The importance of being Sylvie, a Loki unlike any other, who named herself

For a series that has managed to keep the audience beguiled and bewildered for five episodes into a six-part season, perhaps the greatest trick Marvel’s “Loki” pulled may be one of its earliest reveals: the introduction of Sophia DiMartino’s Sylvie, Loki’s most dangerous game.

Until Tom Hiddleston’s Loki caught up with Sylvie at the close of Episode 2 he assumed he was chasing a male version of himself – a variant, to use one of the Time Variance Authority’s organizational terms. In explaining the rogue variant’s profile the TVA paints the portray of a deadly foe who has outwitted every agent they’ve thrown at it, and killed more than a few. Truly a formidable Loki by any measure.

Then, at the moment when Loki’s cloaked quarry has retaken the upper hand in their confrontation the fugitive pulls back their hood and, voila. He is, in fact, a she. A barely perceptible shift in Hiddleston’s comportment tells us this is something his infinitely calculating prince of Asgard didn’t account for. While that doesn’t change the rules of engagement for Loki in that instant, the challenge of Sylvie adds new dimensions to his mission.

She addresses that with the first line she speaks in her own voice: “This isn’t about you.”

That’s not entirely true. Five of six episodes show “Loki” to be a character development odyssey wrapped in a mystery. The puzzle is the engine, the simple part – presumably in next week’s finale we’ll find out who or what is behind the TVA, closing the season-long arc.

The identity half of the equation, though, is equally as satisfying to watch, largely due to Sylvie. Her being a woman, and a Loki, is meaningful to this narrative and the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. The show winks in that direction when Loki meets another band of Lokis in the purgatory where “pruned” variants are banished during “Journey Into Mystery” and asks if any of them have ever met a woman variant of themselves.

An older Loki (played by Richard E. Grant), dubbed Classic Loki, shakes his head in disgust and responds, “Sounds terrifying.”

“Oh, she is!” Loki proclaims. “That’s kind of what’s great about her.”

Plainly the show’s emphasis on the title character’s psychological growth and moral realignment are vital to the broader story because this Loki is quite obviously the one we kissed goodbye in “Avengers: Infinity War.” That Loki was defined by his rivalry with his brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth), which he set aside whenever they landed upon some shared purpose, whether that be escape from planet Sakaar or defending their home world. At each of those junctures, we should note, the significant transformational forces in Loki’s life have been women.

His mother Frigga (Rene Russo) loved him unconditionally and is the only one to whom he was ever true, and her death spurred him to fight by Thor’s side. Battling to save Asgard from their sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), the Goddess of Death that Odin banished and hid from his sons, gave Loki another shot at redemption, some of that “glorious purpose” each Loki rants about in the show. Sacrificing his life in the hope of saving his people and brother from Thanos was his ultimate redemption.

Loki’s TV show variant never reached those signposts in the MCU timeline, having escaped via an off-ramp directly after trying to take over Earth in 2012. Just as well, since Frigga’s death adds to the list of women characters who are murdered to motivate men, and Hela’s villainy is representative of the she-demon archetype.

That makes “Loki” a spiritual do-over for Loki and the MCU: an opportunity to add another woman to the pantheon who isn’t fragile, or mad, or Thor in female form, i.e. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie or Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander).

Let me say this: I have nothing but the utmost affection for Valkyrie and Sif and would ride into battle with either or both! But they are, essentially, female Thor equivalents minus the ability to call down lightning, and carrying swords instead of hammers.

Sylvie plays a part in Loki’s game, but she’s not the pawn. She represents something else, as we discover in an episode written by Bisha K. Ali, “Lamentis,” when Sylvie and Loki become traveling companions. Initially this is a matter of survival, since Loki inadvertently trap the two of them on a doomed planet where they have no choice but to stick together, get to know each other and, crucially, learn to trust others who earn that honor.

What Loki discovers about Sylvie humbles him. She bristles at being called a Loki, first of all, which is why she named herself. She has a singular, self-taught power to enchant people, a magical talent beyond Loki’s imagining. Her superior fighting skills, her strategic expertise and supreme logic outstrip his own, especially given his instinct to betray allies in the hope of gaining the upper hand. Loki may be a creature of guile, but Sylvie relies on skill, intelligence and wit. Hence, she’s not the Loki who slips away or backstabs. She’s the one that stands against the impossible and tries to control it.

It is true that Sylvie is central to Loki’s evolution from simple, narcissistic troublemaker to some version of a chaotic neutral white hat – but not for stereotypically gendered reasons. She doesn’t bewitch him with supposed “feminine wiles,” although Mobius (Owen Wilson) interprets the bond they forge as a sort of twisted love. Instead, her bravery and ingenuity are what Loki finds to be fearsome, wonderful and, as he tells the other Lokis who grimace at the thought of her, makes her legitimately different.

DiMartino’s casting in “Loki” was announced long before the series premiered, but keeping the nature of who or what she would be playing a secret for most of two episodes speaks to the character’s importance – even if, Frigga forbid, she doesn’t make it into the next adventure. I do hope she does.

Trickster goddesses exist outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and across multiple cultures’ mythologies but, and here’s a real shocker, they are far fewer in number compared to their male counterparts. And it’s the gods of mischief, not goddesses that are familiar to most people – Coyote, Anansi, Loki, Bugs Bunny. Yes, the cartoon counts.

Of course, when you open the concept of a trickster to interpretation, many more characters and figures qualify. Conceptually tricksters like Loki are gender-fluid beings. He’s transformed into Lady Loki in the comic books but, and this is key, he always returns to his male form.

Sylvie is, if not unique, then at least unexpected in that she wears her version of Loki’s suit and horns as a Marvel character and a woman. This also grants her a place of power in a cinematic universe that granted a solo film to one woman Avenger, Captain Marvel, after the major male players on the team received several outings, and is giving another, Black Widow, her due after her death in the original timeline.

Being a girl or a woman who loves comic books means navigating stories about mighty women through whom we might vicariously play out our wildest power fantasies, who tend to be written and drawn by men. Better custodians of these characters imbue them with substance and fascinating interiority, but even then they tend to be stuffed into hypersexualized forms wearing too-tight clothing.

However, like Sam Wilson in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” she also exists to question our definition of what makes a hero (including critiquing the uncomfortable outfit she’s been stuck with). Being forced to raise herself at the ends of a thousand worlds to hide from the universe’s supposed champions taught her a few lessons about who or what is truly just – which she shares with Mobius when he mourns being wrong about being one of “the good guys.” She points out that the TVA was annihilating entire worlds and orphaning children like her.

Then he tries to engage in false equivalency, pointing out that she did her own share of annihilating. “You hunted me like a dog,” she says coldly, shutting him down.

Hiddleston’s Loki comes to realize that the characteristics that have long defined what it means to be him – a talent for deceit, self-preservation, escape and betrayal – are not virtues. This understanding comes from being with Sylvie, a woman who was neither defined nor coddled like Loki or the rest of his kind. Nobody told Sylvie she shouldn’t be anything other than what she is, so she created herself. Eventually she wound up stealing a show with a man’s name in the title, making it as much about her as it is about him. That, friends, is a goddess-level trickster move.

New episodes of “Loki” stream Wednesdays on Disney Plus.

Dean Cain slams “wokeness and anti-American-ism” in new Captain America comic

Dean Cain, best known for once playing Superman on the ’90s TV series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” wants a word on the new Captain America comic book miniseries, “United States of Captain America.”

In a Tuesday Fox News appearance that’s been making the rounds on right-wing media this week, Cain decried “wokeness ” and “anti-American-ism” in the latest comics, joining a chorus of conservatives criticizing the story for depicting Steve Rogers questioning the reality of the “American Dream.”

“I love the concept of Captain America, but I am so tired of this wokeness and anti-Americanism,” Cain said. “In my opinion, America is the greatest country in history. It’s not perfect. We are constantly striving for a more perfect union, but I believe she’s the most fair, equitable country anyone’s ever seen, and that’s why people are clamoring to get here from all over the globe.”

Now, patriotism can be healthy when it’s aspirational, but there’s no way to “strive for a more perfect union,” as Cain claims he wants to, when you reject any and all reality checks and accountability as “cancel culture” and “wokeness.”

Cain goes on to call himself a “revolutionary” for the somehow radical act of supporting America, a country with a long history of and present-day very real problem of rampant nationalism. “Do these people ever travel outside of America? Do they go to other countries where they have to deal with governments who aren’t anywhere near as fair as the United States? I don’t think they do,” he said. “I do it all the time, and I kiss the soil when I get back.”

Cain’s segment spent whining about comic books actually buries the lede, which is, shockingly enough, that he hasn’t even read “United States of Captain America.” All he really knows about it is that Steve does question the American Dream, but for all Cain knows, subsequently embarks on a patriotic journey to make the Dream accessible to everyone, or at least not just white men.

Still, while Cain’s rant was remarkably bizarre, even by the standard of Fox News, and presents an image of him kissing the ground that none of us really wanted to picture, his obsession with American exceptionalism isn’t exactly rare. Cain sees America’s government as more “fair” than any other country’s because of his apparent ability to pass as white (he has partial Japanese ancestry), maleness and wealth have shielded him from the harshness of our legal system, criminal justice system, and undemocratic voting barriers. Many people who have never experienced these oppressions firsthand, and for that matter, never read the very comic books that inspire unhinged rants like Cain’s, will forever see any criticism of their privilege as an attack.

First Black American national spelling bee winner is a basketball legend too

So, what were you doing when you were 14?

On Thursday night, 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde became the first Black American winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in its nearly 100-year history. But, shockingly enough, spelling is just one of several of Avant-garde’s stunning talents and interests. She also holds the Guinness World Record for most bounce juggles in a minute, as well as two other world records for the art of dribbling multiple basketballs at once. Avant-garde has even previously appeared in a commercial alongside NBA star Steph Curry, who congratulated her on her win Friday morning.

Avant-garde’s Instagram is rife with videos of her basketball mastery, and she told CNN shortly after her spelling bee victory that one aspiration of hers is to coach in the NBA. The NBA would be lucky to have her — but they’d be competing with her other aspirations toward working at NASA, or potentially neuroscience and gene-editing.

Zaila Avant-garde ♥️ pic.twitter.com/uY6w1WLfWH

— Supreme (@SupremeStreet) July 9, 2021

Shortly after being crowned the 2021 spelling bee champion, Avant-garde told CNN “it felt really good to win,” because she had “been working on it for like two years.” In other words, while most of us were trying to bake our ways out of the pandemic, Avant-garde was learning to spell the entire English dictionary.

“To actually win the whole thing was like a dream come true,” she told CNN on Friday. “I felt like in the moment I snapped out of a surreal dream.”

What’s next for Avant-garde? In her own words, anything, really. “I’ll find something else to do,” she said. “Trust me.”

Avant-garde’s victory comes after last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was canceled due to the pandemic. To win her title, Avant-garde competed against hundreds of other spellers ages nine to 15, hailing from the U.S., the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana and Japan. Her crown came with a $50,000 cash prize, as well as recognition and congratulations from First Lady Jill Biden, who celebrated all of the Thursday night competition’s finalists.

The multiverse is a common plot point in shows like “Rick & Morty” and “Loki.” But is it real?

Our age of pop culture is defined by its mega-franchises: Remakes, reboots, soft reboots, spinoffs and the behemoth literally known as a “cinematic universe” have gobbled up massive chunks of our movie, television, literary and musical landscapes.

Not surprisingly, the fictional realms we create with our imaginations have also begun using an intriguing scientific concept to ground their sprawling fantasy universes in the real world: The idea that we may live in a multiverse, meaning a larger plane of existence in which our universe is merely one of many.

Two of the most popular series in America are leaning heavily into their own brand-specific multiverse theories. The television show “Rick & Morty” has used them to expand its core mythology, break new narrative ground in science fiction and offer sharp social satire. Another television series, “Loki,” uses a multiverse-based storyline to retcon the protagonist’s post-“Avengers” story, establish him as a narrative force independent of the “Thor” film franchise and transition the character from big screen to small. From a cultural perspective, multiverses are unquestionably real and successful.

But what is the scientific side of the story — and does it hold up?

What is cosmic inflation?

Before we can dive into science fiction, we must understand that science fact is often just as full of holes as the Swiss cheese-like narrative of your average “Star Wars” movie. Cosmologists, for instance, found that the Big Bang could not explain seeming mathematical impossibilities in the cosmic microwave background radiation that fills up all space. The laws of thermodynamics seemed to be violated when we studied patterns in the universe’s temperature. Similarly, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity could not explain why the universe is so flat when accepted laws of physics indicate that it should curve.

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Cosmic inflation plugs up these and other problems — although not all scientists agree with it. (The idea of a multiverse is also controversial because most of the theories of their existence could never be disproven, and scientists are trained to be wary of non-falsifiable hypotheses.)

Cosmic inflation holds that, less than 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang caused the universe to expand from an infinitesimal singularity roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the universe underwent a very brief period — literally fractions of a moment — during which it grew to 10^26 times its original size. After that, one argument holds, began a process known as the theory of eternal inflation: that the universe will continue to expand, well, eternally. Except, that’s not exactly true — there are points where the endless expansion of our universe seems to have slowed, or even come to a halt.

If true, one theory holds that when inflation stops happening in a certain location, this may signal a collision between two universes, which may be shaped like “bubbles.”

Each of these bubble universes could contain life, but we would never be able to visit them — not that it would necessarily be a good idea to do so, since the laws of physics could be entirely different there.

There are other ways that you can start at the Big Bang and end with the belief in multiple universes. Some researchers believe that there was a mirror image universe created at the Big Bang, with the alternate one exploding backward in time and making the pre-Bang universe effectively an echo of the post-Bang universe. If only one universe was created by the Big Bang and it is destined to expand forever, the fact that matter can only arrange itself into a fixed number of patterns means that everything which exists now would inevitably reappear at other points in space and time. Some science enthusiasts point to quantum mechanics, which holds that subatomic particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously but we can only observe them one at a time, and speculate that with every outcome we observe, alternative outcomes occur in other worlds.

What do we know about possible alternate universes?

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says that there are four possible ways that a parallel universe could exist — but if the laws of physics there are fundamentally different from our own, all bets are off in terms of making an informed guess about what it might look like.

A parallel universe, however, could also be basically the same as our own in terms of its physical laws and life forms. If so, there is the possibility that a parallel universe has the same fundamental laws of physics as our universe but different bylaws — or that those laws were applied to different initial conditions.

In a sense, that means even if “Rick & Morty” and “Loki” get some of the science wrong (at least as we currently understand it), there is no reason they couldn’t add new material to their stories to make it right.

It is also possible that science will someday come around to seeing things the way that the creators of “Rick & Morty” and “Loki” do. It wouldn’t be the first time that science fiction predicted the future.

Barring that, of course, they can continue to follow the example set by the movie “Avengers: Endgame” and simply use scientific ideas to move the story where they think it needs to go.

The beautiful thing about art is that, unlike science, the artists get to make the rules.

Patricia Barber’s hot jazz summer starts with her vulnerable version of “All in Love Is Fair”

With the summer in full swing, music lovers might consider cooling things down with jazz singer Patricia Barber’s mellow cover version of Stevie Wonder’s “All in Love Is Fair.” As a standout track from her forthcoming album “Clique,” Barber’s take on Wonder’s iconic tune will find listeners enthralled with the veteran artist’s ethereal performance.

In Barber’s hands, “All in Love Is Fair” takes on a classic feel. As she told me during a recent interview, “I believe we don’t hear the song often enough because it is difficult to sing technically and emotionally. The structure and harmony lead the ear to a fragile apex where your voice is suspended in all its strength or weakness.” But even for a performer of Barber’s caliber, “All in Love Is Fair” presents special challenges. “If you pull back,” she points out, “everybody will hear it; if your voice cracks, everybody will hear it, if you change from chest voice to head voice, everybody will hear it; if you are lying, or absent, everybody will hear that, too.”

With her latest album, Barber assays one classic cut from the Great American Songbook after another. On “Clique,” which will be released on August 6, Barber tries her hand at such stalwart compositions as Lee Hazlewood’s “This Town,” Alec Wilder’s “Trouble Is a Man,” and Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser.” And when it comes to show tunes, Barber serves up such standards as Lerner and Loewe’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Shall We Dance?” In addition to her vocals and piano, Barber’s jazz trio features Jon Deitemyer on drums and Patrick Mulcahy on acoustic bass, supplemented with Jim Gailloreto on tenor saxophone and Neal Alger on acoustic guitar.

When it came to recording “All in Love Is Fair,” Barber felt especially vulnerable, “as if I’m stranded with a piano on a breakaway ice floe.” Covering Wonder’s song requires “transparency, emptiness, a feeling that you’re close to a precipice. Sometimes in concert I start a song and fully expect my band to come in at some point, but to my surprise, they don’t. They leave me out there on that ice floe all by myself. It is an ethos of this trio. We embrace ‘silence.'”

And it is within those silences that “All in Love Is Fair” truly comes to life. To her great credit, Barber has made a particular effort to accent quietude in her work. “Capturing silence is a high art that comes with work and experience,” she told me. “At home, I practiced outlining the harmony while playing the fewest amount of notes.”

Listeners have a lot to look forward to with “Clique”‘s upcoming release. “The songs from ‘Clique’ are as fun to play as I hope they are to hear,” Barber reports. “They are filled with rhythmic, harmonic, and lyrical hooks, the musical devices that made them hits. We can lean into these hooks, play them inside out, apply a jazz musician’s sophistication, or not—just let the rock and roll chords do their seductive thing.”

With “All in Love Is Fair,” music fans will surely enjoy a taste of things to come.

Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state calls for investigation of Trump, Giuliani and others

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has called for an official investigation of Donald Trump and his allies’ “intense efforts to interfere” with the results of the 2020 presidential election, suggesting that Trump and those working for him may have violated state laws by attempting to influence Arizona’s vote count.

Hobbs’ demand came in a Friday letter to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, urging him to investigate Trump along with former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward. Hobbs alleged that all four have attempted to convince Arizona officials to tamper with the state’s ballots, some of which are currently being re-examined (for at least the third time) in the Republican-backed “forensic audit.”

That audit of votes in Maricopa County, Arizona’s major population center, is currently being conducted by the Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, which has no previous experience in elections and was founded by an overt proponent of the “Stop the Steal” movement.

“Local reporting recently uncovered intense efforts to interfere with the tabulation of ballots and canvass of the 2020 election in Maricopa County,” Hobbs tweeted on Wednesday. “In Arizona, interfering with election officials is a felony.”

In her letter, which she posted to Twitter, Hobbs reminded Brnovich that he is charged under Arizona law with investigating anyone who “knowingly interferes in any manner with an officer of such election in the discharge of the officer’s duty, or who induces an officer of an election … to violate or refuse to comply with the officer’s duty or any law regulating the election.”

Hobbs specifically detailed two incidents reported by the Arizona Republic in which Ward called upon the chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors to “stop the counting.” Ward told him: “I know you don’t want to be remembered as the guy who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election.” Following the report, Hobbs tweeted that her alleged exchange with the chairman was “BS.”

In another instance, county Supervisor Bill Gates received a phone call on Christmas Eve from Giuliani, who left a potentially ominous voicemail message. “Bill, it’s Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer,” Giuliani said. “If you get a chance, would you please give me a call? I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you. Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans sort of are both in this, kind of, situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve this for everybody.”

Hobbs’ letter comes amid significant tension between her and Brnovich. Last month, the Republican-dominated state legislature stripped Hobbs of her authority to handle election-related lawsuits, handing it instead to Brnovich as part of a recent piece of budget legislation. The bill claims to address “election integrity” in the state’s election system, although there has been no evidence that the official results in Arizona were flawed.

Hobbs said the legislative measure was “was unlike anything I have ever seen before,” adding: “The sheer amount of policy issues that were tacked on to the budget in the middle of the night is a shocking abuse of power.”

Over the past months, the Arizona election audit has significantly raised both Hobbs’ and Brnovich’s national profiles. Last month, the secretary of state announced her plans to run for governor, presumably against Republican incumbent Doug Ducey. Brnovich, meanwhile, plans to run for U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly.

Brnovich recently defended the Grand Canyon State’s controversial voting laws before the U.S. Supreme Court. These laws, which ban the use of provisional ballots and “ballot harvesting” in most instances, have been attacked by voting rights advocates as efforts to suppress Black and Latino voters.

Great work, useful idiots of the media: Most Americans buy the unsubstantiated “lab leak” theory

Here’s most important thing to understand about the idea that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab: It’s not very likely, and most of the science still points toward natural origins, meaning random transmission from an animal species. As with Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction,” which led to the Iraq War, evidence for the “lab leak” theory is mostly right-wing wishful thinking, tied to a couple of thin pieces of not-really-evidence, and held together with the duct tape of speculation. Meanwhile, evidence for a natural origin, while far from complete, is scientifically sound and fits with everything that’s currently known about the evolution of coronaviruses. When you really dig into the competing theories, it becomes clear that while “lab leak” makes for a good TV plot, there’s not much else going for it. The theory of animal-to-human transmission, while less dramatic and perhaps less emotionally satisfying, is the likelier one.

Yet we now have a Politico-Harvard poll released Friday morning that shows Americans are “almost twice as likely to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in China than human contact with an infected animal.” And while the lab-leak theory has been hyped by Trump apologists looking to distract from the ex-president’s massive mishandling of the pandemic, the buy-in for this unlikely theory is not particularly partisan. Politico reports that “59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats” believe the lab-leak narrative, while only 28 percent said the virus came “from an infected animal.” This is a dramatic change from March 2020, when only 29% of Americans — basically far-right authoritarians — endorsed the lab-leak theory.

So what happened to change people’s minds? Well, it wasn’t persuasive evidence. On that front, nothing has changed. No one has produced any biological evidence to dispute last year’s findings from the Tulane University School of Medicine, which “determined that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes by comparing the genetic sequences and protein structures of other coronaviruses to those of new virus.” There have been no whistleblowers, unless you count the Australian scientist who worked until November 2019 at the virology lab in Wuhan, and who says “it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab,” which is to say she saw nothing sinister or careless.

The scientific evidence points in the same direction that it did a year ago, as Lindsay Beyerstein argues in a science-heavy, deeply technical piece for the New Republic: “20 years of post-SARS research into the origins and spread of bat coronaviruses point to a natural origin for Covid-19,” and the supposed lab-leak evidence “is neither new nor compelling.”

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It wasn’t evidence that changed people’s minds. It was irresponsible media hype of the “lab leak” theory, brought on by a major push from right-wing conspiracy theorists, and also some gullible pundits and journalists who let themselves be used by the right.

The whole thing really started with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who has been pushing the lab-leak theory from the beginning of the pandemic. He was, correctly, dismissed as a racist conspiracy theorist for months by the mainstream media. This is the same guy who believes that China is hosting the Winter Olympics so it can create super-soldiers by stealing the supposedly superior DNA of American downhill skiers and Canadian hockey players.

But then the Wall Street Journal got in on the act in May, publishing a story about three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developing a respiratory disease in the fall of 2019. After that, it was on, in a way strikingly reminiscent of the hype around WMDs during the lead-up to war in Iraq. As I documented at Salon, a number of supposedly liberal commentators, more interested in proving their supposed fair-mindedness than looking at the actual evidence, started scolding the mainstream press for supposed “liberal bias,” as if the press was ignoring solid information because it came from conservative sources. (Notably, many of the people behind this pressure campaign — including Substacker Matt Yglesias and New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait — also championed the “WMDs in Iraq” theory.)

Instead, the truth was that the press was ignoring crank conspiracy theorists who have no evidence, not out of “bias” but because that’s actually sound journalistic practice. As Beyerstein points out, “the Journal’s reporting actually made the case for a lab leak weaker, relative to what the State Department [under Trump] had previously claimed,” because all it revealed was “a story of three people going to the doctor with flu-like symptoms during flu season.” It’s also unclear how putting this unsupported accusation up for “debate” by cable-news talking heads will get us any closer to the truth of COVID-19’s origins, especially when the “debate” will include people like Cotton, who are happy to tell shameless lies in public.

But the browbeating from Republicans and their useful idiots on the left worked. Mainstream media started to report that the “the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible,” when all that had really changed was the amount of chatter about it. The Washington Post issued a correction, removing the word “debunked” from previous reporting on Cotton’s conspiracy theories, which caused an avalanche of gloating coverage from right-wing media. The term “lab leak” exploded all over headlines and cable-news chyrons, with very few news consumers reading or listening further to hear the details, such as the fact that there isn’t any substantive evidence, just lots of speculation.

I can’t believe this has to be said, but speculation isn’t evidence. But what the right understands — and the press apparently doesn’t — is that most news consumers don’t do a great job of distinguishing speculation from evidence, especially when it’s presented in a bunch of scientific jargon. Instead, they just absorb phrases like “lab leak,” assume that must be a fact, and get on with their day. Which is exactly what hawks hoping to stoke conflict with China are counting on.

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The Chinese government is authoritarian, secretive and sinister, make no mistake. From the beginning of the pandemic, it has acted like authoritarian governments do, by concealing the truth and deflecting blame as much as possible. Notably, this was also how Donald Trump reacted from the first moment he was told about COVID-19. That was why he put so much effort into trying to bully health authorities out of collecting and reporting COVID-19 case numbers.

But the fact that Trump lied his ass off about COVID-19 doesn’t mean he actually created the virus. That’s the kind of speculative leap that the media should avoid, absent real, substantive evidence. Yes, even when we’re talking about China and not Trump. This new poll, suggesting that most Americans now believe a theory that remains unsupported by any actual evidence, should make clear why it’s important not to go hog-wild the way the press did over this.

As the “WMDs in Iraq” fiasco shows, the stakes are extremely serious when speculation about foreign adversaries is allowed to dwarf actual facts in the press. Tom Cotton is not interested in scientific inquiry. He wants an escalation of conflict with China, the kind that could lead to an immensely destructive or even apocalyptic war. Cotton is also a liar and a conspiracy theorist. The initial impulse of the press, which was to disregard his yapping and hold out for real evidence, was the correct one. But once again, the media caved to right-wing pressure, bending over backward to entertain unproven theories and appear “balanced.” And since it’s entirely possible that no definitive proof of the COVID-19 virus’s origins will ever emerge, we may be stuck with this unsubstantiated narrative for years or decades to come.

What the media gets wrong about red-state vaccine hesitancy

In May, the late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” aired a public service announcement that told viewers to “grow the f*ck up” and take the Covid-19 vaccine. In the clip, a Trump-supporting White woman is belittled for spreading misinformation about vaccination risks via Facebook. Viewers are mocked for listening to her over the advice of health care workers who “are smarter than we are.”

The tone of this PSA is consistent with a broader trend in mainstream media coverage of vaccination rates. Narratives about politically conservative White populations commonly assert that belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories have led these groups to underestimate risk. Articles portray these populations as being anti-science while highlighting absurd examples, such as an individual motivated to reject the vaccine simply for the purpose of trolling the political left. This narrative reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity and empathy regarding the complexity underneath these beliefs. By contrast, articles about unvaccinated minority populations have rightly focused on underlying causes of hesitancy, exploring legitimate grievances such as historical and contemporary racism. Explanations beyond hesitancy are often mentioned, including economic factors, structural barriers, immigration status, and lack of health insurance.

Even essays that strive for nuance often reinforce a moral dichotomy between unvaccinated White conservatives and minorities. A May report from the prominent health analytics firm Surgo Ventures, discussed in a New York Times op-ed, contrasts “Covid Skeptics” (a group Surgo previously labelled “Conspiracy Believers“) with “System Distrusters.” Covid Skeptics hail from states like Arkansas and Alabama — conservative strongholds — and believe theories such as “microchips are implanted with the Covid vaccine.”

On the other hand, System Distrusters come from progressive bastions like Washington, D.C., and Maryland and believe members of their race aren’t treated fairly by the health care system. The op-ed emphasizes that this underserved second group must be reached as a matter of equity. Another New York Times opinion piece notes that “For Republicans, [hesitancy] is connected to a general skepticism of government and science. For Black and Hispanic Americans, it appears to stem from the country’s legacy of providing substandard medical treatment, and sometimes doing outright harm, to minorities.” Although the piece goes on to cite class as a common factor, it nevertheless defines Republicans by the superficial expression of their hesitancy, while Blacks and Hispanics are defined by the underlying source of that hesitancy.

In truth, fringe theories around vaccines have long existed across the political and racial spectrum. The pre-Covid anti-vaccination movement defied polarization, with deep roots in liberal circles. Among the 12 people the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch flagged as most responsible for anti-vaccine online content are members of a range of political and racial backgrounds, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rizza Islam, and Dr. Rashid Buttar. Louis Farrakhan — the head of the Nation of Islam — advised Black people not to take Covid-19 vaccines because of links to Bill Gates and governmental sterilization plans.

Yet, rarely is vaccine hesitancy in minority communities attributed to popular belief in these conspiracy theories and misinformation. Rather than dwelling on these most extreme (often non-representative) examples, journalists take the extra step of looking at context such as the “distrust and social alienation” that foments openness to conspiratorial views. This approach makes sense given that individuals often embrace conspiracy theories because of pre-existing distrust of vaccines or medical systems, not the other way around.

If we take this same nuanced approach with unvaccinated conservative White people — and scratch the surface beneath the conspiracy theory and anti-science explanation even a little — we find that their underlying characteristics are similar to those of unvaccinated minority groups.

Even the label “conservative Whites” is misleading. Class is far more predictive of vaccine hesitancy than either politics or race — with working class White people being twice as likely to be hesitant as White college graduates. Poor White people expressing hesitancy typically have strong religious beliefs, face disproportionate economic and access barriers to vaccination, and have legitimate reasons to mistrust the medical system. Historically, the same sterilization programs that the Nation of Islam members evoke also purposefully targeted poor White people. When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” in a Supreme Court ruling upholding Virginia’s involuntary sterilization law, he was describing a poor White woman with no mental impairment.

More recently, the opioid epidemic ravaged suburban and rural Whites. As detailed in Sam Quinones’ “Dreamland,” the opioid epidemic was caused by the entire health care system pushing painkillers like OxyContin. Mass prescription of opiates has been cited as the core cause of rising mortality among poor Whites, relative to other demographics. Arkansas — the state with the most “Covid Skeptics,” according to the Surgo Ventures report — is second in the nation in dispensing opioids. Other states such as Alabama and Louisiana also significantly exceed the national average on both lists.

Vaccine hesitant conservatives are also disproportionately rural. This creates unique access problems, including shortages of health care workers to administer the vaccines and long driving distances to vaccination sites.

My point isn’t that we should weigh political and racial grievances, or declare that one group’s low vaccination rates are most justified than another’s. (Mortality data alone suggest that ethnic and racial minorities still have the most objective reasons for distrusting the medical system). Rather, my point is that the suspicions felt in Black and Brown communities likely aren’t all that different from the suspicions felt by White people. In each case, focusing on outlandish vaccine conspiracy theories glosses over genuine underlying concerns. In each case, vaccine hesitant Americans are being asked to take a drug developed at unprecedented speed under unfathomable pressure using novel techniques based on short-term studies.

Taking such a vaccine requires trust in the medical system and in society more broadly. Most unvaccinated groups have been let down by both, and a connection can easily be traced between vaccine hesitancy and those failures. That dynamic deserves to be approached with empathy, not ridicule. Unfortunately, the mainstream media seems to be treating some groups as worthy of humanizing contextualization, while implying that the others are motivated by rank buffoonery.

* * *

Timothy DeLizza is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. He was awarded the 2020 Barry Lopez Nonfiction Prize for his essay “Legally Speaking, Rats Aren’t Even Animals.”

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

White nationalists prep for “physical” altercation with security at Dallas CPAC conference

DALLAS —White nationalist and Unite the Right attendee Nicholas Fuentes, de facto leader of the ultra-far-right “groyper” movement, has announced that he plans to attending a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering this weekend in Dallas, although he has not been welcomed at previous CPAC events.

A years-long feud between Fuentes and CPAC organizers appeared to escalate on Wednesday after Fuentes’ declaration.

“I’m going to CPAC in Dallas on Saturday,” he tweeted to his loyal “groyper army,” many of whom responded with excitement. “Well, most likely, I’ll be getting physically removed from CPAC in Dallas on Saturday, but you can come watch if you want,” he added.

“I will be there! Can’t wait!” one follower responded to Fuentes’ tweet. Another wrote, “groyper swarm incoming.” In other online forums reviewed by Salon, many of Fuentes’ followers posted plans to attend CPAC and partake in a “White Boy Summer” meetup in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Since 2019, Fuentes has made a point of showing up at CPAC gatherings, likely to create friction and push the bounds of acceptable rhetoric at the American Conservative Union’s events, at times making participants and organizers distinctly uncomfortable.

This year will apparently be no different. At CPAC gatherings both last year and this year, Fuentes has staged his own competing event, dubbed the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), designed to make the more “mainstream” conservatives of CPAC appear to be RINOs or “cucks.”

During the CPAC convention in Florida earlier in 2021, Fuentes attempted to enter the event along with a group of 25 or so fellow white nationalists. They were denied entry.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes attempted to get into CPAC this afternoon, but a CPAC organizer wasn't pleased. pic.twitter.com/Phj1Fxe3UN

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) February 28, 2021

Fuentes didn’t return a Salon request for comment on this story.

Jared Holt, a resident fellow at Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a former reporter for Right Wing Watch, discussed the fraught relationship between Fuentes and CPAC in an interview with Salon this week. “Nick Fuentes and his followers seem to only go to those conferences to antagonize other participants,” Hold said in a phone interview. “It creates situations that have resulted in them being kicked out of the conference. I imagine if they have similar plans in Dallas … their time inside the conference will be short-lived.”

Holt added that Fuentes and the “groypers” see CPAC as a way to “boost their own visibility” and attempt to “siphon off” attendees from more mainstream conservative groups.

More mainstream Republican and conservative pundits, including fervent Donald Trump supporters, generally want nothing to do with Fuentes’ overtly racist rhetoric, while he derides them as “shills.” Some degree of confrontation is more than likely this weekend in Dallas, where Trump himself will deliver the keynote address on Sunday afternoon.

As the Delta variant spreads, Republican reluctance will mean thousands more deaths

There was some excellent news this week about the pandemic. According to modeling done by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. vaccination program is a rousing success. They found that “without a vaccination program, by the end of June 2021 there would have been approximately 279,000 additional deaths and up to 1.25 million additional hospitalizations” and that “if the U.S. had achieved only half the actual pace of vaccination, there would have been nearly 121,000 additional deaths and more than 450,000 additional hospitalizations.”

This is a welcome sign that the richest, most powerful country in the world can actually still do something. A year ago, after we watched the disastrous federal response to the crisis, I wouldn’t have bet on that. But it turns out that despite the horrific malfeasance that led to more than 600,000 deaths, the big bet the Trump administration placed on the vaccines paid off. The Biden administration’s much better grasp of how to make the government work as it should led to a rollout of the vaccines that managed to get a majority of adults vaccinated with at least one shot and created a system within weeks in which most people who are willing to be vaccinated have easy access.

These vaccines truly are a marvel of modern science. The MRNA technology underlying the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was being developed before the pandemic hit, but that event supercharged their progress and brought them to the public in record time. Other vaccines using more traditional techniques came online quickly as well, in in all cases, efficacy and safety are beyond question. They are also free to everyone, which may be the most miraculous thing of all!

This is all such good news that it’s simply mind-boggling that Donald Trump isn’t out there touting these vaccines as the greatest accomplishment of his administration and exhorting his followers to rush out and get them immediately. Unlike 99% of his relentless boasting, it’s not even a lie. Operation Warp Speed was a success. But of course he’s not doing that.

Sure, Trump takes credit for the vaccines as if he had cooked them up himself in the White House kitchen, and frequently suggests that millions more would have died if not for him. But at Trump’s recent rallies, his crowd doesn’t cheer when he brings it up. If there’s anything to which Trump is sensitive (and this is pretty much the only thing), he definitely notices not getting a good reaction from the crowd. Now he’s trying to find a way to work both sides of the issue:

So this is how he's going to straddle the "I am the great vaccine God" and "nobody should take the Devil vaccines" MAGA problem. https://t.co/QYYzTlIFOG

— digby @digby56.bsky.social (@digby56) June 17, 2021

Unfortunately, millions of his followers were convinced by his behavior during his last year in office that COVID was not a crisis. No matter what he says today, they remain convinced that the virus was a political attack, a hoax or simply overblown, regardless of the monumental body count. And then there’s the relentless disinformation campaign coming from right-wing media. Here’s a little taste:

On Wednesday night this week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewed a doctor who proclaimed that “unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines.” That’s the sort of dangerous fear-mongering conservative viewers see every day, even as thousands of them are still dying.

It appears that’s about to get worse. We are seeing the beginnings of another COVID surge among the unvaccinated, and the largest cohort among them are Trump voters in red states with low vaccination rates. The Kaiser Foundation reported this week:

One of the main factors driving differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates across the country is partisanship. Our surveys consistently find that Democrats are much more likely to report having been vaccinated than Republicans, and Republicans are much more likely to say that they definitely do not want to get vaccinated. In May, just as vaccine supply was starting to outstrip demand, we examined average vaccination rates by county and found that rates were lower in counties that voted for Trump in the 2020 Presidential election compared to those that voted for Biden. Now, two months later, we find that not only does this remain the case, the gap has grown.

This is happening as the CDC reports that more than half the new cases in the U.S. are caused by the far more transmissible and deadlier Delta variant. It’s spreading rapidly among the unvaccinated and many are getting severely ill. (The good news that the vaccines are still effective in preventing serious illness from this strain.) In Missouri, where only 40% of people are even partly vaccinated, the ICUs are filling up again. NBC News quoted one doctor there saying his patients are “shocked” when they end up in the hospital and many of them have regrets. He said many tell him “that they wish that they knew they were going to end up in the hospital this sick and they would have made a different choice and got the vaccine.”

CNN recently reported on a Georgetown University study that found five undervaccinated COVID clusters in the South and Midwest which could put the whole U.S. at risk should a new variant arise within the human petri dish they are providing. According to the Atlantic’s Ed Yong, most scientists agree that the longer the virus circulates this way, the more likely that is to happen.

These people are held captive by beliefs that make them vulnerable to a deadly disease and you have to feel some sympathy for that. But they are not just putting themselves in danger, and at this point there really is no acceptable excuse. This country is awash in vaccines, and we are so spoiled that millions of people have to be bribed into getting them — and even then many refuse.

Meanwhile, as Yong points out, the rest of the world is literally dying for them:

Of the 3 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide, about 70 percent have gone to just six countries; Delta has already been detected in at least 85. While America worries about the fate of states where around 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, barely 10 percent of the world’s population has achieved that status, including just 1 percent of Africa’s. The coronavirus is now tearing through southern Africa, South America, and Central and Southeast Asia. The year is only half over, but more people have already been infected and killed by the coronavirus in 2021 than in 2020. And new variants are still emerging. Lambda, the latest to be recognized by the WHO, is dominant in Peru and spreading rapidly in South America.

The most sickening irony is that many countries that did so much better than the U.S. did in controlling the virus originally are now being battered by the stronger variants and can’t get the vaccines. It is shameful that we have to beg so many Americans to do it.

I’m with Dr. Fauci on this one:

Sizzling in the South: Gulf Coast communities fight for equitable climate solutions

Millions of tourists still flock to Miami’s prized beaches, but each year the sea steals a little more of those fabled sands. South Florida could see more than two feet of sea-level rise in the next 40 years, according to the region’s scientists.

For a city built on porous limestone and racial inequality, this reality is already seeping in. With such immediate concerns, Miami has become a frontline community in the fight against climate change.

But climate is not the city’s only challenge.

Miami-Dade is a majority-minority county with a gaping wealth gap. It’s also part of a state with a history of environmental exploitation and a climate-change record ranging from lackluster to downright hostile.

As city leaders raise funds and develop game plans to tackle climate challenges, local groups are pushing to make sure the region’s most vulnerable populations aren’t left behind.

The work is part of a growing effort across the South to tackle both climate change and inequity — and to show the importance of local, community-driven action in states where climate change concerns have taken a backseat. To understand more about how Miami can make climate resilience equitable and how communities are banding together across the conservative Gulf Coast, The Revelator spoke to Zelalem Adefris, vice president of policy and advocacy for Catalyst Miami, a nonprofit working with low-wealth communities in Miami-Dade County.

Given the threats facing Miami, what would climate resilience for the city look like to you?

Climate resilience is typically defined as being able to bounce back from a challenge. But I think our baseline is not necessarily where we want to be in terms of the wealth, prosperity and the ability of our communities to thrive.

For example, as sea-level rise affects the coast, people on higher elevation land, which typically are lower-income areas because they don’t have the coastal views, are now seeing housing costs rise exponentially and their communities are being targeted by developers. We call it climate gentrification.

We already have an affordable housing crisis here in South Florida. We have a lot of luxury condos and vacation homes for the very wealthy and not enough housing stock for people that actually live here.

So I hope that in the process of achieving resilience, working on climate justice, making whatever changes we need to make in order to take climate action, we’re also able to up that baseline to a higher expectation for all of our households across the county so people aren’t going back to a pretty low quality of life and are instead will be better off as we move.

What’s the public’s perception of climate change?

I would say most people already see climate change happening in their neighborhoods, but they might not always know that it is climate change. We’ll talk to people about extreme heat and how Miami has added almost two months of summer — so days over 90 degrees — since 1970. People who have been here for that long recognize that, they felt that change and how the years have gotten significantly hotter. So we don’t find too much pushback because unfortunately it’s our lived reality. Our work is more like naming that reality.

What kind of support for solutions do you see from state and local governments?

We’ve been working with the local government for a really long time. They are getting on board and coming up with climate action plans and are a great partner of ours. Sometimes we need to push, but ultimately we work really well with them.

I would say at the state level, unfortunately, we’re seeing a lot of preemption. There are bills and legislation being passed to actually move a lot of local decision-making to the state level, especially around environmental issues like climate change and plastic.

And as you can imagine, the state does not really move the needle on these issues at nearly the level of our local governments.

Miami became one of the first cities to appoint a chief heat officer. That’s a pretty serious admission about how climate change is affecting the area. How is the city tackling the problem of an increase in dangerously hot days?

Jane Gilbert is the one appointed to that role. She’s actually the former chief resilience officer of the city of Miami, so we know her well. She is working with us and other partners on pushing policy and county programming to address heat. For outdoor heat, so far that effort includes stuff like more tree canopy and addressing concerns about waiting for public transit with a really inefficient bus system while people have no cover to protect them from the heat. We’re also hoping to expand outdoor heat efforts to protections for workers too, because we have an agricultural economy here.

And then there’s also indoor heat issues, so being able to afford your electricity bill, having functioning air conditioning, having a quality of housing in which you don’t have cracks in the wall that leak all your cool air — and your money — out into the heat.

How does your work fit into broader climate resilience efforts, or challenges, in southern states?

Gulf South for a Green New Deal is an initiative to try to get together folks from all the Gulf South states — Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi — to talk about strategies that are specific to our states.

I think having spaces for states in the South or other states with challenging legislative atmospheres is always good. It’s great to hear what’s coming out of states like California and New York, but it can be difficult sometimes here in Florida.

We don’t necessarily have the longstanding environmental institutions, but we do a good job of collaboration and leading with community voices first and community priorities. And we’ve had some powerful local wins throughout the years. I think anytime you see a conservative state making policy gains, there’s definitely something to learn from there.

In South Florida, since the state’s inception, there’s been an onslaught against the environment. Development has been prioritized in the entire history of the region, starting with the Everglades — you have to pave over the Everglades to even get here for the most part. So we have a legacy that needs to change.

But at the same time, for all of its existence, there’s also a legacy of people fighting for what’s right. That’s what we lean on as well.

Six months later: What have we learned from Jan. 6? Not enough to stop it from happening again

Six months have passed since the historic and horrible events of Jan. 6, 2021. What have we learned since then?

More than 550 members of Donald Trump’s attack force have been arrested, including nearly 40 charged with conspiracy. The ringleaders, including Donald Trump and his inner circle, who instigated, funded and organized the attack on the Capitol have not been punished. Given the Department of Justice’s timid approach to investigating and prosecuting the Trump regime’s many obvious crimes, it is unlikely they ever will be.

Trump and his Republican Party’s plot to overthrow the government by nullifying the results of the 2020 presidential election were far more extensive — and far more likely to succeed — than was previously known.

Public opinion polls show that a growing number of Americans simply want to “move on” from the events of Jan. 6. Predictably, this is especially true of Republicans.

There will be no bipartisan committee to investigate what happened that day. The Republican Party has obstructed such investigations because of its obvious guilt and complicity. Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will convene a select committee, which will presumably have less power and authority than a proper commission.

Those who want to move on have deluded themselves into the fantastic belief that climbing into the memory well will magically keep them safe. In reality, the memory well is a type of purgatory or prison.

In keeping with how fascism spreads in a failing democracy, Trump and his propagandists are now elevating right-wing terrorists into “heroes” and “political prisoners” who should be freed from prison immediately. But the most important fact remains unchanged: The events of Jan. 6 were a trial run, and proof of concept. If the Republican Party loses a presidential election in the future, we will in all probability see a second coup — and it will likely be successful.

These last six months have also been a time of public events, commemorations and other important dates that signal to an American story of violence, freedom won in blood, racism and white supremacy, destruction and creation, freedom dreams and authoritarian nightmares — with the color line intersecting it all.

Specifically, in that time we have seen the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa white-on-black race massacre, the one-year anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, the first Juneteenth to be a national holiday, and the first Memorial Day and Fourth of July since the Capitol attack.

On this, James Baldwin wrote in 1963 that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

In total, America’s unresolved history its and accompanying need for a moral reckoning gave birth to the befouled creature that is Trumpism and American neofascism — and continues to give it life. In the maelstrom of this half-year there was an important moment that received little attention, but that explains much about the events of Jan. 6, the motivations of the attackers and coup plotters, and the likelihood that such political violence will happen again.

On June 29, the House of Representatives voted to remove Confederate statues on display in the Capitol. All Democrats voted in support of the bill. Most Republicans voted against it. It will now go to the Senate where the Republicans will almost certainly kill it with the filibuster.

Of course, those who defend displaying Confederate statues in the home of American democracy, and in public places more generally, will summon up intellectually dishonest claims about how such objects represent “history” and “heritage,” perhaps even a “noble cause.” They may also offer nonsense claims that the treasonous cause of the Confederacy was about “states’ rights” instead of about protecting the vile institution of white-on-black chattel slavery.

The Confederacy was dedicated to white supremacy, racial authoritarianism and a particular kind of “white freedom” in which the human rights of Black and brown people were not to be respected. Today’s Republican Party — in which the Southern slaveocracy and Jim Crow South have been reborn — largely shares the same values and beliefs, albeit presented in a different (and less honest) form.

When Trump’s followers launched their lethal attack on the Capitol, some waved Confederate flags, which are symbols of white supremacy and hatred. The Trump attack force wore and displayed other white supremacist symbols and regalia. Many carried crosses to symbolize their commitment to the fascist “Christian identity” movement. It is no coincidence that open white supremacists including Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other right-wing paramilitary groups played such a prominent role on Jan. 6.

Trump’s attack force was not just attacking the rule of law and the Constitution, but also the idea of multiracial democracy itself. Those who have been arrested have repeatedly told law enforcement that they were acting out of “patriotism”. The traitors in the old Confederacy used similar language.

Because it can no longer win free and fair elections, the Jim Crow Republican Party is trying to keep Black and brown people from voting. To that end, in nearly all states Republicans have proposed anti-democracy laws that disproportionately target Black and brown people and other members of the Democratic Party’s base. This new Jim Crow apartheid is explicitly designed to subvert the people’s will and to rig elections so that Republicans — the world’s largest white supremacist political organization — literally cannot lose. As in the old Confederacy, the ultimate goal is to create a type of white “Christian” plutocracy and racial authoritarian state.

The Republican Party and the larger white right’s moral panic about “critical race theory” (which in practice means any substantive and truthful discussions of racial and social inequality) is an attempt to literally whitewash American history in the service of white supremacist fantasies. The Confederacy and its loyalists did much the same thing. That project continues in the present.

Moreover, what the Jim Crow Republicans and other neofascists now describe as “patriotic education” is in practice white supremacist Orwellian brainwashing. As seen in Florida and elsewhere, those who dissent from such a regime will be punished for thoughtcrimes.

The Republican Party’s commitment to the neo-Confederate cause is not something being imposed on its voters and followers by outside forces. Public opinion polls and other research shows that white Republicans (and especially Trump supporters) are committed to white racial authoritarianism, are afraid of the “browning of America.” and subscribe to the paranoid view that they are somehow being “replaced” by Black and brown people. These same fears motivated white Southerners during white-on-black slavery and through to the end of Reconstruction and beyond.

A 2019 Economist/YouGov poll reported that 53% of Republican voters believed Donald Trump was a better Republican president than Abraham Lincoln.

The thousands of Trumpists who attacked and overran the Capitol on Jan. 6 wore their signature red MAGA hats and other markers of loyalty to the Great Leader and his neofascist cause. Those red hats were not something outside of American history or entirely without precedent. More than a century ago their forefathers — in spirit, and in some cases literally as well — donned red shirts and other garments to symbolize their dedication to white power as they engaged in a campaign of terror against free Black Americans and their white allies during Reconstruction and after.

Writing at the Daily Kos, journalist David Neiwert connects that past to Trumpism and white supremacy.

Banning the Klan simply did not work. Southerners instead began forming “rifle clubs” whose purpose was in fact to sow political terror. The participants in these clubs began wearing bright blood-red shirts as a way of mocking the “bloody shirts” supposedly waved about by their Northern foes. Thus, the Red Shirts came into being.

Southerners called their strategy — which essentially entailed overthrowing Reconstruction-era Republican rule by means of organized threats of violence and suppression of the black vote — “the Mississippi plan,” whose name came from the violent skirmishes that broke out in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which culminated in the deaths of several hundred black people and the assassination of the black sheriff. Similar strategies emerged when organized whites staged a coup in Louisiana that ultimately overthrew the Republican governor, as well as a “race riot” in Alabama that achieved similar results for Barbour County.

However, it was in the Carolinas that the Red Shirts became a notable presence that persisted for decades. In the 1876 elections, an organization of Red Shirts from both South Carolina and Georgia converged on the border town of Hamburg (which no longer exists) to provoke a bloody confrontation that culminated in the massacre of a number of black freedmen, many of them executed in cold blood. Even worse violence broke out in Ellenton, South Carolina, resulting in the deaths of dozens of black people. …

However, the Red Shirts were far from finished. They remained an active voice in Southern politics for another two decades, in every instance serving to threaten and intimidate black voters, passing Jim Crow laws and then enforcing them through both legal and extralegal means.

Neiwert warns that the descendants the Red Shirts are visible around us today amid the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the “patriot” movement and elsewhere, with the identical aim of depriving disadvantaged groups “with long histories of political oppression their access to the political and legal franchise.”

Did the Confederacy really lose the American civil war? On the battlefield the Confederates were defeated. However, in many ways the Confederacy won the long economic and political war. The current battle against the Jim Crow Republicans, Trumpism and an ascendant neofascist movement is the American civil war continuing into its third century.

The Confederate army could never conquer Washington and overrun the Capitol. On Jan. 6, Trump’s forces were able to accomplish that goal within a few hours. Their victory served as inspiration and fuel for the American fascist movement. They will never forget that day and their triumph.

And what about those other Americans, who have convincing themselves that organized forgetting offers safety and salvation? They will soon learn that it does not.

Sorry, haters: Ranked-choice voting produced the most diverse city council in NYC history

It’s an election of firsts. While we don’t yet have the certified results, it’s clear from preliminary numbers that when New York’s next city council takes office, it will be the most diverse in the city’s history — and that’s just the start of it.

A 51-member council long dominated by men will have gender equity — and with at least 29 women elected, a female majority — for the first time ever. A council that had been the province of old-guard political elites — and has never had more than 18 women — will share power with new voices and rising generations, some breaking inspiring barriers of their own.

Crystal Hudson will be be the first openly gay Black woman elected to New York’s City Council. Shanana Hanif will be the first Muslim woman and the first South Asian council member, as well as the first woman ever elected to represent her district in Brooklyn. Queens-born Jennifer Gutiérrez will be the first Colombian-American on the council and Shekar Krishnan will be the first Indian-American. Chi Osse, at 23, will be the council’s youngest member. Twenty-six of those 29 women are women of color. Eighteen of them are under the age of 40 (and 16 of those 18 were endorsed by Run for Something). It’s a remarkable transformation.

All this history did not happen by accident. Another first helped make these firsts possible. New Yorkers used ranked-choice voting for the first time in June’s party primaries. That led to more candidates running, more competitive elections, a spike in voter turnout and truly representative results. Perhaps most important, it also empowered a new generation of candidates to step forward and seek office. Many of them ran for the very first time. And all over the city, they are celebrating stirring victories.

These candidates ran exceptional campaigns, generated real grassroots enthusiasm and found creative ways to connect with voters during a pandemic. They accomplished what many political experts said couldn’t be done.

But rules matter too, and ranked-choice voting played an important role here. In New York, RCV gave voters the power to rank their favorite candidates in order, one through five. It also put an end to plurality winners. If no candidate cleared 50 percent on the first ballot, it triggered a series of instant runoffs. The last-place finishers were eliminated and the second choices of their supporters came into play. Studies show that women and minority candidates do better under this system.

That helped liberate candidates and provide voters with more nuanced choices to make. Candidates were rewarded for broadening their base and seeking support everywhere. Contests became more dynamic, open to everyone. Party primaries, long tantamount to winning the election in this blue city, became a genuine battle of ideas about the future.

The old way? Well, that concentrated power in the hands of party machines, and discouraged even strong challengers from running. Challengers were derided as “spoilers.” Two or more candidates from the same ethnic or racial background would often generate fears of splitting the vote and electing someone unrepresentative, so candidates would be discouraged from running and splitting “the women vote” or “the Black vote.” Party bosses worked to keep primary challengers off the ballot. Eager candidates were told to stand in line and wait their turn. Those who didn’t might be punished. Voters didn’t get the dynamic choices — or the full and equitable representation — that they deserved.

Ranked-choice voting turned the usual incentives on their head. With no fear of vote-splitting or electing a plurality winner, new candidates flooded races and sought to persuade voters based on their vision for New York’s future. When Sandy Nurse first sought a seat on New York’s city council in a special election in 2020, the Democratic party machine challenged the Afro-Latina community activist’s signatures and knocked her off the ballot. Given a fuller chance to compete, Nurse won this time. Similarly, in the Bronx, Amanda Farias lost against the machine in 2017. In her second run this time around, and with the benefit of ranked-choice voting — which brought her from a close call in round one to a resounding victory in round six — she’ll bring progressive representative to a previously conservative district.

None of this is to say that political parties are the problem in themselves. They are the way that we organize ourselves, and are often central to our identity and the way we see the world. But in a one-party city like New York, a one-party primary structure can stifle new voices and even pit women and racial minorities against each other in a winner-takes-all system. Ranked-choice voting gives voters more say and a powerful tool. It makes our elections better. It puts all of us in charge.

On New York’s council, it puts Shahana Hanif and Chi Osse and Pierenia Sanchez and Crystal Hudson and Shekar Krishnan in charge. Young people and women and the LGBTQ community and first-generation New Yorkers. We all have a seat at the table now, and more control of our future. The most diverse city in America finally has a council that truly resembles — and can truly represent — all New Yorkers. Ranked-choice voting worked in New York City. It’s time for more states and cities to adopt it — making everyone’s elections better and encouraging more people to run for something.

The five undervaccinated clusters putting entire U.S. at risk

A new data analysis by researchers at Georgetown University pinpoints a number of undervaccinated clusters of the United States that pose a significant threat to the nation’s—and potentially the world’s—gradual progress against the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly given their potential to serve as “factories” for extremely contagious variants such as the now-dominant Delta strain.

The five most significant clusters identified by the Georgetown researchers are largely located in the southern U.S., in states such as Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana—all of which are currently experiencing a rise in coronavirus cases as Delta rips through communities concentrated with people who have yet to receive a single vaccine shot. Those clusters include more than 15 million people.

“The group of counties in each cluster… together have lower vaccination coverage than expected, and make up a large population size. All of the top five clusters are focused in the southeastern U.S.,” the researchers note.

“The more geographically clustered unvaccinated individuals are,” the analysis continues, “the higher the chance that an unvaccinated individual will interact with another unvaccinated individual, and the higher the chance that a disease transmission event will occur. Low vaccination clusters, therefore, are locations where risk of transmission of Covid-19 remains high (in the absence of social distancing and masking).”

Because “variant emergence stems from disease transmission,” the report notes that every new transmission of the disease “creates an opportunity for a new variant to transmit to another host and take hold in a population.

Therefore, the researchers write, “curbing transmission events is our best recourse to prevent variant emergence.”

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, said Thursday that “these clusters of unvaccinated people are what is standing in the way of us putting this virus down permanently.”

“We’ve been lucky with the variants so far that they’ve been relatively susceptible to our vaccine,” Reiner added, “but the more you roll the dice, the more opportunities there will be for a resistant variant.”

The Georgetown analysis came as the Biden administration announced a new initiative aimed at intensifying the U.S. vaccination drive as inoculation rates continue to slow across the country. According to the New York Times, “Providers are administering about 0.73 million doses per day on average, about a 78 percent decrease from the peak of 3.38 million reported on April 13.”

In a speech earlier this week, President Joe Biden said the effort will emphasize tackling hesitancy and increasing access by “getting the vaccines to more and more family doctors and healthcare providers so more Americans can get this shot at their doctor’s office from the folks that they know and they trust the most.”

“Our fight against this virus is not over,” the president said. “Right now, as I speak to you, millions of Americans are still unvaccinated and unprotected. And because of that, their communities are at risk. Their friends are at risk. The people they care about are at risk. This is an even bigger concern because of the Delta variant.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Delta strain—which is estimated to be 60% more transmissible than the previously dominant Alpha mutation—accounted for more than half of all new coronavirus infections in the U.S. between June 20 and July 3 as it sweeps across the country and the globe.

But Politico reported Thursday that Biden administration officials believe the Delta mutation is “significantly more widespread” in the U.S. “than the current federal projections.”

“It is everywhere now,” one unnamed official told Politico. “The risk really is in the unvaccinated community. We’re starting to see more and more people get sick and need medical attention.”

Right-wing cartoonist draws Trump as Don Quijote — but draws mockery for missing book’s point

Conservative columnist Ben Garrison this week drew a cartoon depicting former President Donald Trump as the heroic knight Don Quixote — without realizing that essentially means he’s calling Trump delusional.

In the cartoon, Trump is riding on a horse and aiming a spear at a windmill that represents major tech platforms Facebook, Google, and Twitter, as seen below.

The point of the cartoon seems to be that Trump is heroically using a lawsuit to defend free speech against the monsters of Silicon Valley.

However, the story of Don Quixote is about a wannabe knight who attacks windmills because he mistakenly believes them to be monstrous giants — and the book makes very clear that attacking the windmills is an act of madness and not of heroism.

Garrison’s apparent failure of basic reading comprehension earned him ridicule all over Twitter — check out some reactions below:

Teacher: "Mr. Garrison did you read Don Quixote?"

Ben Garrison: "Uh…. Yeah."

Narrator: "Ben of course had not read it." pic.twitter.com/YbO283Cw4a

— 💀DeathMetalViking💀 (@DeathMetalV) July 8, 2021

In a very meta way this cartoonist actually gets the Don Quixote analogy right, but I just don't think it's in the way he thinks it is. pic.twitter.com/Wwl0tabVvn

— Todd Hoyer (@toddhoyer) July 8, 2021

Don Quixote charging the cancer causing windmills. pic.twitter.com/b2XbM1P7vm

— JFK (@JFKtheone) July 8, 2021

Does…

Does Ben Garrison not realize that Don Quixote was completely insane and is the literary exemplar of futilely raging against an imaginary foe? pic.twitter.com/E0A42hBJ4l

— KevinlyFather 🇺🇲🇨🇦🇲🇼🇸🇿 (@KevinlyFather) July 8, 2021

Reasons why a liberal arts education that includes literary "classics" is important now needs to include: "So you don't radically misinterpret 'Don Quixote' and get dragged by the entire internet."

Amazing.

— Jonathan Ficke (@jonficke) July 8, 2021

bro no one expects you to read don quixote it's long as shit but tilting at windmills is literally the one thing people know about don quixote and you got it wrong pic.twitter.com/fsTvMkPXIR

— Ping-pong, Pnin? (@jermergerg) July 8, 2021

Four Seasons Total Landscaping will host the greatest, most in-demand concert this summer

As much of the country moves to “return to normal,” part of that normalcy naturally includes summer concerts. In a delightful little throwback, Four Seasons Total Landscaping — that same groundskeeping store that hosted a Trump campaign press conference borne of epic logistical blunders — will be one venue for a concert in Philadelphia next month. The news was tweeted out by the venue itself on Thursday.

The Philly concert at the now famous landscaping store, notably positioned next to an adult sex toy shop, will include solo performances from Laura Jane Grace and Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms on Aug. 21. Mark your calendars!

“This will be the first and last time Brendan and I will play in front of a landscaping company and we promise it will be better than that MAGA sh*t show,” Grace has said in a statement.

Although the lineup has been locked in, that doesn’t mean that the trolling has ended. The site also tweeted out a Photoshopped image of Rudy Giuliani on the head of a lead singer with the caption, “Auditions for the opening slot got interesting . . .”

Auditions for the opening slot got interesting… @LauraJaneGrace @badsandwich @davekisstweets pic.twitter.com/k1WcaNga7z

— Four Seasons Total Landscaping (@therealfstl1992) July 8, 2021

The once anonymous, hole-in-the-wall store where customers can shop bulk potting soil was catapulted into overnight viral fame when former President Trump’s failed reelection campaign mistakenly booked the store instead of the Four Seasons Hotel in Philly for a press conference. The presser, set for the day voting finally finished and Joe Biden became President-elect, would see Trump associates like Rudy Giuliani speak to contest the election results, and pedal the lies that would eventually lead to a mob of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol not two months later.

Of course, without foresight into the violence and terror that lay ahead, the press conference and its unlikely venue became the stuff of comedic legend. Earlier this year, it was announced the debacle surrounding Four Seasons Total Landscaping would be adapted for a documentary called “Four Seasons Total Documentary” — described in its press release as a feel-good, “firsthand account of the rollercoaster journey that one well-meaning small business in Philadelphia went through when they agreed to host a political press conference in the midst of the most hard-fought American election in recent history.”

The documentary will come from director Christopher Stoudt, in collaboration with producers Glen Zipper, Sean Stuart, Chris Paonessa and Kevin Lincoln. It will also, hopefully, provide insight into some of the remaining, unanswered questions about the Trump team’s big little mishap.

It all started with then-President Trump tweeting, “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 a.m.” Shortly after, he offered this clarification: “Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. 11:30am!” Next, it was Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia’s turn to clarify the situation via tweet: “To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. No relation with the hotel.”

Had the Trump team tried to book the hotel, and been denied? Was it merely a logistical blunder? If so, how could a presidential campaign team have made such a mistake? Had the sex toy shop next door provided any comment on the matter?

Nearly one year out from the press conference mess, Four Seasons Total Landscaping remains an icon in the public’s memory, to be celebrated and commemorated with an upcoming concert. Speaking of the concert, tickets go on sale this week — and, of course, so do exclusive T-shirts and merch.

The first trailer for “Succession” Season 3 looks amazing

“Game of Thrones” ended in 2019, and there have been a lot of shows trying to fill the whole it left behind since: “The Witcher,” “The Wheel of Time,” “The Lord of the Rings” . . . but for my money, the best replacement for all the scheming and backstabbing in Westeros has nothing to do with dragons or magic; it’s a show set in our time that’s about to air it’s third season on HBO: “Succession.”

At once a satiric indictment of the super-rich, a blistering family tragedy and an addictively watchable soap opera, “Succession” is about the blue blooded Roy family, which runs a media empire started by patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox). But Logan is looking a little frail these days, and his power-hungry kids (as well as various other hangers-on) are starting to plan for what happens when he dies and power passes to . . . who, exactly? That’s the question at the heart of the show and the one I can’t wait to see answered in Season 3, for which HBO just dropped a teaser trailer:

When last we left our incredibly dysfunctional billionaire family, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong, who won an Emmy for playing this character) had basically declared war on his father and his family’s company. Obviously they’re not taking it well.

Why was Shiv spitting in that book? I love that Kendall doesn’t know how to trash talk using fairy tales. And good to see that the relationship between Tom Wambsgans and Cousin Greg is as colorful as ever.

“Succession” Season 3 will premiere this fall on HBO.

Revisiting Meghan McCain’s legacy on “The View” shows the reality of across-the-aisle “friendships”

On July 1, “The View” co-host Meghan McCain announced her planned departure at the end of the show’s 24th season later this month, leaving many to wonder if we’ll ever uncover the mystery of who her father is. The announcement unsurprisingly sparked joyous reaction from McCain’s many online critics — and also undoubtedly brought some relief to her fellow co-hosts, many of whom have visibly struggled to put up with some of her most outlandish, misinformed and offensive takes throughout her nearly four-year tenure on the show.

McCain’s departure, and the years of on-air infighting, ignorance and racism that preceded it, warrant a fair amount of interrogation as to what she was even doing on the show in the first place (besides bewildering us with an array of dubious hair art). There are plenty of warm, optimistic explanations for this casting, like the importance of representing diversity of thought and perspective, or the classic, welcoming “both sides.” After all, ABC might have seen McCain’s inclusion as just good business — plenty of the show’s target female audiences watching “The View” on weekday afternoons may share her conservative viewpoints, or revere her father, the late John McCain, in case Meghan failed to mention that.

But there’s a dark side to that viral meme of the stick-figure best friends, Sally, a Democrat, and Bob, a Republican, who are both presumably white. The glorification of across-the-aisle friendships, which “The View” has tried to simulate with McCain as a co-host, ignores the toll these relationships can have on people of color, LGBTQ folks, women, immigrants, survivors, or, of course, people hailing from countries that have been devastated by U.S. military actions and imperialism. The reductive notion that politics is “just” politics, and we can be friends with those who “disagree” with us, doesn’t apply to people who don’t have the privilege of being able to treat politics as abstraction, rather than their everyday, oppressive realities. Politics isn’t something those who are marginalized can just compartmentalize and neatly put aside for the comfort of those who are complicit in their oppression.

The implosion of McCain’s time on “The View” is the natural outcome of such a hackneyed sociopolitical experiment. It’s the natural outcome of planting an unapologetically entitled and problematic white woman on a show to spar with or even argue against the humanity of her female co-hosts who generally know better. Now that McCain’s time on the show nearing its end, it’s worth revisiting her highlights to recognize just how harmful it was for ABC to platform her all these years.

October 2017: McCain’s establishes her self-interest in her “View” debut

For her inauspicious debut, McCain decided to weigh in on Mike Pence’s NFL stunt, in which he stormed out of a game knowing that players would be kneeling in protest. While the idea of protesting the anthem is a hot topic among conservatives, McCain turned the conversation to make it all about herself. This was just a sign of things to come.

April 2018: McCain tells “The View” audience they “deserve” Trump

When “The View” audiences applauded former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement announcement — yes, the Paul Ryan who tried to snatch health care from millions — McCain chastised audiences for celebrating. “If Paul Ryan is the greatest sin, this is how we got Trump, because if Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and people like this are the worst politicians, then you deserve Trump,” she said.

Of course, this holier-than-thou lecturing at audience members was hardly the shrewd commentary McCain intended for it to be. Under Trump, millions would suffer the unthinkable, from state-sanctioned family separation programs to the eventual, deadly mishandling of COVID — but, sure, Meghan. Celebrating the retirement of an evil politician means we had it coming!

December 2018: McCain almost drives Joy Behar to quit

In a particularly tense exchange between McCain and her co-host Behar, the women argue about Behar’s choice to segue a conversation about the legacy of President George H.W. Bush into the urgent issue of climate change, which McCain found disrespectful.

At one point, as the cameras cut away, Behar reportedly said of McCain, “If this s**t doesn’t stop I’m quitting this damn show. I can’t take this much more.” She continued, “I’ve tolerated a lot of s**t on this show but I’m at my wits’ end with this entitled b***h. Enough already! Enough already! I’m not playing nice any longer.”

At this point, McCain had been on the show for just over a year — a year of talking over her co-hosts, spewing misinformation. It probably wasn’t the first time one of her fellow co-hosts threatened to quit over her, and it probably wasn’t the last.

February 2019: McCain equates abortion with “infanticide”

At a time of increased violence targeting abortion providers because of baseless smears from Trump and other Republicans that equated abortion later in pregnancy with “infanticide,” McCain added fuel to the fire, arguing again with Hostin, who she accused of thinking “a baby born from a botched abortion should be put down like a dog or a cat?!”

Abortion later in pregnancy can sometimes happen due to extreme health conditions, or because someone wasn’t able to get an abortion earlier due to the expansive web of restrictions on care. The frequent conflation with this health service at any and every stage of pregnancy has frequently led to retaliatory violence on providers and patients.

McCain, of course, wasn’t entertaining opposing views, or even just facts. “If the Democratic Party wants to be the party of infanticide, that is their choice,” she said at the end of the segment.

McCain has a history of bringing up her hatred of abortion on the show, from baseless right-wing myths on abortion to more recent criticisms of abortion as “a cardinal sin,” arguing in favor of the Catholic Church’s retaliation against President Biden. All of these takes, of course, were spewed in the presence of fellow co-host Whoop Goldberg, who has shared her story of self-inducing her abortion as an adolescent girl, decades ago. This insensitivity to Goldberg is hardly the only time McCain has been unapologetically, well, the worse.

March 2019: McCain cries at Rep. Omar’s “anti-Semitism”

In what the Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona aptly described as “some grievance cosplay,” McCain responded to her interpretation of Rep. Omar’s comments on Israel’s financial influence over U.S. politicians by crying, and somehow casting herself as the victim of Omar’s supposed “anti-Semitism.”

“I take this very personally,” McCain said of Omar’s criticisms of Zionism. “I would go so far as to say I probably verge on being a Zionist as well,” she continued, citing her family’s close friendship with Jewish politician Joe Lieberman. “I take the hate crimes rising in this country incredibly seriously and I think what’s happening in Europe is really scary. And I’m sorry if I’m getting emotional.”

June 2019: McCain identifies self as “sacrificial Republican” of “The View”

In a routine, par-for-the-course argument with McCain’s fellow co-hosts on what motivates Trump supporters, McCain at one point referred to herself as the show’s “sacrificial Republican.” In response to McCain’s usual self-victimizing, co-host Joy Behar offered a sarcastic, “aww,” to which McCain snapped back, “Oh don’t feel bad for me, b***h, I’m paid to do this, okay. Don’t feel bad for me.” McCain, of course, was the one who had initiated the self-pity party, despite — as she points out — being paid to spew white-supremacist-lite commentary on the show.

December 2019: McCain calls herself the “Mother of Dragons”

As if the “Game of Thrones” series finale flop weren’t enough to ruin the series for its legions of fans, McCain’s self-identification with Daenerys Targaryen, “Mother of Dragons,” was the nail in the coffin. While getting into it with Goldberg in a nastier-than-usual argument about — you guessed it! — politics, Goldberg, speaking for all of us, asked McCain point-blank, “Will you stop talking?”

McCain later took to Twitter to tweet out a GIF of Daenerys accompanied with the text, “Good morning – to all the fellow conservative ‘girls’ who won’t be quiet.” To be clear, there’s nothing especially brave about having harmful political views that are written into oppressive laws across the country. There’s certainly nothing brave about agreeing with the marginalization of poor people of color. That said, there might be some merit to McCain’s conflation of herself with an intolerant and tyrannical imperialist like Daenerys — perhaps McCain isn’t always wrong!

March 2020: McCain harangues Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is ignored

If there’s one thing Senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is famous for, it’s “having a plan for that.” And she was nothing if not prepared to deal with Meghan McCain being Meghan McCain in her March 2020 appearance on “The View.” Between offering her wide-ranging plans and policy positions on a wealth tax, universal child care, and funding public education for all, Warren simply ignores McCain’s numerous, rude outbursts and interruptions, and doesn’t waver once or give McCain a chance to derail her. Jezebel called the segment an “excellent lesson in ignoring McCain,” which is a lesson McCain’s own co-hosts and ABC might have done well to learn from, earlier.

June 2020: McCain presumes to know more about voting rights than Stacey Abrams, calls neighborhood a “war zone”

In a particularly embarrassing segment with the hindsight of the events of November 2020, McCain attempted to condescendingly explain the voting accessibility trends in guest Stacey Abram’s own state of Georgia, to Abrams herself. Abrams nearly pulled off an upset victory in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, only to be defeated by rampant, racist voter suppression efforts in the state. Rather than be demoralized by the loss, Abrams instead worked tirelessly to understand voter suppression trends, strategize on how to overcome these trends, and even flip her state blue.

In any case, on that day in June, Abrams had some time, which she lent to schooling McCain, and tearing apart the “View” host’s nonsense about the majority of Georgia counties that experienced ballot and voting problems in the 2018 election being run by Democratic leaders. Trump would notably co-opt these conspiracy theories upon losing Georgia in 2020.

“The reality is your access to democracy shouldn’t depend on your county of residence,” Abrams said. She continued, “Fundamentally we deserve to have elections that work for everyone. And yes, I believe that we saw a combination of malfeasance which is a continuance of the voter suppression we saw that [Georgia Secretary of State] Brad Raffensperger inherited from [Georgia Gov.] Brian Kemp, but it’s also incompetence. And if we don’t solve both of those problems, we’re going to have a national breakdown of our election come November.”

That same month, amid surging protests against racist police violence, McCain who is decisively against this First Amendment right, called her wealthy Manhattan neighborhood “a war zone.” She said, “This is not America. Our leaders have abandoned us and continue to let great American cities burn to the ground and be destroyed. I never could have fathomed this.” On top of being plainly inaccurate, her comments were foremost offensive to people who live in actual war zones, and certainly offensive to people protesting for safety from militarized police forces.

March 2021: McCain makes rise in anti-Asian racism about herself and “identity politics”

Shortly after the Atlanta shooting in March that saw a white man kill six Asian women at massage parlors, among other victims, McCain took the surge in anti-Asian violence as an opportunity to bemoan how so-called “identity politics” — or, really, any recognition that race, gender and class exist — hurt her, a wealthy white woman.

“We’ve only had one Asian American host co-host this show. Does that mean one of us should be leaving because there’s not enough representation?” McCain very patronizingly asked her fellow “The View” hosts. She also expressed concern that someone who is “more qualified who happens to be a white straight person who has more experience” in their field may lose out on opportunities to a “minority with less experience.”

Her remarks ignore the obvious reality that far more often than not, well-connected, wealthy and incompetent white people are chosen for opportunities over significantly more competent and qualified people of color, who are never even considered. And while they’d be offensive and reductive really any time, her invocation of a crisis of white supremacist violence to worry about opportunities for a “white straight person” like herself was wildly offensive, even by her own standards of ignorant depravity.

April 2021: Following Ohio police killing a teenage Black girl, McCain criticizes NBA star LeBron James

Shortly after the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota police officer charged with killing George Floyd, Ohio police killed Ma’Khia Bryant, a teenage girl. The killing of Bryant sparked outraged response, including from LeBron James, who demanded “#accountability” for the police responsible in a tweet.

“When you have people like LeBron James posting pictures of this police officer before this has been adjudicated and litigated,” McCain started, “you’re also putting that police officer’s life in danger, and I would like killing to stop in this country and violence to stop.”

Throughout the segment, McCain repeatedly insisted she “heard” and “understood” everything her fellow co-host Sunny Hostin said about racist police violence, yet made the decision to focus instead on violence supposedly targeting police officers, and violence broadly, blaming citizen protesters rather than militarized police departments, and racist police violence.

May 2021: McCain equates the “Squad” of progressive women of color in Congress with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley are often referred to as “the Squad” — in a warm, badass way by their supporters, and a dismissive, infantilizing way by their detractors. More recently, in May this year, McCain equated their passionate support for health care for all, compassionate immigration laws, living wages, and other common-sense progressive policies with the unrepentant fascism of Rep. Greene, shortly after Greene equated the Holocaust with COVID vaccinations.
“If [Greene] is the face of the Republicans, the Squad is the face of the Democrats,” McCain said. “I would love Democrats to put that same type of energy into what’s happening on the left.” She continued, “Quite frankly, this is how people get red-pilled. The media doesn’t want the Squad to look bad. They just want Marjorie Taylor to look bad.”

* * *

As McCain’s time on “The View” comes to an end, unfortunately, her legacy of giving representation to the many white women who condemn racism in words while checking off whole Bingo sheets of racist microaggressions, will continue on one platform or another, lest she decry being “canceled” by Twitter liberals. Such is the most frightening, insidious thing about white women like McCain, who are “reasonable” Republicans, and are therefore entitled to not just platforms but friendships with those across the aisle: Their cloying sense of victimhood when they’re disliked or socially rejected for holding abhorrent, racist views, can be weaponized at the drop of a hat against marginalized people who are seen as rejecting them.

Whenever a person of color supposedly allows politics to disrupt their relationship with someone with dehumanizing political beliefs, they’re the ones seen as intolerant and aggressive, rather than the person with views like McCain’s. They’re the ones expected to expend their emotional labor to offer a crash course in patriarchy and white supremacy to “friends” with dehumanizing, triggering political beliefs.

For all McCain’s whining about so-called “cancel culture,” conservative values remain deeply institutionalized and normalized at nearly every level of government, and broadly within our culture. It’s not impossible to be friends with those with whom you may share vehement disagreements — it is, however, impossible to be friends with people who repeatedly disrespect you. The cocoon world of McCain’s time on “The View” had to break open eventually.

Dan Bongino instructs followers to form right-wing safe spaces

Fox News host Dan Bongino, a thrice-failed Republican Congressional candidate-turned-right-wing media mogul, said Thursday that he’s given up on his self-professed lifelong mission of “owning the libs,” instead advocating for conservatives to create their very own safe spaces.

Bongino made the remarks during his daily podcast Thursday morning, calling for right-wingers of all stripes to flee “liberal cities” in order to form their own “freedom and liberty-loving enclaves.”

“Listen, nothing is real anymore to leftists. Nothing. Spying, government spying, critical race theory, censorship. Nothing is real; it’s all made up,” Bongino said. “It’s a figment of our imagination.”

“Leftists, again, reality just kicks them in the cojones every day, so they just lie,” he added. “We have to get away from these people. I know that might trouble some people listening to the show today; we have to get away from these people.”

“We have to evacuate these liberal states and shrink the federal government to the point where we can live in our own freedom and liberty-loving enclaves.”

Minutes later, Bongino lost his composure in the middle of a rant against liberals, calling them “thugs” and “sick people.”

“Because they are leftist thugs, thugs, thugs, losers, thugs, zeros, that’s what they [liberals] are. I despise these people. I don’t want them anywhere near me,” he stated.

“Safe spaces,” traditionally found on college campuses, are what the Oxford dictionary defines as an “environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm.”

Notably, Bongino and his fellow Fox News pundits have long railed against the creation of safe spaces, often using the word “snowflakes” to describe advocates of the practice.

When asked about the apparent contradiction by Salon, Bongino did not respond to a request for comment.

You can watch the full “Get Away From The Libs As Quickly As You Can” clip below, via YouTube.

A strange meteorite unlocks clues about the origins of our solar system

Most scientists dream of having a “Eureka!” moment — that precious instant when you realize you have discovered something new, wonderful and significant.

In movies, we imagine it occurring with a swell of epic music and perhaps some well-timed lightning strikes. As Professor Ryan C. Ogliore of Washington University in St. Louis tells it, however, the team of scientists he was on had a more anticlimactic build-up to their breakthrough.

“The first thing you think is, ‘Oh, there’s something we’re doing wrong,'” Ogliore explained. “So we change things around and look at it again. If the weird thing is still there, then you think you have something good.”

To be thorough, Ogliore and his team tested the anomalies they were studying in a number of different ways, but over and over again their research yielded the same hopeful conclusion.

“That when I was really confident that this was the right answer,” Ogliore recalled.

Their finding? Ogliore — working alongside his colleagues Lionel G. Vacher (who led the team), Clive Jones, Nan Liu and David A. Fike — had studied an ancient meteorite and learned that a long-dead massive star played an instrumental role in the creation of our solar system. It’s a discovery they say could be used to someday find the building blocks of life in other solar systems.

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Some background: After NASA’s 2011 Genesis mission brought back solar wind samples, scientists discovered that oxygen isotopes on the Sun differ from those found on Earth. The most likely explanation was that the cosmic material, which would later form into our planets, was pounded by a burst of ultraviolet light.

But where did that light come from? Scientists have been at a loss to explain their findings — until now.

Vacher, Ogliore and their team of researchers found the answer in Acfer 094, a piece of an ancient asteroid found as a meteorite in Algeria more than 30 years ago. In addition to being one of the oldest meteorites ever discovered, it is also the only meteorite that contains cosmic symplectite — or very heavy oxygen isotopes.

Ogliore then came up with the idea of measuring sulfur isotopes in the cosmic symplectite to study the ancient ultraviolet radiation that accompanied the birth of our universe.

Their breakthrough, as published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, was the discovery that the light did not match the UV spectrum that would have come from our young sun — meaning the light had to have come from a nearby star.

“We conclude that the Sun’s stellar neighbors, likely O and B stars in a massive-star-forming region, affected the composition of the Solar System’s primordial building blocks,” the authors wrote in the study. They concluded by pointing out that the isotope anomalies are not consistent with the type of ultraviolet irradiation of the gaseous hydrogen sulfide produced by the young Sun. It is, however, consistent with irradiation of hydrogen sulfide from nearby massive stars.

That is why they believe that “a plausible scenario for the Sun’s birth environment” is that it happened in “a large stellar cluster with at least one massive star (type O or B) in its vicinity.”

As Ogliore explained to Salon, this is a very big deal.

“I think the goal of what I do and what scientists like me do is to understand the formation of the solar system,” Ogliore observed. “We know that formation of planetary systems like our own is not rare in the galaxy. I think understanding the formation of our solar system gives us an understanding of this general property. That’s super important because there is probably life out there too, in those other planetary systems.”

Trump wasn’t just an abnormal figure — psychiatrists say his rhetoric caused real trauma

Donald Trump was an unprecedented president in many ways. He was the first president to lack any previous political or military experience, one of only five presidents to win an election without the popular vote (and the first to also later get impeached) and the only president to reject an election loss outright in order to promote a Nazi-esque Big Lie.

For millions of Americans, the end of Trump’s presidency came as a relief — but for some, the break from normalcy has lasted far longer than they anticipated. Several psychiatrists who spoke with Salon used the word “trauma” to describe the lingering impact the last four years have had on many Americans, particularly those from marginalized communities most at risk from Trump’s rhetoric.

Dr. David Reiss, a psychiatrist who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon that although many of Trump’s policies could be characterized as traumatizing, there were two areas which “crossed partisan boundaries.”

First, he pointed to Trump’s intentionally divisive rhetoric (policy-wise he was not that different from other recent Republican presidents) and noted that it has traumatized his supporters as well as his opponents.

“This is different from ‘normal’ pre-Trump politics wherein using anger strategically is not uncommon, but is typically not a personal attack and at least on the surface, it is couched in ‘mature’ language and focused on policies or specific behaviors regarding policies rather than being personal attacks,” Reiss wrote via email. “Trump seems always willing to attack anyone who disagrees with him, or whom he does not see as sufficiently supportive of him. His attacks in very direct, personal, immature ways (name-calling/childish nicknames; stating overtly that opponents are horrible people, etc.), as well as Trump’s using occasions that are typically at least superficially non-partisan (holidays, tragedies, etc.) to almost always include an attack on some person or persons, is far outside of what is normal.”

These actions traumatize supporters by triggering their anger in emotionally damaging ways, and, more importantly, make his opponents targets for very real-life abuse from Trump’s supporters, Reiss said. His political opponents, meanwhile, have to endure an unusual amount of verbal abuse — even for contemporary politics.

Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NY Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine, also noted Trump’s extreme and cruel rhetoric as abnormal in American politics.

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“President Trump used deprecating, extreme, cruel language to discuss anyone or groups he did not agree with,” Saltz told Salon via email. “He often included an indictment of the person or group with verbally aggressive language, even suggesting at times for others who agreed with him to rise up and ‘defeat’ any who would oppose him. He ridiculed and shamed others around him and constantly threatened others with being treated aggressively should they fail to support him.”

Even worse, Trump’s actions “gave permission to many people to treat other people and groups the same way. As a result, it had a ripple effect, where targeted groups (due to immigration status, race, religion, sexuality, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) were being treated badly through being shamed, threatened with violence, and threatened with loss (money, inclusion, a home to live in, shunning from their society, etc.).”

When Trump wasn’t abusing people with his juvenile insults, he was altering their sense of reality to meet his own political purposes. This occurred most infamously, of course, with his refusal to accept the science behind COVID-19 or the objective reality that he lost the 2020 election.

“Similarly, although with somewhat different content, Trump’s constant ‘redefining of reality’ to meet his needs of the moment, often with minimal connection with objective reality or in direct contradiction of facts, and not infrequently even internally inconsistent (Just last week: From ‘No one knows more about taxes than me’ to ‘No one really knows about taxes’) is traumatizing,” Reiss said. “Again, agree or disagree, these statements are at best discombobulating, if not overtly traumatizing (i.e., ‘gaslighting’). Even if a person supports Trump, the constant fluctuations of his definition of reality is disorganizing and anxiety-provoking — and then ties into triggering anger at others who do not support whichever point of view you adopt.”

Saltz had a similar observation, explaining that “when a leader makes statements that deny reality, enforce that only news they agree with is real news and all else is fake news can further the trauma for those people who are living with the difficult consequences of their reality. So to be in terrible struggle and then have the leader, the person in charge, say it is not your reality can only add to trauma.”

She compared Trump to other world leaders who have traumatized people — including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and Spain’s Francisco Franco — arguing that “the very essence of trauma is believing that your life or future life has been put at real risk, that you experience living through an utterly frightening and dangerous time that is not typical for the human experience of feeling safe and having some security.”

She added, “This type of fearful loss of the ability to say ‘I am okay, I will be okay’ can generate ongoing psychological symptoms of anxiety, depression, intrusive frightening thoughts, flashback reoccurrences of terrible moments, trouble concentrating, sleep disruption and avoidance of anything that reminds you of the traumatic time.”

Olivia James, a London-based therapist who specializes in trauma, recalled that roughly one-third of her practice reported unanticipated physical responses when Trump began smearing then-candidate Joe Biden on the campaign trail.

“Several people reported they found themselves breathing deeply from their bellies,” James wrote to Salon. “Their shoulders dropped. And they didn’t even realize they were holding four years of tension in their shoulders or diaphragm. Four others spontaneously started to weep. They found they were grieving the past four years.”

James elaborated on how Trump is so effective at hurting people.

“Trump is widely regarded as a malignant narcissist; twisting the truth, gaslighting and bullying,” James explained. “Trump uses DARVO – a blame-shifting strategy used by abusers including narcissists: 1. Deny 2. Attack 3. Reverse Victim & Offender. He used it against 20 women who accused him of sexual assault. He’s also used it to claim the Democrats were trying to steal the election he won by a landslide.”

James later added, “The fact that so many Republicans backed him even after he showed what he was capable of will also add to the trauma and anxiety. There’s also the real fear that he may come back, so the hyper-vigilance will continue.”

Yet she said people should not feel embarrassed or believe they are powerless at Trump’s hands.

“If you feel traumatised by Trump, this means your empathy and moral compass are still functioning,” James said. “Find your tribe so you don’t feel so isolated and powerless. We’ve got to hold onto our hope and our shared humanity. Focus on what you can do, individually and collectively. Even micro actions will help you feel like you have agency.”

Giant focaccia sandwiches are the new party subs

There are a few subtle clues that signal to me that a party is going to be good. I mean genuinely good. Not an attempt at a drunken rager as a latent grasp at college good ol’ days and not a meticulously assembled dinner party where you’re shepherded from the living room to the dining room and then back to the living room on a precise schedule.

I’m talking about the kind of party that leaves everyone pleasantly tipsy and very relaxed, warm from that potent combination of good-enough alcohol, summer air and heady laughter. Even though truly effortless entertaining is largely a myth, I’m partial to the parties that feel pretty damn close.

Typically, there are drinks chilling somewhere other than a wine fridge (bonus points for the bathtub on ice) and the evening line-up is blissfully devoid of icebreaker activities. There are dozens of other details that really do it for me — lighting, music, little bowls of salty things — but in the absolute best-case-scenario there is also a table that is practically heaving under the weight of a gigantic sandwich that’s meant to be shared.

The party sub is a revelation.

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If done right, it can be absolutely delicious and foster the kind of communal “Hey, we’re breaking bread together” that makes get togethers go round, while also tapping into a certain retro-nostalgia. Whenever I see an oversized sandwich, my mind inevitably wanders to classic “Scooby Doo” escapades, as Shaggy and Scoob raid a random refrigerator to make a sandwich stacked with everything from fried eggs to full wheels of cheese. They always looked incredible and who wouldn’t want that in their own kitchen?

The thing is, party subs, especially the kind you can pick up at sandwich chains and supermarkets, aren’t always great. They can get soggy after sitting out and the flavors veer pretty pedestrian. There is a better way, though: the giant focaccia sandwich.

Focaccia is an Italian bread with a beautiful airy, sponge interior and crisp, dimpled top that’s been brushed with olive oil and salt. It’s equal parts hearty and delicate, making it an ideal sandwich bread. During the pandemic, as people rotated through viral baking recipes, focaccia was a perennial favorite. It’s not a particularly finicky bread to make — especially when compared to sourdough or brioche — and the payoff is delicious.

If you were one of the many who picked up focaccia-making during isolation, there’s something kind of nice about applying that skill to entertaining.

Here’s the basic set-up:

Make and allow your focaccia to slightly cool. I really, really like Claire Saffitz’s focaccia recipe from “Dessert Person.” It’s made in a standard half-sheet pan and the color around the edges is just spectacular.
Using a serrated bread knife, carefully cut the bread in half horizontally. Once the focaccia is cool to the touch, carefully use a bread knife to cut it through the middle, making the “top” and “bottom” pieces of bread for your sandwich.
Time for toppings! I tend to go in an Italian-ish direction for my sandwich ingredients, but feel free to experiment. My current go-to is a thin layer of prosciutto, a thicker layer of finocchiona (fennel salami), a layer of mortadella, sliced tomatoes, provolone cheese and a homemade broccoli rabe pesto
Put the sandwich back in the oven — but just until the cheese melts!
Slice and serve. A half-pan of focaccia can easily make a dozen tiny sandwiches (or six heartier ones). The recipe and process is easy to double-up though, if needed. The assembly can also be done the day prior and the focaccia sandwiches can simply be put in the oven right before the party begins.

Mike Pence “lost it” after Trump threw crumpled up newspaper at him: report

According to a report on a new book from reporter Michael Bender titled, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” former Vice President Mike Pence got into a heated exchange with Donald Trump when the then-president threw a crumpled up newspaper at him, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The incident reportedly took place in early 2021 when Pence was set to preside over the certification of the 2020 election. Pence’s political committee had just hired Trump’s adviser Corey Lewandowski, prompting Trump to reportedly hold up an article about the news while complaining it made him look like “his team was abandoning him.”

Trump reportedly then “crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president,” saying, “So disloyal.” That’s when Pence “lost it,” according to the book.

“Mr. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr. Trump,” Bender writes. “He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. ‘We walked you through every detail of this,’ Mr. Pence snarled. ‘We did this for you — as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.'”

HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot introduces a new class treading the same tired path

Nobody watches a soap opera and marvels aloud afterward about the way it, you know, really makes you think. We plug into them to do the opposite, which is to turn off our brains and surrender to frivolous stories of the rich and glamorous hobnobbing with sexy poors. We covet and coo about the fashions and the jewelry while ironing and folding our off-the-rack work wear; we drool over displays of six-pack abs and superhuman glutes showcased poolside or bedside.

The original “Gossip Girl” made all of this into an artform at the height of its powers, otherwise known as the 2007-2008 TV season. Despite the exasperatingly uneven quality of the writing, the characters consistently reminded us of their humanity and emotional frailty, persuading us to overlook their sins every few beats. Its finest moments were propelled by its heart, the main organ that HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” revival is missing.

More of an unnecessary continuation than a refreshing renovation, the 2021 return could have thoughtfully ushered the heady world introduced in Cecily von Ziegesar’s YA novels and the CW’s primetime lineup into our new age. Instead the very qualities that should be selling points, namely its inclusive casting and overt queerness, are by and large cosmetic.

Back when texting and blogging blind items were the primary tech vices of the day, the first “Gossip Girl” guided us through a version of New York most of us could never afford. It also took up where “Sex and the City” left off by spicing prime time with some of the sharpest dialogue on TV, pressed into the mouths of high school students stalking the halls of the elite Constance Billard School for Girls and its brother school, the St. Jude’s School for Boys.

But the original was far from flawless, don’t forget. Among other things that may not have passed muster today, Chuck Bass was established as a “bad boy” in part by sexually assaulting two women in the pilot, and he wound up being one of the show’s most beloved characters.

Another shortcoming announces itself in the original series’ poster with yet another all-white core cast acting out a story set in one of the most diverse cities on the planet. In that sense the old “Gossip Girl” was simply carrying on a tradition established by “Friends” and “Sex and the City” and other shows on The CW that weren’t “Veronica Mars.”

The new “Gossip Girl” corrects that part straightaway by making a pair of Black women the modern equivalent of Blair and Serena, and half-sisters at that. One of them, Julien (Jordan Alexander) is a wealthy 16-year-old Instagram influencer perched on the top rung of the Constance St. Jude’s social ladder, carefully attended by her pals and image supervisors Luna La (Zión Moreno) and Monet (Savannah Lee Smith).

The other, Zoya (Whitney Peak), is a 14-year-old freshman who is newly arrived, on an arts scholarship, and friendless.

Julien and Zoya were kept apart by their fathers for a very-good-for-dramatic-purposes reason – their shared mother abandoned Julien and her extremely rich and influential white dad for Zoya’s middle class Black father. The two men hate each other, but the sisters secretly decide they shouldn’t, even though Julien’s very exclusionary clique would rather have their Queen Bee on the attack.

As horribly as these children of high society treat peers they deem to be lesser, they hold their teachers in even lower regard. Faculty like Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson) are forced to put up with it or risk being fired and blackballed in their profession. This topsy-turvy power structure scares these adults, but it also makes them resentful, leading Kate to a brash decision.

In the original series, the identity of the all-seeing entity known as Gossip Girl (and voiced then and now by Kristen Bell) remained a secret until the end of the series. The reboot opts to establish the party behind the pseudonym’s resurrection right away, a clever choice until the conceit become too farfetched to buy.

Better stories have been built around less, which gives this “Gossip Girl” even less of an excuse for failure. Once you abandon the willingness to embrace some level of implausibility, which happens from the moment Julien and Zoya enact the older sibling’s clumsy plan to assimilate into the school’s upper crust, it’s pretty much all over.

But on a more essential level, the reboot dooms itself by placing non-white characters in clones of roles originated by a white cast and expecting viewers not to notice. This robs them of the opportunity to create truly original personalities for the show and ensures they’ll be walking similar loops to their predecessors – circles that eventually bored the audience.

Julien is the Blair, of course, making Zoya Serena’s equivalent. The circle expands predictably from there: Julien’s boyfriend Obie (Eli Brown) is a mad scientist’s project that crosses earnest writer Dan’s DNA with that of forlorn rich boy Nate, and since he’s dating one sister he’s destined to drive a wedge between them. Julien’s closest confidante Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind) merges Blair with Jenny Humprey’s innocence and gives her a devoted boyfriend in Aki (Evan Mock), who acts as a sounding board for the group’s charming version of the predatory Chuck Bass named, no joke, Max Wolfe (Thomas Doherty).

Aside from wearing a moniker ripped straight out of a parody name generator, Doherty’s character more closely emulates to the sexually omnivorous version of Chuck Bass presented in the books, and his charisma carries every scene he’s in. Nevertheless, not even he can salvage some exceptionally dreadful writing and plot choices.

Showrunner Joshua Safran worked on the first “Gossip Girl,” which should lend additional legitimacy to this new version instead of providing plausible theories as to why it rehashes threadbare twists from any number teen primetime soap classics. No joke, if you’ve watched any part of “Beverly Hills, 90210” or its inferior reboot, or “The O.C.”, or “Pretty Little Liars,” you can accurately map where every single crumb dropped in the pilot leads, which would be fine if the scenery flanking that path were interesting.

But Safran quickly proves he can’t outrun a problem created by the show’s topmost innovation, in that he and the writers craft this “Gossip Girl” narrative around a pair of Black women without writing anything acknowledging their Blackness. That the actors in question happen to be light-skinned only makes the optics worse at a time when Hollywood’s casting producers are contending with accusations of colorism. To be clear, Alexander and Peak turn in able performances with what they’re given, including navigating a wreck of a subplot that involves a corny, shallow revelation about bullying. They’re also the non-white characters with the most lines in the show. The only other Black peer in their social orbit is Monet, a minimally developed mean girl on the outskirts of the action.

Referring back to my original assertion, I still hold that soaps don’t exist to make profound statements about racial injustice or any serious cultural or social ills, but that doesn’t mean treating your characters of color as raceless or the audience as color-blind. And that problem extends beyond the two siblings. Oble, for instance, is announced as one of the “guilty rich” due to his work with underprivileged kids, which could lead to some eye-opening conversations about savior complexes and class guilt without abandoning the flashiness that made previous primetime soaps such glitzy dopamine hits. Max’s sexuality is a handy distraction and temptation for other characters who may be bored and newly curious about their own sexual identities. It also comes across as the storytelling equivalent of a hot plate, a device to heat up situations rather than a natural extension of circumstances.

But this “Gossip Girl” lacks the conviction to do any of that, leaning heavily on look instead of substance. A brouhaha at a fashion show culminates in a theatrical conflagration made for being caught on iPhone cameras, which is exactly what happens. Characters who shouldn’t be seen together get caught in a rainstorm and handily change out of their wet clothes in front of a gigantic window. Everything in this show is about as subtle as an anvil dropping from a 30,000 feet in the air.

In some ways that’s apropos of Gossip Girl’s new medium, Instagram. Placing Gevinson, a child prodigy of the fashion world turned actor and influencer herself, in the role of navigating the stressors of social media is the show’s smartest move; if any performer deserves a broader choice of roles after this, it is her.

But she is a lone original voice in a choir of cover artists wearing more current fashions but behaving in all the same ways the rich, famous alumni that carved the path of ahead of them did. It just goes to show that no matter what decade we’re in, some types of people never change – but to keep TV audiences interested, some stories really should. Even the sudsier ones.

“Gossip Girl” is now streaming in HBO Max.