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The best cheese for cheeseburgers, period

That Cheese Plate is a column by Marissa Mullen — cookbook author, photographer, and Food52’s Resident Cheese Plater. With Marissa’s expertise all things cheddar, comté, and crudité — plus tips for how to make it all look extra special, using stuff you probably have on hand — we’ll be crafting our own cheesy masterpieces without a hitch. This month, Marissa is sharing her thoughts on the best possible cheese to melt on a burger, inspired by the Absolute Best Tests column.

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It was in 1934 that the term “cheeseburger” was first coined, on the menu at Kaelin’s restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. They topped a patty with American cheese in the hopes of adding a “new tang to the hamburger,” and this now-classic staple would soon appear everywhere from diners to backyards, all across the U.S. Over the years, the cheeseburger has morphed from its humble origins — sometimes so much that the folks at Kaelin’s probably wouldn’t recognize it as the same dish. Restaurants love to experiment with various toppings and condiments, from sautéed mushrooms and crispy onions to aioli and pickle relish, to transform the traditional cheeseburger into something new. At the core, however, the cheeseburger always relies on a ground beef base and gooey cheese topping.

Everyone seems to claim a favorite style of cheeseburger, whether it’s classic American cheese or something more adventurous, like a blue cheese burger. I decided to really put the concept to the test to find out which is the absolute best cheese to use on a burger, considering flavor and meltability.

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The cheeses


Photo by Marissa Mullen

I used eight different cheeses for this test, including a plant-based one as a wild card:

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The setup

For this trial, I graded the cheese’s ability to melt on a warm beef patty (considering its texture and consistency once melted) and how each cheese tasted with the burger. Each cheese received a melting score and a flavor score.

For each trial, I used:

  • 2-ounce ground beef patty, seasoned with kosher salt and black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • Grill pan with lid
  • Medium-high heat
  • Burger cooked for 3 minutes on each side until browned
  • Cheese placed on the burger and the lid placed on the pan, continuing to cook over medium heat until melted (the exact time varied by type)

* * *

The tests and Marissa’s cheesy findings

American Cheese

Tested: 1/4-inch-thick slice of American cheese, covered and cooked for 45 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

First up we have the cheeseburger’s original, American cheese. Although this product isn’t necessarily considered “cheese” by everyone, I had to include it in the running for originality’s sake. American cheese is made by blending a cheese base (usually Colby) along with other ingredients such as cream, water, salt, spices, and an emulsifying agent. Depending on the brand, it can be rubbery, individually plastic-wrapped slices, or a creamier-textured larger slab, which can be sliced at the deli counter or at home. For this test, I used the latter. American cheese was one of the best melting cheeses, taking about 45 seconds to soften in an even layer. The flavor interacted with the juicy burger in a complementary way — not too overpowering, but buttery and decadent.

Melting Score: 10/10

Flavor Score: 8/10

Cheddar

Tested: 1/4-inch-thick slice of cheddar cheese, covered and cooked for 1 minute 30 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

Cheddar didn’t melt as quickly as I thought it would, cooking for almost a full minute longer than the American slice. Once fully melted, the cheddar was dispersed evenly across the burger in a consistent texture. Like many cheeses, cheddar’s consistency is based on age. Mature cheddar (aged 1 year or more) contains less moisture, resulting in a more crumbly texture. For burgers, I suggest using a younger cheddar (aged 2 to 3 months) with a higher moisture content for easier melting, such as Cabot or Tillamook. The flavor worked well with the savory burger, adding in a sharp element to the bite. However, I wish it was a bit more creamy rather than earthy in flavor.

Melting Score: 8/10

Flavor Score: 7/10

Fresh Mozzarella

Tested: 1/2-inch-thick slice of mozzarella cheese, covered and cooked for 1 minute 45 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

Mozzarella was one of my favorite cheeses during this experiment. Fresh and smooth, this fior di latte is an elastic textured cheese, making for excellent melting capabilities. It melted in a way that developed a silky texture, rather than runny, like other cheeses. Cooking for about 1 minute and 45 seconds, the cheese held its own and enveloped the burger in a thick layer. Taste-wise, the mozzarella and burger combination worked wonderfully together. The creamy melted cheese was mild enough to not overpower the burger, but slightly sweet enough to add contrast to the savory meat.

Melting Score: 9/10

Flavor Score: 9/10

Brie

Tested: Two 1/2-inch-thick slices of Brie cheese side by side, covered and cooked for 1 minute 15 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was, but Brie won the melted cheese competition in my book. With the rind still intact, these little slices melted in a gooey, creamy layer over the burger. Brie has notes of crème fraîche, cultured butter, and sometimes earthy notes of mushroom and cabbage. I typically love adding sautéed mushrooms to a burger, and Brie brought out those umami notes my palate was craving. Not to mention the texture feels like a party on your taste buds.

Melting Score: 10/10

Flavor Score: 10/10

Blue

Tested: 1/2-inch-thick slice of blue cheese, covered and cooked for 1 minute 15 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

In theory, I felt that blue would have been a contender for this contest. I’ve seen blue cheese on burgers across countless restaurant menus. To be honest, I wasn’t completely satisfied. It took about 1 minute and 45 seconds to melt, but the melting consistency was not ultra gooey like other cheeses tested. I usually love blue cheese paired with honey or something sweet and savory, like a bacon jam, but on the burger it was a bit too pungent and overwhelming. The cheese overpowered the details in the meat, making the flavors feel overly busy. However, if you’re a fan of very intense flavors, I’d give this one a shot.

Melting Score: 6/10

Flavor Score: 7/10

Provolone

Tested: 1/4-inch-thick slice of provolone cheese, covered and cooked for 45 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

Another great melting cheese, provolone pulled through in this experiment. The texture is less creamy than American, but more buttery than cheddar. I used a younger provolone in this test, which had a smooth and mild flavor. The cheese took only about 45 seconds to melt over the burger in a soft, even layer. However, once paired with the burger, the mellow notes of the cheese were definitely overpowered by the meat.

Melting Score: 9/10

Flavor Score: 7/10

Emmental

Tested: 1/4-inch-thick slice of Emmental cheese, covered and cooked for 1 minute 20 seconds


Photo by Marissa Mullen

Emmental is the cheese that’s notably referred to as “Swiss cheese” in America. With its distinctive holes (or as cheese professionals say, “eyes”), this cheese is frequently spotted on burgers during barbecue season. It took a bit longer to melt than the American and provolone cheeses, but managed to melt in a consistent, even layer. I might be biased, but I don’t love the taste of Swiss deli slices in general — I’m more of a Gruyère girl. In fact, a nutty Gruyère (a more complex Swiss cheese) would have been a better choice for this one, as the Emmental was too mild to stand up to the meaty flavors.

Melting Score: 8/10

Flavor Score: 6/10

Plant-Based Smoked Gouda

Tested: 1/4-inch-thick plant-based smoked Gouda, covered and cooked for 2 minutes


Photo by Marissa Mullen

This was the wild card in my test, mainly because I wanted to see if a dairy-free cheese (I used the Follow Your Heart Smoked Gouda) could actually melt. This one had some trouble. With a base of water, coconut oil, and potato starch, the plant-based cheese did not rise to the occasion. I didn’t want to overcook my burger, so I removed it from the pan after 2 minutes. Although a suitable dairy-free option for snacking, it was not the best for a burger. In addition, the melted taste was bland, only mildly smoky, and lacked creaminess.

Melting Score: 2/10

Flavor Score: 2/10

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So, which is the best cheese for a cheeseburger, according to our resident cheese plater?

  • After testing out these various cheese styles, I marked Brie as my favorite cheese to melt on a burger. Spread the word!
  • Second place was mozzarella, followed by American cheese. (I don’t normally see Brie or mozzarella as options for burgers in many restaurants, but maybe that should be reconsidered.)
  • If you don’t eat dairy, I’d recommend doing a few taste tests of some other dairy-free styles at the grocery store for your own experiment.

Friends are saying “I do” — but might not understand the legal risks of their platonic marriages

When a couple decides to tie the knot, they’ll often say they’re marrying their best friend.

But what if two actual best friends – no sex or even romantic feelings involved – just decided to get married?

Friends, The New York Times recently reported, are starting to “marry in a platonic fashion, swearing never to leave each other for better or for worse.”

These “nonconjugal couples” – mutually supportive relationships of friends or relatives that lack a sexual component – are powerfully challenging dominant social and legal norms around what constitutes family.

I’ve recently written about how these nontraditional couples could one day gain legal recognition – and thus tax breaks and couple benefits – in the courtrooms of the U.S., Canada and Europe.

But legal recognition, as of today, doesn’t exist. So there are risks in saying “I do” to a friend.

The legal pitfalls of platonic marriages

Two friends can get married for a host of reasons.

They might not believe in the traditional heterosexual family and wish to challenge it. They might simply think that their best friend is the person they want to share chores, meals and finances with. Or they might also believe that, as law-abiding taxpayers, they should also be able to receive the family benefits that other married couples receive, like filing their tax returns jointly.

At the moment, though, friendship is not recognized by law. And only a handful of states allow friends to gain legal recognition through registration as domestic partners. These include Maine, Maryland and Colorado.

However, any two consenting adults – regardless of their genders – can get married in the U.S. Two friends, therefore, can pretty easily pull it off. But they can’t admit that they’re only friends.

Legally speaking, it could be seen as a sham marriage.

For this reason, two friends who tie the knot and receive a marriage certificate can still face considerable risks. They expose themselves to criminal sanctions and civil penalties on grounds of “marriage fraud” if a federal or state agency becomes suspicious of the union. And they may also be denied benefits usually granted to married couples.

Kerry Abrams, the current dean of Duke University School of Law, has outlined different doctrines developed in welfare law, social security law and immigration law over the course of the 20th century to specifically detect fake or sham marriages. Whether it’s two people tying the knot so one can gain citizenship, seeking to obtain a housing allowance or getting married ahead of a trial so they can’t be forced to testify against one another, the conclusions of the courts are the same: Their marriage is a sham, and the individuals expose themselves to criminal or civil liability and a termination of benefits.

Detecting a sham marriage isn’t easy. And courts acknowledge that there are many reasons that may motivate a person’s decision to marry that aren’t “romantic,” such as a desire to file income jointly to gain tax exemptions.

Therefore, courts look at whether there is what they call a “specific illicit purpose.” As a judge wrote in his ruling in a case about a couple that fraudulently got married to gain a housing allowance:

“It is not the absence of a perfect or ideal ‘love, honor, and cherish’ motivation of the parties that renders the consequences flowing from the appellant’s actions in the case before us criminal; rather, it is the affirmative presence of a singularly focused illicit one – an intent to fraudulently acquire a government payment stream – that does so.”

Two married friends will need to demonstrate before courts that they did not have a “singularly focused illicit” purpose of acquiring some sort of government benefit. But they’ll have a hard time doing so. That’s because when courts seek to understand whether the couple intended to live together as husband and wife, they’ll be assuming the family norm in which the couple has a sexual relationship.

Since there is no romantic relationship, judges will likely default to arguing that the friends got married only to game the system.

Can the Constitution help?

At the constitutional level, there is this one decision that might lend some hope to nonconjugal couples: Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, also known as “the hippies case.”

The Moreno case concerned a group of impoverished, unrelated people living under the same roof who, at some point, were denied food stamps by the government. The government argued that its goal was fraud prevention: In its view, households with unrelated people – such as friends – are more likely to commit fraud to illegally obtain government benefits.

The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of the household in 1972. It concluded that minimizing fraud is a valid interest, but that the government could do so through other, more specific measures, instead of just denying benefits to a whole group of people.

However there are two problems with using this decision as a precedent for opening the door to allow two friends to marry. First, the outcome was largely driven by what the Supreme Court deemed the “cynical” motives of the legislature, which, in amending the law, had singled out “hippies” as undeserving of food stamps. Second, it isn’t about marriage, per se; it’s about who can gain access to one specific legal benefit: food stamps.

So I would argue that the constitutional decision that says something about the fate of platonic marriages is not Moreno, but Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court judgment on same-sex marriage.

The idea of marriage Obergefell puts forth is one founded on rather traditional family norms. The plaintiffs in the Obergefell case – a gay couple – were, in every way aside from their same gender, congruent with what most Americans understand a married couple to be. Their relationship was sexual, exclusive, romantic, nuclear and involved two people. They were also committed to each other for life.

To show that same-sex marriage is a subset of the broader fundamental right to marry, LGBTQ litigators chose to reinforce preexisting norms of marriage and family. They marshaled evidence showing that a gay or lesbian couple had the same ability to love, be intimate and raise children. Friends do not necessarily adhere to these norms: They are not intimate, and they are not necessarily interested in raising children, though some of them are.

Ironically, it seems that LGBTQ activism has made it much harder for other nontraditional families to gain access to marriage. Polyamorous and polygamous relationships are among them.

And, yes, friends, too.

Nausica Palazzo, Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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

USAA pushed to drop ads on Tucker Carlson Tonight after Fox host disparages military leaders

Advertisers are facing renewed calls to drop their spots on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show, with customers and activists alike putting particular pressure on the United Services Automobile Association, a banking and insurance company which primarily serves veterans and their families. 

The push comes after a week in which Carlson used his considerable platform to disparage U.S. military leaders for promoting anti-racist education in service academies and make several racially charged statements, including the claim that a full-fledged race war, and even something similar to the Rwandan Genocide, awaited white Americans in the near future if such lessons were allowed to continue.

It’s not a new position for the frozen foods heir-turned-cable news provocateur, who has spent much of the last few years staring down repeated rounds of advertiser boycotts and pressure to tone down rhetoric many, even reportedly within Fox News itself, see as bigoted.

Critics seized upon Carlson’s comments this week blasting Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. The bulk of Republicans’ questions to Milley focused on “critical race theory,” which he said the U.S. military does not teach or practice — an answer Carlson found seemingly insufficient.

“Hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He’s that unimpressive,” Carlson sneered on Thursday. “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”

Several veterans’ groups, including the non-partisan Veterans for Responsible Leadership, seized on the comments and called on USAA to cease its ad buys on Carlson’s show.

“So, @USAA, is this who you advertise with?” the group’s account tweeted. “Asking for 18 million friends.”

Longtime Fox critic and veteran Travis Akers, who previously led a charge to have military institutions boycott the network, also announced he would end his insurance policy unless the company ended its support for Carlson’s show.

“Please accept this as my formal notice that you have until the end of June to cease all advertising during any @TuckerCarlson programming or I will move my insurance policies and accounts to a competitor that does not financially support Carlson,” he wrote, and his mentions were immediately filled with similar anecdotes from fellow veterans.

Though Tucker Carlson Tonight is a ratings behemoth, the number of advertisers on the show has dwindled considerably this year in the wake of a number of controversial segments. Statistics from the first financial quarter of 2021 show the number of advertisers on the program dropped from 73 in January to 58 in March, according to market research firm iSpot. 

Over the quarter, MyPillow — run by conspiracy theorist and attempted 2020 election overthrower Mike Lindell, a frequent Fox guest before the network’s eventual acceptance of Joe Biden’s electoral victory — made up more than 20% of those ads, with internal Fox promos making up nearly 10% more, iSpot found.

Carlson has also been the subject of a wave of internal criticism at Fox after a muckraking New York Times column outlined the ways in which he has served as an important source to other media outlets that he bashes publicly on the air.

In particular, a nasty beef with fellow primetime star Sean Hannity has spilled over into public view, with the longtime host bashing Carlson this week during an on-camera meltdown.

“Some people at Fox apparently don’t like me, and said bad things about me gutlessly behind my back,” Hannity said Thursday night. 

Neither Carlson nor Fox News has backed down from any of the comments.

She predicted the blue wave — now she’s trying to prevent a big red one

Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer made a name for herself as an election analyst who saw the 2018 blue wave coming long before anyone else. On July 1 of that year, she presciently predicted a 42-seat gain for Democrats — a near-perfect call, when others still envisioned smaller gains. At the same time, she warned that the landscape would be very difficult for Democrats in 2022, based on the same understanding of negative partisanship and the ways the electorate has changed. The 2018 midterms were a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency more than it was about individual candidates and individual races, she argued, foreseeing that aggrieved Republicans would be similarly motivated in 2022.

Salon’s 2019 interview with Bitecofer helped her gain the recognition she deserved, leading to her first appearance on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.” In that interview, she told Salon: 

Under my model, Democrats win the White House in 2020, and then in 2022 they’re going to have a very tough electoral cycle, because turnout for Democrats will go back to normal. And because Democrats have poor electoral strategy, they’re going to compound that problem, probably by not appealing to Democrats to get them to the polls. 

For all the attention Bitecofer gained since that interview, that basic message still hasn’t penetrated the Democratic establishment as a whole. So rather than fruitlessly try to change their thinking, Bitecofer has decided to go around them, leaving the academic world and creating her own super PAC — Strike PAC — to do the kind of messaging her research suggests is key to winning elections with today’s electorate. There are no big-money donors involved. She’s counting on grassroots support to deliver a grassroots message. The first batch of ads she’s released paint a clear picture of the threat to democracy the Republican Party now presents, and an equally clear picture of how Democrats should respond. 

Salon spoke with Bitecofer about her PAC, this new wave of advertising and the thinking behind them — and of course how she sees next year’s critical midterm elections. This interview has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

On “Morning Joe,” you said your new PAC “is about bringing a brand offensive against the whole Republican Party. It’s not just about Donald Trump, but it definitely includes him.” Three things struck me about that. First, that seemed to be exemplified by your ad, “Fuse.” Tell me about that one. Why is it shaped the way it is, and why now? 

All four of our launch-packet ads are targeted toward different aspects of this branding offensive. “Fuse” is geared towards a national audience. In political advertising, the conventional two types are what we call “persuasion” — which is trying to get voters who don’t have a firm vote to come over and vote for you — and the other type is “mobilization,” making sure your core voters will show up. 

What Strike PAC is doing is not within those two buckets. It certainly has overlap — it’s performing both persuasion and mobilization. But what it’s arguing is, “Look, the GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left.” They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting and debasing our brand. That will go from everything from economics to the “woke” war, so it’s always about showing us as unattractively to voters as possible. We’ve never answered that.

Democrats, up until now, have been told by their consultants, “Don’t worry about it,” or “Don’t push back on ‘socialism’ or ‘defund the police.'” To their credit, candidates are starting to understand when somebody is lobbing missiles at you, you can’t just stand there and pretend it’s not hitting. They are starting to try to put forward a response. But the it’s a defensive mechanism, it’s not offensive. The GOP is saying, “We’re going to have a debate about these topics,” and when you enter into that field, you are basically on the defense the whole time because you’re having a conversation that’s been structured by the opposition party. 

So that’s what “Fuse” is trying to change?

It’s flipping that GOP tactic over to our side. It’s attacking the Republicans to make a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab, that goes back from contesting the results of 2020, an armed insurrection, Trump actually trying to use the Justice Department to stage a coup, and the Republican Party’s wholesale embrace of that. 

It’s not like Trump did these things and the Republican Party stood against him. They have slowly but surely normalized this anti-democratic behavior. In fact, they have doubled down on it by going into these state legislative sessions trying to restrict voter access for progressive parts of the electorate, even going so far as to put provisions that take the certification process away from nonpartisan actors and into their partisan hands. 

That conversation is something you might see if you’re me or you, if you’re very political, but for the broader electorate it’s happening completely invisibly. There’s very little media coverage — certainly not saturation coverage like you would see for Clinton’s emails — about this power grab, what that means for democracy and what it means for Democrats in the next cycle. 

So “Fuse” is about fixing that problem, putting the stakes of 2022 in clear-eyed focus for the other half of the electorate. Because the Republican electorate has been told now for a while that the other side is coming after democracy, right? So it’s their belief in a Democratic Party that has been articulated by the GOP. It’s completely out of whack of reality, but Republican voters believe that Democrats are trying to “destroy democracy,” and what they’re doing is saving it. It’s not like they don’t have a motivation. So we really need this side of the electorate to realize that this meta-conversation about American democracy is on the ballot in 2022. 

To me, “bringing a brand offensive” pretty much describes how Republicans have run the vast majority of their national campaigns at least since Ronald Reagan, if not Richard Nixon. Democrats have virtually never done so—not even when Trump first ran in 2016. Why do you think that is?

That’s exactly right. You could believe it’s a problem that began when polarization really began to take off in the mid-2000s when asymmetry appears, and to some extent that’s true, because Republicans developed this technique of making every election a referendum on the Democratic brand. But you’re right, it does have its roots back in the 80s. 

That said, we really do see a distinct version of the modern GOP that has its origins in that 2004 Bush re-election campaign with Karl Rove, to use the gay marriage issues to turn out on their side, but also to talk about politics — including Senate and House races that might have otherwise been more local — with the intention of making them about the national party, about the national political climate and the national brand. That really starts to solidify with the 2010 midterms. They made it a referendum on Obamacare and Nancy Pelosi, and tied every candidate to that as tightly as they could. So every candidate really didn’t stand for re-election on their own performance in office or voting record, things that people think traditionally mattered. Instead, it was all about whether they were a Democrat. 

We never made that adjustment at all. In fact, it seems like we don’t even really recognize how distinctly different voter behavior in the two coalitions are and how hyper-partisanship has changed things. Whether or not we want that change, it’s there, right? We’ve been grasping for this old-school model of electioneering, it’s like when Sega was replaced by Nintendo. 

The GOP is running this very strategic, very intentional branding campaign, and we’re still talking about politics in terms of policies and things like that. We’re arguing that we are making a huge mistake when we’re tinkering around in the branches of electioneering infrastructure on the left, because our real problem lies at that root level, where we are not engaged in a campaign technique that matches the moment.

That segues to the third thing I wanted to ask about. “Bringing a brand offensive” sounds like a logical outgrowth of your election analysis in terms of the hyper-polarization driven by negative partisan. So, how did the idea of Strike PAC develop out of your earlier work?

You could say it had its genesis on election night 2020. Around 7 o’clock it was clear that Biden was going to win the presidency — at least to me — with the Midwest swinging back to the Democrats. But it was also becoming increasingly apparent that Democrats had delivered a tremendous underperformance down-ballot. I understood exactly why those two things were, the most important factor being the asymmetry in terms of how they do politicking, how they do campaigns and elections at that messaging and strategic level. 

The way that you would nationalize the 2020 campaign down-ballot is that instead of Biden running against Trump, the party should have run against Trump and the Republican brand. You don’t make it about one guy, you make it about the whole party embracing and covering for him and staying next to him. But you also make it about economics. Reaganomics has now got a 40-year track record, and it’s a total shitshow. It should be easy to eviscerate. In 2020, for example, Democrats could have made the economic argument for the HEROES Act.  The HEROES Act was introduced in July and then blocked by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. The Democrats should have been from top to bottom, even at the state legislative level, hammering the Republicans for denying economic aid in a crisis. And that did not happen.  

I also saw many things that I assumed would get fixed after 2016 go completely unaddressed. It was dramatically underwhelming in terms of what changed. And then there was suspension of field operations [by Democratic campaigns]. That was a huge mistake. Yes, I understand that, ethically, you do not want people knocking on doors in a pandemic. But when the opposition party is doing it and it is the only thing that really ever shows a measurable effect — at least if you’re doing it to mobilize people, not persuade them — then you have to find a way, right? 

So I was watching that and I was deeply concerned. At that point I wasn’t even sure if Democrats would hold onto the House. It’s just unbelievable, they had the best fundamentals you could ever hope for in 2020. You’ve got a man who’s mismanaging this pandemic, completely incompetent. At that point his negligence had led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and you don’t make that a central theme? Like, “Hey! These people can’t do government!” So I realized these things were not going to change unless I found a way to do it myself.

While “Fuse” exemplifies the idea of a brand offensive against the GOP, you have another ad that does that as well, “Hold the Republican Party Accountable,” which starts with Donald Trump saying, “Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore. You’ll never get back our country with weakness.” Tell me about this ad. 

It’s not one that we necessarily would show in its entirety to target voters, because it’s a little long. But this ad is about trying to get people to understand that we seem to have two conversations in America. We have the right talking about how extreme and crazy the Democrats are. Then we have Democrats bitching about that, bitching about “woke” culture and self-inflicting. It’s like, the Republican Party makes a critique, and then Democrats jump in and start having that conversation too, just amplifying it. 

We don’t have any conversation on this side about a party that literally is extreme, has an extremism problem which has been quantified throughout dozens of political science articles, and Democrats just assume, “Well everyone knows the Republican Party is extreme.” 

Actually, the average person on the street, if they’re not one of the 10% of people like us and your readers, you ask them about the Republican Party and they are apt to say, “Low taxes, right?” 

There’s no media ecosystem that’s focused on how crazy the Republican Party is. The assumption is that the mainstream press has a liberal bias, but left-wing topics are not centralized in the way that right-wing topics become. There’s no intensive conversation about what the Republican Party has been doing for the last five years as it has progressively fallen down the pathway towards fascism. So that ad is about telling that story and tying those disparate events into a cohesive story.

Your website says, “We modernize electioneering strategy. STRIKE PAC’s electioneering model revolutionizes how Democrats campaign from top to bottom.” More specifically, you promise “Messaging that creates a ‘reverse’ referendum on the GOP by putting them on the defense” and implementing “high-stakes, nationalized messaging maximizing coalitional turnout and conversion.” You have two state-level ads that seem to embody these points. Let’s talk about the Virginia ad first. 

Virginia’s important because it’s an off-off-year election — its state-level elections are not on the regular calendar. Two states do that, New Jersey and Virginia. New Jersey would be more interesting if it spent more time in political competition, but it doesn’t. So Virginia has long been seen as a temperature check for the newly-elected president. There was a long history of breaking against the new party in power that really only started to fall off in the 2013 election, when [Democrat] Terry McAuliffe won the governorship even though Obama had won the White House the year before.

Nevertheless, political conversations will center very much around the narrative that comes out of Virginia’s 2021 election. Whoever wins in that cycle will go into 2022 with the political media giving them a more positive narrative. That’s incredibly important for Democrats in particular because they’re expected to do well now in Virginia, and expectations matter. And No. 2 because any political scientist will tell you that one of the most striking and robust patterns is the midterm effect, where the president’s party loses seats in the Congress in the subsequent midterm election. So when we talk about Democrats facing tough fundamentals, that’s one part. 

So what they need to do is they need to hold onto their trifecta in Virginia [the governorship and both houses of the state legislature], so the media narrative is positive. In terms of Virginia, the worry is because the messaging from the Democratic Party and allied organizations doesn’t focus on coalitional turnout and doesn’t nationalize and  speak plain messaging, that turnout might decline enough where you could even have McAuliffe win the governorship, but because of that ballot drop-off problem we saw in 2020, Democrats maybe lose the [legislative] majority, and the narrative then becomes mixed.

So that’s the problem. What’s the solution?

What we’re doing in Virginia is going to be heavily focused on stake-framing, and just really napalming the GOP brand, getting people exposed for the first time to a message that argues that the Republican Party has been a shitshow for the economy and for you, personally and economically. All of these credit-claiming things we see from Democrats is a step in the right direction, but credit claiming is not as good as telling them other people are coming to take things away. You really want a sophisticated messaging. 

In the case of our first ad, we chose to focus on the issue of the voting laws, because I could see the Democrats having this wonky policy conversation like they normally do, calling it voter suppression and access. It’d be great if we had that electorate, but we do not. We do not have those voters. We have the ones that the GOP talks to more effectively and so we must make it clear to people: This is a power grab. They’re coming to steal your vote. If they can take power in Virginia, they’re going to pass a law like they did in these other places. Those laws aren’t about “voter access,” they’re about election rigging.

You also have an ad about the California recall targeting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. How does that embody your strategy? And how does that contrast with the Democrats’ ineffectual response to the 2003 recall of Gray Davis?

Yes, exactly. You hear that the electorate is much more Democratic than it was in 2003 and that is verifiably true, OK? But that doesn’t mean that California isn’t still at risk of having a repeat of 2003. In the recall in 2003, the turnout was in the 30% range, and when you’re talking about only 30% of California, there’s a very motivated Republican Party versus a complacent Democratic one. Because Newsom will probably poll pretty decently and [folks will say] “Oh, this is in the bag. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not worried about it.” 

We’re doing a couple things with this ad. Again, we’re doing the nationalization component that’s lacking in Democratic messaging, and is the bread and butter of the GOP. But it’s also innovating — I wanted to show an example of something that other people might want to copy, which is to make the frame of the recall not about Newsom. Because if it’s about Newsom, then you’re going to have this conversation about whether he shut down too long, or too little and blah blah blah. You’re just playing right into their hands. That’s the conversation they want to have. 

Instead, you want to personalize the stakes of the recall to the electorate, so that they feel the connection, and you want to paint to them a picture: “It’s not about Newsom or the Democrats, it’s about you controlling California and turning it into a liberal wonderland. And they’re coming for it!” You want to make voters feel motivated about the recall, and also attacked. Their identity is being attacked. That’s how the Republicans would approach it. That’s how they defended Scott Walker, which is what I’m modeling this on. 

Another key aspect of your modernization strategy is “Building a positive, values-driven firewall Democratic brand.” You’ve released another ad called “This is What Democracy Looks Like” that starts with John Lewis saying, “We may have come here on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now,” and proceeds with short clips from a wide range of notable Democrats—from Sherrod Brown to Katie Porter, AOC, Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock. What was the thinking here?

That ad in particular is again a movie-style ad. It’s aimed specifically at Democrats, but ultimately the same methodology will be adapted to go after young people, especially voters of color. Latinos are a huge persuasion target for conversion right now and even young Black voters, but younger white voters in particular. The GOP, in my opinion, still over-performs with white young people, people under age 30, relative to what the Republican platform, and their embrace of racism and fascism, should warrant. When you’ve got one party that is constantly taunting the Democrats — “They support Hamas, and they’re socialists, yada yada yada,” you want to create an image for those younger voters: “No, this is what the Democratic Party really is.” 

Another aspect of your modernization strategy is “Undermining the Republican brand and areas of perceived dominance, like the economy.” You did this in an ad you showed on “Morning Joe” [at 9:25] comparing Democrats’ and Republicans’ record on the economy since 1933, on GDP growth, job creation and the stock market, using sports imagery from football, basketball and baseball to drive home the point that Democrats do much better on all these key indicators. The difference is stark, but Democrats never talk about it. 

That’s exactly right. If you ask the average voter, the GOP often wins or at least breaks even on the question of which party is good for the economy, although the facts bear out a completely different story. But instead of making an affirmative case for ourselves, especially as we move through Reaganomics — and even by the early 2000s the failures of that economic philosophy were already legion — instead of running on that, saying “The GOP tried this thing and it totally destroyed our infrastructure, it destroyed our K-12 education system,” and going on what I’ve called a brand offensive, you see Democrats try to align themselves rhetorically with their opponents, saying “I’m a fiscal conservative.” 

The economy tends to be the most salient issue, or second-most salient, every election cycle. So why would we concede on an issue that’s that important to so many people? Especially when we’re better at it? So that’s why we’re going after that, and the other sacred cows for the GOP, national security. I’m going to go after national security as well because the performance of the Republican Party over the last 20 years on foreign policy and national security is terrible. 

That’s good to hear, because I was going to ask about what’s to come. Could you say a bit more about that? 

What’s to come will depend on you — I mean you, the readers, the listeners and the people who support this idea — understanding that we lose winnable elections and want to stop. Because never before been has a super PAC been raised from such humble roots as someone like me. I don’t come from the electioneering world. I don’t come from money. I don’t have a good Rolodex to start this from. So, this is what I consider to be a people PAC. How far I’m able to get with my creative concepts and my strategy is going to depend on how successful we are. If my goal was to become personally famous in political nerd circles, I’m on a fine trajectory for that. But if my goal is to win as many races as possible and to disrupt what might be the collapse of American democracy in 2022. I need to be able to deploy all this creative energy in a sophisticated way to where it needs to go and how it needs to go. 

The playbook I intend to run in electioneering doesn’t come from any established playbook. It’s kind of like Space-X is to space and to NASA. NASA is focused on space, but Space-X was able to start their program by looking at how that other one was shaped and made and being able to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of that old system were and design one completely to the realities of space travel.

There are two other aspects of your strategy I’d like you to discuss. First, “Innovative persuasion and mobilization messaging and micro-targeting strategies.” We can see some of that in the state ads we just talked about, but what else do you hope to accomplish in the future?

I can’t speak with specificity about all of the things I have cooking. I’m trying to build an organization. But I will say that what people see from this launch is just the tip of the iceberg as to what I have planned in deploying messaging in ways where people are forced to see it. The old Democratic model was TV-reliant, it had an old playbook. The direct mail system runs on this basically phoned-in template. My vision and plan is to build this organization so I can come in and redo how we talk to voters and how we work on winning elections, in all of those spheres and more. 

The second aspect is about “unleashing the power, scalability and scope of digital for year-round party branding” Same question: The seeds of that are clearly present in the ad we talked about before — showing young voters what the party really is — but do you have future examples in mind?

Here’s one thing I will tell you. The status quo of electioneering on the left is “Oh, we’re innovating now. We’re telling people what we’re doing,” which is fine and dandy. But if you’re assuming that telling people “I’m doing this stuff for you” is good enough to get people to actually show up to vote, that’s a mistake. And then a lot of the innovation is focused on how we go back and get these white working-class voters to vote for us. 

If you don’t understand that realignment is moving in one direction and one direction only, and that what we should be doing is leaning into our own realignment — which is especially white-collar, educated voters, especially as the newer ones that are moving in party politics, who maybe have been voting Republican because their parents were Republican — we should be working on breaking their party brand loyalty. Kind of like Coke vs. Pepsi. 

You want people to see what the Republican Party is actually doing and hear about what it’s up to — but not in ways that are focused on “Think of how this will hurt some nameless, faceless other,” which is how all of our messaging is structured on the left. Instead, we have to make it highly personal to the particular voter and really target that hard. 

Finally, what’s the most important question I didn’t ask? And what’s the answer?

You didn’t ask what the URL is for people to donate to Strike PAC!

“Britney does not need to be protected from herself”: How society treats those perceived as disabled

“I’ve been offered a hysterectomy so many times by doctors for no medical reason.”

Dr. Robyn Powell, a visiting professor at Stetson Law, offered this disturbing personal account in an interview with Salon while discussing the recent allegations Britney Spears made in court. Among the many details Spears discussed, the pop star claims her conservatorship has forced her to keep an IUD inserted, and prohibited her from having more children and marrying her boyfriend.

While many were surprised by the horrifying allegations, Powell, a woman with a disability, was not.

“It’s not shocking to people with disabilities because these things happen every single day for us; people’s bodily autonomy is taken away every single day,” she said. “We need to understand Britney’s experience within a larger context of disability justice and reproductive justice… There is a lot of resistance to people with disabilities having children.”

Whether or not Spears has a disability, she’s in this situation because she was perceived as having one, Powell says. And that’s enough in the eyes of the conservatorship to not only deny her wish to have more children, but to medically prevent her from doing so. Spears entered a court-mandated conservatorship overseen by her father in 2008, following her much publicized mental breakdown during that year and the year before, but actual details about whether she has a mental illness haven’t been disclosed.

There’s a long history of people with disabilities being denied reproductive decision-making power for ableist, racist and classist reasons. Many perpetrators have been those closest to them, including family members, guardians or romantic partners.

Reproaction, a grassroots organization that mobilizes communities to build toward reproductive justice, saw Spears’ story as a grave matter of reproductive injustice, even before Spears’ forced IUD revelation, and held a web seminar on her conservatorship last fall.

“Reproductive justice includes the right to parent, not to parent, and to raise families in safe and healthy communities,” Erin Matson, executive director of Reproaction, told Salon. “Core to our movement is autonomy, dignity and respect — and people with disabilities deserve the same amount of autonomy, dignity and respect as everyone else.”

In some cases, rather than partners or guardians, the government has wielded this power to decide on someone’s reproductive decisions. The Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell ruling in 1927 permitted government-funded and sanctioned forced sterilizations primarily targeting Indigenous people and people of color, the poor, and those with disabilities. These sterilizations were carried out across the country for years. Today, forced sterilizations and eugenics programs are supposedly a relic of the past, but as recent as last summer, an ICE detainment center was accused of carrying out mass nonconsensual sterilizations on immigrant women. 

The infantilization and reproductive control of people with disabilities continues to this day, says Powell. The same ableist thinking that helped fuel eugenics in America continues to shame and pressure people with disabilities to not have children. “There’s a history of restricting people with disabilities who want to get married and limiting their access to sexual health education,” Powell said, further highlighting how people with disabilities can be “desexualized,” or, like Spears, treated like children. 

Reproductive coercion as abuse 

Unfortunately, reproductive coercion like what Spears says she is experiencing isn’t rare, and all people, including pop legends, can be victimized. Research has shown the prevalence of abusive partners controlling their victims’ access to contraception or abortion. One study found 15% of women experiencing physical violence from a male partner reported also experiencing birth control sabotage. Another study found 25% of adolescent girls who reported having abusive male partners said their partners tried to impregnate them against their will, and this number rises to 66% for adolescent mothers who are poor and on public assistance.

Even prior to Spears’ conservatorship testimony, her story has been understood by feminist and reproductive justice advocates as a fundamental issue of consent. It’s unclear whether she was able to consent to enter the conservatorship, and she’s made it clear she does not consent to it today.

Consent doesn’t just apply to sexual encounters and assaults — it also applies to medical procedures, receiving medications (which Spears alleges she has been forced to take), and certainly, consent to pregnancy, parenthood, or being put on birth control.

“This story shows how women aren’t listened to, how women are labeled crazy, and presumed to need a knight in shining armor to control them so they can be protected from themselves,” Matson said. “Britney does not need to be protected from herself.”

Reproductive justice advocates argue that reproductive coercion, whether to deny someone birth control and abortion, or in Spears’ case, deny them the ability to have children, is violent and abusive — and it can come from a romantic partner, state abortion ban, or family members and guardians. California’s legislature is currently considering a bill to include reproductive coercion as a form of domestic abuse in the state’s civil code.

Policing the pregnancies of mentally ill people isn’t new

Matson also sees connections between state governments policing pregnant people for substance use or suspected substance use, and Spears being held under a conservatorship that denies her right to parent, due to her supposed mental impairment.

“In Wisconsin, for example, pregnant people can be forced into medical treatment or even jail on the basis of even suspected substance use. They don’t even need to confirm it,” Matson said. “And we know people who are poor and people of color are targeted most for criminalization. It’s part of a spectrum of presuming people who can become pregnant can’t be trusted with their own health care and realities.”

Numerous people — and disproportionately women of color — have faced criminalization for miscarriages, stillbirths or inducing their own abortions due to strict feticide laws and a greater culture of controlling pregnant people in the U.S . They’ve been charged with manslaughter, child endangerment, abuse of a corpse and more outrageous charges. At the height of the War on Drugs, Black pregnant women were frequently surveilled and criminalized for substance use, supposedly for their own good. But reproductive justice advocates have argued pregnant folks with substance abuse struggles should be treated with compassion and support, not criminalization.

If Spears’ claims about her forced IUD are true, her court-mandated conservatorship may extend from this same, greater issue of state policing of people’s pregnancies, and disproportionately, people with disabilities. Advocates say Spears’ conservatorship reflects how people with or perceived to have mental illnesses are dehumanized and denied autonomy.

Powell hopes Spears’ story will force a crucial reckoning within the reproductive rights movement, and society broadly, on the need for intersectional approaches to supporting people with disabilities and pregnant people.

“Reproductive rights has always focused on abortion, which is really important, but not the only issue here. This is intersectional,” Powell said. “This is about how reproductive decision-making happens within all systems in society, across race, gender, orientation, ability. We really need a society in which people can make decisions and they’re supported in their decisions, and we understand reproductive decision-making power transcends both having a child and not having a child.”

While Spears may be the most high-profile person to experience this extreme level of coercion and dehumanization, on the basis of judgments about her mental abilities, she certainly isn’t the only one. The attention and outrage her story has inspired could be crucial to creating change, and shining a light on the everyday realities that people with disabilities, women, and pregnant folks, struggle with each day.

Honest approach to virginity in “Love, Victor” dismantles trope of the horny teenage boy

“Men are dogs,” and “boys will be boys.” We hear some version of these slogans all the time, especially when it comes to sex, sexuality and masculinity. The expectation that men prove their masculinity and social status through being boastful about their voracious sexual appetites and conquests, unfortunately, starts young — often, with the cultural double standard that celebrates teenage boys for losing their virginity, while simultaneously shaming teenage girls for the same sexual acts, let alone for having any sexual desire at all.

Yet, for all the noise and fanfare around sex and the stereotype of the obscenely horny teenage boy, for a lot of people — young men included — your first time can be scary, anxiety-inducing and bring up a lot of insecurities, though we barely see this side of the coin represented on screen. The “losing your virginity” episode is a classic chapter of pretty much any young adult flick, and Hulu’s “Love, Victor” is no exception, but with a relatable twist. In the second season episode “The Sex Cabin” we see two teenage boys who love their partners, but are intensely nervous about their first time. 

Victor (Michael Cimino) and his boyfriend Benji (George Sear), and Felix (Anthony Turpel) and his girlfriend Lake (Bebe Wood), are both about to take their relationships to the next level after months of dating, and despite their deep attraction to their partners, and their desire for intimacy, they’re also both terrified of messing up. In Victor’s case, as a newly out teenager who’s often had to rely on Benji for guidance in navigating his sexual identity, this next step in their relationship is especially nerve-racking, since Benji revealed he had multiple sex partners before while the friend group played a game of Never Have I Ever.

Following a chaotic turn of events in which Victor falls off a bed trying to get cell service to call his queer mentor Simon for advice, and Felix cuts himself trimming his pubic hair or “manscaping,” both best friends wind up bleeding together on the bathroom floor. “Look at us,” Felix says, “two virgins, bleeding in the bathroom.” Both confront each other about why they’re unable to tell their partners about their fears, before eventually setting out to do just that. 

In the process, the show offers surprising wisdom from the mouth of stereotypical-jock-turned-sensitive-ally, Andrew, played by Mason Gooding. Andrew validates Felix’s fears, and reminds him that while “sex is scary for everyone the first time,” the truth is, “if you’re with the right person, it doesn’t matter.” For all the YA dramas that have depicted perfect, passionate and entirely comfortable and competent scenes of teenagers having their first time, pretty much anyone can attest to how much audience suspension of disbelief this requires. Last year, Hulu drama “Normal People” was widely praised for its depiction of Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne’s (Daisy Edgar-Jones) first time together, in which he tells her very casually, “If it hurts or anything, we can stop. It won’t be awkward.”

And in Victor’s case, while your first sexual encounter can bring up insecurity for anyone revolving around body image or other societal pressures, someone’s first queer sexual encounter can come with even more pressure, due to the shame or embarrassment that young queer people may struggle with in a homophobic and heteronormative society. There’s also the reality that comprehensive, accurate sexual health education isn’t taught in most schools, and LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed is also prohibited in many states and school districts. Safe, accurate and non-judgmental sex ed and health resources are difficult to come by for all young people, leading many to rely on trusted adults to support and advise them. But many young LGBTQ people may not have an adult like this in their lives, especially if they haven’t come out.

While the hypersexualization of women and girls is a more known issue, men and boys are also hypersexualized in a different but still harmful way. For one thing, as a society, we often spend more time talking about so-called false accusations against men and boys for sexual assault, than we do, about men and boys who are victims. Men are, of course, more likely to be victims of sexual violence than be falsely accused of it, yet narratives about male victimhood are framed solely in a context that allows men to call women liars. This relates to the hypersexualization of men and boys because the narrative that all they want in life is sex erases the fact that they can be victims of sexual violence at all, often leading to male victims being mocked, dismissed, or even called “lucky.” 

In reality, as “Love, Victor” explores, men and women and boys and girls have complex, wide-ranging feelings about sex and virginity. There’s no such thing as normal, and no two people, regardless of their gender, are the same, or will want the same things. Not every teen will be nervous about their first time, but many — including teenage boys — will be. And finally, we have a YA show that accurately and authentically portrays this — and for both queer and straight youth, for that matter.

Both seasons of “Love, Victor”  are now streaming on Hulu.

K.Flay on Spotify playlists, “Sgt. Pepper” and the power in John Lennon’s lyrics

Musician, rapper and songwriter K.Flay joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about growing up in a “Beatles over Stones” household, her new EP “Inside Voices,” (featuring “TGIF,” her collaboration with Tom Morello) and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Grammy-nominee Flay (real name Kristine Flaherty) released her first album in 2014. She says that as a child, “the Beatles were like water in the fish tank of my home – they were always there.” She would find herself singing songs like “Yellow Submarine” but not knowing where they came from at the time. After having majored in psychology and sociology at Stanford University, she found an even greater appreciation for the “wonderfully childlike” lyrics in such songs and became more drawn to the Beatles’ “goofy, trippy druggy” tunes, naming “I Am the Walrus” and the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” albums as “playful and bizarre” favorites.

In creating her own music, Flay tends to channel John Lennon the most, and his idea of “our society [being] run by insane people for insane objectives” (taken from a 1968 interview). In her new single “TGIF,” Flay tackles the notion that “celebrating Friday” is a cultural trick to “motivate us to get back to work on Monday,” and the struggle of “railing against an institution and ideology while also being a part of it.”

Subscribe today through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Breaker, Player.FM, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.

However, as she also tells Womack, as much as society and record companies want to use “genre as a way to sell things,” people themselves will still make things more diverse – using the example of how eclectic Spotify playlists are and likening them to the “wild contrast” found on the Beatles’ albums.

Womack comments on how “Beatle-esque” Flay’s approach to music is, in that both artists seem to blow up their work and start over again with new ideas and new sounds. And she tends to agree, saying there is power in not only that, but also in crying and, sometimes, in just being able to shout, “I am the Eggman!” at the top of your lungs.

Listen to the entire conversation with K. Flay on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

Kevin McCarthy met with officer injured on Jan. 6 — and it didn’t end well

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally met with a police officer who is still out on medical leave after being brutally attacked during Donald Trump’s January 6th insurrection.

“I asked him specifically for a commitment to denounce that publicly. And he said that he would address it at a personal level, with some of those members. But again, I think that as a leader of the House Republican, or I’m sorry, as the leader of the House Republican Party, it’s important to hear those denouncements publicly,” DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone said.

When asked how the meeting went after leaving McCarthy’s office, Fanone replied, “I need a drink.”

Mobile vaccine clinics have made vaccines more accessible — and could be the future of public health

On Thursday, President Joe Biden beseeched Americans to meet his deadline of having 70 percent of American adults partly or fully vaccinated against the coronavirus by July 4. In a speech, he asked Americans to “knock on doors and talk to friends and neighbors” about getting vaccinated so that the country can reach the much-touted 70 percent threshold — which, public health experts say, marks the point at which the novel coronavirus will slow down and eventually cease in its spread.

The president’s plaintive is related to the sudden slowdown in demand for the vaccine, as supply now outweighs demand for the COVID-19 vaccines. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 62.9 percent of Americans over the age of 12 have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, and 65 percent of adults over the age of 18 have received at least one dose. The Biden administration has about one more week to reach its goal.

Though the gap may seem small, the nation’s ability to close it depends on smaller, more localized efforts. As mass vaccination sites are closing across the country, more counties and cities are turning to mobile vaccination clinics to reach underserved populations, high-risk groups, essential workers, and rural communities.

Remarkably, it appears to be working.

Dr. SarahBeth Hartlage, the interim medical director for Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness, told Salon that the mass vaccination site in Louisville, Kentucky gave out 110,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine between January and April 2021. But by the end of April, it appeared they had entered a “different phase,” one in which many people had “questions” and “concerns” about the vaccine.

“[There were] concerns either about the safety of the product itself or the government’s involvement or long-term consequences, or even the need for vaccination — especially for younger folks who feel like they maybe don’t need it ,”  Hartlage said. “At that point we went ahead and transitioned to our mobile operations. And since then we’ve run 137 mobile operations with a little over 5,000 doses given across those events.”

Hartlage said at the mass vaccination site, they were vaccinating 1,500 and 2,000 a day. Now, with their mobile clinics— which are actually going into communities and posting up at churches, employers, schools and dollar-store parking lots — they usually vaccinate between 20 to 100 people per event.

“It’s a very different strategy, a very different phase of the operation,” Hartlage said. “We have found the most success in partnering with community organizations that are tied into smaller groups, smaller parts of the community.”

For example, Hartlage said they’ve had successful partnerships with Colectivo LatinX, a local grassroots organization, which helped provide Spanish language services and answer questions. It’s a very “resource intensive” strategy, but it’s working.

“In the beginning of the mobile missions, which we started doing in March, the largest number of people we were reaching at that point was people who had access problems — they didn’t have transportation, they didn’t speak English or they had some other barrier that made it difficult for them to access traditional healthcare and receive vaccination through the other paths,” Hartlage said. “As we get deeper into it, we’re engaging with people who have concerns and questions that they want to have heard.”

Carl Wood, president and pharmacy manager of VaxVan, is leading a mobile vaccination program in the greater Charlotte area in North Carolina. Echoing Hartlage, Wood said partnering with community organizations has been the most successful approach in vaccinating underserved communities who have been marginalized by overall vaccination efforts. For example, when Salon spoke with him, he was gearing up to work with Meals on Wheels, which serves people over the age of 60 who are homebound and unable to purchase or prepare regular nutritious meals for themselves.

“We’re going to volunteer and pack meals for them and just include a flower with our information or phone number that says ‘Hey, if you need a shot, call us, we’ll come to you,'” Wood said. “Our model is to go into the communities with trusted community partners.”

But Wood’s VaxVan has been “everywhere.”

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“We’ve operated in gymnasiums, we’ve operated in conference rooms, we’ve operated lots of drive-throughs — it’s been a wide variety of scenarios,” Wood said. “I think it really helped to reach two groups, people who are skeptical of the providers and those who were unable to get to those mass vaccination clinics, and waiting hours and hours and hours.”

Wood said they’re still successful in vaccinating people who have had barriers to access, but now it’s mostly an effort to turn the vaccine-hesitant. For this cohort, they’re having less success.

Julie Swann, a professor of systems engineering at North Carolina State University, told Salon in the final hours to meet Biden’s deadline mobile vaccination clinics are one in a “portfolio” of strategies that need to be used to reach people who have yet to be vaccinated.

“I don’t think that one approach is going to solve all of the challenges, because there are different challenges,” Swann said. “We’ve already gotten, as some people say, ‘the low hanging fruit’ in terms of people who really wanted to be vaccinated, but now you’ve got to address all of these issues — barriers to access, vaccine hesitancy based on experiences in the healthcare system, vaccine hesitancy based on misinformation online, indifference to vaccination because of youth, vaccination hesitancy because you don’t believe the pandemic is important.”

“These are different problems that, to some extent, have to be solved in different ways,” Swann added, suggesting that incentives might work for some people in addition to incentivizing people by requiring vaccinations to return to school or attend summer camp.

But overall, bringing the vaccines to a broader population has been a success. Indeed, it raises the question as to whether this mobile strategy should have been implemented from the very beginning.

“2020 hindsight is Monday morning quarterbacking,” Litjen Tan, chief strategy officer of the Immunization Action Coalition, told Salon. Tan said an early mobile vaccine strategy would have been useful; but, given where the country was during that time, he thinks the mass vaccination sites were a success in rapidly vaccinating people who wanted the vaccine and were eligible then.

Still, he thinks there’s a place for mobile vaccination sites in the future.

“I would really love to see how we can work on maintaining this infrastructure,” Tan said. “I would love to see how we can keep this going, so that we can continue to reach these populations with other vaccines.”

And Tan isn’t the only one thinking about that. Wood of VaxVan said he’s already planning a mobile vaccination clinic with the flu shot.

“So that’s kind of our business model is to take what we’ve done successfully with COVID shots and just do the same thing for flu shots,” Wood said. “One of our thoughts is to reach out to high schools and colleges in the spring and in the fall, and say ‘hey, if you have folks who come in who haven’t gotten their immunizations, we could do those on site.'”

Troubled waters: USA Swimming’s struggle to cover up its sexual abuse crisis

At the annual United States Aquatic Sports Convention, one year in the late 1990s, a prominent Indianapolis sports lawyer named Jack Swarbrick first warned USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body, that it had better prepare itself for the sexual abuse issue. 

Today Swarbrick is best known as the athletic director at the University of Notre Dame, which has had to deal with its own problems surrounding sexual assaults by football players. He has also been an adviser to USA Gymnastics, whose various scandals — most notably the hundreds of molestations of young athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar, who landed in prison for life — have given it a somewhat higher profile on this issue than USA Swimming.

But if the challenges of swimming have come with fewer front-page headlines despite its much larger footprint on daily American life, swimming is nonetheless battling scores of claims in courts across the country that coaches preyed on underage athletes. USA Swimming also reportedly finds itself the subject of a federal grand jury investigation for allegations of insurance fraud, concealing its assets and covering up abuse cases.

(Grand jury deliberations are secret. The office of Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is directing the probe, declined Salon’s request for comment.)

Critics such as lawyer and former swimming gold medalist Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who heads the advocacy group Champion Women, describe swimming’s legal problems as the inevitable fallout of a culture that took it for granted that competitive youth swimming should enable an unsafe and overly sexualized environment for young athletes. For generations prior to the pandemic, swimming’s after-school practices and year-round weekend meets, a largely recreational activity for many of its nearly half-million participants, has been a staple of Americana, while simultaneously serving as the country’s Olympic medal developmental system.

“Not every coach is a pedophile, but every pedophile wants to be a coach,” says Hogshead-Makar. “Why? Because you get to spend hour after hour in an authority position over athletes, unsupervised, with almost no oversight or consequences to really horrible behavior.”

Hogshead-Makar also co-chairs the reform group Team Integrity, whose theme, in her words, is that “sexual abuse is a symptom of athletes having no power” in the higher councils of the Olympic movement.

Swarbrick was at that aquatics convention more than 20 years ago because he then  represented USA Swimming at of the Indianapolis firm where he practiced law, then called Baker & Daniels. He was an old friend of the late Chuck Wielgus, at the time executive director of USA Swimming; they had gotten acquainted when Wielgus headed U.S. Canoe and Kayak. Swarbrick was also part of the Stanford Law School network of swimming’s top lawyer, Richard Young of the Denver office of Holmes Robert & Owen, a law firm since absorbed by Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.

Finally, as chair of the Indiana Sports Corp, which promoted the placement of marquee events in the state, Swarbrick had a close business relationship with another board member, Indianapolis sports consultant Dale Neuburger, a longtime top official of both USA Swimming (for which he served a term as president) and FINA, the governing body of worldwide competitive swimming. 

Swarbrick’s observation about the oncoming sexual abuse issue came to light years later,  in a 2010 deposition in a civil lawsuit against USA Swimming by swimmer Jancy Thompson, who was abused across a period of years by her coach, Norm Havercroft. John Leonard, who was executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA) until his retirement last year, recalled the remark. He also testified as to his own reaction.

“Show me the numbers,” Leonard said he told Swarbrick. “Show me where this [abuse] is an issue that is large.”

The crisis emerges

Leonard’s remark encapsulated swimming’s passive attitude toward widespread abuse. But perhaps on the basis of Swarbrick’s advice, USA Swimming in 1999 established its first Code of Conduct for coaches. Four years later, the group set up a task force to study the problem of sexual abuse after former Olympic gold medalist David Berkoff spoke out about rumored instances of top coaches having sex with their swimmers, many of them underage.

In an email to an activist in 2010, Berkoff recalled that he had been told “by several of Mitch Ivey’s swimmers that he was sleeping with Lisa Dorman in 1988. I heard the whole Suzette Moran story” from gold medalist Pablo Morales. (Morales denies the conversation.) “I was told that Rick Curl was molesting Kelley Davies for years starting when she was 12 by some of the Texas guys.”

(Ivey was a swimmer and coach whose career began at the legendary Santa Clara Swim Club in California and ended in a hail of abuse allegations at the University of Florida. Curl was a Maryland club coach whose statutory rapes of Davies came to the surface when she swam at the University of Texas.)

Berkoff’s former coach at the Germantown Academy outside Philadelphia, Dick Shoulberg, was also on the task force. During one of the panel’s email discussion chains, Shoulberg wrote: “I would hate to see our organization ever in the predicament of the current Roman Catholic Church — protecting child molesters!”

As leader of ASCA, the professional coaches’ body, Leonard was the task force’s most truculent voice. He felt any standard for coach discipline less rigorous than the proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in criminal cases would unfairly imperiled careers and reputations. In 2012, Leonard emailed a journalist to claim: “We do not have an organization that deals directly with children, nor is that part of our purpose in any way, shape or form.”

In 2006, USA Swimming instituted criminal background checks for its thousands of sanctioned coaches. (Around 11,000 are ASCA members.) They are spread out across the country at age-group clubs of all sizes and shapes, and with various business models. Some clubs are owned by their coaches; others are run by self-perpetuating parent nonprofit boards. Nearly all rent public facilities, such as park district pools or high school or community college aquatic centers, at subsidized rates. From there, a few of the young athletes become the Michael Phelpses and Katie Ledeckys who provide a fortnight of entertainment, and an upswell of national pride, during the quadrennial Olympics.

In 2010, Jack Swarbrick’s foreboding took shape when ABC’s “20/20” broadcast an investigative segment on swimming’s abuse problem. The report’s most sensational accusation was that Deena Deardurff, a gold medalist at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, had been serially molested during her teen years in Cincinnati by her coach Paul Bergen, a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

Asked on camera for comment, swimming chief executive Wielgus assumed a defensive posture. “You feel I need to apologize to them?” he said, apparently referring to victims of sexual abuse.

Amid mounting public criticism of his televised interview performances, on both “20/20” and in a similar report on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” Wielgus established a USA Swimming program called Safe Sport, which the parent Olympic Committee would expand in 2017 with a new agency, the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Scott Blackmun, president of the Olympic Committee until the gymnastics scandals exploded in 2018, frequently cited swimming as its model sport for addressing abuse issues.

Swimming began publishing the names of coaches banned for sexual misconduct. Today the banned list has grown to 191 names. However, it does not include figures like Bergen, the late Jack Nelson (a Hall of Fame coach who Diana Nyad, the celebrity open-water swimmer, has claimed molested her in the 1960s as a high school student in Fort Lauderdale), the quasi-fugitive Irish coach George Gibney and others. USA Swimming insiders say many of them are likely on a separate, secret document known as the “flagged” list. 

In 2014, Wielgus himself was scheduled for induction into the Hall of Fame, but stood down in the face of a public petition by victims of abuse, who charged him with presiding over a generation of cover-ups. Most infuriatingly for the petitioners, Wielgus had spoken misleadingly about his knowledge of an abusive coach, Andy King, who regularly hopped from one  position to another across different states, and who was labeled “a monster” by the prosecutor who brought him to justice for raping and impregnating a 14-year-old girl, among other offenses. This victim confided in her pastor, setting in motion King’s long overdue arrest. (In 2009, King pleaded no contest to 20 counts of felony child molestation. Now 73, King remains in a California prison, serving a life sentence.)

Wielgus’ death from cancer in 2017, along with the deaths or retirements of other key figures going back four or more decades, is cited by some observers of the current grand jury investigation as an indication that it’s unlikely to produce criminal charges. Regardless, the accumulation and pattern of anecdotes portray a youth-serving sports organization that consistently appeared to put the safety of young swimmers below the quest for medals, profits and prestige.

Among the thousands of pages of documents before the grand jury, according to sources close to prosecutors, is a trove of internal USA Swimming memos, emails and coach complaint dossiers, which the group previously attempted to withhold during California civil suits by former swimmers who claimed sexual abuse by their coaches. For its defiance of lower court discovery orders, the organization paid tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions before finally producing the documents, under seal, in 2012, on order of the California Supreme Court. This cache of materials, subsequently subpoenaed by the FBI field office in Campbell, California, is the basis for some of the reporting for this article.

At the top, USA Swimming’s revenue streams are significant. Its annual nonprofit Form 990 filings with the IRS show that the book value of the organization’s assets has been as high as $54 million in recent years. At the time of his death, Wielgus drew annual compensation of more than $1.2 million. In 2019, 13 executives, ranging up to Wielgus’s successor Timothy Hinchey at $792,207, made an average of more $300,000 a year. (Staff at the organization’s Colorado Springs headquarters totals around 100.)

By way of perspective, the PR and marketing budget lines of USA Swimming alone might very well exceed the combined expenditures for everything in all Olympic sports in a number of Third World countries.

According to filings, the St. Louis-based Bryan Cave law firm’s three Colorado offices, after many years and millions of dollars in billable hours, were supplanted three years ago by Atlanta’s King & Spalding LLP.

USA Swimming’s “captive” insurance company — headquartered in Barbados

Belying their homegrown image, youth sports are big business. So is organization insurance for youth sports. The grand jury is scrutinizing swimming’s insurance structure as well the underlying activity of sexual abuse, which gave rise to the sport’s liability crisis. The two go hand in hand.

Around the same time of Jack Swarbrick’s warning, internal documents show, the parent U.S. Olympic Committee was telling swimming that it could no longer use the Olympic Training Center facilities in Colorado Springs. The reason was insurance: USA Swimming was the only sport body without what the USOC considered appropriate coverage; at the time, its general liability policy contained a clause excluding coverage for claims of abuse or molestation.

USOC’s risk manager explained all this bluntly, in writing, to USA Swimming’s consultant, Risk Management Services. In turn, on May 3, 1999, the senior vice president of RMS, Sandy Blumit, submitted notes to swimming executives detailing the problem.

“[USOC] mandates innocents should be protected by their [national governing body]. Therefore, can’t delete abuse and molestation,” Blumit wrote, adding that as a consequence USOC “would not allow any local members’ clubs, volunteers or members on premises (training center).”

This impasse was resolved two days later when swimming advised USOC that it would amend its insurance coverage to include claims of abuse and molestation. Swimmers and their coaches were allowed back to the training center.

What appears most significant about this from 22 years’ distance is that Blumit’s presentation of the controversy was made not to USA Swimming’s board but to its wholly owned subsidiary, United States Sports Insurance Company, Inc. The story of USSIC embodies some of the financial maneuvers of corporate insurance practices that are likely a focus of the current federal investigation, according to lawyers who have been involved in civil lawsuits and dissidents who formerly served in sport leadership positions.

USSIC had been incorporated in 1988, when USA Swimming’s main insurance carrier, AIG, was complaining that premiums were too low in multiple areas of liability, including abuse. Given the level of exposure, AIG would only discuss an annual premium in the range of $1 million. Previously, they had been closer to $200,000.

“We would have to pay a million dollars to get a million dollars of coverage,” explained Ronnie Lee Van Pool, USA Swimming board president from 2002 to 2006, in a 2010 deposition in a “Jane Doe” abuse lawsuit against swimming.

In that period, both for-profit and nonprofit entities faced the same problem of steeply rising liability premiums. Their collective response was a new industry wrinkle called “captive reinsurance.” With smart leveraging of tax breaks and regulatory gimmicks, corporations could save money through a combination of insuring themselves, managing claims themselves or underwriting the risks of their third-party commercial carriers. The Catholic Church, for example, has a captive, called National Catholic Risk Retention Group, Inc.

By the time USA Swimming got around to forming USSIC, the USOC already had its own captive, Panol Insurance. But foreshadowing the dispute over swimming’s access to the training center a decade later, Panol was just as reluctant to underwrite swimming’s risks at the established premiums as AIG had been. While other sport bodies saw their premiums reduced or coverages remain stable, underwriters for swimming considered it uniquely beset both with greater risks and with poor risk management. 

USA Swimming had to figure out where to locate its own captive reinsurer. In the late 1980s, Caribbean countries competed to be the preferred home of captives. For USSIC, Barbados won the prize. The Caribbean island nation offered many years of tax abatement, as well as a structure so loose that all the operation really required was a dummy bank account and a set of books domiciled on the island. The clincher may have been the absence of a tax treaty between Barbados and the U.S. After all, the less exposure to American laws and their pesky inspectors and enforcers, the better. 

USSIC set up shop on White Town Road in Bridgetown, the Barbadian capital. Local law mandated an annual board of directors meeting on site, which in practice became a beachfront bacchanal, below the radar of dues-paying families and their swimmers, and a favorite perk for officials in the know.

The phenomenon of offshore captives has receded in recent years as Delaware and other U.S. states have escalated their own inducements to become insurance regulatory havens. As the image of swimming suffered during the publicity of abuse scandals, officials also realized that an offshore subsidiary, although entirely legal, was a bad look for an organization that marketed patriotism as much as athletics. In 2013, USSIC was brought onshore and put into what is known as “runoff mode.” Three years later, London’s Randall & Quilter Investment Holdings Ltd purchased USSIC’s assets for $2.1 million, and swimming was out of the captive business. 

Throw clubs under the bus — but protect the national brand

In its heyday, USSIC featured an unorthodox wrinkle in swimming’s insurance structure known as the “wasting” provision. This is believed to be one focus of the federal investigation.

Meanwhile, USA Swimming worked around USOC’s mandate to include specific abuse coverage in its umbrella liability coverage: That coverage did not extend to the 2,000 member clubs across the country. Instead, those clubs were given USSIC-underwritten coverage to cover claims of abuse or molestation by coaches — coverage capped at $100,000 per claim.

The wasting clause in insurance policies acted like the ultimate deductible: Every dollar spent on defending a claim was correspondingly reduced from the coverage. Thus, if investigators and lawyers for USA Swimming ran up a tab of $100,000 in a particular case, a victim-claimant stood to collect a maximum of $100,000 minus $100,000: zero dollars.

The club being sued, in such a case, would also have zero dollars remaining to defend itself, its coaches and its club boards. Furthermore,, the coverage limited member clubs to two claims a year.

The working concept here was that an individual club could be thrown under the bus, in contemporary parlance, with its coaches forced into bankruptcy and any parent board left holding the bag. The larger goals were twofold: protecting USA Swimming from claims made against its member clubs, and denying settlements to victims that would actually  cover their injuries, therapy and treatment.

There was only one way, under this system, for plaintiffs to find effective relief: Get past the member clubs’ coverage and all the way to USA Swimming’s general liability coverage. Strategies meant to pierce the national organization’s financial veil are largely what have driven the lawsuits of recent years. These are also being studied by federal prosecutors.

This line of attack was emboldened in April, when the California Supreme Court ruled that USA Taekwondo — and not just an individual predator, the convicted coach Marc Gitelman — was liable under the principle of “duty of care” in the case of Yasmin Brown, Kendra Gatt and Brianna Bordon, who had won $60 million in a lawsuit against Gitelman. That decision potentially means that abuse survivors can go after the deeper pockets of national sport governing bodies (although the USOC remains excluded from liability).

Swimming’s insurance practices did more than just protect the people at the top. They also generated paper profits. In return for tamping down victims’ claims, USSIC formulated a “safety rebate,” reflecting successful years when premiums and underwriting costs were exceeded by savings.

As safety rebates flourished, USSIC’s assets reached as high as $27 million, according to IRS filings. In 2008, the company held a portfolio of U.S. government bonds totaling more than $12 million. Two years later the value of corporate bond holdings and other fixed income approached $15 million. 

A congressional probe fizzles — but it’s not the end of the story

In 2012, Kelley Davies, the swimming abuse victim from the 1980s who had been identified by whistleblower David Berkoff, saw her old coach, Rick Curl, on the pool deck during televised coverage of the Olympic Trials in Omaha, and she was furious. Co-owner of the Curl-Burke Swim Club, a prominent age-group program in the Washington, D.C., area, Curl had lost his coaching position at the University of Maryland and relocated to Australia. But now Curl was back and had resumed his American coaching career, with no apparent resistance.

Davies told her story to a Washington Post reporter, and Curl was banned by USA Swimming and indicted in Maryland. After appearing at the 2013 sentencing hearing, which followed a plea deal, Davies advocated for a congressional investigation, and the Post editorial page echoed her. (Curl, now 71, was sentenced to seven years in state prison and paroled in 2016.)

Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat, heeded the call. With Republicans in the House majority at the time, he served as ranking minority member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Though Miller did not control the committee or have the power to call hearings, he asked the Government Accountability Office to produce a study of laws relating to youth sports programs. And his staff investigated and fielded tips.

In a July 2, 2013, memo to the USA Swimming board of directors, Wielgus and then board president Bruce Stratton announced emergency measures in response.

“We recognize that some of the issues we face today are an increasing unfortunate fact of life for all youth-serving organizations and that our evolving role and responsibilities related to inappropriate conduct by our members is permanently with us,” Wielgus and Stratton wrote. “… [O]ur strategy moving forward will have the ultimate goal of improving the overall perceptions of USA Swimming’s Safe Sport Program efforts.”

At a cost Wielgus and Stratton estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be drawn from “the Executive and Business Development budgets,” their steps included commissioning an “independent review” of the Safe Sport program, which would be carried out by the Wisconsin-based Gundersen Health System. This review would be “by far the most expensive piece” of swimming’s counter-measures. 

In addition, Wielgus and the then director of Safe Sport, Susan Woessner, would undergo “intensive media training.” This training and other crisis communications services would be coordinated by GroundFloor Media, a Denver marketing and public relations firm. Other resources were targeted to local teams and regional governing affiliates for whenever “an issue of sexual misconduct arises [and] there is a flare-up of local media attention.”

(Woessner resigned in 2018 after she was accused of having had an undisclosed relationship with Sean Hutchison, one of the first subjects of an investigation by swimming’s newly formed Safe Sport program in 2010. This came about after Ariana Kukors, a gold medalist swimmer who had been groomed and abused by Hutchison over a period of years, filed suit against him and the organization. In her resignation statement, Woessner claimed she had only “kissed” Hutchison once and denied any sexual relationship. Hutchison, under criminal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and others, is believed to have fled to Brazil.)

The Gundersen Health System review, publicly released in early 2014 without having been distributed beforehand to the board, concluded that USA Swimming was doing a good job of meeting the coach sexual abuse problem.

Miller retired from Congress at the end of 2014. Before leaving, he released an exchange of letters with the FBI. In his July 9, 2014, letter to then-director James Comey, Miller requested “that you fully investigate USA Swimming’s handling of both past and present cases of child sexual abuse.”

Miller’s 11-page letter did not elicit a response from Comey. Instead, Maxwell Marker, acting deputy assistant director of the bureau’s Criminal Investigation Division, delivered a pallid three-paragraph memo. “FBI representatives recently met with USA Swimming officials and discussed applicable federal violations associated with child exploitation matters, the vulnerabilities of those within USA Swimming, and provided information to assist in USA Swimming’s effort to educate their membership regarding the sexual exploitation of children,” he wrote.

The GAO report requested by Miller in 2013 was not published until 2015, after he left Congress. This report turned out to be a perfunctory rundown of sexual abuse statutes. USA Swimming’s investment in public relations initiatives seemed to have paid off.

It didn’t last. In 2018, the USA Gymnastics scandals made national headlines, and the federal grand jury investigation of USA Swimming began.

535 new fast radio bursts help answer deep questions about the universe

On June 9, 2021, my colleagues and I announced the discovery of 535 fast radio bursts that we detected using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment telescope (CHIME). Detected in 2018 and 2019, these bursts of radio waves last only milliseconds, come from far across the universe, and are enormously powerful – a typical event releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun does over many days. 

Fast radio bursts are the subject of a young and emerging field in astrophysics, with only around 150 having been found before the release of our new catalog. A lot of work has been done to understand these events, but these cosmic radio bursts remain as mysterious as when they were first discovered in 2007. Simply put: No one knows what exactly produces them. 

Every newly captured event is allowing astrophysicists like me to learn more about these weird cosmic phenomena. And, as this is happening, some astronomers have begun to use fast radio bursts as incredibly powerful tools to study the universe itself.

What is a fast radio burst?

The name “fast radio burst” is pretty on the nose. These signals are bursts of radiation in radio frequencies that last for mere milliseconds. A defining property of these bursts is their dispersion: The bursts produce a spectrum of radio waves, and as the waves travel through matter, they spread out – or disperse – with bursts at higher radio frequencies arriving at telescopes earlier than those at lower frequencies.

This dispersion allows researchers to learn about two important things. First, telescopes like CHIME can measure this dispersion to learn about the stuff that radio bursts pass through as they travel toward Earth. For example, some of my colleagues were able to solve a long-standing mystery of missing matter that was scattered across the universe. 

Second, by measuring dispersion, astronomers can indirectly determine one of the most important pieces of information in all of astronomy: how far apart things are. The larger the dispersion measure, the more material the signal encountered. So, presumably, passing through more stuff means the burst traveled farther across the universe. 

The dispersion measures for fast radio bursts are so large that astronomers know the signals must be coming from outside of the Milky Way galaxy, but these estimates can be inaccurate because of the uneven distribution of matter in the universe. We therefore needed another way of finding distances to the sources of fast radio bursts to avoid assumptions on how matter is distributed and thus unlock a large amount of information and opportunities. 

A striking solution to this problem came in 2017, when colleagues of mine were able to pinpoint the exact location of the source of a repeating fast radio burst in the sky. By taking images of repeating bursts on the sky, they found the specific galaxy that the bursts were coming from. Then, using optical telescopes, they determined the distance to this galaxy – approximately 3 billion light-years away from Earth.

Repeating fast radio bursts make it much easier to pinpoint the host galaxies of their sources by giving researchers multiple chances to catch them. While astronomers work to answer important questions about fast radio bursts – What are they? Are repeating bursts different from single bursts? Are they all caused by the same things? – these lingering mysteries don’t stop us from putting them to good use in the meantime.

Using fast radio bursts to study the cosmos

The unique properties of fast radio bursts and their host galaxies – combined with recent technological advancements like the CHIME telescope – have given researchers hope that these phenomena can be used to answer some long-standing questions about the universe.

For example, some theorists have proposed that fast radio bursts can be used to study the three–dimensional structure of matterin the universe. Others have shown that the most distant bursts could be used to learn about poorly understood early momentsin the evolution of the universe. But to answer these and other questions, astronomers need a large number of fast radio bursts and their dispersion measures, strengths and locations in the sky. 

And this is where our new catalog from CHIME comes in. By releasing information about 535 new fast radio bursts – including 61 bursts coming from 18 repeating sources – our team is more than quadrupling the total number of known events and pushing the field into an era of big data. With a large and growing number of measurements, all sorts of questions can finally start being addressed.

Recently, student members of the CHIME collaboration began releasing studies using this catalog. One study showed that the fast radio bursts detected by CHIME come equally from all directions – a fact that had previously been under debate. Another team studied the shapes and sizes of bursts in the catalog and confirmed that repeating events behave differentlyfrom single bursts, pointing to multiple causes of fast radio bursts. And a third team for the first time confirmed that fast radio bursts are strongly associated with known galaxies. This means astronomers can use events to map out the structure of the universe.

An adventurous future lies ahead

CHIME and other telescopes are detecting more fast radio bursts every day, but researchers are just scratching the surface of what can be learned about – and done with – these mysterious and powerful cosmic events.

Colleagues of mine recently argued that attributing thousands of events to their individual host galaxies is “the most urgent observational priority for [fast radio burst] science.” Finding host galaxies is very challenging, though – only 14 galaxies that host fast radio bursts have been found so far. But other telescopes, like the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, have successfully detected and pinpointed a small number of nonrepeating bursts to their host galaxies. Next-generation telescopes are being designed to combine the high-detection capability of CHIME with the high-resolution imaging of the Australian telescope. 

The field of fast radio burst astronomy is still in its infancy, and it is hard to predict what discoveries will be made next. But I expect the future of the field to be just like these profound cosmic events: bright and fast.

GOP using new laws to drive out local Democratic election officials — and not just in Georgia

Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill aimed at preventing “election subversion” after Republican state lawmakers wasted no time in using newly passed voting laws to seize control of local elections, replacing existing officials with their own appointees.

Democrats have rallied around the For The People Act, also known as HR 1 and S 1, a sweeping voting rights bill that would codify voter protections, create new election administration standards and crack down on dark money in politics. But while the bill could prevent state crackdowns on mail-in voting, driven by false claims about their security by former President Donald Trump and his allies, it would do nothing about the wide range of new state laws that strip power from election officials and will make it easier to overturn future elections.

A group of Senate and House Democrats this week introduced the Preventing Election Subversion Act, aimed at protecting election officials from political pressure by barring unjust removal of local election officials, making it a federal crime to intimidate election workers and restricting poll watchers.

“The dangers of the voter suppression efforts we’re seeing in Georgia and across the nation are not theoretical, and we can’t allow power-hungry state actors to squeeze the people out of their own democracy by overruling the decisions of local election officials,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement. “This legislation is critical to ensuring the federal government has the tools to make sure every eligible voter’s voice is heard and their ballot is counted to help decide the direction of our country.”

Warnock’s office noted in a statement that at least 210 bills giving legislatures more power over election officials have been introduced in 41 states, according to the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group promoting fair elections. At least 24 have already been enacted into law.

“The bill is a good start, but much more needs to be done,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, told Salon.

In Georgia, at least 10 county election officials, most of them Democrats and half of them Black, have been removed or had their positions eliminated, or are expected to be replaced by Republicans under local ordinances and a bill signed by Gov. Brian Kemp earlier this year, The New York Times reported last week.

Helen Butler, a Black Democratic election board member in Morgan County who will be removed at the end of the month, told MSNBC this week that her ouster was the result of record election turnout and an outcome Republicans “didn’t like.”

“The next election you’ll have a board that is appointed strictly by a majority Republican Party,” she warned. “That will oversee the counting process, absentee voting, application requests, having to have an ID. With the county process required, who will get to count the ballots, how it is counted, and what are the results.”

But it won’t be just any Republican who gets a seat on the board. In DeKalb County, local Republicans are moving to replace Baoky Vu, the Republican vice-chair of the county’s election board who refuted GOP false election claims, with a far-right conservative Democrats have described as a “white nationalist, misogynist and homophobe” who is “infamous for his hateful antics and supporting overturning the election.”

“It’s certainly a possibility that real elections integrity would be thrown out the window when you start putting some of these dangerous demagogues in the place of individuals who have carried out their duties and under, at times, great risk to their health and to their livelihoods,” Vu, who was censured by the county GOP earlier this year for opposing the new voting law, told CNN.

Georgia Republicans have also given themselves more power over the state election board, while Arizona Republicans are similarly trying to strip powers from the Democratic secretary of state. Arkansas Republicans passed a bill that allows a state board to “take over and conduct elections” if the legislature decides there are doubts about the “appearance of an equal, free and impartial election.” Elsewhere, Republicans are snatching power away from local election boards, imposing criminal penalties on election officials and pushing dubious election “audits” like the one currently underway in Arizona. 

“For decades, our elections have been run by trusted professionals who are dedicated to protecting the freedom to vote,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, in a statement to Salon. “Now, a handful of politicians are trying to hijack our elections and intimidate election officials by criminalizing routine and minor aspects of their work. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for American democracy. We need to use every tool we have to make sure our elections reflect the will of the American people — not politicians. The bill introduced in Congress this week is an important step in that direction.”

Democrats worry that the removal of Black election officials could further disenfranchise voters of color and that if the new laws had been in place last year Republicans could have found legal avenues to overturn legitimate election results, according to the Times article.

“What’s driving these efforts is anti-democratic sentiment,” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the nonprofit good government group Common Cause, said in an interview with Salon. “These individuals attempted to overturn an election and they were unable to do so. So they are now attempting to change the rules so that next time they can overturn the will of the people.”

While the obvious primary concern is that Republican partisans will now have methods they could use to overturn an election simply because they don’t like the outcome, replacing local election officials could have more insidious effects in election administration.

Depending on the state, “these individuals might now have the power to close polling stations or limit voting machine access,” Albert warned. “This is part and parcel of a very anti-democratic push to make sure that people who vote against you don’t get to vote and if they accidentally do, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll throw out their votes.'”

Georgia Republicans have also stripped Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, of his role as head of the state election board after he debunked Trump’s false claims about the election. Republican lawmakers in Arizona are likewise trying to strip Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of her powers after she trashed their “forensic audit” of ballots in Maricopa County.

“Secretaries of state just oversaw the highest turnout and most secure election in American history, in the midst of a pandemic,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement to Salon. “Voters elected secretaries of state to administer elections, and it shows that the partisan insiders pushing these measures do not trust voters and are trying to tilt future elections in their favor. 

“It’s undemocratic, and part of the coordinated national effort to undermine the right to vote.”

The ouster of local and state election officials is only one aspect of Republican lawmakers’ multi-pronged approach to seize more power over elections.

Some states are moving to impose criminal penalties on election officials. A Texas voting package would make it a crime to send an unsolicited ballot application to a voter or to attempt to stop disruptive poll watchers, among other routine election administration functions, and Wisconsin lawmakers are weighing similar legislation. Republicans in 20 states have introduced at least 40 bills to empower partisan poll watchers, raising fears of voter intimidation, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

North Carolina Republicans passed a bill that would give them the ability to block the Democratic-led elections board from settling lawsuits over ballot access. Kansas passed a similar bill, and lawmakers there also voted to strip the governor of power to modify election laws. Arizona lawmakers voted to ban the state attorney general from representing Hobbs in lawsuits, and banned Hobbs from using public funds to hire outside counsel. At least 14 states have introduced bills that would seize power from election officials or otherwise limit their authority.

Some Republicans are also looking to follow Arizona’s lead in fueling fraud allegations by “auditing” results that have already been counted, recounted and certified — even, bewilderingly, in states where Trump won. Lawmakers in crucial swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan have called for such audits, based on nothing beyond the sentiments and conspiracy theories of disgruntled Trump supporters. The Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee on Wednesday released a report that found “no evidence” to back up Trump and his allies’ claims of fraud and described the push for an audit as “not justifiable.”

“The 2021 state legislative season may ultimately prove to be a turning point in the history of America’s democracy,” the States United Democracy Center said in a report last week. “The number of anti-voter laws that have been introduced and passed is unprecedented. These are the ingredients of a democracy crisis.”

The Preventing Election Subversion Act aims to rein in some of this state legislation, partly because the For the People Act has been criticized for failing to address the most alarming measures in this year’s slate of voting restriction bills. The new bill was introduced on Tuesday as Republicans used the filibuster to block debate on the For the People Act, leaving the fate of the legislation in doubt. Democrats hope to add this new legislation to the larger Senate voting rights package, including provisions to protect election workers who have faced death threats in response to false claims of election fraud.

The bill would make it a federal felony to “intimidate, threaten, coerce, [or] harass” an election worker, to interfere with their duties or to retaliate against them for performing their official duties. It would allow election officials to sue in federal court if they are removed without just cause and empowers the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to intervene on behalf of election officials in such cases. The legislation would also bar people who are not state or local officials from challenging a voter’s eligibility and would impose a buffer that poll watchers must respect inside polling places.

The bill was introduced in the Senate by Warnock, along fellow Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who is leading legislative efforts on the Senate version of the For the People Act.

“Around the world we see sham elections controlled by a ruling party to give a veneer of democracy while preventing the people from actually deciding who holds power,” Merkley said in a statement. “And in 2021, this threat has arrived on our shores. For the first time in my memory, one party is trying to dismantle the safeguards that give us independent, free elections so they can rig — or throw out — the results they don’t like.”

The bill was also introduced in the House by Reps. John Sarbanes, D-Md., Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Collin Allred, D-Texas, Nikema Williams, D-Ga., and Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y.

“This year, the right to vote has been under the worst assault since Jim Crow,” Jones said in a statement. “Republicans in state houses across the country have gone to outrageous lengths to silence Black and brown voters, introducing over 400 racist voter suppression bills and removing nonpartisan election officials who oversee and certify elections. Our bill would protect the independence of local election officials and ensure that future elections are free and fair.”

Hasen told Salon that while the new bill would indeed rein in some of the most insidious new state laws, Democrats should also rework the Electoral Count Act, which allowed Republicans to object to the electoral results on Jan. 6 after the Capitol riot, “so that Congress cannot subvert the voters’ will either.”

Democrats have clearly been dealt a setback after the Republican filibuster of the voting rights legislation, given the resistance by centrist Democrats to reforming or ditching the arcane Senate procedure. Given the near-total Republican legislative control in the states that have enacted new voting laws, state-level Democrats currently have little recourse except to challenge the laws’ provisions in court.

“We need the federal government to rise to the urgency of the times,” Griswold told Salon, “and pass laws to protect democracy and the right to vote.”

Why the Southern Baptist Convention finally rejected Trumpism

On Tuesday, June 15, some supporters of former President Donald Trump were bitterly disappointed when the Southern Baptist Convention chose the Rev. Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, as its president and rejected some of the more extreme Trumpians who were competing for the position — including the Rev. Mike Stone, who was supported by the far-right Conservative Baptist Network. Journalist Molly Olmstead analyzes this development in an article published by Slate on June 17. As Olmstead sees it, Litton’s narrow victory shows a move away from Trumpism among Baptists.

“The SBC has been going through something like an identity crisis this year,” Olmsted explains. “Southern Baptists, like most White evangelicals, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but in the run-up to the 2020 election, critics began to chafe at the frequently conspiracy theory-laden partisan politics within their churches. After last summer’s racial unrest, many of the denomination’s Black pastors — actively courted by a Convention uncomfortably aware of its overwhelming whiteness and deeply racist history — began to protest the SBC’s unwillingness to recognize the extent of modern-day racism. At the same time, an organized group of Southern Baptists has pushed for a second conservative resurgence to correct what it sees as a loosening of the core Southern Baptist identity.”

Baptists who believe that the Southern Baptist Convention should be MAGA through and through favored Stone, a Georgia-based pastor. But 52% of the vote went to Litton, who is White and politically conservative but believes that Baptists should have at least have a conversation about race. The Trumpians at the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention were pushing for things like an official position against critical race theory, which has become a boogieman in right-wing media. Critical race theory is a field of study that examines the history of racism in the U.S. and the ways in which racism of the past has an effect on institutions of the present.

“Critical race theory has been a contentious topic within the SBC for months longer than its more recent turn in the media spotlight,” Olmstead observes. “When Donald Trump was nearing the end of his presidency this fall, he launched a sudden attack on the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach to analyzing the systems that have created and perpetuated racial inequality. As the anti-CRT sentiments quietly percolated in certain circles thanks to the president’s comments, the conservatives of the SBC seized on the issue.”

Although many Baptists identify with the far-right White evangelical movement, some African-American Baptists are outspoken supporters of liberal and progressive causes — the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, for example. The far-right Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., the late founder of the Moral Majority and a one-time segregationist and supporter of Jim Crow laws, was a Baptist — but so was Dr. Martin Luther, King, Jr., a civil rights icon. There were heated debates among Baptists during the 1950s and 1960s, and there are still heated debates among Baptists in 2021.

Olmstead notes, “In November, well ahead of the Republican Party’s current uproar over CRT, the seminary presidents put out a joint statement calling the framework ‘incompatible’ with the Baptist Faith and Message, the SBC’s central doctrinal statement. Critical race theory, they argued, was counter to their faith because the Bible, which evangelicals view as the literal and unerring word of God, should be the only tool for addressing the evils of the world. These comments essentially reversed a previous position the SBC had taken back in 2019, when the convention passed a resolution allowing critical race theory and intersectionality to be used as analytical tools as long as they were second to scripture.”

And in 2021, Olmstead adds, “most observers came out of the meeting with a sense that the delegates had put the brakes on the convention’s careening path toward the right.”

Trump aides prepared Insurrection Act order against BLM protests: report

New information is coming to light about the extraordinary actions that almost happened to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of Georgia Floyd by Minneapolis police.

“Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said. The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the administration over how to respond to the protests,” The New York Times reported Friday.

“Mr. Trump, enraged by the demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.”

June 1 is the same day that authorities deployed tear gas on activists in Lafayette Square to clear the park for a photo op where Trump held a Bible upside down.

“Mr. Trump was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military to patrol the streets of the capital,” the newspaper reported. “According to one former senior administration official, Mr. Trump was aware that the document was prepared. He never invoked the act, and in a statement to The New York Times he denied that he had wanted to deploy active-duty troops. ‘It’s absolutely not true and if it was true, I would have done it,’ Mr. Trump said.”

Read the full report.

Trump Org. could be hit with criminal charges as soon as next week: report

Prosecutors in Manhattan have notified Donald Trump’s lawyers that his family business could be slapped with criminal charges as soon as next week.

The indictment would cover fringe benefits provided to Trump Organization’s chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and other company executives, including private school tuition for the CFO’s grandchildren, apartment rents and car leases, several sources with knowledge of the case told the New York Times.

Prosecutors are investigating whether those perks were properly recorded in the company’s books and whether taxes were paid on them, and Trump’s lawyers met Thursday with senior prosecutors working for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in hopes of persuading them to drop the criminal case — a routine development in white-collar criminal investigations.

Vance’s office has been investigating Trump and his family business dealings for years.

Jen Psaki asked whether Biden is planning for Trump to try and re-take White House in August

White House correspondent for Playboy Magazine, Brian Karem, posed an unexpected question to President Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, during a Friday press briefing: is the current administration prepared in the event former President Donald Trump seeks to be re-installed as president come August?

The claim has been championed in recent weeks by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and other fervent Trump allies, and Trump himself reportedly believes it will come true.

“Is this administration prepared for — we’ve heard rumblings from the former president and supporters about August and the inevitability of him being reinstated? Is this administration prepared to meet the challenge if, in fact, they press that issue in August?” Karem asked.

“We’ve already seen an insurrection; what would this administration’s actions be if that is pressed in August?”

The press secretary responded by saying Biden remains committed to leading the nation, despite claims made by right-wing activists that Trump will be re-installed as president.

“The president is prepared to continue to govern and lead the United States of America,” Psaki stated. “Of course, should there be an elevation, an escalation, you know, that is something we would certainly monitor and track as well.”

TrumpWorld itself remains largely spit on the idea that Trump will be re-installed come August.

However, the initial August theory cooked up by Lindell claims that the former president will be re-installed in August, pending widespread voter fraud stemming from the 2020 election being uncovered, has already been revised. 

“I might be off by a month,” Lindell said in a recent interview with a right-wing Christian outlet while hinting that the Trump second-coming might not occur in August but rather on “God’s time.” 

Erik Prince linked to long-running undercover scheme to infiltrate Democratic party organizations

A former British spy and Republican mega-donor Erik Prince, a founder of the private military contractor Blackwater (now rebranded as “Academi) and brother to former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, recruited a motley crew of home-grown American operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas and elsewhere to lead an initiative to infiltrate state-level Democratic party organizations and campaigns, according to a new report.

Prince, alongside the ex-MI6 officer he recruited to head the project, Richard Seddon, also targeted moderate Republican officials and those deemed as insufficiently dedicated to the hardline right-wing agenda favored by former President Donald Trump, The New York Times reported Friday.

The duo were bankrolled by the longtime conservative donor and heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune, Susan Gore, and trained their operatives on a remote Wyoming ranch in areas like the “basics of espionage” and “political sabotage,” according to the newspaper.

It remains unclear what level of success they were able to accomplish, though the Times notes Seddon and Prince placed two spies — Beau Maier, the nephew of conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and Sofia LaRocca, deep into Democratic political organizations in Wyoming, Arizona, and Colorado. 

But then, at some point, Democratic operatives became suspicious of the story LaRocca was claiming, according to The Times: 

Her behavior raised some suspicion. Ms. LaRocca and Mr. Maier lived in Fort Collins, Colo., only about 45 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital, but their residence prompted some Democrats to ask how they planned to organize a grass-roots campaign to flip the state while living in Colorado. Ms. LaRocca told others she could not rent a home in Cheyenne because she had a dog, an implausible explanation.

Ms. LaRocca had also introduced herself to party officials as Cat Debreau. She eventually told a story about why she later went by the name Sofia LaRocca: She had been the victim of an online stalker, she said, but decided to once again use her original name because the police had told her that her stalker had reformed.

“Her story from the start rang very untrue,” said Nina Hebert, who at the time was the digital director for the Wyoming Democratic Party. “The police don’t call you and say, ‘Hey, your stalker is better.'”

Neither Project Veritas nor its longtime head and frequent Fox News guest James O’Keefe returned a request for comment Friday.

One of the most prominent targets of the operation was Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican who many in Trump’s corner viewed as overly moderate and whose candidacy Gore had vigorously opposed. 

Maier and LaRocca were also able to install themselves within the Wyoming-based progressive organization, Better Wyoming, which only discovered the plot months later, after they had been well integrated into Better Wyoming operations. Nate Martin, the group’s head, told the Times he suspected the idea was to “dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody.”

Maier and LaRocca were married last week in Wyoming, according to the report. Glenn Beck delivered a toast at the reception.

Ron DeSantis leaves scene of Florida building collapse to announce border deployment

The morning after a major building collapse near Miami left four people dead and close to 200 others missing for several hours amid a frantic search for survivors, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., left the scene — heading north to Pensacola to instead see off a sizable contingent of Florida law enforcement officers on out-of-state deployments to Texas and Arizona.

Dozens of officers from a variety of state agencies will be deployed for 16-day shifts at the U.S. border with Mexico, DeSantis announced in a Friday press release, the first posted to his website since the collapse of a high-rise condo building called Champlain Towers South in Surfside rocked the state one day earlier.

And despite the major domestic catastrophe making international headlines, DeSantis referred to the current conditions at the U.S. border as a “crisis” that requires immediate action. Immigration activists have blasted this rhetoric, used by the GOP in recent weeks, as a political distraction meant to obscure the actual problems faced by migrants and border communities.

The juxtaposition of both events likely wasn’t lost on those watching DeSantis’ subsequent appearance on Fox News, in which the hosts veered off-topic from the building collapse to blast President Joe Biden’s border policies. Even the Florida officers who could, in theory, be sent out-of-state on the assignment appeared to be confused by the governor’s hastily arranged announcement, reports suggested.

Representatives for sheriffs’ departments across Florida told the Pensacola News Journal on Friday that they weren’t quite sure what resources were being allocated to which jurisdictions, what personnel they should ready and who exactly was footing the bill. The question of funding for the venture failed to gain much clarity during DeSantis’ Friday press conference, with the governor punting the inquiry as something to be hashed out in the future.

“That’s still a point of discussion,” he said in response to a reporter’s question about who was paying for the deployment. “Typically, if someone would help us, we would pick up some of their funding, so that’s how we would hope that it goes.”

DeSantis was one of three Republican governors to commit state officers to border duty after a letter from Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, and Gov. Doug Ducey, R-Ariz., called for help from their counterparts in the remaining 48 states. In particular, DeSantis used a rising number of methamphetamine arrests to justify the deployment, saying the the influx of drugs coming from Mexico is an existential threat to the safety of everyday Floridians.

Meanwhile, at least 159 people remain missing in the rubble of Champlain Towers as first responders continue their search for survivors. Authorities had located 120 people who were unaccounted for by Friday afternoon, according to The Washington Post. 

It remains unclear what caused the building to suddenly collapse, though reports suggest that the site sits on reclaimed wetlands, with one 2020 study finding it had been slowly sinking since at least the early 1990s.

Biden approved an emergency declaration on Friday, which clears the way for federal relief efforts. 

Biden whispers — and right-wing media goes nuts, claiming he’s “compromised” or an “alien”

During President Biden’s White House press conference on Thursday, he whispered a response to a reporter’s question — an apparent attempt to appear patient after having lost his cool last week in an exchange with CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins. 

Biden’s whisper prompted an immediate freakout on right-wing media, where various commentators utterly lacking in medical qualifications diagnosed the president with “dementia,” suggested that he was “compromised” and even hinted he might be an “alien” and there were reasons to be frightened of him. 

The original moment from Thursday’s press conference was perhaps slightly odd, although to most neutral viewers it will likely appear that Biden was seeking not to lose his well-known temper. 

Salon has compiled some of the most outlandish claims made across right-wing programming over the past 24 hours, which appear to play into a more significant messaging push in the conservative media ecosystem, which has had difficulty stigmatizing Biden effectively amid the broad popularity of many of his proposals. Many of the pundits heard or watched by millions of conservative-leaning Americans every day have seized on whispering as evidence that Biden’s mental health is diminished, albeit in an unspecified way. 

“And to lean forward and, you know, whisper your answers kinda leads me to believe that there is some level of dementia,” Fox News contributor Sean Duffy said on Friday morning. 

Right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka, who often proclaims himself to be a “doctor” but is definitely not a physician, responded on his radio show: “He’s not functioning, guys!”

Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon floated the idea on his “War Room: Pandemic” podcast, alongside Boris Epshteyn, that the whispering suggests Biden is now an “alien.”

“By any objective measure, the man is clearly compromised,” Fox News host Dan Bongino told Sean Hannity on Thursday night, going on to say that whispering was a “serious issue.” 

Exactly why right-wing TV hosts like Duffy and Bongino feel qualified to opine on the president’s mental condition is not clear. Neither of them possesses medical training or certification of any kind. 

The hits kept on coming. Former Republican Senate campaign staffer Matt Whitlock tweeted, “This is nuts.” Conservative Mediaite editor Caleb Howe said, “This is painful.” Rep. Andy Biggs, a far-right Arizona Republican and “Stop the Steal” supporter, remarked, “‘Creepy’ Joe just took on a new meaning.” 

“What an utter embarrassment he is,” said Fox News host Steve Hilton of the president. Fox News contributor Sara Carter asked rhetorically: “Listen to Biden and let me know if you’re feeling scared.” Exactly what we might be scared about, Carter did not specify.

This latest anti-whispering campaign arrives after many previous right-wing attempts to characterize Biden in damaging terms have fallen flat. As the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins noted in a recent feature article, neither right-wing commentators nor the conservative publishing industry have yet “figured out how to turn the new president into a compelling villain.”

Watch Salon’s supercut video above, via YouTube. 

“Sex/Life”: Netflix’s best worst raunchy ride of this summer is 50 shades of oy vey

“Sex/Life” is proof that very zeitgeisty terms hit a point at which they lose their original meaning – or worse, are co-opted to promote projects that don’t qualify. Here, the term in question is “female gaze.”

Purely in a mechanical sense it fits, in that it’s a series created by a woman, Stacy Rukeyser, whose eyes presumably work. Her take on a woman’s erotic journey reminds us that not all womanly visions are delivered with 20/20 clarity. Some are entirely myopic.

Nevertheless, “Sex/Life” serves a purpose at a time when so many are starved for touch. Netflix knows you’re probably bored with diddling yourself to “Bridgerton” for the millionth time. And without “Broad City”‘s Ilana and Abbi to guide you to the good stuff, navigating the Internet’s kinkscape can be frightening. So think of this as the service’s invitation to enjoy eight not-too-explicit episodes featuring “The L Word” star Sarah Shahi getting railed by an Australian and a living mannequin.

That “Sex/Life” purports to examine a woman’s desires and how those may conflict with her reality as a mother and caregiver could be thought of as revolutionary. That is, if some version of that notion had never inspired who knows how many horny housewife skin flicks, be they of the softcore variety or along the lines of “I can never un-see that; please arrange for an exorcism after you call my therapist.”

In fairness, that description shortchanges her character Billie Connelly, a transplanted Georgia girl who occasionally references the state as if it’s a cultural wasteland. Billie who is living a House Beautiful life in Connecticut funded by her investment executive husband Cooper (Mike Vogel), who only has eyes for her and looks like a Ken doll, only one that isn’t smooth down there.

Billie’s children are sweet and loving, and the other moms at school are perky and welcoming. Everything about Billie’s life looks faultless . . . say it with me now . . . from the outside. In truth, Billie yearns for her old New York City life, when her boobs didn’t leak and she and bosom buddy Sasha (Margaret Odette) were graduate students, thick as thieves and unapologetically hunting down the D.

Hi-de-ho, was life sparkling until Billie met Brad (Adam Demos), a heartbreaker with a reputation and the tortured soul that comes standard with his particular model of heterosexual man. Brad ruins all who come after him for Billie, which is explained by way of a full frontal shot that is . . . Let’s just say you’ll be amazed that Billie doesn’t needs a kitchen stepladder to make it through the show’s obligatory wall-banging excursions.

Did we mention Brad is Australian? Not Hemsworth Australian, but far from Murdoch, and with a unit that could destroy the Sydney Opera House in a single swing.

Nevertheless, he would have remained nothing but a spot in Billie’s memory bans if she hadn’t decided to unburden herself in a journal. And where does she keep that journal? Why, in a document on the family laptop. That means this entire trip, one traveled in a vehicle with a Skinemax body and a Lifetime flick’s basic bitch brains, could have been avoided if Billie had simply used a password that wasn’t her birthday, or 1-2-3-4.

Inevitably the only other literate human in the household, Cooper finds Billie’s randy notes and spins out – but in a super sexy, filthy-dirty dangerous way. Billie’s delighted until Cooper’s obsession with Brad gets out of hand in the usual repressed suburban rich white people ways. After that the love triangle starts to cause more tears than orgasms.

About that. Among several recurring motifs is Shahi’s instant-climaxes, the type that completely messes up an inexperienced person’s understanding of sexuality and becomes comical after the first close-eyed sighs at next to nothing. Merely standing on a balcony is enough to get her humming, which would be nuts if this show were aspiring to be something more than a messed-up quilt stitched together with threads that could have been swiped from an AITA forum.

In that vein, can we talk about the unrealistic reliance on, shall we say, random digital stimulation? Using the cruder phrasing is better, since I really want you to understand how bad it is when I say the finger blasting in this show is assaultive. It is pretty much what passes for foreplay, too. That’s not a selling point because the perpetrators ply it with the same tenderness as a radio operator, or a gentleman enthusiastically going after the primer bulb on a lawnmower that won’t start.

And this is where the false advertising of the female gaze in “Sex/Life” viewers shows itself. Yet again we have a series that takes an opportunity to present a version of sex and sensuality that doesn’t adhere to the standard patriarchal framework. Instead Rukeyser sticks with the male filmmaker’s tradition of treating the female body like a machine that requires little more than pumping and groaning, and precious few sequences devoted to building a slow charge via intimacy.

That also takes away from the scenes in which Rukeyser realistically demonstrates the requirements motherhood asks of Billie’s body, a contrast with her yearning for sexual fulfillment. This registers in the feminist-tinged focus on Shahi’s breasts both as eye candy and as a source of nourishment for Billie’s baby. I can’t think of another show like this that realistically contends with challenges lactating mothers face from day to day, including an accident that occurs during an awkward attempt to be spontaneous with her husband.

Otherwise the main way “Sex/Life” engages into the female gaze conversation is by allowing many opportunities for the audience to drink in the cast’s nudity between bouts of unsubtle conversation. Shahi is a vision, always has been. And her assets may be the expertly lit focal point of objectification, but the camera also displays Vogel’s form and captures the peach fuzz on Demos’ shapely cakes. Billie’s sensual buffet almost entirely consists of white people, by the way, with Sasha being an exception that checks off the ” wise-and-wild Black best girlfriend” box.  

Eventually Rukeyser wraps up “Sex/Life” with an avalanche of feminist epiphanies, including a voiceover of Billie paraphrasing Betty Friedan and a speech about pleasure being woman’s birthright to other uptight mothers at her young son’s school event.  All of this would be laudable if the writing weren’t hilariously atrocious. At least it’s adhering to form, which means you can fast forward through most of it.

Here’s the thing about softcore porn, though. While it’s largely harmless and dumb, it’s also only bearable in the smallest of doses. An hour or two of fleshy humping interrupted by mediocre plot is about all but the most disinterested can typically take. That means “Sex/Life” is testing our tolerance to quite a degree with eight hour-long episodes centered on the tried-and-true “bored suburban housewife embarks on a sexual journey” yarn.

However, and I mean this, is it worth getting your panties in a bunch over semantics if they’ve been dry as the Mojave for what feels like forever? Maybe not. Sex and sensuality exist on a wide spectrum, and for all I know watching some thunder from down under treat Shahi’s undercarriage like a rough game of “Operation” may be all it takes to turn you into a puddle.

Women deserve better – and Netflix has better in its library, frankly – but it’ll do in a pinch. So gather your most reliable friends, a bunch a fresh batteries and maybe a warm human or two, and enjoy “Sex/Life,” the best worst feel-up show of the summer.

Just watch out for those fingers.

All episodes of “Sex/Life” are currently streaming on Netflix. 

Biden campaign staffers go after “Trump Train” attackers using anti-KKK law

Participants in a Texas “Trump Train,” a caravan of cars adorned with Donald Trump and Confederate flags, On Thursday, are now being hit with a lawsuit filed by a group of former campaign staffers for Joe Biden who say they their campaign bus was harassed off the road by this so-called Trump Train in October. 

According to the complaint filed in the Western District of Texas, Trump supporters Eliazar Cisneros, Hannah Ceh, Joeylynn Mesaros, Robert Mesaros, Dolores Park, and a Jane and John Doe “terrorized and menaced” the bus by “playing a madcap game of highway ‘chicken,’ coming within three or four inches of the bus,” and trying to run it off the road. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of White House staffer David Gins, former Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, and bus driver Timothy Holloway, all of whom were riding in the bus at the time, as well as Eric Cervini, a Biden campaign volunteer who was escorting the bus in a separate car.

The suit alleges that by preventing the bus from making campaign stops in San Marcos and Austin, the defendants violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, which prohibits the violent intimidation of voters and obstruction of free elections. A separate lawsuit was filed by the same plaintiffs against the city of San Marcos, who they claim violated the same law by failing to respond to the incident.

New footage released on Thursday by Wendy Davis to CNN shows trucks festooned with pro-Trump and Confederate flags swerving in front of the bus and surrounding it on all sides, causing it to slow down. The video also includes snippets of the Biden staffers’ 911 call with authorities, where they decry the slow police response to the harassment. “I mean, I think if they really wanted to help, they’d be here,” a passenger can be heard saying before a police car comes between the trucks and the bus. The FBI opened an investigation into the confrontation in November.

Some of the defendants named in the suit took credit for the harassment when footage of the Trump Train was released on social media last fall. “That was me slamming that f—er…Hell yea,” Eliazar Cisneros posted on Facebook in reference to video of a truck side colliding with an SUV that was part of the Biden campaign caravan. Hannah Ceh and Dolores Park both live streamed the event on social media and used the hashtag #operationblockthebus. According to the lawsuit, some of the organizers of the Trump Train were also were identified as having taken part in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

“As a Black man, I’m no stranger to voter intimidation and political violence,” plaintiff Timothy Holloway, who hasn’t worked as a bus driver since the event, said. “It happened in Texas. It happened on January 6th. We need our political leaders to take this threat seriously and help end it now.”

A nation divided: Almost all U.S. COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated

Nearly all Covid-related deaths in the U.S. are people who have not yet been vaccinated, meaning that fatal cases of the virus are “at this point entirely preventable” due to the efficacy of the shots, according to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

Pulling from government data, AP News confirmed these findings in a Thursday analysis, which found that, out of the 853,000 people hospitalized throughout the U.S. in May, just 1,200 of them were vaccinated, a proportion that corresponds to roughly 0.1%. 

AP similarly found 150 vaccinated Americans accounted for the 18,000 Covid-related deaths over that month, which translates to about 0.8%. 

Dr. Paul Offit, a top official at the the Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC that breakthrough infections – or illnesses that occur in the case of vaccinated individuals – are “to be expected.” He explained: “The vaccines aren’t 100% effective, even against severe disease. Very small percentage of the 600,000 deaths.”

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong also smoothed over concerns about breakthrough infections, telling CNBC: “You are just as likely to be killed by a meteorite as [you are to] die from Covid after a vaccine. In the big scheme of things, the vaccines are tremendously powerful.”

According to AP, the daily COVID death toll has plummeted since this January from 3,400 to under 300. Approximately 63% percent of all vaccine-eligible Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Moreover, 53% of this group has been fully inoculated. 

For seniors, who are most vulnerable to hospitalization, the CDC found that one dose of the vaccine made Americans ages 65 and up about 64% less likely to be hospitalized. It likewise found that fully vaccinated seniors were 94% less at risk of hospitalization. 

“The second shot is critical,” Offit told NBC News. “We know from the phase one studies that the second shot induces a level of virus-specific neutralizing antibodies that’s about tenfold greater than that after the first dose.”

Despite evidence that the vaccine is both effective and safe for use, vaccine hesitancy lingers in the U.S., especially amongst conservatives, making Republican leaders especially poised to have an impact on these fears.

As Salon reported back in March, Republican men exhibited a disproportionately high amount of vaccine hesitancy, with 49% of all Republican men claiming they were not willing to take the shot. For Democratic men, this number hovered around 6%, according to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll.

On a state-by-state basis, AP found that Arkansas had the lowest vaccination rate, with 33% of its population fully vaccinated. The state has recently seen hospitalizations and deaths rise. 

Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,  warned this week that the U.S. may soon see an uptick of infections within clusters of Americans who remain unvaccinated.

“There is so much misinformation out there about the vaccine, coming through so many channels — a lot of it being spread on social media,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, U.S. surgeon general, told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “It’s inducing a lot of fear among people.”

As air travel starts up again, emotional support animals get left behind

As a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), LeAnn Egeto is passionate about training her miniature pinscher, Habibi, to serve as an emotional support animal.

Professionally, Egeto has seen clients connect with animals after recalling a traumatizing event from their past. Personally, she’s experienced the benefits of having the comfort and support of an animal. Before she got Habibi — right before the pandemic shut down the country — she had Willie, a rescue mutt. Before Willie passed away, he and Egeto used to fly between Boston and Florida together. He’d sit on her lap and provide support during the flight, and during her visits with her family.

“When I flew to go see my mom or I flew to go see my father, which are really complicated relationships and can very easily trigger episodes of dissociation and PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], my dog helped me stay grounded,” Egeto said. “I used him as an ESA [emotional support animal] for my own PTSD and anxiety.”

But flying from the East Coast to the South is no longer an option for Egeto and Habibi.

In December 2020, when very few Americans were traveling, the Department of Transportation (DOT) quietly announced a final ruling in a revision to its Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) stating that U.S. carriers would no longer accommodate emotional support animals. The only service animals that would be accommodated would be service dogs, a category that generally doesn’t include dogs trained solely for emotional support. By January 2021, Southwest, Delta, United, Alaska, JetBlue and American Airlines had all announced that they would no longer allow emotional support animals in accordance with the DOT’s guidance.

While details vary between airlines, the new provisions around emotional support animals are in stark contrast to the pre-pandemic era. Previously, DOT guidance said that airlines could not restrict passengers from traveling with emotional support animals; now, if a passenger wants to bring their emotional support dog on a flight, they will likely have to pay a fee, and the dog must remain in its carrier. 

As Habibi is trained to be an emotional support animal and be with her during a flight, such separation was stressful for the two of them, Egeto says. She opted to buy a car to facilitate trips back and forth from Boston and Florida rather than fly. 

“Not being able to have my [emotional support animal] available to me while I’m transitioning out of the pandemic was insurmountable,” said Egeto, calling the situation “stressful.” Egeto says she was “grateful” she had the resources to buy a car, but did not want to; “I hadn’t owned one in two years,” she noted.

Egeto is one of thousands facing a harsh new era in air travel, in which emotional support animals are separated from their owners. In 2016, U.S. airlines carried 540,000 passengers with emotional support animals, according to Airlines for America. That number more than doubled to over 1 million by 2018. In 2019, Airlines for America, the trade association for major U.S. airlines, wrote in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao that emotional support animals led to an increase in “incidents” that have “ranged from mauling and biting to urinating and defecating.”

“This misbehavior not only threatens the health and safety of our passengers and crew, but also passengers with disabilities traveling with legitimate service animals,” the letter stated.

The inclusion of the word “legitimate” speaks to the heart of the rancor over emotional support animals. As the Airlines for America letter alluded to, the rule-change has been positioned as a way of protecting people with “legitimate service animals,” suggesting that emotional support animals are illegitimate. 

The U.S. Department of Transportation now defines a service animal as a dog (no other animal) that has been “individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a qualified individual with a disability, including a physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental disability.” Psychiatric service dogs (PSD) are still protected under the Air Carrier Access Act; but emotional support animals — which are certified by a mental health professional such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other licensed mental health care provider for a person with an emotional or mental disability — are not. Notably, the DOT change to dogs-only service animals is prohibitive to people with disabilities who are allergic to dogs.

Many disability-justice groups oppose the move, fearing that it will make it harder for people with disabilities to travel.

“The regulations are fundamentally unfair, prioritizing corporate interests over the rights of Americans with disabilities,” wrote Curt Decker, an executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, in a USA Today op-ed. “We believe that the provisions dealing with emotional support animals should be rescinded.”

At the center of the debate lies one fundamental question: Were emotional support animals being too leniently designated before? Many therapists say no — or at least in their own practice, a diligent evaluation was always conducted.

Prairie Conlon, a licensed professional counselor and Clinical Director of CertaPet, a service that matches people with licensed mental health professionals for an emotional support animal evaluation, explained that there are explicit criteria to determine if someone qualifies for an emotional support animal — specifically, two questions that stem from the Fair Housing Act.

The first question, Conlon said, is “does the person seeking to use and live with the animal have a disability — i.e., a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities?” Second, “does the person making the request have a disability-related need for an assistance animal?”

“In other words,” Conlon continued, “does the animal work provide assistance, perform tasks or services for the benefit of a person with a disability, or provide emotional support that alleviates one or more of the identified symptoms or effects of a person’s existing disability?”

Answering these questions can be an “extensive” process, Conlon said, noting that these evaluations may consist of “written assessments and measures, structured clinical interviews, treatment planning, and continued check-ins.”

Dr. Therese Rosenblatt, a psychologist and author of  “How Are You? Connection in a Virtual Age,” said she wrote letters for her clients that could be shown to passengers on the plane as well.

“I’m thinking of a few patients of mine who needed this, and it was not a hard call,” said Rosenblatt. “These were people who had a lot of trauma in their background, who could get triggered or activated in a number of different situations, and once they were triggered they’d be consumed by panic and anxiety.”

Rosenblatt stressed that she does not issue emotional support animal letters willy-nilly. She specified that she did so only for her regular clients.

“I do think some people give them out more liberally than I would,” Rosenblatt added. “And I do it very deliberately and take it very seriously.”

As a mental health professional, Egeto said, there’s a concern that the inability for patients to have emotional support animals by their side will be detrimental to them, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.

“A problem in our country is that we define health as an absence of symptoms and not a presence of well-being,” Egeto said, adding some clients have relied on animals to keep them company throughout the pandemic.”People are relying on alcohol, food, and animals, and sex, to survive this.”

“It’s go-to coping,” Egeto added.

Trans kids in the U.S. were seeking treatment decades before today’s political battles

In 1942, a 17-year-old transgender girl named Lane visited a doctor in her Missouri hometown with her parents. Lane had known that she was a girl from a very young age, but fights with her parents over her transness had made it difficult for her to live comfortably and openly during her childhood. She had dropped out of high school and she was determined to get out of Missouri as soon as she was old enough to pursue a career as a dancer.

The doctor reportedly found “a large portion of circulating female hormone” in her body during his examination and suggested to Lane’s parents that he undertake an exploratory laparotomy – a surgery in which he would probe her internal organs in order to find out more about her endocrine system. But the appointment ended abruptly after her father refused the surgery, feeling “the doctor did not know what he was talking about.”

I first encountered Lane’s story buried among the papers of an endocrinologist, but her brief encounter with a doctor during her teenage years was typical of many transgender children like her in the early to mid-20th century. These stories form a key thread of the first several chapters of my book, “Histories of the Transgender Child,” and they point to the tremendous obstacles these kids faced in a world where the word “transgender” didn’t even exist.

The living laboratories of gender

In the first half of the 20th century there was nothing like today’s gender-affirming pediatric care model, which involves building a social support network and can include treatments like hormone blockers. Doctors simply did not allow trans patients to transition.

That doesn’t mean doctors and researchers weren’t interested in seeing children like Lane as patients. But instead of supporting their wishes and hopes, doctors tended to see them as canvases for experimentation – to see how their growing bodies responded to various surgeries or hormonal cocktails. In my research I tracked several decades of this kind of medical research, beginning in the early 20th century at research hospitals like the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

In fact, medical researchers were particularly interested in treating still-developing LGBTQ youths as a way to refine their techniques for forcing a binary sex on intersex children or carrying out conversion therapy – which aims to coerce a heterosexual or gender-confirming behavioral outcome – on gay children.

In this climate, Lane’s father may have unwittingly saved her from a harmful attempt at “corrective” surgery or hormones to try to prevent her from being trans. Even though Lane left home at age 18 to live as a woman, she would have to wait over a decade before finally obtaining access to hormones and surgery in the mid-1950s.

Trans childhoods before trans medicine

The struggles of trans children in the era before modern transgender medicine show not just how trans youths are far from a new phenomenon, but also how tenacious and forward-thinking they were compared with their parents and doctors.

Two stories of other trans people like Lane show how clinicians’ refusal to let them transition never stopped them from being trans. Both of them found their way to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, which, during the first seven decades of the 20th century, was widely regarded as the one institution in the U.S. for people with questions about their sex and gender.

When psychologists at Johns Hopkins interviewed a retired trans woman from the Midwest in 1954, she told them about her childhood in the 1890s. Even then, without any concept or term for being trans, this woman – by then in her 60s – told them it was obvious to her that she was a girl.

“I wanted a doll and buggy very much,” she reminisced of her intense attachment to the toys given only to girls. While her wish to be a girl never waned, her life had never afforded her the opportunity to transition to living full time as a woman until she retired.

Five years later, the clinicians at Johns Hopkins met a trans man who was then in his 30s. He had come to them seeking top and bottom surgery. Growing up in rural upstate New York in the 1930s, he had been forced to drop out of school “because of the excruciating sense of embarrassment at being obliged to wear girls’ clothes.”

Unlike the trans woman from the Midwest, this trans man, as a teenager, found a path to living openly as a boy: manual labor at a lumber mill. By working in a men’s profession and proving his masculinity through showcasing his strength, his presentation as a boy was embraced by his community. Decades later, he sought out the doctors at Hopkins only to confirm what had long been true in his life: that he was a man.

Growing up despite every obstacle

Each of these three children – like the countless more from this early 20th-century era – had to wait until adulthood to finally transition.

Yet the failure of doctors and other gatekeepers to stop them from transitioning as children, and their inability to access any form of gender-affirming medical treatment, hardly prevented them from being trans or growing up to be trans adults.

This is all the more remarkable given that before the 1950s, very few Americans had access to any concept or information about trans life. While small communities of adult trans people are evident as far back as the turn of the 20th century, most children would not have had access to these discreet social worlds, which tended to exist in major cities like New York and San Francisco. Without any media to supposedly influence them and without role models, these remarkable young people were able to stay true their inner feelings en route to living trans lives.

They’re a reminder that conversion therapy, attempts to suppress or limit transness and gatekeeping through legislation don’t work.

They didn’t work a century ago and they won’t work today.The Conversation

Jules Gill-Peterson, Associate Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pittsburgh

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