“Utter betrayal”: Angry activists who helped elect Kyrsten Sinema say “she has no values”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who has perplexed the nation, once criticized the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold and urged Democrats to pass critical legislation with a simple majority. But the onetime Green Party activist and self-described “Prada socialist” has transformed, somehow or other, into one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, and the activists who helped elect her can’t help but feel a sense of “betrayal.”

Sinema, a former state representative, in 2010 lamented the “false pressure” to reach a 60-vote supermajority to pass significant legislation in a video unearthed by the progressive advocacy group More Perfect Union. Sinema urged Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to pass major bills like health care reform instead of “kowtowing to Joe Lieberman,” the centrist senator who served as a roadblock to the party’s major proposals despite caucusing with Democrats throughout his career.

When Lieberman briefly ran president in 2003, Sinema described him as “pathetic.”

“He’s a shame to Democrats,” she told a reporter at the time. “I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him — what kind of strategy is that?”

Past comments like those have puzzled Arizonans who have watched Sinema ascend to the Senate only to become a Lieberman-like figure herself. The shift has particularly stung for activists who helped register and turn out a record number of voters in the 2018 election, when Sinema narrowly defeated Republican Martha McSally. Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), a grassroots group that led a coalition that knocked on 2.5 million doors that year, say they’ve been shut out by Sinema since she was elected.

Sinema “will not take meetings with us personally,” César Fierros, the group’s communications manager, told Salon, adding that meetings with her team have been “incredibly dismissive” and even “combative.” By comparison, he said the group has had an “open line of communication” with newly-elected Sen. Mark Kelly (who also defeated McSally, in 2020, leaving the latter in the improbable position of losing two Senate races two years apart).

“From the beginning, our members and our community went out to knock on doors for Sen. Kelly and showed up at the polls,” Fierros said. “We have high expectations because that is what our community deserves. Our members expect our senators to address the needs of their community.”

Sinema’s stance on the filibuster has further soured relations with the group.

“Sinema’s choice to obstruct the Biden agenda during her time in the Senate can only be described as a complete and utter betrayal to the good people of Arizona that cast a vote for her in 2018,” Fierros said. “Her delusional defense of the filibuster is a major roadblock to not only the real reforms we campaigned for when electing Sinema but also the defense of our democracy. With so much on the line, the senator continues to turn her back on promises made for true progress on voting rights, minimum wage and immigration reform.”

Many young LGBTQ activists who were inspired by Sinema, the first bisexual woman in the Senate, also say she has broken her campaign promises by defending the filibuster rule, undercutting her support for legislation like the pro-LGBTQ Equality Act.

Joan Arrow, a trans LGBTQ activist, was never politically inclined before the Trump presidency but quickly rallied behind Sinema’s historic candidacy and volunteered for her campaign.

“I wasn’t out of the closet yet,” Arrow said in an interview with Salon. But “I knew that if I was going to be safe coming out of the closet, I’m going to need members of the LGBTQ community and allies in positions of power who would vote for something like the Equality Act, who would put my interests first. I trusted the promises she made in her campaign. I knocked on doors for her, I argued up and down that she was better than Martha McSally. And now that she’s in a position of power, I really feel left behind.”

Sinema is a co-sponsor of the Equality Act, which would grant civil rights protections to the LGBTQ community. But her defense of the filibuster means the bill has virtually no hope of advancing in the Senate after 50 Republicans used the rule to block debate on the legislation. Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced more than 250 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation in state legislatures, according to the Human Rights Campaign, which warned that 2021 is set to become the “worst year for LGBTQ state legislative attacks.”

Arrow, who now works with the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster, organized a coalition of over 140 LGBTQ groups and activists to sign an open letter calling on Sinema to “take the necessary next step of ending the filibuster,” warning that if she refuses “we will have no choice but to seriously consider whether our support for you, including financial donations, may better serve our community if directed to another Democrat who will use their power as a U.S. senator to stand up for our rights.”

The letter was cathartic for many LGBTQ activists who felt frustrated with Sinema’s direction, Arrow said.

“I felt incredibly betrayed,” she said. “Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has really echoed that feeling of betrayal. LGBTQ Arizonans need people to do what they say they’re going to do, and when you have this historic candidate in our community getting elected to the Senate, who then turns tail and abandons everyone who lifted her up into that position — the LGBTQ Arizonans I’ve spoken to, we feel betrayed.”

The Equality Act is just one of the major pieces of Democratic legislation that has languished in Congress as a result of the filibuster. Republicans have also filibustered the For the People Act, a sweeping voting rights bill, and the threat of a filibuster has impeded progress on policing reform and the PRO Act, which would strengthen unions.

“LGBTQ issues are the same as anybody else’s,” Brianna Westbrook, a vice chair of the Arizona Democratic Party who helped organize the letter, said in an interview with Salon. “LGBTQ people and people with disabilities, in particular, are two communities that really intersect with multiple social and economic classes and the filibuster is a barrier that’s really restricting not only the Equality Act but other legislation that’s important to the LGBTQ community like raising the wage, immigration reform, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and allowing LGBTQ people to organize their workplaces.”

Progressive groups have poured millions into campaigns to ramp up pressure on Sinema to reverse her position on the filibuster. Operatives who helped elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York have launched the No Excuses PAC, which threatens to back primary challengers to Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., if they continue to “join with Republicans” against their own party’s agenda. Another group has launched the Pressure PAC to raise money for an eventual progressive primary challenger to Sinema. Just Democracy, a coalition of more than 40 civil rights groups, last month launched a $1.5 million ad campaign to urge Sinema to “deliver on her campaign promise to protect voting rights and stand up for Arizonans.”

Sinema “campaigned for her seat by telling Black and brown Arizonans that she’d have our backs in office,” Stephany Spaulding, a Just Democracy coalition member and founder of Truth & Conciliation, told Salon. Sinema promised to “support fair wages, more and better jobs, climate justice … promises that compelled Black and Brown people to turn out in record numbers. But instead of having our backs, Sinema turned her back on us. Her insistence on letting Republicans use the Jim Crow filibuster keeps her from delivering on the promises she made — the filibuster is a ubiquitous barrier to progress on all issues.”

Sinema’s opposition to eliminating the filibuster to advance voting rights legislation comes as Republicans this year have introduced more than 350 bills to restrict voting access. In Arizona, Republicans voted to strip power from the Democratic secretary of state and to implement new voting restrictions amid a dubious “forensic audit” of an election where no evidence of widespread fraud has been detected. The Supreme Court on Thursday dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act, upholding previously enacted absentee voting restrictions and making it more difficult to challenge new state restrictions in the future.

“Senators like Sinema who insist on prioritizing ‘bipartisanship’ over crucial legislation aimed at strengthening our democracy are resurrecting the legacy of segregationists,” Spaulding said. “Instead of protecting our democracy, they’re placing a Jim Crow relic over the most fundamental right we have as Americans: the right to vote.”

Sinema has so far appeared entirely unmoved by the pressure campaigns, doubling down on her position in a Washington Post op-ed last month, arguing that the “best way to achieve durable, lasting results” was through “bipartisan cooperation.”

“I think she truly sees that if you can forge bipartisan compromise, it’s going to be much more sustainable in terms of legislation. It’s going to be able to withstand a turnover in party control,” David Lujan, a former Arizona state legislator who served alongside Sinema, said in an interview with Salon.

But Lujan said he also questions that strategy, “especially when you have Republicans who despise Democrats and think that they’re pedophiles and are harming kids in tunnels. How do you negotiate with people that believe that?” In an era of “ultra-polarized” politics, Lujan added, “I don’t know if her approach is necessarily going to work.”

Sinema argued in the op-ed that eliminating the filibuster would produce only “temporary victories” that were “destined to be reversed” if Republicans retake control of Congress, and noted that Democrats had filibustered police reform and COVID relief proposals under Trump “to force continued negotiations toward better solutions.”

Eliminating the filibuster to expand health care could open the door to Republicans passing legislation “dividing Medicaid into block grants, slashing earned Social Security and Medicare benefits, or defunding women’s reproductive health services,” Sinema wrote. Eliminating it to protect the environment or strengthen education could open the door to Republicans defunding or abolishing entire agencies and programs.

But most of the programs she mentioned can already be cut or eliminated with a simple majority, using the budget reconciliation process, if Republicans regain a majority in Congress. In fact, that’s what they unsuccessfully tried to do with their attempts to repeal Obamacare.

“It’s a lot harder to repeal legislation after it’s been enacted,” Westbrook said. “We saw the amount of blowback Republicans received anytime they tried to dismantle the ACA. When you get legislation that materially changes the lives of human beings, you’re going to have people fighting tooth and nail to make sure that legislation stays in. I think it’s a bad move to not take the opportunity that you have as an elected official in this moment to pass as much legislation as humanly possible. I see that premise that she’s basically put in that article as, ‘I won’t do anything.’ That’s not the job we elected her to do.”

Sinema has tried to forge a bipartisan track herself, working on a bipartisan bill with Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, to raise the federal minimum wage to $11 after she joined Republicans and some Democrats in scuttling President Biden’s $15 proposal. She was also involved in negotiations on a bipartisan infrastructure bill. But the wage bill has gone nowhere and Republicans are already threatening to blow up the bipartisan deal, which provides a fraction of the funding originally proposed by Biden, because Democrats plan to pass a larger bill including their top priorities using the budget reconciliation process.

Sinema argued that voters expect her to be “independent — like Arizona — and to work with anyone to achieve lasting results.” But her minimum wage bill would do little to help working people in Arizona, where the minimum wage already exceeds $11 despite years of Republican control, and the bipartisan deal rejected many top Democratic priorities that they now plan to advance themselves.

“Arizonans are linking the issues to the filibuster because they understand what Sen. Sinema does not — that broken rules and systems impact people’s everyday lives,” Spaulding said. “They know the dangerous consequences of keeping the filibuster intact and allowing it to stop progress on policies that affect their loved ones directly.”

Sinema says that her critics have it all wrong and there was no big transformation ahead of the current filibuster fight.

“I held the same view during three terms in the U.S. House, and said the same after I was elected to the Senate in 2018,” she wrote in the Post op-ed. “If anyone expected me to reverse my position because my party now controls the Senate, they should know that my approach to legislating in Congress is the same whether in the minority or majority.”

On this, she has a point. Critics who questioning how the former Ralph Nader acolyte, who organized anti-war protests during the Bush era, became a conservative Democrat are ignoring much of her career in government. Sinema has also developed a persona of sorts, touting her working-class credentials by frequently recounting her childhood living in poverty. Republicans have helped shape Sinema’s leftist image as well, frequently referencing her activist days and painting her as a radical leftist in unsuccessful efforts to defeat her.

Sinema is a former social worker and criminal defense lawyer who tried to run for Phoenix City Council and later the state House as an independent, failing both times. Sinema’s “first political compromise,” as the socialist magazine Jacobin described it, came when she registered as a Democrat to run for a state House seat in 2004, beginning a long journey that led to a “complete 180 on almost every position she ever took on almost any issue.”

Lujan denied that Sinema has “changed what she believes in,” but agreed that he saw a shift after she was elected to the legislature and was met with a Republican supermajority that “shut out” the Democratic minority.

“When she first entered the legislature, if you look at the bills that she filed back then, you’d find that was a pretty progressive list of bills that never got a hearing or went anywhere,” he said, adding that she soon started to introduce “more moderate legislation.”

Despite serving as a Democrat in a deeply red state, Sinema pulled off some big unlikely wins.

The first was when she led the opposition effort to a 2006 ballot initiative that would have prohibited same-sex marriage.

“Everyone I think at the time predicted that it was going to pass easily, but Kyrsten and our group were successful in defeating the measure,” Lujan recalled, noting that it was the first such measure defeated in the country.

“She did that by messaging people that maybe traditionally would not have opposed that measure,” he said. “She really tried to cross party lines and ideological lines to have people join in opposing the measure. That was probably the first time I saw the value in that approach.”

Another “turning point” for Sinema was when she introduced a measure to prohibit state investments in Darfur and got strong bipartisan support to pass the bill.

“That was probably the first bill she got through the legislature,” Lujan said. “She then really started to look at, ‘What’s legislation that I can work across the aisle and find compromise on to get something done?'”

That shift was accompanied by embracing the state’s top Republicans. Sinema even defended then-state Senate President Russell Pearce, an anti-immigration extremist, saying that she “love[d] him” and “would love to see him run for Congress,” declining to join a successful recall campaign against him because he was her “boss.”

Though she moved further right in the legislature while pushing progressive legislation, the shift was more dramatic after she quit the legislature to run for Congress in a more politically diverse district. After winning that election she joined numerous bipartisan groups that called for “reforming” Social Security and Medicare, cutting corporate taxes and regulations, and reducing spending. She joined numerous centrist or business-friendly groups like the Blue Dog Coalition, the Problem Solvers Caucus, No Labels and Third Way.

After joining the House Financial Services Committee, Sinema quickly came under fire from progressives in her state for backing a bill written by Citigroup and supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to roll back some Dodd-Frank financial reforms. She later supported an even larger rollback of the law that deregulated most of the country’s largest banks. In 2015, was one of just four Democrats to support giving the financial industry an advisory role on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations. The financial industry responded by boosting its campaign contributions to Sinema from just $28,346 in 2012 to more than $890,000 by 2016. She has also won the Chamber of Commerce “Spirit of Enterprise” award, for members who vote with the group more than 70% of the time, seven years in a row and was the lone Democrat to receive the award last year It was a startling departure from an activist who decried the ills of capitalism two decades earlier.

She has also voted to repeal the estate tax, which only applies to individuals with assets over $11.7 million, repeatedly supported increased military spending, and voted to repeal Obama’s Clean Water Plan and block his Clean Power Plan. Sinema joined Republicans to delay the Obamacare individual mandate and allow insurers to offer plans that don’t meet the Obamacare standards while introducing a bill to repeal the law’s tax on insurers.

After being recruited by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to run for Senate, Sinema immediately expressed opposition to Schumer serving as the party leader. After winning a close race over McSally in 2018, Sinema voted with Trump half the time and broke with her party more often than any other Democrat besides Manchin, particularly in approving Trump’s nominees. She was singled out for praise by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and an ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on video naming Sinema as one of 11 senators “crucial” to the oil giant’s opposition to climate change legislation.

Even Biden, who has touted bipartisanship as much as anyone, recently called out Sinema and Manchin as “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Lujan said that Sinema’s conservative bent could help her among the more moderate electorate in Arizona, but said he didn’t see it as a political calculation.

“I think her approach to getting elected was the right approach, and I think she’s taking the approach that she feels is the one that’s going to help her get re-elected,” he said. “But I also think she actually, truly believes that it’s the right approach to take, that you’re going to have better legislation if you work in a bipartisan fashion.”

It remains to be seen whether that approach will pay off. In a poll earlier this year, a large majority of Arizonans said it was more important to pass major legislation than to preserve rules like the filibuster. And while Sinema’s popularity lags behind Kelly’s, a recent poll showed that her approval rating is significantly higher among Republicans than it is among Democrats and independents.

Sinema seems to have traded her progressive support “for a boost from Republicans in opinion polls,” Arrow said. But she’s skeptical that will work. “She’s not going to get supported by those Republicans: They’re going to vote for someone who represents their values. Sinema is going to find herself alone, because she’s shown everyone on both sides of the aisle that she has no values.”

Westbrook argued that while Sinema’s decisions are politically “calculated,” her calculus is “outdated.”

“She is not changing with the electorate,” she said. “Arizona is changing, the dynamics are changing. The people that Sinema should be appealing to are the people are disengaged in the political system. Those are the people that are going to get her back to Washington.”

Lujan expressed doubt that pressure from progressives would change Sinema’s mind, predicting that the senator would continue pursuing a bipartisan path “until she figures out that it’s not working” herself.

“Then I actually think, if she does not have success in getting things done, she will look to see if maybe that’s not the right approach. That’s my hope,” he said. “She is going to work very hard to forge bipartisan solutions, but I think she’s also very pragmatic. My hope is that if it’s not working, she will begin to see that it makes sense to do away with the filibuster rule.”

Sexual harassment scandal threatens to derail Arizona election audit

Several women who’ve participated in Arizona’s partisan election “audit” are alleging sexual harassment by male co-workers, and they say management initially ignored their complaints.

One of the alleged victims provided Phoenix’s CBS 5 with statements from seven witnesses and victims corroborating her description of what happened.

“The statements described situations that involved more than one alleged offender, but the complaints centered on one man in particular,” the station reported. “The letters are dated May 8. But the employee who spoke to (CBS 5) said the man was kept on staff for another month.”

“We told upper management and they allowed him to stay on the floor for weeks,” the woman said.

According to the alleged victims, the primary offender engaged in unwanted touching, demanded dates from women he thought were attractive, and made comments about their appearances, asking them things like, “You showing off your butt?”

When they rebuffed his advances, he would insult them. He also reportedly was prone to angry outbursts. “This issue seemed to stem from some type of anger over women having authority over him,” one witness said.

Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who initiated the audit, relayed a statement to CBS 5 from the project’s “lead vendor” — presumably the private firm Cyber Ninjas.

“I have never received any written complaints of any type of sexual harassment, nor has a complaint like this been brought to my attention,” the statement said. “The closest thing I can think of is I am aware of a single table manager who was cussing a lot, and had apparently told an inappropriate joke. We fired him immediately.”

In related news, ballots and machines being used in the audit were packed up and moved for the fourth time Thursday — to make way for a gun show at the basketball gym Cyber Ninjas had been using. The audit was initially expected to be completed in May, but a spokesman for the audit said this week they have “a little more work to do.”

“In an interview, an observer watching the process on behalf of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), the state’s chief elections officer, said it appeared to him as though the delay has potentially been caused by audit workers who were spotting problems and struggling to reconcile their own numbers,” the Washington Post reported. “Ryan Macias, former acting director of certification and testing for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said he overheard one worker express confusion over why a process she believed was sound was producing so many mistakes.

“Macias also said audit organizers had been continually introducing new procedures into their work — on Tuesday he said for the first time he saw workers using large scales to weigh boxes of ballots, presumably to get a new count of how many ballots each box contained.”

Capitol rioter joined House Republicans on trip to U.S.-Mexico border: report

Anthony Aguero, a far-right YouTuber and ally of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, was reportedly among the group at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, though at this point he has not been charged with any crime related to the insurrection. And his proximity to the shocking attack, apparently, isn’t preventing some House other Republicans from associating with him. According to CNN reporters Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck and Drew Myers, Aguero “accompanied Republican members of Congress” on a visit to the U.S./Mexico border earlier this week and served as a translator for them.

“During his livestream of the Tuesday visit,” the CNN journalists explain, “Aguero interviewed and chatted with Reps. Tom. Tiffany of Wisconsin, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Chris Jacobs of New York, Michael Cloud of Texas, John Rose of Tennessee, Ronny Jackson of Texas and Mary Miller of Illinois.”

During the livestream, Aguero can be seen getting Cawthorn’s last name wrong and saying, “Hi guys, Congressman Hawthorn is behind me. That is freaking awesome. That is freaking awesome. I’ll tell you that.”

Aguero and the House Republicans were in Texas on the U.S. side of the border.

Aguero, during the livestream, also said that the U.S. Border Patrol was “herding” people crossing the border into a particular location and saying, “We’re about to catch them all as they basically come out of the woodworks.”

Aguero gave a statement to CNN, saying, “I appreciate the congressmen and congresswomen that went out of their way to come to the border to see the crisis for themselves.”

Kaczynski, Steck and Myers point out that CNN’s KFile “previously reported that Aguero went into the Capitol during the January 6 riot and cheered and justified the break-in.”

The CNN reporters note, “Aguero has not been charged for unlawful entry at the US Capitol on January 6. After chanting ‘heave-ho’ as rioters attempted to break in, he entered the Capitol Rotunda and later chanted ‘our house’ on the Capitol steps. In a livestream one day after the Capitol riot, he attacked those who condemned the ransacking of the Capitol. The FBI previously declined to comment on whether it was investigating Aguero in an e-mail to CNN.”

In February, CNN’s Erin Burnett reported that Aguero has “worked closely with” Greene on “causes like immigration and the border.”

In 2020, Aguero ran in a GOP primary in Texas for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives but lost.

From Karen Gillan as an assassin to the Obamas’ musical, here’s what’s new on Netflix in July

If a heat wave in your state is making the outdoors uninhabitable this month, consider staying in and streaming instead. Netflix is rolling out dozens of exciting new titles throughout July, from classics like all three “Austin Powers” movies to a dating show featuring contestants dressed quite literally as “sexy beasts.”

But new Netflix titles also mean a whole wave of departing ones, and when titles are gone, they’re gone. “The Iron Lady,” which tells the story of the controversial life of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played by Meryl Streep, leaves Netflix by July 5, while Disney favorite “The Princess and the Frog” starring the first Black Disney princess voiced by Anika Noni Rose, departs on the 15th. Meanwhile, “Spotlight,” the 2015 drama on the Boston Globe investigation that unearthed widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, starring Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton, will depart at the end of the month.

Also at the end of the month, Netflix will be saying goodbye to “Friends With Benefits,” starring Mila Kunis, Justin Timberlake, and numerous cameos of fan favorites sprinkled in, throughout, on the 31st. Also saying goodbye are classic comedy-apocalypse flick “Zombieland,” starring Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, and the first “Mad Max.”

But there’s plenty to look forward to, and we got you covered. From the perfect crimes, to an Obama-produced musical on civics, Netflix’s July additions are perfect for staying in, staying cool, and streaming.

“Audible,” July 1

Directed by the Emmy nominated Matt Ogens, “Audible” is the story of a Deaf high school football player, Amaree McKenstry, and his close friends during their senior year. Throughout the film, McKenstry copes with the loss of a friend’s suicide, explores relationships, and prepares for the upcoming homecoming game. The filmmakers spoke to Salon about making a film that uses sound design to make an impact on its hearing viewers.

“We the People,” July 4

Aptly dropping on Independence Day, the highly anticipated, Obamas-executive-produced, short-form musical series is a bright and quick crash course on American civics, that’s fun for the whole family — regardless of your family’s background and familiarity with civics.. The series features music and voicing from artists like H.E.R., Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monáe, Amanda Gorman, Bebe Rexha and others.

“I Think You Should Leave” Season 2, July 6

Hosted by Comedy Central alum Tim Robinson, the second season of offbeat, classic sketch show features a whole roster of fun guest stars, and wild yet everyday scenarios.

“Cat People,” July 7

No, it’s not the movie based on the viral New Yorker essay “Cat Person” — it’s “Cat People,” a feel-good docuseries on the many, many different kinds of cat people out there, who come in all shapes and sizes, and from all backgrounds, united by their love for cats. This should help recalibrate the image of a cat person who isn’t necessarily a shut-in and doesn’t look like the scraggly haired lady on “The Simpsons.”

“Dogs” Season 2, July 7

To balance things out, of course, Netflix will be releasing the second season of the beloved 2018 documentary series of the deep, nuanced emotional bonds shared between different dog owners and their dogs. While the first season traveled the globe, this season will stay stateside and feature a former astronaut, Butler University’s beloved canine mascot, a veteran and more.

“Gunpowder Milkshake,” July 14

Called the “mother of all action films” by Netflix, “Gunpowder Milkshake” is the story a mother-daughter assassin team and their pals who rebel against the men who could take everything from them. Directed by Navot Papushado, the action film looks like the latest in the delightfully expanding genre of odes to female rage and stars a bunch of badass women: “Doctor Who” alum Karen Gillan, “Game of Thrones” wine lover Lena Headey, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino.

“Heist,” July 14

Who doesn’t love a story of the perfect crime? “Heist” is the shocking docuseries on three of the biggest heists in modern American history, explained by the very people who pulled these heists off. From stealing millions in Vegas casino cash, to the biggest bourbon burglary in history, “Heist” will feature original interviews, exciting reenactments, and essentially pull back the curtain on your favorite fictional heist movies, like “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Catch Me If You Can.”

“Private Network: Who Killed Manuel Buendía?” July 14

In another true crime deep dive, “Private Network” will investigate the murder of Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía, and explore the deep ties between politics and drug trafficking.

“Never Have I Ever” Season 2, July 15

Season 1 of the breakout comedy “Never Have I Ever” was a fan favorite throughout last summer, and the Mindy Kaling-created show is back. This time around, Netflix teases a new love life and new classmate for teen protagonist Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), as well as plenty of “questionable decisions.”

“Sexy Beasts,” July 21

It wouldn’t be summer without a catty new dating show, and “Sexy Beasts” takes this quite literally, starring single contestants dressed in elaborate makeup and prosthetics to assume the form of a wide range of different animals. This, of course, is all in pursuit of bringing back blind-dating chemistry. The result is a chaotic and beastly new dating show.

“Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop,” July 22

In this new Netflix original anime, a shy boy will express himself via haiku poem to his bubbly but self-conscious crush, leading to a brief but magical summer. You can watch a trailer below.

“The Last Letter From Your Lover,” July 23

Starring Shailene Woodley and Joe Alwyn, among others, this new “The Last Letter From Your Lover,” based on the novel of the same name, follows the story of journalist Elle Haworth (Felicity Jones) as she uncovers the secret letters of two lovers, Jennifer Stirling (Woodley) and Callum Turner (Anthony O’Hare), having an extramarital affair in 1965 — all while embarking on a romance of her own. You can watch the steamy trailer below.

Here’s the full list of everything coming to Netflix this month:

July 1
“Audible”
“Dynasty Warriors”
“Generation 56k”
“Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway”
“Young Royals”
“Air Force One”
“Austin Powers in Goldmember”
“Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”
“Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”
“The Best of Enemies”
“Boogie Nights”
“Born to Play”
“Bureau of Magical Things” Season 1
“Charlie’s Angels”
“Congo”
“Dennis the Menace”
“The Game”
“Hampstead”
“The Karate Kid”
“The Karate Kid Part II”
“The Karate Kid Part III”
“Kung Fu Panda”
“Kung Fu Panda 2”
“Life as We Know It”
“Love Actually”
“Mary Magdalene”
“Memoirs of a Geisha”
“Midnight Run”
“Mortal Kombat”
“No Strings Attached”
“Not Another Teen Movie”
“Ophelia”
“Sailor Moon Crystal” Seasons 1-3
“She’s Out of My League”
“Spanglish”
“Star Trek”
“The Strangers”
“Stuart Little”
“Supermarket Sweep” Season 1
“Sword of Trust”
“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day”
“Underworld”
“Underworld: Awakening”
“Underworld: Rise of the Lycans”
“What Dreams May Come”
“Why Do Fools Fall in Love”
“ZATHURA: A SPACE ADVENTURE”

July 2
“The 8th Night”
“Big Timber”
“Fear Street Part 1: 1994”
“Haseen Dillruba”
“Mortel” Season 2
“Snowpiercer”

July 3
“Grey’s Anatomy” Season 17

July 4
“We The People”

July 5
“You Are My Spring”

July 6
“I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” Season 2

July 7
“Brick Mansions”
“Cat People”
“Dogs” Season 2
“The Mire: ’97”
“The War Next-door”
“Major Grom: Plague Doctor”
“This Little Love of Mine”

July 8
“Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime”
“Home Again”
“Midnight Sun”
“RESIDENT EVIL: Infinite Darkness”

July 9
“Atypical” Season 4
“Biohackers” Season 2
“The Cook of Castamar”
“Fear Street Part 2: 1978”
“How I Became a Superhero”
“Last Summer”
“Lee Su-geun: The Sense Coach”
“Virgin River” Season 3

July 10
“American Ultra”

July 13
“Ridley Jones”

July 14
“A Classic Horror Story”
“The Guide to the Perfect Family”
“Gunpowder Milkshake”
“Heist”
“My Unorthodox Life”
“Private Network: Who Killed Manuel Buendía?”

July 15
“A Perfect Fit”
“BEASTARS Season 2
“Emicida: AmarElo – Live in São Paulo”
“My Amanda”
“Never Have I Ever” Season 2

July 16
“The Beguiled”
“Deep”
“Explained:”Season 3
“Fear Street Part 3: 1666”
“Johnny Test”
“Twilight”
“The Twilight Saga: New Moon”
“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse”
“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1”
“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2”

July 17
“Cosmic Sin”

July 20
“milkwater”

July 21
“Chernobyl 1986”
“The Movies That Made Us” Season 2
“One on One with Kirk Cameron” Season 1
“Sexy Beasts”
“Too Hot to Handle: Brazil”
“Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans”

July 22
“9 to 5: The Story of a Movement”
“Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop”

July 23
“A Second Chance: Rivals!”
“Bankrolled”
“Blood Red Sky”
“Kingdom: Ashin of the North”
“The Last Letter From Your Lover”
“Masters of the Universe: Revelation”
“Sky Rojo: Season 2”

July 24
“Charmed” Season 3
“Django Unchained“

July 26
“The Walking Dead”
“Wynonna Earp”

July 27
“All American” Season 3
“Mighty Express” Season 4
“The Operative”

July 28
“Bartkowiak”
“Fantastic Fungi”
“The Flash” Season 7
“The Snitch Cartel: Origins”
“Tattoo Redo”

July 29
“Resort to Love”
“Transformers: War for Cybertron: Kingdom”

July 30
“Centaurworld”
“Glow Up” Season 3
“The Last Mercenary”
“Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean”
“Outer Banks” Season 2

July 31
“The Vault”

Stop dressing like your kids – it’s weird, sad and kind of creepy

Maybe I’ve just listened to too many podcasts about cults, but, families who dress alike, you creep me out.

I’m sorry. I never want to yuck another’s yum, and on my abnormally long list of “Things Other Families Do that Bother Me,” photo shoots in matching outfits falls well below gender reveal parties and bribing your child’s way in to the Ivy League. And as we find ourselves currently deep in the midst of summer family portraits at the beach season, my first wish is for every family to be healthy and safe. But also, you really are giving me cult vibes.

The sartorially coordinated family is not a recent invention. Writing in The Atlantic in 2018, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell noted that siblings have been going matchy-matchy for centuries. And in circumstances where families are making their own clothes, one might sensibly want to get the maximum bang for the buck out of their fabric, as everyone who’s seen “The Sound of Music” could tell you.

But parents have historically stayed out of the act. Chrisman-Campell notes how that changed at the turn of the 20th century, when French couturier — and working mom — Jeanne Lanvin started designing children’s clothing that echoed her adult creations. The Mommy and Me look was born, and before long it had trickled down to the ready-to-wear crowd.

What then followed were, at least in a certain portion of the American consciousness, decades of magazine ads featuring smiling housewives and their feminine, miniature doppelgängers in matching outfits — with Dad and the boys sportingly joining in for Christmas pajamas- and sweaters-related moments.

For those of us of a certain generation, however, the very idea of intergenerational twinning conjures up nothing so much as Faye Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest.” At best, there might be an association to an entire subcategory of Awkward Family Photos. For many of us raised on reruns of “The Partridge Family,” it would be difficult to pin down which idea sounds weirder — that a child would willingly dress like their parents, or that a parent would dress like one’s children.

It’s entirely possible that my deep and visceral distrust around dressing alike has something to do with those eight years I spent in Catholic school. It doesn’t really matter if you’re all wearing t-shirts that say “SQUAD,” I just read it as, “Enforced Conformity.” Not that this was ever a problem I had to face as a parent. From their earliest days, my daughters asserted their own individual styles. My firstborn can be described as ren faire casual, while my younger daughter sprang, fully formed, from the head of Brandy Melville. Even when they were in their “Sesame Street” years, they would no sooner have voluntarily dressed like each other — or worse, me — than they would have let their carrots touch their chicken nuggets. The closest we ever got were the all-but-required Thing 1 and Thing 2 tees they once sported on an Orlando vacation.

But while my kids were growing up with a quiet yet pronounced disdain for any show of aesthetic unity, other families leaned in hard. It’s no coincidence that the rise of matching outfits aligns neatly with the ego vortex known as family social media. The Holderness Family — Penn, Kim, Lola and Penn Charles — became a viral juggernaut with their 2013 YouTube ode of “Christmas Jammies.” Three years later, The Boston Globe reported that “The tradition that first revealed itself on social media several years ago has now become a full-blown consumer event, with young families spending as much as $500 for the photo-ready sets. Target expects to sell 500,000 family pairs of holiday pajamas this season.”

Parents looking to monetize their offspring have learned that nothing says ka-ching ka-ching like people who are related to each other in the same style of attire. “We’re a pretty-synced-up family,” dad of triplets Ryan Beck told the Washington Post in 2019. “If we’re going to the mall, we’ll all wear jeans and a green shirt or something like that.” I feel like Wes Anderson has a lot to answer for here. Two years later, the Beck family have over 250,000 followers on Instagram, and are still incredibly “synched up.”

Synchronicity has not just been a boon for aspiring influencers. Big retailers, from Neiman Marcus to J. Crew to Old Navy, have cashed in on the matching and “coordinated” trend. Hannah Anderson, once synonymous with the holidays, offers matching pajamas all year long. It’s ingenious — why entice a shopper to buy one Hawaiian print shirt when you can sell five? Capitalism triumphs again! As Old Navy’s senior vice president of merchandising Andres Dorronsoro told the Washington Post two years ago, “It’s really become an everyday trend. ‘It’s Wednesday. Let’s wear the same thing, take a picture and share it on Instagram.’” Okay and then what?

Social media can create the impression of family life as one big tidy yet whimsical, harmonious yet quirky romp. And nothing says unity like a uniform. But closeness needed’t come from subsuming individuality. I was encouraged recently to see family photographer Sophia Lemon advise on her site, “Do not match! Not every color or fit works for every person.”

It can be very validating, in the real world chaos of parenting, to show to the world that we’re all on the same team. It can be comforting, in the divisiveness of our culture, to declare similarity. I’m remembering how earlier this year, author Joshua Coleman talked here in Salon about the rise of familial estrangement and observed that “We’re no longer defined in relationship as much, in marriage, church, neighborhood, etc.” As our cultural isolationism and individualism becomes more pronounced, maybe it’s no wonder we seek reassurance in the cozy embrace of matching jammies. Maybe we just want to prove we’re not alone.

Fox News host rips Kamala Harris for “toxic femininity” after disgruntled staffers come forward

Fox News host Jesse Watters attempted to bash Vice President Kamala Harris for “cackling like a wacko” Thursday, following a new Politico report that alleges Harris’ office is rife with disgruntled employees who believe their work environment isn’t healthy.

Watters, co-host of “The Five,” took the news of chaos in Harris’ office and ran with it, adding his own spin onto the story by arguing that the new claims stem from the vice president exuding what he called “toxic femininity.”

“This isn’t just, like, a low-level staffer that worked for Trump saying something that got overheard by Politico and sensationalized. This is 22 people talking to Politico, not a right-wing publication, so you know it’s ten times worse than it actually is. It sounds like a jailbreak or a cry for help. People are leaving or have left,” Watters said. “They’re looking to get out of there, and it doesn’t surprise me because the campaign imploded, and now the VP’s office is imploding.”

The Fox News host continued by taking potshots at Harris’ laugh, billing it as “cackling.”

“She is a very insecure person. She’s riddled with insecurities, very defensive, and you see that when she’s cackling like a wacko. But this is early for the disintegration of the VP’s office. We’re not even six months in,” he added.

Politico’s report, which was published on Wednesday night, cited a total of 22 former and current staffers who detailed a “tense and at times dour office atmosphere.” One source extremely familiar with Harris’ operations told the publication: “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses, and it’s an abusive environment,” adding, “it’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***.”

Watch the full clip below via Media Matters for America:

At 65 Jerry Hall has proven to be more than just a rich man’s arm candy – she’s a feminist firebrand

If you’re like me, which is perhaps to say a Rolling Stones fan of a particular vintage, you’ve spent more time than you probably should have thinking about Jerry Hall — specifically, why you like her so much even though you haven’t been able to put your finger on the reason why. Since she came to public attention in the 1970s in fashion magazines and, shortly thereafter, on Mick Jagger‘s arm, her more memorable remarks — here’s one: “I’ve always felt the man is king of the house and should be amused and treated well” —announced her as (how to put this?) less than a paragon of forward thinking.

Still, if you’re like me, you found yourself rooting for Hall, and you definitely fumed when Jagger squirmed out of paying her as much as he would have paid a bona fide wife when the couple, who had four kids together, split up in 1999. But maybe your fear that Hall wasn’t all you wanted her to be seemed confirmed in 2016, when she married the indecently wealthy Fox News progenitor Rupert Murdoch, who is 25 years her senior. That the pair could have married for love isn’t beyond plausibility, but it sure appeared as though Hall had bartered her looks and relative youth for financial security — a move disappointingly straight out of rock star wife central casting.

But since Hall married Murdoch, several things have revived my interest and faith in her. There’s the 2019 article in Harper’s Bazaar about her commitment, alongside her daughters, Lizzy and Georgia May Jagger, to getting the Equal Rights Amendment passed.

And in that same story, Hall had this to say about the #MeToo movement: “All these guys who abused their power in the movie industry, it’s really wrong . . . It’s great that they’re shining a light on it. People should be held responsible for how they behave.” (As a point of cringy contrast, consider this 2018 opinion on #MeToo from another Jagger ex, Marianne Faithfull: “I think it’s really sad, you know? I mean, if that happened to me, I would just laugh at the guy. Physical assault is too much . . . But on the whole, a clever, interesting girl can bat them away.”)

Here’s the biggest surprise of the bunch, though: last year Forbes reported that Hall donated $500 to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. This, coupled with the Harper’s Bazaar revelations, had me wondering where Hall has been hiding all this bold-faced liberalism. I did some poking around, and guess what? It was there all along.

Hall’s feminism was unmistakable in a 2008 interview on Ireland’s “The Late Late Show” when she said, “I’m voting for Hillary . . . I think bitches get things done.” And while the reclamation of that epithet by feminists is still being debated, we can still appreciate Hall’s participation in the 2005 reality TV show “Kept,” in which she got to choose among a dozen-odd strapping male playthings who were all significantly younger than she was.

But my sleuthing finds Hall’s feminism at its most sustained in “Jerry Hall’s Tall Tales,” the now out-of-print 1985 memoir that she wrote (well, “wrote”: the book’s acknowledgments say that the text was culled from recorded conversations) with Christopher Hemphill. I didn’t have the good sense to purchase “Tall Tales” as a teenager, but my local library recently tracked it down for me, which enables me to tell you that the book is just like Hall: its frothy surface (cover copy: “Mick Jagger’s Longtime Love: From Texas to the Top! Supermodel, Jet Set Star!”) masks a substantive core.

“Tall Tales” offers a long-form version of the origin story that most of us know about Hall: she grew up one of five girls in a turbulent working-class family in Mesquite, Texas. In the book, she describes her father as “so Texan and right wing” and says, “He had so much anger in him. He had to vent it somehow and it would always be on us . . . Mama used to try to keep him from beating us girls up by jumping on him. Then he’d throw her across the room and it seemed like she’d get more beat up from trying to stop him from beating us up.”

Hall has since said, in The Guardian in 2010 and elsewhere, that her father’s rage surely stemmed from PTSD, which, of course, went unnamed, as the diagnosis didn’t exist in his day. “Daddy was a decorated war hero,” Hall says in Tall Tales. “He was away for five years and Mama said the war changed him.” Hall plotted her escape, but Mama wasn’t budging: “Sometimes the neighbors could hear it and they’d call the police and the police would come but my mother would never press charges. I think she was afraid that if she pressed charges he’d kill her. And what could she do? She couldn’t exactly leave and support all of us kids.”

Hall’s mother may have stood by her man, but her daughter didn’t always stand by hers. Readers of “Tall Tales” will find themselves cheering Hall when, after she achieves her dream of becoming a successful model, she breaks off her engagement to Bryan Ferry in large part because the Roxy Music singer was behaving like a controlling goon: he wanted her to swap out her glitzy style for that of a proper English hostess (“There were the gray suits he wanted me to wear”). Ferry was also apparently threatened by Hall’s success: “I think he was afraid that I was going to be too ambitious and that I was going to go off and do my career and not stay with him. I think every man has that a bit — that’s been my experience — but he had it real bad.”

Jagger, for whom Hall left Ferry, wasn’t like that (and a glance at his romantic history reveals an honorable predilection: Jagger likes a woman with a career), and she kept right on working after they got together. “I like the idea of having my own money,” Hall says in “Tall Tales.” “I don’t have to go to Mick all the time to ask him if I can buy something. It’s nice to be able to get your own things.”

In her book, Hall says that when she would model in cities where the Stones were playing, “The local girls, the models, were all saying, ‘Golly, we can’t believe that you’re here with the Stones and that you want to work. You ought to quit working.’ Sure. For what? To sit around the hotel room like some groupie?”

If I were the sort of person who kept my “Good feminist” list on paper instead of in my head, I would have added Hall’s name when I read that. And I would have underlined her name when I read this: “I think if a girl’s successful it’s good for womankind. It opens doors for more women.” And I would have used up all the ink in my pen festooning her name with hearts when I read her thoughts on feminism: “I like a lot of things about feminists. What I don’t like is the antagonism that goes on between men and women. But I believe in spurring women on to greater things. It’s boring to sit at home and watch soap operas and do the dishes. And if you have your own career and make your own money and go out and do things, you should be a lot more fun to talk to at dinner.”

It wasn’t the dinners that were the problem in the house of Jagger-Hall; it was the nights. Jagger’s infidelities, which finally convinced Hall to leave him in 1999, began during their courtship. “Finally I decided to move out for a while until he could figure out what he wanted — to date other girls or to be with me,” she says in “Tall Tales.” When the press reported that Hall was romancing British horse breeder Robert Sangster, “They were making me out to be the bad one,” she says. “It wasn’t so bad for Mick. But what’s odd is that afterward so many women have come up to me and said, ‘You were so brave the way you carried that off. So many men treat women so awful and the women just stay because they don’t know what to do.'”

It seems that Jerry Hall has always known what to do. What she’s doing now, according to the Harper’s Bazaar story, is spending time with her husband and enjoying her retirement. On July 2, Hall turns 65 — that unofficial gateway to senior citizenry — and if making it a little easier for her to grow old is a rich 90-year-old man who doesn’t beat her or cheat on her, so be it. And if her marriage makes it possible for her to toss money at the Equal Rights Amendment and the occasional Democratic candidate, then so be that as well: the bitch is getting things done.

Don Jr.: Trump Organization indictment “no different” than Putin persecuting Alexei Navalny

Donald Trump Jr. claimed Thursday that this week’s grand jury indictment against the Trump Organization is “no different” than Russian President Vladimir Putin’s persecution of political opponents.

Trump Jr. appeared on Fox News after his company and longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were charged with a yearslong scheme to avoid paying taxes on compensation to top executives.

The former president’s namesake compared the prosecution to Putin’s persecution of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Trump. Jr. incorrectly referred to as “Navatny.” The Biden administration imposed sanctions on Russia earlier this year after concluding that Navalny was poisoned and nearly killed by Russian security forces before being imprisoned.

“This is the political persecution of a political enemy,” Trump Jr. told Fox host Jesse Watters. “This is what Vladimir Putin does. Just ask Navatny [sic].”

Trump Jr. went on to argue that the prosecution was “no different” than Putin.

He also complained about the length of the years-long investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who initially began probing hush-money payments to women who alleged affairs with Trump before embarking on a more sweeping review of Trump and his company’s business practices. Trump Jr. downplayed the charges even though Weisselberg faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

“This is what they come up with,” Trump Jr. said. “They’re gonna charge a guy who’s 75 years old on crimes of avoiding paying taxes on a fringe benefit.”

Eric Trump also made the rounds on Fox News to dismiss the allegedly ill-gotten gains as “employment perks.”

“These are… a corporate car which everybody has, I guarantee you… there’s people in this network that have corporate cars, there’s people in every company in the country that have corporate vehicles. This is what they’re going after,” he argued. “This isn’t a criminal matter.”

Does the lawyer for the indicted company that Eric is an EVP at know he's on TV? pic.twitter.com/7udDv0VO41

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 2, 2021

The payments also allegedly include tuition for one of Weisselberg’s grandchildren, an apartment, and other bonuses.

The grand jury returned a 15-count indictment against the Trump Organization and Weisselberg, accusing the company and its financial chief of using two sets of books to funnel more than $1.7 million in untaxed “indirect employee compensation” to Weisselberg starting in 2005. Prosecutors said the scheme was “orchestrated by the most senior executives, who were financially benefiting themselves and the company, by getting secret pay raises at the expense of state and federal taxpayers.”

Prosecutors charged the company with criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records, among other counts. Weisselberg, who was brought to his arraignment in handcuffs, faces charges including tax fraud and grand larceny, which carries up to 15 years in prison. Both the Trump Organization and Weisselberg pleaded not guilty.

Former President Donald Trump, who has not been charged in the investigation, called the case “ridiculous” in an interview with The New York Times, but avoided questions about whether his company “systemically avoided its tax burdens.” Advisers close to Trump say he is “thrilled” with what they described as light charges, and is already planning to use the prosecution as fodder for rallies as he reportedly eyes a 2024 run.

Trump is hardly out of the woods and neither are his children, however. The Times noted that the company has also written off numerous personal perks for Trump and his adult children in recent years, which has allowed the family to reduce their own personal tax bills.

“These investigations work in stages, and there’s no indication that the investigation is winding down,” said Times reporter Ben Protess, who has been covering the probe. “Once you indict the C.F.O. and the company, that pretty much only leaves Donald Trump himself.”

Former Trump Organization vice president Michael Cohen also predicted on CNN that “there are other members of the Trump Organization, including the children who are next to come up on to these indictments.”

And going on TV to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation may not help matters.

“Criminal lawyers will invariably, almost invariably tell their clients, ‘Do not make any statements regarding the case to the press,'” Michael Bachner, a former prosecutor at the Manhattan DA’s office, told the Washington Post. “The reason is fairly obvious: Statements made by people who can be construed as corporate representatives could be deemed as admissions of the corporation in the litigation.”

Attorney Bradley Moss quipped on Twitter that “clearly no one at Trump Org has told the nepotism hires that commenting on the criminal matter is unwise.”

Sharks have an image problem — and are on the edge of extinction

If the oceans were a stage play, sharks would be the villain. Human media, from blockbuster movies to viral videos to news reports, depict sharks as vicious, uncompromising killers. They’re out for blood, and we humans should fear them. Our negative stereotypes of sharks are embedded in the root of the word itself: “shark” is believed to derive from the German word “schurke,” meaning villain or scoundrel.

But I’m not afraid of sharks. I’m afraid for sharks. As a marine biologist, I know these vital members of our marine ecosystems are in real danger of vanishing from the planet. And our widespread misconceptions about them — our prejudices and stereotypes, if you will — are among the reasons why.

If we’re to have any hope of saving these extraordinary animals from extinction, we’ll need to change the way we look at sharks and their place in our natural world.

Based purely on the facts, there’s little reason we should see sharks as homicidal monsters. Sharks have more to fear from us than we do them. In 2020, the number of humans killed in shark-related incidents anywhere on the planet was 13. And the number of unprovoked shark bites was just 57. Consider that there are 7.9 billion humans on Earth.

Humans are more likely to die from a lightning strike or a dog attack than an encounter with a shark. Humans, meanwhile, take the lives of some 100 million sharks every year. Yet somehow, sharks are considered villains.

It is also a mistake to think that all sharks resemble the menacing beasts we’re used to seeing in the movies. There are more than 500 different species of sharks, half of which are fewer than three feet long. Some are small enough to fit in your hand.

The more we learn about sharks, the clearer it becomes that the members of this diverse group of species aren’t frightening — they’re awe-inspiring.

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Sharks have been around for over 400 million years. They’re older than dinosaurs, and even predate trees, which evolved a mere 385 million years ago. Some sharks are the color of bubble gum, while others glow in the dark. That sharks have become synonymous with the title character in the movie “Jaws” is more an accident of history than anything else.

But does it really matter how sharks are depicted in popular culture or how the average beach-goer reacts to seeing one? It’s not like we can hurt sharks’ feelings.

It matters a great deal. Nobody wants to protect a murderous predator or a horror-movie monster, after all. And right now, sharks are in desperate need of our protection.

Since 1970, the total population of sharks and rays, their close relatives, has dropped by 70 percent, according to a recent study in the journal Nature. That’s mostly because of overfishing. Of the species examined in the study, three-quarters were at risk of extinction.

This isn’t the first time sharks have nearly vanished from the face of the earth. According to a new study in the journal Science, a mysterious event some 19 million years ago nearly put an end to sharks.

They might not be so lucky this time around.

It’s a tragedy when any species goes extinct, especially one that’s been evolving on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. An extinction-level event for sharks could have disastrous and wide-ranging consequences for our environment.

As apex predators, sharks play a pivotal role in the food chain by regulating the populations of the animals on which they prey. This, in turn, leads to greater species diversity — and a more vibrant and sustainable ecosystem.

Put another way, healthy oceans need healthy shark populations. Right now, shark populations are shrinking quickly. Reversing these trends requires more than the right policies and political will. It requires a cultural shift in how we view these animals.

If we continue to think of sharks as fearsome monsters — and not as the majestic, ancient, indispensable creatures they truly are — we may end up with a situation far more frightening than an ocean full of sharks. And that’s an ocean with no sharks at all.

A revolution, finally televised: Questlove’s “Summer of Soul” corrects pop fest history of the ’60s

Leave it to Ahmir Thompson — better known as Questlove — to break into the documentary game in fine style. With “Summer of Soul,” the Roots’ joint frontman, drummer and world-breaking songwriter makes his directorial debut. As with the best films, Questlove’s narrative is shrouded in mystery, while leaving an emotional resonance that won’t be soon forgotten.

Subtitled as (“…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised”), “Summer of Soul” traces the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of concerts held in Mount Morris Park on consecutive Sundays from June through August 1969. While the Western world was entranced with Woodstock, some 300,000 attendees flocked to the Harlem festival, taking in such standout acts and artists as the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone.

Television producer Hal Tulchin filmed the concert series in its entirety, searching in vain for a distributor to share the magical event with the world. And that’s where the mystery begins. For more than 50 years, the footage was stowed away in a basement. Over the years, as music historians bathed Woodstock and the Monterey Pop festivals in platitudes, the Harlem Cultural Festival was consigned to history’s dustbin. Until now, that is.

Thanks to Questlove — who set out explicitly to “correct history” — the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival is finally earning its due. And just as significantly, magisterial performances from a host of popular music’s most defining artists are finally seeing the light of day.

After producer Robert Fyvolent learned about the footage’s existence, he bought the rights from Tulchin, paving the way for Questlove to bring the festival’s story to life. The result is simply breathtaking. In Questlove’s hands, the performances come alive as fresh and impactful as if they were produced last year, much less five decades ago.

For his part, Questlove couldn’t help wondering, “What would have happened if this [festival] was allowed a seat at the table? How much of a difference would that have made in my life?” As it stands, the previously unseen footage depicts many of our greatest artists working at the height of their powers.

Take the Edwin Hawkins Singers, belting out “Oh, Happy Day” with unchecked abandon. Or the Fifth Dimension, their harmonies soaring ever higher on “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” Thanks to Summer of Soul, audiences can watch, mouths agape, as 19-year-old Stevie Wonder breaks off a drum solo for the ages. Or experience Gladys Knight and the Pips singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in pure technicolor. And then there’s Sly and the Family Stone, performing their counterculture masterwork “Everyday People” with the kind of gusto that can only be achieved in front of a sea of enrapt concertgoers.

But in the end, as Questlove reminds us, the most important aspect on display during that fabled summer was, pure and simple, “Black joy.” Summer of Soul is a wonder to behold.

“Summer of Soul” is streaming now on Hulu.

Controversial new “Top Chef” champion crowned amidst harassment allegations

“Top Chef: Portland” aired its season finale Thursday night, marking the end of a feel-good season shot during the pandemic that sought to honor the rich diversity of our nation’s food – including Indigenous and African traditions – and the sacrifice of frontline workers. Unfortunately, this goodwill was marred by real-world concerns when the judges crowned a winner whose past caught up with them.

It came down to finalsts Dawn Burrell, a Houston-based chef and a former Team USA Track & Field Olympian; Austin-based Gabe Erales, who specializes in Mexican cuisine; and Seattle-based Shota Nakajima, who was thankful for a second chance after having to shut down one of his restaurants. After the finale challenge, in which they were tasked with preparing the best four-course meal of their lives, the panel of all-star judges chose Erales as the new “Top Chef” champ and first Mexican American to hold the title.

That triumph quickly faded as fans on social media pushed back and demanded some answers for an earlier report about Erales. According to the Austin Chronicle, Erales was fired from his job at the Austin restaurant Comedor, where he had been head chef, in December. Eater reports that an ambiguous email from the restaurant in December said Erales had left the restaurant “due to repeated violation of our policies and for behavior in conflict with our values.”

Erales notably did not appear on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live,” which would traditionally feature the winner of the season post-finale. Instead, hosts Padma Lakshmi, Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons appeared and discussed the competition without alluding to any real-world concerns (with Lakshmi even referring to Erales’ “incredible saucework” on the show). Nor has his win been announced and celebrated on Bravo or “Top Chef” social media accounts, which merely acknowledged the hard work of all three finalists.

Amid backlash from fans criticizing the show for its silence on the matter, Lakshmi addressed the controversy in a tweet: “As someone who has been sexually harassed, this topic is a serious one, and merits openness,” she wrote. “We filmed Top Chef in October of last year & were not aware of the allegations now coming out against Gabe. This should be investigated & the network should consider its best action.”

In a lengthy Instagram post, previous “Top Chef” champion and guest judge Gregory Gourdet elliptically alluded to the allegations against Erales by writing at length about worker abuse in the restaurant industry, which especially targets “womxn.”

“As toxic conditions in kitchens and and the bad behavior of chefs get exposed, I feel like we are in a vicious cycle with the womxn in our industry continually suffering the most,” Gourdet wrote. He added, “Our industry has a long way to go and I wonder if we will ever get there but I’m not giving up . . . Basic human decency is just the starting point of our survival. So is the end of power hungry, abusive, egomaniacal chef.” Gourdet, who is a Portland-based chef, has also taken steps to build a fairer workplace, according to a New York Times interview.

While it’s unclear what exactly led to Erales’ firing from Austin’s Comedor, and neither “Top Chef” nor Comedor have specified, fans believe the firing was related to sexual harassment and abuse of workers, given Lakshmi and Gourdet’s social media statements, as well as some more specific allegations made on social media. Fans, and Gourdet himself, have pointed out the importance of better vetting from media and TV competition shows of their contestants.

“Top Chef” isn’t the first offender when it comes to poor vetting and possible casting mistakes like this. In a particularly extreme example, one reality star, Ryan Jenkins, had competed on VH1’s “Megan Wants a Millionaire” shortly before murdering his wife Jasmine Fiore in 2009. In slightly less extreme examples, ABC’s “The Bachelor” has long struggled with casting contestants who are later revealed to have made racist or sexist comments or behaviors, compete while having romantic partners back home, and more. Discoveries about reality stars’ true colors always offer rude awakening that while we often watch these shows for escapism, they star real people, with real, often disappointing or disturbing histories.

“Top Chef: Portland” notably filmed prior to Erales’ firing, but if there’s any truth to social media users’ claims that harassment allegations had been made against Erales for some time before the firing, it seems “Top Chef” could have uncovered this. In the very least, his firing was made public before the show began in earlier this year, giving time for an investigation. The show and its network have yet to comment on the controversy as of Friday afternoon.

Season 18 of “Top Chef” originally featured 15 chefs, competing throughout the pandemic over the course of 13 episodes of intensive competition. Some of the previously eliminated contestants returned for the season finale, as former contestants Jamie Tran, Byron Gomez and Maria Mazon paired with the finalists to help them shop for ingredients. Later, they had six hours to cook and prepare the four-course meal at Willamette Valley Vineyards, to a panel of judges that included former “Top Chef” all-stars and other luminaries of the culinary world, including Gourdet, Melissa King, Naomi Pomeroy and Peter Cho.

The finale of “Top Chef: Portland” on Thursday evening was immediately followed by the premiere of “Top Chef Amateurs,” which will feature 12 episodes of competition between amateur chefs, who will each be assigned a Top Chef all-star to be their sous chef, over the next several weeks.

Trump supporters turn on “cuck” Ron DeSantis after he thanks Joe Biden for help on Surfside disaster

President Joe Biden met with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday to discuss the collapsed condominium building in the town of Surfside — and some supporters of former President Donald Trump aren’t happy about it.

In particular, some Trump supporters were angry that DeSantis thanked Biden for being “very supportive from day one” of the tragedy in Surfside, which has resulted so far in 18 confirmed deaths and nearly 150 people still unaccounted for.

Many Trump fanatics said that DeSantis shouldn’t have even met with Biden, whom they believe is an illegitimate president despite beating Trump in the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and in the electoral college by 74 votes.

Check out some reactions from angry Trump fans below.

Governor why are you sitting next to this fraud. https://t.co/b2mY3edMpu

— jdt@july4th (@jthackerson1) July 1, 2021

DeSantis is dead to me.

— Kathy Ultra MAGA (@KLUltraMaga) July 1, 2021

DeSantis meets with the Trojan Corpse imposter. Looks like President Trump will be finding another running mate. DeSantis is a ball-less coward!
NOW – Florida's Gov. DeSantis thanks Biden for being "very supportive from day one" in Surfside building collapse.@disclosetv

— Kathy Ultra MAGA (@KLUltraMaga) July 1, 2021

And here we go. Trump 2024 please.

— E.A (@ghost_fos) July 1, 2021

Kyrsten Sinema’s run out of excuses: Supreme Court leaves Senate Democrats with little choice

Is Kyrsten Sinema a troll?

There’s been disturbing signs in the past that the senior senator from Arizona gets cheap thrills by provoking outraged reactions from her fellow travelers in the Democratic party. Most notably, of course, there was the time Sinema threw a cute little cursty while voting against a minimum wage raise she claims to “support,” predictably drawing thousands of angry responses. She then released a photo provoking large swaths of Democratic voters at the height of their anger at her unwillingness to vote to end the filibuster Republicans use to block all meaningful legislation. In the photo, Sinema is seen flashing a ring that reads “f*ck off” with a smile. And then, in a move any 4chan user would envy, she dramatically increased the rage-sputtering on the left by declaring it “sexist” to be mad at her for any of this.

Sinema again pulled her signature gaslighting move — piously claiming to support legislation while actively blocking it — after the Supreme Court upheld a racist voting suppression law in her very own state on Thursday:

Here is a statement from @SenatorSinema today on the SCOTUS ruling that will now allow for greater minority disenfranchisement in AZ. @kyrstensinema is also pretending that the Voting Rights Act can pass without the elimination of the filibuster. It can’t. pic.twitter.com/QtOAlqK0LL

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) July 1, 2021

Again, it’s worth wondering if Sinema is simply trolling here.

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She knows full well that Republicans unanimously blocked voting rights legislation from even being debated in the Senate just last week. She also knows she and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia are the only two Democratic senators who refuse to strip this near-absolute veto power away from Republicans. Being a co-sponsor of the bill is a meaningless gesture when she is the person keeping voting rights bills from even being debated in the upper chamber.

Sinema’s sanctimonious declarations of meaningless “support” for bills that she’s blocking from the floor isn’t just bizarre trolling — it’s also self-defeating.

Forget about the high-minded talk about saving democracy or protecting voting rights, what’s really weird here is that Sinema isn’t worried about Republicans openly trying to cheat her out of winning re-election in 2024. By refusing to budge on the filibuster she is refusing to do what’s needed to save her own seat.

The law that the Supreme Court upheld is a 2016 Arizona law banning ballot collection and the use of provisional ballots. As the New York Times editorial board pointed out, lower courts found “clear evidence that the laws make voting harder for voters of color — whether Black, Latino or Native American,” which should be seen as a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “which bars any law that discriminates on the basis of race, whether intentionally or not.” The decision opens the door to all manner of voter suppression laws that are meant to target minority communities that tend to lean Democratic — especially in Arizona, where Joe Biden’s presidential victory has kicked off another round of anti-voting fervor in the GOP-controlled state legislature.

The impact of voter suppression laws on presidential elections has gotten the most attention, but equally important is the way that Republicans are using these laws to gain control of Congress, particularly of the Senate. Sinema only beat her Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. Martha McSally, by a hair — around 56,000 votes in an election where 2.3 million people voted. In 2020, the Democratic candidate for the other Arizona Senate seat, Mark Kelly, beat McSally by about 79,000 votes out of nearly 3.4 million cast. Republicans understand that they don’t need to keep the majority of voters of color from the polls to steal elections in that state. Even keeping just a fraction of non-white voters from accessing the ballot will be enough to throw elections to Republicans.

Republicans are openly trying to cheat Sinema out of her own seat, and instead of fighting back, she’s openly inviting them to do it. This is hardly some noble self-sacrifice for the greater good. Instead, Sinema is undermining her own political future to defend the filibuster, an archaic practice that only exists because of a historical accident, which has been largely used for the purpose Republicans use it now, to protect and promote white supremacy.

Worse, there’s evidence that Sinema used to agree with the majority of Arizona voters that passing bills is more important than preserving the filibuster. In a recently unearthed video from 2010, Sinema can be heard calling the filibuster “false pressure to get to 60” votes to pass bills. This was a much different tune than the one she’s been singing lately, such as in her infamous Washington Post op-ed where she claimed that the filibuster encourages “bipartisanship,” which is the only way to “achieve durable, lasting results.”

(In reality, as the inability to pass voting rights legislation shows, the filibuster is a good way to achieve nothing but a more rapid decline into authoritarianism.)

The change from someone who wanted to pass progressive legislation to someone happy to given control to the Republican minority, even to the detriment of her own political future, has spurred all manner of speculation about Sinema’s dark motivations. But unlike Manchin, who really does have strong ties to right wing corporate interests, there’s really not a lot of evidence that Sinema is in thrall to pro-filibuster industries like the fossil fuel industry.

The alarming possibility is that she really is just a person who has more ego than sense.

Tim Murphy published an in-depth profile of Sinema for the July/August issue of Mother Jones, and in it, he traces her enthusiasm for the idea of bipartisanship to a political victory early in her career in the Arizona state legislature, when she joined a bipartisan group that successfully defeated a 2006 ballot provision to ban same-sex marriage. Rather than making appeals for LGBT equality, her group’s strategy “decided to emphasize the impact the referendum would have on straight couples,” due to its provision that stripped legal rights away from all domestic partnerships, gay or straight.

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In Murphy’s telling, this was the moment that Sinema’s entire attitude towards politics changed. She became enamored of the idea that she’s some brilliant strategist who can manipulate “bipartisanship” to achieve progressive ends. It really may be that her self-image as a mastermind at playing 11th level chess is what’s driving her to think she’s smarter than nearly every other Democrat on Capitol Hill. She’s likely unwilling to see that the strategy that worked against this single-ballot initiative 15 years ago is not going to work against the obstructionist politics that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R- Ky., has embraced to great success for at least as long. Of course, if Sinema thinks she’s smarter than McConnell, she’s wrong.

Last week, Sinema was repeatedly photographed with President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators to announce a “deal” struck on an infrastructure bill that would supposedly attract enough Republican votes to overcome the filibuster. In the photos, Sinema’s grin has an unmistakable air of gloating. No doubt she was thrilled to believe she had proved her critics wrong and demonstrated that she really is the bipartisan negotiation ninja she imagines herself to be.

Within hours, however, Republicans produced the pretext to blow up the bill. They feigned outrage that Biden, as he always said he was going to do, was working to attach Democratic priorities left out of the bipartisan bill to a budget reconciliation bill that only needs a 51-vote majority to pass. Republicans did what everyone who has been actually paying attention to D.C. politics said they were going to do: Waste Democratic time by pretending to negotiate a bipartisan bill, only to find some excuse to blow it up at the last minute. It’s the GOP’s time-honored “running out the clock” playbook and entirely predictable. But Sinema thinks she’s smarter than everyone else, and so she walked right into the Republican trap.

It’s cold comfort, knowing that Sinema will likely pay for her outsized ego by losing her re-election campaign. While no one deserves it more than she, the problem is that losing her could very well mean Democrats lose control of the Senate. If the vote suppression also returns the White House to Republican hands, the kind of immoderation that Sinema claims to oppose will only run rampant. McConnell will get right back to an agenda of slashing taxes for the rich and stuffing the courts with right-wing radicals, all without having to worry one bit about being stopped by that filibuster that Sinema rates as more important than democracy itself.

Sinema may be the egotistical dingbat in this situation, but it’s the nation that will pay the price for her hubris.

Is climate change amping up the Pacific Northwest heat wave? Yes — and it’s time to stop asking.

There’s no longer any need to ask if heat waves are influenced by climate change.

On Monday, temperatures in Washington and Oregon soared to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing records and leaving locals — many of whom don’t have air conditioning — struggling to find shelter from the suffocating heat. In Seattle, fans and air conditioning units were sold out at major retailers as temperatures reached an all-time high of 106 degrees Fahrenheit, marking an unprecedented third straight day of 100-degree heat. In Portland, light rail cables literally melted amid record-smashing temperatures up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

And some scientists are beginning to say that not only is the once-in-a-millennium heat wave broiling the Pacific Northwest linked to climate change — but that it’s safe to assume that all heat waves are being made more severe or more likely as a result of all the carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere.

“Now, if we have an extreme heat wave, the null hypothesis is, ‘Climate change is making that worse,'” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. Instead of having to prove that climate change did affect a heat wave, Dessler explained, the burden of proof is now on any scientist to prove that global warming didn’t play a role.

That’s a far cry from two decades ago, when scientists hesitated to link extreme weather events to climate change at all. When researchers did connect an extreme flood, drought, or heat wave to human-caused warming, their research was often released years later, due to the long process of peer review. But now, as heat extremes (and research) continue to pile up, scientists have grown increasingly confident that climate change plays a role in essentially every one of them.

“Every heat wave occurring today is made more likely and more intense by human-induced climate change,” tweeted Friederike Otto, a climate scientist and the associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

Over the last decade, researchers have analyzed over 100 heat waves around the world, concluding that climate change made almost all of them more likely or more severe. (In a few studies, the results were inconclusive.) One study found that the 2017 European heat wave nicknamed “Lucifer” was made four times more likely; another found that an exceptionally warm summer in Texas in 2011 was made 10 times more likely.

In a few cases, researchers have calculated that heat waves would have been virtually impossible without the 2 degrees F (1.2 degrees Celsius) that the planet has already warmed since pre-industrial times. Scientists estimated a heat wave in Siberia last year — which brought temperatures in the Arctic circle to 100.4 degrees F — was made 600 times more likely due to the warming climate.

“The analogy that people often use is loading the dice — you have dice and they used to be fair but now we’re loading up the sixes,” Dessler said. “But what’s actually happening is we’re hitting the point where we’ve added another side. Now we’re rolling sevens.”

Many areas of the U.S. simply aren’t prepared for that kind of extreme heat. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, major U.S. cities experienced two heat waves a year in the 1960s; now it’s more like six. The heat wave season is also 47 days longer — which helps explain why the Pacific Northwest is getting hit by extreme heat as early as June.

For Dessler, the scary thing is that all of this is occurring at only 2 degrees F (1.2 degrees C) of warming, and the planet is slated for around 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees C) of warming before the end of the century. And climate change, he pointed out, doesn’t proceed linearly. Things might seem gradual until all hell breaks loose. “It’s going to be a lot worse than three times as bad,” he said.

Yes, Trump should be “thrilled” by this week’s news — indictments and all

Donald Trump’s company and its chief financial officer were indicted on Thursday on multiple felony counts and the prosecutors went to some lengths to say they weren’t finished yet. In a sane world, one would think that presents a real problem for a man who is planning to run for president but this is Trump we’re talking about and he’s survived dozens of legal challenges as a businessman and as a politician so it’s a fairly good bet he’ll wriggle out of this one too. After all, in the last 18 months, he’s been impeached twice, botched the handling of a historic global pandemic resulting in more than 600,000 American deaths, incited an insurrection against the U.S. Congress, and his supporters love him more than ever. He famously said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes and it appears to literally be true.

This is probably why he is reportedly happy about the indictments, “thrilled” they are what he thinks of as light charges, and already anticipating how the cases can be leveraged for his big comeback in 2024 because it will “hurt Sleepy Joe.” He plans to make this latest “witch hunt” a theme of his upcoming rallies and since his political career has been built upon relentless whining, which his followers eat up with a spoon, he may just be right.

The Witch Hunt continues folks. I’m beginning to wonder how this is any different than how Vladimir Putin treats his political enemies? My thoughts on the New York DA/AG and their political persecution. https://t.co/3wR7Xjfkbg

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 1, 2021

Since January 6th, there is a very powerful, unspoken threat should any real danger to Trump and his future plans present itself: violence. It’s doubtful that anyone involved in these or any other cases aren’t constantly weighing the risks against the benefits in taking steps to hold Trump accountable. He’s gotten away with so much that even grounded, rational people have to be asking themselves if he’s literally made a deal with the devil.

According to Politico, people around him say that while he has been spending some time at Trump Tower (since he’s summering at his Bedminster Golf Club) and has been concerned about these cases, it’s far from his top priority.

Aides said that Trump’s interest in the Manhattan D.A.’s case pales in comparison to his obsession with the idea that he could still prove to be the winner of the 2020 election. “His world is seriously consumed by that,” said another Trump adviser. “In comparison to election fraud, [the D.A.’s investigation] is not even close.” According to this adviser, Trump is holding out hope that if the Arizona “audit”/fishing expedition ends up in his favor, a few other states will follow suit, triggering some sort of legal process that would make him president.

He’s even questioned the merits of the Constitution, if it can’t be used to investigate election fraud.

He must have been awfully pleased to see that the Supreme Court seemed to agree with him, at least to the extent that states should be able to make it as hard for people to vote as possible, ostensibly to protect itself from voter fraud, which doesn’t exist. Thursday’s ruling on the voting case Brnovich v. DNC, from Arizona, ground zero for Trump’s Big Lie hysteria, with the full conservative bloc coming together to further weaken the Voting Rights Act, must have made his day.

The court upheld a series of voter restrictions much like the ones that are popping up all over the country in the wake of Trump’s Big Lie, although it did not, as was feared, completely eliminate all barriers to such restrictions. It did create a new set of criteria for determining if a voting law is discriminatory, one of which seems to say that any restrictions which may have been in place in 1982 (when the Voting Rights Act was amended) are acceptable. (I guess this is yet another form of “originalism?”) The majority opinion cites this example:

“it is relevant that in 1982 States typically required nearly all voters to cast their ballots in person on election day and allowed only narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee ballots.”

So much for mail-in voting.

That opinion was written by Samuel Alito, a sure signal to the GOP establishment that this one was for them. (Alito is, by far, the most flagrantly partisan justice on the Court.) This decision, which endorses the idea that states can restrict voting because of (non-existent) voter fraud, is solely a Republican Party project. This decision makes it clear that while this court may throw a bone to the left once in a while when it comes down to securing power for the Republican Party, their allegiance is certain. Mitch McConnell must have strained a muscle patting himself on the back for his efforts to make that happen.

At this point, the entire Republican establishment, which includes the Supreme Court majority, is working together to take advantage of the opening Trump’s Big Lie has given them. The party strategically targeted the states that Biden won closely and is feverishly passing laws to disenfranchise Democratic voters there. At the same time, they are assiduously working to disempower any form of non-partisan oversight of the election apparatus. In fact, they are using every lever of power at their disposal, from legislative control in the states, to the filibuster and the Supreme Court.

Yet even in light of that, the Democrats are saying that any changes to voting laws must be bipartisan and are letting the GOP get away with obstructing voting legislation for the dumbest possible reason: they think they need to hold on to the filibuster to stop Mitch McConnell and a future GOP president from doing things they don’t like in the future. As if McConnell and the Republicans haven’t made it crystal clear that they will do as they like by any means necessary. If Republicans need to nuke the filibuster in the future they will not hesitate to do it. In fact, they may do it just to troll the libs the minute they get back the majority.

The consensus among the political press is that this battle is over.

CNN’s Senior White House correspondent Phil Mattingly insisted on Thursday that the handful of Democrats who believe this drivel are not going to change their minds and the rest of the party is accepting their fate, with the White House planning to fall back on the “bully pulpit” to tell people how they might avoid the undemocratic roadblocks the Republicans are putting in their way.

That’s right. The party that controls the House, the Senate and the White House apparently believes it is impotent to protect American democracy from a bunch of right-wing crazies who worship Donald Trump so they’re planning to give some speeches instead.

If this cynical consensus is right (and I fervently hope it isn’t) all I can say is that it’s a good thing we have an empathetic mourner-in-chief in Joe Biden to comfort us when our democracy finally dies. Unfortunately, we probably won’t be able to hear his consoling words over the giddy laughter of Trump and the Republicans. They couldn’t have dreamed the Democrats would go down so easily.

States step up push to regulate pharmacy drug brokers

Under pressure to rein in skyrocketing prescription drug costs, states are targeting companies that serve as conduits for drug manufacturers, health insurers and pharmacies.

More than 100 separate bills regulating those companies, known as pharmacy benefit managers, have been introduced in 42 states this year, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy, which crafts model legislation on the topic. The flood of bills comes after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling late last year backed Arkansas’ right to enforce rules on the companies. At least 12 of the states have adopted new oversight laws. But it’s not yet clear how much money consumers will save immediately, if at all.

The companies are powerful, together administering medication plans for more than 266 million Americans. A handful of the companies, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and OptumRX, control the vast majority of the market while also operating national pharmacy chains. PBMs say they use all that power to negotiate lower prescription prices. But the inner workings of the deals — and how much of the savings the companies pocket — happen largely behind a curtain that lawmakers are trying to pull back.

Montana is one testing ground for whether more transparency leads to lower drug prices with a new law that places those businesses under state oversight. The legislature unanimously passed a measure in April that, beginning next year, requires pharmacy benefit managers to get a state license and publicly report how much money they receive. It also dictates what information PBMs must provide to other companies amid negotiations.

“This was kind of the low-hanging fruit in terms of something where we thought we could get some meaningful policy out there,” said Troy Downing, Montana’s Republican commissioner of securities and insurance. “At least turn the light on in that black box.”

New York lawmakers also passed legislation requiring PBMs to get a state license and submit an annual report that details the financial benefits they collect. Some efforts go broader, such as one in Wisconsin that brought PBMs under state oversight and required pharmacies to tell customers about less expensive generic prescription options.

PBMs pit drug manufacturers against one another to get lower drug prices on behalf of clients such as health insurers or large employers offering prescription drug benefits. They influence what prescription plans cover, and they help set pharmacy reimbursement rates for medications bought under PBM-managed plans. They can make money by pocketing some of the cash saved in negotiations and through the rebates that drug manufacturers offer for a sought-after spot on the list of prescriptions covered by health plans.

PBMs are accustomed to negative attention, though they often counter it’s pointed in the wrong direction.

“The main focus for state policymakers should be to examine brand drug manufacturers’ pricing strategies,” emailed Greg Lopes, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a national trade group. “Drug manufacturers are solely responsible for setting and raising drug prices.”

One in 10 U.S. adults ration prescriptions they can’t afford, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And as prices climb, every industry touchpoint for pharmaceutical drugs — manufacturers, distributors, insurers and more — blames the others. Policymakers have said each plays a role, though PBMs have become easy targets for politicians across political parties.

While PBM regulation is often pitched as a way to lower drug costs, patients shouldn’t expect lower prices at pharmacy counters immediately, said Elizabeth Seeley, an expert in health care payment systems at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“There’s really not a clear answer on what types of policies will necessarily bring down spending,” Seeley said. “Because you have to also ask the question of ‘spending for who?'”

The changes could mean savings for patients or savings for just another part of the health industry, such as insurers. Seeley said she welcomes the recent spate of legislation to get more transparency into the system. But to get more affordable prescriptions on a wide scale, she said, lawmakers need a broad set of policies that sweep in players such as drug manufacturers. That would most likely have to happen on a national level.

Last year, bills died in Congress that sought to penalize drugmakers for raising prices above inflation rates and to cap some Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket costs. Drug-pricing proposals are back on the table this year, with some zeroing in on specific industry players — including pharmacy benefit managers.

Montana’s Democratic senator, Jon Tester, recently introduced bipartisan legislation that aims to prevent pharmacy benefit managers from extracting fees from pharmacies after they’re already reimbursed. He has proposed similar efforts before. Tester said local rules help, but national policy forces the companies to play by the same rules in every state.

“This isn’t going to solve the problem of high prescription drug prices, but it will help,” Tester said.

Independent pharmacies are often in the background, lauding such efforts to regulate PBMs.

“They’re squeezing us out of the market,” said Josh Morris, who owns several rural Montana pharmacies.

Morris said that, when it came time to sign a new PBM contract last year to stay in an insurers’ preferred network, reimbursement rates were too low to cover the pharmacies’ costs to supply the prescriptions. So, he rejected the offer from the company, which he declined to name out of concern it would hurt their future interactions. As a result, Morris said, many of his customers’ prescription copays rose, but they have few other pharmacies nearby. His patients in West Yellowstone, for example, faced a 90-mile trek to Bozeman as the next-closest option for more affordable medicine.

“How is that better for patients?” Morris said. “Pharmacies are stuck in the middle with no power; we’re told, ‘Here are the rates — either sign it or don’t sign it.'”

While Morris hopes to see more rules like Tester’s legislation become reality, for now he thinks Montana’s new law could help. The rules call for PBMs to have adequate networks, which Morris said he hopes will help remote pharmacies like his.

David Root — vice president of government affairs for Prime Therapeutics, one of Montana’s larger PBMs, which represents more than 30 million people nationwide — said the increased legislative scrutiny is a classic case of shooting the messenger.

“In some cases, we’re the deliverer of bad news,” he said.

Root said some of the changes taking place in Montana and elsewhere aren’t an issue, such as being licensed through the state and establishing rules on what PBMs communicate to insurers. But he said bills like Montana’s go wrong by making numbers public, potentially stripping some of the companies’ power to negotiate among other players, which he said could result in higher drug prices.

Downing, the Montana insurance commissioner, said the state rules aren’t saying PBMs must drastically change how they operate — they just have to show some of their work along the way.

“Best-case scenario is, through this transparency and through this regulatory authority, we start to see market forces improving consumer costs,” Downing said. “Worst-case scenario is, in two years, we know what we don’t know now, and we can make better decisions on how to better attack this problem.

The right’s attack on “critical race theory”: Another battle in the Orwellian war against democracy

For the Republican Party, the white right and the broader neofascist movement, “critical race theory” means both everything and nothing. That ambiguous term has become a highly effective weapon in their war on democracy, reality, truth and freedom: It is a blank slate or empty signifier to which almost any meaning can be attached, easily used to prey on the fear, paranoia and other negative emotions widely found across White America.

“Critical” sounds scary, as if white people as individuals are being personally criticized. More “sophisticated” right-wing propagandists are also misrepresenting critical race theory as somehow connected to Nazism, “socialism” and Marxism through the intellectual tradition known as “critical theory.”

“Race” is a word that triggers many white people into a defensive reaction, born out of fear that they will be personally attacked for their individual and societal sins. The common reaction to “race” by many white folks also reflects the ways that white racial innocence and what some have described as “white racial fragility” combine to produce a rage-filled reaction when matters of racial inequality or racial justice are discussed.

“Theory” is also being misrepresented as to mean something not known — an uninformed opinion or mere speculation.

But “theory” as applied by critical race theorists means a framework used to analyze and draw conclusions from empirical evidence, and more generally the rigorous study of a given topic, subject or idea as it relates to a larger system of meaning.

At the Guardian, Julia Wong outlines how “critical race theory” is being weaponized at ground level:

Viral videos of impassioned parents denouncing critical race theory at school board hearings have become a cornerstone of the movement to ban its teaching.

In one such video, a mother declares critical race theory (CRT) to be “a tactic used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slavery very many years ago to dumb down my ancestors so we could not think for ourselves”. In another, a woman calls CRT “the American version of the Chinese cultural revolution”. A third mother says she has proof that her local school board is “teaching our children to go out and murder police officers”.

The videos, and their spread online, are emblematic of the way the campaign to ban CRT has combined genuine grassroots anger, institutional backing, and a highly effective rightwing propaganda machine to propel critical race theory from academic obscurity to center stage in the US political debate. … Legislation seeking to limit the teaching of CRT has been introduced in at least 22 states this year, and enacted in six: Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. Statewide resolutions against CRT have also been passed in Florida, Georgia and Utah.

In reality, critical race theory is a narrow academic paradigm focused on how to understand the ways that American society has been structured to reproduce racial inequality. Critical race theory’s basic premise is that racism and white supremacy have created material and other disadvantages for Black and brown across American society, through the law and other public policies. That’s not an unproven hypothesis. It’s an incontrovertible fact.

Moreover, critical race theory is an advanced interdisciplinary approach to the study of power relationships and the color line: It is not being taught in public schools. Those on the right who have seized on this term to advance their political agenda are not, of course, interested in facts.

It is no coincidence that images of (mostly) white parents protesting at school boards and engaging in other hysterical theatrics to “protect” their children against “critical race theory” seem so familiar. In much the same way that the Tea Party morphed into Trumpism, many of these “protests” are actually sponsored or inspired by right-wing interest groups.

As part of that optics management and disinformation campaign, some of the parents and other “concerned citizens” who have been interviewed on Fox News (and no doubt elsewhere in the right-wing echo chamber) have turned out to be conservative activists.

These images of enraged white people, especially white women, also channel the “massive resistance” campaign across the Jim Crow South (and other parts of the country) against desegregation and other goals of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

When viewed in the larger context of right-wing culture-war battles, the white right’s attacks on “critical race theory” are nothing new. Today’s moral panic about “critical race theory” is part of a decades-long attack on America’s educational system (and especially the humanities, social sciences and other liberal arts disciplines), where the right’s long-term goal is to ensure that America’s educational system produces human drones who are incapable of critical thinking and eagerly willing to submit to power rather than resist it.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch focuses on Florida as a way of locating the white right’s attacks on “critical race theory” in a broader context:

The Republicans who currently run America’s fourth-largest state — led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 White House front-runner — had a different idea about the notorious “Red Scare” of the 1950s. They want to bring it back.

Last week, DeSantis signed the latest in a series of measures aimed at chilling political conversation on college campuses and crimping what teachers in Florida’s classrooms can say about racism or other troubling aspects of America’s past. The new law mandates that Florida’s public universities conduct an annual survey of students’ views on “viewpoint diversity” — with the governor suggesting that campuses not open to right-wing ideas (like his own) could lose government funding. DeSantis said colleges that appear to be what he called “hotbeds of stale ideology” are “not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

The new law came just days after the Florida Board of Education — at the urging of DeSantis, who appointed most of its members and appeared before the panel to urge teachers to stop “trying to indoctrinate [students] with ideology” — moved to ban the teaching of what it called “critical race theory.” Educators say the ban will make them fearful of suffering consequences for any teaching around America’s historic racism.

As Bunch observes, these attacks on academic freedom resemble “a replay of a different grim moment in the history of what the late Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ when Sen. Joe McCarthy claimed that Communists had infiltrated the nation’s classrooms. … One of the most fearsome crusades occurred in Florida.” Scholar Robert Dahlgren, who studied Florida’s 1950s battle over academic freedom, told Bunch he sees “eerie similarities” and “worries that more extreme measures like loyalty oaths for teachers and professors could come in the near future.”

When the white right’s campaign against “critical race theory” is presented in a full proper context, it is shown to be one more front in a larger war to overthrow multiracial democracy and replace it with a fascist racial authoritarian state.

At his website, political commentator Umair Haque also warns that George Orwell would have been impressed with how Republicans and the larger white right in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are “taking doublespeak to a whole new level” in their attacks on “critical race theory”:

On the face of it, Pennsylvania’s bill doesn’t look too bad. It makes it prohibited to “each, advocate or encourage the adoption of racist and sexist concepts” at schools and universities. It’s even forbidden for students to “adopt or express racist and sexist concepts.” Good news, right? Wrong. When you understand that this bill is drafted by American ultra-conservatives, you might get the suspicion something is very wrong here.

Their definition of “sexist and racist” concepts isn’t … anyone sane’s. They mean things that are “anti-white” and “anti-men.” For example, something like “America was a racist country during the Jim Crow era” Is now a “racist concept.” What the? Or something like: “America was the world’s largest apartheid state until 1971.” Or even: “American Blacks suffered history’s longest genocide, which is what slavery was.” Even saying “men unconsciously perpetuate patriarchy” is now considered a “sexist concept.” They’re literally trying to cleanse history of all its follies, sins, and errors — by flipping the meanings of everyday terms on their heads. By preventing schools from teaching it. How Orwellian is that?

On his TV show “The 700 Club,” white right-wing Christian evangelist Pat Robertson recently let slip a fundamental truth about these attacks on “critical race theory.”

Last week, Robertson told his viewers that “people of color have been oppressed by the white people and that white people begin to be racist by the time they’re two or three months old, and therefore the people of color have to rise up and overtake their oppressors and then — having gotten the ‘whip handle,’ if I can use that term — then to instruct their white neighbors how to behave. Now that’s critical race theory.”

Such claims are absurd: Black Americans as a group, from the era of white on black chattel slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow and then the civil rights movement, have never sought revenge against white people and/or White America.

Public opinion polls and other research, however, confirm Robertson’s inference that many white Americans fear Black and brown people’s “revenge.” To wit: a new poll by Fox News shows that a majority of Republicans are so delusional as to actually believe that Black and brown people have society-wide advantages over white people.

White fear-mongering, whether by Pat Robertson, Tucker Carlson or other right-wing provocateurs, is a form of psychological projection. James Baldwin said in 1984 that “the real terror that engulfs the white world now is a visceral terror. … It’s the terror of being described by those they have been describing for so long.”

Almost four decades later, Baldwin’s truth-telling still illuminates the perilous ways of Whiteness as it interacts with the global color line. Ultimately, the white right’s bogeyman attacks on “critical race theory” are part of an old American story. Almost inevitably, white rage and racial paranoia will result in violence against Black and brown people, as well as against white people of conscience who are struggling to defend America’s multiracial democracy. It is not a question of whether such violence will take place, only when.

My very brief night on the town: A movie screening with Seb Gorka and Devin Nunes

Donning a new golden-hued necktie I recently snagged from the clearance section of a local Nordstrom Rack store, I rolled up on Wednesday evening for a pro-Trump movie screening in northern Virginia, prepared to enjoy the night on the town. There was an open bar (unfortunately, I don’t drink), an incoherent film and a speech from “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka — all things I was looking forward to soaking in.

The event, a screening of the film, “The Plot Against the President,” has been heavily hyped in right-wing circles. The movie allegedly has the goods to enlighten the masses about a “deep state” plot to take down former President Donald Trump. If you think the title makes it sound like a MAGAworld action movie, you would be wrong. It’s more a slow-paced documentary featuring numerous far-right characters — including a Pizzagate hoaxer — opining on subjects they know little about.

Nevertheless, I was pumped. Ready to mingle with TrumpWorld royalty, I purchased my ticket to the screening, was given a red wristband, and immediately spotted several of the minor MAGA celebrities characters one would expect. Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, neo-Nazi collaborator and former One America News host was there. So were Judicial Watch founder Tom Fitton, right-wing movie producer Amanda Milius and various others.

But when I made eye contact with Gorka, who clearly recognized me, I knew the sands of time were running down for me at this glorious event. Not long after that, I was approached by Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” organizer Daniel Bostic, a producer of “The Plot Against the President,” who claimed I had written “false” things about him in my work for a previous publication; I heard him out and shook his hand. After that conversation, Bostic began whispering to security, clearly attempting to get me booted. It took about three minutes for me to be ejected from the venue, which involved overzealous security guards radiating wannabe-cop energy and getting right up into my grill. Without identifying himself, one large individual barked, “Walk down here with me!” Then he placed his hands on me to escort me to the door, loudly ordering, “Leave, leave!” I can assure you I was not resisting.

Unfortunately, I was not able to chat with Gorka, who was briefly a member of the Trump administration and now claims to have been spied on by the NSA, perhaps in an effort to keep up with Tucker Carlson. Gorka showed up by Uber rather than driving his EcoBoost Mustang convertible, which it’s possible he still doesn’t know how to park legally.

Rep. Devin Nunes of California, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a darling of TrumpWorld, was also on the speaker’s list, but I saw no sign of him during Salon’s brief tenure at the movie theater.

Gorka was a fan favorite at the event! pic.twitter.com/rQdb4weRna

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) June 30, 2021

As the night went on, Gorka, tweeting from behind a Twitter block, launched a series of angry tweets attempting to get me fired from Slate, a publication I do not work for and never have. But his attempt to render me unemployed didn’t dampen my delightful evening. I stumbled into free samples of fresh-squeezed orange juice at a nearby grocery store. It was delicious and free!

Here’s the trailer for the movie, if you’re into that sort of thing:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story reported that former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam had attended the movie screening. Kassam has informed Salon he was not present, and the story has been corrected.

The empire strikes back: Mainstream Dems try to crush the left in Buffalo and Cleveland

The two biggest cities on the shores of Lake Erie are now centers of political upheaval. For decades, Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered from widespread poverty and despair in the midst of urban decay. Today, the second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.

For Buffalo’s entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent Byron Brown, who has a deplorable track record. “I am a coalition builder,” Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city’s power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.

“This is organizing,” Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. “When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo — this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I’m talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”

To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she came out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like food access, pandemic recovery, education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo’s levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Brown had looked like such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican even bothered to run, so Walton’s name will be the only one on the November ballot.

Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from real estate developer Carl Paladino — whose estimated net worth is around $150 million —a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton’s victory incensed Paladino, who has made it clear that he vastly preferred the Black incumbent to the Black challenger. “I will do everything I can to destroy [Walton’s] candidacy,” Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.

In tacit alliance with Paladino — while keeping the affluent Republican businessman at arm’s-length — Brown announced on Monday evening that he plans to mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor’s office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements “the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it’s been in over 25 years.” Then he began scare-mongering.

“I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community,” Brown said. “People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor’s office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don’t want an unqualified, inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand.”

Such attacks, with their echoes of Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, are likely to be at the core of Brown’s strategy for winning the general election. But he’ll have to do it in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, “to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall.” It added: “Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city’s future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on Nov. 2.”

Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.

On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, went out of his way to make clear that he doesn’t want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner’s main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.

Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos in an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn’s self-conception but nothing much about Turner. “What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” he said. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”

In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked hard to block. “Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary,” the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.

The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls “the commodification of health care” is a major reason.

In mid-June, Turner “launched her television spot entitled ‘Worry,’ in which she talks about how her family’s struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All,” the Daily Poster reported. “The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner’s primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray — a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All.”

Whether Clyburn’s endorsement will have a significant impact on Cleveland voters is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and House Democrats’ chief deputy whip, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — who, like Turner, was a national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign — is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: “They’re afraid of a politician that can’t be bought.”

‘Bombshell’ lobbyist video reveals Exxon’s secret campaign to water down U.S. climate legislation

While ExxonMobil’s decades of sowing public doubt about climate science and the impact of fossil fuels have provoked various lawsuits, secretly recorded videos released Wednesday expose how the company continues to fight against U.S. efforts to tackle the climate emergency.

Published by Unearthed, Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative journalism arm, and the British Channel 4 News, the footage of ExxonMobil lobbyists sparked new calls for congressional action to hold the oil and gas giant accountable.

The videos, obtained by Unearthed reporters posing as recruitment consultants, feature Keith McCoy, a senior director in ExxonMobil’s Washington, D.C. government affairs team, and Dan Easley, who was a senior director for federal relations until leaving the company for a clean technologies firm earlier this year.

“In the midst of a deadly heatwave, the Exxon Tapes show how Exxon’s climate lies have spanned from outright denial to puppeteering our government and economy,” said Lindsay Meiman, 350.org’s U.S. communications manager. “Exxon knew and lied about the climate crisis for decades, and our communities are bearing the costs.”

“As the window for action quickly closes, this footage proves what we’ve known all along—Exxon continues to deliberately block necessary climate action to skirt accountability,” Meiman added. “We demand Congress immediately investigate Exxon and fossil fuel companies’ climate crimes, and make polluters pay for their destruction.”

We can no longer allow Exxon, or any other companies, to prevent our collective action on the climate crisis.

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) June 30, 2021

McCoy said on the Zoom call, secretly recorded in May, that ExxonMobil cast doubt on the scientific consensus about the climate crisis and targeted centrist lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—”I talk to his office every week,” the lobbyist claimed—to scale back President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package.

“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not,” he said. “Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments; we were looking out for our shareholders.”

McCoy also said that “we’re playing defense, because President Biden is talking about this big infrastructure package and he’s going to pay for it by increasing corporate taxes. So it’s a delicate balance we’re asking for help with taxes over here [lobbying for subsidies for a carbon capture project] and we’re saying, don’t increase our taxes over here.”

He further suggested that ExxonMobil’s public support for a carbon tax is just an “effective advocacy tool,” saying: “Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that, but it gives us a talking point that we can say, well what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax.”

Easley, who was ExxonMobil’s chief White House lobbyist when former President Donald Trump was in office, “laughed when asked by an undercover reporter if the company had achieved many big policy wins under Trump, before outlining victories on fossil fuel permitting and the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade agreement,” Unearthed reported.

“You should Google ‘ExxonMobil announcement’ and ‘Donald Trump,'” Easley said. “So he live-Facebooked from the West Wing our big drill in the Gulf project, he mentioned us in two States of the Union, we were able to get investor state dispute settlement protection in NAFTA, we were able to rationalize the permit environment and you know, get ton of permits out.”

“The wins are such that it would be difficult… to categorize them all,” Easley added. “I mean, tax has to be the biggest one right, the reduction of the corporate rate was, you know, it was probably worth billions to Exxon, so yeah there were a lot of wins.”

In a statement, ExxonMobil chairman and chief executive officer Darren Woods doubled down on past climate pledges and tried to distance the company from the footage:

Comments made by the individuals in no way represent the company’s position on a variety of issues, including climate policy and our firm commitment that carbon pricing is important to addressing climate change. The individuals interviewed were never involved in developing the company’s policy positions on the issues discussed.

We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials. 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.

However, climate experts and advocates pointed to the footage as confirmation of findings from previous investigations into the company.

Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran, who has published multiple scientific papers on the company’s efforts to mislead the public, said the videos show that “ExxonMobil has been a bad-faith actor on climate change for 30 years, and it still is.”

3/n: All told, this investigation corroborates the findings of our academic research and the suspicions of climate advocates: ExxonMobil has been a bad-faith actor on climate change for 30 years, and it still is. The Exxon tiger hasn't changed its stripes.

— Geoffrey Supran (@GeoffreySupran) June 30, 2021

Since 2017, 26 U.S. state and local governments have filed lawsuits against major fossil fuel companies for deceiving the public about their products’ role in the climate emergency, according to the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI).

CCI executive director Richard Wiles said Wednesday that “this bombshell recording confirms yet again that ExxonMobil simply cannot be trusted by policymakers.”

“They lie about climate science and their products’ role in the climate crisis,” Wiles continued. “They lie about their commitment to climate solutions. And they lie to protect their bottom line, with no regard for the catastrophic damage their products continue to cause to our planet and everyone on it.”

“It’s time for members of Congress to stop doing the bidding of oil and gas lobbyists and executives who have no interest in solving the climate crisis,” he added, “and instead hold them accountable.”

I am near speechless. An Exxon official admitting, on camera, how the company works to prevent effective climate action by using third party “whipping boys” so no one knows it’s them.

These recordings should be played on every TV station in the world. https://t.co/Ag0dKyuz6M

— Emily Atkin (@emorwee) June 30, 2021

Amid protests by climate advocates in Washington, D.C. this week, Democratic leaders are working out the details of a reconciliation package to pass alongside the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden recently announced with centrist in Congress.

In his response to the ExxonMobil videos, Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn focused on federal infrastructure legislation.

“If you’d been wondering who was to blame for putting Biden’s climate agenda on life support, we now know: ExxonMobil,” Henn said. “The recordings help clarify the battle lines for the next round of infrastructure negotiations: This is going to be a showdown between Exxon and the American people.”

According to Henn, “The question for President Biden and members of Congress is: whose side are you on?”

“It isn’t a coincidence that many of Exxon’s ‘key senators’ are the ones that supported the bipartisan infrastructure package, instead of an actual plan to tackle the climate crisis,” he added. “They’re doing exactly what Exxon asked: Protect the company’s profits at all costs.”

“President Biden needs to show us he’s not Exxon’s puppet,” Henn concluded, “by putting climate back at the heart of his agenda.”

Unearthed, meanwhile, promised that in the coming days, its journalists will also reveal “claims that Exxon covertly fought to prevent a ban on toxic chemicals” and “how Exxon is using its playbook on climate change to head-off regulations on plastic.”

10 new HBO Max shows and movies to watch in July 2021

A lot of exciting new content is headed to HBO Max! We share the top 10 new HBO Max shows and movies not to miss in July 2021.

At Hidden Remote, we always praise the variety of content available at Netflix. But, as much as we love the streaming titan, we must admit that HBO Max has been stepping up its game lately! While the pandemic hurt the entertainment business, streaming services took the saying “work smarter, not harder” and made things work.

HBO Max, Apple TV+, Disney+, and all other streaming services adjusted to the times and planned upcoming releases accordingly, and wow has it been working well for them all!

Netflix continues to be the variety content champ, but HBO Max is where the big feature movies are, and the month of July 2021 has some amazing movies and shows in store for subscribers.

From a movie that’ll have us feeling nostalgic to an exciting reboot fans have long been anticipating, we’ve narrowed down the best HBO Max shows and movies to watch. Let’s get right to it.

HBO Max shows and movies to stream at home

“No Sudden Move,” July 1
“Tom and Jerry in New York,” July 1
“Gossip Girl,” July 8
“The White Lotus,” July 11
“Space Jam: A New Legacy,” July 16
“100 Foot Wave,” July 18
“Through Our Eyes,” July 22
“FBOY Island,” no premiere date revealed
“The Immortal,” no premiere date revealed
“Romeo Santos: King of Bachata,” no premiere date revealed

“Space Jam: A New Legacy” is one of the movies fans have been waiting for after several delays. The movie sees basketball champion and icon LeBron James go on an epic adventure with Bugs Bunny and the Tune Squad.

I’m also looking forward to watching “No Sudden Move,” which follows a group of small-time criminals hired to steal what they are made to believe is a simple document, but things go horribly wrong.

Finally, I know the “Gossip Girl” is at the top of many of your lists! What will you be watching?

Quentin Tarantino doubles down on Bruce Lee shade and uses foul language to tell critics off

It’s been two years, but occasional auteur Quentin Tarantino is still having to answer for how he depicted Bruce Lee in his film “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” and his incendiary comments characterizing the martial arts legend as arrogant. Despite backlash, Tarantino is sticking to his guns.

“I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her f**king father, I get that. But anybody else [can] go suck a d**k,” Tarantino said in a new interview on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Set in Hollywood 1969, the scene in question pits stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) against with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) on the set of “The Green Hornet” and portrays the martial artist as disrespectful and even mocking stuntmen.

Lee’s daughter, Shannon who is an executive producer on the martial arts series “Warrior,” originally spoke out against Tarantino, claiming the scene wrongfully portrayed her father as an “arrogant a**hole full of hot air.” At the time, Dan Inosanto, who studied under Lee, agreed that the film Bruce Lee’s actions were completely out of character for his real-life mentor.

Despite the support from those with personal ties to Lee, Tarantino stood by his words citing secondary sources like books and biographies that back up the film’s sentiment.

“Stuntmen hated Bruce on ‘The Green Hornet.’ It’s in Matthew Polly’s book . . . Bruce had nothing but disrespect for American stuntmen and was always hitting them. He was always tagging them with his feet and his fists and it got to the point where they refused to work with him,” Tarantino continued.

Fans of Bruce Lee also criticized how the fight in “Once Upon a Time” goes down. Although Bruce gets in a punch, Cliff throws Bruce onto a car, and the fight ends in a draw. Tarantino was criticized for minimizing Lee’s physical abilities.

Initially the director dodged answering who would ultimately win in such a fight if Cliff were actually real. But on the podcast he finally voted in favor of his fictional stuntman.

“He fought in World War II . . . if Cliff fought Bruce Lee in a Madison Square Garden martial arts competition, Cliff wouldn’t stand a chance,” Tarantino said.”But as a killer who killed men in a jungle, he’d kill him.”

DHS warns of right-wing violence fueled by Trump’s August reinstatement delusions

The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning to Congress on Wednesday over potential right-wing violence fueled by former President Trump’s widely panned theory that he will be reinstated as president next month.

The warning came during a House Committee on Homeland Security briefing, where John Cohen, a top counterterrorism official, said the department is probing a sea of online chatter from various communities of ideological extremists.

Early last month, sources close to the former president told the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” While the theory is entirely bereft of any legal or historical legitimacy, many interpreted it as an implicit call to arms for Trump’s loyal fan base to stage a violent assault once more.

During the session, Cohen addressed rising crime throughout the U.S. over the last year, which experts have attributed to a recent spike in gun violence.

One senior official noted to CNN that there has also been a spike in violent extremism, which he speculated could be tied to the recent suspension of longstanding coronavirus restrictions and stay-at-home orders.

“You’re going to have more people out,” he explained. “You’re going to have more people in public places. And you increase the opportunities for individuals or groups of individuals who are interested in conducting attacks.”

An FBI report from May found that there were 32 deaths in the U.S. stemming from domestic terror in 2019, a record high since 1980. Most of these deaths were carried out by white supremacists.

A DHS spokesperson told Politico that the department is “focused on the nexus between violence and extremist ideologies” and is working to “prevent acts of domestic terrorism inspired by disinformation, conspiracy theories and false narratives spread through social media and other online platforms.”

Earlier this month, a Morning Consult/POLITICO survey found that nearly a third of the former president’s base believes that Trump will be reinstated. One Trump supporter at a rally in Ohio even warned CNN viewers of a “civil war” if the former president is not ushered back into office.

A DHS National Terrorism Alert System (NTAS) Bulletin obtained by ABC News claimed that “in recent weeks, domestic violent extremists (DVEs) motivated by various violent ideologies have continued to advocate violence and plan attacks.

It continued: “As of 16 June, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist-white supremacists (RMVE-WSs) were sharing downloadable links to a publication discussing targeting mass gatherings, critical infrastructure and law enforcement officers.”

Intelligence officials are on especially high-alert with the Fourth of July weekend approaching, which will be flooded with mass gatherings. One senior law enforcement told ABC News that Independence Day – combined with rise in homicides and domestic terror – could create a “perfect storm” for violence.

Watch a cartoon Tig Notaro do stand-up in a trailer for new animated HBO special “Drawn”

Fresh from evading zombies in her action-movie debut in “Army of the Dead,” Tig Notaro is coming back to the screen by returning to her comedic roots — while taking on an entirely different form altogether.

On Thursday, HBO released a new trailer for “Tig Notaro: Drawn,” the comedian’s new stand-up comedy special that, as the title suggests, will be fully animated. Vignettes in the special range from Notaro herself dressed in a patterned cardigan holding a mic on stage in front of cartoon faces to the stories she tells that vividly fill in what our own minds would’ve drawn themselves.

“I’ve had my stand up animated over the years and different little pieces. It’s been really fun to see jokes and stories animated, and so I thought it would be cool to have a special,” Notaro said in an earlier interview with Salon. “I love animation and I’m neck-deep in the middle of animation in my day-to-day just because I have two four-year-olds that watch animation all the time.”

Notaro starkly contrasts these visuals with deeper content — like how she collapsed on stage at the end of her show due to internal bleeding. “Drawn” aims to give its audience the best of both worlds by animating such anecdotes and personal stories but also keeping the live aspect of what makes stand-up comedy so inviting — as the cartoon version of Notaro interacts with audience members and even the theater’s resident spider.

The special will also play around with various animation styles, such as the hand-drawn one seen in the trailer to CGI renderings, taking full advantage of the flexibility of Six Point Harness animation studio, which produced the Oscar-winning “Hair Love” and the Netflix foodie kids show “Waffles & Mochi.”

This latest special from Notaro will be her third — following the 2015 release of “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted” which garnered Notaro an Emmy nomination and “Tig Notaro: Happy To Be Here” in 2019. While fully written by Notaro, “Drawn” is also made in collaboration with fellow comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who executive produces, among others.

“Stand-up can be a very solitary art form, so combining it with a collaborative years-long creative effort was such a joyful experience,” said Notaro in a statement.

“Tig Notaro: Drawn” premieres on Saturday, July 24 at 10 p.m. on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max. Watch the trailer below: