Right-wing Twitter imitations don’t work — and Trump desperately wants back on real social media

Donald Trump loves a lawsuit, and not because he’s especially good at winning them. Like other litigious bullies, Trump loves court battles because he knows the other party is likely a somewhat normal human who doesn’t get a cheap thrill out of abusing the legal system, and can be beaten down or sucked dry by endless nuisance filings. But while that strategy often works for silencing ex-girlfriends and stiffing contractors, it’s less effective against huge institutions that actually have the resources to fight back, as Trump found when he foolishly thought he could nuisance-sue the government into pretending that his 2020 election defeat didn’t happen.

Now, in what may be an even more pathetic act, Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, demanding to be allowed back on their platforms so he can incite more terrorist violence through spreading election lies and claiming that Ashli Babbit was a martyr. Cool story, bro — except that these companies are wealthy behemoths with fleets of lawyers, not two-bit operations who make most of their money through tax fraud and cellphone ringtones. Plus, as half the lawyers in the country have already noted, Trump’s claims that his “free speech” rights have been violated are a joke, as proved by his blog that failed from lack of public interest, not censorship.

A social media account is not a human right, of course. But it’s also worth noting that there are multiple social media platforms that have been begging for Trump’s presence, such as Parler, Gab and Mike Lindell’s Frank, all of which were established to be a welcoming new home for the white supremacists, QAnon lunatics and COVID-19 denialists who have been kicked off more established social media networks. The newest effort at such a thing, Gettr, has also failed to snag that all-important @realdonaldtrump account, even though the platform was literally started by a bunch of Trump hangers-on, most notably his former campaign spokesperson, Jason Miller.

These right-wing alternatives to mainstream social media have been notoriously plagued by problems, from infighting between their funders to tech failures and poor security that leaves them open to hacking. Silicon Valley, unsurprisingly, is not sending its best to work for the Pepe-meme crowd. But that’s probably not the main reason Trump would rather pursue his fruitless lawsuit than sully his Diet Coke-sticky iPhone by posting on any of these apps.

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No, it’s because trolling is central to the Trump messaging strategy. Unfortunately for Trump and his cronies, however, trolling only works if the people you’re trying to troll can see your message — and more critically, amplify it. Posting provocative garbage on Parler is the trolling equivalent of sex with a blow-up doll: The motions are the same, but you’re just not getting the reactions that make the interaction worthwhile.

As I’ve written about extensively, both in my book and here at Salon, spite is the main motivating force behind the contemporary American right. Bereft of any winning arguments or valid policy ideas, modern conservatives instead are focused on “owning the liberals.” The success of any right-wing pundit is based not on the sharpness of their analysis, but their perceived success at irritating liberals. From his phony marriages to his illiteracy to his shameless racism, Trump couldn’t have been better created in a lab to irritate the liberals, which is the main reason for his enduring popularity with the conservative base.

But trolling liberals isn’t just the main source of pleasure for the right. It’s also how they amplify their message.

In a recent edition of his Message Box newsletter, former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote that “weaponizing liberal anger into online engagement is the primary Republican political strategy of the Internet Age,” because social media platforms prioritize “the most engaging posts.” By sharing right-wing posts — purportedly to dunk on them or express outrage — liberals only manage to “ensure that the offending post receives more engagement and is seen by more people.”

Just as important, liberal outrage is crucial for selling bad or offensive ideas to the GOP base. Tucker Carlson of Fox News, in particular, understands this. He rarely tries to persuade his audience to embrace his bad ideas — from “replacement theory” to refusing a COVID-19 vaccination to the nobility of a fascist insurrection — on the merits, knowing full well that’s impossible. Instead, he focuses on how much liberals hate these ideas, convincing his audience to adopt otherwise idiotic beliefs out of pure spite.

Provoking liberals is vital to selling a message to right-wing audiences, but in order for that to happen you need to reach those liberals to provoke them. And beyond a few journalists and other professional masochists, provokable liberals are basically nonexistent on Parler and Gettr.

We see this issue time and again with right-wing figures who, by choice or by force, have tried to move their base of social media operations to the conservative social media ghetto. In January, professional troll Dan Bongino reacted to Trump’s Twitter ban by dramatically tweeting that this would be his “final post on this anti-American platform,” and that he was moving to Parler. A few months later, he quietly crawled back to Twitter and starting posting again, never acknowledging that he had flounced away in righteous indignation.

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Other right-wing figures, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones, have seen their fortunes and profiles decline precipitously after being banned from spaces where regular interactions with liberals created opportunities for outrage harvesting. Yiannopoulos has set up shop on the far-right social media networks, and frequently uses the space to grouse about how these platforms don’t “drive traffic” because it’s just “a little private chat with my gold star homies.”

Trump’s own “social media platform” — which was actually just a blog — folded in less than a month. It turns out that the key to his social media success wasn’t just writing half-literate missives overflowing with lies and vitriol. He needed his political foes to retweet his content and dunk on it to get his followers excited.

Which is not to say there’s no value in these right-wing silo sites for the growing authoritarian movement. For instance, hundreds of thousands of QAnon enthusiasts have flocked to the messaging platform Telegram, where the talk of violence and overt anti-Semitism have become increasingly extreme. As Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told NPR in January, that kind of space is “an incubator for radicalization,” because extremists can whip each other up without outsiders arguing back or expressing skepticism.

But that leaves the far right with a recruitment problem. Luring everyday conservatives into more radical spaces requires attracting them in the first place. That means appealing to the thing those folks care about the most: Owning the liberals. Unfortunately for them, you can’t trigger the libs from afar. Which is all the more reason for the major social media platforms to tell Trump he can take his nuisance lawsuit and shove it. He is always free to use his First Amendment rights to whine about it to left-behind conservatives on Parler.

A former federal prosecutor thinks Ivanka may be the next person who gets indicted in Trump Org case

Michael Cohen, who was once former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and “fixer,” has been stressing that the criminal indictment of 73-year-old Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, is merely the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr.’s investigation of the ex-president’s company. Cohen predicts that more indictments of Trump Organization employees, past or present, are on the way. And journalist Bess Levin, in her July 6 column for Vanity Fair, lays out some reasons why she believes that former White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump is a strong candidate for an indictment.

Weisselberg has pled “not guilty” to charges that include criminal tax fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records. Because of Vance’s investigation, the Trump Organization itself has also been indicted for alleged financial crimes; under New York State law, both companies and individuals can be indicted on criminal charges.

“While Donald Trump is obviously the first name that comes to mind when envisioning a scenario in which a Trump family member is sentenced to time in prison, according to numerous experts, his adult children should be extremely concerned as well, starting with his favorite offspring: Ivanka Trump,” Levin writes. And the Vanity Fair columnist goes on to point out what former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne had to say about Ivanka Trump when she appeared on MSNBC on Monday, July 5.

According to Alksne, Weisselberg’s arrest is merely an “opening salvo” in Vance’s investigation.

Alksne told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez, “Prosecutors went to an amazing amount of effort to show Weisselberg ‘we have everything we need.’ And they’re really not only pressuring him to flip, but the amount of detail in this indictment tells me that they’re trying to tell other people you have got to flip — because ‘we have everything. We have the double books. We know what you told your tax accountants was a lie. We know that we’re gonna be able to prove these cases.’ So, I think . . . first, it’s Weisselberg and (then), there are a lot of other people mentioned, ‘Individual Number One’ or ‘Person X signed’ or ‘Person Y signed.’ Those people who are mentioned in the indictment, I would expect they’re next — and then, it builds.”

When Menendez asked Alksne what she would do next if she were prosecuting Vance’s case, the former federal prosecutor responded, “I would focus (the investigation) on the kids. Apparently, they’ve had some testimony by the comptroller; in the state of New York, that means they’ve essentially given him immunity. So, I would focus on the kids. My guess is (Trump Organization COO Matthew) Calamari is kind of easy picking and that there are similar ways to give money for the kids. We’ve heard a lot of this reporting about Ivanka Trump getting consulting fees — ‘consulting fees’ for things that she may or may not have done. That looks to me like the next place, but we’ll just have to see.”

Levin also notes what Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio had to say when CNN’s Jim Acosta interviewed him on July 4.

D’Antonio told Acosta, “The other person who I think is in peril is Ivanka Trump. One of the things that Allen Weisselberg is in trouble for is (allegedly) taking money as a contractor and then claiming self-employed status so that he can get some of the retirement benefits that the tax code allows for self-employed people. Well, we know that Ivanka Trump got quite significant sums paid to her as non-employee compensation. That freed the Trump Organization from paying part of her taxes, and it put her in a status that I think the IRS would have lots of questions about. So, these folks don’t know how to play the game straight. I think everything they do is crooked.”

You can watch the videos below via YouTube:

Earl Blumenauer wants to ban bee-killing pesticides. Is Congress listening?

Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) has long pushed for policies that would make U.S. agriculture greener, including linking crop insurance subsidies to conservation practices and making agriculture a central component of the Green New Deal.

For over a decade, he’s been doggedly sounding the alarm on threats to bees and other pollinators, and proposing legislation to address those threats. On Wednesday, he introduced the Saving America’s Pollinators Act for the third time (with some changes made along the way), with Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) as a co-sponsor and strong support from conservation groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Friends of the Earth, and the Center for Biological Diversity.

In addition to establishing a Pollinator Protection Board explicitly free from pesticide industry representation, the bill would make sweeping changes to the commodity agriculture status quo by immediately canceling the registration of neonicotinoids until they undergo further review. These systemic insecticides, called neonics for short, are used to coat the vast majority of corn and soy seeds planted in the U.S. and farmers spray them on many fruit and vegetable crops.

Although Blumenauer admits the bill has little chance of advancing or becoming law, a lot has changed since he first shone a light on the issue in 2007. Neonics’ devastating impacts on bees and other pollinators are now well-established, while more recent research is showing the chemicals can leach into soil and water and negatively affect aquatic animals, birds, mammals, and entire ecosystems. Policymakers in the European Union, Canada, and some U.S. states have also instituted various bans and restrictions on their use.

Still, the U.S. has allowed most farmers in most places to continue using neonics, and while evidence shows their use as treatments on commodity corn seeds may not ultimately benefit crops or farmers, it hasn’t slowed down their use. And in places like Florida and California, citrus growers rely on them to battle pests.

The day before he introduced the bill, Blumenauer spoke with Civil Eats to discuss why he’s convinced banning these pesticides is critical and what the path forward looks like.

You’ve introduced this bill a few times. What makes you want to keep bringing it back session after session?

Pollinators play a critical role in the food supply. Three quarters of the foods that make life interesting and healthy involve pollination. On a global scale, we’re talking about upwards of $200 billion dollars a year, and we continue to see pollinator populations struggling. We lost an estimated one-third of honeybee colonies between 2016 and 2018. National honey crops have remained at record low levels, and the scientific evidence that we are creating this with nicotine-derived pesticides, neonicotinoids, [is increasing]. To be clear, it also exposes humans, especially farmworkers [to health risks].

Other parts of the world are moving: The E.U. has permanently banned the outdoor usage of several neonicotinoids, and we’ve got some [laws] in Oregon, in Portland and Eugene, and Maryland that have restricted the use. [California may also soon restrict use.] But the federal government has not. And in fact, Trump’s EPA allowed bee-killing pesticides back on the market—and announced it was suspending data collection for its annual honeybee survey, which gives us the information to track the honeybee population.

Read more Civil Eats: Narsiso Martinez is Painting the Plight of Farmworkers

So, as public awareness grows, the problem continues to be vexing, and it’s getting worse and we’re falling behind the rest of the world. We’re trying to get the federal government back in the game. We’re establishing a Pollinator Protection Board, which I think will be extraordinarily useful for monitoring. [The bill] is just a way for us to refocus on how pollinators and the food system are in crisis.

The proposed requirement that the Pollinator Protection Board not include pesticide industry representatives seems unprecedented. The industry obviously has a lot of power in D.C. and fights any regulation of neonicotinoids, and they’re used to having a seat at the table. What kind of pushback do you expect?

Well, I don’t think that they have a lot of credibility. I want to start with the people who really need to be there. The people who are dealing with keeping bees, farmers, conservationists, scientists. Those are the people who are most important to be a part of this process. If we end up having to add an industry representative, so be it. But there’s not a strong position on their part in terms of trying to protect pollinators. It’s business as usual, full speed ahead, and resisting reasonable approaches. So I didn’t start with them.

The other thing that industry groups and the Farm Bureau argue whenever regulations on neonics are proposed is that they’re a vital tool to protect crops. How do you respond to that argument?

We don’t need to be involved with practices that actually jeopardize our food supplies. Putting pollinators at risk creates problems. We have a pretty good record—when we put our minds to it—on developing non-toxic alternatives, more approaches that are in keeping with natural predator control.

Instead, we get into a cycle where we use more chemical applications, become more dependent upon them, and have more and more negative consequences. I hope that we can break this cycle. I mean if it’s killing pollinators, it’s not good for farmers, farmworkers, or people who are in the vicinity of the applications of these products.

Have you been keeping up with the new science that extends beyond pollinators to other animals and human health?

Yes, I think the case is stronger and stronger, but it’s also more and more disturbing. We want to try and get ahead of this curve. I have co-sponsored the bill with the head of the powerful Rules Committee; Representative Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) has been a champion here. And it’s fascinating to me as we continue this work that more and more people are concerned about food systems. People are concerned about limiting chemical pesticide applications. We’re kind of caught in a vicious cycle here and this is a way to try and break it.

And from a procedural standpoint, do you see a path forward for this legislation?

Well, I’m hopeful that increased awareness [will help], and frankly there’s a different attitude with the Biden administration. They’re much more interested in regenerative agriculture and providing environmental protections. David Scott, the new chair of the Ag Committee, is much more open-minded. I’ve had several great conversations with him about where he wants to take our agricultural policies, and he is much more open to new ideas than what we have had in the past.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest Nazi analogy: Vaccine to be distributed by “medical brown shirts”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., once again drew an analogy with Nazi Germany on Tuesday when she described officials handling President Joe Biden’s vaccine rollout as “medical brown shirts.”

“Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people,” the Georgia freshman tweeted. “People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations. You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”

In the late 1920s and ’30s, the often-violent paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, officially called the SA, was colloquially described as the “brownshirts” for the color of its uniforms. The SA was involved in orchestrating pro-Hitler demonstrations and played a key role in the destruction of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht in 1938.

Greene’s latest comments come on the heels of her apology last week for a similar Nazi comparison in which she likened mandatory mask-wearing to the Nazi-era requirement that Jewish people wear identifying Stars of David on their clothing.

“You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene said in an interview, “and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

Greene later retracted those remarks after visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, saying, “I always want to remind everyone — I’m very much a normal person.”

The Georgia lawmaker’s latest comments came in response to Biden’s remarks during a speech on Tuesday, when he said: “Now we need to go community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oft times door-to-door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus.” He did not suggest that such inoculations would be mandatory, or would involve any form of force or coercion.

Asked about Greene’s latest remarks, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said no one should be taking medical advice from the Georgia congresswoman. Biden’s vaccine effort, she said, “is about protecting people and saving lives. That’s a role we’re going to continue to play from the federal government and use any of the tools and tactics that we think will be effective.”

Although Greene was technically correct in saying that coronavirus vaccines are “NOT FDA approved,” health authorities have described that as a distinction without a difference. All three vaccines available to Americans went through an expedited process known as “emergency use authorization,” under which testing, production, approval and distribution happen at an accelerated pace. The vaccines have all “met FDA’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Greene has often run into trouble on previous occasions over her apparent penchant for baseless sensationalism. In February, she was stripped of her committee assignments in the House after her previous social media activity resurfaced in which she had implied support for the assassination of various Democratic lawmakers, suggested that the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting in 2018 could have been a “false flag” operation and seemingly endorsed the notion that wealthy Jewish elites had used “space lasers” to start wildfires in California.

A viral hack for homemade tteok in minutes

I come from a long line of tteokbokki lovers on my mom’s side of the family. A few years ago, I even set up a Google Alert that updates me on the latest fusion flavor twists, snack launches, cutesy merch — and one hack I had to try.

Tteokbokki — spicy, stir-fried rice cakes — is a staple dish in South Korea, often sold from street carts and at snack shops. Tteok traditionally come in two shapes: Tteokguk-tteok, thinly sliced circles, are the slurpable star of Dduk Guk (aka tteokguk), rice cake soup. Garaetteok, finger-sized cylinders, are the preferred vessel in saucier dishes like tteokbokki.

In the Before Times, you could purchase frozen tteok from a local Asian grocer, or make them at home. But in 2020, the internet started burning up with a new homemade tteokbokki that requires far less time and technique.

The reinvented approach begins much like Vietnamese fresh spring rolls: with a stack of dried rice paper wraps and a dish of hot water for soaking. Only, rather than dipping one sheet at a time, two to three are stacked and soaked together, then rolled into a tight log and chopped into bite-size pieces.

Texas-based YouTuber and chef Seonkyoung Longest, who introduced the trend to many Americans, demonstrates the process above. According to other blogs, this trick hails from Vietnam, a country that’s come to embrace Korean cuisine and regard tteokbokki as comfort food. While the exact creator remains unknown, the trend became a popular cooking project during quarantine. It quickly attracted a following on Korean social platforms like Naver and KakaoTalk, then soon enough on YouTube and Instagram all over the world.

For my fellow tteokbokki obsessives on the internet (hi, hello!), this method offers so much. It uses rice paper wrappers, an affordable, shelf-stable ingredient, and comes together in a matter of minutes. The broader appeal, though, is how these rice paper rolls are significantly chewier — or “jjolgit-jjolgit (쫄깃쫄깃)” as Korean-speaking YouTubers like HojuSara and Nado have put it — than typical tteok. (Unsurprisingly, the chew’s distinct sound has become the source of ASMR gold.)

Me though? I felt at odds. I know firsthand how tricky acquiring tteok can be, but I’m a firm believer that its quintessential suppleness shouldn’t be substituted, and this hack was doing exactly that. Nevertheless, before I got yet another Google notification, to curb my tteokbokki FOMO (a thing!), I had to give it a try.

I filled a sheet pan with warm water, soaked a stack of three rice sheets, then tightly rolled them into a tube. Several folks suggest adding cheese, preferably a sliced or string variety, so I made another log with mozzarella. Then I cut the rolls into quarters. At this point, the makeshift tteok are ready for any given tteokbokki recipe. Usually, this involves a sweet gochujang sauce. I put mine toward this splendid recipe from Food52 community member Kyna.

At first glance, the smooth, glutinous roll-ups looked exactly like normal garaetteok. The only aesthetic difference was their gentle translucent hue, similar to Chinese liangfen (jelly noodles).

One bite and I was stunned. Much lighter and bouncier than what I’m used to in tteokbokki, these were chewy to the nth degree. And while I expected the individual sheets to unravel, they stayed together in perfect, plush harmony.

Admittedly, my mozzarella rice cakes were less successful. All the videos I watched advised against cutting filled rolls prior to cooking but — oops — I did just that, and the cheese melted into the sauce. But hey, happy accidents can lead to cheesy tteokbokki, and since when was that ever a bad thing?

Lessons from a minimalist kitchen — plus, where they keep the clutter

Architect John Pawson is known for his rigorously minimalistic aesthetic. A typical John Pawson interior looks like it is waiting for the owner to arrive: There’s no clutter and the furnishings are kept to a minimum. Looking at his own bare kitchen and dining room, it might come as a surprise that Pawson and his wife Catherine have just published a cookbook Home Farm Cooking that’s geared towards home cooks.

Despite the book’s pristine photos of the Pawson’s kitchens, a lot of cooking goes on in the Pawson household. “This book is about home cooking,” says Catherine. “I invited some of my favorite chefs in to collaborate with me on recipes, but the rest are old favorites: some from my mother and John’s mother, plus other people’s recipes that I’ve adapted.”

The book takes its title from the name Pawson has given his Cotswolds estate: Home Farm. A former farm, Pawson connected an existing barn and farmhouse to create the main building and turned the stable into a guest house. Because the home sprawls over multiple existing structures, there are actually three (yes, three) kitchens: A kitchen in the “barn” end of the main structure, which gets lots of use in the summer when they take meals outside; a smaller kitchen on the “farmhouse” side where John and Catherine take their morning coffee and do most of their cooking; and a small kitchen in the guest house. The unusual setup came in handy last year: “During lockdown, we’ve had adult children living at home,” says Catherine “We didn’t anticipate using all three kitchens at once, but it’s been brilliant.”

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

Pawson is quick to point out that you obviously don’t need three kitchens or really too much of anything at all to cook a great meal. “You need fire and water and a bit of space in between, a few shelves and drawers, and the right equipment,” he says. However, the secret to his minimalist-looking cook space is not to go without the usual tools and appliances you’d find in a contemporary kitchen. Instead, Pawson has designed ways to hide the clutter and developed habits that make the clean, spacious look possible. Here are the lessons we learned from John Pawson’s uber-minimalistic kitchen.

Learn to find satisfaction in tidying up.

John and Catherine Pawson make a mess when they’re cooking like the rest of us, “When I’m cooking, it’s like a bomb has hit the kitchen,” laughs Catherine, who says she’s the type of cook who leaves the cleaning up to the end. While John shakes his head at his wife’s description, he says his own inclination to tidiness is ingrained, “I quite enjoy clearing up and putting everything away . . . I get tremendous pleasure in an empty surface — the materials and also the kind of freedom of the spatial qualities.” Thinking of how good your own kitchen feels on its best day can help motivate your daily clean up. And remember professional photographs of any kitchen are not how they look every day: Don’t feel like you need to tidy up to picture-perfection–just what feels good to you.

Consider a larder — an old-fashioned idea that deserves reviving.

In the farmhouse part of the house, John kept the existing larder in his redesign of the kitchen space. The unheated pantry room is where the couple stores non-perishable items, much of their fresh produce, and servingware. “I absolutely love it,” says Catherine. “It’s probably my favorite room in the whole house.” Even if you don’t have a separate pantry room, you might think of adding a hutch or storage cabinet that can store overflow foodstuffs and less frequently used items.

Create a “garage” for small appliances

The Pawsons also have all their small appliances tucked away in the larder, where they are easy to access but out of sight. “The beaters, the ice-cream machine, the coffee maker, they’re all plugged in, ready to go,” says Catherine. “That way you’re not taking out the machine, putting it down, plugging it in. It just works more efficiently.”

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Know that editing is a never-ending process

While John Pawson is known for reducing and editing everything he creates to achieve simplicity “we’ve still got more stuff than we need,” he confesses. “I think that is where the adage that you expand to fill whatever you’ve got proves true.” His wife concurs, adding “If there’s anything you haven’t used for the last year, you probably don’t need it.”

Buy things that will last

The Pawson’s kitchen has prototypes of John’s cookware and tabletop designs rotating through, but their overarching philosophy is to buy fewer items that will last a lifetime. “Most of the things I have, I’ve had for over 20 years, ” says Catherine. “We have beautiful knives from Japan and beautiful copper pots.”

Design storage that is flexible and generous

“I think it’s very difficult to foresee very particular places or places for everything,” says John of designing kitchen storage. “I prefer a much looser, simpler storage system: Wide drawers — lots of them — and enough storage space, but nothing too prescriptive about where things go. I find things have a habit of moving around.” You’ll also notice the Pawsons don’t have their pantry staples decanted into matching canisters. They like to keep things neat (even behind cabinet doors), but don’t obsess about being hyper-organized.

Make the appliances disappear

In the Pawson’s kitchen, the refrigerator and dishwasher hide behind doors. While they are full-size models, Pawson says he favors refrigerators that are petite by U.S. and even U.K. standards, he says, “They’re fairly small because we like to go shopping almost every day.” When shopping for appliances during a remodel, opt for “panel ready” models, and consider how much fridge space you really need.

Likewise, the induction range is a minor interruption in the counter, but it is also now Catherine’s favorite way to cook. “I was very reluctant,” says Catherine. “But I’ve actually come to love induction. It’s very responsive, it heats up super fast, and it stops cooking immediately when you turn it down.” Plus, she points out that it’s safer, especially with grandchildren around, “The cooking surface and the handles of the pans do not get hot.”

Use open shelves only for everyday items

John designed their farmhouse kitchen with a single open shelf. “What you see in the photographs, those are all things that we use every day,” says John. This means nothing gathers dust and it’s easy to keep the shelf looking nice “If you have open shelves, there needs to be some order — and with more things that’s difficult to achieve,” he cautions.

Republicans want “18 more months of chaos” — followed by the end of democracy

Today’s Republican Party is a fascist, criminal, sociopathic, anti-democratic, white supremacist, theocratic, plutocratic and cultlike organization. Its leaders (and followers) have repeatedly and publicly shown the world that they embrace such values and behavior.

In response, the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media and too many average Americans have responded to the Age of Trump and its horrors by trying to convince themselves that the Republican Party and larger right-wing movement are something other than what they have shown themselves to be.

And of course there is the fetish of “bipartisanship.” Under its sway, the Democratic Party’s leadership and too many among the mainstream news media and commentariat have convinced themselves that compromise with Republicans, no matter how radicalized and extremist they have become, is something virtuous in itself.

If the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, that truism is especially correct here. President Biden and the Democrats have attempted to work with an opposition that has at almost every moment shown itself to be an enemy of democracy, up to and including its support for Trump’s ongoing coup attempt and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

As I have previously written, “white identity politics and white rage are more important than pocketbook issues for many of today’s Republican voters.” The only meaningful way Biden and the Democrats can fight back must begin with “acknowledging that this crisis of democracy is existential” and acting accordingly:

This means not cooperating with the Republicans on any policies in the name of “bipartisanship.” Protecting American democracy should be the Democrats’ No. 1 priority. To work with Republicans is to legitimize them as responsible partners in government, when in reality today’s Republican Party is an extremist, anti-democratic and white supremacist criminal organization.

Today’s Republican Party is ultimately incapable of being a partner in responsible governance. It rejects basic principles of democracy and compromise towards a shared goal of serving the public good. Instead, the right-wing movement’s primary goals are chaos, obstruction and destruction, with the aim of delegitimizing the very idea of democracy itself — except as a meaningless term used to describe one-party Republican rule.

Republican leaders, officials and other spokespeople know this is the strategy and have repeatedly admitted to it. Leaked video footage of Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, saying precisely that is only the latest example. As reported by Common Dreams:

Newly leaked video footage of a recent event hosted by the right-wing group Patriot Voices shows Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas openly admitting that his party wants “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” as President Joe Biden, a bipartisan group of senators, and congressional Democrats work to pass climate and infrastructure legislation.

“Honestly, right now, for the next 18 months, our job is to do everything we can to slow all of that down to get to December of 2022,” Roy says in the clip, referring to the month after that year’s midterm elections. Republicans need to flip just a handful of seats to take back the House and Senate.

“I don’t vote for anything in the House of Representatives right now,” Roy says in response to an audience member’s question about the sweeping infrastructure and safety-net package that Democrats are planning to pass unilaterally alongside a White House-backed bipartisan deal.

As Indivisible co-director Ezra Levin noted on Twitter, “Chip Roy got caught saying it out loud, but to be clear this has been [Mitch] McConnell’s plan all along.”

What does Roy’s “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” mean in practice? Of course it means blocking specific legislation, such as President Biden’s infrastructure bill and investigations into the Trump regime and its obvious crimes. More important still, it means further restrictions on Black and brown people’s voting rights in a 21st-century version of Jim Crow.

Over the last several decades, Republicans and movement conservatives have shown that for them democracy is not a primary virtue or a sacred principle. Instead, they view democracy as a means to an end, a tool for acquiring and holding as much power as possible so they can impose their will on those Americans targeted as the enemy.

Such political behavior is typical of failing democracies, where an extremist, authoritarian faction infiltrates government and then uses the institutions of democracy to destroy it from within.

As Nancy MacLean, Heather Cox Richardson and other scholars have shown, one of the main tensions in American society is the relationship between democracy, property and the value of human life. Should capital and profit reign over all other considerations? Or should the United States be a social democracy where human rights have primacy over profits and property rights?

From before the founding to the present, America has been a racialized society structured around the dominance of white people over nonwhite people, and for most of that history Black people were defined as human property. So these debates about “freedom” and “rights” can often be reduced to a basic question: How much power, wealth and control should a small minority of rich white men hold over everyone else?”

In an interview last year with Yale News, political scientist Jacob Hacker explored how Republicans have built an implausible coalition rooted in “plutocratic populism,” combining “organized money and organized outrage to win elections, tilt the playing field in their favor, and govern for the top 1%.” In order to draw voters to support economic polices that were beloved by “big donors and big corporations but unpopular among voters, and even many Republicans,” the party created an “infrastructure of outrage,” notably the NRA, the Christian right and the right-wing propaganda media.

There’s an obvious contradiction at work here, Hacker notes, but to this point Republicans have managed to conceal that from their own voters:

[T]he steep rise in inequality after 1980 created a sort of conservative dilemma for Republicans in the United States. Essentially, there’s a growing tension between those at the top and the rest of society. It’s a tension between the goals of the plutocrats — the richest people, big business, and the organizations they create to influence policy — and the ideas that Republicans need to articulate to attract ordinary voters.

In particular, Republicans have become increasingly reliant on white working-class voters. These are [Lee] Atwater’s populists. But to do so, Republicans basically divorce their economic policies from their electoral strategies. Those strategies rest more and more on radicalizing voters and getting them to see electoral politics as “us versus them” identity wars. They use racial imagery, demonize government and Democrats, and basically create a kind of tribal identity around whiteness, conservative Christianity, rurality, gun ownership, and the like. The goal is to shift the focus from the growing economic divide and instead incite outrage that reliably gets their voters to the polls but doesn’t challenge the party’s plutocratic aims.

Unless Joe Biden and the Democrats jettison the totem of “bipartisanship” — which is largely a concern of the political class, not average Americans — the Republican Party’s chaos campaign against democracy will keep on winning.

Next year’s congressional midterms and the 2024 presidential election will be two of the most important elections in American history. Democracy is literally on the ballot. The Republicans and their allies and foot soldiers are following through on an aggressive plan to end multiracial, majoritarian democracy by nullifying the people’s will, and have made clear they are willing to endorse right-wing terrorism and political violence to win and hold power.

What will it take for the Democratic Party, its leaders, the press and the American people to take the Republican Party’s existentially dangerous behavior more seriously? Or is it already too late to stop America’s accelerating descent into neofascism and a “whites only” pseudo-democracy?

The Surfside tragedy could be a “bellwether moment” for managed retreat

The Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida, collapsed last week, killing at least 18 people with 145 others unaccounted for. It’s too soon to say whether climate change had anything to do with the tragedy. But the collapse has shone a spotlight on Florida’s unique vulnerabilities to climate change and raised questions about whether the state’s coastal infrastructure is equipped to handle the flooding that comes with sea-level rise.

The climate stakes for Floridians are high. By 2050, buildings in South Florida may be inundated by 2 to 3 feet of sea-level rise, plus 4 or more feet of storm surge. By 2100, the flooding will be even worse. Some counties might be able to afford to raise their roads and build sea walls. But adapting to rising seas is expensive, complicated, and, ultimately, unsustainable — especially in coastal states like Florida, which will experience intensifying Atlantic hurricanes in addition to sea-level rise.

Preventing future tragedies means acting now, said Randall W. Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University in Miami. He thinks it’s already time to start thinking about moving residents away from the sea. A certain amount of sea-level rise is baked in, given current atmospheric carbon levels, he says. The longer Florida waits to organize the systematic withdrawal of people and assets from the coast, the more chaotic that eventual retreat will be.

This retreat-oriented attitude isn’t widely shared in Parkinson’s home state. When he gives presentations on the inevitability of mass migration inland from Florida’s coast, attendees have verbally accosted him and called him “Dr. Doom” — a moniker he rejects. He’s even received threatening messages at his house, he says. “It’s just a terrible, terrible shame in this country how we’ve responded to climate change,” he said. “There’s no leadership.”

Grist caught up with Parkinson to talk about climate change, the Surfside tragedy, and what Florida can do to prepare itself for what’s coming down the pike. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Q. Has the condo collapse made you think more urgently about rising seas?

A. One of the side effects of the tragedy of the condo collapse was people started to say, “Is this because of climate change?” Which is a fair question. But realistically, even if all of the buildings were resistant to the structural challenges of climate change, in 50 years most of them are going to be underwater anyway. It did bring to the front this issue of our coastal zone. How safe are we? How’s our quality of life going to change under climate change?

To me, the collapse was a bellwether moment or a tipping point in the conversation, where for the first time, many more people are thinking more seriously about climate change in the coastal zone. Perhaps they’re doing it for the wrong reason, in the sense that the collapse probably had nothing to do with climate change. But designing more resilient buildings and all that, it really depends on where you live. If your elevation is 20 feet or below and you live within a mile or two or three of the coastline, that zone is at high, high risk. Let’s just say sea-level rise is going to be five feet, although I personally think that by the end of the century it’ll be higher than that. But now, you have a storm on top of that that has a surge of 20 feet. So look up in the sky and imagine 25 feet and that’s where the sea is going to be during a storm surge at the end of the century.

Q. Is climate change impacting Florida’s infrastructure in other ways?

A. We’re looking at flooding by sea-level rise, flooding by storm surge, and flooding by changes in precipitation patterns. There will be a longer dry season. But when the rains do come, they will be very heavy. And this will lead to flooding because Florida is a low-lying land, but also because of our infrastructure. A lot of it is designed for rainfall patterns that are of a historical nature. And if you have a stormwater drain that is draining into the ocean, but the oceans are rising, pretty soon the drain will be underwater, which is what is happening in Miami Beach. Saltwater is bubbling up through the drain systems.

In Miami Beach, when they wanted to do a little work on their stormwater drains and elevate the roads to reduce flooding, they just did a couple of miles and it was $500 million. If you’re an affluent community with a very strong tax base, maybe you can implement these things. But if you don’t have that, what are you going to do? And even if you’re in a community that raises your roads and deals with your storm water, did the community next to you do that? Because if they didn’t, then you can’t get to your home anyway.

All the real estate on high land now is getting pricier and pricier. Traditionally, people who live not on the coast but behind the coast were people that didn’t have the resources. So these areas that are now prime real estate targets because of climate change are being invested in, and the market’s going up, and the taxes and the rents and all that. That process is called gentrification.

Q. Are politicians making progress on thinking about these climate-related issues?

A. We’re making some progress. The state has a resilient coastlines program, it was funded a few years ago, which is when it finally put its toe into the water of climate change and sea-level rise. The program will continue to award grants to municipalities and counties to do what is the first step in preparing for climate change: Identify your risks.

There have now been 30 or 40 of these assessments completed through the state of Florida’s resilient coastlines program. But then you have to implement that plan, and that’s where it gets very challenging. How do you prioritize your list of things to do? Implementing the plan is a struggle in itself, but then where’s the money going to come from? Nobody knows the answer to that. Nobody.

Q. So what can Floridians do to protect themselves against these future impacts?

A. Your options are: You do nothing, you adapt (which is a temporary fix because eventually these low-lying coastal areas are all going to be underwater), or, at some point, people are going to have to think about a managed withdrawal from the coastline. Right now, it wouldn’t be managed; it would be total chaos.

A couple of years ago in the Florida panhandle, when hurricanes devastated the area, people said “We are resilient, we are going to go back in and rebuild.” At some point, there may not be the will or the money. At some point, it’s going to have to be, “We’re just going to have to let that go and relocate.” And how is that done? That is the question that we will be faced in the second half of this century. Because by 2050, sea levels will be a foot or two above present in most of Florida. So these current plans, they might hold the line for the next 30 years or so, but it’s just going to be untenable after that. And people are going to have to begin to make plans for how to withdraw and to ensure equity in the transition.

Q. Managed retreat might be the long-term solution, but if people move, they’re not going to do it right away. What can be done in the short term to prevent Florida’s infrastructure from crumbling?

A. Mayors in Florida are suggesting that they’re going to go in and reevaluate these buildings even if they’re not 40 years old. That’s a visual inspection of the property. I’m assuming that that would be things like revisiting the structural design elements of the building, looking at how the foundation was built, what were the pilings made out of, how deep did the pilings go, what they’re going through or into, and so forth. And then at the end of that, you get what apparently the Surfside condo got in 2018: recommendations on how to move forward. I think that that is a very important first step.

We’re really talking about two different time scales here: the next 20 or 30 years — let’s just say the duration of a mortgage — and then beyond that. Obviously, we need to be doing things now, even if in the end they’re not going to solve the problem. But we also need to be using this time to begin thinking about what the next step is so that you’re not having to make that decision when you have a major catastrophe.

New TrumpWorld social media site Gettr is hacked, mocked and trolled with hedgehog porn

Former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller launched a new social media platform called Gettr late last week, only to see it quickly mocked online, particularly for its uninspired name. Gettr was presented to the public as a way to solve conservatives’ problems on social media, but, the launch encountered with a series of challenges, from hackers scraping troves of users’ private data to leftists trolling the platform with NSFW Sonic the Hedgehog content.

Last Thursday, Politico was the first to report on Gettr’s plans to go live. A team of former Trump campaign associates helped to kickstart the new right-wing app, which announced itself as aimed at “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”

While ridicule indeed followed, many in TrumpWorld showed up at the half-developed website, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, former Trump White House aide Sebastian Gorka and a plethora of former Trump campaign staffers.

Soon thereafter, The Daily Beast uncovered that Miller’s entire venture was being funded by fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, aka Miles Kwok, who is friendly with various TrumpWorld figures, most notably Steve Bannon. But before the dust even got a chance to settle, Gettr became the target of hackers who saw the site security as laughable.

On the morning of July 4, on the day the site was slated for its grand launch, the site was hacked by a somewhat friendly hacker who defaced usernames on top accounts, including those of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jason Miller himself.

Jason Miller's new right-wing social media site "Gettr" was hacked this morning. pic.twitter.com/cncddw9RZ9

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) July 4, 2021

“JubaBaghdad was here, follow me in twitter :),” the hacker wrote, as first reported by Salon. The hacker told Salon that the breach took him less than 20 minutes to carry out in subsequent conversations. “Took from me 20 minutes to find them. And I’m sure I can find more if I spent more time,” the anonymous hacker shared.

The following day, on Monday, the hacker reached back out to Salon with a lengthy list of other points of concern on Gettr, including “a dangerous bug in their API server,” which the hacker said was an access point where he was able to uncover information including “email, birthdate, and location.”

The hacker, known on Twitter as “JubaBaghdad,” offered as proof that they were able to access accurate information scraped from this Salon reporter’s Gettr account, created only days earlier.

The hacker added: "hackers will scrap user data and will sell it on [the] black market like in dark web," while adding that there remain a high number of bugs in the code of "Gettr."

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) July 5, 2021

JubaBaghdad claimed they had attempted to get in touch with Miller’s development team, but to no prevail. The hacker stressed that Gettr remains open to attacks.

Miller didn’t respond to Salon’s request for an interview, nor to the offer of answering questions by email.

In public statements, Miller has claimed that Gettr was poised to challenge the “woke tyranny” of Big Tech, a major villain in the conservative universe.

“GETTR is a direct challenge to the social media oligarchs from Silicon Valley, and what better day to declare independence from their woke tyranny than July 4th?” Miller declared. “GETTR is the marketplace of ideas. We will not cancel people for their political opinions, and GETTR offers far more features and better technology than anything else out there.”

That claim appears debatable. Miller boasted that Gettr had made the list of top 10 most downloaded applications on the Apple app store even before its launch, and so far appears unfazed by its apparently questionable development and security features.

“Users won’t have to choose between conservative-leaning platforms with inferior technology and slicker liberal Apps that crush their freedom of expression,” Miller added. “With GETTR, they’ll get back their freedom of speech and have a superior product at the same time.”

But this sales pitch evidently made little impact on Donald Trump, Miller’s former boss, who evidently has no plans to join the right-wing platform anytime soon.

On Tuesday morning, Vice News reported that hackers had scraped 90,000 emails from Gettr users, in addition to a host of other sensitive data points from account creation on the site.

One would be remiss not to mention the extraordinary amount of “furry” porn involving Sonic the Hedgehog that has flooded Gettr. Salon has verified that the Gettr site is now attempting to ban accounts posting Sonic porn, which has provoked protest from left-wing trolls eager to argue that Miller’s team is violating their own mission statement of free expression.

Early on Wednesday, numerous account postings reviewed by Salon accused Gettr of “censoring” user content under the respective hashtags “#sonic” and “#sonic_came_in_my_bussy.”

A growing number of accounts on Jason Miller's new right-wing "Gettr" site posting "Sonic the Hedgehog furry porn" are being banned from the platform — and now there is a push among leftist users to argue that "furry porn is protected under the first amendment."

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) July 6, 2021

Miller has claimed that Gettr has now successfully patched the security vulnerabilities, but the hacker who communicated with Salon dismissed that, saying they “can take over any account through XSS bug[s]!”

Salon reached out to several pro-Trump pundits who have recently joined Gettr and invited them to share their experiences on the new platform. None responded.

MSNBC’s Morning Joe slams J.D. Vance for bending the knee to Trump

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough lambasted J.D. Vance for disavowing his criticism of Donald Trump and remaking himself as a caricature of the twice-impeached one-term president.

The “Hillbilly Elegy” author has apologized for since-deleted tweets criticizing Trump during the 2016 election as he campaigns for the Republican nomination Ohio’s U.S. Senate primary, and the “Morning Joe” host and conservative contributor Charlie Sykes debated the wisdom of Vance’s position.

“He’s remade himself, not just remade himself in the image of Trump, but remade himself into one of the crudest, dumbest versions of it,” Sykes said. “Really, it is extraordinary, and you know, as you say, you know, human nature is endlessly interesting. We think we’ve seen all of the various versions of people abasing themselves or, you know, losing their way, but we keep seeing new versions of it, and J.D. Vance is one of the more dramatic examples of that.”

Scarborough pointed out that Vance enjoyed broad appeal until entering electoral politics, where he’s already thrown away his credibility and alienated voters he’ll need in the general election if he wins the GOP primary.

“This is a guy who wrote a book, and had a story that united people across political aisles,” Scarborough said. “I had conservative friends, moderate friends, liberal friends, all reading this book. Mika [Brzezinski] and our children, many of them read this book, and this is a guy that could have had a future in really either party, and why in the world, it’s just like you said, [Rep.] Elise Stefanik, why in the world would they completely twist and contort themselves to try to fit into this Trumpist sort of mold when this is a guy who’s twice impeached. He lost the White House, he lost the Senate, he lost the House. He’s not going to get re-elected again. Why would they do that? I just — I don’t understand it.”

Sykes blamed their flip-flops on “raw ambition,” saying Vance, Stefanik and others were aping Trump to appeal to his Republican supporters — but Scarborough still didn’t get it.

“It’s stupid, Charlie,” Scarborough said. “It’s strategically — if you’re ambitious, this is the opposite of what you do.”

Sykes wasn’t convinced.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said. “I mean, I hope you’re right about that. Elise Stefanik is looking around, thinking, ‘Hey, I’m No. 3 Republican, and we’re going to win back the House of Representatives.’ Right now, there’s no negative to being dumb, to being racist. [Rep.] Paul Gosar is openly consorting with white nationalists, what price has he paid for that? [Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, what price has she paid? The incentive structure now rewards the most reckless, irresponsible and some of the dumbest politicians out this, at least for the moment. I agree with you long-term, it seems like a terrible life choice, but they’re caught up in the moment, and so we’re seeing how far are people willing to contort themselves to get power, prestige, money [and] clicks in the age of Trump.”

“You have J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, Nikki Haley, Tucker Carlson, these are all people who are smart people, who could have gone a different direction, who know exactly what they are doing,” Sykes added. “I mean, you have guys like Sean Hannity, who’s dumb as a box of rocks, but these other guys, they know, they understand the history, they know what they are doing. They understand the match they are lighting out there, who they are encouraging and what they’re doing, and they’re willing to do it anyway, and that’s what’s so sickening about it.”

How a Greenpeace undercover reporting team embarrassed ExxonMobil

Unearthed, an environmental news team run by Greenpeace UK, recently carried out an undercover investigation into the oil giant ExxonMobil, in which the team posed as corporate headhunters and recorded two of the oil giant’s top U.S. lobbyists soberly admitting that the company has systematically suppressed climate science and pushed lawmakers to impede meaningful climate action.

The two lobbyists — Keith McCoy, a senior director for federal relations at Exxon, and Dan Easley, a former Exxon White House lobbyist — helpfully outlined a number of ways in which Exxon has successfully squashed federal environmental regulation in service of its bottom line over the past decade.

McCoy boasted that he had personal relationships with a number of Democratic senators friendly to the oil industry, including Jon Tester, of Montana, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and the famous or infamous Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whom McCoy described as a “kingmaker,” saying he calls Manchin every week to discuss Exxon’s political interests.

McCoy characterized Exxon’s public support of a carbon tax, which would put a price on emissions, as purely a PR ploy designed to convey the impression that the company is environmentally conscious. The company’s stance, he said, is merely a “talking point,” because “a carbon tax isn’t going to happen.”

McCoy even said that Exxon often sends oil industry trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute to lobby for the company’s interests as its “whipping boys.”

Perhaps most noteworthy in Unearthed’s report was the claim that Exxon played a direct role in shaping President Biden’s infrastructure bill. According to McCoy, the company has been working to nix a carbon tax that was originally included in the bill to fund the construction of clean energy infrastructure.

“Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts [at regulation]? Yes, that’s true,” McCoy said. “But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our shareholders.”

Unearthed’s findings have made headlines in just about every major U.S. news outlet, providing smoking-gun evidence of a back-scratching relationship between Big Oil and political insiders that environmental advocates have long argued exists behind closed doors.

To get a better sense of the report’s significance, Salon spoke with Lawrence Carter, a senior reporter and special projects editor at Unearthed. Carter himself conducted the sham interviews and helped lead the investigation alongside editor Damian Kahya.

The idea, Carter said, was born out of previous investigations into BP, the British multinational oil and gas company now infamous for spilling more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Carter explained he had been “carrying out investigations into oil companies that have claimed to support the Paris Agreement but [didn’t] actually seem to back it up with their actions,” whether that meant the company’s actual emissions or its lobbying positions.

BP was one of these companies, Carter said, purporting to be a leader in tackling methane emissions and “flaring,” a high-emissions practice in which nonviable gas is burned off for safety reasons. Behind the scenes, Carter discovered, the energy mammoth has done just about everything it could to flout its public Paris-aligned position.

In 2009, for instance, a year before the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP lobbied the Obama administration for an exemption from a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rule that would have required the firm to produce a report on the potential environmental impact of the Macondo Prospect, the Gulf of Mexico oil field where the spill would soon happen. More recently, as Unearthed reported, BP lobbied in 2017 for a legislative dilution of NEPA, weakening the requirement for oil and gas companies to predict the “cumulative impacts” of potential projects in order to receive federal approval.

Though Unearthed’s findings went far beyond what was publicly known at the time, Carter acknowledged that the team’s investigations were limited. In the case of Exxon, he said, “we ultimately came to a conclusion that an undercover investigation is justified and necessary to reveal what they’re really doing.”

The decision to pursue such an investigation was the result of a “painstaking” process, Carter said. “We had to find a very large body of prima facie evidence to justify doing the investigation at all.”

A key piece of that evidence came from revelations about where Exxon was directing its money with respect to political advocacy. In 2016, a bombshell report by the Guardian found that the oil giant had known about the correlation between climate change and carbon dioxide emission as far back as 1981. Despite this, the company funded a number of right-wing interest groups that have systematically denied the connection, according to Greenpeace. These groups have included the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the International Policy Network, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council and a number of others.

Shortly after the Guardian report surfaced, a broad public awareness campaign — dubbed @ExxonKnew on social media — coalesced around the oil company’s apparent complicity in climate change and climate denial. “Exxon knew about climate change half a century ago,” the campaign’s website read. “They deceived the public, misled their shareholders, and robbed humanity of a generation’s worth of time to reverse climate change.”

Going into the Unearthed investigation, Carter said “there was some trepidation about what a $300 billion oil company is going to do in response.” This investigation arrives amid an acrimonious legal tangle between Chevron and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who successfully sued the company on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous people affected by Chevron’s operations in that country. Chevron retaliated with a legal onslaught alleging that Donziger effectively ghostwrote the report that led to his success in court. A federal judge ruled in Chevron’s favor, and Donziger has been on house arrest since August 2019 after refusing to surrender his laptop and cellphone, claiming that was a violation of attorney-client privilege.

Not eager to face a similar fate, Carter said he had consulted a number of lawyers before launching the investigation to ensure it would be conducted legally.

Neither McCoy nor Easley responded to Salon’s request for comment. A spokeswoman from the American Petroleum Institute (API), which McCoy described as Exxon’s “whipping boy,” responded to Salon with this statement:

API is out front and transparent about whom makes up our Board and where our industry stands on policy issues — and we proudly disclose and advocate for both, either as API alone or as part of broader coalitions of manufacturers. Our industry has a long public record of supporting policies that enable the safe and responsible development and use of American energy and other petroleum products while reducing emissions and protecting public health.

The spokeswoman declined to address McCoy’s comments specifically.

Exxon, which also did not respond to Salon’s request for comment, has released a public statement attempting to distance the company from McCoy and Easley.

“We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials,” said CEO Darren Woods. “They are entirely inconsistent with the way we expect our people to conduct themselves. We were shocked by these interviews and stand by our commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change.”

Carter told Salon that Woods’ statement “stretches credulity.”

“It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” he said. “That we just so happened to speak to the only two bad employees in their lobbying team — and that they were running some kind of covert lobbying operation behind the company’s back. It’s not the sort of behavior you’d expect from a major company, to blame their staff.”

Carter said he had “spoken with a couple of reporters” about the striking statement from Exxon. “They all said they can’t remember the last time Exxon apologized for anything.”

Amy Coney Barrett ruled in favor of major backer without explaining ties

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled in favor of a major donor to her confirmation battle without explaining her ties to the plaintiff.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation sued over a California law requiring charitable organizations to disclose the identities of their major donors to the state attorney general’s office, but Barrett not only declined to recuse herself from the case — she also vigorously took part in oral arguments and joined the majority opinion without addressing questions about her involvement, reported The American Prospect.

“There is no mechanism to force a justice to adhere to the Court’s own prior rulings in their ethical conduct, or to hold them accountable for failing to do so,” wrote columnist Steven Lubet. “Self-regulation, in other words, does not work. In fact, it creates an essential imbalance, as those justices who conscientiously follow recusal practices take themselves out of cases, while those with no such concerns do not.”

The Koch-funded advocacy group publicly committed more than $1 million promoting Barrett’s confirmation weeks before Donald Trump lost his re-election bid, and the newly minted justice was personally alerted to that backing in a letter from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) calling on her to recuse herself from the case.

The senators detailed efforts by Americans for Prosperity to secure Barrett’s confirmation and pointed out that federal law provides that a Supreme Court justice is disqualified in any case where her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

The test outlined in the statute does not require evidence of bias, but only the showing of circumstances where a judge’s “impartiality could reasonably be doubted,” but Barrett never responded to the senators’ letter or acknowledged their question about her involvement in the case, which the court found 6-3 in her donor’s favor.

“It has been the Supreme Court’s ‘historic practice‘ to leave recusal questions to the determination of each individual justice, rather than submit them to the full court,” Lubet wrote. “The unfortunate consequence of that approach is fully evident in this instance, where Justice Barrett has seemingly disregarded both a federal statute and a previous SCOTUS decision.”

How George Floyd’s murder shone a light on previously invisible stories

Darnella Frazier, the 18-year-old woman who won an honorary Pulitzer for filming the murder of George Floyd last year, announced her uncle was killed Tuesday night after being caught up in a police chase in Minneapolis — a police chase that reportedly did not involve him.

While the details about that case remain unclear, it is, if nothing else, a reminder of one of the most important legacies of Floyd’s killing — the fact that it shone a spotlight on police abuses that previously went unnoticed.

Shortly after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for murdering Floyd, his brother Philonese referenced Emmett Till, an African American teenager from Chicago who was beaten and murdered while visiting rural Mississippi. There was much that separated the two homicides: Till was lynched in 1955, while Floyd was strangled under Chauvin’s knee in 2020; Till’s murderers were acquitted by an openly racist jury, while Floyd’s murderer was convicted by diverse jurors; Till, 17, was much younger than Floyd, 46, and lived at a time when lynching was common, especially in the South.

Yet in the most important respect, Philonese Floyd was not wrong when he referred to Till as “the first George Floyd.” Both murders wound up being rallying points for major social justice movements, drawing attention to the manner in which America’s legal system has devalued African American lives throughout history — and continues to do so. In Floyd’s case, this also helped to increase attention for other instances of the American state’s violent racism.

First, an important date: May 25, 2020. That is the day when George Floyd died. The exact anniversary passed nearly two months ago, but the memory of what happened never can. Indeed, a big part of the problem is that too many stories don’t get remembered by enough people.

More than two months earlier, on March 13, a 26-year-old African American woman in Louisville named Breonna Taylor was shot to death by police officers who forced their way into her apartment while investigating alleged drug dealing operations. There is no evidence that Taylor was involved in any of those operations, although one suspect was offered a plea deal by authorities if he would implicate her. Despite some successful litigation from her family, no criminal justice proceedings have occurred as a result of her death — nor does it appear that such a case will ever happen. Although Taylor’s shooting occurred before Floyd’s murder, the important legal decisions regarding her death occurred afterward. While many argue that justice has not been done for Taylor, the legal system’s unwillingness to treat her shooting as a crime caused waved of protests across the country.

Elijah McClain died almost seven months before Taylor. The 23-year-old African American man worked as a massage therapist in the Colorado city of Aurora and was known as a multitalented musician, at one point performing on a violin for stray cats in a video that has since gone viral. He was killed by police officers as he walked home from work because a 911 caller complained that he “looked sketchy.” McClain was never accused of a crime. He entered an agitated mental state when the police arrested him and a struggle ensued, during which police held him against the ground while handcuffing him, subjected him to a chokehold and gave him ketamine. He suffered from cardiac arrest en route to the hospital and died a few days later.

Some intersectional stories have also emerged. Neli Latson, for instance, was an 18-year-old African American on the autism spectrum when he was confronted by police officers in 2010. He was sitting outside of a library when an anonymous caller told authorities that he looked “suspicious” and might be armed (he was not). According to a civil rights suit filed by his mother, Latson was approached by a deputy who triggered autistic responses by making unwanted physical contact with him. The deputy was injured and Latson was sent to jail, where he was often held in solitary confinement and on one occasion Tasered and strapped to a chair. The jail has since paid him a settlement and implemented some reforms.

It is notable that Floyd also suffered from mental health issues, which both Floyd and his friends tried to explain to his arresting officers at the time.

Sometimes the stories involve law enforcement simply not acting when violence occurs against an African American, such as the Georgia police who needed to be pressured by social media activists to start charging people in the killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging unarmed in February 2020 when he was pursued and shot to death by three white men. The charges against his alleged murderers were filed only days before Floyd’s killing, perhaps foreshadowing the wave of activism that would occur after his death.

And ometimes the stories involve police openly displaying rage with vulgar glee, as in a recently released 2019 video of Louisiana police beating and stunning 49-year-old Ronald Greene after he led them on a chase. Greene later died and the causes surrounding his death remain mysterious.

There are many other stories that could be included here. The tragic reality is that Floyd was not the first African American to be murdered by police and it is unlikely he will be the last: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin and so many others came before him. At the same time, like Till’s lynching, Floyd’s murder may have pushed awareness of these events, and their shocking regularity, to another level.

One part of that has been increasing the attention to victims whose stories occurred before Chauvin murdered Floyd. This is just one way in which that Minneapolis afternoon changed the world.

MTG throws cold water on Trump’s August re-installment fantasy: “That’s not true”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tossed a bucket of cold water on MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s theory that, come August, former President Donald Trump will be re-instated as the commander-in-chief.

Appearing on Steve Bannon’s “WarRoom Pandemic” podcast on Wednesday, the far-right lawmaker, known for her coziness with various conspiracy theories, tried to make a distinction between her false belief that Trump won the 2020 election, and the idea that Trump will be re-installed as president next month.

“We re-elected President Trump on Nov. 3 in 2020,” she told Bannon. “I want people to be careful in what they believe. It’s going to be very difficult to overturn the 2020 election and, so, I would hate for anyone to get their hopes up thinking that President Trump is going to back in the White House in August. Because that’s not true.”

Greene went onto say that as a member of Congress, the August feat is a “very difficult” thing to bring to life. “It’s just that I don’t want people to get excited and think that something is going to happen and then they get disappointed. We need to stick with the truth. We have to stick with the process,” the lawmaker said. “And we have to reveal the election fraud.”

Bannon, nearing the end of the segment, did appear at one point to step in and defend his top advertiser and trusted ally, Lindell.

“Trust the process. We’re going to be in uncharted waters. For Mike Lindell and the guys [that say] August, hey, I’ve always got an open mind,” the former Trump advisor stated. “We’re in uncharted waters, but you’ve got to [go] step by step by step.”

Over the course of the past week, the pillow tycoon has made continual announcements about his upcoming gladiator-style “cyber symposium” event being held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Aug. 10, 11, and 12. Lindell has since shared with Salon that both Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines will be present at the three-day event to help carry out a “mock election,” in an attempt to prove how voter fraud supposedly occurred in the 2020 election.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell will hold his "cyber symposium" on August 10th, 11th, and 12th in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he tells me he will have both Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines present to hold a "mock election."

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) July 6, 2021

On Tuesday night, Lindell extended an invite to President Joe Biden for the symposium, and called on him to resign from his post as president immediately.

“He lost the election,” Lindell said. “He needs to admit that he lost the election and quit trying to destroy our country.”

You can watch above, via YouTube.

Fox News is shocked Captain America, longtime Nazi puncher, is political

There’s an old, simple little adage that goes something like, “Everything is political,” and it’s true. The ability to avoid politics, or not have different parts of your identity politicized by society, is political, itself — it extends from the privileges conferred upon some, living under patriarchy and white supremacy.

That said, yes, everything is political, but some things are, like, super political, and one such topic is Captain America, as depicted by both Marvel Studios and the comic books. All of Marvel is political, often telling stories about power, resistance, government secrets, weapons development, identity, and more — not to mention having input and sign-off from the U.S. military for some movies.

But all of this is news on Tuesday to anchors and guests on an outraged Fox News segment, horrified by what they perceived as the sudden politicization of a superhero named *checks notes* Captain America. Fox News’ outrage was prompted by Marvel Comics’ new “United States of Captain America” miniseries, in which Steve Rogers will question the concept of the American Dream.

Steve’s name was also trending over the holiday weekend – marking his shared birthday with the U.S. on July 4th – in addition to discourse on how Steve and the character of Captain America have always held up a mirror to American politics.

Michael Loftus, self-identified comedian and host of The Loftus Party, joined Fox News to bemoan how Captain America has become “Captain Woke.”

“It’s so sad when Captain America is like Captain Woke or Captain Propaganda . . . I’m done with Captain America. He’s dead!” Loftus said. “Did I miss an issue where he was kidnapped by liberal arts professors and was forced to move to Portland?”

Loftus continued, “It’s just more proof the left is going to come after everything that real Americans hold near and dear — they tried to cancel baseball, apple pie, and now Captain America!

“Maybe they’ll change his outfit! Maybe now instead of a shield he’ll be armed with a laptop and will have exciting adventures where he sits in coffee shops and tweets mean things and he’s an active fact-checker on Facebook!”

Fox News guest, having a completely normal one: "It’s so sad when Captain America is like Captain Woke or Captain Propaganda… I'm done with Captain America. He’s dead!" pic.twitter.com/g4p3qE2oxI

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 6, 2021

It’s hard to even know where to start with these lines, which admittedly come from a comedian, who seems to feel like he’s speaking truth to power; his podcast supposedly “crushes the news into bite sized bits of comedic common sense.”

Certainly, identifying leftist Twitter users as bullies when our very own former Republican president was notorious for his daily tweet storms blasting the appearances of any woman who critiqued him, is so absurd as to be comical. But Loftus eventually continues his screed by whining about how “gone are the days of the lone hero and self-reliance,” proving he missed the whole point of the “Avengers” saga, which is quite literally about how no one superhero can save the world alone. Humans are communal, collaborative creatures by nature, and, sure, Iron Man is the one who snapped his fingers in “Endgame,” but the Avengers wouldn’t even have had the Infinity Stones or gauntlet, were it not for a whole lot of teamwork and sacrifice.

The Captain’s political history . . . and future

Anthony Mackie in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (Marvel/Disney+)

Let us reiterate: Captain America has always been political. Steve Rogers has been punching Nazis since World War II, not to mention frequently distinguishing between patriotism and fanaticism in the comic books — a concept plenty of Fox commentators would do well to learn from. Even the present-day “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is an exploration of the real-life horrors of the surveillance state and predictive policing technologies, which can show who is a “threat” before they’ve even graduated high school. The sequel, “Captain America: Civil War,” is similarly rife with political commentary on reining in global superpowers, and whether global governing bodies and treaties can be trusted.

The enduring legacy of the politics of Captain America is further examined and deepened in Marvel Studios’ recent limited series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” in which the mantle of Captain America is picked up by Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, a Black man with mixed feelings about becoming a symbol of a country still steeped in white supremacy. The short series explores how the experiments that created super soldiers like Steve (played by Chris Evans onscreen), and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), were rooted in racism and nonconsensual human experimentation on Black men. The show is devastating but honest, even including a scene where Sam is racially profiled by police.

Before this most recent bubbling culture war over criticism of the American Dream in “United States of Captain America,” the right was also in a tizzy over a “Captain America” comic book installment by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which fascist supervillain Red Skull is notably based on far-right academic Jordan Peterson. “What the hell?” Peterson memorably tweeted in shocked response to the discovery.

From its comic books to its movies, Marvel’s subject matter has always been political — the first Phase 1 MCU film, “Iron Man,” is foremost a movie about weapons development and manufacturing, and Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) change of heart on war profiteering. Marvel’s movies have only become more political since, featuring more diverse casts of superheroes and more modern concepts. Marvel hasn’t always stuck the landing, often portraying political radicals with reasonable demands and goals exclusively as mad serial killers, who somehow see the very people they want to help as collateral damage (think: Killmonger in “Black Panther” and Karli in “Falcon and the Winter Soldier”). But, all of this is to say, the notion that Marvel wading into politics with the latest Captain America comic is new is simply ridiculous, when Marvel stories have been critiquing and reflecting on power and oppression for decades.

In the South, the cheese wafer — the savory-shortbread queen of every drinks party — is personal

The first time I ate a cheese wafer — the savory-shortbread queen of every southern drinks party — was also the first time I made one. It was weeks into Chicago’s umpteenth lockdown last fall, and my bubble friend Louise Price was homesick for her hometown of Raleigh. She’d brought over the three-ring-bound Price family cookbook, titled “Home Cookin’,” which contained her late great-gran Mary Dudley’s cheese wafer recipe that I made for us alongside other such family treasures as the Gloucestershire Community Club Barbecue Chicken and Blayne’s Salad, layered with iceberg, hard-boiled eggs and peas (and iced with mayonnaise, naturally).

“In North Carolina, cheese wafers are like what Garrett’s Popcorn is to people in Chicago,” Price declared. Flaky-crisp and cheesy with a jolt of heat from a dusting of cayenne, the cheese wafers were, like Garrett’s, almost impossible to stop eating once we got going — especially when washed down with a glass or two of pink bubbly.

The simple assemblage of flour mixed with room-temperature fat, shredded cheese and cayenne pepper was credited to a Mrs. Arndt, of whom we know little else, except that she “lived in the corner house now occupied by Mrs. McGee.” In typical granny fashion, the method was spare in a manner befitting of someone who’d absorbed it to the point of muscle memory:

Mix well, working in flour gradually. Bake in moderate oven. Do not brown. This works well in a cookie press.

Luckily, the “Cheese Biscuit” recipe that followed Gran’s lent enough guidance for me to guess this was sort of like making shortbread. This version, which contained cornmeal for added crunch, came from Julia Mitchell, who was purportedly a friend of Gran’s and fellow weaver. More importantly, I quickly learned that this recipe was also the overwhelming family favorite.

“Did you make the cornmeal ones? Those are the ones you should try,” Price’s mom Olivia Mayer said later, during what quickly became a heated cheese-wafer text exchange. “Those are the ones we all remember. I don’t recall ever having had [Gran’s]. And in the cheese wafer world, the cornmeal ones are unique because nobody ever makes them that way.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

When I called on award-winning food writer, prolific cookbook author, cooking teacher and native North Carolinian Sheri Castle to learn more about this idiosyncratic nosh, she had incidentally just made a batch of her go-to cheese-coin dough to bring to a friend’s home in the mountains. (Have you noticed that they’ve already been called three different names?)

Castle quickly rattled off a handful of other monikers and variations. “Some call them cheese straws if they’re elongated; they’re called cheese coins if they’re half dollar-sized,” she said. “Some doughs are flaky, some are more of a Play-Doh consistency. Some people roll and cut them; some extrude them through a cookie press or stamp them out like spritz cookies and put a pecan in the center. I make one version — and this sounds crazy — with Rice Krispies in it, but it makes them really crisp.”

The author learned the hard way that hands are the best tool for mixing cheese wafers. (Photo courtesy of Maggie Hennessy)

Suddenly, I understood why Mayer had insisted that I try the cornmeal variation. The cornmeal adds a satisfying crunch and subdued, buttery corn flavor. As ubiquitous as cheese wafers are across the South, Castle is certain that this simple derivation of a shortbread cookie didn’t originate there. “But there’s a lot to be said for why we do them better.”

Indeed, the origin story and base method of such vernacular cooking, as Castle affectionately categorized the cheese wafer, matters far less than how it evolves with each generation of keeper. Castle couldn’t even recall the first time she had a cheese wafer. Her taste memories instead tie to specific instances “when I had ones that were better than mine, and I had to get to the bottom of it.”

From a sheer culinary standpoint, certain tenets reveal themselves with enough practice. If you let it rest long enough to let the flour absorb the fat, you’ll end up with a better final texture. “The angel’s in the details of how you make it your own,” Castle said — whether that’s through textural breakthroughs, or the addition of blue cheese or bumping up the heat or umami factor.

To this day — and after making a career out of sharing recipes with others — Castle, too, keeps one or two hard-won secrets for her own family canon. “I have a version of my cheese coins that I tell people about, and I have one with a couple of secret ingredients that are mine,” she said, “and I will pass them onto my daughter.”

So if you’re lucky enough to inherit a spiral-bound community or family cookbook that contains a cheese wafer, biscuit, coin or straw recipe, hold tight to it and stake your claim. Maybe you share it for the next printing of “Home Cookin’,” or maybe you keep one or two secrets for yourself.

Cheese Wafers (Photo courtesy of Maggie Hennessy)

For cheese wafer novices: A note on their nefarious tendency to crumble

When I emailed Sheri Castle in a panic because my cheese wafer log had crumbled when I took it out of the fridge to slice it, she gently reassured me that I should not also crumble. She also shared some invaluable tips to keep in mind before you start baking so you don’t find yourself muttering expletives as you gather up the fragmented remains of your dough log to form into cracked biscuits. (By the way, they were still delicious!)

With cheese wafer dough, you’re looking for a consistency like Play-Doh — “firm enough to squeeze into a tight ball without crumbling but not greasy,” according to Castle. She tests this by pressing a knuckle into the formed dough. “If it leaves a clean impression that does not close or leave sticky dough on your hand, it’s probably good.”

As with making pie dough, it helps to bring cheese wafer dough together using a few tablespoons of ice water. Again, like pie dough, no two batches of cheese wafer dough take exactly the same amount of water. It depends on the type of flour, cheese and other seasonings you use, as well as whether you work the dough by hand versus in a food processor. Castle’s personal recipe, for instance, calls for a range of 3 to 6 tablespoons.

One more thing: If you chill the dough before baking, let the disk sit on the countertop for a few minutes after you pull it from the fridge so that it doesn’t crack when you try to roll it. “It’s easiest to work with when it’s closer to room temp,” Castle said. “If the dough gets too soft and stretchy as you roll and shape the biscuits, put them on the baking sheet and refrigerate the entire thing until firm again before baking. Chilled dough in a hot oven really helps the texture.”

Perhaps most importantly, if at first you don’t succeed, eat those damn crumbly biscuits and try, try again!

***

Recipe: Julia Mitchell’s Cheese Biscuits

Adapted from Home Cookin’

1 lb (about 3 cups) grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 lb (4 sticks) room-temperature butter
3 tsp salt
2 tsp cayenne (less if you prefer a bit less heat)
1 cup cornmeal
6 cups flour
Ice water, as needed

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Using your hands, mix the butter, cheese, cayenne and salt together in a large bowl. Add the cornmeal and flour, rubbing it into the butter and cheese until it forms small crumbs with a few bigger clumps in it. Add ice water, a tablespoon at a time, mixing with your hands just until the mixture forms a ball that lightly sticks together and pulls in all the flour. To test, press a knuckle into the dough; if it leaves a clean impression that doesn’t close or leave sticky dough on your hand, it’s just right.

Shape mixture into 1-inch balls, place them about an inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet and press them out flat with the palm of your hand. Or form the dough into logs, wrap in wax paper and plastic wrap and chill in the fridge up to a few weeks in advance. (Note: If you chill the dough before baking, let the log sit on the countertop for 15 minutes after you pull it from the fridge so that it doesn’t crumble when you try to cut the biscuits.)

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until firm. Do not brown. Remove, and cool on the pan on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

More by this author:

Why autistic people tend to self-medicate at much higher rates

It was summer 2018, and I was talking to the governor of Colorado.

John Hickenlooper was, at that point, running for president (he later dropped out and got elected to the Senate instead). During this moment of our interview, however, I found myself speaking not just as a journalist, but as an autistic person. I felt the need to explain something important about neurodiversity to this powerful neurotypical man who told me he was concerned about allowing autistic people to smoke marijuana because he believed they could “have an inclination to bipolar” or become “almost schizophrenic.”

Hickenlooper mentioned an unnamed friend whose child had a bad reaction to the drug, although he seemed impressed by my argument that many of my successes occurred not in spite of but because I medicated myself with marijuana for various mental health ailments. A year later Hickenlooper seemed to acknowledge the validity of my perspective when he added, “I don’t know enough to be able to speak specifically about the autism spectrum. And I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

Hickenlooper’s press team did not respond to Salon’s request for comment on this article.

It was a particularly enlightening incident that came to mind this week as I interviewed a researcher whose new study reveals just how many autistic people choose to self-medicate.

Elizabeth Weir of the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Center was first author on the Lancet Psychiatry piece, which studied 919 people — including 429 autistic individuals — and found that “compared with non-autistic individuals, autistic individuals were nearly nine times more likely to report using recreational substances to manage behaviour and more likely to report using recreational substances to manage mental health symptoms.”

“Self-medication is a big issue,” Weir told Salon. People in the study talked about “dealing with mental health alongside autism, and having autism symptoms that they wanted to manage, and not getting enough support from physicians,” she said, adding that those people “needed to self-medicate, I guess, for those symptoms that they wanted to manage.”

She has heard stories of suicide attempts, of people using drugs to manage eating disorders or being forced to take drugs at a young age — but there were also hopeful stories. Weir talked to people whose lives were utterly transformed, for the better, once they received their autism diagnosis.

“It really surprised me to have so many different people specifically say, ‘The reason I stopped abusing drugs is because of my autism diagnosis, because I finally as an adult got diagnosed and understood the experiences I was having better,”’ Weir explained.

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Though for all the dangers Weir says self-medication can pose, many people with autism extol the virtues of substances like alcohol, marijuana and even psilocybin — found in hallucinogenic mushrooms — which they say can help them cope.

Sevdha Thompson, a Bollywood style dancer, was not diagnosed with autism until she was in her mid-20s. By that time, her experiences had already hurt her professionally — a common problem for autistic individuals.

“I had issues with certain types of jobs that I was doing before because of my sensory difficulties,” Thompson told Salon. “I used to work at the airport some time ago and when alarms went off, it would put me in an almost immobile state which was actually very dangerous when you’re manning a security booth, for example.”

She also struggled with social skills —another common issue for autistic individuals — noting that she would be hard pressed to network professionally unless she had someone more adept helping her.

Eventually, however, she found that alcohol helped.

“I never used to use alcohol at all during my adolescence and during much my 20s,” Thompson said. “It was very recently that I started to realize that having a little alcohol here and there made me far more socially loose, so that it hindered a lot of the anxiety that came with talking to people or the mental blocks. So I started having sips of wine once in a while.”

She has also made a point of going to places where heavier drugs are legal and, with a so-called “trip-sitter,” safely experimenting with them.

“Very recently I started putting a lot of research into the use of psilocybin, which I realized experimenting with gave me a far better sense of openness and connectedness with other people that I’m not used to feeling on a regular basis,” Thompson observed.

Sharon Kaye-O’Connor, an autistic psychotherapist who specializes in neurodiversity, explained to Salon why autistic people may see an appeal in self-medicating.

“Some autistic folks may self-medicate with substances in an attempt to cope with anxiety or an overwhelming sensory environment,” Kaye-O’Connor said via email. “Autism is so frequently undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed as other conditions, which then makes it difficult for things like sensory issues to be properly understood and addressed. If an autistic person’s sensory issues are mislabeled as anxiety or another condition, it is a missed opportunity to help someone better understand and accommodate their sensory needs.

“For some autistic adults, it may feel like they are living in an overwhelming world with little support. It can be incredibly difficult to find health care providers who truly understand autism and the autistic experience.”

Russell Lehmann, a contributor to “Autism Parenting Magazine,” added another important observation — that people on the spectrum may use mind-altering substances not as an escape from reality, but as lubricant on the wheels of processing reality.

“When I am high I immediately gain a broader perspective on what it means to be human and am able to look back at my usual sober state with more objective hindsight, which I can then generate into foresight,” Lehmann wrote to Salon.

“Cannabis frees my mind,” he added. “It dismantles all of the manufactured mechanics that I have developed in order to achieve some sort of normalcy or baseline within society.” It has also helped him grapple with other metal illnesses with which he was struggling, and improved his meditation practice. “It is a beautifully painful and cleansing experience.”

Despite the anecdotes, Weir says self-medication is not necessarily a good thing, and may sometimes cover up issues that might be better addressed through other treatment methods.

“I take a neurodiversity perspective,” Weir said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being autistic. I think it should be embraced and we should adapt our society.” She also pointed out that other studies have shown a link between autism and higher rates of addiction, “which obviously, if you’re self-medicating, could be something that poses extra challenges for you.”

Weir also expressed concern about overdosing, especially for drugs that manage physical and mental pain.

“There are possible drawbacks, but also I completely understand why people are doing it when they aren’t receiving adequate support from healthcare providers,” she said.

“Clearly more research is needed.”

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger says he suspects GOP knew of Jan. 6 insurrection plans: “I saw the threats”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., one of the few Republicans to vehemently deny former President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud, said that he suspects some of his Republican colleagues could have predicted the Capitol riot and even supported it.

“I won’t name names, but yes, I do have that suspicion,” Kinzinger told the New York Times Magazine in an interview. “I will say, if you just looked at Twitter — the whole reason I brought my gun and kept my staff home and told my wife to stay in the apartment was looking at Twitter. I saw the threats.”

Kinzinger specifically called out a Jan. 6 tweet posted by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., just prior to Trump’s rally: “Today is 1776.” Critics have speculated that Boebert was either aware of the rioters’ plans to breach the U.S. Capitol building and/or calling for violent civilian protest.

“I don’t know what that meant other than this is the time for revolution,” Kinzinger said. “Maybe it was a dumb tweet that she didn’t mean. Fine. I’ll give her that credit for now. But if you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah we need to know.”

During the insurrection, Boebert also publicized the exact location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., later claimed that Boebert “was told by the Sergeant of Arms in the chamber to not make any social media posts. It was said repeatedly. She defied it because she is more closely aligned with the terrorists than the patriots.”

Late last month, Pelosi moved forward with her plan to assemble a select committee to investigate the Capitol riot after facing opposition from Senate GOP members. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the idea “purely” a “political exercise.”

Kinzinger is just one of ten House Republicans who voted back in January to impeach the former president for inciting the violent insurrection that unfolded on the Capitol earlier this year. But perhaps with the exception of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. – who was ousted from her leadership position in May over her apparent lack fealty to Trump – Kinzinger has been the most outspoken in his condemnation of the former president’s election fraud conspiracies.

In the Times Magazine interview, Kinzinger said he believes that “the vast majority” of Republicans “agree with my position; they just aren’t speaking out.”

“If you’re scared to tell the truth to people, I understand, but you need to find a different line of work,” he argued. “On something as existential as this, as threatening to the Constitution — my goodness.”

Earlier this year, Kinzinger launched his Country First PAC, a never-Trump political action committee that set out to reform the Republican Party, which he described as being “in the middle of this slow sink,” much like the Titanic.

“We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine,” he said. “And meanwhile, as I’ve said, you know, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat.”

Though Kinzinger has expressed opposition to Trump, he has in the past politicked along staunchly conservative lines, voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act and repeal the Dodd–Frank Act. He also voted against the Equality Act and supports punishing sanctuary cities.

Trump issued QAnon influencers press passes for Florida rally

High-profile QAnon believers and influencers were distributed press credentials for former President Trump’s rally in Sarasota, Florida this past weekend, suggesting that the former president is continuing to welcome conspiracy theorists into his post-presidency operations.

The development, first reported by VICE, centers on two prominent members of QAnon.

Jeffrey Pedersen, who operates under the moniker “In The Matrixx,” announced through Telegram on Friday that he and his podcast co-host, known as “Shady Grooove,” had been given media credentials by the Trump Organization.

“We are the news now,” Pedersen declared.

During the rally on Saturday, Pedersen tweeted photos online of himself and his partner holding up their press badges, with the caption: “YEAAAAAA!!!” Pedersen and his partner were reportedly seen in the vicinity slinging insults at other journalists, donning wristbands that read: “Where we go one we go all.”

Pedersen’s posts were originally flagged by Media Matters researcher Alex Kaplan, who noted that this is not the first time members of QAnon were christened as journalists.

Back in 2019, Derik Vance, the podcast host of Patriots Soapbox, once described by the Daily Beast as a “24-hour, 7-days-a-week full-face dive into the heart of QAnon,” was given a press badge for one of Trump’s rallies in Ohio. Trump’s then-campaign manager, Brad Parscale, went so far as to pose for a picture with Vance.

At Saturday’s rally, Trump repeatedly bandied the false (yet somehow undying) notion that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him due to widespread election fraud. This claim has been largely propelled into public discourse by QAnon believers, which hails Trump as the country’s sole antidote to what would be an otherwise authoritarian regime controlled by a cabal of corporate, pedophilic, cannibalistic elites who worship Satan.

“We won so much, and then we had a rigged election unfortunately,” Trump said recently. “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy. I am the one trying to save American democracy.”

Over the past several years, the QAnon movement has become a mainstay of American political discourse — but research shows support may be tapering off following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

Back in January, a Morning Consult poll found that about a quarter of all Republicans believe in the QAnon conspiracy – a marked 14% decrease from last October. A report from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab similarly found that QAnon rhetoric was “evaporating from the mainstream internet.”

The report speculated: “Decreases in QAnon-related chatter can be attributed to several factors including, but not limited to, major tech platform moderation actions against the conspiracy theory and its digital community; a prolonged silence from the pseudonymous “Q” author; encouragement among community members to mask their language; and President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.”

Although it appears a minority of Republican are Q-aligned, a clear majority of all Republican voters in the U.S. believe that Trump is the “true president” of the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

This belief apparently carries over to GOP political candidates as well: As Salon’s Igor Derysh reported, over 700 Republicans running for Congress in 2022 have aligned themselves with Trump’s election conspiracy.

Wendy’s steps into the fast food plant-based burger wars

Wendy’s is only the latest fast food restaurant to break into the plate-based market with the announcement of a vegan burger. That said, their approach may set them apart from competitors.

The chain will test its new Spicy Black Bean Burger in three cities: Pittsburg, PA; Columbus, Ohio; and Jacksonville Florida beginning on June 28th, according to a report from QSRWeb.

Plant-based burgers have been gradually permeating into mainstream supermarket and restaurant culture for the past two years, most notably the Impossible Burger and the BeyondMeat alternatives. KFC, Burger King and White Castle are among big nationwide chains already serving at least one of these options.

Wendy’s plant-based vegan option will be their own creation and the fact that it’s a veggie burger feels like a pleasantly almost-retro option when compared to lab-made choices. As part of their “Made to Crave” menu series, the Spicy Black Bean Burger comes with jalapeno peppers, a spicy chipotle sauce, lettuce, onions, tomatoes and the option to add pepper jack cheese.

“We’re bringing forward an incredibly tasty Spicy Black Bean Burger to this line-up in three select markets.” said Carl Loredo, Wendy’s U.S. chief marketing officer in a press release. “Consumers are demanding plant-based sandwiches, and we’re answering the call in a way that only Wendy’s can with a mouthwatering sandwich packed with multiple layers of heat and flavor.”

These rising alternatives to meat don’t hold any crazy health benefits that unprocessed vegetables lack, so you should still eat your greens, but plant-based options are meant to target those who consume meat — or miss consuming meat — by emulating it’s texture. As a result, they’ve become more mainstream.

So why this push towards plant-based products?

Meat consumption hurts the environment, as livestock is responsible for approximately 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions as the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization reports. From helping to conserve land-use and water-use, plant-based alternatives have the potential to drastically eliminate our carbon footprint.

Amidst rapid rates of climate change, the responsibility of taking care of our planet has only grown heavier with time. People have become passionate about environmental issues and industries have been put under pressure by consumers to adapt. Widespread environmental advocacy and the rise of social media to educate and inform have also definitely affected the push towards eco-friendly foods.

While meat consumption currently doesn’t seem to be going anywhere — even rising at times, the visibility of plant-based options available at fast food chains in addition to supermarkets and restaurants is a step in the right direction. And the description alone of a spicy black bean patty complete with chipotle sauce, jalapeno peppers all atop a toasted bun is definitely enough to cause intrigue and give Wendy’s step into the plant-based world quite the edge.

No, billionaires won’t “escape” to space while the world burns

Last Friday, in the latest volley in the Billionaire Space Race, Richard Branson announced that he’ll be flying to low Earth orbit on July 11, nine days before Jeff Bezos’ planned visit. While some plutocrat stans cheered for their chosen corporate overlord, many on Twitter responded with renewed outrage that not one but three billionaires have managed to hoard enough wealth to start their own personal space programs. The news landed particularly viciously after a week in which hundreds of people died from a record-shattering heat dome in Canada and the Pacific Northwest and the ocean caught on fire.

the existence of a space race between billionaires is a clear sign these people aren't being taxed nearly enough. https://t.co/OxIcFwmRaS

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) July 1, 2021

I actually don’t think we’re angry enough about rich people going to space while the world burns

— Read Starting Somewhere (@JPHilllllll) July 3, 2021

What caught me by surprise was the number of folks who seem to believe that Musk, Bezos and Branson are trying to “escape” the ravages of climate change for a life in space — and might even succeed in doing so. The notion that the rich will live comfortably high above the Earth while the planet becomes an uninhabitable wasteland has been popularized by movies like “Elysium” and “WALL-E.” The New York Times fueled this fantasy back in 2018 with a story about Axiom’s proposed luxury space hotel, under the headline “The Rich are Planning to Leave this Wretched Planet.”

me: [on fire] i shouldn’t have used all those plastic straws

billionaires: [leaving on space yachts] you shouldn’t have used all those plastic straws

— soul nate (@MNateShyamalan) June 30, 2021

But as a scifi writer and the spouse of a NASA flight controller, let me assure you that the rich escaping the earth for a space utopia is only a trope in fiction — at least in our lifetimes.

The most comfortable living situation we’ve ever devised above Earth’s orbit is on the International Space Station. The ISS is an incredible feat of engineering — one that the combined space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada have been working on for 23 years now. But life on the ISS is anything but luxurious.

Around half a dozen astronauts live up there at any given time, bouncing around a narrow tube with roommates they didn’t choose and who can’t properly bathe for months on end. The wifi is slow. The food is not Michelin starred, to say the least. Their sleeping situation is akin to a floating coffin. And pooping involves a complicated procedure in a port-o-potty where the door is a plastic curtain and everything floats.

Astronauts’ time is micromanaged by a team of experts on the ground. Unlike future space-tourists’ imagined itineraries, much of their time is spent working on actual science, but a great deal is dedicated to mere survival as well. Space-dwellers must exercise at least two hours a day to keep their bones from turning to goo. They spend a ton of time studying systems and conducting repairs on equipment that frequently breaks because space wants to kill you. Outside the space station, there are micro-meteoroid strikes, extreme temperature fluctuations, the cold welding of metal parts that occurs in a vacuum, and atomic oxygen/ultraviolet degradation. Inside, things frequently break from age and constant use — fans, exercise equipment, and, tragically, the toilets.

The ISS crew is only able to survive up there at all because multiple countries employ thousands of brilliant, highly-trained engineers and doctors and astrophysicists and computer experts whose full-time job is keeping them alive and the ISS functioning. When something does break, these teams scramble to devise fixes. And those fixes — lord, are they tedious.

I used to think my spouse’s job was so glamorous, all hanging out with astronauts in Mission Control. But during this pandemic year, he’s mostly worked from home, and I have glimpsed the schematics and overheard bits of meetings. It’s like an IKEA furniture assembly manual fell in love with a PhD-level math textbook — that level of tediousness.

Every time some critical system breaks outside the station, astronauts have to study these schematics and procedures for hours to learn how to repair the broken thing. Then the spacewalks themselves entail five to eight hours in a bulky suit, working with stiff gloves, with someone in your ear all, “Drive bolt 7A into dock 31X.” That’s five to eight hours of hard, tedious labor that often leaves super-fit astronauts trembling with muscle fatigue. Can you imagine Richard Branson enjoying that? I cannot.

Scott Kelly was the first U.S. astronaut to spend a consecutive year in space on one mission. As soon as he got home, he retired from NASA and got to work on his memoir, aptly named “Endurance.” He’d spent his adult life preparing to be an astronaut, and still he found it physically and psychologically grueling to be up there for just one year. “During my time in orbit, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained my heart,” he wrote. “Every day, I was exposed to ten times the radiation of a person on Earth, which will increase my risk of a fatal cancer for the rest of my life.”

So rest assured, Bezos and Branson will not be sipping champagne next to their space-pool on Low-Earth Mar-a-Lago. Even if Axiom gets their space hotel built, it’s going to be cramped and dangerous, and when the toilet breaks, someone’s going to have to clean up the floating shit. For all their wealth, billionaires do not have the power to make space a more comfortable place to be than Earth. I can’t tell if they grasp that or not. Musk doesn’t seem to when he says he wants to “die on Mars.”

And what about Musk’s dream of a colony on Mars, or at least the Moon? Those are astronomically less feasible. The farther away from Earth you’re trying to sustain life in space, the harder it gets. And while they have the benefit of gravity, the surface of the Moon and Mars are covered with a powdery regolith that gums up mechanisms. NASA is currently working on sending astronauts to live on the Moon as part of the Artemis mission. They’ve been working on Artemis plans for years and will continue to plan for years more before sending the first crew to sleep on the Moon — for a week or two, max. No, there will be no Moon-a-Lago, let alone a Mars-a-Lago, in our lifetimes.

So despite Musk’s lofty claims of making humanity “a multi-planetary species,” that’s way, way beyond the realm of current technical possibility. And his claim is especially absurd, considering that in order to generate the wealth that sustains billionaires like Musk, we’re rapidly destroying the one planet we can live on — Earth. If we don’t reverse the environmental and societal degradation caused by global capitalism, the ISS may turn out to be the pinnacle of human space exploration.

So when you understand the science, it becomes clear that the “billionaire space race” is just that—nothing more than a pissing contest between egotistical robber barons. Branson and Bezos aren’t investing their money to forward science or expand the bounds of human possibility. They’re doing it to be the first rich guy to bounce around uselessly up there, as opposed to NASA astronauts who, again, do science. And after they bounce around uselessly, they’re hoping to swindle more of their obscenely rich friends into doing the same.

The pointlessness of it all is especially despicable when you understand that space tourism is funded with the hoarded wealth of billions of workers who are struggling to survive here on Earth. The space tourism industry will be built with the profits off supply chains that work people to death-by-exhaustion, literally enslave people, and are rapidly destroying the future habitability of our planet.

That’s a pretty bleak dystopia. We should really consider taking our wealth back from billionaires before they build it.

But if we fail, join me in enjoying the schadenfreude. Space tourism will inevitably suck. Our billionaires won’t find anything up there but a whole lot of time to sit with the gaping void in their hearts, which space certainly won’t fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they’re constipated as hell from astronaut food.

The world is burning, and billionaires are arguably the people most responsible. But at least they will not be able to escape to some other, better place. They will live and die (alone, like all of us) on this beautiful, precious, one-in-a-gazillion planet.

“This isn’t how it works”: Trump’s performative lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter is a futile stunt

Donald Trump announced multiple lawsuits against social media companies on Wednesday, but his dubious claim that tech giants are “government” actors violating his First Amendment rights means that the complaints are destined to fall apart under scrutiny, much like his numerous election lawsuits.

Trump’s legal team filed three separate lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their chief executives on Wednesday, accusing the social media giants of violating his First Amendment rights. As a constitutional refresher, the First Amendment only protects speech from actions of government, not decisions by private companies. Trump and his allies have also not presented any evidence that the platforms are biased against conservatives.

Trump has frequently sued or threatened to sue countless entities in his decades-long career in business and politics. Just months earlier, Trump and his allies filed dozens of election challenges that were rejected by courts across the country. Trump used those failed lawsuits to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but spent just a small fraction of that money on legal costs while investing far more on additional fundraising. The baseless lawsuit against social media companies for alleged violation his constitutional rights appears to be the latest attention-grabbing ploy, inevitably to be rejected by the courts based on extensive precedent. Indeed, the defeated ex-president wasted no time fundraising off the lawsuit minutes after the announcement.

Trump claimed during a news conference at his New Jersey golf club that his “class-action” suit aims to weaken or strip the companies’ Section 230 protections, which give firms legal immunity for user-generated content on their platforms if they moderate speech. He also demanded the “prompt” restoration of his social media accounts and punitive damages against the companies that he claimed could total in the “trillions of dollars.”

Attorneys quickly pointed out that “this isn’t how it works.”

“You don’t announce a class-action lawsuit,” tweeted attorney Janet Johnson, noting that a class needs to be certified, and cannot simply be declared by an individual. “He can’t be the lead plaintiff in a class that doesn’t exist. A class of presidents? This is just repeating nonsense.”

Trump was flanked at the news conference by others banned from social media platforms for violating their policies who have joined his lawsuits, but he predicted that “thousands” of others would sign on. Trump’s lawsuit is backed by the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit launched by former Trump officials to push his policies. Trump also touted his legal team full of “tobacco lawyers,” who he said “really wanted” to represent him in the case.

“This lawsuit is a pathetic joke,” wrote attorney Bradley Moss.

“Just a sad, little man,” tweeted Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.

Trump’s argument effectively boils down to completely unsupported claims that social media companies somehow qualify as “government” actors and that Section 230 is unconstitutional.

“While the social media companies are officially private entities, in recent years they have ceased to be private with the enactment and their historical use of Section 230, which profoundly protects them from liability,” Trump said Wednesday. “Once they got Section 230, they’re not private companies anymore in a lot of views. No other companies in our country’s history have had protection like this. It’s in effect a massive government subsidy.”

Legal experts roundly rejected this argument, as have the courts on numerous previous occasions.

“The First Amendment does *not” apply to non-governmental actors,” tweeted Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at the University of Texas School of Law. “Full stop.”

Trump went on to claim that the social media companies have been “co-opted” by the government to become the “enforcers of illegal, unconstitutional censorship at the highest level.” He argued that Congress, by holding hearings with social media executives, has “coerced” and “bullied” them into censoring conservatives.

Attorney John Coale, who is representing Trump in the case, dubiously argued at the news conference that only the Supreme Court can decide what constitutes hate speech and “misinformation.”

“We’re going to prove that they are government actors, therefore the First Amendment does apply,” he claimed, prompting attorneys on Twitter to point out that court precedent has long established that social media companies are not state actors when they ban people.

Trump and Coale both touted the fact that they chose the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to file the case, even though Facebook’s terms of service require any legal action against them to be filed in federal court in Northern California, where the company is based.

“We think we’re in the right area,” Coale said, referring to the district-shopping that landed the lawsuit in South Florida.

Cole also claimed that Trump’s ban from the platforms violated court precedent on “prior restraint,” which prevents legal action before an act occurs. This appears nonsensical, since the social media companies banned Trump after he violated their policies on inciting violence, following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In fact, should the lawsuit move forward, Trump could be forced to give sworn testimony on the Capitol riot during the discovery process, suggesting that his team may even expect the lawsuits to be dismissed.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is not part of the legal team, also spoke at the news conference to argue that Facebook is a government actor because emails released by the government show that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been in contact with Dr. Anthony Fauci about the coronavirus. Bondi claimed this amounted to exchanging “trade secrets” and “collusion,” which she claimed meant “they are not immune anymore.”

Bondi backed up her claims by citing a $50 million lawsuit filed by former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard against Google for violating her First Amendment rights. She failed to mention that Gabbard’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed because she failed to show how Google’s regulation of its own platform was “in any way equivalent to governmental regulation.”

Trump has made a career of suing or threatening to sue his enemies, but has only occasionally followed through and has won many cases when he did. The former president and his allies have also spent years complaining about Section 230, but their calls to eliminate or reform the law have gone nowhere except into fundraising appeals. Trump even signed an executive order aimed at punishing online platforms, which was revoked by President Joe Biden in May.

More than anything else, Trump appears angry that his social media presence has quickly faded after he was banned from major platforms following the Capitol riot. Though his statements are still circulated on social media platforms, by his supporters, an analysis by The New York Times found that engagement has dramatically fallen off since he was banned.

The social media companies named in the lawsuit have not commented. A former Facebook official who is still close to the company told The Daily Beast the complaint was just a “desperate fundraising appeal disguised as a lawsuit.”

Fox News host questions Tucker Carlson about spying claims: “This is the stuff of banana republics”

Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday became one of the first Fox News hosts to cover NSA spying allegations made by Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s biggest stars.

Carlson joined Bartiromo on her “Mornings with Maria” Fox Business program.

“You don’t go on TV lightly to say the government is spying on me because you sound like a crazy person, and of course, you would never say that unless you knew that it was true,” Carlson told Bartiromo. “And I did know that it was true. Almost accidentally, I was in Washington for a funeral last week and ran into someone I know well, [who] said I have a message for you and the proceeded to repeat back to me details from emails and texts that I sent.”

Carlson surmised that his leaked emails could have only have been obtained by the NSA.

“The NSA has this and that was proven by the person repeating back the contents of the email,” the Fox News host said. “To be totally blunt with you, I would never have said this in public if [the email] was something I felt was wrong or illegal or immoral. They don’t actually have anything on me.”

“It is not in any way a figment of my imagination,” he added. “It’s confirmed. It’s true. They’re not allowed to spy on American citizens. They are.”

“This is the stuff of banana republics and third-world countries,” Bartiromo agreed.

“It’s entirely real, and I thought long and hard before saying it,” Carlson explained. “Because, you know, your credibility is the currency, of course, if you’re on television and you don’t want to seem delusional or like a conspiracy nut or like a crazy person. I try to be fact-based, you know, to the extent that we can and not be crazy and not say things that we can’t prove but this is actually true.”

For his part, Carlson did not deny communicating with a foreign source who was the target of the NSA.

“I’m allowed to email with anyone I want!” he insisted. “I’m a journalist, and I’m an American, more importantly. It’s none of your business who I’m emailing with. If you think I’m committing a crime, then charge me with it.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Trump “stunned” former White House chief of staff John Kelly by praising Hitler, new book claims

Former President Donald Trump “stunned” his then-chief of staff John Kelly by praising Adolf Hitler, according to a new book.

“The Guardian” obtained a copy of the forthcoming book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, which reported the twice-impeached one-term president’s remark while on a visit to Europe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly, according to the book.

Trump made the remark after Kelly “reminded the president which countries were on which side during the conflict” and “connected the dots from the first world war to the second world war and all of Hitler’s atrocities,” Bender reported.

The former president denied making the remark about Hitler, according to Bender, but he also wrote that sources said that Kelly “told the president that he was wrong, but Trump was undeterred” and praised the German economic recovery under Hitler during the 1930s.

Kelly pushed back, saying that “German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide.”

Even if Germany’s economy recovered after the Nazis took over in 1933, Kelly told Trump, “you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can’t.”