“In the Heights” celebrates the resilience Washington Heights has used to fight the pandemic

With camera work that swoops from rooftops to street corners, the film “In the Heights” brings to life the dynamism of northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.

Directed by Jon M. Chu, “In the Heights” updates Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Tony Award-winning musical of the same name. Set in a changing neighborhood defined by Dominicans and Latino immigrants, the film eloquently expresses the feel of a hardworking place where your block is your home and a 10-minute walk is a journey to another world.

For me, the film hit home. It brought me back to the years I spent researching and writing my book “Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City,” when I interviewed residents, walked police patrols and dug into municipal records.

In Washington Heights, long home to a mosaic of ethnic groups, some people have recoiled from human differences and huddled up in tight but exclusionary enclaves – ignorant of their neighbors at best, nasty toward them at worst.

Other residents, street-smart cosmopolitans, learned to cross racial and ethnic boundaries to save their neighborhood from crime, decayed housing and inadequate schools. In the 1990s, their efforts turned Washington Heights, once known for a murderous drug trade, into a gentrification hot spot.

My book was released in paperback during the fall of 2019. Just five months later, COVID-19 came.

Could a neighborhood already grappling with the challenges of gentrification – a prominent theme of “In the Heights” – survive a global health disaster? And could a film conceived before COVID-19 emerged speak to a city that sometimes seems to be transformed by the pandemic?

So far – and even though Washington Heights stands out in Manhattan for its suffering due to the coronavirus pandemic – the answer is a cautious yes.

But that painful victory, won with vaccines, local institutions and local ingenuity, will be valuable only if enough can be learned from northern Manhattan’s solidarity and activism to build a healthier and more just city as the pandemic recedes.

A neighborhood rife with vulnerabilities

Like other immigrant neighborhoods confronting the pandemic, Washington Heights and Inwood – the neighborhood to its immediate north – faced serious vulnerabilities.

Immigrant labor and business acumen rescued New York City from the urban crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, when white flight, job losses, a withering tax base and high crime devastated the city.

But as my co-author David M. Reimers and I pointed out in “All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York,” the rebuilt city is marked by inequality. Rents are astronomic, so families in Washington Heights and Inwood often double up to make costs more bearable. In the face of an easily transmitted disease, overcrowded housing was a ticking bomb.

Residents in these uptown neighborhoods were also endangered by their jobs. In a city where many white-collar workers could work from home on their laptops, a disproportionate number of Washington Heights residents had to venture out to staff stores, clean buildings, deliver groceries and provide health and child care. As one uptown resident told me, her neighbors weren’t worrying about gaining 15 pounds – they were worried whether their next customer would infect them.

Equally troubling, many uptown residents had nowhere to run to. In more affluent neighborhoods, like the Upper East Side where I live, many people with country houses could decamp. In Washington Heights and Inwood, most people hunkered down in their apartments.

Bonds forged in mutual struggle

Nevertheless, Washington Heights and Inwood have strengths born in the hard experience of making a new home in New York.

The neighborhood has long been the destination of newcomers to the city, among them African Americans escaping Jim Crow, Irish immigrants putting behind them political and economic hardship, Puerto Ricans looking for prosperity, Eastern European Jews in flight from pogroms, German Jewish refugees from Nazism and Greeks expelled from Istanbul. In the 1970s, Dominicans fleeing political repression and economic hardship began to arrive in transforming numbers, along with a small but significant number of Soviet Jews escaping anti-Semitism.

For all their differences the German Jews, Soviet Jews and Dominicans had one thing in common: individual and collective memories of living with three brutal dictators – Hitler, Stalin and Rafael Trujillo. Such experiences were traumatic and could foster a tendency to stick to the safety of your own kind, but they also bred resilience.

Starting in the 1970s, and with cumulative impact by the late 1990s, significant numbers of these residents crossed racial and ethnic boundaries to revive and strengthen their neighborhood.

Thirty years later, when federal authority was absent and the pandemic surged, public-spirited residents – fortified by community institutions – stepped up again. In both cases, it was a clear example of what the sociologist Robert J. Sampson has called “collective efficacy.”

The community steps up

Back when the neighborhood was ravaged by the crack epidemic, Dave Crenshaw, the son of African American political activists, took action. Crenshaw set up athletic activities with the Uptown Dreamers – a youth group that combined sports, community service and educational uplift. The program gave young people, especially women, an alternative to dangerous streets.

When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, Crenshaw built on his track record. He worked with The Community League of the Heights, a community development organization founded in 1952, Word Up, a community bookshop and arts space dating to 2011, and students from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Together, they distributed food and masks, cleaned up grubby street corners, and got people tested and vaccinated.

Further north, the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights and Inwood, founded in 1917, built on its record of serving both Jews and the entire community. Victoria Neznansky – a social worker from the former Soviet Union – worked with her staff to help traumatized families, distribute money to people in need, and bring together two restaurants – one kosher and one Dominican – to feed homebound neighborhood residents.

At Uplift NYC, an uptown nonprofit with strong local roots, Domingo Estevez and Lucas Almonte had anticipated, during the summer of 2020, running summer programs that included a tech camp, basketball and a youth hackathon. When the pandemic struck, they nimbly shifted to providing culturally familiar foods – like plantains, chickens and Cafe Bustelo coffee – to neighbors in need and people who couldn’t go outside.

Arts and media organizations eased the isolation of lockdown. When the pandemic loomed, blogger Led Black, at the local website the Uptown Collective, told readers that “solidarity is the only way forward.” In his posts he shared his griefs and vented his rage at President Donald Trump. He closed every column with “Pa’Lante Siempre Pa’Lante!” or “Forward, Always Forward!”

Inwood Art Works, which promotes local artists and the arts, shut down a film festival scheduled for March 2020 and started “Short Film Fridays,” a weekly presentation of local films on YouTube. The organization also launched the “New York City Quarantine Film Festival,” which explored topics such as life uptown in the COVID-19 pandemic, the beauty of uptown parks and the life of an essential worker.

Dreams of a better life

Of course, Washington Heights suffered during the pandemic.

Beloved local businesses vanished. Foremost among them was Coogan’s, a bar and restaurant that was the unofficial town hall of upper Manhattan, whose life and death were chronicled in the documentary “Coogan’s Way,” which is now screening at film festivals.

Families were forced to live with unemployment, isolation and fear of infection. As the social fabric frayed, loud noise levels and reckless driving of motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles raised alarm. Worst of all, the neighborhood’s residents died at rates greater than in Manhattan overall.

In Washington Heights and the rest of New York City, the coronavirus pandemic exposed long-brewing inequalities. It also illuminated character, community, strong local institutions and dreams of a better life. All these receive loving and lyrical attention in “In the Heights.”

We live, I believe, in an era when it is important to see the strengths that immigrants and their institutions bring to our cities. This film could not have come at a better time.

Robert W. Snyder, Professor Emeritus of Journalism and American Studies, Rutgers University – Newark

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

Merrick Garland announces DOJ lawsuit against Georgia over new election law targeting Black voters

The Justice Department is suing Georgia over its new voting law that Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday was enacted with “the purpose of denying or abridging” the rights of Black Georgians in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Garland’s enforcement announcement came on the eighth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s infamous Shelby County decision gutting the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act which the Justice Department uses to target states whose new voting restrictions may violate federal law. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division says Georgia’s controversial Senate Bill 202, which President Joe Biden compared to Jim Crow-era restrictions, aims to restrict the voting rights of Black Georgians “on account of their race of color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

Garland added that “Many of that law’s provisions make it harder for people to vote,” undercutting months of dubious Republican claims that the law did not restrict voting access. The sweeping new law includes provisions restricting absentee voting and drop-boxes, banning mobile voting buses used in the Atlanta area, imposing new voter ID requirements, criminalizing giving water or food to voters, as well as other provisions that may make it easier for Republicans in the state to overturn future elections.

Kristen Clarke, the first Black woman to head the Civil Rights Division, said Friday that “several provisions” of the law were “passed with a discriminatory purpose,” noting that the legislature passed the bill through a “rushed process” and the bill quietly ballooned from a three-page bill approved by the state Senate to a 90-page law signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after just two hours of debate.

“These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population continues to steadily increase,” she said, noting that the law particularly targeted absentee voting, which Black voters are “now more likely use than white voters.”

Other provisions, she said, also “were adopted with the intent” to restrict the equal voting rights of Black citizens.

“The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at every step of the process, pushing more Black voters to in-person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines,” Clarke said. “SB 202 then imposes additional obstacles to casting an in-person ballot.”

These changes were not made “in a vacuum,” she added, but “immediately after successful absentee voting in the 2020 election cycle, especially among Black voters.”

Clarke cited provisions restricting the state from sending unsolicited mail ballot applications and that “irrationally” shorten both the period voters have to request and receive mail-in ballots, both of which data shows would disproportionately impact Black voters. The DOJ is also challenging a provision that “imposes substantial fines” on third party organizations like churches and advocacy groups that help voters cast ballots, she said, the provision that restricts the use of ballot drop-boxes, the measure banning food and voter for voters, and another provision that “reduces the likelihood that out-of-precinct provisional ballots will be counted.”

Along with the DOJ’s lawsuit, voting rights groups have filed more than a half-dozen complaints challenging provisions in SB 202. Top Democratic attorney Marc Elias, who is among those suing the state, called the DOJ announcement a “game-changer.”

Kemp issued a statement accusing the Biden administration of “weaponizing” the DOJ to “carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity.” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger accused the administration of doing the “bidding of Stacey Abrams” and said he looks forward to “beating them in court.”

Garland and Clarke vowed to review voting restrictions in other states.

“The rights of all eligible citizens to vote are the central pillars of our democracy. They are the rights from which all other rights ultimately flow,” Garland said, vowing that the department would respond to the “dramatic rise in state legislative actions that will make it harder for millions of citizens to cast a vote that counts.”

Florida and over a dozen other Republican-led states have already passed sweeping voting restrictions in response to baseless fraud allegations stemming from former President Donald Trump’s loss, and other states like Texas are expected to pass onerous restrictions as well.

“We are scrutinizing new laws that seek to curb voter access,” Garland said. “And where we see violations of federal law, we will act.”

The attorney general vowed that the lawsuit is the “first of many steps” in the Justice Department’s renewed focus on ensuring that “all eligible voters can cast a vote, that all lawful votes are counted, and that every voter has access to accurate information.”

Garland also called out the so-called election “audit” in Arizona and any potential future “audits,” pledging new guidance to ensure they comply with federal law. The DOJ will also provide new guidance for the coming redistricting cycle, he said, noting that it will be the first since the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act restricting electoral changes by states with a history of racial discrimination.

The DOJ will also ramp up and prioritize enforcement in response to a “dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats” aimed at election officials and poll workers, Garland said, announcing a new task force that will focus on such threats.

Garland said that the DOJ is using “every method” at its disposal to protect voting rights, but “that is not enough” without Congressional legislation.

“We urge Congress to act to provide the department with important authorities it needs to protect the voting rights of every American,” he said, calling on lawmakers to reinstate the preclearance requirement in the Voting Rights Act. Democrats have rallied around the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the requirement, but the bill has stalled in Congress and faces the threat of a Republican filibuster.

“If Georgia had still be covered” by the preclearance requirement, Garland added, it is “likely that SB202 would never have taken effect.”

Filling the Trump void: Right-wing media’s calls for violence grow louder

For months now, experts in violent extremism have openly worried that the January 6 insurrection was not the end of the right’s Donald Trump-fueled violence, but actually a blueprint for those who are still interested in some old-fashioned authoritarian blood-letting. That Trump himself longed to use — and occasionally did use — violence to silence his political opponents is no secret. It was reconfirmed this week with reports that he reacted to last summer’s protests by demanding that federal authorities “crack their skulls” and “just shoot them.” His departure from office, however, doesn’t seem to have turned the temperature down.

Trump and his allies keep pushing conspiracy theories, like one that claims he will be “reinstated” in August, that work to keep the violent insurrectionist sentiments churning among his base. This poses a heightened threat as the summer heats up and the moment when the Trumpers realize that their beloved orange savior is not actually getting the White House back nears. Unfortunately, right-wing media outlets are handling this situation by adding more fuel to the simmering flame of Republican paranoia.

In just the past week, two prominent conservative TV hosts were caught overtly layering in justifications for lashing out violently against Democrats, progressives, and anyone else viewed as getting in the way of MAGA power. A recent rant from the One America News Network host Pearson Sharp is getting a lot of media attention because the call for violence was so explicit that it’s hard even for the most dedicated gaslighter to deny it. In a segment devoted to hyping Trump’s Big Lie that Joe Biden stole the election, Sharp declared that “radical Democrats left fingerprints all over the country” in the supposed theft, suggested that “tens of thousands” of people are involved and that “in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution.”

The call for red hats to start the executions is barely subtext anymore. The justifications are all there: The lie about a stolen election, the claim of moral authority to murder, and the implication that, because the American government won’t do its duty, ordinary Americans must step up. Eric Kleefeld at Media Matters documents more examples that make it clear this is part of a larger push from right-wing media to continue “the incitement that led to the January 6 violence at the Capitol.”

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In particular, the OAN segment was explicitly about the fake “audit” of the Arizona vote that MyPillow salesman Mike Lindell and Trump himself have been using as an anchor for false claims that the “fraud” is about to be exposed and Trump will be reinstalled as president in August. This supposed “audit” has been going on for a couple of months now, and, as the Washington Post reports, an entire infrastructure of right-wing media has been hyping it this entire time. When Trump’s grand reinstatement inevitably fails to happen, there are going to be thousands of right-wingers who are furious and drunk on this rhetoric suggesting that violence is the only appropriate response.

Over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson’s Thursday night show is also getting a lot of media attention for his attack on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who testified about the January 6 insurrection this week before the House Armed Services Committee. Milley correctly identified the cause of the Capitol riot as “white rage,” which he clearly and correctly sees as rooted in a belief in white supremacy. Of course, right-wing media exploded in predictable outrage, suggesting that the military be defunded for this insult to the honor of racists.

Milley is “not just a pig,” Carlson told his audience about the top military general, “he’s stupid.”

As Heather “Digby” Parton points out, the “party that once extolled the police and the military as the highest form of civic duty and patriotism” is now attacking Capitol police, the FBI and the military. Hypocrisy is always a story in American politics, so this is getting the lion’s share of media coverage. But even more concerning might be something else Carlson said in his Thursday night program, in which he suggested that white people are in imminent danger of being the target of genocide.

“Pundit, after senator, after professor, after general: each one of them spewing race hate. Whiteness, white rage!” Carlson raved. “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

As he often does, Carlson plays this rhetorical trick where he equates simply being white with holding an ideology of white supremacy, and suggests that any criticism of racists is, therefore, an attack on white people for their race. The invocation of Rwanda, of course, is a reference to the Rwandan genocide, when members of the Tutsi minority in that country were hunted down and mass-murdered. And while he would no doubt spew all sorts of gaslight to deny what he is doing, Carlson is telling his audience that any effort to understand or analyze the history of racism will lead to white people being mass murdered based on skin color.

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This is, in part, Carlson doing his usual thing, where he takes ideas from literal neo-Nazis, cleans them up and presents them as “common sense conservativism” on his show. In this case, the idea he’s laundering is “white genocide,” the white nationalist belief that valuing racial diversity is equivalent to the genocide of white people. But this is also incitement to violence, even if Carlson is being a bit more subtle than Sharp. By telling white people they’re in imminent danger of racialized violence, Carlson is positioning white violence as mere self-defense. Recasting aggression as self-defense is a classic fascist move, and Carlson doesn’t need to be explicit here for his audience to pick up what he’s putting down.

The atttacks on the military, the FBI and any police who are caught defending democracy are even more subtle, but part of the same alarming push towards violence in right-wing media. These are the authorities who are most likely to be involved in shutting down fascist insurrection, after all, especially now that Trump’s no longer in the White House. Getting MAGA loyalists to see these institutions as enemies, instead of as respected authorities, is a crucial part of the radicalization process.

The August date that Trump floated for his supposed reinstallation got a flurry of media coverage and then fell out of the news cycle as other pressing matters, such as the voting rights and infrastructure bills, emerged. It’s easy to dismiss the whole conspiracy theory as just more of Trump wanting attention and gorging himself on any bit of flatterry. Hopefully, that will be the case, especially as there are so far no signs of something like the “Stop the Steal” rally being organized — yet.

Still, it’s deeply concerning that the rhetoric of justified violence is increasing, and not just in fringe social media circles, but on cable news networks being projected into millions of American homes. It’s also timed alongside this Arizona “audit” and its accompanying conspiracy theories, and placed in the summer months, when people are far more likely to be out and ready to gather in person than in the dead of winter, when the Capitol riot happened. The fire may not spark, but there can be no mistaking the immense amount of fuel that right-wing media is gleefully pouring over the kindling.

Britney Spears’ plight and the outrage of millennial women who’ve had enough

On June 7, Britney Spears shared with her 30.5 million Instagram followers a carousel of photos. In it, the superstar struck a series of poses wearing green snakeskin.

“I held a snake at the @VMAs one time but decided to go ahead 20 years later and become the motherf**king snake myself!!!!” she captioned the post. “And since TRICKS ARE FOR KIDS you tricky little s**ts . . . who knows what color snake I will be tomorrow.”

At the time, this was a feel-good millennial throwback post, referencing the iconic “I’m a Slave 4U” performance at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Like her usual Instagram content, full of quick dance videos, Bible quotes and cute animals paired with exclamation points and platitudes, it seemed innocuous. It wasn’t until two weeks later, when Spears addressed a Los Angeles probate judge, that the context became clear. “I’m not here to be anyone’s slave,” she proclaimed in a prepared 24-minute statement, one of the first times the public has heard her speak in 13 years. After 20 years, the aspirational embodiment of Y2K girlhood was no longer the lucrative performer draped by a symbol of danger and deception. She was the motherf**king snake, tightening her grip on the oppressive conservatorship that has restricted the majority of her adult life with one horrifying revelation after another. Her photos were clever foreshadowing, contrasting the height of her zeitgeist success and power with this pivotal plea clawing out from years of helplessness and loneliness.

She is smarter than pop culture gives her credit for. But for the millennial generation of women that watched her rise and fall and disappearance, we knew that. We felt it in our bones. Her story is an extension of our own.

* * *

The New York Times Britney Spears documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” premiered in February 2021, just as an end to the COVID-19 pandemic was taking shape as a reality. The vaccines and a new presidential administration were promising a return to “normal,” even though the American normal had failed us in every way. The documentary focused on the conservatorship formed in 2008 to control Spears’s career and finances in the wake of a perceived mental health crisis. Over that bleak winter month, creeping into our one-year anniversary of quarantine, the film became the latest must-stream content. Not only did it reignite interest and concern from the public in the unusual case, it forced a reckoning with the late ’90s and early aughts celebrity machine. In glaring hindsight Justin Timberlake, Sarah Silverman, and Perez Hilton all issued apologies for the roles they played in discrediting Britney and gleefully celebrating (and profiting from) her downfall.

For all of us old enough to remember staying up late on a school night to watch that famous VMA performance, watching her story brought back a barrage of memories of the era’s social conditioning. We were all supposed to want to be her. Out of the lot of us, she’d done it. Reached level Perfect. And yet, it still wasn’t good enough. And when she realized this, recoiled and pushed back at the insatiable media torture, she was suddenly considered insane. Watching the most successful, famous, influential performer of our generation cornered into a powerless legal agreement capped off a long year of communal vulnerability.

Women, especially those of color, have had their lives uniquely decimated by the pandemic. According to the Center for American Progress, “Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September [2020], roughly 865,000 women compared with 216,000 men.” The most commonly cited reason for leaving the workplace was child care. The equation of school suddenly going remote, along with daycares closing or vastly reducing operations, left parents with an impossible choice: career, or family. Unsurprisingly, the child care burden fell disproportionately on women.

Women and minorities also made up a majority of essential workers in sectors like retail, hospitality and other service-industry jobs that cannot be performed over Zoom. Many of these functions were exempted from stay-at-home orders, and with the lack of a national mask mandate and the Trump administration’s protracted denial and mismanagement of the pandemic, this set up yet another double-bind. Put food on the table and pay the rent, and risk exposure to a deadly and little-understood disease. Large chains like Kroger had a public relations blitz proclaiming their love of essential workers, but pulled their “hero pay” wage increase just two months into the pandemic.

For women unlucky enough to get sick, studies have shown that they are at increased risk of enduring long COVID with symptoms including headaches, breathlessness, coughing, fatigue, and cognitive impairment. This lingering manifestation of the disease compounds women’s inability to resume career functions, and puts their livelihoods, and those of their families, in further jeopardy.

One of the most disturbing revelations from Britney’s June 23 testimony was the suppression of her reproductive rights:

I would like to progressively move forward and I want to have the real deal, I want to be able to get married and have a baby. I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby, I have a (IUD) inside of myself right now so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the (IUD) out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children – any more children. So basically, this conservatorship is doing me waaay more harm than good.

In the same year that parenthood became more expensive, more difficult and less supported than ever before, Republican lawmakers spent huge swaths of their energies on restricting abortion services. Near-total bans have been enacted in Arkansas and Oklahoma, while Idaho and Texas have limited access to abortions for fetuses more than six weeks old — even though commercial pregnancy tests cannot reliably predict a pregnancy until four weeks post-fertilization. If the pregnancy is unplanned, it’s not likely to be detected until at least a week after a missed period, right when the legal window is closing. With a conservative-stacked Supreme Court, contraception options are poised to shrink even further.

Spears’s requests of the court are breathtakingly simple. She wants to set her own work schedule. She wants to own the money she’s made. She wants to have autonomy over her body and free rein over her reproductive choices. They are the same things that we all want: to be paid a living wage without working ourselves to death. To fall in love. To decide whether we want kids, and not worry that our livelihoods will suffer because of that choice.

It is not some illicit scam that has trapped Britney Spears and forced her to beg for her freedom. Her situation is formed and supported by California conservatorship law. Although this arrangement is typically reserved for those suffering from illnesses such as dementia, and said to be a “last resort” to protect a vulnerable person’s assets, these implied guidelines are not written into the law. Once a court has placed an individual under a conservatorship, the burden falls on the conservatee to prove they no longer need guardianship.

The system is failing Spears by doing its job. Just as the labor and social policies that have made 2020 and 2021 an unsolvable quagmire from which millennial women are unlikely to recover were written with intention, and remain unchanged even after proving a million times over that they are detrimental to the stability of low- and middle-class Americans. In Britney’s story is our own, and the truth — that none of us, no matter how smart or talented or beautiful or successful, can evade the traps set by a thriving patriarchy. Seeing our fears, frustration and impotence reflected in this universal idol kindles an empathy and rage two decades in the making. And there aren’t enough window-smashing umbrellas in the world to quell it.

Trump tests the right’s patriotism: Republicans suddenly begin to sour on the military, police

If there was one thing I always thought Donald Trump truly cared about, it was men in uniform. After all, one of his earliest forays into politics, if you want to call it that, was an infamous full page ad he took out about the Central Park Five jogger case entitled, “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police,” in which Trump waxed nostalgic about the days when police had free rein in the city and recalled fondly the time he saw a couple of cops violently rough up some guys in a diner when he was a kid. Trump was also said to have loved dressing up in his military high school uniform and considered his four years there akin to serving in the military. He would always call the Pentagon leadership “my generals” and loved it when they looked as if they came out of central casting. His 2016 campaign was filled with lurid stories of tough officers committing war crimes, which he enthusiastically endorsed.

Trump’s idealized view of the men in blue and the military brass was sorely tested as president, however.

He locked horns with his first defense secretary, retired General James Mattis, whom he had chosen on the basis of the nickname “Mad Dog” and was sorely disappointed when he turned out to actually be sane. Likewise he had nothing but disdain for those who insisted that military discipline and preparedness required that the military not allow war criminals to go unpunished, much less be lauded for their crimes.

His great respect for law enforcement had its limits as well.

Trump was vicious when it came to the FBI, insulting the agency and many employees by name when it became known that he was in their crosshairs. And on January 6th, as a wild mob of insurrectionists engaged in hand to hand combat with police trying to protect the Capitol and a joint session of congress, it took hours before Trump could be persuaded to gently admonish them to not be violent with the police. It was clear he was siding with the mob. After all, he did send them there.

I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the Republican base would be hostile to the FBI. Being gun fetishists, the extreme right has long had issues with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which certain politicians called “jack-booted thugs” back in the 90s. And there has always been the pretense among some on the far right fringe that they are preparing for war with the federal government. But I have to say that I never thought we’d see the day when average Republican voters would storm the Capitol and openly beat rank-and-file cops over the heads with metal flagpoles, all with the not-so-subtle encouragement of the man who professed to be the “law and order” president.

CNN has excerpted a new book about the last months of the Trump administration and the 2020 campaign by Wall St. Journal reporter Michael Bender called “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” and it reveals just how uncivilized and tyrannical Trump really was. Recounting the period of the George Floyd protests a year ago, Bender writes that Trump was beside himself with anger at the protesters. He loved footage of police getting confrontational with the protesters telling his staff, “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people! Crack their skulls!”

This isn’t a total surprise. I wrote about this last year, quoting a source for the Daily Beast saying that he kept talking about returning to “eye for an eye” and wanting to “go in” to Democratic run cities and round up (Black) people for summary executions, one of his favorite fantasies. But I didn’t know how hard he pushed the military to “go in and beat the fuck” out of the protesters. According to the book, Trump said “just shoot them!” multiple times.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Miley pushed back Trump’s intention to invoke the Insurrection Act so the military could get involved in domestic protests (although he made the monumental mistake of wearing battle fatigues to accompany Trump on his ill-fated photo-op and had to apologize.) According to the book, at one point, Milley pointed to a portrait of Lincoln and said: “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.”

Seven months later, we did have an insurrection — at Trump’s direction. And this week Milley appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to discuss it:

Wow! This is a must watch.

Asked about Critical Race Theory, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley delivers an answer you need to watch.

“I’m white, and I want to understand white rage, why they attacked this building?”
pic.twitter.com/ISUQNDQV3v

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) June 23, 2021

If you had asked me a few years ago if this would be the way Fox News would respond to such comments, I would not have believed you:

An angry Laura Ingraham says she’s totally outraged over General Milley after she suggests withholding funding to the military pic.twitter.com/wApq1qytRV

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 24, 2021

Who had money on the Republican Party running on “Defund the Military” in 2022? Not me. And the next night, there was this:

Tucker: Mark Milley is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant or because he’s brave or because the people who know him respect him. He is not and they definitely don’t pic.twitter.com/MJv4n8T0jP

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 25, 2021

He made that up, of course. Milley is actually known to be blunt spoken and has spent a great deal of time on the battlefield. Carlson topped off that insulting commentary with this charming observation:

Tucker on Milley’s comments: He’s not just a pig. He’s stupid pic.twitter.com/XNxNCBjLHp

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 25, 2021

I won’t go into Tucker Carlson’s ongoing descent into madness on national TV but suffice to say that right-wing pundits are now completely incoherent.

The party that once extolled the police and the military as the highest form of civic duty and patriotism is now celebrating the actions of people who beat cops over the heads with metal pipes and calling the military leadership stupid pigs, as if they’ve traveled back in time to a Bizarro World version of 1968. They are simultaneously excoriating the Democrats because some activists used the slogan “defund the police” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd while angrily demanding that we “defund the military” — which will certainly come as a surprise to their leader Donald Trump who considers his bloated military budgets to be among his greatest achievements.

If there’s one lasting legacy of Donald Trump it’s that there are no longer any sacred cows on the American right. They have given themselves permission to literally say anything in the moment without regard to principle or ideology while at the same time wringing their hands over the supposed destruction of American culture by “wokeness” and political correctness. They no longer have any commitment to making sense and I’m not sure that anyone knows exactly how to combat such surreal intellectual anarchy.

Biden quietly transforms Medicaid safety net

The Biden administration is quietly engineering a series of expansions to Medicaid that may bolster protections for millions of low-income Americans and bring more people into the program.

Biden’s efforts — which have been largely overshadowed by other economic and health initiatives — represent an abrupt reversal of the Trump administration’s moves to scale back the safety-net program.

The moves, some of which were funded by the covid relief bill that passed in March, could further boost Medicaid enrollment — which the pandemic pushed to a record 80.5 million in January, including those served by the related Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s up from 70 million before the covid crisis began. New mothers, inmates and undocumented immigrants are among those who could gain coverage. At the same time, the Biden administration is opening the door to new Medicaid-funded services such as food and housing that the government insurance plan hasn’t traditionally offered.

“There is a paradigm change underway,” said Jennifer Langer Jacobs, Medicaid director in New Jersey, one of a growing number of states trying to expand home-based Medicaid services to keep enrollees out of nursing homes and other institutions.

“We’ve had discussions at the federal level in the last 90 days that are completely different from where we’ve ever been before,” Langer Jacobs said.

Taken together, the Medicaid moves represent some of the most substantive shifts in federal health policy undertaken by the new administration.

“They are taking very bold action,” said Rutgers University political scientist Frank Thompson, an expert on Medicaid history, noting, in particular, the administration’s swift reversal of Trump policies. “There really isn’t a precedent.”

The Biden administration seems unlikely to achieve what remains the holy grail for Medicaid advocates: getting 12 holdout states, including Texas and Florida, to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income working-age adults through the Affordable Care Act.

And while some recent expansions — including for new mothers — were funded by close to $20 billion in new Medicaid funding in the covid relief bill Biden signed in March, much of that new money will stop in a few years unless Congress appropriates additional money.

The White House strategy has risks. Medicaid, which swelled after enactment of the 2010 health law, has expanded further during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. The programs now cost taxpayers more than $600 billion a year. And although the federal government will cover most of the cost of the Biden-backed expansions, surging Medicaid spending is a growing burden on state budgets.

The costs of expansion are a frequent target of conservative critics, including Trump officials like Seema Verma, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, who frequently argued for enrollment restrictions and derided Medicaid as low-quality coverage.

But even less partisan experts warn that Medicaid, which was created to provide medical care to low-income Americans, can’t make up for all the inadequacies in government housing, food and education programs.

“Focusing on the social drivers of health … is critically important in improving the health and well-being of Medicaid beneficiaries. But that doesn’t mean that Medicaid can or should be responsible for paying for all of those services,” said Matt Salo, head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, noting that the program’s financing “is simply not capable of sustaining those investments.”

However, after four years of Trump administration efforts to scale back coverage, Biden and his appointees appear intent on not only restoring federal support for Medicaid, but also boosting the program’s reach.

“I think what we learned during the repeal-and-replace debate is just how much people in this country care about the Medicaid program and how it’s a lifeline to millions,” Biden’s new Medicare and Medicaid administrator, Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, told KHN, calling the program a “backbone to our country.”

The Biden administration has already withdrawn permission the Trump administration had granted Arkansas and New Hampshire to place work requirements on some Medicaid enrollees.

In April, Biden blocked a multibillion-dollar Trump administration initiative to prop up Texas hospitals that care for uninsured patients, a policy that many critics said effectively discouraged Texas from expanding Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation.

The moves have drawn criticism from Republicans, some of whom accuse the new administration of trampling states’ rights to run their Medicaid programs as they choose.

“Biden is reasserting a larger federal role and not deferring to states,” said Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.

But Biden’s early initiatives have been widely hailed by patient advocates, public health experts and state officials in many blue states.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” said Kim Bimestefer, head of Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.

Chuck Ingoglia, head of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, said: “To be in an environment where people are talking about expanding health care access has made an enormous difference.”

Mounting evidence shows that expanded Medicaid coverage improves enrollees’ health, as surveys and mortality data in recent years have identified greater health improvements in states that expanded Medicaid through the 2010 health law versus states that did not.

In addition to removing Medicaid restrictions imposed by Trump administration officials, the Biden administration has backed a series of expansions to broaden eligibility and add services enrollees can receive.

Biden supported a provision in the covid relief bill that gives states the option to extend Medicaid to new mothers for up to a year after they give birth. Many experts say such coverage could help reduce the U.S. maternal mortality rate, which is far higher than rates in other wealthy nations.

Several states, including Illinois and New Jersey, had sought permission from the Trump administration for such expanded coverage, but their requests languished.

The covid relief bill — which passed without Republican support — also provides additional Medicaid money to states to set up mobile crisis services for people facing mental health or substance use emergencies, further broadening Medicaid’s reach.

And states will get billions more to expand so-called home and community-based services such as help with cooking, bathing and other basic activities that can prevent Medicaid enrollees from having to be admitted to expensive nursing homes or other institutions.

Perhaps the most far-reaching Medicaid expansions being considered by the Biden administration would push the government health plan into covering services not traditionally considered health care, such as housing.

This reflects an emerging consensus among health policy experts that investments in some non-medical services can ultimately save Medicaid money by keeping patients out of the hospital.

In recent years, Medicaid officials in red and blue states — including Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland and Washington — have begun exploring ways to provide rental assistance to select Medicaid enrollees to prevent medical complications linked to homelessness.

The Trump administration took steps to support similar efforts, clearing Medicare Advantage health plans to offer some enrollees non-medical benefits such as food, housing aid and assistance with utilities.

But state officials across the country said the new administration has signaled more support for both expanding current home-based services and adding new ones.

That has made a big difference, said Kate McEvoy, who directs Connecticut’s Medicaid program. “There was a lot of discussion in the Trump administration,” she said, “but not the capital to do it.”

Other states are looking to the new administration to back efforts to expand Medicaid to inmates with mental health conditions and drug addiction so they can connect more easily to treatment once released.

Kentucky health secretary Eric Friedlander said he is hopeful federal officials will sign off on his state’s initiative.

Still other states, such as California, say they are getting a more receptive audience in Washington for proposals to expand coverage to immigrants who are in the country without authorization, a step public health experts say can help improve community health and slow the spread of communicable diseases.

“Covering all Californians is critical to our mission,” said Jacey Cooper, director of California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. “We really feel like the new administration is helping us ensure that everyone has access.”

The Trump administration moved to restrict even authorized immigrants’ access to the health care safety net, including the “public charge” rule that allowed immigration authorities to deny green cards to applicants if they used public programs such as Medicaid. In March, Biden abandoned that rule.

KHN correspondent Julie Rovner contributed to this report.

Working with deadly pathogens dangerous, but necessary for scientists

There are about 1,400 known human pathogens – viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and helminths that can cause a person’s injury or death. But in a world with a trillion individual species of microorganisms, where scientists have counted only one one-thousandth of one percent, how likely is it researchers have discovered and characterized everything that might threaten people?

Not very likely at all. And there’s a lot to be gained from knowing these microscopic enemies better.

So even though in day-to-day life it makes sense to avoid these dangerous microorganisms, scientists like me are motivated to study them up close and personal to learn how they work. Of course, we want to do it in as safe a way as possible.

I’ve worked in biocontainment laboratories and have published scientific articles on both bacteria and viruses, including influenza and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Here at Oklahoma State University, 10 research groups are currently studying pathogens in biosecure labs. They’re identifying genetic variations of viruses and bacteria, studying how they operate within cells of their hosts. Some are untangling how the host immune system responds to these invaders and is affected by so-called comorbidities of obesity, diabetes or advanced age. Others are investigating how to detect and eliminate pathogens.

This kind of research, to understand how pathogens cause harm, is crucial to human and veterinary medicine, as well as the health of mammals, birds, fish, plants, insects and other species around the globe.

Forewarned is forearmed

Think about all scientists have learned in the past century about how to prevent diseases based on understanding which microorganism is responsible, where it is in the environment and how it overcomes humans’ natural defenses.

Understanding what these organisms do, how they do it, and how they spread helps researchers develop measures to detect, mitigate and control their expansion. The goal is to be able to cure or prevent the disease they cause. The more dangerous the pathogen, the more urgently scientists need to understand it.

This is where lab research comes in.

Scientists have basic questions about how a pathogen conducts itself. What machinery does it use to enter a host cell and replicate? What genes does it activate, to make which proteins? This kind of information can be used to pinpoint strategies to eliminate the pathogen or lead to disease treatments or vaccines.

As the library of what is known about pathogens grows, there’s more chance researchers can apply some of that knowledge when faced with an emerging pathogen.

People might encounter new pathogens as they move into different parts of the world, or alter ecosystems. Sometimes a pathogen adapts to a new vector – meaning it can be carried by a different organism – allowing it to spread into new areas and infect new populations. Roughly 70% of emerging infectious diseases around the world are transmitted through animals to people; these are called zoonotic diseases. It is critical to understand how these pathways work in order to have even a modest ability to predict what could happen.

While there are patterns in nature that can provide clues, the tremendous diversity of the microbial world and the rate at which these organisms evolve new strategies for their own defense and survival makes it imperative to study and understand each one as it’s discovered.

Can this research be done safely?

There is no such thing as zero risk in any endeavor, but over many years, researchers have developed safe laboratory methods for working with dangerous pathogens.

Each study must document in advance what is to be done, how, where and by whom. These descriptions are reviewed by independent committees to make sure the plans outline the safest way to do the work. There’s independent follow-up by trained professionals within the institution and, in some cases, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or both, to ensure researchers are following the approved procedures and regulations.

Those who work with dangerous pathogens adhere to two sets of principles. There’s biosafety, which refers to containment. It includes all the engineering controls that keep the scientists and their surroundings safe: enclosed, ventilated workspaces called biosafety cabinets, directional airflows and anterooms to control air movement inside the lab. Special high-efficiency particulate air filters (HEPA) clean the air moving in and out of the laboratory.

We stick to good laboratory work practices, and everyone suits up in personal protective equipment including gowns, masks and gloves. Sometimes we use special respirators to filter the air we breathe while in the lab. Additionally we often inactivate the pathogen we’re studying – essentially taking it apart so it is not functional – and work on the pieces one or a few at a time.

Then there’s biosecurity, meaning the measures designed to prevent loss, theft, release or misuse of a pathogen. They include access controls, inventory controls and certified methods for decontaminating and disposing of waste. Part of these security measures is keeping the details close.

The research community recognizes four levels of biosafety practices. Biosafety level-1 (BSL-1) and BSL-2 are applied to general laboratory spaces where there is low to no risk. They would not work with microorganisms that pose a serious threat to people or animals.

BSL-3 refers to laboratories where there is high individual risk but low community risk, meaning there is a pathogen that can cause serious human disease but treatments are available. This is the kind of work my colleagues and I, and many medical and veterinary schools, will do.

BSL-4 refers to work with pathogens that pose a high risk of significant disease in people, animals or both that is transmitted among individuals and for which an effective treatment may not be available. BSL-4 laboratories are relatively rare, by one estimate only about 50 exist in the world.

At each level the increased risk requires increasingly stringent precautions to keep workers safe and prevent any accidental or malicious misuse.

What’s at risk if science ignores these microbes?

In recent years, the world has seen outbreaks of severe disease caused by several types of pathogens. Even for the pathogens scientists do know about, much remains unknown. It is reasonable to expect there are more threats out there yet to be discovered.

It is critical for scientists to study new disease pathogens in the lab as they’re discovered and to understand how they move from host to host and are affected by conditions; what variations develop over time; and what effective control measures can be developed. In addition to more well-known viruses such as rabies, West Nile virus and Ebola, there are several critically important pathogens circulating in the world today that pose a serious threat. Hantaviruses, dengue, Zika virus and the Nipah virus are all under investigation in various labs, where researchers are working to understand more about how they’re transmitted, develop rapid diagnostics and produce vaccines and therapeutics.

Microorganisms are the most abundant form of life on the planet and extremely important to human health and the health of plants and animals. In general, people have adapted to their presence, and vice versa. For those microbes with the capacity to do real harm, it makes sense to study as many as scientists can now, before the next pandemic hits.

Jerry Malayer, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education and Professor of Physiological Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine, Oklahoma State University

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

A simple guide to buying and storing spices like a professional chef

Growing up in an Indian household, I thought my mom had the most extensive collection of spices. Walking around a grocery store today is even more overwhelming. There’s so much to choose from and so much that’s unknown. Should I buy in bulk? Is it better to buy ground or whole? Do spices go bad? What is a spice?

Take a deep breath. There’s actually a very simple guide to buying and utilizing spices. The key is to know what you’re working with.

1. Spices are dried parts of plants and are great for your health!

That’s right. All spices are produced from parts of a plant other than the leaves. For example, cinnamon comes from the bark of a tree. Allspice happens to be a dried berry. Cardamom is a seed. Cloves are dried flowers. And so on.

Spices enhance flavors of food, but not all spices are spicy or sources of heat.

Most spices have a big bang of antioxidants, which promote many long-term health benefits like improving gut health, lowering blood sugar, improving brain and memory functionality, and more.

Spices (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Culinary Education)

2. Whole > Ground

When possible, purchase whole spices — like black peppercorns or cumin seeds — and grind them as needed. Why? Whole spices stay fresher for longer. Grinding them on an as-needed basis ensures maximum potency of antioxidant properties and a fuller flavor. You can grind your spices the traditional way with a mortar and pestle or use a spice grinder or even a coffee grinder!

Pre-ground spices often contain additives or contaminants, which according to the FDA, are not required to be disclosed by suppliers.

3. Avoid grocery stores and “gourmet” shops.

Spices normally have a shelf life of no more than six months. Chances are, the spices you purchase at the grocery store (especially if you’re buying ground spices) are stale. It’s always best to go to an ethnic market or a local spice merchant.

If you’re not completely confident about purchasing from a store, some of my favorite (and reputable) go-tos in New York are Kalustyan’s and La Boite. You can also order online from Burlap & Barrel.

4. Buy only what you need.

I love a good bulk deal as much as the next person but spices will go stale, especially if they’re of good quality. Fresh spices are very pungent, so a little goes a long way when it comes to cooking.

5. Store with care — NOT near your stove!

Nothing sucks the life out of fresh spices faster than heat and moisture. Rather than storing them in a cabinet near your stove or directly above your stove, opt for a dark and relatively cool, dry space.

When storing your spices, be aware of the best by dates. If there isn’t one labeled, a good rule of thumb is two years for whole spices and one year for ground spices from the date of purchase.

By Chef Palak Patel, Institute of Culinary Education

How NotMilk, the latest dairy-free alternative, stacks up against whole and oat milks

I’m not a vegan, but in my day-to-day life, I tend to choose alt milks more often than not. My smoothies, coffee and cereal are all spiked with just a splash of whatever plant-based milk I have in the fridge — and my body just tends to feel better for it.

For about the past year, I’ve been very content with oat milk, but earlier this week I saw a Washington Post article titled, “NotMilk says it has achieved a breakthrough: Plant-based milk that mimics dairy.”

“In the world of plant milks, the base ingredient is everything,” Emily Codik wrote. “The variety is dizzying: cashew milk, soy milk, coconut milk, almond milk, oat milk, even macadamia milk. We call them milks, but they don’t act like cow’s milk.”

It’s true. The base ingredient can be overpowering — coconut milk, for instance, will first and foremost always taste like coconut — and some of these milks react poorly when heated or cooled, which minimizes the ability to cook or bake with them.

NotMilk purports to be different. It’s made with an 18-ingredient formula that includes pea protein, pineapple juice, chicory root fiber, cabbage juice and sunflower and coconut oil. According to NotCo’s founders, the mixture mimics actual dairy, and I was curious just how closely it actually did.

Gallons of reduced-fat and whole NotMilk are available at Whole Foods nationwide, so I stopped after work to pick some up for a taste-test alongside oat and whole milk. (There’s a Whole and Oats/Hall and Oates joke here, but, ahem, “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid.”)

I drank it straight, poured it in coffee and used it in a basic Béchamel sauce. Here’s exactly what happened:

Poured cold straight into a glass

Where oat milk is noticeably thicker and more, well, beige than dairy milk, NotMilk looked strikingly like the glass of whole milk that I poured. Seriously, I was holding the two glasses up to the (albeit shoddy) light in my apartment kitchen in what felt like a millennial recreation of the FFA competition scene from “Napoleon Dynamite” to try to spot the differences. In the right light, the NotMilk is a touch more brown.

As for taste, oat milk was the outlier again. It has a subtle, nutty sweetness that’s almost akin to the milk found at the bottom of a bowl of cereal, which is one of the reasons I love it in baking. However, this makes it less ideal for straight drinking. (FYI: It’s honestly been a really, really long time since I decided, “Hey, I’m going to go pour myself a glass of milk.”)

Both the NotMilk and the whole milk were, foremost, creamy. While the whole milk had some secondary lactic and almost grassy flavors, the NotMilk veered a touch fruitier. Perhaps it was merely the power of suggestion after having read the ingredient list, but that sweetness did have some pineapple undertones.

Stirred into hot coffee

While I’m typically Team Cold Brew all year long, there are times when you just want a hot cup of coffee with frothy milk. Some plant-based alternatives simply don’t hold up to the task. Almond milk tends to curdle almost immediately, and coconut milk — while delicious — is a definite mood, flavor-wise.

Oat milk is typically my go-to because it serves as a really beautiful counterpart to coffee’s inherent bitterness, plus the texture is on point. As it turns out, NotMilk is another stellar option. While it forms more of a slick film than dairy milk, there’s no weird clumping or curdling. The flavor is really pleasant, too.

Used in a Béchamel sauce

Alright, so this is where NotMilk really shines.

Over heat, the sugars present in some plant-based milks tend to take on a sweet, caramelized flavor. While this can be great for baking or in some coffee beverages, it’s hit-or-miss in some dishes. See also: the unsavory curdling mentioned above. That can make cooking a Béchamel sauce — one of the French mother sauces made with butter, flour and whole milk — tricky.

Oat milk, again, tends to be my go-to if I’m veganizing a savory dish. It stands up to heat really well, and it doesn’t get glommy (though the inherent “oat” flavor does become more pronounced).

NotMilk, it turns out, is also a really stellar choice. I used dairy butter to remove another variable from the sauce. After melting it and whisking it with flour until a roux formed, I added a steady stream of NotMilk. The sauce quickly thickened and became quite smooth and glossy.

Was it a little sweeter than whole milk? Yes, but a pinch of salt took care of that really quickly. I was ready to sprinkle in a little nutmeg and start layering the sauce into a gorgeous vegetarian lasagna.

The verdict

NotMilk is probably the closest analog I’ve found to whole dairy milk. If that’s your jam, then it’s worth buying.

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Mark Meadows and Kevin McCarthy have a long, strange history of dubious self-dealing

From the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his supporters tried to accuse Biden of nepotism and various kinds of corruption involving his son Hunter Biden’s checkered business career. Almost six months into Biden’s presidency, his administration has come under criticism for the appearance that family members and other relatives of senior staffers have been given jobs in the federal government.

There’s nothing new about that in politics, and it’s certainly not unique to either party: John F. Kennedy appointed his own brother as attorney general. But the Trump administration, which faced more charges of rampant corruption and blatant nepotism than any in recent political history, was poorly positioned to make such charges. According to a Salon investigation, two prominent Republicans in Washington — one a Trump ally, the other much less so — seem particularly compromised on this issue. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, before that a congressman from North Carolina, have an extensive history of self-dealing and doling out perks to family members.

Blake Meadows, the former congressman’s son, was awarded a competitive internship with the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the summer of 2013, shortly after his father had been appointed to the committee. That was at least a plausible violation of House Ethics rules which state: “Members and staff should not do any special favors for family members.” That internship was only the beginning of a process that included Blake obtaining a free ride to law school. Meadows also hired Blake’s girlfriend (now his wife) and Blake’s best friend and college roommate as paid interns in his congressional office.

McCarthy likewise hired his son’s girlfriend (also now his wife) as a paid intern, as well as the children of his friend and ally Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., who interned the summer before their senior years in high school. Denham’s daughter went on to intern under former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney at the Office of Management and Budget in 2017, when Denham was still a sitting member of Congress. (He lost his seat in the 2018 midterms.) While McCarthy’s son was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, he worked for Capitol Counsel, a lobbying firm that contributed to McCarthy’s campaign, supporting “partners on healthcare and tax policy work.”

Blake Meadows’ experience on the House Foreign Affairs Committee undoubtedly helped him obtain a highly competitive 2014 Emory Law School Woodruff Scholarship, which includes a full ride through law school valued at $160,000. Blake’s 2014 bio on the Robert W. Woodruff Scholars and Fellows Program website outlines his experience as “an intern for the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations; a regional congressional campaign manager; and a property manager at Connarista Camp, a conservation and outreach program focusing on land conservancy and wildlife management.”

In addition, Blake’s profile claimed that he was “a paleontology enthusiast, having led four excavations in Colorado, one of which uncovered the fourth known Allosaurus skull worldwide.”

Blake description of his time with the Foreign Affairs Committee appears truthful, but the rest of that profile is questionable at best. He definitely did not lead an expedition that uncovered an allosaurus skull. Blake Meadows was 9 years old in 2001, when the skull in question was excavated by a fossil hunter named Joe Taylor, as detailed in a lengthy 2019 report by Charles Bethea of the New Yorker.

Blake and his family did, however, later participate in a home-school “adventure” based on “creation science” at the Colorado site of the excavation. That became the basis for a controversial and widely mocked documentary called “Raising the Allosaur,” which not only claimed that a group of children had found the fossil but that they had identified evidence of “a relatively recent and catastrophic event similar to that described in the Bible as the Flood of Noah’s day.” Even within the world of Biblical fundamentalism, that preposterous scenario was going too far. The film has largely been withdrawn from circulation, and the claim that home-schoolers found the dinosaur has been abandoned.

Blake Meadows’ alleged employment experience at “Connarista Camp” also appears dubious, and no mention of it appears on his LinkedIn profile or his professional biography. An extensive search by Salon could not find any company or organization with that name. Blake may have been referring to the 80-acre parcel of land owned by Mark Meadows’ LLC, Sound Investments of WNC, in Bertie County, North Carolina, adjacent to a tiny unincorporated community called Connaritsa. (Note the different spelling.) No camp of any description has ever operated on that property.

Blake’s longtime girlfriend and now wife, Phoebe Bermudez, was an intern in Meadows’ congressional office from January through May of 2013. Furthermore, Blake’s best friend and college roommate, Ben Williamson, was also an intern for Meadows’ congressional office in the summer of 2014 and became Meadows’ legislative correspondent in May 2015 after graduating from Patrick Henry College. He later worked for Meadows in the Trump White House.

Emily Norris, the longtime girlfriend and now wife of Connor McCarthy, the House minority leader’s son, was a paid intern in Kevin McCarthy’s congressional office during the summer of 2014. Her LinkedIn profile confirms that, identifying her as a “Congressional Intern for the U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Majority Leader” from June to August that year. Her sister Elise Norris was also an intern there in the summer of 2012 before going onto work for Fox News as a booker and later joining the Washington-based news outlet Axios as a director.

House rules prohibit members from hiring their own family members in their congressional offices, but other members can hire them, which likely explains why McCarthy hired both of Jeff Denham’s children as paid congressional Interns. Austin Denham worked for McCarthy in the summer of 2013 and Samantha Denham did so in the summer of 2015, in both cases just before their senior years in high school. As mentioned above, Samantha went on to intern for former Rep. Mick Mulvaney at the Office of Management and Budget in 2017, while her father was still in Congress.

Connor McCarthy, meanwhile, landed a gig with lobbying firm Capitol Counsel while working on his 2016 philosophy degree at Georgetown. His father is consistently listed as one of the top recipients of Capitol Counsel’s campaign contributions. As individuals, the principles, partners, attorneys and consultants at Capitol Counsel have given more than $40,000 to Kevin McCarthy’s campaigns since 2013.

According to an online bio, Connor worked as a research assistant at the firm, largely on health care issues and tax policy. In 2015, Kevin McCarthy took out a federal parent loan of between $50,000 and $100,000 to pay for Connor’s final year at Georgetown.

Kevin McCarthy’s congressional office didn’t return Salon’s request for comment, and Mark Meadows, now a private citizen, could not be reached for comment.

In a March 2020 interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, discussing the supposed Hunter Biden scandal, McCarthy criticized elected officials “who use their office or has children who use their office to get economic gain … and you have no experience whatsoever, and the only reason you have that job is because of your father.”

In a now-deleted Medium post, Connor McCarthy wrote about his father: “I’ve undoubtedly benefitted from my proximity to this political power.”

Chris Matthews on Jan. 6, the danger to democracy and what he learned from #MeToo

When it comes to politics, Chris Matthews has just about seen it seen it all. His career has taken him to the White House, as speechwriter for Jimmy Carter to hosting “Hardball” on MSNBC for more than 20 years. He even served as a U.S. Capitol Police officer in the 1970’s. But he says he’s never witnessed anything close to what we are seeing with today’s Republican Party.

In our Salon Talks conversation about his new book, “This Country: My Life in Politics and History,” Matthews didn’t hold back on Donald Trump or the Republicans, arguing that the former president has consistently “been trying to undermine democracy,” and that a swath of his party no longer believes in it. “I do believe there are a number of Americans, I don’t know whether it’s 10% or 25%,” Matthews told me, “who do not believe in majority rule.”

Over the last few months, we’ve seen Republicans openly waging an assault on voting access in state after state. Their goal is straightforward, Matthews explained: to ensure that the GOP’s opponents — minorities, the young, etc. — can “never vote,” which is the only realistic way Republicans can win.

Matthews also made the important point that in the past, when the GOP saw extremists seek to join its ranks — such as anti-Semites or white nationalists — Republican leaders would publicly condemn them, as Ronald Reagan did when he was endorsed by the KKK during his 1984 re-election campaign. With today’s GOP we don’t see that, which as Matthews notes should concern us all.

In our wide-ranging conversation, we touched on everything from Matthews’ teenage past as a Nixon Republican to his resignation from MSNBC after women came forward to say that he had made inappropriate comments about their appearance — which he admits to, and apologizes for again. Watch our interview below or read the following transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity.

It’s a great book. First of all, you were a 15-year-old young Republican? You rooted for Nixon over Kennedy? You, Chris Matthews?

Well, it was complicated. I was for Nixon because my family was Republican and I was going along with that. And then I fell completely in love with the glamour of the Kennedy crowd. I also rooted for Nixon because he wasn’t glamorous like the Kennedys. He didn’t have all the money and the charm and the social confidence. He seemed more like my dad or somebody, a regular guy. And I guess I rooted for the underdog.

I think my book “Bobby Kennedy” is the most popular because Bobby hits the right chord today. He’s a progressive, and also he’s tough. He wants people to meet their responsibilities. It’s not just about entitlement, it’s about duty. One of the things I pointed out in my book is that he was the only one of the liberal Democratic senators back in the ’60s and ’70s who made a point of saying hello to the Capitol policemen, showing a little dignity, a little, “Yeah, we’re in this together. You’re protecting me. And I agree with you, what you’re doing, protecting the Capitol.”

Most people don’t know that about you: You began working on Capitol Hill with the Capitol Police?

I was working in the senator’s office for four or five hours in the morning, at least four hours. And then I’d go over and put on my uniform and my gun at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and work until 11 o’clock at night. So I was putting in a full day and I was learning a lot in both jobs. I was very proud to be a Capitol policeman. I learned a lot of life lessons from these guys. A lot of country guys from West Virginia who didn’t get to go to college, didn’t get a lot of the breaks we got in life. I learned from them and I was rooting for them, especially when I found out how good a job they did trying to stop the insurrection on Jan. 6. When I got a clearer picture of it and could see that they risked their lives, in some cases lost their lives. And I will never forget that African-American officer who was leading the mob in the wrong direction to save Mitt Romney. Come on. That’s a great story.

Your life has been a remarkable journey.

Isn’t it? Aren’t you impressed? Isn’t it something? Air Force One, back rooms with Tip O’Neill, Berlin Wall when it’s coming down, Cape Town when they’re voting the first time, Belfast and the Good Friday Accords, then to the Pope’s funeral. I got to see history as it was happening from inside politics in America. And, I’ll be romantic here, people in the world who wanted what we have, which is democracy, which we better hang onto. Nelson Mandela, you know what he did for South Africa? He said to the Black majority, “We’re going to get to the voting booth. We’re going to take over this country with the vote. That’s how we’re going to do it, by long election lines, not through a war. We’re going to do it the right way.”

There’s also something else people might not know. You ran for Congress in 1974?

I was running to get the big politics away from dirty money and all this money and buying everything. I could see it on the Hill and you can see it’s just going to be with us until we got a better system, but it wasn’t so bad 30 or 40 years ago. You had guys like Gale McGee. He was a professor at University of Wyoming who ran for the Senate. You had people like Mike Mansfield, who were academics. Try that today. The self-funders own this process. Except for the really skilled people like Bobby Casey, because of his family name, and Sherrod Brown, because he’s so darn good at it, at being a good working-class politician and knowing how to talk to Trump people really.

Why didn’t you ever run again?

Because I didn’t have a career in Philadelphia. I had to have a law degree. That’s why it’s great to be a lawyer. Everybody listening, if you’re 22 years old and you want to have a political career, get that law, get that sheepskin. Because then when you lose, and you will lose at some point, you can fall back in that law firm and run the next time.

But it’s very hard to do that if you don’t have that parachute. My dad was pushing me to pay my bills for the campaign. He wasn’t going to pay the bills. It wasn’t a lot. It was $1,500 bucks for the literature we had. But he wanted me out of the house basically. He wanted me to go back to Washington. He put up with the campaign. He was all for me. He even switched registration for me. But I think he was happier with me in Washington. He thought that was where I belonged. He said, “That’s your city.” And he was right. I got to the White House after that.

Well, the reason I went to law school was because I was going to run for office. I ended up not doing it. If you come on the campaign trail, you’ll have the fun with the honking and holding the signs up.

Oh, I love that stuff. It gets back to my romance about politics, that you can actually campaign with little money like Ed Markey did up in Massachusetts against Joe Kennedy. A lot of young people, they’re excited about issues. You got to get them excited about you and the issues and social media makes a lot of things possible. I’ll tell you one thing I know. If I were running, I’d go home at night, I’d sit up in bed or at my desk, and I’d start typing out a message to the campaign workers and the people I know adore me, the No. 1’s. I’d be talking to them every night. My dad once taught me, he said, “Get people involved. Tell them what your strategy is. Tell them why you need their help, what their enemy’s up to. Bring them in, mentally and emotionally. Share.” That’s what you can do on social media. You couldn’t do that 20 years ago.

In your book, you talk about working for Frank Moss. He was a Democratic senator from Utah. But he lost in 1976, after three terms, to Orrin Hatch. We all try to figure out when the hyper-polarization began in this country. It could be Goldwater in ’64. It could be Orrin Hatch winning in ’76. You’ve traced this?

I’m going to say something that cuts across me. I think we all agreed on foreign policy when it was fighting communists globally, because we saw what was going on. It may not have been a right metaphor, but when we saw Yalta and we saw Eastern Europe, we saw China, we saw Ben Bella up in Algeria. We saw countries in Latin America, Castro, and some other countries. You could see them moving toward that red part of the map. And we go, “This looks like World War II coming. This looks like the same spread of the enemy. And appeasement is not the right answer. We got to stop them somewhere.”

So Harry Truman tried to stop them, somewhat effectively, in Korea. And then looking at that same model of stopping them in their tracks, our government tried to stop the communists in North Vietnam. But the trouble is nationalism was working on the side of the communists in Vietnam, just like nationalism was working on the side of the countries of Eastern Europe. They saw communism as an enemy of their nationalism. Whereas in Vietnam, communism was the friend of nationalism and we were on the outside.

We should have realized that the people are still going to be in that country when we come home, and we will come home eventually, and they will be calling the shots. And we should have understood that when we went into Afghanistan. You can only temporarily control a country with military force. Eventually you leave and the natural spirit of the country takes over and we got to deal with the Taliban. The only example I can think of was that the Brits did a darn good job of selling democracy in India. Whatever else they did in their history, the Indian people are a democracy and they learned it from the Brits, the idea of Westminster-style democracy, parliaments built by different political parties, coalitions that lead to cabinets and prime ministerships. Find another example. We’ve never been good at it. Maybe the Philippines, I don’t know. But it’s very hard to sell a form of government.

We have a hard time right now keeping the democratic spirit in this country. I do believe there are a number of Americans, I don’t know whether it’s 10% or 25%, maybe in that range, who do not believe in majority rule. They want to reduce the size of the electorate. They don’t want everyone voting. In fact, it used to be in the good days of politics, and we did it on MSNBC, you spend months saying to people, “Get out and vote. Get out and vote. Everybody.” Vote, vote, vote. We always said, the more the merrier to vote.

Only lately has a political party pretty openly said, “No, not the more the merrier. The less the merrier. The fewer people, the fewer minorities, the fewer young people. Just have the older usual white voters show up and that’ll be good for us.” I think it’s the first time a party has so openly said that, as they’re saying right now in politics. The party was the segregationist party under Roosevelt. Let’s face it. That was the deal. The New Deal was for white people, right?

Yes, exactly. The policies actually matched that. Home loans to the GI Bill, Black veterans coming back from World War II did not get the same benefits as white veterans.

Well, people like me and my family lived entirely on the fact that my dad got to come back and went to engineering school on the GI Bill and became middle-class. That’s how we grew up middle class as opposed to working class. That’s the fact. The GI bill created the large American middle class. That was wonderful. That was Roosevelt’s wonderfulness, that he thought of that as being a No. 1 priority coming out of the war.

You have people right now who don’t view each other as fellow Americans. They’re enemies almost. How concerned are you for the future?

I am very concerned about Michael Flynn. But you can see the pattern. And back in the ’60s the pattern was the antiwar movement was getting more bitter from ’68 to ’70, much more bitter than it was when I was marching around the Pentagon. Right now you can see that, first off, Trump wins the presidency by losing by almost 3 million votes. It doesn’t seem to bother him. In fact, he thinks it’s cute. It’s neat. I would think that if I got elected president, or somebody I cared about got elected president, and lost by 3 million votes, I’d feel a little humiliated by it, a little humbled. I’d be saying things, “I got to be careful here. A lot of people voted against me. I don’t quite have a mandate yet.” And then this time he loses the Electoral College and says he didn’t lose, like he’s in Zimbabwe or Pakistan. “No, no, it was rigged. It was rigged.”

No it wasn’t. We have honest elections in this country. Usually elections are decided by 20,000 or 30,000 people anyway, so luckily there’s room for a little margin of minimal corruption here and there, but very little. And the margins are always well beyond any hanky-panky that went on. For him to walk around and say, “These elections are rigged,” that’s rotten. That’s anti-American. And he knows it. He knows he lost. Look at him. The Democrats didn’t like Trump, but they knew he was damn well president. You know how they knew it? They tried to impeach him twice.

How do you think Democrats should be framing Jan. 6, to be effective? You’ve got some Republicans now literally saying, “Oh, it’s a tourist visit.”

They came in to kill. They came in to kill. I used to say about Watergate, suppose Nixon got away with it. That would have been much worse, if he’d gotten away with it. What would the second term had been like with his secret operatives and all this stuff he was pulling? It wasn’t just screwing around. Some of the idiots with their clown costumes on and hanging from the rafters. There was some menace in that crowd that was stopped by law enforcement.

You faced early retirement last year because of some comments you had made. You don’t defend them, you’ve been very clear about that. How much do you think we are learning, you are learning, from the MeToo movement?

Well, there was a great line in a cult film years ago. I watch movies, I love cult films. “We only truly believe what we discover ourselves.” You can hear about a rule. You can generally obey the law. But you don’t have a personal connection to it. And when you get involved like I did, by making too many comments about appearance on and off the air — I made too many, certainly one too many, and I was wrong. When I think back on it, and I did give a lot of thought to this over the last year and a half, why should an average looking person, a woman, have to put up with somebody talking about how somebody else is good-looking? Why do they put up with this walking Miss America contest? Why should anybody put up with it? Men don’t generally have to put up with it. “Joe McGee and his lovely wife have just arrived.” Why do we talk like that? We don’t say, “Mary McGee and her lovely husband.”

I have a granddaughter. She’s very smart. She just turned nine, Juliette, very smart. And a friend of mine came by the house and said, “Your granddaughter’s so pretty.” So I went up to Juliette and said, “That guy came by in the car just said how pretty you are.” And she said to me, right to my face, “Grandpa, I’d rather he said how intelligent I was.” And then she said it to me in French. There’s a real cultural change about this among young people. They don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s not just the rules at work that are ascribed to them by their bosses. People don’t like it. I was wrong. What used to be seen as a compliment is not taken that way. I can go on on this because I’ve been thinking about this, Dean, for so many months.

You finish the book by talking about your hope for America. What is your hope for this country going forward?

Well, I’ve been lucky to have had a life where I have been on the political inside. I’ve been up there in Air Force One with a president fighting for his second term. I’ve been up with Tip every morning, with the legendary speaker fighting with Ronald Reagan, trying to get things done and trying to beat him politically. I’ve been overseas watching people at the Berlin Wall, waiting for the wall to come down and asking them about freedom. And they said, “Talking to you is freedom.” I’ve been in South Africa watching people get to vote for the first time in their own country. I’ve seen people that want democracy. They really want it, and they know that it’s better than anything else. Nothing’s perfect, but they want to be able to decide whether we have capitalism. East Germans said, a lot of people I interviewed there at the time in ’89 said, “We want capitalism. We want socialism. Let us decide. Let us make these decisions.” They weren’t able to make them under the communist rule.

But I worry now, as we were talking about a few moments ago, I do worry about Americans because they think their side, especially if they’re conservative white people, they feel their side’s losing demographically. So, oh, we’re going to change the rules. We’re going to make it harder for other people besides white people to vote, we’re going to make it harder for young people to vote. We don’t like the way young people are thinking. But you can’t change the rules of democracy.

We talked about the founding fathers because even though that’s hundreds of years ago, we believed they were right. We’re all created equal and being able to speak freely and being able to vote freely are tied together. If we lose the ability to speak, like you don’t have in Cuba today, for example — I don’t mind bashing the communists because I don’t like them — but if you can’t speak, you’re unlikely to win the vote. And if you don’t control the vote, you’re unlikely to keep your rights because the vote guarantees your rights.

You can knock people down like Nixon when they blow it on rights and undermining people’s democratic freedoms. I think freedom and democracy are intertwined. I think we’ve got to be vigilant, and we got to call these conservatives out. God, how do you say “Put on your big boy pants” to Kevin McCarthy? OK buddy, are you a leader or are you a front man? If you’re a front man, we get it. But if you want to be a leader, say, “Biden won.” Say it loud. Say it every morning when you go to the House. You want to be speaker, act like the speaker. Say, “We have a constitutional system.”

If you’re Michael Flynn, remember your oath to the Constitution and remember what you owe, loyalty to this country and its Constitution. It’s what you sign up for when you become an officer. And he was a flag officer.

Anyway, I do worry. Steve Scalise ought to stand up. I have talked to these guys. They’re normal people. They’re Americans. They’re one of us. They should be able to say, “Here’s where I draw the line.” Back in the old days, when the Republican Party was joined by the John Birch Society and the antisemitic stuff, people like William F. Buckley said, “No, you’re not here. You don’t belong here if you have those attitudes. Go away.” The John Birch Society was a real bad shadow of the Republican party. They should clean it up today and hope they can win some elections positively.

Why isn’t Trump in jail? Former George W. Bush lawyer says Biden’s DOJ is protecting him

Donald Trump’s regime turned the United States government, and in some sense the entire country, into a crime scene. Given that, why isn’t Trump in jail? Why are the collaborators and co-conspirators in his multitude of apparent crimes not in jail with him?

These are questions I have asked myself many times during the Age of Trump and these months after his coup attempt and the Capitol attack, especially as more “revelations” have emerged about the vast scale of Trump’s crimes against democracy, the rule of law and the American people.

Many other Americans have the same questions about justice and consequences for Donald Trump and members of his regime, which at this point includes nearly the entire Republican Party.

There are various plausible answers to these questions. Of course there are actions that may be immoral, wrong or evil but not technically illegal. Perfidy, lies, cruelty and bigotry are in most cases not offenses that can successfully be prosecuted in court.

Joe Biden’s administration and the senior leadership of the Democratic Party appear to feel that a proper investigation into the Trump regime, for example through convening a truth commission or some similar independent body, would be a “distraction” from their policy agenda.

Perhaps Biden and other Democratic leaders feel that the scale of the Trump regime’s obvious criminality is so great that to reveal the truth in full would cause an even greater crisis of legitimacy in the country’s governing institutions. In essence, the Democrats may be trying to “protect” the American people from the truth.

There is also the raw and ugly fact that rich white men in America are rarely held accountable for their actions, and that goes double for Republicans and conservatives. If Trump were black or brown or a Democrat, he and his cabal would in all likelihood have been convicted and sent to prison months or years ago.

In an effort to understand why Trump and his regime are not being prosecuted for their many apparent crimes — and may never be — I recently spoke with Richard Painter. He was White House chief ethics counsel under President George W. Bush and is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN and other news networks. His most recent book, co-authored with Peter Golenbock, is “American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump is the Worst Offender.”

In this conversation, Painter explains why there appears to be little if any interest from the Department of Justice in prosecuting Donald Trump. This is partly because its leadership under Attorney General Merrick Garland is afraid of setting such a precedent, but more importantly, the DOJ is now institutionally committed to the idea that there are few limits on presidential power.

Painter also discusses the absurdity of the Department of Justice under Biden choosing to defend Donald Trump in court against the many lawsuits that are being brought against him, including those concerning his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and larger coup attempt.

Painter also warns that this refusal to investigate and prosecute the Trump regime, which will only empower future presidents to commit crimes without consequence, could lead to the collapse of American democracy and its descent into authoritarian rule — not altogether different from the fate of Ancient Rome.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

Given all their public crimes and other misdeeds, more of which are emerging every day, why are Donald Trump and his inner circle not in jail?

I am not sure that prosecutors want to go after Donald Trump and his cohorts. We will have to see what happens in New York. But at this point in time, it has been pretty obvious that the U.S. Department of Justice, if anything, is going to be defending Trump in a number of civil lawsuits. These include the Lafayette Park case, and the Freedom of Information Act requests from CREW [Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] over the DOJ memo about whether they could indict Donald Trump back in 2019 [at the time of the Mueller report].

The DOJ will not disclose that memo. CREW has sued, and guess what? The Biden Department of Justice is defending the executive privilege of the Trump administration with respect to that memo. They do not want to release it. Biden’s Department of Justice also restrained former White House counsel Don McGahn about what he could say when testifying before Congress, even though he had been subpoenaed by the House of Representatives.

The Department of Justice once again is asserting attorney-client privilege and executive privilege over some of the communications between Trump and McGahn. There is now a rumor that the Department of Justice might actually defend Donald Trump with respect to his conduct on Jan. 6 and during the insurrection, in the private litigation against him.

I believe that the Department of Justice should indict former President Trump for obstruction of justice, as laid out in the second part of the Mueller report. He should also perhaps be indicted for inciting the insurrection and riot on Jan. 6, among other criminal offenses. But the Department of Justice is going in the opposite direction. Biden’s DOJ wants to defend Donald Trump and the idea of presidential power and presidential prerogatives. I think that’s most unfortunate. There is a great deal of timidity and apprehension about going after a former president.

How do DOJ lawyers and other legal professionals and scholars reconcile protecting Donald Trump when he was and is a dire threat to the country’s democratic institutions? There is this obsession with “institutions,” but those institutions will be further imperiled if Trump and members of his cabal are not held responsible for their obvious crimes. In essence, not to punish them is to encourage another coup.

That is the danger. I believe that the lawyers and legal scholars can be separated into two distinct groups. There are those who are worried about too much presidential power. I am among that group. I believe that a sitting president should be indicted for any crimes he commits in office. A former president should certainly be indicted if he committed crimes while in office. The notion of executive privilege — keeping communications confidential from Congress and from prosecutors — is way overblown. And the idea that the president could somehow fire the FBI director, or threaten to fire Bob Mueller, is clearly obstruction of justice. The president of the United States is not above the law.

There is another view of these questions. Sometimes the phrase “unitary executive theory” has been used to describe this belief in heightened presidential power. There are both liberals and conservatives in that camp.

There are people who believe, as [former] Attorney General Barr does, that a president can fire anybody at will, because he is in charge of the executive branch. For example, the president can just fire the FBI director in the middle of an investigation if he wants to — that’s what Barr has said.

There are supposed liberals who believe pretty much the same thing. Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School is among that group. He has also said that you cannot indict a sitting president for a criminal offense he commits while in office. Sunstein is working for Joe Biden right now.

Many people in the Justice Department — and who filter in and out of the Justice Department in different administrations — are committed to this latter view of presidential power. As such, the unitary executive theory tends to be the predominant view in the Department of Justice. I think it’s wrongheaded. It’s not consistent with the United States Constitution to have that much power and privilege, in essence legal immunity, in the hands of the president.

How would they respond to the basic observation that the president of the United States is not a king or an emperor? Their commitment to the unitary executive theory basically means, in practice, that a president, especially a Republican president, can overthrow the government if they do not like the result of an election.

That is where we could end up as a country, where the president can do anything he wants while in office. If the president cannot be indicted and has broad power to hire and fire anybody he wants without criminal accountability, and he can use the military for whatever he wants, then he will commit crimes and use his official powers to stay in office. That is a pattern in countries that become dictatorships. It happened with the Roman Empire almost exactly that same way, with power being concentrated in the hands of a single individual.

What if Biden had exercised bold leadership by immediately signaling to the Department of Justice that they should aggressively pursue Donald Trump, his inner circle and others who have committed crimes?

If I were Joe Biden, I would not have done that. Instead, I would have said, “We’re going to bring in an independent counsel who will make this decision. It’s not a political decision.” If Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be prosecuted. That should not be a political decision. I do not believe that Joe Biden or any appointee of Joe Biden should be making that decision.

Again, if someone commits a crime they should be prosecuted. They should go to jail if they committed a felony. The second part of the Mueller report shows that there was obstruction of justice by Trump and his inner circle. Part two of the Mueller report is an outline of an indictment. But the Department of Justice does not want to do it.

If Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be indicted. It is pretty clear to me that is in fact the case.

What are these “institutionalists” afraid of when it comes to prosecuting Trump, his coup plotters and other members of his regime?

Part of it is that the DOJ’s lawyers have been defending presidential prerogative, presidential privilege, and the like across many administrations. They have been doing this in both Democratic and Republican administrations. These people are political appointees of the president, which explains the ideology at work. These political appointees may have different views on political issues and different political affiliations. But many people in the DOJ have a view that they are there to protect presidential privilege and power and immunity. It is very bad for our democracy. We are not getting the pushback from Congress that we need right now. It is a very frustrating situation.

Why didn’t more people in the federal government who were a witness to these crimes, and Trump’s assaults on democracy more generally, stand up and speak out? We needed many more whistleblowers and other patriots.

The real problem is the people in Congress who supported Donald Trump and the extremists and the conspiracy theorists. It is very hard to root out the people who are from congressional districts that are extremely conservative and consistently vote Republican.

I hope the Republican Party will clean out the worst people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who spread conspiracy theories. I do not know if it’s going to happen, but we need to hold the Republican Party accountable. I was a Republican for 30 years. They still have some good people. But it’s very, very hard now, because Republicans either endorse Trumpism or they are scared and therefore won’t speak up against it. We need some courage in this country, and we are not getting it right now.

What were your thoughts as you watched those events on Jan. 6? How do you assess the investigation so far?

A bunch of Trump followers invaded the Capitol. Those people were being held to account, such as the Proud Boys. But at this point, the only people being indicted are the people who were actually there. I have not seen a lot of activity going to the next level and finding out who the political operatives were, whether from the Trump campaign or other people behind the scenes, who were orchestrating the events of Jan. 6.

This was a conspiracy. It’s pretty obvious that people were planning some of this in advance. Donald Trump inspired them to go down there to the Capitol and do what they did. Trump did not say, “Go kill a police officer,” but it was pretty clear he was instigating a riot, an insurrection, with the false rumors about election fraud and the rest of it. I want to see investigation from the DOJ go to the next step. But thus far, we are not seeing that.

Do you think a signal was sent by the Biden administration to not prosecute the ringleaders for reasons of “stability” and protecting the “institutions”?

There are a number of signals at play here. Primarily that “we’re going to look forward.” The Obama-Biden team sent that message with respect to the torture lawyers in the Department of Justice.

And guess what? They just came back in the Trump years, pushing for more executive power. This is not a good situation. We need to have a clear message that people who violate the law, when they hold positions of public trust, are going to be prosecuted and the lawyers involved will be disbarred.

What happens next if such presidential power is not curtailed?

If the Democrats want to put a stop to it, they need to rein in executive power and make it clear that even with a Democrat in the White House, we’re not going to put up with it. We’re not going to defend presidential privilege and confidential communications of criminal conduct. We’re not going to do that. We do not need to have an all-powerful president to live in a democracy. Congress passes the laws, the president signs the laws. But we don’t need to have a president who can do anything he wants, whether he’s a Democrat or a Republican. That needs to be the overriding principle here.

If the Department of Justice actually ends up defending Trump against civil and other charges for his role in the coup and the Capitol attack, what does that do to the DOJ’s credibility? What message does it send to the public about the presidency?

It creates the impression that presidents are just interested in power. And that means that the concept of presidential power and presidential prerogative and privilege is what really matters to the Department of Justice. By implication, it means that is what’s important to Joe Biden. That he’s willing to defend everything Donald Trump did so that he in turn can do what he wants. That’s the impression it’s going to give. Now, I do not see Joe Biden abusing his power. But there is no reason for the DOJ to defend Donald Trump.

What advice would you give Joe Biden about Trump’s crimes and this torrent of new information about his extreme wrongdoing while in office?

I’d say, Mr. President, you need to have the attorney general appoint an independent prosecutor. Or maybe it’s going to take two or three independent prosecutors because of the amount of criminality here. Have those independent prosecutors make the decision about whether Donald Trump ought to be indicted or not. I’d say, second, the Justice Department should stop defending Donald Trump in any and all civil litigation, or defending his presidential privilege. His communications with his White House counsel should be revealed to the United States Congress. CREW should get a copy of that memo the DOJ wrote in 2019 about whether Donald Trump could be indicted. There needs to be complete transparency, no more secrets. That’s the bottom line.

Trump urged military to “beat the f**k” out of George Floyd protesters, “crack their skulls”

On Thursday, CNN reported that an upcoming book on former President Donald Trump by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender alleges he demanded that military and law enforcement groups “crack skulls” during efforts to control the George Floyd protests last summer.

“Titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” the book reveals new details about how Trump’s language became increasingly violent during Oval Office meetings as protests in Seattle and Portland began to receive attention from cable new outlets,” reported Zachary Cohen. “The President would highlight videos that showed law enforcement getting physical with protesters and tell his administration he wanted to see more of that behavior, the excerpts show.”

“That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump is quoted as telling officials. “Crack their skulls!” He added that he wanted them to “beat the f**k” out of the civil rights demonstrators — although when military officials and then-Attorney General William Barr pushed back, he said, “Well, shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot.”

Trump drew furious protests after he posed with a Bible at the church near the White House as police were tear-gassing protesters, although a recent inspector general report claimed that the attacks on protesters weren’t directly tied to Trump visiting the church.

How Peter Thiel turned a retirement account for the middle class Into a $5B tax-free piggy bank

Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS tax return data on thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. This data provides, for the first time, an inside look at the financial lives of the richest Americans, those whose stratospheric fortunes put them among history’s wealthiest individuals.

What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country’s richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.

One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.

The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiel’s wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand.

Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.

Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.

Buffett didn’t respond to questions sent by email. Mercer couldn’t be reached for comment, and his accountants and attorneys didn’t respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Smith also couldn’t be reached for comment, and an employee at his hedge fund repeatedly hung up when ProPublica reporters identified themselves. Other representatives for Smith and his hedge fund didn’t respond.

In a written statement, Weschler said his retirement account relied on publicly traded investments and strategies available to all taxpayers. Nevertheless, he said he supports reforming the system.

“Although I have been an enormous beneficiary of the IRA mechanism, I personally do not feel the tax shield afforded me by my IRA is necessarily good tax policy,” he wrote. “To this end, I am openly supportive of modifying the benefit afforded to retirement accounts once they exceed a certain threshold.”

A spokesman for Thiel accepted detailed questions on Thiel’s behalf, then never responded to phone calls or emails. Messages left at Thiel’s venture capital fund were not returned.

While the scope and scale of such accounts has never been publicly documented, Congress has long been aware of their existence — and the ballooning tax breaks they were garnering for the ultrawealthy. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, for years has warned that the wealthiest Americans were accumulating massive retirement accounts in ways federal lawmakers never intended.

At the same time, Congress has slashed the IRS’ budget so severely that the agency’s ability to ferret out abuses has been stymied. Money was so tight that at one point in 2015 the agency couldn’t afford to enter critical data about IRAs from paper tax filings into its computer system.

Over the years, a few politicians have tried, and failed, to crack down on the tax breaks the ultrarich receive from their giant IRAs.

In 2016, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, floated a detailed reform plan and said, “It’s time to face the fact that our tax code needs a dose of fairness when it comes to retirement savings, and that starts with cracking down on massive Roth IRA accounts built on assets from sweetheart, inside deals.”

“Tax incentives for retirement savings,” he added at the time, “are designed to help people build a nest egg, not a golden egg.”

But Wyden soon abandoned his proposal; there was no chance the Republican-controlled Senate would pass it.

Meanwhile, Thiel’s Roth grew.

And grew.

At the end of 2019, it hit the $5 billion mark, jumping more than $3 billion in just three years’ time — all of it tax-free.

Thiel, a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, by then had brought his Roth under the auspices of a family trust company called Rivendell Trust. In “The Lord of the Rings,” Rivendell is a secret valley populated by elves, a misty sanctuary against forces of darkness. Thiel’s earthly version resides in a suburban Las Vegas office complex, across from a Cheesecake Factory, and is staffed by a small group of corporate lawyers.

And thanks to the Roth, Thiel’s fortune is far more vast than even experts in tallying the wealth of the rich believed. In 2019, Forbes put Thiel’s total net worth at just $2.3 billion. That was less than half of what his Roth alone was worth.

* * *

The ultrawealthy’s hijacking of a tool meant for the middle class becomes especially striking when you consider what the retirement future looks like for many Americans.

There isn’t one.

One in four working-age Americans has nothing saved for retirement, a 2020 Federal Reserve study found.

Individual retirement accounts emerged from the ruins of corporate pensions. The traditional IRA had existed since the 1970s for workers who didn’t have pensions, but as corporations shifted the burden of saving for retirement to workers, too few Americans were setting up these accounts, condemning many to scrape by on Social Security in old age. By the 1990s, politicians on both sides of the aisle were fretting over the declining savings rates in the U.S.

It was against this backdrop that an idea Sen. Roth had been pushing for years finally found its moment.

One of the fathers of Reaganomics, Roth was determined to slash the federal budget, cut taxes and rein in the IRS. Starting in 1997, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Roth held a series of hearings that portrayed IRS agents as menacing thugs. Roth’s investigations sparked legislation that gutted the IRS’ collection powers for more than a decade.

But it was his championing of the Roth IRA that would earn the senator posthumous fame and a mention in the American Heritage dictionary. Roth’s obsession was a new kind of IRA, which he said would “be a blessing to countless Americans as they prepare for the future.”

It would also create an escape hatch from the entire income tax system.

Run-of-the-mill retirement plans — a traditional IRA or 401(k), for instance — defer taxes to a later date. The money that people put into their accounts is deducted from their income, so they aren’t taxed up front, nor are the dividends, interest or gains on investments along the way. But when retirees withdraw money, they have to pay income tax on it.

A Roth, by contrast, eliminates tax liability rather than deferring it. People who open a Roth don’t get the tax break on the money they initially put in. But once they deposit that money, their investments grow tax-free forever and retirees don’t pay a penny of taxes on withdrawals. Even better, unlike a traditional IRA, the Roth doesn’t require retirees to deplete the account as they age.

Sen. Roth promised that his new IRA would “provide relief to hard-working, middle-class Americans.”

The law creating the Roth IRA passed in 1997 with overwhelming bipartisan support. A few tax wonks predicted that workers who were most likely to struggle financially in old age wouldn’t open the accounts because they couldn’t afford to save. Roths, they warned, would become a giveaway to mostly well-off taxpayers who would have saved anyway. Investing in a Roth was like locking in a rate on a mortgage when interest rates were low, an attractive proposition for wealthy Americans worried that Congress would raise tax rates in future years.

That’s why the Clinton administration insisted on barring people who made too much from stashing money in a Roth. Surely, that would prevent the superrich from gaming the system to use Roths as tax shelters.

1999 Thiel Roth IRA worth: $1,664

1999 S&P 500 Roth IRA worth: $2,421

* * *

One day in early 1999, a deputy of Thiel’s at the company that would become PayPal walked into the San Francisco office of Pensco Pension Services. It could have been an uneventful appointment. Instead, it changed Thiel’s life.

Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, ran a small hedge fund and hadn’t yet joined the ranks of the ultrawealthy. But he had outsized ambitions for his months-old tech venture, where he served as both chairman and CEO. He envisioned his company creating “a new world currency, free from all government control.”

Influenced by libertarian Ayn Rand and Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy, Thiel, then in his early 30s, carried himself like a contrarian philosopher king. A few years earlier, he had co-authored a jeremiad against multiculturalism that accused the administration of then-President Bill Clinton of waging class warfare. “Taxing the rich seems to have become an end in itself,” he and his co-author wrote.

Pensco was a small firm that allowed its customers to put nearly any investment they wanted into a tax-advantaged retirement account. Thiel was about to become Pensco’s whale.

In an interview with ProPublica, Pensco founder Tom Anderson recalled how Thiel and other PayPal executives had wanted to put startup shares of the company into traditional IRAs.

Anderson dangled something sweeter.

“I said, ‘If you really think this is going to be big, you know, you might want to consider this new Roth,'” recalled Anderson, who is now retired. If the investment ballooned, he remembered saying, “‘you’re not going to pay tax on it when you take it out.’ It’s a no-brainer.”

The math was compelling. Thiel wouldn’t get a tax break up front, but he’d avoid an immense tax bill later on if the investment surged in value.

“They immediately grasped that,” Anderson said. “And they did it.”

What happened next deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions. Thiel used his new Roth IRA to purchase shares of his startup.

In 1999, single taxpayers were only allowed to contribute to a Roth if they made less than $110,000. Like many startups, PayPal offered its top executives low initial salaries and large stock grants. Thiel’s income that year was $73,263, the IRS records show.

Thiel also had an advantage over most Americans with IRAs, who typically use them to purchase publicly traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and certificates of deposit. Since Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of a private company, the value wasn’t set on a public stock exchange.

Although the details of such purchases are not usually public, Thiel’s financial assistant later disclosed them in a letter included in the entrepreneur’s application for residency in New Zealand: “Mr. Thiel purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation.”

While SEC filings describing that time don’t mention Thiel’s Roth, they show that he bought his first slice of the company in January 1999. Thiel paid $0.001 per share — yes, just a tenth of a penny — for 1.7 million shares. At that price, he was able to buy a large stake for just $1,700.

In 1999, $2,000 was the maximum amount you could put into a Roth in a year.

Thiel’s unusual stock purchase risked running afoul of rules designed to prevent IRAs from becoming illegal tax shelters. Investors aren’t allowed to buy assets for less than their true value through an IRA. The practice is sometimes known as “stuffing” because it gets around the strict limits imposed by Congress on how much money can be put in a Roth.

PayPal later disclosed details about the early history of the company in an SEC filing before its initial public offering. The filing reveals that Thiel’s founders’ shares were among those the company sold to employees at “below fair value.”

Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has written about the valuation of founders’ shares, read the PayPal filings at ProPublica’s request. Buying startup shares at a discounted $0.001 price with a Roth, he asserts, would be indefensible.

“That’s a huge scandal,” Fleischer said, adding, “How greedy can you get?”

Warren Baker, a Seattle tax attorney who specializes in IRAs, said he would advise clients who are top executives working at a startup not to purchase founders’ shares with a Roth to avoid accusations by the IRS that they got a special deal and undervalued the shares. Baker was speaking generally, not about Thiel.

“I would be concerned about the fact that you can’t support the valuation number as being reasonable,” he said.

At the time Thiel bought his founders’ shares, his own hedge fund had already loaned the new startup $100,000, California and SEC records show.

And soon after the company sold him the shares, millions of dollars poured in from investors, securities filings show. In just a month’s time, the company sold a slice of itself to investors for $500,000. That June and August, another $4.5 million poured in from the venture fund arm of telecom giant Nokia and other investors, those records show.

The dot-com boom was in full swing. “We’re definitely on to something big,” Thiel told employees in late 1999, predicting that PayPal would become “the Microsoft of payments,” according to “The PayPal Wars,” a book by a former employee recounting those heady early years.

But when it came time for Pensco, the custodian of Thiel’s Roth, to report the value of the account to the IRS at the close of 1999, none of the investor enthusiasm was apparent. Pensco told the IRS that Thiel’s Roth was worth just $1,664 at the end of 1999, tax records show.

In an interview, Anderson said Pensco relied on the companies whose shares were in a Roth to say what they were worth. He didn’t know how PayPal came up with its market value, but he said Thiel’s purchase of those shares was “very legitimate.”

From there, nothing would stop Thiel’s Roth. In a Silicon Valley equivalent of Tolkien alchemy, his Roth would transform those PayPal shares into a tax-free fortune — one that would be safer than all the gems, gold and silver in the dragon Smaug’s mountain.

* * *

After 1999, Thiel would never again contribute money to his Roth, tax records show.

He didn’t need to. In just a year’s time, the value of his Roth jumped from $1,664 to $3.8 million — a 227,490% increase.

Then in 2002, eBay purchased PayPal. That same year, Thiel sold the shares, still inside his Roth, his financial assistant later told New Zealand officials. The tax-free proceeds poured into his account. By the end of 2002, Thiel’s Roth was worth $28.5 million, tax records show.

If he had held his shares outside of the Roth in a normal investment account, Thiel would have owed the IRS 20% of his gains and owed another 9% to California tax authorities. Because the shares were in a Roth, he had no tax bill when he sold them, saving him millions.

Suddenly, Thiel had an advantage few investors could claim: His own personal investment bank that wasn’t subject to taxation. He could now use the cash inside the Roth to buy and sell nearly any investment he wanted. Thiel used the millions in proceeds from his PayPal windfall to invest in other Silicon Valley startups as well as his own hedge fund, according to his financial assistant’s memo. Once again, Thiel’s Roth scooped up startup shares at bargain-basement prices.

For instance, Thiel and colleagues in 2003 founded Palantir, a data analytics company, helped by an early investment from a CIA-backed venture fund. The company was named after the “seeing stones” made by elves in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, used to detect danger near and far.

Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of Palantir when it was still a private company, years before it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to a ProPublica analysis of tax records, an SEC filing and shareholder records included in a civil suit.

Over the years, Palantir has won federal contracts from the military to hunt terrorists and from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find undocumented immigrants. Even the IRS has a $99 million contract with Palantir to comb through data to identify tax cheats.

Then, in 2004, Thiel met Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard undergraduate who had come to Silicon Valley for the summer to work on growing the company that would become Facebook. Thiel invested $500,000, Facebook’s first large outside infusion of cash. Those Facebook shares ended up — where else? — in Thiel’s Roth IRA, an attorney for Facebook later disclosed in a letter filed in federal court. That ensured that Thiel wouldn’t owe taxes on his early investment in the company.

As Thiel’s Roth and fortune ballooned, he scolded Americans for their financial imprudence. In a 2006 Forbes column, headlined “Warning: Save, Save, Save,” Thiel lamented the low household savings in the U.S. and called for most Americans to live within their means.

“Forgo the new kitchen and sundeck,” he wrote. “Shoot to put away 15% of the paycheck.” His closing advice: “Living modestly and saving well is better than dying broke.”

In an interview on the website Big Think, Thiel said the U.S. tax system has “fairness problems” in which “you have super rich people paying a lower rate than people in the middle or upper middle class.”

The answer wasn’t taxing the rich more, he said, but “taxing the middle class and the upper middle class a lot less” and cutting their dependence on expensive programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

By then, Thiel had purchased a Ferrari and had bought and sold a penthouse in the San Francisco Four Seasons. In 2005, he sought residency in New Zealand, which had become a destination for some ultrawealthy people who saw it as a safe haven should civilization collapse.

“I have long admired the people, culture, business environment and government of New Zealand, as well as the encouragement which is given to investment, business and trade in New Zealand,” Thiel later wrote in a letter to the country’s government.

Thiel applied as an investor. His application, prepared by his then-financial assistant, Jason Portnoy, touted the size of his Roth. Thiel transferred $749,967 to a bank in New Zealand, keeping it under the umbrella of the Roth.

The country, where the “Lord of the Rings” movies were filmed, approved Thiel’s application. The New Zealand Herald later revealed that the country had secretly granted Thiel full citizenship. The newspaper obtained Thiel’s application through a public records request, and those documents included Portnoy’s letter.

In the next two years, Thiel’s Roth reached new heights, reflecting Facebook’s meteoric rise. In his bestselling book on startups, “Zero to One,” Thiel wrote: “Money makes money.” By the end of 2008, the Roth was worth $870 million.

* * *

Up to this point, Thiel was one of the few Americans who had managed to amass prodigious Roth accounts. Among the others were at least three additional PayPal alums who eventually built Roths worth more than $80 million each, according to tax records and SEC filings.

Even so, the existing income limits managed to keep most of the superrich out.

Then, in the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, Congress took a wrecking ball to those defenses, and the wealthy stormed in.

The change centered on an unsexy-sounding maneuver known as a Roth conversion. It works like this: If you have money in a traditional IRA, you can transform it into a Roth as long as you pay one-time income tax on the money. By converting the account to a Roth, no additional income taxes are ever due.

Conversions had existed since the Roth’s conception, but they had been restricted to Americans making below $100,000 per year.

In 2006, Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress were seeking to slash taxes on capital gains, the type of income that can be generated when stocks or other assets are sold. But they faced a problem. Budget rules required them to find a way to make up for the lost revenue.

Their solution was widely viewed as a gimmick: using one tax cut to pay for another tax cut. A provision was included in the Bush bill that lifted the ban on the wealthy making Roth conversions. Since the maneuver requires a payment of tax up front, it counted in short-term congressional budget models as actually raising revenue. The tax breaks didn’t come until later. “It will have large and damaging effects on the federal budget for decades to come,” wrote budget expert Len Burman in the specialty publication Tax Notes.

The new backdoor into the Roth opened in 2010 and set off a frenzy of conversions among hedge fund managers, industrialists and heirs, the tax records reviewed by ProPublica show.

Weschler, the Berkshire Hathaway executive, amassed a giant traditional IRA in his years as a private equity partner and hedge fund manager. He converted a whopping $130 million. His boss, Warren Buffett, converted $11.6 million. After paying the one-time tax, both men saw their Roth accounts soar.

In his statement, Weschler said he opened a retirement account as a 22-year-old junior financial analyst in 1983 and began contributing the maximum amount allowed, along with a generous match from his employer. Weschler said his Roth is so large because he chose investments carefully, had “exceptional luck” and had nearly four decades for it to grow.

Weschler said he could envision the late Sen. Roth holding up his experience as “an aspirational example of the power of deferred consumption” that could “hopefully help motivate generations of future savers.”

He added that he paid more than $28 million in federal taxes to convert his account to a Roth.

Some of the wealthy managed to avoid even that one-time tax bill.

Three members of the Ebrahimi family, whose patriarch made a fortune at the software firm Quark, collectively converted $65 million into Roths in 2010 and 2011. Farhad Ebrahimi, one of the heirs of the fortune, has supported left-wing causes and became known for walking around the Occupy Boston protest in 2011 wearing a hand-lettered T-shirt that declared he was a member of the 1% and said: “Tax me, I’m good for it.”

Kind of.

He converted $19.4 million into a Roth, which would have triggered $6.8 million in income tax. But thanks to losses generated by other investments, he wiped out the tax bill on the conversion. Ebrahimi declined to comment.

* * *

In 2009, word of Thiel’s secret weapon leaked for the first time.

In a story headlined, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Taxpayer Money,” Gawker Media, citing anonymous sources, revealed that Thiel held his Facebook investment in a tax-free Roth.

The Great Recession, though, caught up with Thiel. His hedge fund racked up big losses.

Thiel then did something unusual: For five years starting in 2010, he dipped into his Roth for at least $254 million, the IRS tax return data obtained by ProPublica shows. That is almost unheard of among the wealthy, tax advisers say, because it shrinks the pot of money that can be invested tax-free. Because Thiel was still in his 40s, he was too young to pull money from a Roth without paying income tax plus a 10% penalty on these withdrawals.

During the life of his Roth, Thiel also has made money outside it. He took in an additional $687 million of income from 1999 to 2018, largely from gains on investments, tax records show. All told, over that period he paid $206 million in federal taxes, including the taxes on the early Roth withdrawals.

In four of those years, however, Thiel managed to cut his federal income tax bill to zero.

In 2011, Thiel caught the attention of the IRS. The agency launched an audit, tax records show. The records don’t spell out what the IRS was looking at or if it involved Thiel’s Roth. Whatever the case, the audit was closed years later and Thiel didn’t owe any more taxes, tax records show.

By 2012, large IRAs began to attract scrutiny, falling under the klieg lights of presidential politics.

That January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mitt Romney, the former private equity executive running for the GOP nomination, had listed on a financial disclosure form that he had amassed an IRA worth between $20 million and $102 million. The story ran on the front page and launched waves of coverage in other publications. Romney had a traditional IRA, not a Roth. But how, people wondered, could the account have grown so large, given that the government imposed strict limits on how much money could be put into one of the tax-deferred accounts?

Citing former company insiders and documents, the Journal reported that during Romney’s time as CEO at investment giant Bain Capital, executives there had effectively bypassed the contribution limits by putting extremely low-valued shares from private equity deals into their IRAs, then watching them balloon.

ProPublica’s analysis of the tax records show that by the end of 2018, at least seven other current or former Bain executives had amassed IRAs worth $25 million or more, with three exceeding $90 million.

Other financiers also found ways to supersize their retirement accounts. Michael Milken, for example, the 1980s junk bond king who went to prison for fraud and was later pardoned by President Donald Trump, had traditional IRAs valued at $509 million.

A senior adviser to Milken declined to answer questions, “since it’s not our practice to publish or discuss Mike Milken’s private financial information, I can’t help you on this one.”

Romney lost the 2012 election, but the IRA revelation provoked a lasting backlash. Wyden asked the investigative arm of Congress to look into the matter. In a landmark report issued in 2014, the Government Accountability Office sounded the alarm, finding the mega IRAs stood “in contrast to Congress’s aim.”

IRS officials told investigators that the federal government was losing more and more money to “IRA abuses.” The GAO investigators flagged “aggressive” valuation tactics by private equity. And while it didn’t mention Thiel or his PayPal co-founders, the report laid out how startup founders’ shares could be used to render IRA contribution limits irrelevant. “Individuals can manipulate contribution limits by grossly undervaluing investments at the time the individual uses an IRA to purchase them,” the congressional investigators wrote.

The report estimated that, as of 2011, there were around 300 taxpayers with IRAs worth more than $25 million. That detail reverberated around the media and Capitol Hill. Few knew that most of those accounts were minuscule compared to Thiel’s, which that year was valued at nearly $1.6 billion.

A series of reform proposals followed. Wyden, who now holds Roth’s old position as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has become the leading proponent of rolling back what he calls “unfair strategies used by the privileged to rake in subsidies and dodge tax bills with so-called ‘mega Roth IRAs.'” In 2016, he released a plan that would require owners of Roth IRAs worth more than $5 million to take money out of the accounts. Amid howls of protest from the retirement industry and a Senate and House controlled by Republicans, Wyden’s proposal went nowhere.

The IRS, meanwhile, was floundering in its efforts to police retirement accounts. At one point the agency recommended Congress prohibit IRA accounts from buying investments that aren’t traded on a public market, such as founders’ shares. That went nowhere, too. Instead, Congress began slashing the IRS’ budget, kneecapping the agency for more than a decade.

In 2009, an internal team had recommended the agency at least collect data on unorthodox assets held in IRAs. But it took more than five years for the agency to mandate disclosure of those investments. Even then, the agency simply required tax forms to say whether an IRA held stock in a private company, not the name of the company or the price per share.

By 2015, the agency was struggling to handle the paper forms sent in by the companies that administer IRAs. The agency couldn’t afford to digitize them. Another two years went by before the IRS started electronically transcribing the forms.

After years of plodding, the agency said it was finally ready in 2019 to use the data to target potential abusers for audits. And that’s before the real fighting begins over hotly contested issues such as how to value shares in a startup that aren’t publicly traded. IRS officials have complained to congressional investigators that challenging such valuations is costly and time-consuming, and that it requires a small army of experts to go up against deep-pocketed taxpayers.

The IRS did not respond to detailed questions. But as ProPublica has reported, in tax disputes with the superrich, the IRS is completely outmatched.

* * *

In his book “Zero to One,” Thiel argues that fortunes are built not by luck or unfair advantage, but by discerning investors and founders who are more courageous than their peers, leaders who zig when the crowd zags. Thiel devotes an entire chapter to the importance of keeping secrets, writing that “every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”

A secret of Thiel’s is that his fortune was built not just with brains but also with massive tax breaks. By 2019, Thiel’s holdings had grown so vast and diverse that his $5 billion was spread across 96 subaccounts inside his Roth.

As his wealth grew, Thiel showered millions of dollars on Republican politicians and groups with an anti-tax agenda, including Club for Growth Action. In 2016, he became the rare Silicon Valley titan to endorse Donald Trump.

The Trump years, which fueled a market boom, were good for Thiel and his Roth. In 2018, he moved his Roth from Pensco to Rivendell, the family trust company named after Tolkien’s elven sanctuary.

In Tolkien’s fantasy world, elves can be killed in battle or succumb to grief, but they don’t die of old age or disease. Thiel has told people he hopes to live to be 120 years old. That might be a bit optimistic, but he is not taking any chances and is investing in anti-aging technology companies. He’s even tucked some of those shares into his Roth, SEC and tax records show.

Assuming a modest 6% annual return and no withdrawals, his tax-free golden egg could be worth about $263 billion in 2087, when Thiel plans to celebrate his 120th birthday. That’s larger than the current gross domestic product of New Zealand, his adopted homeland.

“There is good news and bad news,” Thiel told The Washington Post when asked about living more than a century. “The bad news is: If you don’t believe in the good news, you’re not saving enough for retirement and likely to spend much of your old age in poverty.”

“The financial planning,” Thiel said, “takes on a very different character.”

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Secret IRS Files is an ongoing reporting project. Sign up to be notified when the next installment publishes.

Sean Hannity fires opening salvo in Fox News civil war over Tucker Carlson’s “gutless” gossiping

A civil war within the Fox News ranks broke out on Thursday evening, with host Sean Hannity melting down on-camera over reports fellow primetime star Tucker Carlson has spent years dishing to other media outlets about internal goings-on at the network.

The drama started with a muckraking column from New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, outlining the ways Carlson has served as an important source for a wide variety of outlets that he’s spent years railing against publicly.

“Tucker Carlson Calls Journalists ‘Animals'” the article’s headline reads. “He’s Also Their Best Source.”

Hannity apparently didn’t take too kindly to the activity outlined in the report, and used his considerable bully pulpit to make his feelings known Thursday night by lashing out at everyone involved. The longtime Fox host set aside a good chunk of his show to repeatedly blast the New York Times, and Smith himself, over their alleged failings in reporting on the campaign and presidency of former President Donald Trump.

The longtime Fox staple also made a point to mention a follow-up report from the long-running pop culture newsletter “Pop B****,” which wrote that Tucker has been gossiping with reporters specifically about Hannity — with no love lost between the conservative cable network’s marquee stars.

“Turns out one of Tucker’s favourite topics to chuckle about with his MSM mates is how much of a cringing Trump sycophant Sean is,” the outlet wrote. “Have fun in the green room together, chaps!”

Smith retweeted a screenshot of the newsletter, adding an emoji of two eyes — something Hannity mentioned in detail during his rant.

“They’re now tweeting out, and using an account on Twitter that’s called — their words, not mine — at ‘Pop B****'” Hannity said, shrugging theatrically. “You can’t make this Adam Schiff up.”

Hannity never actually mentioned Carlson by name, but it quickly became apparent who he was talking about.

“Now the big news is that some people at Fox apparently don’t like me, and said bad things about me gutlessly behind my back, according to Ben Smith.”

He went on to call the behind-the-scenes rift at Fox “a normal day in the world I live in,” and further refused to apologize for, well, anything at all.

Watch the video below via Twitter:

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad. pic.twitter.com/Bqi41oP2PD

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 25, 2021

Matt Gaetz deletes tweet about defunding FBI amid ongoing agency sex trafficking probe

Embattled Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., sent out a tweet Wednesday calling for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be defunded — despite the fact that he is currently being probed by the agency over sex trafficking allegations.

He almost immediately deleted the tweet, which was captured by Propublica’s “Politwoops,” a website dedicated to capturing the deleted tweets of politicians.

“If Democrats want to defund the police, they should start with the FBI,” Gaetz wrote.

A spokesman for the staunch Trump ally later would tell Vice News that Gaetz “felt it appropriate to remove a jocular tweet taken from a speech some time ago.”

The statement comes as the lawmaker remains under investigation by the FBI over allegations he paid to have sex with a 17-year-old-girl.

The months-long probe reportedly hinges on the testimony of Gaetz associate and fellow Florida politico Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty to felony charges of sex trafficking a minor in a separate federal case.

Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing and maintained that he and his family are the victims of an extortion plot stemming from the allegations.

“On March 16, my father got a text message demanding a meeting wherein a person demanded $25 million in exchange for making horrible sex trafficking allegations against me go away,” Gaetz told Fox News host Tucker Carlson when the news of the scandal first broke. “Our family was so troubled by that; we went to the local FBI. The FBI and the Department of Justice were so concerned about this attempted extortion of a member of Congress that they asked my dad to wear a wire, which he did, with the former Department of Justice official.”

Miami Herald blasts Florida GOP over McCarthy-esque college politics survey

On June 22, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a Republican-sponsored bill that calls for standards of “intellectual diversity” to be enforced on college campuses in the Sunshine State. But the Miami Herald’s editorial board, in a scathing editorial published on June 24, emphasizes that the law isn’t about promoting free thought at colleges and universities but rather, is an effort to bully and intimidate political viewpoints that DeSantis and his Republican allies in the Florida Legislature disagree with.

“The state government wants to know what political ideologies and beliefs university professors hold, and it’s giving the green light for students to secretly record lessons to later use what instructors say against them,” the Herald’s editorial board explains. “All of that is being done in the name of free speech. Such twisted logic and targeting academia have been hallmarks of anti-democratic regimes. Now, they have also become the MO of Florida Republicans who passed a bill that requires public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff, to ensure ‘intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity’ on campuses.”

The Herald’s editorial board notes the type of arguments that Florida Republicans have used in favor of the new law. According to the law’s supporters, college campuses in Florida have become “socialism factories” designed for “indoctrination” of students.

The Herald’s editorial board writes, “Don’t worry, bill sponsors say, these surveys won’t be used against college professors or to threaten their employment, even though there’s nothing in House Bill 233 that guarantees that, or that survey responses will remain anonymous. University budget cuts might be looming if our supreme leaders — er — lawmakers don’t like what the survey results show, bill sponsor Sen. Ray Rodrigues and DeSantis suggested Tuesday.”

According to the Herald’s editorial board, the HB 233 is designed to do the exact opposite of promoting “intellectual diversity” on college campuses.

“College professors have got to be seeing the writing on the wall,” the Herald’s editorial board writes. “We wouldn’t be surprised if they fudged their survey responses out of fear of retaliation or that their institution will lose funding for being deemed too liberal. That’s especially true for professors teaching liberal-arts degrees that conservatives consider a waste of time and were trying to make ineligible for full Bright Futures scholarship funding. Luckily, that proposal failed during this year’s legislative session after student backlash.”

History repeats itself, and the Herald’s editorial board recalls that during the 1950s, college professors were a favorite target of far-right Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his Cold War witch hunt.

“University professors were a target of the post-war Red Scare,” the Herald’s editorial board notes. “In 1949, the National Council for American Education published a booklet called ‘Red-Ucators at Harvard,’ listing professors deemed subversive. In 1954, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee sought to flush out communists among educators and questioned professors accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Intellectual diversity should be something every university strives for, but we know the results of government officials policing educators: paranoia, persecution and the opposite of the free speech Republicans say they want to protect.”

“Interview With the Vampire” finds new life on your television

Vampire television is coming back to life. While FX’s hilarious “What We Do in the Shadows” is still representing for the undead on the small screen, there hasn’t been much in the way of dramas lately. Enter the gothic charms of “Interview With the Vampire” . . . again.

On Monday, AMC announced that a series adaptation of the famed Anne Rice novel – which once was adapted into a cult-favorite movie in the ’90s – will debut on AMC and AMC+ in 2022. The new eight-episode series will be the first title adapted from AMC’s acquisition deal last year that includes 18 Rice titles encompassing the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches novels.

Rolin Jones (“Friday Night Lights,” “Perry Mason”) comes on as the series creator, showrunner and executive producer, while Rice herself and son Christopher remain on as the non-writing executive producers of the show.

“In 1973, a grieving mother and extraordinary writer began what would become the finest vampire novel ever written (all respects to Mr. Stoker),” said Jones in a statement. “Nearly 50 years later we know what’s expected of us. We know how much this book and the ones that follow mean to their massive fan base. We feel you over our shoulders as we tend the Savage Garden. Louis and Lestat are coming out of hiding and we can’t wait to reunite them with you.”

The 1994 film adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire” stars Brad Pitt as Louis, a man who claims to have been a grieving plantation owner before becoming a vampire, turned by the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise in a blond wig). Theirs is a rocky relationship as they disagree on whether they must kill humans to feed or not, and it comes to head over the transformation of a 10-year-old girl Claudia (Kirsten Dunst in a breakout role) into one of the undead.

Since the release of the popular yet controversial film, (which even prompted Oprah to walk out of a screening due to the film’s gory yet sensual themes), the gothic and alluring world of vampires inspired by Rice’s words have spawned a whole genre of bloodsucking media. With Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as the ’90s blueprint for smoldering male vampires, what followed were more projects that combined vampire love triangles: “True Blood” on HBO, the “Twilight” movies, “The Vampire Diaries” on the CW, among others. It should be noted that all are adaptations of popular book series written by women.

Written from Lestat’s point of view, Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have transformed the modern legacy of vampires and other supernatural beings from creatures of myth, to beings with humanity, magic and capable of intimacy in the human world.

Britney Spears’ conservatorship saga highlights the dark side of IUDs

Of the many bombshells encapsulated in Britney Spears’s Thursday statement protesting her conservatorship, there was one in particular that evoked a collective horror. “I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” she told the Los Angeles Superior Court. “I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby, I have a [IUD] inside of myself right now so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the [IUD] out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children – any more children.”

This is how reproductive coercion works in our world. It’s about forcing women to become mothers when they are not physically, financially, or emotionally prepared to do so. And it’s about obstructing their ability to become mothers when it is not socially or economically advantageous to their oppressors and abusers. In May, the Guttmacher Institute published a report on the ways in which long-acting reversible contraceptives have been exploited, issuing a call “to avoid creating programs that contribute to racist, ableist and coercive contraceptive policies and discourse—or that broadly target marginalized groups rather than prioritize individual needs.”

Reading Spears’s chilling comments this week, I was thinking of these issues, and was reminded of a conversation last winter with author Elizabeth Catte, whose book “Pure America” traced the history of the state of Virginia’s eugenics program. “People who want to control women have taken tremendous advantage of their anatomy,” she said then. “Out of the gate, people assume that women are less rational actors, that they’re more prone to fluctuations of their moods, that things like menstruation and childbirth affect women negatively to such a degree that they can’t be in control of their own bodies.” And when it comes to a useful female worker, whether it’s a housemaid or a pop superstar doing a Vegas residency, it’s obvious who gains when, as Catte put it, there’s “no pregnancy to interrupt your productivity.”

Spears’s accusation feels poignantly harrowing right now, coming in the midst of a long overdue public conversation about the hard realities of the intrauterine device experience. For many women, an IUD can be an emancipating, stress-free form of birth control, a worthwhile tradeoff for an uncomfortable trip to the gynecologist to have it inserted. For others, it can be an agonizing ordeal. But whatever the circumstances, whether it’s an embryo or an IUD, the notion of any woman having to carry anything inside her body against her will is a nightmare. “Your reproductive health is your own — and no one should make decisions about it for you,” Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson tweeted on Wednesday.

The intrauterine device, or IUD, has a checkered history. In the early 20th century, Dr. Richard Richter pioneered the concept of a device that could be implanted in the uterus to ward off sperm. Over time, IUDs were tweaked and refined, notably with the introduction of copper, which acts as a spermicide. Along with the rise of the pill in the sixties, the IUD’s popularity also grew. It’s easy to see why: they are highly effective, easily reversible and long-acting. An IUD can also, however, cause serious complications, evidenced most notoriously by the Dalkon Shield.

Introduced in the early seventies, the shield looked like a crab and was marketed as a safer birth control at a moment when oral contraceptives had higher doses of estrogen — and more side effects. The shield, however, turned out to be far more of a health hazard. As Rainey Horwitz explains in the Embryo Project, its string “drew vaginal bacteria into the uterus, resulting in septic infection, miscarriage, and an array of other related complications, including death…. the Dalkon Shield was correlated to an increased rate of pregnancy-associated complications, including septic pregnancies, or a bacterial infection of the placenta and fetus. Those complications were serious enough that they usually led to hospitalization.” Writing in the New York Times in 1987, Gina Kolata reported “as many as 200,000 American women have testified that they were injured by the device.” And that’s just the ones who spoke up.

The modern IUD, fortunately, bears little resemblance to its recklessly barbaric ancestor. Now, popular brands like Mirena and Skyla release the progestin hormone to prevent pregnancy, which can also ease period pain and flow. Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates 14% of American women who use contraception rely on IUDs.

I have had my own chaotic relationship with the IUD. Because of other health issues, I had to have my Mirena inserted and removed, inserted and removed, repeatedly over the course of several years. In my life, I’ve had only a small handful of pain experiences I would describe as “out of body,” the kind that made me think, “I know what Anna whispered in ‘Martyrs.'” Certain migraines. A baby’s head crowning. And the mind-shaking feeling of someone reaching inside of you and performing an action that feels like having your reproductive organs pinched really, really hard. Planned Parenthood describes the process of IUD removal as “A health care provider gently pulls on the string, and the IUD’s arms fold up and it slips out,” and for some people, that snug scenario is surely true. For me, I feel like that sentence could end with, “and then you are tenderly scraped from the ceiling.”

Mileage varies wildly. In a 2016 roundup in Self, 17 women described their own IUD experiences; they ranged from “It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would!” to “My whole abdomen was seized up in excruciating pain.” One consistency is that women are rarely honestly apprised of what getting an IUD may be like, nor are they adequately offered pain relief.

In a stunning feature this week for The Times, Caitlin Moran published a story headlined “Why we all need pain relief when getting an IUD fitted.” As the author posed, “Why is it presumed that women will be fine with having their cervix artificially dilated with a pair of metal barbecue tongs before having what is basically the wire coat hanger from a doll’s house inserted into their uterus?” Soon after, BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty opened up about her own experience, telling radio listeners, “I won’t go into all the details, but my screams were so loud that my husband tried to find out what room I was in to make it stop.” And though she said she fainted twice, “At no point was it suggested that I could have any anesthetic or sedation… I felt violated, weak and angry.”

On Wednesday, Telegraph writer Lucy Cohen added her voice to the chorus, recalling that when she went for her IUD, “I have never felt pain like it. Nothing can describe that profound agony as the ‘sound’ (a medical instrument used to probe), hits your uterus. Or the invasive and violating feeling of having your cervix clamped.”

Cohen soon realized that her friends had similar tales, so she felt inspired to conduct a survey that eventually attracted 1,300 women. The results were sobering. A full 93% said they’d experienced pain in their IUD fitting — with 43% rating it as “extremely painful, almost unbearable, or excruciating.” But what really leaps out here is Cohen’s observation that “More than half (53%) said they were not advised to take any pain relief at all. Their stories were unbelievably depressing: stories of medical professionals dismissing women’s pain and making them feel they were being excessively dramatic about it.”

The word “violation” leaps out in these accounts. Even in a healthcare procedure freely chosen, one that benefits the woman, the ways in which the process unfolds can be deeply upsetting, insensitive and invasive. Now imagine that added indignity of having no agency in the narrative.

Spears’ situation is sadly not unique — in 2016, Illinois woman Melanie Jones sued a local Catholic hospital, claiming doctors refused to remove her IUD after it had become dislodged and was causing pain and bleeding. And in a 2019 Huffington Post story, several Canadian women shared their stories of doctors refusing to remove their devices, even as they complained of pain. “I had to change gynecologists twice just to get it removed,” said one.

As the National Women’s Health Network writes, “Any attempt to force a woman into using an IUD, or to prevent her from removing it, is an injustice and a violation of your rights.” Britney Spears now says she is enduring just such an injustice and violation. And as she makes her demands for autonomy, she’s highlighting the tyranny of limiting our reproductive choices, and the horror of of a woman being made to carry her shackles inside of her self.

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OAN host suggests mass “execution” of those who oppose Trump’s voter fraud claims

A host on the right-wing cable network One America News Network (OANN) called for the mass execution of former President Donald Trump’s opponents, saying the extreme punishment should be used on anyone who sought to “carry out a coup” against Trump while pushing baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

OAN host Pearson Sharp began the Wednesday monologue by claiming, “radical Democrats left fingerprints all over the country” of supposed vote tampering, which he repeatedly called a coup attempt. Pearson’s fever dream continued with an outline of the way he wanted to discipline those who believe President Joe Biden won the election — with a veritable genocide.

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

“What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?” the OAN host stated. “Well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution.”

“Treason is considered the highest of all crimes and is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution,” Sharp added, “which states that anyone is guilty of treason if they support America’s enemies.”

The segment was quickly noticed by QAnon conspiracy theorists and praised by the group’s cult-like following.

One viewer even posted a video of himself on TikTok excitedly shouting, “They get hung!” during the unhinged monologue.

Julian Feeld, a researcher who studies the far-right and co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, said the monologue was a perfect example of OAN’s continued appeals to the “bloodthirsty fantasies” QAnon believers want to see.

“One America News is playing on people’s desire for justice and political representation, but has no interest in helping its audience achieve that,” Feeld told Salon. “Instead, they rely on a series of falsities and inversions to gin up outrage, then propose the same bloodthirsty fantasies we’re used to seeing from QAnon conspiracy theorists.”

“This is a growing reality: a portion of the American population yearns to see the boot of the military or the police come down on their perceived enemies and right-wing media pundits seem more than happy to draw up a list of who those enemies are,” he added.

The clip was first spotted by eagle-eyed Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer, who discovered the segment after seeing it circulate among QAnon believers.

“There’s a real fascist vibe to this One America News personality calmly calling for the execution of potentially tens of thousands of Americans over fake voter fraud claims,” Sommer tweeted.

“I came across the clip because QAnon people are seeing it as proof that the mass executions are right around the corner. Lots of glee in the Q chat rooms, demands for how exactly their imagined executions will be carried out, and complaints they had to wait too long,” he added.

OAN has become ever more fringe in the post-Trump era, delving repeatedly into baseless conspiracies, including theories that appease QAnon adherents who believe leading Democratic politicians and celebrities are running a secret child sex trafficking ring.

Sharp did explain his comments to Talking Points Memo, saying that he wasn’t seeking to “embrace” executing Americans — simply pointing out that the punishment is theoretically possible under current law — while at the very same time doubling down on his initial remarks:

“No, neither myself, nor OAN is ’embracing executing thousands of people,'” Sharp replied. “OAN is simply pointing out that if election fraud is proven, then it could very well constitute treason. And according to our laws, treason is punishable by death. If it is found that government officials coordinated with foreign countries to overthrow the election, then that would be the very definition of treason. Which, according to our nation’s laws, could result in execution.”

He then helpfully directed TPM to the federal law defining treason and its punishment, death.

“These are simply facts,” he said. “You may disagree with the suggestion that election fraud was committed. However, it is indisputable that the US has laws which lay out consequences for committing certain crimes, including treason. This report is only making that point clear.”

OAN didn’t immediately return a Salon request for comment.

You can watch the full OAN clip, via YouTube.

Parkland parents trick former NRA president into speaking in anti-gun violence video

On June 4, David Keene, a former NRA President and current board member of the infamous gun group, gave a rehearsal speech for the commencement address to James Madison Academy’s 2021 graduating class. There was only one hitch: There is no such school.

As he addressed 3,044 empty chairs in a Las Vegas stadium, Keene urged the graduating class to fight those seeking to introduce gun safety measures.

“Picture for a minute the young James Madison, for whom this school is named,” Keene began. “This year, you focused on one of the most important of Madison’s Amendments—the Second Amendment. There are some who continue to fight to gut the Second Amendment, but I’d be willing to bet that many of you will be among those who stand up and prevent those from proceeding.”

Those empty seats, however, were actually meant to represent the thousands of young Americans who did not graduate this year after losing their lives to gun violence. Named the “The Lost Class” of students, three videos were posted on Wednesday that presented the fake rehearsal of a high school graduation. Sweeping drone shots of the stadium contrasted harrowing audio from 911 calls that echo the terrified voices of students trapped in schools during recent mass shootings. Each video concludes and asks viewers to sign The Lost Class’ petition for universal background checks at www.thelostclass.com.

Change the Ref, the organization behind the stunt, was founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin was murdered in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. The gun safety group also invited gun rights activist and author of “More Guns, Less Crime” John Lott to speak at the ceremony.

Like Keene’s pro-gun speech, Lott cited James Madison and refered to his time working in the Justice Department during the Trump era, saying, “gun control advocates and Democrats will fight you tooth and nail.”

The speakers believed they were at a rehearsal and were told after the filming that the ceremony was canceled, according to a report by BuzzFeed News. In a statement to NBC News, Lott said his remarks in the video were taken “out of context” and called the clips “deceptive and selectively edited.” He also requested that Change the Ref release his full speech.

Seeking to raise awareness about mass shootings, The Lost Class’ website states, “Although the futures of those in The Lost Class may have been taken away, they can still make a difference in the future of America by urging the government to require universal background checks on gun sales.”

Britney Spears testifies on “abusive” conservatorship, firing up the #FreeBritney movement again

Two years after pop star Britney Spears‘ last court appearance, she finally broke her silence in a devastating testimony on her ongoing court-ordered conservatorship before the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, according to CNN. Spears is currently suing to end the conservatorship, which has been in place since 2008 and has given her father, Jamie Spears, almost full control over Spears’ life, career, medical decisions, and fortune.

Conservatorships have traditionally been put in place to protect mentally infirm people who aren’t able to advocate for themselves. But many advocates – and a recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears” – have long questioned the ethics of Spears’ conservatorship, which has required her to work intensely and with little autonomy for years.

While the numerous, horrifying allegations made by Spears throughout her testimony shocked many, superfans of the artist have long been at the forefront of the #FreeBritney movement, and showed up in big numbers to support Spears in downtown Los Angeles.

Megan Radford, one of the founders of #FreeBritney, told BBC, “Everything she [Spears] said was absolutely heartbreaking and it was actually even worse than I really thought it was.”

FreeBritney.net first launched in 2009, shortly after the beginning of the conservatorship. On Wednesday, protesters near the court held signs that read, “Conservatorship = Slavery” and “Free Britney Now,” while some particularly dedicated fans even shaved their heads in solidarity with Spears, who famously shaved her head at a particularly difficult time in her life, in 2007.

According to Variety, Spears’ testimony contained numerous bombshell allegations, including that, according to Spears, she had been forced to perform and go on tour against her will, and had also been forced to take powerful lithium medication when she wouldn’t. Spears also recounted being forced into a rehabilitation program that she says required her to work “seven days a week, no days off.” Spears added that “in California, the only similar thing to this is called sex trafficking.”

While at the rehab program, Spears says she was given no privacy, and not even given a door for her room. “They watched me change every day — naked – morning, noon and night,” she said. “My body – I had no privacy door for my room. I gave eight vials of blood a week.”

One of the most alarming revelations from Spears’ testimony was her claim that despite how she wants another child, her conservatorship isn’t allowing her to remove her IUD, which prevents her from getting pregnant.

“I was told right now in the conservatorship, I’m not able to get married or have a baby,” Spears said. “I have an IUD inside of myself right now so I don’t get pregnant. I wanted to take the IUD out so I could start trying to have another baby. But this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have . . . any more children.”

According to Spears, despite how her social media and other media appearances have presented a facade that she’s “OK and happy,” this image is “a lie.”

“I’ve been in denial,” she said. “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized.. . . . But now I’m telling you the truth, OK? I’m not happy. I can’t sleep. I’m so angry it’s insane. And I’m depressed. I cry every day.”

Spears also cleared the air about her family situation, and her frustrations with the control her father has exercised over her life for the past 13 years. “I would honestly like to sue my family, to be totally honest with you,” she said. “I also would like to be able to share my story with the world, and what they did to me, instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.”

In particular, at one point in Spears’ testimony, she criticized her father for enjoying the power he held over her. “The control he had over someone as powerful as me — he loved the control to hurt his own daughter 100,000%,” she said. “He loved it.”

And while Spears petitioned earlier this year for Jodi Montgomery, an experienced conservator and professional care manager, to take over her conservatorship full-time after Montgomery temporarily filled the role in September 2019, on Wednesday, she said that “even Jodi is starting to kind of take it too far with me.

“They have me going to therapy twice a week and a psychiatrist. I’ve never in the past . . . had to see a therapist more than once a week,” Spears said. “It takes too much out of me going to this man I don’t know.”

In addition to #FreeBritney mega-fans who protested in Los Angeles Wednesday, other celebrities and activists, from Spears’ ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, to Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson, and even Piers Morgan, have expressed support for Spears to be free from the conservatorship.

“We stand in solidarity with Britney and all women who face reproductive coercion,” McGill Johnson said in a statement. “Your reproductive health is your own – and no one should make decisions about it for you. Every person should have the ability to make their own decisions about their bodies and exercise bodily autonomy.”

The next step in Spears’ legal battle for freedom from her conservatorship is an upcoming hearing on July 14.

“The Good Fight” is as gripping as ever as it tackles Jan. 6, race and ethics in 2021

Among the many pleasures “The Good Fight” offers is its relentless commitment to idealism, even in the darkest of circumstances.

That doesn’t mean Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) and the rest of the lawyers at Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart always win. Showrunners and co-creators Robert and Michelle King know that the bulk of the legal system involves settlements and compromises, with the best resourced team receiving the greatest advantage.

The Trump era stretched that assessment of American justice beyond boundaries the most imaginative absurdist could have cooked up, providing terrific material for the Kings amidst terrible circumstances for our democracy. But the direst consequences of Donald Trump’s ineffectual stewardship of the country affect us even now.

One of them forced the show’s fourth season to run shorter, with seven episodes instead of 10, ending on a bizarre if satisfying goose chase involving Jeffrey Epstein.

It was a fine finale, although one that left a few important changes unresolved – namely the departures of Delroy Lindo, who plays name partner Adrian Boseman, and Cush Jumbo, whose Lucca Quinn transitioned to the show from “The Good Wife.”

Lindo left to headline the pilot for ABC’s “Harlem’s Kitchen” while Jumbo says she wanted to move back to the United Kingdom; she stars in the upcoming AMC drama “The Beast Must Die.” However, both wrap up their arcs in the fifth season premiere “Previously On,” a hopscotch through 2020 that lands the characters at game-changing points in a year where the decks were stacked against righteousness and reason.

The Kings, who write the episode, leave Adrian and Lucca with fresh possibilities containing little but upside, which is both a relief and entirely predictable for a series that tends to cap the most awful and terrifying of circumstances with some brightness. It’s also fitting, since the last time we saw them Adrian had aspirations to rise within the national Democratic party while Lucca cozied up to one of the wealthiest Black women in the world.

As for where we meet Diane, Liz and the rest . . . well, you remember everything that happened in 2020, don’t you? Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart was already under pressure from its new owners, the multi-national legal firm STR Laurie, whose demand to cut 20% of its staff sparks a rift before the pandemic brings the world to a screeching halt. Michael Boatman’s Julius Cain was arrested on false charges, a result of refusing to play along with a powerful unseen cabal that appears to control everything by way of an inexplicable directive known as Memo 618.

The threat soon becomes a reality for players we know, but it pales in comparison to lethality of COVID, an adversary not even the white-collar class can escape, especially in Chicago. It continues from there. George Floyd’s murder, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an election that tested the coronary health of the stoutest Americans – the Kings put every character through the wringer, along with their relationships.

By the time “Previously On” drops us off in 2021 the writers establish that a new, allegedly saner administration doesn’t mean less material for “The Good Fight.” Case-of-the-week plots tackle such real-world puzzles as the legislation that has enabled social media to effectively destroy local news and fact-based journalism, and in the same way that the pandemic hits close to home, so does the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Last year adversely impacted the world in myriad ways, but if there’s an upside it’s that the lockdown provided “The Good Fight” a chance to hit the reset button. “Previously On” is designed to serve everyone who has been with the show since the start, of course, but to those coming in cold it’s a succinct summary of what happened before that nobly sends Adrian and Lucca on their way while moving confidently into the next chapter.

Beyond the premiere are fascinating pathways to a fraught new era that should be less stressful but isn’t, starting with Diane’s personal life. Until now passionate liberal Diane’s marriage to conservative loyalist Kurt McVeigh (Gary Cole) was written to resemble the amicable relationship we perceive that James Carville and Mary Matalin share as opposed to whatever is happening between Kellyanne and George Conway.

The rioters’ storming of the Capitol building tests their bond in alarming ways. Initially, though, that doesn’t weigh as heavily on Diane’s conscience as being a white woman heading up an African American law firm based in Chicago, a city with only of the largest Black populations in the country.

The Kings needed to address that head on at some point, even if Baranski’s starring in “The Good Fight” is what made the spinoff viable. (Next to Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick, and Archie Panjabi’s Kalinda Sharma, Diane was one of the most popular characters on “The Good Wife.”) Diane’s whiteness is a source of ireful conversations between associates and partners throughout this series and her previous. But with 2020’s protests against systemic racism reverberating throughout our culture, the writers wisely bump it to the front of the plot queue.

Questioning Diane’s vaunted status atop Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart’s is only where this season’s hard look at internal biases and inequities begins. Events of 2020 vastly change the paradigm and career trajectories of the firm’s investigators: Jay Dipersia (Nyambi Nyambi) is in the rare position of being simultaneously essential to the firm and subject the unequal social and class structure under STR Laurie.

Marissa Gold (Sarah Steele) holds a position of high privilege in the firm in several respects, but the pandemic inspires her to make a switch. And while “The Good Fight” never existed in a world that was not utterly insane, this new season invites tougher conversations about morals and ethics through the introduction of Carmen Moyo (Charmaine Bingwa) a new associate who is fresh out of law school and hungry to a point that impresses some very dangerous clients.

Various debates about ethics and morals in the realm of the law make “The Good Fight” one of TV’s most consistently gripping shows, but Carmen enigmatic presence raises new questions. If a lawyer’s job is to grant every client the best representation available regardless of what wrongs they may have committed, then is it reprehensible for good people to defend odious ones?

Also, what value does having principles have when the bottom line is what matters to the higher-ups? Answering that question at least is at the heart of a subplot involving Mandy Patinkin’s “Judge” Hal Wackner, a regular guy who responds to the justice’s system’s favoritism towards the wealthy by setting up his own court in the back of a copy store.

Likely owing to the unforeseen shortening of the fourth season, the as yet undefined Memo 618 mostly fades to the background. Its presence remains – this isn’t a show prone to leaving major threads to dangle in the breeze – but the writers correctly pivot the plot to speak to a world they couldn’t have predicted a year ago. Patinkin’s storyline, and Bingwa’s, are promising results of that switch, each of which contributes in its way to the consistent, wry humor woven throughout every episode. Along with the A-plots driving Diane and Liz, guest star turns from Bebe Neuwirth, Jane Curtin, Wallace Shawn, Wayne Brady, and occasional appearances by the version of Frederick Douglass who was Afro Sheen’s spokesperson, the spark and wit is as palpable as ever.

All is also in keeping with the Kings’ optimism, if not about the state of the American justice system, then certainly about the gladiators navigating it with the best of intentions. (Heck, the premiere’s credits sequence is, no kidding, adorable.) The 45th presidency may be over; nevertheless, “The Good Fight” is dealing with its hangover, same as the rest of us. But it also makes the lingering headaches bearable by reminding us that while the battle may not be won, it’s still invigorating and worthwhile to keep on swinging.

New episodes of “The Good Fight” stream Thursdays on Paramount +.

“There was a lot of envy at Black success”: Director Dawn Porter on new Tulsa Massacre documentary

We are always sold this vision of the American dream, which normally consists of a story about some immigrant who came to America with nothing but a dream of freedom and prosperity. And then how that said immigrant whipped those dreams while having a stomach full of nothing into a mega empire. I can’t lie those stories are always romantic and inspiring even though they are lies.

Not lies because these experiences did not happen, lies because that story is sold as universal and it is not. Black people did not come to this country with a dream –– they were kidnapped, stolen, beat, raped, separated from their families and had their free labor fuel the power needed to transform America into the superpower that many people enjoy today. People argue that things became “even” after slavery without acknowledging the years it takes a people to recover from the unpaid servitude and the trauma endured during capture. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter captures all of this in her new National Geographic film “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer.”

Porter, whose work has appeared on HBO, PBS, Discovery, Netflix, is currently directing a documentary series with Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry and has now released “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer,” a film that should be required watching. The film shows how in1921 the affluent black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was looted and burned by jealous white mobs –– leaving 35 blocks of houses and businesses destroyed, over 800 people injured, and an estimated 300 people dead. The remaining residents tried to file insurance claims but were denied because of the color of their skin. On a recent episode of “Salon Talks,” Porter and I discuss why we and too many others were never taught about this deadly era of American history in grade school or college.

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Dawn Porter here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on this film. I think it’s extremely necessary, timely, and should be required viewing for our citizens everywhere. So, tell us how this project came about?

National Geographic came to me last spring. They were working on a big feature for their magazine with reporter DeNeen Brown. National Geographic studios wanted to do a film and they asked if I would be interested and of course I was interested, but I was also working on two other things. So, I was like, “I’m really interested, but I can’t possibly do it.” And then the studio exec said, “Well, just meet DeNeen.” And then of course I fell in love with DeNeen, this Black female reporter at The Washington Post. I’m a former journalist. I’m just enamored of her process.

So, DeNeen was originally going to be a consultant to the project because she had done so much reporting and she’s from Oklahoma. As we started talking, I just thought, “What a beautiful way to make this contemporary, to not just be a historical story, but a reminder that this story is vitally important, not only for all Americans, but there are people whose relatives were killed, whose relatives were victimized, and they’re still here and they still need some manner of justice for them.” So, I asked DeNeen if she would be on camera and mercifully, she said, “Yes.”

Surprisingly, and strangely, but not that strange, a lot of our viewers and readers don’t know a lot about the Tulsa Race Massacre, along with the other massacres that you talk about in the film. So, can you just give like a brief history for context?

Yeah. There’s a reason why none of us know about this history. I wasn’t taught this history. I found out about Red Summer in the making of this film. So, I think that points to a really problematic gap in knowledge, and that’s why documentary is so important. So, this year is the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. It was originally called a riot, but that is such a misimpression. It was a targeted effort to kill Black people, to destroy the town of Greenwood, the area of Greenwood, which was known as “Black Wall Street.” It was a thriving Black community.

On May 30th, a young man named Dick Rowland went to use a restroom in a building with an elevator. There was a woman, a white woman in that elevator named Sarah Page. He may have tripped. They may have been seeing each other. No one really knows, but what emerged was a rumor that she had been “assaulted” in this elevator, in the five minute elevator trip. So, the police arrested Dick Rowland. They took him to the courthouse, pending “investigation” and a white mob starting to gather. Black people knew the story of when a white mob gathers with an allegation that a Black man has harassed a white woman or assaulted a white woman. That would be deadly. So, Black people took to the streets, Black men, to try and counter and stop him from being killed, stop him from being lynched.

There was another scuffle during that period. A gun went off. No one knows the origins of that gun, and that started one of the deadliest episodes in American history on American soil, not just against Black people, but on American soil. Ultimately 35 blocks, the entire Greenwood district was leveled, burned, looted by an angry white mob. But, in addition to that, the town was firebombed from the air. Men, women and children were killed, as flaming fire bombs came from planes up in the sky. So, that history, the aftermath of Tulsa, is fairly well-documented.

For a documentarian, this was very interesting and challenging, because there aren’t that many images of Tulsa before or after. We were just getting into the age of the moving image. So, this was really, a remarkable thing to have documented, largely by Black people and the Black press.

Just being in Tulsa or just being around survivors and victims, I wanted to know what does some of those millennial and Gen X voices sound like when they talk about this era? What is their language like?

I think that not enough people know about this, and I think we’re just starting to get that recognition. But I’ll tell you, I’m not a millennial, but my experience was, it was almost a relief, because rumors of massacres and killings, we’ve known about this in the Black community for decades. The warning, “Don’t go here, don’t go there, sundown towns, all of these things.” When you show people the proof that this happened, it stops the ability to gaslight. “That didn’t happen. Why are you all so sensitive? Why are you so afraid?” “We’re afraid because you fire bombed my community and destroyed all of our possessions. That is why I’m afraid. That is why I’m worried about police.”

The other thing though that emerges for me, that is also not part of our history, is the story of Black resistance, the story in Washington, D.C. There was a mob in front of the White House, that was resisted by Black people. Thurgood Marshall’s father noted that it was African American men returning from war who had fought bravely. They took their rifles and went down, and as one of our historians says, “The Black people won that day.” So, we were not just mowed down like sheep, but it was this constant, efforted resistance.

The other piece of it that to me was so mind-blowing is examining the reasons for these massacres. There was a lot of envy at Black success. That really was the motivating factor. Greenwood was a prosperous community, and by prosperous, not everybody was wealthy, but they were living a calm, peaceful, self-sustaining life. Just people living their lives, going to church, and prom, and going to be barbers, and hairstylists, and drugstore workers, just living peacefully. That was enough to cause envy.

It challenged the narrative that Black people were lazy or non-intelligent, or couldn’t help themselves. It challenged all those slavery stereotypes. So, it had to be destroyed. Understanding that we were targeted because we were successful, that’s a mind trip. Right? What a difference that makes to me, and to my kids, to say, “There was so much envy. It wasn’t just a random hatred of dark skin. It was envy at success. We are successful and that caused this targeting.” It doesn’t erase the pain, but I think the shifting of that narrative is important.

In this era where they’re trying to erase critical race theory, are the people in Tulsa getting this education? Are they constantly being reinforced, or is it kind of glossed over as well?

I think there’s a split, like much of America. Tulsans have told me they still are not learning this in school. The mayor of Tulsa says that in our film. He did not learn this and his relatives were alive. Once he started hearing about these race commissions, he went and asked his grandparents who confirmed that it had happened and he was shocked. So, I think in the Black communities, particularly in Tulsa and the other cities, not in schools, but at home you would hear stories, but that’s not the same as putting context around the breadth of the entire experience. That’s why I wanted to cover not just Tulsa, which is a very important story, but some of the massacres that occurred before, because Tulsa was one in a long line of similar types of episodes in America.

You’re from Baltimore. There was a massacre in Washington, D.C., where Black people were mowed down in front of the nation’s Capitol, where “Birth of a Nation” was shown in the White House, cementing the stereotype of the savage Black male lusting after white women. That was the narrative. Most Americans saw that story. That penetrates your psyche. That leads to the fear of the Black people, of Black men. That’s the image that was cemented. So, I don’t think we’re where we need to be, in terms of the education, but now with these films, with something called the Google, there’s no excuse for people not understanding it. You learned about this far earlier than most Americans. I did not know this history until I started making this project.

Once you know, the question is, what do you do with that understanding and how do we teach all children this?

What are some of the main points you want your viewers to walk away with?

I want people to understand that Tulsa was not this extraordinary event. It didn’t just happen in a vacuum. It was part of a systemic campaign against Black people living their lives. We saw that in more than 25 cities across America, in this concentrated period. It really was a reign of terror against Black people. Understanding that, there’s also a story of rebirth and rebuilding. I want us to focus on that too, that there’s Black ingenuity and creativity and resilience and resistance. Also, that is part of our story. So, I came away from this series, this film with a pride in knowing how people, under these incredible opposition, were able to make a good life. The story I tell my children is, “You come from a strong people.” The most severe opposition to your life has been thrown at Black people, and that’s why we called it “Rise,” because it is not just a story of terror, it is a story of resistance.

I really want people to watch this film, but I will say this, one character let me down, when he said he thinks that money is not the answer because the citizens of Tulsa shouldn’t have to pay something that happened a long time ago. That made me really upset because the taking away of somebody’s money and livelihood was the answer then, and we see the long-term effects of what’s happening now. My question to you is, what do you think the government’s responsibility is in all of this?

I think understanding what happened. And we can start with Tulsa because I think that’s an easy case. The residents of Tulsa, and we show this on screen, documented their material losses. This did not get into emotional pain, or the cost of rebuilding. They documented loss of furniture, jewelry, possessions, homes. They submitted them to insurance, like all good Americans do, insurance that they had been paying for. That is the reason why Tulsa Massacre was described as a riot, because then it would be an exclusion from insurance. So, no insurance repaid these people for their losses.

In addition to that, more than 6,000 Black people, all of the residents of Greenwood, were interned in an internment camp in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If the denial of the loss of your documented losses and the placing of American citizens in an internment camp guarded by the National Guard is not a reason for reparations, I don’t know what is.

Do you think they’ll do anything?

I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure. I don’t know the answer to that, but that’s kind of up to like you and me and everybody else. It’s really important to me that one of the reverends who’s leading the call for reparations in Tulsa, and he says, “I agree with reparations paid to Japanese citizens who were interned, to Holocaust survivors that Germany made to them. Why aren’t Black people entitled to the same full benefits of humanity, as other groups?” So, I think that’s a question that to me, there’s only one answer to.

I think your film is going to push us all in the right direction. It’s brilliant, and I want you to tell everybody where they can see it?

“Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” premieres on National Geographic, Friday, June 18th, and then it is available on Hulu. So, there’s no reason for any of you all not to see it.