him to “retire.” I told my father that he would be dead in a year from loneliness and boredom and that he should fight to keep his job. Better to die at work while feeling useful than lying in a hospital bed. Almost 80 at the time, my father was tired and convinced himself that “retirement” was a good thing. But I was right: He did not last a year after being forced out of his job.

One day, shortly after that “retirement”, my father was in the kitchen having an enthusiastic conversation with someone on the phone. I thought it was his best friend. I watched until he acknowledged me. “Who was that?” I asked. He said it was a telemarketer and told me they are nice people who have interesting things to say. I realized my father had become one of those older folks who are so lonely they make friends with the telemarketers. I walked into the den, sat down in that old lounge chair and went to sleep.

There are many such people who instead of being “nice” are selling pain, anger, misery, rage, hate and fear to the lonely among us. These voices also promise “solutions,” offering a life of meaning through feelings of community, loyalty and “patriotism”.

I receive dozens of email newsletters and updates every day from right-wing news sources, political action committees, interest groups, think tanks and other parts of the right-wing propaganda machine. I seek out these sources and always make sure to subscribe.

In my public warnings about the Age of Trump and America’s descent into fascism, I have often been far ahead of the hope-peddlers, stenographers and professional centrists of the mainstream news media. But I am no Cassandra or otherwise possess any preternatural gifts. I simply pay close attention to what the Jim Crow Republicans, Trumpists and other neofascists say and do — and I take them at their word.

As a black working-class person in America I do not have the privilege and luxury that many white folks do — especially those with money — of pretending that everything is going to magically be fine, that “the institutions are strong,” that the “norms” of democracy will hold, or that “we are a good people.” I know for certain that the Trumpists and other neofascists are not “exaggerating” or engaging in “hyperbole” in their threats to create a new American apartheid.

To deny reality and embrace such fictions is an example of a particular type of white freedom. On this James Baldwin wrote, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

What have I “learned” from reading right-wing propaganda emails and other missives in recent weeks and months?

I have learned Joe Biden should be impeached because he is a traitor and perhaps mentally incompetent. Biden and Kamala Harris hate America and are responsible for every “crisis” from Afghanistan to “the border” and the overall downfall of American society. “Critical race theory” is the equivalent of the Taliban. “Liberals,” Democrats and other “America-haters” should be dealt with by “patriots.”

Donald Trump is perfect and a great leader. America is perfect and divine and should never be criticized.

Trump had a plan to defeat the Taliban, but Biden, the Democrats and the liberal media stabbed our military in the back.

Evil socialists are everywhere. They are plotting and scheming against America and our freedom.

I have also learned, of course, that Democrats and their allies stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Black Lives Matter and antifa are terrorists working to destroy the country. Trump’s followers who attacked the Capitol were originally said not to exist at all, but are now described as noble patriots being unjustly incarcerated as political prisoners.

There are also great schools I can enroll in online that will teach me the true history and facts of America and the Constitution from a patriotic perspective.

Through these emails I now know that there are Black conservatives who are not on the Democratic Party’s “plantation.” They love America and are smart enough to know that the Republican Party represents Abraham Lincoln while the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan and slavery.

COVID-19 is not really a danger to the country or the world — yet somehow Donald Trump also helped create vaccines to defeat the disease.

Donald Trump loves his followers and has issued membership cards that they should carry to prove their loyalty to him. Trump also needs true American patriots to give him their money to defend the country.

In total, the right-wing echo chamber is a powerful reality-altering propaganda lying-machine for those who choose to live in it. It constitutes a lifeworld, existing in a state of epistemic closure where facts and reality are rejected in favor of lies and myths.

In this most recent iteration, the right-wing echo chamber is now TrumpWorld, revolving around its high priest and cult leader. Its doctrines include fascism, authoritarianism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, ignorance, misogyny, a veneration of violence and other antisocial beliefs and values.

Liberals, progressives, Democrats and other rational thinkers must accept one crucial reality if they are to save America’s democracy (and themselves): Those who live in the right-wing echo chamber really do believe what they are being told. Those beliefs are now extensions of their core identities.

On the question of such society-wide collective madness, psychologist Erich Fromm warned in his 1955 book “The Sane Society”: “Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions — the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

In a new essay for Mother Jones, Kevin Drum explores the extreme political polarization in America and the role played by Trump’s Republican Party and the right-wing hate media in creating it. He points first of all at Fox News:

And as anyone who’s watched Fox knows, its fundamental message is rage at what liberals are doing to our country. Over the years the specific message has changed with the times — from terrorism to open borders to Benghazi to Christian cake bakers to critical race theory — but it’s always about what liberal politicians are doing to cripple America, usually with a large dose of thinly veiled racism to give it emotional heft. …

Drum observes that the “Fox effect” is real, and that “rage toward Democrats means more votes for Republicans”:

As far back as 2007 researchers learned that the mere presence of Fox News on a cable system increased Republican vote share by nearly 1 percent. A more recent study estimates that a minuscule 150 seconds per week of watching Fox News can increase the Republican vote share. In a study of real-life impact, researchers found that this means the mere existence of Fox News on a cable system induced somewhere between 3 and 8 percent of non-Republicans to vote for the Republican Party in the 2000 presidential election.

The Fox pipeline is pretty simple. Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, largely by highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action.

Drum observes that “this is not an exciting conclusion” and that it may sound “more interesting to go after something new, like social media or lunatic conspiracy theories.” But Fox News is the No. 1 perpetrator in stoking discord, division and far-right ideology.

Tens of millions of Americans are now lost to the right-wing cult. As repeatedly shown throughout the Age of Trump and beyond many of those people are willing to kill or die for a man who in fact despises them. (That is only one of the important facts they do not understand, but a highly salient one.) In that way, Trumpism is a license for a particular type of white rage, directed toward nonwhite people in particular and the other more generally.

Trumpism and other forms of fascism are not abstractions of political theory and philosophy. In practice, they are a force that lives through, by and against actual human beings. As I navigate and document the right-wing echo chamber (and the larger political madhouse of which it is a part), I repeatedly return to the human costs.

In a 2018 interview with Salon, Jen Senko, director of the documentary “The Brainwashing of My Dad” discussed this with me in a conversation that merits extensive quotation. My comment is in bold. We discussed the fact that in Fox News programming, everything is presented as “breaking news” or some kind of “alert.”

This is exciting for older people and it can actually become addictive. Young people are watching Fox News too of course, but it really is targeted at older people. Just think about it. You are an older person, you don’t have that much of a social life and you’re at home. Fox News provides excitement. It provides a purpose. Fox News viewers are on a team. They feel special. There’s like an in-group. Fox News is also like a cult because it’s exclusive and the other side isn’t just wrong, they’re evil. That’s what they have going for them.

After making the documentary you have likely had many people reach out to you. They see their relatives acting like your father.

Every day I get emails from people who want to help their parents or grandparents and other relatives. It is really heartbreaking. People reach out to me after watching my documentary, because for them it was like watching their own family. Most people are relieved that they’re not alone. They tell me, “Now I understand why they’re so angry.” Now these people who have relatives addicted to Fox News know that they don’t have the problem, they are not crazy. It’s like when you’re sick and you have a diagnosis and it makes you feel better. The same applies here.

An acquaintance told me about how when Obama first got in office she went to her uncle and aunt’s house on Thanksgiving. She thought she could talk about the economy, because obviously Obama had just gotten in and he couldn’t have had anything to do with the state of the economy at that point. Her uncle got so mad. He said, “Don’t you talk about that man in my house. Get out!” She said, “No. I’m not leaving.” He goes upstairs, gets a pistol, comes down, points it at her. She’s scared to death. He lowers the gun and then shoots the floor.

Donald Trump’s followers are no longer content with shooting the floor.

Law enforcement and other experts have warned that the United States is likely to experience a violent right-wing insurgency that could last for years. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have warned that white supremacists are now a greater threat to the U.S. than Islamic terrorists.

There will be blood. There has already been much blood spilled.

American democracy is facing an existential threat, as seen on Jan. 6, in Trump’s extended coup attempt and in the nationwide campaign by Republicans and the larger white right to restrict the voting rights of Black and brown people. Almost none of this is happening in secret. It is announced and loudly promoted almost every second of every day across the right-wing propaganda echo chamber. You can look away, but you do so at your own peril.

The social and environmental perils of magical thinking

There has been much coverage in recent media of citizens who fail to acknowledge the existence of such global crises as Covid-19 or anthropogenic climate change. They are said to be skeptical or in denial. They refuse to participate in any solution for the simple reason that they believe them to be non-issues.

Just as dangerous to the common good is a person who fully accepts the existence of a problem, yet believes as a matter of course that everything will work out just fine. They are indulging in magical thinking — a mentality marked by excessive optimism and a dash of egocentrism. Magical thinkers are content to simply sit on the sidelines and radiate good thoughts at those doing the heavy lifting to solve the world’s ills.

Both adamant deniers and cheerful magical thinkers refuse to contribute time and energy or make personal sacrifices to solve social problems. They hold society back from tackling its most pressing threats to equity, security, and even survival. They leave others to do the worry and the work. Not only is this monumentally unfair to those who shoulder the responsibility, it wastes valuable time. No local or global crisis will disappear if everyone assumes that someone else will fix it.

It is easy to understand why magical thinking’s core element, optimism, arose as a human trait, and why it persists. The alternative to belief in positive outcomes can be resignation or despair, which are both painful and limiting. It could be argued that humanity would not be where it is right now if not for legions of optimistic ancestors ignoring the local doomsayer’s warnings not to cross that river or build that tower or taste that strange new berry. Whenever a bold (and perhaps foolhardy) pioneer managed to explore, engineer, or eat something new and lived to tell the tale, human culture grew in its complexity — and in its capacity for further creativity. To put it another way, had all early hominins been cautious to a fault, we may never have ventured away from out points of origin.

Yet here we are in the 21st century. Billions of human beings are benefitting from millennia of cultural innovation and more than three centuries of Enlightenment thinking, a paradigm shift that enabled great minds to tackle age-old problems such as infectious disease. But Enlightenment thinking has also caused its share of problems, such as the release of massive amounts of carbon dioxide from combustion engines and factories. It also gave rise to, or at least reinforced, a quasi-religious belief in the power of the human mind to solve almost anything with technology, given adequate time and resources. Biologist David Ehrenfeld calls this the arrogance of humanism. It provides an easy fallback for any crisis. Not to worry. Somebody will think of something.

Take the loss of global biodiversity. The denialist would say, “Environmentalists exaggerate the threat of extinction just to get attention.” The optimist would say: “It sounds really bad, but nature is resilient, and ecologists are resourceful. Why, just the other day they discovered a frog they thought was extinct for decades!”

The magical thinker combines that optimism with a self-interest that can take root when a solution to a problem conflicts in some way with their identity or values, or simply takes too much effort and time. “Smartphones use rare-earth metals mined in biodiversity hotspots? Awful,” the magical thinker would say. “I love gorillas. But as a busy working mom, I cannot give up my phone. Someone will find a safer source of metals before long.”

This discomforting cognitive dissonance begs to be resolved. In their 2007 book, “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me),” Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write, “Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened — typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.” We can add: or when they are called upon to do something that clashes with their self-image in some way.

Given how unbearable cognitive dissonance can feel, it’s hardly surprising that magical thinkers grasp at any relief available. They shut down the avenues of curiosity that could lead to deeper understanding, prematurely reassure themselves that things sound worse than they are, and place unwarranted faith in others to do any repair they acknowledge needs doing. By convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t need to be fixed yet, and then only by others, they create a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for their consciences.

As we lurch further into the Anthropocene, people comfortable with change will continue to bump up against those who aren’t. How can activists, policymakers, and even ordinary citizens mitigate magical thinkers’ disengagement with reality and responsibility?

Shaming them does not work. Badgering them with more and more facts will only cause entrenchment, more elaborate magic. It’s like Aesop’s fable about the sun, the wind, and the cloaked traveler. No matter how hard the wind blew, it could not remove the man’s cloak; in fact, it only succeeded in making him hold on more tightly. But when the sun beamed at him, the man took off his cloak voluntarily. The fable advises a soft sell augmented by persistence. (The sun tried to make the man change even after witnessing the wind’s failure.)

To spur magical thinkers to action, I would also advise anyone in the position of educating the public about an issue to avoid automatically painting an optimistic picture of possible measures as if they are almost faits accomplis. Faced with dire scenarios such as those in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is tempting to comfort people by doing such things as enumerating successful extant “green” technologies, like electric cars and solar panels, as a way of predicting the arrival of similar solutions further down the line. It is far more effective to pair cold facts with warm hope instead of palliatives. As Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci said, we need the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.

When a problem arises, denial and magical thinking both fail to get the job done. The best kind of hope we can give people hinges on a contingency, where the need for participation is understood: We can do this if we put our heads together, find workable solutions, then put them into play. It sees a light at the end of every tunnel, but knows we’ll never get out of the darkness without the collective will to change.

* * *

Louise Fabiani’s science writing and critical essays have appeared previously in Undark, as well as in JSTOR Daily, Aeon, Slate, Science, New Scientist, Pacific Standard, the TLS, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.

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

The EPA may finally reckon with aviation’s dirty secret: leaded fuel

Optimistic that President Joe Biden’s administration will take action to address the largest remaining source of airborne lead emissions in the country, a coalition of environmental advocacy organizations joined forces with California’s Santa Clara County on Tuesday to press the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to classify leaded aviation gasoline air pollution as a danger to public health and the environment. An EPA-issued finding on this matter would allow the federal government to propose regulatory standards to address the harm caused by a highly toxic additive in aviation fuel.

Environmental advocates have petitioned the EPA to make this decision, known as an endangerment finding, for nearly two decades. They argue that the move is long overdue, given decades of scientific evidence demonstrating the harms of lead exposure, particularly for children.

“It’s unconscionable to think about the hundreds of thousands of children that have been exposed to lead over all of these years from airport activity,” said Jonathan Smith, a senior attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing Friends of the Earth, one of the original petitioners to the EPA, as well as Oregon Aviation Watch, the Montgomery-Gibbs Environmental Coalition, the Center for Environmental Health, and the Alaska Community Action on Toxics. (Disclosure: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)

In a letter accompanying the petition to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, these organizations argued that leaded aviation gasoline emissions exacerbate environmental injustices faced by children of color who are already disproportionately burdened by chemical exposure. Black children are disproportionately burdened by lead exposure nationwide, and Latino children are disproportionately burdened in California. A majority of the 50 general aviation airports with the highest volume of lead emissions are located in communities of color, according to the letter. The Biden administration has pledged both to prioritize environmental justice issues and to reduce childhood lead exposure. The coalition hopes these commitments will make Regan receptive to their call for action.

“Lead poisoning is widely regarded as an environmental justice issue,” said Smith. “So we do call on the Biden administration to recognize this … and prioritize it as the environmental justice issue that it is.”

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA regulates emissions from aircraft and the use of lead in gasoline, including automotive gasoline additives, which were phased down beginning in the 1970s. The agency subsequently banned the sale of leaded gasoline for on-road vehicles in 1996, but it allowed the continued use of lead in aviation fuel, known as avgas. This leaded fuel is used in the roughly 170,000 piston-engine aircraft estimated to be in use nationwide, including airplanes and helicopters, which operate out of more than 13,000 airports. These small, gasoline-powered general aviation aircraft comprise the largest single source of lead air emissions in the U.S., according to 2017 data from the EPA, and generated 468 tons of emissions that year. They constitute about 70 percent of total lead air emissions nationally, according to a congressionally-mandated report issued earlier this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. More than 5 million people, including 363,000 children under age 5, live within 500 meters of these airport runways, and more than 160,000 children attend school in these areas, according to a 2020 EPA analysis.

Marcie Keever, the legal director of Friends of the Earth, which previously petitioned the EPA to make an endangerment finding and subsequently filed a lawsuit in 2012 over the agency’s “unreasonable delay” in responding to the petition, told Grist that these communities of color are burdened not just by pollution from these airports, but also from nearby industrialized zones that contaminate the air with multiple pollutants.

Lead particles can remain for decades longer in the soil of surrounding communities, leading to continued exposure to children who grow up or attend school in these areas. Keever pointed to a recent study commissioned by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisor examining the blood lead levels of children living near the county-owned Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose. The study found that the continued use of leaded aviation fuel has contributed to increased blood lead levels, particularly for children who live within a half-mile of the airport, which is surrounded by a population of more than 50,000 residents. Additionally, children who live downwind of the airport have substantially higher blood lead levels than children who live upwind of the facility. The margin of difference is roughly equal to the measured difference between children who were tested at the peak of the Flint water crisis compared to children who were tested before the city’s water supply was contaminated by lead.

“I’m thankful for the decision-makers that have stepped up here [in Santa Clara County], even in this very hyper-local context, to say enough is enough,” said Keever.

Santa Clara County Counsel James R. Williams told Grist that, given the scientific consensus that there is no safe blood lead level, the decision by the county to join the endangerment finding petition was straightforward. It’s not the first time the county has taken a stand against lead exposure. Williams’ office led a nearly 20-year battle on behalf of Santa Clara County and nine other plaintiffs in a landmark legal case that held former lead paint manufacturers accountable for promoting lead paint for use in homes despite its known toxicity. The 2019 settlement led to a $305 million payout to 10 California counties and cities to address lead-paint hazards in homes across the state.

In the case of leaded aviation fuel, Williams said the battle for regulation will be fought on both federal and local fronts. “We’re under no illusions that it’s going to happen in 24 hours, and in the interim we have thousands of children whose lives and livelihood is at stake now,” he told Grist.

Seeking a more immediate remedy, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to ban the sale of leaded avgas at Reid-Hillview Airport and to press the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, to close the facility earlier than 2031, when conditions connected to FAA grant funding are set to expire. Williams expects the FAA to oppose both efforts, but his office plans to continue to press them to take action.

“We can’t, then, as a local community, sit by and leave children exposed with permanent damage and permanent harm while the federal government takes however long it may take,” said Williams.

In its petition, the coalition makes the case that leaded avgas meets the criteria required by the Clean Air Act to make an endangerment finding. This includes a determination that leaded avgas emissions from piston-engine aircraft contribute to air pollution, and that lead air pollution can be reasonably anticipated to endanger the public’s health or welfare. Given the level of evidence required — for example, if emissions contribute even a small percentage to that pollution, the standard can be met — the finding could have been made decades ago, according to Smith. The coalition recognizes that the EPA is facing many pressing challenges given the environmental regulations that were rolled back under the Trump administration, but given the existing research, Smith said the endangerment finding is essentially teed up for a decision.

“Everyone knows that lead is harmful, everyone knows that these aircraft are the major source of lead emissions into the air. The EPA has all the studies it needs at the ready; all it needs to do is just cross the finish line and make this endangerment finding,” said Smith.

By law the EPA is required to respond to the petition by either denying or granting the petition’s demand. It’s a decision that Keever hopes will be made promptly and affirmatively. Even if the EPA decides to move forward with the finding, it would trigger a multi-year process involving hearings, the final endangerment finding, then rulemaking to adopt standards in conjunction with the FAA for regulating and mitigating emissions. Keever noted that while the staff at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation diligently continued to study the issue during the Trump administration, the ultimate decision to move forward will depend on the political will of those leading the agency.

“[The staff at the Office of Air and Radiation] have dotted every i and crossed every t over and over again, and the problem seems to be the political decision-makers at EPA, no matter the administration,” said Keever. “Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where we’ve delayed and delayed and delayed, so we’re still going to have a process in front of us.”

In the intervening years, Keever has encouraged fellow advocacy organizations to push for unleaded fuel options at general aviation airports — which some facilities like the San Carlos Airport in San Mateo County, California, have already adopted — as well as additional research to find fuel alternatives. Part of that effort includes raising the general public’s awareness of a toxic contaminant that is invisible and being spewed by small general aviation airports that aren’t often viewed as sources of harmful pollution.

President Biden’s commitment to addressing environmental justice and childhood lead poisoning has left the coalition hopeful that leaded aviation fuel will finally get regulatory attention from the EPA.

“It’s not a matter of more studies, it’s not a matter of the science of lead, it’s not a matter of needing to assess anything,” said Williams. “It’s a matter of the political will to actually issue the regulation and know that the market will follow, just as it did everywhere else.”

How the Minnesota GOP imploded: From a toxic workplace to a full-blown sex trafficking scandal

Kayla Khang remembers being excited for her first real job — a political internship with the Minnesota Republican Party, in 2017, organizing routine door knocking and phone bank campaigns for candidates she believed in.

It was the dawn of a new era for the party, the 17-year-old thought, and she was ecstatic when the internship turned into a paid position just a few months later. Jennifer Carnahan, another Asian-American woman, had just been elected as state party chair with promises to diversify and bring new blood to the organization, which had floundered in recent years due to financial mismanagement and a rising Democratic tide buoyed by growing numbers of young liberals moving to the state.

But as she advanced in the party, Khang grew increasingly uncomfortable with the casual racism and sexual harassment which seemed to penetrate all levels of the organization. Seemingly as a matter of course, she was warned which men to avoid being alone with, and which to avoid entirely.

Things reached a head when she began working on a competitive special Senate campaign in northern Minnesota with Spencer Krier, one of Carnahan’s close associates, a fellow field staffer at the time. He often greeted her by adopting a faux-Asian accent: “Herro Kay-rah,” forcing hugs and touching her inappropriately even though Khang told him several times the behavior made her uncomfortable.

During an election night party, she remembered Krier making an especially egregious remark about the dress she was wearing: “You look chinky today,” he allegedly said with a grin.

“What?!” he continued, faking surprise at her outrage. “It just means you look really Asian.”

Several others who witnessed these events and spoke with Salon corroborated Khang’s accounts, and described similar conduct from Krier, who would go on to become “operations manager” for the state party before sliding into a job with Arsenal Media Group, a political media strategy firm which boasts such clients as Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and right-wing commentator Candace Owens. (UPDATE: Arsenal Media Group confirmed that Krier is no longer an employee at the company)

Are you a current or former Minnesota GOP insider with information to share? You can reach Brett via email at brett.bachman@salon.com or securely via Signal at 715-563-3242.

Khang said she reported the incidents multiple times to her bosses — and to Carnahan’s assistant — but each time they brushed it off, saying, “That’s just Spencer.” After several tries, she gave up, and to her knowledge a formal complaint was never recorded.

Krier did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

But in the coming months, Khang says Carnahan grew increasingly angry at her and others who spoke up about similar behavior, screaming at them in public and calling them after-hours to continue earlier tirades. Several other Minnesota GOP employees told Salon that they witnessed Carnahan repeatedly dress down Khang and other employees for minor mistakes, and speculated that she may have been driving them away from a career in politics for complaining about the behavior of Krier and others.

“She was very good at belittling people, insulting them in really personal ways,” Khang said. “She’d always threaten people — ‘I can end your career in a second’ — stuff like that.

“She just made you feel so small, you know?”

Khang eventually did leave politics, and the state.

Former Minnesota GOP staff member Kayla Khang, left, with former Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan. (Courtesy of Kayla Khang)

In conversations with seven current and former staffers of the Minnesota Republican Party, most of them women who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, all shared similar experiences of racism and sexual harassment or assault by high-level employees of the state organization.

Likewise, all outlined a pattern of reprisal from Carnahan targeting anyone who spoke out about these and other issues within the organization, subjecting employees and even some activists affiliated with the party to repeated verbal abuse. Strict non-disclosure agreements were also a requirement for anyone who wanted to work closely with Carnahan, a fact she used as a cudgel to silence dissent, several of the employees said.

Two former staffers even described sustained harassment campaigns directed against them and others that included male staffers showing up at their homes at odd hours — an apparent intimidation tactic — and drastic measures like withholding paychecks for anyone who complained about Carnahan or her top lieutenants’ behavior.

“I remember this so vividly — I had to drive across town with my supervisor to fill up another staffer’s tank because she hadn’t been paid in months after some kind of dispute with Jennifer,” Khang said. “She was completely broke.”

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

The employees who spoke with Salon all said the toxic work environment was so bad that dozens of talented people were driven out of politics for good.

“I know a staggering number of people who left politics as a result of Jennifer Carnahan,” Khang said.

“There’s no bench of [Republican] talent in Minnesota right now, and it’s 100% her fault,” another former Minnesota GOP staffer added.

The four most recent Minnesota GOP executive directors — Becky Alery, Andy Aplikowski, Christine Snell and Kevin Poindexter — even took the rare step of releasing a joint statement last week which substantiated a number of these claims. In the lengthy letter, all four decried Carnahan’s behavior as head of the state party, describing a workplace “ruled by grudges, retaliation, and intimidation.”

Statement regarding #mngop pic.twitter.com/y9O5k0XfQf

— Kevin Poindexter (@Kdpoindexter) August 18, 2021

The state’s College Republicans chapter also released a statement last week alleging that Carnahan covered up the sexual assault and rape of a member of the Republican youth organization — choosing not to act when the accusations were brought to her attention and maintaining a public friendship with the accused even after he left his job in politics.

“Jennifer Carnahan is no advocate or example for young women,” the organization wrote.

Carnahan declined to comment on this story through a spokesperson, but the state party ultimately released a statement rebutting a number of the claims, claiming Carnahan was the victim of a politically motivated attack by her opponents within the organization.

“The statements that the Chairwoman had any knowledge of sexual harassment allegations are categorically false,” the statement said. “This is just the latest in unfounded accusations against the Chairwoman in recent days for those in the party that hoped to unseat her in her re-election on April 10.”

These Republican party employees and insiders are speaking out now after Carnahan stepped down last Thursday, following a sordid sex trafficking scandal that threatens to hobble the party apparatus for years to come.

“It’s clear to me how individuals feel more comfortable coming forward simply because they didn’t have the ability to do so before,” Rebecca Brannon, a party insider-turned-independent journalist who has been probing Carnahan’s alleged misdeeds for months, wrote on Twitter. “This has been a sickness for a long time within the MN GOP.”

Anton Lazzaro, one of the state party’s top donors and a close personal friend of Carnahan’s, was indicted for child sex trafficking — alongside a rising College Republican star, Gisela Castro Medina, who chaired the University of St. Thomas College Republicans. Federal prosecutors allege the pair recruited and abused at least five minor victims in a scheme Carnahan maintains she knew nothing about.

All the former Minnesota GOP employees who spoke with Salon expressed incredulity at Carnahan’s claims of ignorance. “It’s not that she missed the signs,” one former Minnesota GOP staff member said. “It’s that she totally ignored them, even after people brought their concerns to her attention.”

Now Republican leaders across the country are struggling to figure out a path forward to rebuild the state organization from the bottom up.

“The party is in ruins,” Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP, told Politico last week. “I don’t know if the party has hit rock bottom yet.”

* * *

The first impression shared by almost everyone in Minnesota politics who met Anton Lazzaro was how young he was. The second thing they noticed was his money.

The 30-year-old flaunted his lavish lifestyle on social media: driving a Ferrari, jetting to tropical locales and often posing for pictures with large wads of cash. He even took a jaunt to Ukraine late last year, apparently on a private plane, to “investigate” Hunter Biden’s dealings in the country. It’s unclear whether Lazzaro ever connected with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was Donald Trump’s personal attorney at the time and visited Ukraine for the same reason in the same time period.

Antony Lazzaro flaunted his playboy lifestyle on social media, posting pictures with large amounts of cash. (Instagram)

The source of Lazzaro’s wealth was unclear to everyone who spoke with Salon for this story, and was a constant source of speculation for state party insiders. The only information about his family Salon was able to uncover was that his grandfather was a longtime administrator at the University of Southern California, who transformed the school into a “sprawling bastion of research” over his 42-year tenure, according to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

“From the very beginning, everyone was like, ‘Who is this guy?'” Khang said of Lazzaro. “I met him when he was 26 and throwing around thousands of dollars on state-level races. … We all wanted to know how he amassed that kind of money so early in his career.”

Lazzaro has indeed been a prolific donor to the party since at least 2014, donating more than $100,000 to various Republican candidates — including more than $30,000 to Carnahan’s husband, Rep. Jim Hagedorn, according to campaign finance filings.

One analysis from local TV station Fox 9 estimates that Lazzaro has given $273,000 to Minnesota GOP candidates and causes. He spent so much, so regularly, that several Minnesota GOP staffers said they called him “sugar daddy” and referred to him as the party’s “cash cow” behind his back. All they knew about his finances was that he talked often about Bitcoin.

“I had a bad feeling about him from the start,” one former Minnesota GOP employee said. “We all thought something shady was going on.”

On FEC disclosure forms, Lazzaro always lists his occupation as “self employed.” On his LinkedIn page, however, Lazzaro says he has a job: CEO of a consulting firm called Gold River Group, which claims to provide marketing and technology solutions to firms in a dizzying array of economic sectors: “We specialize in the Securities, Family Office, Energy, and Political industries,” the page says.

Salon could not determine if Lazzaro’s business has a physical office — the Minnesota address listed on Gold River Group’s state registration is a post office box in a downtown Minneapolis UPS store. A second address in Cheyenne, Wyoming, found on GRG’s website, appears to belong to a company called Wyoming Registered Agent, which helps businesses incorporate and provides mail forwarding services. A third address in Rolling Hills Estates, California, listed on the firm’s website as its preferred “postal address,” is yet another mailbox at yet another UPS store. The company’s phone number, meanwhile, appears to be Lazzaro’s personal cell, which has a voicemail message telling callers to text because the inbox is “not checked regularly.”

In other words, whatever Lazzaro’s company actually does, it seems implausible that it provided him with the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has spent in Minnesota politics over the last decade or so — let alone on a Ferrari, private flights and the nearly $1 million luxury condo that property records show he owned in downtown Minneapolis. Gold River Group, in fact, was only incorporated in December of 2019, according to state records obtained by Salon, well after staffers say Carnahan brought him into the party’s inner circle following her election to party chair in 2016.

“She brought him around. It sounds like he gave some money before [2016] but he never had any kind of position or influence,” a high-level former GOP staffer told Salon. “That all changed when [Carnahan] became chair.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFVCGIVAEhj/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Financial records first reported by Fox 9 show that Lazzaro has a pattern of starting and sometimes dissolving businesses — at least eight of them in rapid succession over the past 13 years. Many of these ventures appear to only exist on paper.

They include two apparent currency brokerages, HonestForexSignals.com (which one reviewer on the now-defunct website said “feels like a scam”) and Forex Globe LLC; an online publisher called Wolf Private Trading LLC; an advertising agency called Allegiance American Enterprises LLC; and three marketing firms, 777 Marketing Group, 21st Promotional Offers LLC and Wingate Marketing Group LLC.

At least three of those businesses were registered using P.O. boxes at UPS stores in California.

In 2018 Lazzaro also founded a largely self-funded organization called Big Tent Republicans PAC — a reference to his stated goal of making the party more inclusive for minorities, women and the LGBT community. Through it, he’s given more than $22,000 to other political committees in several other states, according to FEC records.

In 2019, he even managed to snag a job as campaign manager for Minnesota congressional candidate Lacy Johnson, who ran against Rep. Ilhan Omar in her heavily Democratic Minneapolis-area district (and lost).

Johnson denied any knowledge of Lazzaro’s extracurricular activities, telling The Daily Beast, “I don’t know that side of Tony. He’s young, he’s got money, and… that tends to attract females.”

At the time, Lazzaro also hosted a podcast with Carnahan called “#TruthMatters,” which ran for about four months in. late 2019 and early 2020. He used his newfound platform to make several appearances as a talking head on Fox News. It was a stunning rise for someone who just a few years prior was a complete unknown in Minnesota politics, party insiders said.

* * *

But employees also describe a dark side to Lazzaro’s sudden ubiquity within the state party.

One former GOP employee who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation described a situation where they were trying to correct a clerical error in the organization’s payroll system and were told by a supervisor to speak with Lazzaro — who did not have an official position within the party, let alone one that would afford him access to employees’ personal information.

Another employee recalled speaking with Lazzaro about payroll issues as well, though they did not remember that fact as unusual, given the close-knit culture of the party apparatus and his constant presence at high-level meetings.

Everyone who spoke with Salon recalled Lazzaro’s nebulous role as a source of endless gossip within the Minnesota GOP, from innocuous speculation to the salacious.

I need to grow my hair out so we are the same height. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/3LTm7iPO5t

— Anton (Tony) Lazzaro 🇺🇸 (@GOPtony) October 8, 2018

One incident that continues to create waves within the party and was mentioned repeatedly in interviews concerned an anonymous Twitter account that began posting in late 2019, claiming to be a high-level party insider with knowledge of Lazzaro’s nefarious activities.

Salon was unable to find the Twitter account, and everyone who spoke about the incident said it was deleted shortly after it was created. Still, at least four people close to the party described the page tweeting out a variety of accusations, including that Lazzaro was filming porn in a luxury condo he owned at a swanky downtown building called The Ivy in Minneapolis.

All four of those people also recalled the firestorm that was created when Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan found out about the account — within hours a full scale internal investigation was launched into the source of the rumors, quickly becoming “priority No. 1” for the Minnesota GOP office, as one former staffer put it.

The account was shut down a few days later, and apparently nothing ever came of the internal investigation. But the staffers describe a situation where the accusations were, because of the voraciousness of Carnahan’s response, generally accepted as true among party insiders.

“That’s always how I explained [Lazzaro’s] money in my head,” one staffer said.

Several women who spoke with Salon described this incident as the beginning of a rumor network to warn other female GOP staffers — especially younger employees and volunteers — to stay away from Lazzaro and other men who were rumored to have assaulted or harassed their female counterparts.

Brannon, the conservative activist, says there’s little chance Carnahan wasn’t at least aware of these rumors. “There is no chance the chairwoman didn’t at minimum know of Anton’s lifestyle,” she said.

After these accusations came to light, several Minnesota GOP staffers also remembered previous incidents that had seemed innocuous, but were now cast in an entirely different light. Two former Minnesota GOP employees, offered anonymity to protect their personal safety, described visiting Lazzaro’s home on routine business and finding hidden cameras set up in multiple rooms — including a bathroom.

“I feel fucking horrible about it now, but I let my family — my younger siblings — around this guy,” one former colleague, who said she discovered the camera in Lazzaro’s bathroom, said. “I personally believe [Carnahan] 100% knew what a creep he was.”

In fact, the network of cameras Lazzaro kept in his condo was described in court this week by a private investigator Lazzaro hired, who argued that the cameras made the property perfect for home confinement — all Lazzaro had to do was give the state access to a live feed of the devices for 24/7 monitoring. The judge disagreed, calling it a way for Lazzaro to skirt punishment in a “prison of privilege.”

During that same court hearing Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Laura Provinzino asked one of Lazzaro’s character witnesses if they were aware that Lazzaro was running a Pornhub account called “Only Young Teens,” according to an account from Minnesota Reformer, a local news site.

It was the first mention in court documents of any pornographic activity from the 30-year-old, who is accused of paying teenage girls with gifts, cash and lavish dinners in exchange for sex. His official charges include six counts of sex trafficking, three counts of obstruction and one count of conspiracy to sex-traffic minors.

It’s unclear whether the allegations Lazzaro was making porn will become a part of the case — though the FBI’s Minneapolis bureau says the investigation is still ongoing and that the agency anticipates more victims may come forward.

The #FBI believes there could be more victims of this alleged conduct. Please consider calling our office with any information. 763-569-8000.https://t.co/vwyWl4AXQs

— FBI Minneapolis (@FBIMinneapolis) August 12, 2021

Reached for comment Thursday, Lazzaro’s Texas-based attorney, Zachary Newland, specifically denied any allegations of child pornography.

“Mr. Lazzaro is not charged in any way shape or form with producing or possessing child pornography. Any assertion that Mr. Lazzaro was involved with child pornography is blatantly false. Even the overreaching indictment against Mr. Lazzaro does not make those sort of claims. The facts and truth leave nothing up for debate. Mr. Lazzaro looks forward to clearing his good name and shining the light on these false anonymous allegations in court.”

An officer with the Minneapolis Police Department, Brandon Brugger, said during Tuesday’s court hearing that investigators have not discovered any child pornography on any of Lazzaro’s devices, records show. Brugger made no mention of any pornography that featured adults.

* * *

Just a year ago, Republicans in Minnesota looked as if they were on the upswing. Even though the party hadn’t won a statewide race in 15 years, Donald Trump spent millions on advertising and repeatedly campaigned there, following a surprising performance in 2016, when he only lost narrowly to Hillary Clinton.

But Joe Biden did exceptionally well in Minnesota in 2020, winning by more than seven percentage points. Now, a burgeoning sex trafficking scandal has left the organization, which is without leadership until a new election can be held, in total disarray, insiders say. It also doesn’t help that the most recognizable Republican in Minnesota at the moment is pillow salesman-turned-election truther Mike Lindell.

And despite the near-unanimous calls for Carnahan’s resignation last week, the Republican Party of Minnesota is not united on how to move forward from the scandal.

Carnahan made as much noise as possible on the way out, loudly trumpeting her innocence while casting the deciding vote to give herself a severance of more than $35,000. She described herself as the victim of a “coup,” led by a “mob mentality” that she said sought to “defame, tarnish and attempt to ruin my personal and professional reputation.”

“The party and its leaders cannot be held responsible for donors and unofficial persons,” she wrote on Facebook prior to her resignation, denying any knowledge of Lazzaro’s alleged illicit activities. “We cannot be expected to know more than law enforcement.”

Minnesota Republican Party chair Jennifer Carnahan looks on during the national anthem during a rally for President Donald Trump at the Bemidji Regional Airport on September 18, 2020 in Bemidji, Minnesota. (Getty Images)

It’s unclear what impact all this will have on the party’s fundraising and recruitment efforts. Everyone who spoke with Salon worried that donors would be hesitant to give and potential employees will be even more hesitant to work at the organization following the scandal and investigations that are sure to follow.

Many high-level Minnesota GOP staffers, including the four former state chairs, are calling for third-party audits into both the accusations of rampant sexual misconduct and the state organization’s finances.

Jennifer DeJournett, a Minnesota Republican insider and president of the organization Voices of Conservative Women, echoed those calls in a statement to Politico last week, later adding that, scandal or not, “the operation of politics [in the state] doesn’t stop.”

“There’s a ton of alphabet soup groups out there that are still doing the work to help push causes and candidates … Politics doesn’t stop while the state party is getting its act together.”

But in the meantime, Carnahan doesn’t appear any closer to an apology — posting defiantly on Facebook that she, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh have “much in common.”

“I’m proud to stand in good company among men that have experienced what I have recently gone through (although what they went through was way worse),” she wrote, alongside pictures of herself with both men.

“The truth always prevails, the universe will right the wrongs and bad people only get away with bad actions for so long. It’s time to ‘stand in the sun.'”

Lauren Boebert admits to campaign finance problems: “I under-reported a lot of stuff” to the FEC

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., knows a thing or two about not following rules that apply to her. In light of recent reports of Boebert’s alleged or apparent violations of House ethics rules, an old interview from February reveals just how blatant her violations were and understood to be, all while acting with apparent impunity from the letter of the law.

According to the FEC, “When candidates use their personal funds for campaign purposes, they are making contributions to their campaigns. Unlike other contributions, these candidate contributions are not subject to any limits. They must, however, be reported.” Such rules are meant to apply to all elected officials, independent of party affiliation, but appear to have been ignored in the case of Boebert, who has claimed she walks around Washington strapped with a Glock handgun, which would violate District of Columbia law. The far-right lawmaker brazenly declared in February that she “under-reports” her expenses, stating, “They want to come against me for legitimate expenses, go ahead. I am doing the work of the people. I had to make those connections. And really, I under-reported a lot of stuff.”

FEC records reviewed by Salon suggest that Boebert’s campaign spent $2.6 million in the 2020 cycle yet only made a total of 147 payments to a total of 32 recipients. Moreover, 40 of those payments made went to the ride-sharing platform Uber in December 2020, around the very same time Boebert attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington. In the maze of FEC filings, seemingly obvious expenses the campaign incurred were not included in those disbursements.

Dating back to November of 2019, Boebert purchased two domain names she used as campaign sites, one of which, www.keepourguns.com, was for sale on a third-party site called Huge Domains, likely with a high price tag attached. Both that domain and the more straightforward www.laurenforcolorado.com were operational by the time Boebert declared her candidacy in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district in December 2019.

It’s a safe assumption that those domains were purchased, but no campaign payments relating to website purchases or website design were registered with the FEC.

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

The laurenforcolorado.com campaign website featured a custom campaign logo, professional photographs of Boebert and her family, and a professional studio photograph of her posing with a group of Bikers for Trump. The campaign didn’t file any record with the FEC that Salon could find for that graphic design creation. Additionally, the campaign didn’t pay for photography until almost a year later, in September 2020, when she purchased “advertising” from photographer Patrick Cavan Brown, whom Politico magazine had commissioned to shoot Boebert for a lengthy profile.

This past week, CNBC reported that Boebert’s campaign has come under scrutiny for Venmo payments to the congresswoman herself for personal expenses. In a July 2020 letter to the FEC, Boebert’s treasurer, Marjorie Ann Klein of SWS Polifi, wrote, “There was no intent to try to report contributions illegally as I just plain forgot to watch for large donations as I was preparing the report.” Boebert further failed to file financial disclosure forms covering 2019 and 2020 as required by law, which allowed apparent or possible conflicts of interest to remain invisible, most notably her husband’s ties to the energy industry.

Salon’s previous exclusive coverage of Boebert:

Lauren Boebert’s gas problem: Far-right lawmaker concealed blatant conflict of interest

Lauren Boebert fails to file 2019 financial disclosure; sale of cargo plane remains a mystery

Rep. Lauren Boebert lost a family member to COVID — but she’s still a vaccine foe

Lauren Boebert says her late-night Capitol mystery tour was “totally legit.” Except it wasn’t

Rudy Giuliani addresses drinking rumors during interview with NBC New York: “I drink normally”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed his drinking during an interview with WNBC surrounding the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“At age 77, Giuliani says he’s as sharp as ever,” Melissa Russo reported. “And he denies claims and published reports and from colleagues that a drinking problem is to blame for the change people perceive in him.”

Russo played a clip of the interview.

“Have you ever struggled with alcohol?” Russo asked.

“Never at all,” Giuliani replied. “Never at all.”

“Were you drunk during those interviews when they said you were?” she asked.

“Absolutely not,” he replied. “I don’t think i’ve ever done an interview drunk.”

“I have sometimes — I mean, I drink normally. I like scotch. I drink scotch,” he said.

“So you do not believe you have a drinking problem,” Russo asked.

“I don’t believe it — I know I’m not, I mean, I — no, I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a functioning — I’m probably — I probably function more effectively than 90% of the population,” Giuliani argued.

Watch: