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Fox News leans into Bill Cosby apologia in wake of surprise court ruling

Bill Cosby found an ally in Fox News Wednesday following a surprise court ruling which overturned the disgraced entertainer’s sexual assault conviction, with a number of hosts going to bat for Cosby across the network’s early evening hours.

Geraldo Rivera, who himself was accused of sexual assault by actress Bette Midler in 1991, kicked off the Cosby apologia by calling the original conviction “mob justice” and asking how Cosby would “get back the two years he has lost.” Rivera, who likened the case against Cosby to the beheading of aristocrats during the French Revolution, also has a long history of using his platform to downplay accusations of sexual harassment and assault against powerful men, first documented by Media Matters For America in a 2017 investigation.

“He paid—he paid big time. His career: destroyed. His reputation: ruined,” Rivera went on to say. “Bill Cosby did two years on a case that never should’ve been brought. That is the pound of flesh here.”

Following Rivera’s lead, “The Five” host Greg Gutfeld declared that Cosby “was railroaded,” while just a few minutes later joking about Cosby’s reported proclivity for drugging the drinks of women in order to assault them.

“His team has been working around the clock, which — He should buy them drinks, but they shouldn’t drink it,” Gutfeld said, casting a sly look at co-host Jesse Watters, who met the comment with a laugh. 

Cosby was set free Wednesday afternoon after serving just under three years of his sentence. He was convicted of three counts of sexual assault in 2018, though the ruling was effectively nullified Wednesday after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that an agreement he made with a previous prosecutor should have prevented the original charges from being brought in the first place.

The court also wrote that the judge in Cosby’s trial tainted the jury by allowing the testimony of five other accusers, which a lower appeals court previously found was an appropriate move to establish a pattern of behavior. 

It finally happened: Trump Organization reportedly indicted by Manhattan grand jury

The Trump Organization and its longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg, were indicted Wednesday by a grand jury in Manhattan, according to various reports.

The indictments themselves will remain sealed until Thursday afternoon, according to the New York Times, citing sources familiar with the proceedings. The charges themselves have not been specified, though investigators have reportedly been looking into unpaid taxes on fringe benefits the Trump family business handed out to employees, including Weisselberg.

The Washington Post also reported that former President Donald Trump himself is not expected to be charged this week, nor is anyone else in the Trump family or organization. However, the escalation is sure to raise the pressure on Weisselberg, who prosecutors have long hoped will offer testimony against Trump in exchange for leniency in his own case. He has worked with Trump for nearly 40 years, and is widely considered to be the most important person within the Trump organization who is not related to the ex-president.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, along with New York Attorney General Letitia James, has been building a sweeping investigation into Trump’s business dealings for nearly a year, and seems to have recently settled on Weisselberg as a target. 

Investigators with both departments have reportedly spoken with Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg, about the lavish, allegedly tax-free benefits he received while working for the Trump family — including several apartments, luxury cars and private-school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren, according to the Times.

Wednesday’s apparent indictment would represent the first criminal case ever brought against the Trump Organization — though the former president’s business empire has a history of settling civil suits, including one which resulted in a $25 million payment to end a case brought against Trump University over students who claimed to be victims of fraud. 

Bro, say can you see? “America: The Motion Picture” shows we’re not just dumb, we’re drawn that way

None of the events depicted in Netflix’s newly released “America: The Motion Picture” are accurate depictions of any concrete version reality we know. OK? For the love of all that is pure and good, please know this.

A few years ago I would have taken it for granted this would be obvious to everyone. We’re talking about a cartoon movie that depicts Abraham Lincoln‘s funeral as having been attended by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marilyn Monroe, and has George Washington consulting I.M. Pei on how the Lincoln Memorial should look. The level of revisionism at work here isn’t merely absurd, it’s insane.

However, this movie arrives less than two weeks after Congress and President Biden officially made Juneteenth a holiday while, at the state level, conservatives are campaigning to prevent schools from teaching the children the truth about how and why Juneteenth became a holiday.

Still think that I’m taking this all too seriously? Allow me to remind you about Reagan Escudé, student.

Name not ringing a bell? This Shreveport, Louisiana, native and bright beacon of our future spoke at a Trump rally last year and hailed Aunt Jemima, fictional character and racist breakfast mascot, as “the picture of the American dream. She was a freed slave who went on to be the face of the pancake syrup that we love and we have in our pantries today.”

What I’m saying is that a huge swath of this nation really is that dumb, and not only that, dedicated to preserving their ignorance and passing that ignorance down to their children.

Those are precisely the sort of stone-cold imbeciles who would rather believe the most far-fetched nonsense about our history than study and learn the truth of it. Ergo, an additional burden falls to the rest of us to explain that this is not some kind of “Schoolhouse Rock” equivalent or a Cliff’s Notes version of the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And that George Washington never dual-wielded chainsaws, and wasn’t alive at the same time as Thomas Edison, who never invented gloves that shoot lightning.

Perhaps you find all this to be a bit mean-spirited, but please understand that this is precisely the audience to which director Matt Thompson (“Frisky Dingo,” “Archer”) and screenwriter David Callaham are speaking. Rarely have I seen a movie so confident that its viewers not only revel in American benightedness but are eager to identify with it.

That makes “America: The Motion Picture” not only a waste of time but an insult to ignoramuses.  

Even among those who get the joke, to use that term quite liberally, it barely qualifies as a contender for an eighth of anyone’s attention over July 4th weekend. And as an avid fan of some of Thompson’s other work, this is most disappointing.

The intent itself is creative, and the underlying meta-commentary is clever and somewhat sobering. The movie imagines the events leading up to the Revolutionary War and a handful of historical figures as action heroes playing through versions of popcorn flicks profoundly embedded into American identity.

In its vision George Washington (Channing Tatum) and Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte) are best friends, so when Washington witnesses Lincoln’s assassination at the hands of Benedict Arnold (Andy Samberg), he embarks on a vengeance crusade – not just for himself, but for what will soon be known as America.

So he assembles an inclusionary super-squad consisting of racist, keg-chugging frat bro Samuel Adams (Jason Mantzoukas); idiot savant horseman Paul Revere (Bobby Moynihan); Thomas Edison – who dude, bro, get this, is, like a girl and stuff (Olivia Munn)? He also lures Geronimo (Raoul Max Trujillo) along for the ride as well as a character officially known as Blacksmith for stunningly lowbrow reasons (and voiced by Killer Mike) but is recognizable as some version of the legendary John Henry. 

“America: The Motion Picture” isn’t entirely bereft of cleverness. Someone shrewder could have made better use of its marriage of history and blockbuster cinema to comment on our addiction to violent, explosive versions of American mythmaking. They may have more effectively parodied the tendency of the same folks who don’t understand that the Gettysburg Address was not an actual address to seek out deeper philosophical meaning in diversionary trifles like “The Transporter” or any of the “Fast and Furious” movies.

Instead it’s playing to rubes given to happily pointing and yelling, “OMG . . . they’re, like, joking on ‘Star Wars’ right there!” Which is fine and admittedly fun if your can manage to switch off your innate critical thinking skills. Do that, and you may enjoy a few legitimately hysterical gags within this feature.

Nevertheless, after a point the sheer length of this disaster defeats whatever joy you might wring from it. “America: The Motion Picture” stretches a gag that’s worth 45 minutes, tops, to a spirit-murdering hour and 38 minutes. Props to Matt Thompson for showing the world that some antics aren’t worth the marathon treatment when a 100-yard dash will do.

Stupid comedies have their place, understand. I have a soft spot for some real mind-rotters, all of which help me turn off my brain and just yuk it up for a while. Everybody needs that. But “America: The Motion Picture” never achieves that level of necessity or sustains whatever glimmers of substance poking through because it meets the intended targets of its joke at their level. If this were a smarter nation maybe that would be enough to make me laugh – but we’re not, and that’s simply depressing.

“America: The Motion Picture” is now streaming on Netflix.

Want impossibly crisp chicken parmesan? Try this simple sheet pan layering trick

In the fourth episode of “Hacks,” one of my favorite shows of the year, the final moments center on an exchange between Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance and her assistant Ava (Hannah Einbender) about a room service order. 

“I think they may be overcharging you for room service,” Deborah says. “They have you ordering 3 chicken parms in one night? I think they made a mistake — I don’t like being overcharged”

“Three chicken parms? In one night?” Ava responds. “That’s crazy … but I did order them.”

“What, were you entertaining?” Deborah exclaims incredulously. 

“No, it was just me,” Ava said. “But they’re medium-size, though, and I eat the leftovers for breakfast, so you’re actually saving money”

This exchange truly encapsulates my ethos and adoration for chicken parmigiana. Chicken parm is my ultimate comfort food. No frilly intros here — that’s it. I find “comfort food” to be a silly concept because it varies so much and is so dependent on so much: culture, childhood nostalgia, location, food sensitivities and allergies, sociopolitical and economic status, ethics. But, speaking for me and me alone, chicken parmigiana epitomizes the entire notion. 

The Italian-American “red sauce joint” has many a chicken dish in their oeuvre, but chicken parm is clearly the apex and confluence of weeknight meal, red sauce joint staple and comfort food. In the seventeen or so years that I’ve been cooking, I don’t think there is a single dish I’ve made as often as chicken parm. 

The renditions I made as a 16-year-old took me half the day and were a true exertion of energy, but fast forward a little over a decade and I’m now whipping up the dish in under an hour without breaking a sweat. Pardon the cliche, but I could truly cook chicken parm with a blindfold on at this point. The aroma, the taste, the muscle memory — it’s all coalesced into something that is a deeply satisfying food experience, from the start of cooking to the last bite of chicken. 

Historically, the tale goes as such: a slightly lighter version of chicken parm originated with melanzane alla parmigiana — otherwise known as eggplant parm — in southern Italy.  After many Italians immigrated to the US, protein was more abundant, and the ingredient of choice switched from eggplant to chicken. By the mid-1950s, the Italian-American restaurant had begun to proliferate the East Coast, and with it, the chicken parm began to spread in ubiquity. 

In 1962, the New York Times shared a chicken parm recipe and the rest is history.

My chicken parm is reliable, dependant and a constant. I know that I can bread chicken, I know that I can make sauce, I know that I can top chicken and sauce with copious heaps of cheese with reckless abandon. And I know that it’ll taste delicious. 

Making chicken parm is also inherently tangible — the entire breading process, the frying, dousing in cheese. The contrasts of texture is what always gets me: moist chicken, thinly sliced or pounded, shatteringly crisp, pan-fried or deep-fried coating, piquant marinara, and heaps and heaps of cheese. There is no equal. 

There is, of course, something inherently contradictory within chicken parm — why take the time to render a perfectly crispy piece of pan-fried or deep-fried chicken, just to then slather it with an explicit amount of sauce and cheese, rendering it soggy and devaluing all of the work you put in to ensure its crispness? 

In order to counteract this, you just need to change up your typical technique a little bit. Instead of topping the crispy cutlets with sauce and cheese before going into the oven, instead layer the sheet tray with sauce and cheese and place the chicken atop it. This ensures the chicken stays crisp while you still get a bite of cheesy-saucy goodness. 

I take my chicken parm to the edge of glory (a.k.a burning). I like the cheese to get as bubbly and crisped and browned as possible, crisping the contents of the sheet tray in both the oven and broiler until the dish is perfectly bronzed. Frankly, it’s not the most balanced dish. The only acidic component is the tomato — everything else is pretty laden — but no one is indulging in chicken parm for its nutritional benefits, right? 

My ultimate chicken parm. dinner is always rounded out by a glass of ice cold Mountain Dew (I’m sorry) and a side of either penne, rigatoni or spaghetti. My favorite part of chicken parm, frankly, is not the chicken at all — I heap so much cheese on my cutlets when making chicken parm that the cheese essentially melts across the entire surface of the sheet tray, bubbling and crisping in the heat until the entire tray is “parmed.” 

As it cools, I love to eat the shards of melted cheese. Chef’s treat!

***

Recipe: Simple Marinara
Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

  • Extra virgin olive oil
  • ½ large onion or 1 small onion, finely chopped
  • 3 to 4 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 2 (28-ounce) boxes crushed tomatoes, ideally San Marzano
  • ¼ cup water, wine, or stock (aim for unsalted)
  • Rind of Parmigiano-Reggiano
  • Kosher salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper, optional
  • Herbs of choice (I generally go herb-less, but some are adamant about a basil or parsley inclusion)
  • Kosher salt

1. Heat olive oil in a medium-sized pot over medium heat. 

2. Add onion and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, until translucent. 

3. Add garlic cloves, toast for 30 seconds, and then add tomato paste. 

4. Stir and cook until mixture becomes brick-like in color and the tomato paste begin to caramelize. 

5. Add crushed tomatoes, water, wine, or stock, and rind. Salt generously, add pepper if using, and be sure to taste it. It is so important to taste red sauce for seasoning. 

6. If using herbs, add just before serving. Stir well.

[Author’s note: I’m vehemently anti-adding sugar to tomato-based sauces, but I will note that I typically use boxed, crushed tomatoes — I try to steer clear of cans — so if you’re using legitimate off-the-vine tomatoes, the acidity can certainly vary. I find sweet tomato sauces to be the culinary equivalent of stepping in a puddle with socks on, but if you’re really into sweet sauces, go wild.]

***

Recipe: Chicken Parmigiano
Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts (either sliced in half or purchased ‘thinly sliced’)
  • 1 cup of Simple Marinara 
  • Kosher salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • ½ cup Panko
  • ½ cup regular bread crumbs
  • 8-ounce block Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated on microplane, divided; plus more to taste
  • 1 ½ teaspoons onion powder
  • 1 ½ teaspoons garlic powder
  • 3 eggs, whisked with 1 ½ tablespoons milk, half-and-half, or water
  • ½ cup AP flour
  • ¾ cup neutral oil (canola, vegetable, grapeseed, etc.)
  • Fresh mozzarella
  • 1 package shredded mozzarella
  • Additional cheeses, if using (fontina, asiago, “Italian blend,” etc.)
  • Handful of chopped parsley
  • 3 to 4 pats of unsalted butter

1. If you’ve purchased thinly sliced chicken, ignore this step. If you haven’t, carefully slice chicken in half horizontally. Season both sides generously with salt and pepper.

2. Set up your SBP (standard breading procedure). In a shallow bowl, mix flour with salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, and some grated Parm. In another shallow bowl, place egg mixture. In a third bowl, toss both breadcrumbs, Parmigiano, onion and garlic powder, salt, and pepper. 

3. Heat oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan or saucepan over medium heat.

4. Dredge chicken cutlet in flour, turning to coat, then move to egg mixture, turn to coat and let excess drip off back into bowl, and then transfer to breadcrumb mixture. Turn to coat and use fork, tongs or hands to slightly “pack” breading onto chicken. Repeat with the rest of the chicken.

5. Add chicken to pan, only a few pieces at a time so as to not overcrowd, and cook, turning as few times as possible, until deeply, deeply browned and crisp. Transfer to a wire-rimmed rack or paper towel-covered plate and sprinkle with flaky salt. Repeat with remaining chicken cutlets.

6. On a large sheet tray, spread tomato sauce “wall-to-wall.” Top with cheeses (both mozzarellas and Parm), spreading out into one “layer.” Top with crispy chicken and — if you’d like — more cheese. 

7. Sprinkle parsley over top and dot cutlets with small pats of butter to ensure thorough, deep browning. Place in the oven, cook until cheese has melted and then transfer to broiler until tops of chicken are crisped and bronzed.

[Author’s note: swapping out marinara for vodka or butter chicken sauce is *chef’s kiss*]

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

 

Historians rank Trump near bottom of U.S. presidents, Obama rises into top 10

Former President Donald Trump was ranked near the bottom of a new list by historians surveyed on who they believe the best U.S. presidents are, and received the lowest leadership grades of any commander-in-chief over the past 150 years.

It was Trump’s first appearance on C-SPAN’s Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, with the one-term president ranked 41st out of America’s 45 former executives.

Rated by a group of over 140 historians, the survey ranks former U.S. presidents on 10 different leadership qualities, such as “public persuasion,” “international relations” and “crisis leadership.” Since 2000, C-SPAN has taken the survey after every change in White House administration.

On Wednesday, C-SPAN tweeted that the 2021 survey saw a 50 percent increase in the number of historians participating, and a big jump in the diversity of respondents — as defined by demographic information such as race, gender, age and philosophy. 

The results of this year’s survey indicate the divergence between Trump’s standing among academics and how his followers have viewed his presidency — historians hold him in the lowest regard of any president since Reconstruction, yet he continues to hold an iron grip on leadership of the GOP and remains a frontrunner for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.

He is also the only president ever to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives.

The historians rated Trump as the worst president in history on two of 10 leadership qualities: “moral authority” and “administrative skills.” His strongest grade is for “public persuasion,” in which he was ranked No. 32.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, rose into the top 10, climbing from No. 12 in C-Span’s 2017 survey.

In individual leadership categories, Obama was ranked in the top 10 overall for “moral authority” and “economic management,” and ranked third in history for “pursued equal justice for all,” behind only Lincoln and Johnson.

Other modern presidents with notable standings include Ronald Reagan, who ranked No. 9; Bill Clinton at No. 19; George H.W. Bush at No. 21 and George W. Bush at No. 29.

The only president forced to resign, Richard Nixon, is rated No. 31— ten spots above Trump.

Kristi Noem raises ethical concerns with privately bankrolled National Guard border deployment

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that she will deploy up to 50 National Guard troops to the Mexico-U.S. border – a mission not funded by South Dakota or the federal government but a billionaire GOP megadonor with a staunch commitment to “protect America.”

“The Biden Administration has failed in the most basic duty of the federal government: keeping the American people safe,”Noem, a Republican, said. “The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide.

“We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Biden’s Administration seems unable or unwilling to solve. My message to Texas is this: help is on the way.”

The deployment, which will reportedly last between 30 and 60 days, is currently being bankrolled by Willis Johnson, the founder and chairman of Copart Inc., a global corporation that facilitates vehicle auction and remarketing services.  

Johnson, who hails not from South Dakota but Tennessee, told Politico that he’s “trying to help out the governor and help America.” 

In another interview, The Capital Journal asked Johnson whether he thought it was appropriate for a private donation to sponsor military action. “This is America, buddy. I fought in Vietnam,” he responded. “I don’t think this is a, this is America. It’s not private. You sound real negative. I don’t want to talk to you, bye.”

The megadonor’s philanthropic organization, the Willis and Reba Johnson’s Foundation, has in the past donated to a number of churches and the National Rifle Association, according to 2018 tax filings uncovered by The Washinton Post. The Daily Beast also found that the foundation has also given money to Alpha Pregnancy Center, which advises women against having abortions. Individually, Johnson has donated to the campaigns of various Republicans, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, and former president Donald Trump. 

Though the billionaire told The Post that 100% of the investment will go to Noem’s border mission, it remains unclear precisely how large the donation was. 

Noem’s move has sounded alarms amongst military ethics and policy experts not only because it circumvents established levers of state power, but because the South Dakota governor is also on the shortlist of potential GOP presidential candidates in 2024.

Asked whether the governor has the legal authority to launch a privately-funded national security mission of this nature, Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told Politico: “The Governor has authority under SDCL 5-24-12 to accept a donation if she determines doing so is in the best interest of the State. The Governor has additional authority to accept donated funds for emergency management under SDCL 34-48A-36.” The Army Times noted that the privately bankrolled mission appears to be the first of its kind in American history.

Currently the U.S. has stationed roughly 3,600 National Guard troops along the southern border. The troops were originally sent there as part of a Trump administration directive back in 2018 to address what he referred to multiple times as an “invasion” of Central American immigrants attempting to cross the border by caravan. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security continue to work in concert to secure the border. 

Last month, the U.S. saw a record 180,000 border crossings, a surge that has sparked concern from mainstream Democrats and Republicans alike. Over the past year, the Biden administration has fought to unwind many of Trump’s more stringent border policies, though the recent uptick has emerged as a complicating factor in finding more permanent policy solutions.

“Zola” transforms the greatest stripper saga ever tweeted into a masterful, can’t-miss odyssey

One shudders to think what “Zola” would have been if Janicza Bravo hadn’t directed it, if Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris hadn’t written the script with her, and if A’Ziah “Zola” King hadn’t been closely involved with its crafting. Naming these specific creatives matters more than simply trusting King’s social media-generated drama to any filmmaker and writer. Only Bravo’s aesthetic approach to recreating this legendary road trip gone dangerously awry, blended with Harris’ and King’s compatible senses of humor, could result in art and entertainment this spectacular.

“Zola” also credits David Kushner’s Rolling Stone article “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted” as source material, but King is the savvy, ambitious mind behind the Greatest Internet Story Told in 148 Tweets posted back on October 27, 2015.  Her Twitter bio boasts “I invented threads,” and while someone could research whether or not that’s true, the legendary success of her story ensures that challenging that claim is a waste of time. All we need to know is that she’s woman who knew her tale was platinum and through trial and error figured how to circulate it in a unique way and on a massive scale.

“Zola,” like the thread that inspires it, isn’t expressly true either, but who cares?. Bravo and Taylour Paige (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” ), who plays King’s onscreen persona, ensure that everything we witness happening to Zola feels true, hilarious, harrowing and brazenly correct and genuine. That’s the most valuable part.

Then and now King replied to those challenging the veracity of her story by saying it’s mostly true which is the film’s jumping-off point, along with Paige’s delivery of the tweet that started it all, one of the finest opening hooks in recent memory: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”

If you’ve read the thread already you already know the gist of what happens. Even so, Bravo and Harris make enough subtle changes in the plot to transform a wild, embellished story about a narrow escape from sex trafficking into a keen examination of the precarity of friendships between Black and white women, race, and social media’s ability to elevate a regular person’s diverting fable into an epic.

Here’s how it went down according to Zola. She meet Stefani (Riley Keough) in Detroit during a waitressing shift, and Stefani immediately recognizes Zola as a fellow stripper and, to use a catchphrase from the thread, the pair start “vibing over our hoeism or whatever.”

They exchange numbers, and then the next day Stefani phones to invite Zola on a weekend trip to Florida for a chance to make big money dancing down there. Zola’s suspicious at first, but soon agrees and embarks with Stefani, her simple boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun of “Succession”) and suspicious roommate (an excellent Colman Domingo) on what the Internet titled #TheStory and Black Twitter came to know as “The Thotyssey.”

The movie’s status as the first feature based on a Twitter thread defines what we see without overwhelming the action in overt ways, like the recognizable soundtrack of social apps – mainly clicks, bells, whooshes – that pop up unexpectedly throughout, marking moments that appear in the widely available source material or simply recognizably “social” turns.

They’re a clever touch, but Bravo’s subtler choices distinguish “Zola” as a cannily interpretive work evocative of the medium from whence it came. Although King herself has established that Zola’s online persona is a character, Paige’s Zola is the most genuine in a pond of heightened and specifically cultivated personalities, especially Keough’s Stefani, a walking culturally appropriative insult whose “you go girl” personality slams into Zola with such ferocity that what happens is not merely plausible, it’s relatable.

Keough builds Stefani’s synthetic sheen from there, making her seem almost childlike and malleable at times – so much that when Zola makes the decision to save this woman from herself, we understand. There’s more to her than meets the eye, obviously, but to explicitly spell out what that means would flatten out the story’s addictive twistiness. But she does a terrific job of making the odious enjoyable, and you can especially see that in a hideously antic moment when Harris and Bravo flip things around to present Stefani’s outrageous self-serving spin on the same events.

Having some familiarity with the “mostly real” story doesn’t make “Zola” less watchable. On the contrary it frees you to enjoy the stylistic language Bravo uses in her cinematography and the subtext Paige lays down through her portrayal. Her Zola isn’t just a believable narrator (if not an entirely reliable one) she holds her posture, fixes her expression and firmly holds her ground like a woman determined to be in control of an unpredictable, treacherous situation. She embodies the poise Black women wear as armor in a world conditioned to harm them while also showing her vulnerability.

It is up to her – and Harris, reportedly with King’s input – to maintain the movie’s tonal balance between grave tension and laughter earned purely. Knowing that Zola lived through this dicey weekend to tell her tale with comedic verve doesn’t completely remove all sense of threat from the story, and there are enough divergences from the original plot to make a person unsure that everyone gets out alive.

Bravo filters the journey from Detroit to Tampa in a way that lets us know her heroine is descending into a perilous place that’s as attractive as it is ugly. She tells that story with the usual cinematographer’s methods, using lighting to establish mood and saturating colors throughout the scenery to transition from dreamscapes to nightmares to spaces containing both.

However, Bravo take care in how she depicts sex work and, at least in the moments to which Zola consents, the camaraderie shared backstage at strip clubs. When she’s on it’s a slightly different matter, especially when Paige gives a routine her acrobatic best only to have a countrified customer tell her she reminds him of Whoopi Goldberg.

In contrast, a central sequence depicting Stefani working through a parade of johns focuses on the men – their faces and unforgettably, their equipment, which Bravo memorializes via a nervy montage of actual d**k pics. None of it titillating, and all is meant to show sex work for what it is, which is work that sometimes can be jeopardizing.

Bravo’s inclusion of other imagery comments on the plot and warn us about the menace all around them – lingering on a Blood Stained Banner flag flapping in the wind for an extra few seconds during the road trip sequence, or driving by an unarmed Black man being beaten by the cops in another. These aren’t part of the main plot but their specific meaning to those who are watching announce their integral role in the narrative.

“Zola” closes like a Twitter thread too, making its exit hastily but leaving us with a sense of resolution and a shot of Paige, eyes closed, fixing Zola’s face to read “SMH” without saying a word.

James Franco and the other white guys who wrote the first draft on King’s story never would or could have captured such details or made this movie. Thank God Franco dropped out (although his brother Dave maintains a producer credit), because the film we have now is the one #TheStory deserves. “Zola” honors the web of lunacy King weaves in a medium made for telling stories in (at the time) 140 characters or less while never forgetting that it is a full, satisfying picture.  Mainly, and to our great satisfaction, it’s portrait of a Black woman who knows herself and her worth sliding into some seriously risky business, tapping into that confidence and emerging if not completely unscathed then indisputably triumphant.

“Zola” opens in theaters on Wednesday, June 30.

Disinvited from Trump country: Why some red states suddenly want less of Donald Trump

Donald Trump, steadily losing support from his voting bloc since Election Day, appears to suddenly be losing touch with leadership in some red states that supported him during the election. Officials in both Alabama and Florida have reportedly rebuffed Trump’s recent attempts to hold self-promotional rallies. 

Florida’s Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor who is eyeing a potential presidential bid for 2024, reportedly “made a direct plea” to the former president to cancel his upcoming campaign-style rally in Sarasota. The rally, which Trump has so far refused to call off, is set to take place about 200 miles from the Miami suburb where part of an apartment building unexpectedly collapsed last week due to structural deficiencies, leaving 16 residents dead and over 100 still missing. One Florida Republican told the Washington Examiner that Trump and his team should “read the room” amid the tragedy. 

“The governor is getting tested here as to how far he’s going to be pushed before he breaks ranks with President Trump. And he has to be very careful because this is Trump country,” the source continued. “The base loves the president. But they equally love Ron. It’s a showdown going on right now.”

According to one political operative interviewed by the Examiner, Trump’s team is keeping the rally on schedule because of an apparent beef between DeSantis and Susie Wiles, a former Trump campaign official who was charged with leading his post-presidency political operations. 

Back in 2019, during the 2020 Trump campaign, DeSantis reportedly urged Trump to fire Wiles over a “leak of internal correspondence showing how the new governor [Ron DeSantis] appeared to be selling access to special interests on golfing trips.” According to Politico, the firing, which many disagreed with, estranged many Trump campaign officials from Florida’s Republican leadership. One operative told the Examiner that “because Ron DeSantis doesn’t want [the rally], [Wiles is] gonna make sure it happens,” this source said. 

Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Trump, said that the former president “sends his deepest condolences to those who’ve lost loved ones or been displaced by the terrible tragedy in Surfside.”

She continued: “The event in Sarasota, however, is on the other side of the state, 3 1/2 hours away, approximately the same distance from Boston to New York, and will not impact any of the recovery efforts. In fact, President Trump has instructed his team to collect relief aid for Surfside families both online and on-site at the Sarasota rally.”

Trump saw more resistance from a red state when park commissioners in Mobile, Alabama canceled his Saturday rally. 

“It became apparent that it was going to be a partisan political event, rather than just a patriotic event planned for that evening,” commission chairman Bill Tunnell told NBC-15 this week. The rally was set to be held at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park.

“I’ll be honest,” Pete Riehm, a local tea party activist, told NBC 15. “I feel some people just didn’t want it, not just it but President Trump.”

Alabama and Florida’s recent pushback against Trump come amid increasing Republican rebukes of the former president’s attempts to undermine the results of the 2020 election. 

Last week, a Republican-led investigation by the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee found “no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election, calling Trump’s claims “ludicrous.” On Monday, Republican leaders from Wisconsin, which is mulling its own 2020 election audit, told the former president that his grandiose theory of election fraud is “misinformed.”

I was vaccinated in a clinical trial. But officially, my COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t “count”

I’m immunized with arguably the best COVID-19 vaccine on Earth. But according to nation-states and official records, I’m “unvaccinated,”  limiting my travel and social options, and leaving me with no proven, safe, vaccine alternatives.

In December 2020, I volunteered for the phase III, blind study of Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine. So-called blind studies randomly assign participants to an experimental, vaccine group, or a control, placebo group. This method eliminates bias and enables scientists to ascertain a medicine’s effectiveness.

In March, I became eligible for one of the three approved coronavirus vaccines in the United States — Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson — so I asked to be “unblinded,” told if I’d previously received the Novavax vaccine or a placebo. I learned I’d been jabbed with the real thing; if I had been part of the placebo, I would have planned to sign up for another shot as quickly as a possible due to my job. I’m a middle-aged middle-school teacher working in a conservative county with no mask requirements, where the daily COVID-19 test positivity rate once peaked at 36%.

As a result of being “unblinded,” I had to exit the study.

I am completely at ease knowing the two-shot, Novavax vaccine is coursing through my veins. Results from the phase III study demonstrated more than 90% efficacy against the coronavirus with few side effects. Some scientists even believe Novavax is the best vaccine among COVID-19 vaccines.

The problem is Novavax’s vaccine has not yet been approved under the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization. Due to production delays, the company says it might not seek emergency approval until the end of September. Because there’s already a plentiful supply of vaccines domestically, it’s possible the FDA could instead ask Novavax to apply for a full license, which would take several additional months.

Meanwhile, because I was part of a scientific trial, I have no way of “proving” to authorities that I’m vaccinated, even though Novavax is highly effective. As an experimental drug, it just doesn’t count.

I’m already experiencing repercussions.

In April, a friend invited me to Iceland for a summer vacation. Tourists face no entry restrictions if they provide vaccine documentation; otherwise, guests must be quarantined. Iceland doesn’t recognize Novavax as a valid vaccine, so I had to turn down the trip.

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Numerous countries mandate quarantines for unvaccinated guests, which often is not feasible for travelers with limited time.

Maybe, taking a cruise is a possibility. Nope. Several cruise lines require proof of vaccination as well.

It’s not just travel being impacted. An increasing number of venues, work places, and universities are also asking for proof.

I’ve done my fair share of complaining about COVID-19. I decided to become a human guinea pig to be part of the solution. Now, I feel like I’m being penalized, even though I put my life at risk for science.

Friends have suggested I get an approved COVID-19 inoculation in order to earn my vaccine card. I’ve certainly thought about it.

Studies suggest mixing two different vaccines might actually enhance one’s defense against the coronavirus, but more research is needed. I’m not ready to take such a gamble for a piece of paper.

Still, there could be an upside to the glacial pace of Novavax’s authorization process.

Having lived in Africa, I believe the Novavax immunization, if viable, offers one of the most suitable options for developing countries, often lacking infrastructure and specialized equipment. Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which must be transported and stored at temperatures near or well-below zero degrees Fahrenheit — a logistical burden for any nation — Novavax only requires basic refrigeration, as is the case with Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.

That could mean the difference between millions of people in impoverished countries — especially remote areas — being inoculated or going without. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of vaccines globally are wasted, “usually attributable to cold chain and stock management problems.”

With the vaccine glut in the United States, it’s likely Novavax will be shipped overseas to nations most in need of easily-managed inoculations.

If I had to do it all over again, I still would have volunteered for the Novavax trial. Scientists need people to roll up their sleeves to test the shots.

Indeed, I’m grateful to be protected against COVID-19. I just wish I had some way to prove I’m immunized.

Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction overturned in surprise court ruling

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction on Wednesday, after Cosby has served just under three years of his three-to-10-year sentence, according to the AP. The court said it found an agreement with a previous prosecutor that prevents Cosby from being charged in the case.

According to the Associated Press, District Attorney Kevin Steele, who had seen to Cosby’s arrest, had actually been obligated to uphold his predecessor’s promise to not charge Cosby. Steele’s predecessor made this promise when Cosby gave incriminating testimony in the civil suit of Andrea Constand, who accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her several decades ago. However, the AP reports that there is no evidence this promise by the former district attorney was ever put in writing.

The court wrote in its decision that overturning Cosby’s conviction and barring any further prosecution “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.” 

The court also wrote that the trial judge at Cosby’s trial, who had first allowed just one of his other accusers to testify, before allowing five other accusers to testify about their alleged experiences with Cosby in the 1980s, had tainted the trial by doing so. However, a lower appeals court in Pennsylvania says it was appropriate for the prosecution to call these witnesses to show a pattern in Cosby’s alleged behaviors. 

Last month, Cosby was denied parole by the Pennsylvania Parole Board for his refusal to complete a sex offender treatment plan. The actor, who has been accused of sexual assault by 60 women, has also said that he would rather serve his full sentence than acknowledge any remorse over the alleged encounter with Constand.

Cosby was originally convicted and sentenced in September 2018, found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Despite how Cosby has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, his other accusers did not go to the police.

Cosby was first accused of date rape and sexual abuse by several women decades before the #MeToo movement rose to prominence in 2017. But for the most part, the allegations were ignored until a 2015 cover story by New York Magazine which featured 35 of Cosby’s accusers sitting in rows of chairs.

The magazine reported that Cosby’s dozens of accusers presented “almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period.” The first allegation against Cosby was made decades ago in the 1960s. At the time, his conviction in 2018 was seen as a mark of crucial progress in the ongoing movement for justice for survivors.

“Religious leaders should be asking for your forgiveness” on abortion – not the other way around

CoWanda Rusk was weeks away from graduating from her Texas high school, and preparing for college, when she learned she was pregnant. “I immediately knew I didn’t want to be pregnant,” she recounted to Salon.

Rusk had grown up a part of the church where her father was a youth pastor, and she remains a person of faith to this day. “I always rely on my faith for everything, even small decisions — what colors to wear today, what will align with the universe today,” she said.

Her decision to have an abortion was no different. Rusk says she got “on the floor and started praying” the moment after her pregnancy test turned up positive. “I know God was with me in all of those moments, and I know I had the love and support and the guidance of something bigger than myself.”

At the time, Rusk was only 17 and wasn’t too familiar with the complex politics of abortion within the church, within America, or even within Texas. She would eventually need to seek the support of the youth abortion fund and legal support group Jane’s Due Process to get an abortion as a minor, as well as help with covering the costs of the abortion. 

Rusk says she decided to have her abortion when she reflected on everything God had prepared for her, like scholarships and her bright educational future. Because of this she knew she had God’s support. Since having her abortion, she’s actively remained a person of faith and involved in her church, where she continues to organize for social justice, as she believes God intended. Rusk has also connected with We Testify, a program that mentors and supports people who have had abortions, as a storyteller, sharing her experience to empower others and challenge stigma.

Tohan is another storyteller at We Testify, and a Texan like Rusk, who was fresh off of sharing her abortion story with the U.S. Senate in support of the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) when she talked to Salon. As a Christian, Tohan is guided by her faith in many parts of her life, but she says religion was unrelated to her choice to have an abortion. 

“My decision was very personal — nothing to do with religion,” she said. Tohan recalls initially struggling to justify her decision internally, and knowing abortion was “frowned upon” in religious spaces, despite the lack of clear scripture on it. Someone who was once a close friend of hers was highly critical of Tohan when she shared her story. But when Tohan told her father, a minister and conservative Republican, she was surprised by his support.

“I realized, with my friend, I was putting other people before myself, which I can’t afford to do. They’re not in my shoes,” she said. Her father told her those who try to control other people’s reproductive decisions are extremists. “He said, ‘I’m a Republican, but I’m not an extremist, because I have sense,'” Tohan recounted. “He said, ‘So I’m a Christian. But I’m not an extremist.'”

Earlier this month, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to draft new guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, which will challenge President Biden’s ability to receive communion because of his support for abortion rights. This action, of course, is just the latest of near daily political efforts to shape abortion policy around the religious views of some, to the extent that abortion and reproductive care are widely seen as at odds with Christianity and other religions. 

This conflict, Rusk and Tohan say, is an illusion. And the numbers back them up — Catholic people have abortions at the same rate as non-Catholic people. The majority of people who have abortions are people of faith: Most abortion patients surveyed in 2014 have some religious affiliation — 24% said they were Catholic, 17% mainline Protestant, 13% evangelical Protestant and 8% identified with some other religion. People of most faiths also overwhelmingly seem to support abortion rights.

So, where does the illusion of conflict come from?

Progressive spiritual leaders say the religious anti-abortion narrative is new — and entirely political

Born and raised a Catholic, when Jamie Manson was a teenager, she aspired to be a priest — that is, until she learned the Catholic Church doesn’t ordain women.

“Women have no decision-making authority in the Church. They have no voice,” she said. “They think only men should be able to take leadership, and women are meant to be mothers. That’s our most essential vocation — just to give birth and nurture children and family.” Manson says when she made “that connection,” she realized “the church believes essentially in forced motherhood.” 

“That’s when I became very lit up about reproductive rights in the Catholic Church,” Manson said. Today, she serves as president of Catholics for Choice, an advocacy organization that lifts up the voices of the majority of Catholics who support reproductive freedom.

Danya Ruttenberg, a rabbi, scholar-in-residence at the National Council for Jewish Women (NCJW), author of several books on Judaism, and founder of NCJW’s Rabbis for Repro campaign, says she “was a feminist before I was a religious Jew,” volunteering at abortion clinics as a teenager. Reproductive freedom is actually a Jewish value, Ruttenberg says. 

Rabbis for Repro exemplifies widespread support for abortion in religious Jewish communities, with over 1,000 Jewish clergy who “have pledged to teach and preach about reproductive health, rights and justice, and show up and do advocacy work,” according to Ruttenberg. Last year, Ruttenberg and some of these rabbis and Jewish clergy met with 52 Congress members, and got 29 new co-sponsors on a bill for reproductive rights.

For as long as the religious right has mobilized against abortion, conservative politicians and religious leaders have constructed a narrative of people of faith overwhelmingly opposing abortion, and have asserted the Catholic Church and other religious institutions have always condemned abortion.

This is blatantly untrue, according to both Manson and Ruttenberg.

“This wedding of Catholic identity with anti-abortion politics, it only happened in the last few decades,” Manson said. “It’s a very reductive understanding of Catholicism. The tradition is much richer and more interesting than that.”

It’s only because of the wealth and power of the Christian right wing, which is extremely “well-funded, even though it’s a minority,” Manson says, that abortion is understood as anti-religion, and religion as anti-abortion.

“That minority is so vocal and influential, people automatically equate religion with anti-choice values. And it’s simply not true,” Manson said. “It’s not true for Jews, it’s not true for Catholics, it’s not true for Christians. We, the religious left, have to really rise up and make our voice heard, claim the moral high-ground in this struggle and not cede all the power to the Christian right.”

Catholic bishops’ attempt to block Biden from receiving communion, Manson says, is “profoundly sad.”

“To use what is most sacred about our church and sacred to Biden, to punish him or try to bully him into changing his views on abortion rights, is very troubling,” she said. “The bishops taking part in this are part of a right-wing political agenda in this country. It’s very scary.”

Ruttenberg says the religious right “picked up” abortion solely for “craven political ambition and white supremacy.”

“Up until school segregation they were like, ‘Oh, abortion is an issue of personal choice,'” she said. “They eventually lost that fight, for segregation, and were like, what’s a good issue that we could pick up to activate our base? Abortion was no big deal up until then. Then they started coming up with these ‘proof texts’ for why abortion was bad.”

Lost in translation?

“There’s a verse in Exodus, a story of two men who fight, and one of them accidentally knocks over a pregnant woman, and she has a miscarriage,” Ruttenberg said. “As a result, the man has to pay a fine, damages — it’s eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life. So basically, if it’s a miscarriage you pay money, but if the woman dies, you treat it as manslaughter. The Torah and Jewish texts are straightforward: a fetus is not a person. It’s not treated as manslaughter.”

According to Ruttenberg, scripture was clear — until “a very funky game of telephone happened.” Different translations and word choices presented very different stories, that’s now being used by some religious leaders to stigmatize abortion. Manson says the Bible and prominent theologians have demonstrated that abortion isn’t as open-and-shut as today’s religious right would have you think.

“Two of the most important theologians in the church’s history, Saint Thomas Aquinus and Augustine, both believe there were certain stages of fetal development where abortion should be fine, and had different standings about when a fetus got a soul,” she said. “The church’s teaching has changed. It was only this absolute ban now codified in 1913. The church and hierarchy and right wing laity are not being honest about the history of this teaching.”

At the heart of this black-and-white teaching, Manson says, is stigma. This anti-abortion stigma infects even the thinking of progressive, “pro-choice” Catholics. In response to the bishops’ move to deny Biden communion, Mansons says a theologian friend of hers cited a bishop who was known to give communion to “murderers, executioners.” 

“I was just like, I don’t know if that’s the analogy I want to be working off of right now!” Manson said. “That’s part of the problem with the way abortion is being framed. The conversation especially among progressive Catholics has to move to a place where abortion is not intrinsic evil — it can be a moral good, and it’s a freedom that allows women and pregnant people access to other kinds of freedoms, political power, economic power. Let’s start there.”

The great divide

When CoWanda Rusk heard Pope Francis’ message in 2016 that people who had abortions should be forgiven, she says she “cringed.”

“Forgiveness happens on a personal level,” Rusk said. “I absolutely do not agree with needing forgiveness from God nor other people for making a decision to take care of yourself. That is the most ridiculous thing, the most shaming thing. You did nothing wrong by accessing health care.”

If anything, Rusk says, “Religious leaders should be asking for your forgiveness for not using their powers to make sure people have access to basic needs and health care.”

Politicians and religious leaders have often tried to compromise, or present the image of compromising, around abortion, when in reality, there is no middle ground on whether pregnant people should be forced to give birth. In 1976, Congress enacted the Hyde Amendment as a budget provision to restrict public coverage and funding of abortion care. 

Reproductive rights and justice advocates have long seen Hyde as an abortion ban for poor people, yet, for years, the ban was upheld by many politicians as a compromise — abortion is still legal, they suggested, but through Hyde, we protect the delicate consciences of people of faith who don’t have to pay for abortions.

“It’s a lie,” Tohan said, simply. “You cannot impose someone else’s opinion, or religion, or whatever else, on another person. That is not the ‘freedom’ they claim to love.”

The Hyde Amendment, of course, exists all while people who are more likely to be targeted by police must pay for police departments they may morally oppose, or the inflated military budget. Residents of states that pass abortion ban after abortion ban must also watch as their tax dollars fund state governments’ costly legal defenses of these bans in court.

The fact is, bodily autonomy isn’t a matter for half measures — you support it, or you don’t. And there’s a great divide between everyday people of faith and many religious leaders on this.

Ruttenberg sees this divide as primarily one of communication among religious Jews. “Because of the way religious discourse in the U.S. has been so co-opted by the religious right, even in synagogues in fairly liberal communities, congregants are surprised to discover their rabbis support abortion rights,” she said. “Like yes, of course we support abortion rights! There has been such a cultural reticence, it’s a taboo, thanks to the religious right. We haven’t been as good about talking about things as we should be.”

Tohan sees this divide as “a cross, a junction, where politics and religion have intertwined.”

“A religious leader is not God. He doesn’t determine who’s a sinner, and who deserves and doesn’t deserve forgiveness,” Tohan said. “The divide for me is figuring out who you are inside of God — not what your priest thinks, not the Pope telling you who you are. You’re so much more whole than that.”

Trump’s Arizona “audit” is unpopular — and that’s the point

Did Republicans in Arizona screw the pooch by ordering a fake “audit” of the 2020 presidential votes in Maricopa County? According to an article published Tuesday at Politico, some Republican operatives in the  Grand Canyon state are beginning to fear that the whole gambit by conspiracy theorists who believe Donald Trump is the “real” winner of the state was a big mistake. Turns out that the voters, correctly understanding it’s all a farce meant to undermine the validity of their choice of Joe Biden as president, are hostile to the entire enterprise. 

Pollster Fernand Amandi warned Republicans that while the audit is “bloody red meat for the MAGA Republican base,” it’s also “giving Democrats the opportunity to make the case to Arizona voters to stick with them.” Sean Noble, a GOP organizer in the state agreed, telling Politico, “It’s a failure. It’s a joke.” Noble’s concerns are shared by many Republican leaders in the state, as Zachary Petrizzo reported for Salon last week. 

The polling data in Arizona doesn’t look great for the backers of the “audit,” which was ordered by the Republican-controlled state legislature, in response to Trump’s lies about a “stolen” election. Amandi’s poll of the state showed Arizona voters oppose the audit, 49-46, showing a remarkably strong understanding that it’s a Q-Anon-style circus, despite it being packaged as “merely” an exercise in T-crossing and I-dotting. Moreover, “intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support,” and “independent voters upon whom the state pivots in close elections opposed the audit by 18 percentage points.”

But while all of these statistics are true, what this kind of analysis fails to understand is that the folks behind the fake “audit” don’t care if it’s popular with voters. This whole exercise is not about winning anyone over. It’s not about persuading skeptics that Trump’s Big Lie is true. And it’s certainly not about persuading swing voters to choose Republicans in 2022 or 2024. After all, this whole “winning over voters” thing is a relic of the world that the Arizona “audit” team and the majority of Republicans are ready to leave behind. 

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This fake “audit” is about something else entirely. It is about pushing for a post-voting society, where the very idea that leaders are chosen through fair elections is cast aside in favor of a more authoritarian system. It’s about advocating for a system where voter choice doesn’t really matter, because they’re getting GOP leaders whether they like it or not. 

On Wednesday, Politico published another article about how Trump supporters are “spreading the ‘audit’ playbook across the country” and want a similar fake, theatrical review of “the results in states including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” This is understandably upsetting to state election officials across the nation “who say the efforts will further inflame conspiracy theories and erode faith in the American democratic system.” Of course, inflaming conspiracy theories and eroding faith in democracy is the entire point: It’s a feature, not a bug. 

As I wrote in early May, the three-ring circus around the Arizona “audit” is not an accident, but a very deliberate choice on the part of the organizers. There has never been any desire to make the exercise seem professional or trustworthy at all, but the opposite. What the organizers understand, and many critics don’t, is that the first step to replacing democracy with an authoritarian government is turning democracy into a joke. It’s about taking conservatives who are bitter about losing the 2020 election and radicalizing them to believe that the solution is to destroy the very concept of free and fair elections.

On Monday, Morning Consult released a troubling poll that shows that 26% of Americans meet the definition of “right wing authoritarian,” which is defined by psychology researcher Bob Altemeyer as “as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed.” For comparison, the percentage of Americans who are right-wing authoritarians in the U.S. is double that of Canada and Australia. It’s a mindset that has come to define the modern GOP. 

Republicans are a shrinking minority in the U.S., and as their ability to hold onto power by winning over voters disappears, their base is increasingly drawn to the idea that elections are not a legitimate way of allocating power. But while they are intrigued by the idea of an authoritarian America, many of them likely don’t know exactly what such a thing would look like. As Zack Beauchamp of Vox recently wrote in a must-read piece, the model that GOP leaders are circling around is what is called “competitive authoritarianism,” where the illusion of democracy is propped up, but the reality is one-party minority rule. This is accomplished by “rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage.” Beauchamp offers some international examples, like Hungary. (As Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money points out, this also effectively describes Mexico for the decades they were a “camouflaged dictatorship” under the rule of the PRI.)

But American conservatives aren’t known for their interest in looking at international models. So that’s where the fake “audit” in Arizona — and the desire to hold similar events in other states — comes in. 

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If you want to know what it would look like to create the appearance of an election and vote-counting process, while still having a pre-determined outcome, then the Arizona “audit” is perfect. It pretends to be a democratic event meant to ensure a valid outcome.  But no one, not the organizers or their critics, actually believes that it’s a fair count or that any other outcome is possible beyond a declaration that Trump was the “real” winner. After all, the guy running the whole thing is a conspiracy theorist who participates in other propaganda efforts meant to undermine democracy. 

Indeed, the farcical nature of the whole thing is the point. In authoritarian governments, it’s important to demoralize the opposition by making them believe that the whole system is a joke and that, well, resistance is useless. The Arizona audit is a trial balloon to show how this would work. Voters hate it, but they aren’t particularly motivated to fight back, because there’s no real sense of how one could do that. The outcome is predetermined, so the most you can do is shrug and move on.

The implicit message to Republicans is that their actual vote-counting system could be replaced by a similar farce, and that it would get a similarly helpless response from voters who hate it but feel powerless to stop it. Arizona is already making moves to strip authority from election officials and give it to GOP clowns that run the legislature, so the possibility of replacing legitimate vote-counting with a sham that looks like the fake “audit” is  not as fantastical as it may seem. 

For decades, the American political press has relied heavily on polling data as the main metric to analyze the effectiveness of various political actions taken by the parties. After all, “is X or Y action popular with voters” is a good question to ask when voters are the decision-makers. But it’s increasingly clear that Republican leaders aren’t bound by that metric, because they believe that they can render voter preferences irrelevant. Sure, voters in Arizona hate the fake “audit.” But Republicans are working towards a country where voters’ opinions don’t really matter much at all. 

15 best picnic-ready foods from Trader Joe’s

Summer is officially here, which can only mean one thing: a spike in allergy medication sales. It also means the triumphant return of picnic season and we’ll be damned if watery eyes, itchy ears, and a stuffy nose will prevent us from partaking in one of our favorite warm-weather activities.

As home cooks who encourage people to partake in easy, simple recipes, it feels almost blasphemous to recommend grocery store products in place of homemade options. But sometimes life is busy and there is no shame in this game when it comes to making Trader Joe’s runs to stock up on all of the outdoor-eating essentials. Plus, with the temperatures being so unpredictable, invitations to backyard soirees and barbecues can be super last-minute and you never want to be unprepared.

From dips and chips to cheese and a beverage, these are the Trader Joe’s picnic staples that not only travel well, but are undeniably delicious and all-too-easy to munch on.

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Dips & Cheeses

Cambozola Triple-Creme Soft-Ripened Blue Cheese

We received some backlash for not including this Brie and blue cheese hybrid in our roundup of Trader Joe’s best cheeses, and we heard you loud and clear. The spreadable delicacy is, quite simply, amazing, and a perfect complement to dried fruits, crackers, and bubbly. Its blue cheese flavor is also mild, making it a suitable option for anyone who may be averse to the notoriously polarizing dairy product.

Feta, Pepper Drop & Olive Antipasto

It may be difficult to find, but this wonderful assortment of creamy cheese, sweet and tangy peppers, and briny olives will be a fantastic addition to any charcuterie board. The ingredients are also swimming in a spiced and seasoned olive oil that you must absolutely dip some bread into or we will report it as a crime.

5-Layer Dip

There are so many Trader Joe’s dips to choose from, but we’re standing behind their 5-Layer Dip as one of the best. There’s a layer for every palate and preference, including Southwestern standards like guacamole, sour cream, pico de gallo, and shredded cheese, but it’s anchored with an outrageously good black bean hummus we want to eat by itself.

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Chips, Nuts & Crackers

Cornbread Crisps

Tortilla chips? We don’t know her. Upgrade your dipping experience with these sweet-salty delights that are equally as addictive on their own. They obviously play nice with most dips, but pair especially well with cream or cheese-based dips to keep in line with the theme of Southern comfort.

Cheddar Cheese Sticks

Sometimes you just want your cheese in cracker form and that is a-okay. These sharp, pungent cheddar spirals are satisfying alone or dipped into any of Trader Joe’s many spreads and mayo-based salads. Frankly, is there really any wrong way to eat cheese-flavored anything? The answer is a resounding “no.”

Patio Potato Chips

This festive bag features the famous flavors of a picnic in four different chips: salt and vinegar, dill, ketchup, and barbecue. They also taste shockingly good together . . . almost like a hot dog. And that’s something we can sink our teeth into.

Chile & Garlic Cashews

Roasted and dusted with chile powder, garlic powder, onion powder, and salt, the ever-so buttery and addictive cashew gets an upgrade that makes them simply impossible to put down. We’re also a huge fan of sprinkling them into the potato, chicken, or egg salad that someone (or you!) will inevitably bring for some added crunch.

Chili & Lime Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips

We’re going to make a bold statement here and say that these are one of our all-time favorite Trader Joe’s snacks to have ever graced their shelves. The harmonious balance of spice, salt, and tang is a chip-lovers dream and we have admittedly housed entire bags in one sitting. Be sure to buy more than one because it’s inevitable that your friends will follow suit.

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Mains

Vegan Chickpea Masala Salad

This is perhaps one of our favorite new items to come from Trader Joe’s in recent memory. The blend of chickpeas and masala spices topped with pickled vegetables can act like any old-fashioned chicken or egg salad by being spread onto a salad or into a sandwich. We love its play on different textures and so will you.

Chicken Pesto Sandwich

Basil screams summer and this protein-packed sandwich screams “take me to your next picnic!” Served on multigrain Rustico bread, this sliced chicken breast, caramelized onion, mozzarella, roasted tomato, and argula concoction is a must for any red-checkered blanket.

Italian-Style Wrap

Stay out of the scorching sun, but bring on the meat sweats with this smoked ham and salami dream. It’s piled high with Provolone and creamy Dijon and then and wrapped in a wheat tortilla.

* * *

Drinks & Desserts

Sparkling Strawberry Juice

Summer is strawberry season and this bubbly bev celebrates its triumphant return with a pink and refreshing take on sparkling water. At only 60 calories per can, it can also serve as an excellent mixer for fruity cocktails or as a fizzy floater for strawberry-based sangria. Stay hydrated and cheers!

Cold-Pressed Watermelon Juice

This seasonal sweet stuff is scrumptious! Add it to your favorite margarita recipe or drink it straight from the bottle for a summery, thirst-quenching sip.

Gone Bananas!

You know someone is going to need to satisfy a sweet tooth and these dark-chocolate covered discs are an ideal option for just about everyone. They’re just as delicious frozen as they are thawed, making them great to travel with for a crunchy, cold treat that won’t melt and ruin your new picnic basket.

Bite-Size Crispy Cookies Filled With Belgian Chocolate

If fruit doesn’t do the trick (and we can’t say we blame you), cookies are always a great plan B. These mini treats are fantastic when dunked in tea or coffee, but even better as a post-picnic treat for those who must end their day on a sweet note. Thanks to their superiorly crunchy exteriors, they also hold up well in transport, so you don’t end up with a box of crumbs and disappointment.

Trump’s biggest supporters now want to join the Jan. 6 commission — and Democrats are worried

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is calling to be placed on the select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot while simultaneously decrying it as a “witch hunt” against supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The House of Representatives voted to greenlight the committee largely along party lines Wednesday, with only two Republicans voting in favor of the measure.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., introduced the resolution Monday to “investigate and report upon the facts and causes of the attack and report recommendations for preventing any future assault.”

The panel, which will have subpoena power, will include eight members chosen by Pelosi and five members chosen in consultation with Republican leaders, though Pelosi’s office teased that one of her picks may be a Republican.

Taylor Greene, who pushed false claims about Trump’s election loss and the riot and was kicked off her own committee assignments earlier this year for calling for Democratic leaders to be executed and spreading conspiracy theories, volunteered her services earlier this week.

“I have time on my hands, right?” Greene told the pro-Trump outlet Newsmax on Monday. “I don’t have any committee assignments, so I think it’s the perfect thing to happen.”

Greene called the committee “nothing but another witch hunt” and said she would use the position to protect Trump fans.

“I’m very upset about Jan. 6,” she said. “I didn’t like what happened at the Capitol, but I would like to be on that new committee to make sure it’s not a witch hunt against Trump supporters and that we can actually find out real answers like releasing over 14,000 hours of video.”

Greene said she also wants to find out the name of the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed while trying to breach the House chamber. The unidentified officer was cleared of wrongdoing by federal prosecutors.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a close Trump ally who has claimed that antifa or even “federal undercover agents” were behind the riot, and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who voted against awarding medals to Capitol police and denied allegations that she gave Capitol tours to rioters before the attack, are also lobbying for spots on the committee, according to Politico.

It’s unclear whether House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will appoint anyone to the committee as Republicans criticize the committee after voting down legislation that would have established an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot. But Republican lawmakers predict that McCarthy would “gravitate towards controllable Trump acolytes who can work to snarl the select committee’s progress” if he does, according to Politico.

Democratic leaders expect this as well.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the No. 3 Democrat in the House, said he expects McCarthy to “bend the knee” to Trump. “It wouldn’t shock me if he chose Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert. He’s got a collection of characters to choose from,” he told MSNBC, predicting that Trump will “issue recommendations as to who he thinks should be on this committee, and Kevin McCarthy will follow those recommendations hook, line and sinker.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Politico, “The issue is that … there are indications that some of these folks were in on it. And we can’t have folks who were in on it in the investigation.” 

Jordan, another staunch Trump ally and former member of the Select Committee on Benghazi, has dismissed the committee as “impeachment 3.0” and “one more vehicle to attack President Trump.” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., a member of House GOP leadership, told Politico that the committee “sounds like the perfect job for Jim Jordan.”

Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., who voted to impeach Trump and negotiated the terms of the bipartisan commission before all but 35 members of his own party rejected it, has also criticized the decision to form a committee instead.

“It would be a turbo-charged partisan exercise, not an honest fact-finding body that the American people and Capitol Police deserve,” he said in a statement. “For those reasons, I will not support its creation when voted upon. Recognizing the deeply disappointing departure this represents from a truly bipartisan solution, I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where I would participate, if asked.”

It’s unclear who will serve on the committee, though several Democrats told Politico that they expect House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., to head the panel. And Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., the two most outspoken Trump critics in the party, are among potential Republican choices Pelosi could tap for the commission.

Any Republicans who serve on the panel will have to deal with their own party’s role in the riot. According to Politico, one House Republican circulated a list of “about half a dozen fellow Republicans” who should be punished for their role in cheering on the Trump supporters ahead of the riot, including Reps. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. Both men unsuccessfully sought pardons from Trump in his final days in office, according to CNN, and were implicated by “Stop the Steal” rally organizer Ali Alexander with helping to plan the event, which Biggs has denied.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., a former federal prosecutor, has also alleged that Republican members gave “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol ahead of the riot. Sherrill, who has not presented any evidence of her claim, told Politico that she turned over information about what she was to federal investigators.

“We’re seeing information come out about the planning that went into that,” she said. “I don’t really want to comment on what I’ve seen. Some of it is still under investigation, so it hasn’t been publicly released right now.”

McCarthy, who called Trump to plead for him to call off his supporters as they overran the Capitol, may also be called as a witness. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., said in a statement earlier this year that Trump dismissed the concerns on the call and falsely claimed that “it was antifa that had breached the Capitol.”

When McCarthy refuted Trump’s claim and told the president it was Trump supporters, she said, Trump told McCarthy, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

American carnage: What we are now learning about Trump’s nightmarish mishandling of COVID

There are a lot of books coming out over the next few months that chronicled the final days of the Trump administration and it’s pretty clear there are a lot of stories to tell. Of course, there is also a burning desire on the part of some members of Trump’s entourage to buff up their severely tarnished reputations.

Michael Wolff of “Fire and Fury” fame has a new book coming out about the post-election period called “Landslide” that sounds as though it will be as lurid and gossipy as his previous Trump book. ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl’s book called “Betrayal” (which I referenced in this piece about Bill Barr on Monday) appears to take a look at the same period as another new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender called “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” It makes sense that there would be a number of books about the election, Trump’s Big Lie and the subsequent nsurrection. The assault on democracy is the biggest political story of our time and it’s still unfolding.

But I think the most serious story of the Trump administration and granted, it’s hard to choose, has to be the massive, overwhelming failure to deal with the COVID pandemic that’s killed over 600,000 people and counting. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around that number or the fact that the leadership of the United States of America was so inept. According to yet another new book, aptly entitled “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” it was all actually much worse than we even thought.

The authors, Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, tell the coronavirus story from the perspective of the science advisers as well as the political people around Trump who were desperately trying to get him to take the problem seriously. We knew from Bob Woodward’s earlier reporting that Trump had consciously made the decision to “downplay” the virus, ostensibly to keep people from panicking. Nobody really believed that, of course. It was obvious that he was “downplaying” the virus because he was afraid that the stock market would panic and that the ensuring economic turmoil would cost him the election. It seemingly never even occurred to him that mass deaths might be a bigger drag on his campaign.

The earliest unforgettable moment in the saga was the day when Trump went down to the CDC and bragged that everyone there was so impressed by his grasp of the complexities that perhaps he should have been a scientist instead of a president. And he made the comment that would guide the entire response from that point forward:

According to “Nightmare Scenario” Trump was so upset by the idea that these people would “double his numbers” that he asked his staff if there wasn’t “an island we own” that we could send them to and he asked more than once about the possibility of sending them to Guantánamo. The staff finally got the idea scuttled but because they were all just as shallow and self-serving as he was, they did it not because it was grotesquely inhumane but because they were “worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.” They had a point. Sending sick old people to a terrorist prison camp is pretty bad optics.

The “numbers” continued to anger Trump. He demanded that the officials who allowed the cruise passengers into the US be fired (it didn’t happen) and when he said at his infamous Tulsa Oklahoma rally back in June of 2020, “when you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please” — he was not joking. The book quotes Trump having a tantrum over the phone to Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar, saying “Testing is killing me! I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?” (Azar replied, hilariously, “Uh, do you mean Jared?”)

This response was a trainwreck in every way, mostly because of Trump’s ignorance which made his decisions erratic and ineffectual, which I suspect also led to the magical thinking that had him demanding that everyone be a cheerleader and if you just tell people that everything is fine, it will be. He’s quoted as saying to his team, “I am sick and tired of how negative you all are. . . . I spend half of my day responding to what Tony Fauci has to say, and I’m the president of the United States!” He told Dr. Deborah Birx, “Every time you talk, I get depressed. You have to stop that.”

Perhaps the biggest revelation in this book is the fact that Trump was much, much sicker from COVID than we knew. His doctors were seriously afraid he was going to die and pushed the FDA to break all the rules to get him the experimental drugs that might save him. As we know, they did that and pumped him full of steroids and he recovered quite quickly. But in one of the more eye-rolling moments in this story, apparently, some of the advisers like CDC Director Robert Redfield, assumed his very close brush with death would automatically force him to take the COVID protocols more seriously and go out and tell people about his own experience in order to convince them to do the same. That’s just laughable. It would mean he had to admit he was wrong and that’s impossible. You’ll recall that he defiantly ripped off his mask when he returned to the White House and then made a video telling everyone to go out and live their lives. He promised that he was going to make those experimental drugs available for free to everyone. That didn’t happen, although he did arrange for his cronies Chris Christie and Ben Carson to get them.

This book reinforces the story that we already knew which is that the death toll in the U.S. from the pandemic is so high largely because the president of the United States at the time was an incompetent narcissist who was incapable of handling the crisis. So instead he said it was all bad press and poor optics and tried to happy talk his way out of it. It ended up killing people. A lot of people. Despite his desire to be seen as the man who single-handedly created the vaccines and saved the world, his followers heard him “downplay” the virus and they believed him. Now many of them are refusing to get the shots and Trump’s American carnage continues to this day. 

The best brownies are gluten free and have soy sauce in them — really

I have one perfect chocolate chip cookies recipe. One platonic ideal cheesecake. But when it comes to brownies, I will never stop making any and every new recipe I can get my hands on. I’ve made the Katherine Hepburn brownies. I’ve made the Baked brownies. I’ve made cheesecake brownies and black bean brownies. I’ve made two-ingredient Nutella brownies and I’ve made sheet pan brownies. And from the moment I saw the words “soy sauce brownies” in Hetty McKinnon’s warm, inviting “To Asia, With Love,” I couldn’t wait to make them.

McKinnon, a Chinese-Australian writer currently raising her family in Brooklyn, creates vegetarian and vegan dishes that showcase all her influences. As she writes in her introduction, she wanted to create a book with “a strong sense of home,” with flavors that are “not strictly Chinese, but they are Asian(ish).” It’s unsurprising, then, that her unorthodox brownie began its life as an homage to her home country.

“I don’t love sweets in general as a person,” McKinnon said recently via phone, “so my food has always lent very heavily toward savory. I had a salad business in Sydney where I delivered salads on my bike, and every week I would make a sweet thing as an option. Back then, I was making brownies that I would flavor with orange zest or tahini or peppermint. When I left Australia, I basically started adding recipes on my website as a way of staying connected to my audience. One of my first was a Vegemite brownie, as a nod to Australia. That’s where the idea of using soy sauce came from — that deep saltiness that always benefits chocolate.”

It sounds a little unconventional, but this is no TikTok gimmick. “When I started experimenting with this brownie,” McKinnon says, “I realized the soy sauce not only did the job that salt does, it added these beautiful, rich caramel flavors which tell you there’s something special about the brownie. You would never say, this is a soy sauce brownie; it just adds this deep flavor that’s so effortless. You don’t have to do anything cheffy, there’s no huge technique, it’s just the soy sauce bringing those deep rich flavors.” As a tip, McKinnon suggests, “It’s a fudgy brownie, and because it’s held together with almond flour rather than wheat, it does benefit from sitting in the fridge overnight if you can wait.” But, she adds, “I’ve had many people say to me they’ve not waited and eaten the whole thing in one go and that’s fine also.” Having tasted these, I can entirely see why. They’re difficult to stop nibbling on.

Because I don’t have dishwasher, I’ve streamlined the number of bowls and pans McKinnon uses. I’ve also swapped out one tablespoon of regular cocoa powder with one of black cocoa, because black cocoa is straight up magic, but regular cocoa works just fine. You could also use a different kind of nut flour here, and I suspect you could even get away with oat flour. 

###

Recipe: Soy Sauce Brownies

Inspired by Hetty McKinnon’s “To Asia, with Love”

Serves 8 – 12

Ingredients:

  • 1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter
  • 1 cup (175 g) semisweet or dark chocolate chips, or roughly chopped chocolate (A digital scale really is your best friend, invest in one.)
  • 1 cup almond meal
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa powder (or 2 tbs regular cocoa powder and 1 tbs black cocoa)
  • 1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 cup (185 g) brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 3 – 4 teaspoons tamari or gluten-free soy sauce

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9-inch square baking pan with parchment paper, and grease the pan.
  2. Melt butter over medium heat in a large saucepan. (Brown butter squad, keep going until it gets brown and toasty and has stopped popping.)
  3. Remove from heat. Add chocolate and whisk until it’s smooth.
  4.  In your saucepan with the butter and chocolate, add the eggs, brown sugar, vanilla extract and soy sauce. Stir until well blended.
  5. Add your almond flour mixture to the batter and stir well.
  6. Pour batter in to pan and bake about 22 minutes. Do not overbake.
  7. Remove and cool in the pan, then slice and serve. McKinnon recommends letting these chill in the fridge, but the soy sauce flavor is more pronounced when they’re still a little warm and slumpy from the oven, if you’re into that.

More Quick & Dirty: 

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

 

 

The WHO didn’t reverse its position on kids and COVID vaccines

A social media post circulating on Facebook and Instagram claims that the World Health Organization recently flipped its policy recommendation about children receiving a covid-19 vaccine.

“The WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION recently reversed its stance on children getting the Covid vaccine. Sorry to all those dumb parents who rushed out to get their 12 year olds vaccinated. Oops you injected your kids with poison and it’s no longer recommended. Personally no one should but at least save the children!,” the post reads.

A photo posted alongside the caption is a screenshot from the World Health Organization’s website, with the words circled in red: “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.”

The screen grab also shows the following paragraph with the words underlined in red: “There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.”

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its news feed. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with Facebook.)

Others have been spreading similar messages on social media about this alleged change in the WHO’s stance on covid vaccines for children, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). The topic also dominated vaccine-related Google searches on June 22, according to Google Trends data.

Mining the Webpage

The screen grab posted on Instagram was indeed taken directly from the WHO’s webpage and the text had not been altered. The purpose of that specific webpage is to give the public advice on who should receive a covid vaccine.

The webpage stated, “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.”

However, this was not new guidance from the WHO. The organization first posted this guidance on April 8, according to our analysis of the webpage through the Wayback Machine, an internet archive service, and First Draft, a nonprofit group that analyzes misinformation on the web.

When we reached out to the WHO on June 22 to ask officials about the webpage’s wording and whether they had reversed their stance, a spokesperson sent the following statement:

“Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults, so unless they are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.

“More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.

“WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above. Children aged between 12 and 15 who are at high risk may be offered this vaccine alongside other priority groups. Vaccine trials for children are ongoing and WHO will update its recommendations when the evidence or epidemiological situation warrants a change in policy.

“It’s important for children to continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”

The WHO updated its webpage June 23, replacing the language “children should not be vaccinated for the moment” with the precise language sent in the statement above.

Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at KFF, said she reached out to a WHO contact who told her this updated language was added to reflect the latest advice from the WHO’s June 15 meeting of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts, which said the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine can be given to those age 12 and older.

The WHO’s Stance

The WHO’s chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, explained in a June 11 video why the WHO was not prioritizing covid vaccines for children.

“So, the reason that today, in June 2021, WHO is saying that vaccinating children is not a priority is because children, though they can get infected with covid-19 and they can transmit the infection to others, they are at much lower risk of getting severe disease compared to older adults,” Swaminathan said. “And that is why, when we started prioritizing people who should get the vaccination when there are limited supplies of vaccines available in the country, we recommend that we start with health care workers and front-line workers who are at very high risk of exposure to the infection. Also elderly, the people who have underlying illnesses that make them at high risk to develop severe disease.”

Dr. Rachel Vreeman, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, confirmed that the statements on the WHO’s webpage were focused on whom to prioritize most urgently in getting covid vaccines.

“They are not saying that children should not be vaccinated against COVID or that the vaccines currently approved for use in children 12 years old and above are not safe,” Vreeman wrote in an email. “The WHO is saying that the global priority should be on getting more adults vaccinated, since older adults are at the highest risk of serious complications and death from COVID-19.”

“In the face of massive inequities in who has access to COVID-19 vaccines globally, the WHO advises that those at highest risk — older adults — be prioritized first,” Vreeman wrote.

Recommendations of Covid Vaccines for Children in the U.S.

It’s also important to consider that supplies of the covid vaccines are no longer limited in the U.S., as they are in other parts of the world. So, having to ration the vaccine for only health care workers or those who are older or at higher risk for severe disease does not apply here. Remember, the WHO is a global organization, so its recommendations need to be applicable worldwide.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone age 12 and over receive a covid vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been authorized for emergency use in the U.S. in children ages 12 to 18 and adults of all ages.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also recommends that children 12 and up receive a covid vaccine.

So does Vreeman, who is a pediatrician.

“As a pediatrician in the United States, in a setting where the COVID-19 vaccine is widely available, I whole-heartedly recommend that children 12 years old and up receive the COVID-19 vaccination as soon as possible,” Vreeman wrote in an email. “The data show that the vaccines are safe and effective for this age group, and we want to prevent the risks that COVID-19 does present to children.”

Our Ruling

An Instagram post and other posts across social media falsely claimed that the WHO recently reversed its stance on children receiving a covid vaccine because the vaccines were “poison” and would be dangerous for children.

The WHO first posted its guidance for children and covid vaccinations on April 8. That guidance did include the wording, “Children should not be vaccinated for the moment.” But that wording was a reflection of the WHO saying that children should not be prioritized for vaccinations over other groups because in many countries supplies of vaccine are limited and health care workers, front-line workers, the elderly and those with high-risk medical conditions should have first dibs.

There’s no evidence the WHO “reversed” its position on childhood covid vaccination in the way the viral social media posts allege. The WHO updated its guidance on June 23 to reflect a meeting of one of its scientific advisory groups, which said the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could be safely given to children 12 and up. But this came after those misleading posts first appeared.

We rate this claim False.

Sources:

American Academy for Pediatrics, “AAP, CDC Recommend COVID-19 Vaccine for Ages 12 and Older,” May 12, 2021

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “COVID-19 Vaccines for Children and Teens,” updated May 27, 2021

Email interview with Dr. Rachel Vreeman, director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, June 22, 2021

Email interview with Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at KFF, June 22, 2021

Email exchange with World Health Organization Media Relations, June 22, 2021

First Draft News, “Misleading Information About Vaccinating Children Is Linked to Old WHO Advice,” June 23, 2021

Google Trends, “World Health Organization COVID Vaccine,” accessed June 23, 2021

Twitter, Marjorie Taylor Greene status, June 22, 2021

Wayback Machine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Twitter status, June 22, 2021, accessed June 23, 2021

Wayback Machine, World Health Organization — COVID-19 Advice for the Public: Getting Vaccinated, April 8, 2021, accessed June 23, 2021

Wayback Machine, World Health Organization — “COVID-19 Advice for the Public: Getting Vaccinated, June 22, 2021,” accessed June 23, 2021

Wayback Machine, World Health Organization — “COVID-19 Advice for the Public: Getting Vaccinated,” June 23, 2021, accessed June 23, 2021

World Health Organization, “COVID-19 Advice for the Public: Getting Vaccinated,” accessed June 23, 2021

World Health Organization, “Interim Recommendations for Use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, BNT162b2, Under Emergency Use Listing,” June 15, 2021

World Health Organization, “Science in 5 — Episode #42 — Vaccines and Children,” June 11, 2021

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Debunking the biggest myth about wildfires

Ecologist Chad Hanson calls his new book “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate,” but it could just as well be titled Why We Should Love Dead Trees.

Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, uses the book to explain why wildfires are beneficial to forest ecosystems and why keeping fire-burned trees on the landscape creates a biodiversity-rich landscape that rivals old-growth forests.

Smokescreen, steeped in scientific details and personal stories, is written for the average reader — one who’s likely been primed by media and policymakers to regard wildfires as “devastating” and “catastrophic.”

The book examines why, from an ecological perspective, they’re neither. It also tackles the tough issue of why state and federal resources aimed at keeping communities safe from wildfires often do just the opposite.

The Revelator spoke with Hanson about how logging drives fires, what can be done to keep homes safe, and why protecting forests is crucial to fighting climate change.

In some ways it seems like your book is a PR campaign for wildfires, which get a very bad rap despite their ecological benefits. Why should we learn to value them?

Wildfires in our forests are villainized and vilified in many ways that are similar to how native predators like wolves and bears are villainized and vilified in the media, in movies, and by policymakers.

People have this tendency to think about fire in the forest in the same way they think about fire affecting their home. If their home burns, that’s devastating. And therefore, they think if a fire burns in the forest that must also be devastation. So they want solutions from policymakers. They want people to tell them that they’re going to fix the problem out there somewhere in the forest.

And I think we need to fundamentally shift that perception so that people understand that fire is a natural and beneficial ecological force out in the forest.

We actually have a deficit of fire in almost every forest ecosystem relative to natural pre-suppression levels. The real losses and harms that are happening in communities are almost entirely preventable if we focus our resources and attention near homes, but it’s going to take a 180-degree shift in direction from our current policies.

In the book I mentioned the example of a community that really focused on home fire safety and defensible space, pruning within 100 feet of homes. That made a difference in the 2017 Creek Fire in the mountains in Southern California.

There were 1,400 homes ultimately within the fire perimeter and only five burned. You can only see that kind of success when the focus is on home safety and community protection, as opposed to back-country vegetation management — removing trees, chaparral and other native vegetation — and thinking that’s somehow going to stop a weather-driven fire, which it doesn’t.

One of the things you cover extensively in the book is why logging after fires can be so ecologically detrimental. Why are these so-called “snag” forests of dead trees so important?

Fires, including mixed-intensity fires, have been burning in the forests of this planet for over 350 million years. We’ve had fires, including high-intensity fire patches, in our forests since 100 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. These are deep evolutionary processes, and there’s a deep evolutionary history of dependence and relationships with ecosystems and wildlife species related to that.

And it’s not just fire that burns at low intensity and creeps along the surface. Some species like that just fine, but others like it hot and they need the areas where fire burns more intensely and kills most, or all, the trees in patches.

It turns out that these places where fire or drought or other natural processes kill most or all the trees, these places are not destroyed. They’re not damaged from a biodiversity standpoint. They’re ecological treasures.

These snag forests are oftentimes areas that support the single highest levels of wildlife abundance and diversity in the entire forest ecosystem in a given region, provided that those areas are not subjected to post-disturbance logging — what they call “salvage logging” — which destroys all that wonderful rich complex habitat by taking away those dead trees that so many wildlife species need.

The Forest Service and other agencies engage in post-fire logging and thinning projects that they say will keep communities safer from fire. You point to science that says otherwise. Can you explain?

When people hear the term “thinning,” they think about workers out there with pruning shears and rakes. They don’t think chainsaws and bulldozers, which is the reality of thinning in the vast majority of cases. These are really just commercial logging operations.

“Thinning” is oftentimes a stand-in for what the agencies called “fuel reduction,” which is just another stand-in for logging. The reality is most of the time a thinning project will kill and remove upwards of 60 or 70% of the trees in a given stand. And that includes many mature trees, even oftentimes old-growth trees.

The other thing to understand is that thinning fundamentally changes the microclimate of the forest, and it changes it in ways that make the forest more susceptible to a wildfire, have a faster rate of spread, and a higher fire intensity most of the time.

That’s because thinning reduces the forest canopy cover. When that happens, it creates hotter and drier conditions on the forest floor, because it’s letting through more sunlight. Things are getting more desiccated during fire season.

By removing so many trees, thinning also reduces the windbreak effect that a denser forest has against the winds that drive the flames. So when areas are thinned, the fires can spread through faster.

In the first six hours of [California’s 2018] Camp Fire — between the point of ignition and reaching the town of Paradise and claiming 85 lives and over 14,000 homes — the fire burned through several thousand acres that had been heavily logged in the preceding decade. Some of that was post-fire logging where thousands and thousands of dead trees were removed under the guise of fuel reduction. Some of it was commercial thinning on national forest lands and also on private lands.

Those were the areas that the fire moved through by far the fastest and most intensely.

Outside of those areas, once the fire got into other forests that had no logging history or very limited logging history, it burned overwhelmingly at low and moderate intensity.

If weather and climate are the biggest drivers of fire, how should that inform our response to it?

Yes, weather and climate are definitely the primary drivers of wildfire behavior. In the largest scientific analysis that has been conducted on this question, we looked at the whole western United States — three decades of data, millions and millions of acres of fires — and what we found are two key things. Number one, weather and climate variables are dominant. That’s primarily what drives wildland fires. That means what you do with chainsaws is not going to stop these fires because essentially you’re trying to fight the wind and you can’t fight the wind with a chainsaw.

The secondary finding was that forest management, specifically logging, is also a relevant factor. A lot of people think if you have a denser forest, it’s going to burn more intensely. If you have a forest that’s protected from logging, and therefore it’s going to have more trees typically, then that forest has more fuel and it will burn more intensely. We found exactly the opposite.

Even though weather and climate were the primary factors, logging is a key secondary factor, and it strongly tends to make fires burn more intensely.

How do we better protect forests and value them as a tool for fighting climate change?

In order to really usher in an era of ecological management and climate-friendly management on our national forests and other federal public lands, we need to get the Forest Service out of the logging business. That means we’re going to need to enforce existing laws and we’re also going to need to pass new legislation to accomplish that.

There’s a broad consensus, among climate scientists and forest ecologists in this country and around the world, that moving away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible is absolutely necessary, but it is also not sufficient in order to overcome the climate crisis.

We need to draw down CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere. And the most environmentally beneficial way to do that is to protect natural habitats, especially the carbon-rich ones like forests and wetlands.

That is an essential part of climate solutions. In fact, we cannot succeed unless we do that. And the United States must play a leadership role internationally on this, because more logging [by volume of wood removed] happens in forests of the United States than in any other country in the world.

That puts us in a position of culpability, but also potential leadership to turn the corner.

Tucker Carlson prepares white nationalists for war: Don’t ignore the power of his rhetoric

“Stochastic terrorism” is the strategic repeated use of language and other means of communication intended to encourage violence while still maintaining some level of plausible deniability. The advantage of this tactic is that the individual or group that practices it can then claim innocence and accept no responsibility for the behavior of others. The most sophisticated uses of stochastic terrorism will result in a type of moral inversion — not to mention an inversion of reality — in which the aggressor can then claim they are somehow the “real victims.”

This has been one of the dominant strategies of the American right since at least the 1980s, with liberals, progressives, nonwhite people and other designated groups deemed to be the enemy Other targeted as “socialists” or “communists,” anti-American or anti-Christian, “politically correct” snowflakes, “parasites,” “losers” and “takers,” along with other demeaning language intended to provoke or legitimate violence.

This language both reflects political polarization in the United States and fuels it. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans are not equally polarized: Since the 1990s it is the Republican Party that has become increasingly extreme, rejecting any pretense of “normal politics” and seeking to undermine democracy. It now more closely resembles right-wing extremist political parties in Europe than more mainstream or “centrist” political organizations.

The Trump regime and its larger neofascist movement (which now includes virtually the entire Republican Party) escalated the use of stochastic terrorism to extreme levels.

The result was a record increase in hate crimes and political violence against nonwhite people, Muslims, Jews, immigrants and other targeted groups. This wave of right-wing violence and terrorism included mass shootings and other lethal actions. In the wake of the Trump regime’s coup attempt and the Capitol attack, law enforcement and other experts are warning that white supremacist and other right-wing violence remains the greatest threat to America’s domestic safety and security.

The spiral of escalation continues: Right-wing stochastic terrorism is increasingly being replaced by direct public threats of violence against those deemed to be “the enemy”.

Last week a host on the One America News Network (OANN), which can better be described as a right-wing propaganda outlet than a news network, appeared to endorse mass executions of Trump’s enemies who supposedly tried to “carry out a coup” against him. By implication, the host also suggested killing Americans who voted for Joe Biden:

How many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency? And when all the dust settles from the audit in Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who are responsible for overthrowing the election?

What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them? Well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution. Treason is considered the highest of all crimes and is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution which states that anyone is guilty of treason if they support America’s enemies.

These are not implied threats of violence. They are direct commands to right-wing violence.

Healthy democratic societies have a political culture in which public policy disputes and other disagreements are resolved without using force. What OANN and other elements of the right-wing movement desire is a form of anti-politics, where they are able to assert their will over others without consequences, and where to dissent from the right-wing agenda is a crime to be punished by violence. Ultimately, today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement have embraced a fascist logic in which political ideology becomes religious dogma and heretics are to be driven out.

This is just one of the many examples of how far Donald Trump normalized right-wing political violence. Granting permission for violence and other anti-social and anti-human behavior was a core element of Trump’s fascist appeal for his followers. Trumpism is a political cult: Violence is one of its rites and a way of bonding the leader to the followers. To that end, the attraction to violence and the collective longing to act out violent impulses against “enemies” or “outsiders” with impunity represents a type of cathartic freedom for Trumpists and other fascists.

For stochastic terrorism and other commands to violence to achieve maximum impact, they must be repeated and reinforced by various sources in an echo chamber effect. Fox News has long been the epicenter of that echo chamber, with Tucker Carlson as one of its most powerful voices.

Last Thursday, Carlson continued with his campaign to defend (white) “civilization” against its “enemies” by somehow connecting a supposed controversy about scholar Michael Eric Dyson to 19th-century pseudoscience and then to “critical race theory” as somehow part of a nebulous and nefarious plot to “oppress” white people in “their own country.”

At the crescendo of his performance, Carlson said this, specifically attacking Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

And by the way, if it’s a medical condition, at what age can you catch white rage? Most of us assumed our two-year-olds were just teething. Now we know it’s their whiteness that’s making them so angry. Thanks, Mark Milley. We appreciate your contribution to our generation’s scientific racism. By the way, have you read anything about winning wars recently? Apparently not.  

We could go on — pundit after senator after professor after general — each one of them spewing race hate — whiteness! White rage! — dressed up as some new academic theory. We certainly have the tape. We’ll spare you. You’ve seen it. It’s everywhere. The question, how do we get out of this vortex before it’s too late? How do we save the country before we become Rwanda? What should we be teaching our children, so that they can live in a country that you want to live in, one full of many different kinds of people who actually like each other, who can work together, who are united by the fact that they are all Americans? That’s the question.  

This was accompanied by an image on the screen that read “Anti-White Mania.”

Carlson and his writers are masters of mainstreaming white supremacist talking points and narratives. Through a process known as “narrative laundering,” profoundly racist arguments are massaged into something more palatable for the millions of people (predominantly white) who watch his program every evening.

Those who are not familiar with the white supremacist movement and its set of imaginary narratives likely did not grasp the deeper meanings and allusions that summoned by Carlson in his claims about Rwanda and “anti-white” violence. Most obviously, Carlson’s reference to Rwanda was an attempt to invoke the inter-ethnic genocide that occurred there in the 1990s as a way of provoking racial paranoia and anxieties about the supposed possibility of “white genocide” in America.

Through that rhetorical move, Carlson was also directly signaling to decades-old, if not centuries-old, fears and fantasies about a “race war” in which white people would finally subjugate and then exterminate or exile Black and brown people, “cleansing” North America and Europe and driving such perceived outsiders back to their “homelands” in Africa or elsewhere. The not-quite-articulated result of this apocalyptic conflict would be a “white nation” and white global empire, also involving a second Holocaust against the Jewish people, who are viewed by white supremacists as part of a global cabal that is somehow “controlling” Black people to do their bidding. It is no coincidence that much of the QAnon conspiracy theory — an updated version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — is structured in a similar manner.

Carlson was also channeling white supremacist obsessions with supposed large-scale anti-white violence in South Africa and Zimbabwe, especially reports of attacks by Black people against white farmers. Such incidents have been a source of compulsive fascination in the white supremacist community in recent decades.

In an effort to put Carlson’s allusions to race war and genocide into broader context, I asked Texas A&M communications professor Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on rhetoric and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” for her insights. She responded by email:

War rhetoric typically combines ad baculum (threats of force), reification (treating people as inhuman objects), and ad hominem (personal attacks, name-calling), scapegoating (placing the blame for problems on the dehumanized other) and victimage (we are innocent, but under threat). The combination of these features is thought to prepare a nation or people to hate, fear and despise an enemy so that it will be motivated to war.

In other words, Carlson is relying on war rhetoric, while at the same time telling his audience to fear what he describes as the “war rhetoric” being used against them.

Politics is not warfare. People who hold different political or policy positions are not enemies.

But the overarching narrative of Fox News is just that: Politics is war and Democrats are the enemy.

It’s really irresponsible and dangerous propaganda.

These threats of political violence and terrorism should not be understood as a joke, as a “gaffe,” as “strong language” or hyperbole or with some other euphemism intended to downplay their intent and meaning. Violence is one of the main weapons used by fascists in their assault on democracy. In response to these escalating threats, the Democrats, the mainstream news media, and other elites prefer to continue their set of self-delusions about a return to “normalcy” and a naive belief that widespread political violence cannot happen in the United States in the 21st century.

Many of these elites and other influentials — like the American people at large — have been exhausted, intimidated and traumatized by the Age of Trump and its perfidy. Their response, however, is unacceptable: a state of denial about the existential threat to American democracy and society embodied by Trumpism and ascendant neofascism.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their followers consistently, transparently and directly continue to show the world who and what they really are. Denial of this reality is not salvation. It is only a pathway to doom. Unfortunately, too many Americans are wrapping themselves in denial as if it were armor — or, more properly, a security blanket — instead of facing a worsening situation and rising to the challenge.

6 favorite places to buy plants online — pros and cons included

Whether you’re new to caring for houseplants, or you’re already living in an indoor jungle, ordering plants online can be a super convenient way to acquire new plant babies. However, as with any online shopping endeavor, it’s important to make sure you’re purchasing from reputable sellers, especially when you can’t see the actual plant you’ll be receiving before you buy it.

Reputable retailers will know how to ensure that your new plants will survive the trip (that means good packaging), they won’t ship plants that are infested with bugs or disease, they’ll have a history of happy customers with good reviews, and they’ll be transparent about what you can expect when you purchase from them. Here are six of our favorite places to order plants online — pros and cons included.

1. The Sill

The Sill is a very popular online retailer that focuses specifically on selling and shipping plants. They offer a large selection of houseplants, planters, and even monthly plant subscriptions (if you’re so inclined), although they’re not the best option if you’re searching for rare or hard to find plant varieties.

They also have lots of helpful care tips and guides available on the site, which makes it a great option for beginners who may need some help with ongoing plant care. Plus, even if you do happen to kill your new houseplant (but we’re rooting for the opposite), The Sill offers one-year guarantees on some varieties — meaning they’ll send you a new one for free.

https://www.instagram.com/p/COvVOTyFEB0/

2. Hirt’s Gardens

Hirt’s Gardens is a nursery based in Ohio that also offers online shipping across the U.S. In addition to a healthy variety of houseplants (including some rarer varieties), Hirt’s also sells shrubs, trees, perennials, and some fruit and veggie plants. Similar to The Sill, Hirts also has a monthly plant subscription option which promises a monthly curated box of houseplants delivered to your doorstep. Compared to some other DTC plant sellers, their prices are extremely reasonable, and they have next-day shipping available on their site. Unfortunately, they don’t offer any guarantee or warranty on their plants (other than potential issues upon receiving the plant, for which a photo is usually required), but the low price-points make it easier to justify any potential plant fatalities.

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3. Home Depot

Did you know that you can order live plants online from Home Depot? This is a perfect choice if you’re looking for a cost-effective option, and since there are so many Home Depot locations across the country, shipping times are usually pretty quick considering it may be coming from a store in the same city as you. They’re also known for their quality packaging — meaning, no damaged plants. However, with lower prices come some potential things to watch out for, including pests and some aesthetic damage. Unfortunately, Home Depot is not the place to go if you are looking for any rare or hard-to-find plants. They stick to a fairly regular inventory, which includes popular and common plants that are sure to sell.

4. Etsy

A lesser-known option for ordering plants online is Etsy. That’s right, Etsy isn’t just for crafts — there are a large number of nurseries, independent sellers, and even other houseplant enthusiasts that turn to Etsy to sell their plants. This means that there’s a huge selection of houseplants, including rare and hard-to-find varieties that may not be available at most nurseries and plant shops. However, there’s always a risk when it comes to Etsy or other small independent online shops that you may run into scams, so it’s especially important to do your research before you purchase. Make sure you read the shop’s reviews, and as a general rule — if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CM5XzlLF1zN/

5. Bloomscape

Bloomscape is another reputable online retailer that focuses entirely on plants. While it’s one of the more expensive options on this list, Bloomscape is known for their healthy plants that are pre-potted (meaning they aren’t delivered in nursery pots), and packaged extremely well. Bloomscape also has a considerable selection of large and extra-large plants on their site, so if you’re looking for the perfect focal piece for your living room or dining room, Bloomscape may have just what you need.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CP-4TcUMkph/

6. Amazon 

Last but not least, Amazon also offers a variety of live plants that can be delivered straight to your door. Amazon definitely tops this list if you are looking for low prices — you can find plants for as little as $2 each! And of course, Amazon is known for its quick and reliable delivery (especially if you have Prime), so if you’re already a shopper, this may be an easy choice for you. However, unlike some of the other retailers listed here, Amazon is not especially well known for its packaging when it comes to plants, and some reviewers note that their plants arrived damaged or a little smushed from the transport. As with anything else, check the reviews and return policy before adding a plant to your cart.

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

Michael Cohen on Trump legal drama: “They have documents to prove more than you know”

According to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, a top executive at the Trump Organization is not a necessary component in the potential legal prosecution of the ex-president.

New York prosecutors are reportedly considering criminal charges against Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer for the Trump Organization. Legal observers have noted that Donald Trump himself could face repercussions if Weisselberg decides to cooperate with the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of the Trump Organization.

Daniel Goldman, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who served as the lead counsel for House Democrats in the first Trump impeachment trial, predicted on Twitter that “if Allen Weisselberg does not cooperate with the Manhattan DA’s office — and all indications are that he has not and will not — that office will not be able to criminally charge Donald Trump for any of the conduct under investigation.”

But Cohen, who spent years working as Trump’s “fixer,” vehemently disagreed.

“Wrong!” Cohen wrote in response. “They have documents to prove more than you know or should be commenting on. Weisselberg is not the key to a Trump indictment.”

Cohen has met with top officials from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office several times this year.

Rising GOP star Ron DeSantis goes after campus thoughtcrime with vague, threatening new law

Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the rising star of all conservative rising stars, signed a Republican-backed bill that will require public colleges and universities in Florida to survey the ideological leanings of their students and faculty. The bill, HB 233, which purportedly aims to assess each state school’s level of “intellectual freedom,” comes largely in response to the current right-wing hysteria over “critical race theory,” and also to the broader perception that American academia has become a breeding ground for “leftist indoctrination.”

“It used to be thought that a university campus was a place where you’d be exposed to a lot of different ideas,” DeSantis said in a press conference last week. “Unfortunately now, the norm is really these are more intellectually repressive environments. You have orthodoxies that are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, or even suppressed. We don’t want that in Florida.”

Though the motivations behind the measure seem clear enough, the bill’s language evades any explanation of what the survey’s findings might be used for. Florida Republicans have largely stayed mum on this point — except for DeSantis himself, that is, who last week suggested the data might be used to dictate state funding. 

“We do not want [universities] as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said. “That’s not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”

Given the Republican obsession with “cancel culture,” DeSantis’ threat to go after “thoughtcrime” (in George Orwell’s phrase) could have a chilling effect on the Sunshine State’s educational landscape. 

State Sen. Lori Berman, a Democrat who opposed the bill in Education Committee meetings, told Salon that she thinks DeSantis made “a serious threat” that could dampen the free speech rights of professors and students.

“It’s quite possible this could result in certain professors being dismissed on the university level,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past our governor to pull funding from universities if they don’t dismiss these professors or change some things they’re not happy with.”

Though the bill has already been enacted, it remains unclear precisely how the surveys will be conducted or what questions will be asked.

Berman noted that the bill does not require participation from students; it merely mandates that the surveys be distributed to students. This could lead to significant participation bias, where students who feel ideologically at odds with their surroundings are overrepresented among respondents.  

Democratic state Sen. Tina Polsky, who also serves on the Committee on Education, echoed Berman’s concerns, telling Salon that HB 233 has “so many problems.”

“We have no idea what the implications are, whether it’s getting professors fired, or having to hire professors of different ilks to fill some kind of ‘thought diversity’ quota,” she said. “And of course, funding is a concern.”

“No one really knows what the point of the surveys is,” Polsky added. “Nobody knows who’s going to fill it out, how many students, or whether it’s going to be accurate.”

Salon reached out to more than two dozen professors and school administrations throughout Florida’s public educational institutions to gauge their feelings toward HB 233. 

The University of Florida, the state’s flagship research university, responded with a statement: “In keeping with the best traditions of higher education, the University of Florida is a marketplace of ideas where a wide variety of opinions are expressed and independent inquiry and vigorous academic deliberation are valued. We believe the survey will reflect that, and we look forward to widespread participation across campus.”

No administrators at other colleges or universities responded to Salon’s inquiries.

Berman said that Florida’s state schools are “in a position where they’re not going to want to speak out against anything the governor and Republican leadership is supporting,” adding, “If it comes to it, I hope they support their faculty.”

Dr. David Canton, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Florida, told Salon in an interview that the bill is “a political stunt – a diversion or way to carry over to November 2022 [i.e., DeSantis’ re-election campaign] due to a lack of any policies.”

“If you look at the data and numbers,” he added, “the reality is that it’s hard to get a diversity course as a requirement; you get so much resistance from some students.” Florida colleges and universities, he said, are “not liberal bastions of indoctrination.”

Canton also noted that the bill does not serve the state’s long-term economic interests because it could drive top-tier scholars away from graduate programs or faculty positions in Florida schools. 

Other provisions in HB 233, beyond the mandatory surveys, have also become controversial. One such provision allows students to “record video or audio of class lectures for their own personal educational use.”

While the state of Florida has a two-party consent law — meaning that all individuals in any form of communication must consent to being recorded — the bill appears to carve out a specific exemption for college and university classrooms, which have previously been understood as private spaces. 

Karen Morian, the president of United Faculty of Florida, one of the state’s faculty unions, told Salon in an interview that the provision “was created to allow the creation of ‘gotcha’ videos or reputation-destroying videos,” in which conservative students record and leak evidence of their professors promoting “radical leftist” views. 

During the bill’s consideration, Morian said a host of concerns arose around illegal sharing of such videos, the potential for deceptive editing, and the non-consensual recording of minors. “All these questions were raised in committee and debate, but none of them were clarified nor was the language revised,” she said.

In recent years, professors at many academic institutions across the country have been the subjects of “whistleblowing” by conservative students who feel their voices have been stifled. In April, the Intercept reported on an organized “whistleblowing” effort by Campus Reform — a billionaire-backed conservative nonprofit that trains student activists to expose “liberal bias” in higher education. It found that the conservative group targeted hundreds of professors with “online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire [them].” According to a survey this year by the American Association of University Professors, 40% of professors targeted by Campus Reform reported receiving threat by email, phone, or social media.

In 2016, Turning Point USA, another conservative youth advocacy group funded by right-wing billionaires, similarly launched the Professor Watchlist, an online registry of academics who it suggested “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site also led to a number of threats made against professors, including threats of rape and lethal violence. 

Apart from video and audio recordings, HB 233 also addresses attempts by school administrations to “shield” their students from discomfort. The measure defines “shielding” as “limit[ing] students’, faculty members’, or staff members’ access to … ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive” and prohibits the practice altogether, which conceivably restricts or removes administrators’ ability to decide who should be given a platform on campus. 

Morian told Salon that administrators “have the safety of students to consider when making those decisions.” 

In 2017, the University of Florida allowed neo-Nazi Richard Spencer onto campus to give a speech, a move that was angrily rejected by much of the student body. After the event, police arrested three of Spencer’s supporters who made “Nazi salutes, repeated Hitler chants and then shot at a group of protesters.”

Administrators should have the flexibility to deny such speakers access to university platforms, either for educational or campus safety reasons, Morian said. “The legislature has seemingly taken those decisions away from our institutions. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Though HB 233 has received considerable media attention recently, it is best understood as part of Florida’s broader effort to crack down on the perceived or apparent influence of the left in both K-12 and higher education. 

During this year’s legislative session, the state Senate attempted to pass a bill to reduce the amount of scholarship money given to students who major in lower-paying fields in the humanities. That bill failed to reach the governor’s desk. 

More recently, DeSantis signed a bill last week that will require Florida K-12 schools to teach their students that communist governments are undesirable. The governor said Florida’s public school curriculum will now paint “portraits in patriotism,” and provide “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.”

Polsky, the Democratic state senator, called the latest attempt by conservatives to wrest control over Florida’s educational system especially ironic. “It’s a big government situation,” she said. That’s what “they say they’re against.”

White nationalist “groyper” leader doubles down on Jan. 6 Capitol riot, calling it “awesome”

With hundreds of felony criminal cases pending against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, you might assume most organizers of that day’s events would express regret for what transpired, or perhaps simply stay silent. Instead two people in leadership roles on Jan. 6 have since struck a different tune, calling the riot “awesome” and floating the idea that it might have to happen again — perhaps bigger the second time.

“Stop the Steal” leader Ali Alexander, along with white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, leader of the far-right “groyper army,” have emerged from the aftermath of the Capitol riot unfazed, and with larger audiences than ever. 

On Friday evening, with his longtime friend and fellow white nationalist Tim Gionet (aka Baked Alaska) facing felony charges over breaching the Capitol building, Fuentes said how pleased he was the events of Jan. 6. 

“I am unapologetic. I thought the Capitol [riot] was awesome; it was awesome! And so was Trump. And Trump was awesome because he was racist. Trump was awesome because he was sexist,” Fuentes stated. “The only thing Trump wasn’t awesome for was being antisemitic; he wasn’t antisemitic.”

“But the rest was awesome. And people have got to get racist,” he added. 

Since the Capitol riot, Alexander has kept a low profile, speaking to his most loyal followers through the encrypted messaging service Telegram. From behind a screen, Alexander has called for his followers to “bully” government employees and hinted at possible further “revolutions.” 

While neither Alexander nor Fuentes entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, both played significant roles in inspiring their followers to storm the halls of Congress. Neither of them returned Salon requests for comment for this story. 

According to a new report from ProPublica published last weekend, Alexander saw Fuentes as a vital ally in drawing large numbers of fanatical Trump supporters to Washington — which left a bitter taste in the mouths of some fellow right-wing activists, given Fuentes’ overtly bigoted views:

Alexander’s willingness to work with such people sparked conflict even within his inner circle.

“Is Nick Fuentes now a prominent figure in Stop the Steal?” asked Brandon Straka, an openly gay conservative activist, in a November text message, obtained exclusively by ProPublica. “I find him disgusting,” Straka said, pointing to Fuentes’ vehemently anti-LGBT views.

Alexander saw more people and more power. He wrote that Fuentes was “very valuable” at “putting bodies in places,” and that both [far-right radio host Alex] Jones and Fuentes were “willing to push bodies … where we point.”

Misinformation, vaccine accessibility hurdles result in hundreds of COVID-19 deaths each week

The number of deaths from COVID-19 has drastically declined since the beginning of the year.

In January 2021, the country’s deadliest month of the pandemic, the U.S. hit a grim record of nearly 4,000 people dying from complications of COVID-19 in one day. For the week ending June 28, 2021, only 168 new deaths were reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While this is a promising trajectory that tangibly shows the success of the country’s mass vaccination program, Americans are still dying every day. Most of those deaths are of those who are not yet vaccinated, generally due to either lack of accessibility to the vaccine or anti-vaccine attitudes. 

“In my experience treating COVID patients, the ones I’m seeing now are all exclusively unvaccinated individuals,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center, in a phone interview. “Most of which have some high-risk condition, they were obese or they’re elderly people who just have refrained from getting vaccinated, that’s exclusively what I’ve been taking care of for at least probably the last two months or so.”

Adalja, who works in an intensive care unit in Pennsylvania, recently had a 45-year-old patient who weighed 500 pounds die from COVID-19 complications.

“More people need to be vaccinated, there’s still not enough,” Adalja said. “There are still major gaps in vaccine coverage that’s causing some people to get infected, and some people to require hospitalization, and a couple hundred people to die every day.”

The CDC reports that 66.2 percent of American adults have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Among all age groups, that equates to a mere 46.4 percent of the total American population being fully vaccinated. States that continue to have higher rates of COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations include Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, and Washington. In Missouri, local news outlets report that surges in the southwest region of the state are overwhelming hospitals once again who are having to turn away patients. Local health officials are urging people to get vaccinated as these outbreaks are happening among largely unvaccinated communities. 

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“The virus doesn’t respect the boundaries of political subdivisions like counties, states or regions, and with the greater chance of transmission with the Delta variant, hot spots will be inundated with patients,” Dave Dillon, a spokesperson for the Missouri Hospital Association, told the Springfield News-Leader. “It is fair to say that hospitals are already stretched to address pent-up demand for health services that were curtailed last year, and into spring.”

According to a CNN analysis that probed deeper into demographics of COVID-19 deaths over the last couple months, many are younger and more are disproportionately Black Americans.

“These lower rates may be due in part, to vaccine hesitancy, but they may also be due to inequities in vaccine access,” Dr. Lisa Cooper, founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, told CNN. “Many African Americans in the South live in rural areas with limited access to health care facilities. Furthermore, many people may have other stressors related to housing, food, or job insecurity, which may be preventing them from getting vaccinated.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, attributes vaccine hesitancy to a few different factors.

“There’s a lot of misinformation, and there are reports that are circulating that say how many people have died after a vaccination, they look credible and calm,” Gandhi said. “The problem with [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] is it’s completely voluntary, doctors, patients, anyone can report anything — so if data is reported people can essentially report that a death is happening, and say that it was around the time someone got a vaccine.”

Gandhi added that misinformation being spread by people who appear credible is harming public trust in the vaccine, too. Then, there are young people who might not be motivated to get the vaccine, or perhaps they believe the myth that they can die from it. 

And then there are the reports that people who have had breakthrough cases, meaning they’re fully vaccinated but get COVID-19, are still dying. The CDC states that the total number of individuals who died after getting COVID-19 despite vaccination is 750 — a very small number out of  the 153,776,118 Americans who have been fully vaccinated.

The rigors of work may affect vaccination rates, too, Gandhi said.

“Anytime that you’re on an hourly wage and your employer doesn’t give you time off to go get the vaccine, nor does he give you time off the next day if you don’t feel well, then you’re not going to take time out to lose your hourly wage,” Gandhi said. ” I think that’s still happening in terms of access.” 

The consequences of vaccine inaccessibility are being observed now, as deaths generally occur between two to 8 weeks after a person first has symptoms of COVID-19.

As Salon previously reported, many municipalities have been relying on smaller, more localized efforts — like mobile vaccination clinics — to reach rural, lower socioeconomic, and marginalized communities and close the vaccination gap. But that doesn’t seem to work in fighting misinformation and convincing die-hard anti-vaxxers.

Doctors fear that misinformation about the vaccine is costing people their lives, and misinformation will continue to do so as the coronavirus spreads in unvaccinated populations.

“A lot of the people have kind of swallowed some of the myths about the vaccine,” Adalja said. “And that may be what is the major aspect holding up vaccination.”

*This story was updated on June 30 at 2:24 pm EST to add one detail about the 45-year-old who died