How the early internet created a place for trans youth to find one another and explore coming out

Follow coverage of trans issues, and you’ll hear some people say that teens who change their gender identity are participating in a fad, and that social media is the culprit.

As one proponent of legislation that would restrict access to care for trans teens claimed, social media platforms are where trans youths are falsely “convinced” that their feelings of identifying as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth – known as gender dysphoria – are valid.

These fears of Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok as breeding grounds for instilling gender dysphoria in young people recall other moral panics over new media, from the Victorian-era paranoia that serialized stories called “penny dreadfuls” were going to incite a youth crime wave to 20th-century anxiety over children’s exposure to violence on television.

Moreover, it ignores the long-documented history of trans youth in North America, while assuming that trans youth using media to find social support and build community is somehow a new phenomenon.

As I’ve found in my research on early digital trans communities, trans youths have been online since the late 1980s. They weren’t seeking out information and community because their friends were all doing it. They were doing it of their own accord.

Trans adults hesitant to engage

For a long time, adults within trans community organizations largely avoided contact with legal minors. Even though many had recognized their own cross-gender feelings from a young age, they feared backlash from parents or law enforcement if they interacted with youths who sought them out.

In 1996, physician Sheila Kirk, medical adviser to the International Foundation for Gender Education – at the time the largest transgender advocacy organization – said that the organization often had to cut off contact with teens who reached out to them, since the majority of them didn’t have parental consent to communicate with the organization.

In a 1996 column, transgender publisher Kymberleigh Richards wrote that adult members of regional trans support groups feared angry parents might charge them with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Even Richards, who’d done informal phone counseling with trans youths, felt uncomfortable regularly talking with teens without a referring doctor or nurse on the line.

Yet Richards was hopeful that the internet could be a safe space for these youths. Because many of these spaces were anonymous, trans youth could find support and resources by interacting with adults.

Dialing in and making connections

Some of the first recorded examples of trans youth exploring trans communities online date back to 1988.

Unlike today’s always-on internet, the online landscape of the late 1980s and early 1990s varied widely. Some folks connected with others on bulletin board systems, or BBSes, which were independent computer servers often run out of the system operator’s home.

Instead of an IP or web address, users would dial in to a specific phone number using their modem. The cost of extended long-distance calls mostly limited users to those living within the bulletin board system’s area code. In many ways, these networks were some of the earliest forms of social media.

Others used national subscription services like America Online, CompuServe Information Service, Prodigy or GEnie. Most importantly, whether you used a bulletin board system or a subscription service, you received your own email address.

On CompuServe’s trans-specific Genderline forum, chatrooms or CDForum, an early trans email list, trans youths were able to ask questions and learn how to safely explore their cross-gender feelings, find supportive therapists and grow their networks.

For example, 17-year-old Susie, a first-generation Chinese immigrant living in Canada, was a regular poster to CDForum throughout 1992. In her archived emails, available through Queer Digital History Project, she asked members for advice on managing her depression and kept them updated on major changes in her life.

Yet most of the members Susie and other trans youth communicated with were trans adults. Once the World Wide Web – and the homepage, in particular – took off, spaces by and for trans youth became far more common.

Becoming visible

Though websites like GeoCities are now something of an internet joke, they were an important place where trans youths could come out and publicly identify as trans.

During the mid-to-late 1990s, ad-supported web hosting services allowed users to create their own websites, or homepages, that featured a variety of personalized content, from hobbies and fandoms to photo collections and journals.

The Transgendered Teens Web Directory was a hub for trans youths to connect with one another. Internet Archive

Compared with text-heavy Bulletin Board Systems or email lists, homepages were vibrant: Most homepage creators decorated their spaces as you might your bedroom, using an array of colors, typefaces, embedded music files and animated GIFs.

The Transgendered Teens Web Directory, created in 1998 and last archived in 2002, included links, homepages and email addresses for youths from 32 different states. These homepages contained a variety of information, from advice on coming out and navigating being out in high school, to pursuing medical transition as a teen.

For example, the web diary of Transgendered Teens Web Directory founder Sarah, which has entries from 1997 to 2001, repeatedly references her email chats with other trans youths, who support her while she navigates her shifting identity, coming out to her parents, and making friends.

The TransBoy Resource Network offered information and support for questioning kids. Internet Archive

Trans youths also created resources that focused on what they thought other youths needed. On the TransBoy Resource Network’s “About” page, the creator describes being inspired by their own experience with “the potential the internet has for bringing trans people together and for the dissemination of information.”

Most importantly, for trans youths who couldn’t be themselves in real life, the homepage was a space for self-expression. On their pages, they could use gendered colors and graphics without fear of outing themselves, or post photos wearing the clothes they felt comfortable in without facing physical harassment. For trans creators who had supportive parents, their homepage could even become a place to share their transition progress, posting photos at each new personal milestone.

Much like today’s social media profiles, the homepage became a digital version of one’s ideal self. Over time, the growing number of pages meant that trans youths surfing the web were, as teenager Dylan Jared wrote on his own page, always able to “run across people like themselves.”

Trans teens grow their ranks

Through these online spaces, what had once seemed rare – publicly identifying as trans before becoming an adult – was rapidly becoming a common experience for a large part of the trans community.

As trans youths became more visible, organizations felt empowered to actively advocate on their behalf. Issues facing trans youth were a central theme of IFGE’s 2004 annual conference, though some attendees still worried about the “ethical issues” of having youths give presentations.

Throughout the 2000s, the number of people in North America coming out as trans earlier in life grew exponentially. Now, some trans-affirming clinics struggle to see all their prospective patients.

This shift wouldn’t have been possible without the reach of the internet, which showed that trans youth have always been here. Online communities gave them a place – and a space – to be themselves, without fear of being ostracized, undermined or harassed.

And it’s having the support of their peers, not a passing social media fad, that’s giving them the courage to come out, then and now.

Avery Dame-Griff, Visiting Assistant Professor, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, Appalachian State University

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

Could a human actually be engulfed by a whale? A marine biologist weighs in

Last week, headlines about a humpback whale briefly “swallowing” a lobster diver in Cape Cod splashed across news outlets. “Diver describes being nearly swallowed by a humpback whale,” CNN reported of the modern-day Jonah. “MA lobster diver survives being swallowed by whale,” The Daily Beast stated.

For the record, the diver wasn’t swallowed; indeed, it is inaccurate to say that because he was allegedly engulfed in the humpback whale’s mouth, and did not go down the whale’s esophagus. According to the Cape Cod Times, Michael Packard was on his second dive of the day just before 8 AM, about 10 feet above the sandy ocean floor, when he was engulfed by a humpback whale.

“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard said. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”

At first, he thought he was getting attacked by a great white shark, but said he quickly realized it was a whale because he couldn’t feel any teeth and hadn’t suffered from any immediate injuries. On the Jimmy Kimmel Show, Packard said he was “struggling and banging and kicking,” as he thought he was going to die. He estimated in a Reddit thread that he was in the whale’s mouth for 30 to 40 seconds, and that he was released when the whale surfaced.

Since the story has been published, many skeptics have voiced their opinions on whether or not the account is true. According to The New York Post, the lack of barotrauma from ascending from 45 to 35 feet deep to the surface in such a short amount of time would likely cause more serious injuries. Yet, as a lobster diver, Packard is presumably an experienced diver, and perhaps knew how to adjust his body to avoid compression or decompression injuries.

Regardless, this latest tale of a man getting caught in a whale’s mouth touches on an ongoing narrative in human history that intersects with the mysteriousness of whales, and perhaps our subconscious fear of their size. Humpback whales usually range from 39 to 52 feet in length and weigh around 36 metric tons — which equates to around 79,000 pounds. That’s about the same weight as a fully loaded big rig semi truck. And while Packard’s situation is very rare, it is not the first time there has been a report of such an incident.

In the late nineteenth century a man reported being trapped in a whale’s mouth, although the accuracy of his story has been debated as well. Most famously, there’s the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, in which the prophet Jonah allegedly spent three days and three nights in a whale’s stomach. More recently, in California in November 2020, kayakers got in the way of a whale feeding by the surface — an incident that was documented on video.

But clearly, the most important question is one of plausibility. Does Packard’s story add up? And if Packard, as he claims, did get engulfed in a whale’s mouth, what would that be like?

To help answer these questions, I interviewed comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg, Ph.D., who is a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; her research focuses on whales. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So, what would it be like inside a humpback whale’s mouth? Especially 45 feet below the surface?

It’s about the size of a small Volkswagen Bug. Think about the size of a Beetle car, in terms of the volume — and that’s when it’s fully expanded. Getting into a whale’s mouth is kind of like getting into a small car. It’s got about that much room, but you take out all the chairs in the car, and, of course, the walls are going to be very different depending which part you reach out and touch.

Once you’re inside a space like that, the throat and tongue area is extremely stretchy. So I would imagine it’s a lot like jumping on a bouncy castle, one of those air castles, that kids play on. The sides will be very hard because there’s the jaw itself which will have closed around you at that point. So that’s bone, that will be hard, and the upper jaw is also made of bone, and it has the baleen plates hanging down from it on either side.

So, imagine a Polynesian hut with the thatched roof that has the palm fronds on it. It’s kind of like having that kind of material all around you on either side. It’s very hairy, very brushy, a bit pointy — maybe a little bit more like hairs than like palm fronds — but just imagine that there’s a lot of this hairy stuff hanging down on either this side, very stiff bristles of hair are baleen plates which are used for filter feeding. So they have a brushy surface on the inside, but the plates themselves look like giant fingernails, and they’re made of the same kind of material as your own fingernails. So while they’re hairy on the tongue side, on the outside, they are very stiff almost like the edges of your fingernails are.

What is it like to touch the baleen plates?

If you push against them, they might feel like wire mesh, but it has a little bit of give to it. You couldn’t swim between the plates because you could barely get your pinky finger in between each plate — that’s how close together they are, and that particular pattern allows for water to be pushed out between the plates. The hairs trap the food that they’re eating, like a sieve. You wouldn’t be able to swim out through those plates, you’d have to wait for the whale to open its mouth to get back out again.

And I imagine it’s pretty dark in there too?

Absolutely. Well, you know, it’s pretty dark anyway if you’re diving near the bottom of the sea floor which is where this guy was — I’m not sure how deep he was. But when you’re inside the whale’s mouth it would just be dark because there’s no light in there. And so that’s why I’ve only described that you’d feel as opposed to what you would see. You might not even see this whale coming. I’m sure trying to eat him wasn’t intentional — which is why he was released — but if you are a fish, you would be fooled by the camouflage of the whale’s mouth because it is perfectly adapted for the way that whales feed. The inside throat area is actually black where the tongue is. So it’s just like darkness coming toward you.

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It doesn’t really look like anything that you would recognize. Looking down from the surface of the ocean it’s pretty dark. And if you look up, it’s pretty light. So the baleen plates are lighter colored, they look a little bit more like sky, whereas the tongue looks more like the darkness you’d see if you look down in the water.

So what would it be like in a whale’s mouth for 30 to 40 seconds?

Well, it’s a long time if you think about it. Most people can’t even hold their breath for that long. The problem is twofold: one is that you become very disoriented right away because you’re now being swept up inside this animal’s mouth. If you’re trying to force your way out, you don’t even know which way is out because everything’s dark. But at least you know you won’t be swallowed.

Right… because that’s impossible?

Yes, it is impossible for a whale to actually swallow him. I want to draw that distinction. I know people are thinking of [Packard] as some modern day Jonah, but if you believe the story of Jonah, literally, Jonah was swallowed by technically a big fish. In those days, they didn’t have the taxonomy we have today.

So whales were considered fish, but we don’t know if they really meant giant fish or meant a giant whale.

Anyway, a whale’s throat is actually pretty small. I’ve dissected a lot of whales, and I’ve tried to put my arm down the throat of a dead whale, and I can barely get my arm down that throat. So it’d be really hard for my whole body to go down that throat. It’s too small of an opening, and that’s because these animals are not swallowing large prey — they’re swallowing lots of little tiny things. Feeding is kind of like drinking a thick milkshake for them. They squeeze out the water and then they have this slurry of little tiny fish or tiny shrimp-like animals that they swallow, and that slurry can go down a very small throat. They don’t want to drink the seawater — the kidneys have to work extra hard to get rid of all that extra salt. So they exclude the water by pushing it out through the baleen plates, and essentially licki off the baleen plates to get the snack that they want to eat, and just swallow the slurry of little tiny fish.

So if a whale has got a diver in their mouth, it would be like if you eat cherries and there’s a pit — you feel it with your tongue you know it’s there, you’re thinking, “I have to spit that out!”

Do you know if the whale could have tasted the diver?

That’s a really good question and nobody knows for sure because no one can really ask a whale: “Does it taste good?” But I will say anatomically there are taste buds in whales. It’s been studied more in those small-toothed whales (like dolphins). It’s not really clear on the big whales. But there are anatomical structures that are taste buds, but they’re just not as prevalent as the ones we have and it’s not clear what they can sense. Whales could be sensing salinity, or the mucus that sits on the outside of a fish’s body, to know that it’s fish and not a rock or whatever they might be scooping up, especially for feeding at the bottom, which is what this whale was doing.

So what would the journey to the surface be like?

Well, the whale would probably be trying to squeeze out the water at that point so it could then swallow its prey. At that point it would realize, “hey, there’s something in here, and it’s a thing that’s way too large to just be prey because it’s not compressing when I squeeze these muscles.” So I imagine the space would get tighter around the person as the muscles contract that throat area; your Volkswagen is starting to collapse

To me, the biggest danger is actually the fact that the whale is moving to the surface. When you change pressures, which you would be doing if you are heading to the surface, the air in your body starts to expand. And as a diver, if you get panicked you could really injure yourself by not releasing the extra air, because you might get scared and hold your breath, which you know happens to a lot of us. We’re scared, we freeze, and we hold our breath. That’s the worst thing for a diver to do if they’re being pulled up towards the surface. As an experienced diver, he probably knew to continue to breathe out when he felt the whale swimming (if he realized he was in a whale, which I assumed he did pretty soon afterwards) and the pressure lowering. When he realized the whale was taking him upwards, he probably was breathing out, which is a good thing to do because then the air in his lungs would not tear the lung tissue as it expands.

And then what about when he reached the surface, how much force does the whale use to spit something out?

I’m sure it’s hardly any pressure at all. It’s just a little push to spit him out.

Donald Trump and the new Lost Cause

Lies are a denomination of power. The bigger the lie, the more power it represents. Right now in this country, we are being treated daily to the Big Lie that Donald Trump was the true winner of the presidential election of 2020, and the only reason he’s not in the White House right now is because the election was stolen from him.

You may have noticed that the people pushing the Big Lie today are very good at it. This is because many of them have been pushing an even bigger Big Lie for most of their lives: the lie of the Lost Cause, that the Civil War wasn’t really fought over the disgraceful secession of the Southern states and slavery, it was instead a noble cause fought for the “honor” of the South, and that slavery itself wasn’t bad or immoral, because enslaved people were happy workers living much better lives than they would have lived where they came from in Africa.

The Lost Cause was — or still is, because it lives today across a broad swath of America — the foundational ethos of racism and was used to perpetuate the racial crimes of the Jim Crow era, when Black Americans in the South were stripped of the right to vote and segregated from whites and subjected to the pernicious political and social discriminatory practices of white supremacy.

The Civil War was, of course, lost by the Confederacy, but you wouldn’t know it if you lived in the South through the disgraceful years of Jim Crow or even today in the states which comprised the Confederacy. One of the truths about wars is that they are often won or lost not in the big battles which become famous and end up celebrated — or lamented — in the history books, but in smaller out-of-the-way battles that get largely forgotten.

The battle of Franklin, Tennessee, was one such battle in the Civil War. Little celebrated in the history books or anywhere except Franklin itself, the battle was fought late in the war, on November 30, 1864, and was part of the campaign by the Army of Tennessee following the Confederate defeat by the Union Army of Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman in the battle of Atlanta. Commanded by Confederate General John Bell Hood, the Army of Tennessee, instead of pursuing Sherman after he left Atlanta and began his famous “March to the Sea,” turned westward and began a campaign to take Nashville from the Union forces which occupied this important manufacturing center of the South.

The battle of Franklin and the battle of Nashville, which followed quickly on its heels, were a disaster for the Confederacy. The Army of Tennessee began its campaign with 38,000 men in November of 1864. By January of 1865, the Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, who was in overall command of the Confederate armies in the West, would report to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, that his army was reduced in strength to 15,000, having lost more than 6,000 men on a single day in the battle of Franklin, and 2,500 more in the battle of Nashville. More than 2,000 losses were attributed to desertion in the ranks during both battles.

John Bell Hood was incompetent as a tactician and bloody awful as a combat commander. His campaign after the loss in Atlanta was “unfortunate” in the words of some sympathetic texts about the war. Confederate losses in the battle of Franklin were by some counts the largest in a single day in the war. Fourteen Confederate generals were either killed or wounded, along with 55 regimental commanders, decimating the leadership of the Confederate army in the west.

While living in Franklin a few years back, I visited part of the Franklin battlefield at Carnton Plantation with my son on a Cub Scout troop excursion. The house was transformed into a Confederate hospital during the battle of Franklin, and on the property is a cemetery containing 1,481 Confederate graves. The 48-acre site was the location of a plantation consisting of about 1,000 acres of land owned by Randal McGavock, who had been a state supreme court clerk and mayor of Nashville. The 1850 census showed 28 enslaved people working at the Carnton plantation. The plantation house and all the outbuildings, including a large sawmill, were built with slave labor. Records show that in 1859, McGavock’s son John, who had inherited the plantation upon his father’s death, “purchased a slave” for $2500 to run his sawmill. Currently owned by the Battle of Franklin Trust, you can visit the “historic” site seven days a week. An adult ticket costs $18, a child’s ticket $8. All of the land you walk on was worked by the people enslaved at Carnton plantation. Every structure you walk through on the tour was built by enslaved people. Throughout the time the plantation existed, there were more enslaved people on the property than there were white people who owned them.

During the tour of the house, I was stricken by the way the docent described the battle of Franklin. Facing a group of us from a few steps up on the house’s grand staircase, with a lavishly furnished entrance hall behind us, the docent went on at some length about what an “idiot” General Hood was, how he should never have been given command of a Confederate army, how his foolishness had led to so many sad deaths on the day of the battle. All of those now lying in the cemetery less than a hundred yards from the house were killed under Hood’s command, due to his malfeasance as a commanding general. The docent’s emphasis throughout his talk was on the tragedy of the deaths of so many good Southern boys. He didn’t mention once the “cause” they fought for. In fact, the the words “slave” or “slavery” didn’t pass his lips. It was as if the fact of slavery and the enslaved people owned by the McGavock family didn’t exist.

Outside we had passed reenactors in Confederate army costumes. Inside the house, listening to the docent describe the incompetent General Hood and the incredible losses suffered in the battle, we could hear the reenactors firing blanks, showing the tourists how the Confederate soldiers fired their rifles. Omitted from the reenactor’s demonstration was the fact that their rifles were fired in vain in a battle that cost the lives of several thousand Confederate soldiers attired just like them.

It was impossible to miss the implications of the whole scene at the plantation. The life of the distinguished McGavock family within the house was orderly, elegant, refined. The furnishings in the house were beautiful. The battle, as reenacted in a minor way outside and described by the docent inside, was tragic only in that the dastardly Hood had lost it. The Confederate soldiers had fought bravely, nobly for their cause, the Lost Cause that was on display all around us in the structures and land and furnishings. Unstated was the fact that the house itself was built by the enslaved and furnished and cleaned by them, the land was worked by the enslaved, indeed the life of the McGavock family had been made possible by slavery.

Carnton in its day was one of the grandest plantations in the whole Nashville area and had been voted “best farm” at the Williamson County Fair in 1860. For your $18 admission fee, you support the Franklin Battlefield Trust and visit this tribute to the nobility of a time and a way of life that is still celebrated in Tennessee and at similar sites of plantations and other battlefields across the South. Cherished for its “historical” value, the Carnton plantation is all the evidence you need that the Lost Cause was lost in name only.

The Lost Cause of Donald Trump’s defeat at the polls is being celebrated in much the same way every day across the land by his supporters who send money to his political action committee, who buy and wear MAGA gear, who wave huge TRUMP flags alongside Confederate flags at MAGA demonstrations, and of course who wore and waved all of their Trump gear when thousands of them assaulted the Capitol on January 6 in his name.

Some of them are even paying for memberships to his personal plantation at Mar-a-Lago, and to his golf clubs in Sterling, Virginia; Bedminster, New Jersey; and Briarcliff Manor, New York. It has recently been reported that Trump himself has been seen wandering through Mar-a-Lago and his golf clubs, stopping to visit gatherings of members at their weddings and birthdays — in effect acting as his own docent, delivering lengthy descriptions of the Battle of the 2020 Election, which while lost, was nonetheless fought valiantly, nobly by his supporters. The battle is still being fought today in places like Arizona by his own army laboring tirelessly in reenactments in their so-called “audit” as they shove ballots beneath black lights looking for shreds of bamboo fibers which would show their origin in China and give evidence of having been “stuffed” into ballot boxes on election day on behalf of the dastardly Joe Biden.

They’re going to keep this up. They’ve kept up the fiction of the Lost Cause of the South’s defeat in the Civil War for more than 150 years, so why shouldn’t they keep pushing the Lost Cause of Donald Trump’s defeat in the election of 2020? The South has been enslaved by the lies they have told about the Civil War. Look at John Bell Hood! They even managed to get a United States Army base named after the man who lost more Confederate soldiers on a single day than anyone during the entire war! Why give up now? Next thing you know, they’ll be pushing to erect monuments to General Michael “Let’s have a coup!” Flynn! If they can celebrate the criminally incompetent Hood, why not the criminally pardoned Flynn? Why not rename the FBI building after Rudy “Hunter Biden! Burisma!” Giuliani? Or re-name the building housing the Department of Justice after William “What Mueller report?” Barr? Or erect a grand statue of Mitch “I forgot where I was on January 6” McConnell? Or name a federal courthouse after Sidney “I lost every election lawsuit I filed” Powell?

Just watch what they’re going to do with the assault on the Capitol, which is perfect for the Lost Cause of Donald Trump. It’s like their very own Battle of Franklin. They failed to stop the certification of the Electoral College ballots. Joe Biden was named president. They lost the battle of the Capitol, 400 have been indicted, and they accomplished exactly nothing. All they need now is a new Lost Cause battle flag. Or maybe they’ll just adopt the old one, the Confederate battle flag, because that’s what the followers of the new Lost Cause have become: Donald Trump’s Confederacy of Dunces.

An anti-abortion program will receive $100 million in the next Texas budget

Sixteen years ago, Texas lawmakers created a small program with a big goal: persuading women not to have abortions. It was given a few million in federal anti-poverty dollars and saw fewer than a dozen people its first year.

Since then it’s ballooned. Alternatives to Abortion is poised to cost taxpayers $100 million over the next biennium — a twentyfold budget increase — and served more than 100,000 pregnant women and parents last year.

But the Legislature has required little information about what the program has accomplished.

It wasn’t until 2017 that lawmakers began requiring a public report on what contractors do with the money. The subcontracting process is “secret,” one lawmaker said. And state health officials don’t track how many abortions are prevented by the program. The abortion rate has steadily declined in Texas and the U.S. for decades, making it hard to decipher what, if any, role Alternatives to Abortion has played.

“I don’t know if this is untouchable by design,” said state Rep. Bobby Guerra, D-Mission. “If they have good outcomes, I would think that they would be proud of sharing that information.”

Critics say Alternatives to Abortion has eluded accountability in the often fiscally conservative Legislature, which this year requested a study on how to make safety net services cheaper and better. At the program’s worst, critics allege, it shames women seeking abortions and is a poor and expensive substitute for women’s medical care.

But proponents say Alternatives to Abortion meets a different need than heavily regulated medical clinics do — by offering social assistance to those who decide to “choose life in difficult circumstances.”

The program has overwhelming support in the Republican-led Texas Legislature, where lawmakers have pushed through budget increases and say it’s proven to be a massive success.

“I don’t know if you can always peg how many abortions were not done or how many lives were saved through this program,” said state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth. “It’s almost like: How many ships does a lighthouse save? You don’t know, right, but the fact that it’s there you know is helping those ships get safely to where they’re supposed to go.”

Averted abortions are deliberately not tracked to save women the burden of returning and sharing their decision, he said.

To proponents, the program’s rationale is simple: Women might prefer to continue their pregnancies if their life circumstances were different. And learning there are options can make the difference.

Modeled after a similar initiative in Pennsylvania, Alternatives to Abortion channels money to a far-flung network of nonprofits — many of them ardently anti-abortion — to pay for counseling, classes and baby items. Its contractors cover topics like prenatal nutrition and newborn care, and also help parents land jobs. It caters to pregnant women and mothers of young children but also to fathers, adoptive parents and those who have lost a child.

The program has seen more and more people each year, and lawmakers have boosted its funding in nearly every budget.

In 2017, they gave it $20 million from an air quality program. In 2021, they sent it another $20 million from a health technology budget.

When other programs lost state money in 2011, Alternatives to Abortion was spared. “The state prioritized the availability of Pro-Life alternatives,” 80 lawmakers wrote in a 2019 letter.

Of a dozen states The Texas Tribune could identify with comparable programs, Texas’ has had by far the biggest budget in recent years.

As the program has expanded, Democratic lawmakers and other critics have agitated for details about what it does and how cost-effective it is.

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, supports the program’s aims but said it was proposed in 2005 without “minimum standards, adequate oversight” or even a requirement that “the information provided to women be medically accurate.”

Discrepancies in the data are common because the contractors and subcontractors are not “certified or regulated by the state,” she said, and the state’s reports don’t offer enough data for lawmakers to meaningfully assess the program’s performance.

Biennial state budgets list the cost per patient and number of clinical providers enrolled for publicly funded women’s health programs, but not for Alternatives to Abortion. Without appendices, the annual report about the state’s women’s health programs is 65 pages long — longer than all four of the state’s reports about Alternatives to Abortion combined.

Former state Rep. Sarah Davis, a Houston Republican who supports abortion rights, said she thought the lack of information about the program was “very deliberate” and that funding the program had felt like a “trade-off” when she served in the Legislature from 2011 to 2021.

“If I wanted to get the money that I wanted for the Healthy Texas Women program, breast and cervical cancer and family planning [programs],” she said, “then I also had to go along with the Republicans wanting to dump money into Alternatives to Abortion.”

Spending on traditional women’s health programs that help low-income women get birth control or access cancer screenings is on track to almost triple since the abortion alternatives program began, according to numbers from the Legislative Budget Board. The state spends far more on the health programs, budgeting $352.6 million for the next biennium counting federal and state funds. Women’s health advocates say there is still unmet need.

The Texas Pregnancy Care Network was created to administer the Alternatives to Abortion program and was its sole contractor until 2018. It doesn’t provide services itself, instead doling out state money to pregnancy centers, maternity homes, adoption agencies and religiously affiliated organizations like Catholic Charities. Those organizations are reimbursed for nonmedical services they provide.

The Texas Pregnancy Care Network stated in contracting documents that it and the nonprofits it works with must be able to “withstand extreme scrutiny from opponents of the program,” and McNamara said it vets and monitors each subcontractor for compliance.

But critics have complained they have little insight into what those subcontractors do — and are often stymied when they try to add more oversight and accountability. Some said the effort is so futile it’s not worth the fight.

During a recent floor debate, Guerra told House lawmakers that the Texas Pregnancy Care Network was not required to evaluate subcontracts with a predetermined rubric like other state contracts, and that the process was “secret” and only viewable after signing a nondisclosure agreement. He abandoned a proposed reform after guessing he didn’t have enough support to pass it, he said.

“If [the Texas Department of Transportation] wants to build a road and they’re going to hire contractors, they want all the history of the contractors, they want to know what jobs they’ve done,” he said. “I just want to do the same thing for the mothers and the children.”

State Rep. Donna Howard, an Austin Democrat, made a similar bid for information in 2019.

“There really isn’t anything to look at here to give me any kind of assurance that these dollars are being used in a way that’s trying to address the stated purpose of helping women,” she said.

Krause, the Republican lawmaker who has fought to give Alternatives to Abortion more money, said the program is treated the same as other social services and should not be compared to the women’s health programs because it doesn’t offer medical care.

The program has grown to meet demand and is regularly audited, including by the health commission’s office of inspector general who found nothing amiss in its financials five years ago, he said.

Though he supports making more information about the program public, transparency measures added by lawmakers in 2019 — namely, a more detailed 2020 report — have allayed some concerns and shown the program’s contractors are “legitimate groups, helping the needs of women and newborns all over the state,” he said.

“You don’t want to just give money to a place that isn’t making a difference, right, even if it aligns with your beliefs,” Krause said.

Counseling, diapers and vitamins

Alternatives to Abortion’s subcontractors are spread across the state and there has been a booming waitlist of nonprofits hoping to join, lawmakers have said.

Offerings vary by location but often focus on counseling for pregnant women or basic preparation for motherhood such as parenting classes and an assortment of maternity items.

Demand for its services shot up last year, as parts of the state saw shortages of diapers and other baby needs during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a state report.

Catholic Charities of Dallas, a subcontractor slated to get almost a half-million dollars through the Texas Pregnancy Care Network last year, has food pantries stocked with vegetables and gives out diapers, wipes and other baby items. It teaches weekly parenting classes in English and Spanish, covering topics like water safety, potty training and positive discipline.

Human Coalition, another contractor, is largely a call center and marketing operation that tries to intercept women seeking an abortion who don’t typically search for pregnancy support services.

At Human Coalition’s few in-person clinics, visitors take pregnancy tests, identifyobstacles they perceive to their pregnancy and watch a video about abortions, the nonprofit said in contracting documents. Pregnant women may get prenatal vitamins, referrals to obstetricians or an ultrasound, which helps “attract clients” and lets those inclined to get an abortion “fully understand their pregnancy,” the contracting documents said.

At a residential facility that subcontracts with the Texas Pregnancy Care Network, women receive around-the-clock counseling and other services like impromptu four-minute “conflict resolution sessions,” 20-minute trainings on how to soothe a colicky baby or 90 minutes of professional counseling “on goal setting and transitioning to self-sufficiency,” according to McNamara, with the Texas Pregnancy Care Network.

“These are intense, trauma-based intervention facilities that help homeless women and their families,” he said in an email. “They help them learn how to break cycles, be successful parents, and ultimately be self-sufficient.”

Alternatives to Abortion contractors gave out more than 1 million material goods last year, led 331,000 counseling sessions and taught 314,000 classes — some completable in 15 minutes, according to state statistics and information provided to the Tribune. Numbers for previous years have not been published.

Contractors also refer people to assistance programs they may be eligible for, like Medicaid or food stamps. State data provided to the Tribune show less than a third of those 218,000 referrals last year led to someone actually signing up or being waitlisted for an assistance problem. The health commission said that’s an undercount that relies on women circling back to confirm they were enrolled or waitlisted. They don’t have the actual number.

The contractors said cumbersome application processes or “client motivation” and needs could contribute to the low figures.

Tension and competition between contractors has at times revealed claims of unprofessional or misleading tactics.

The Texas Pregnancy Care Network said in contracting documents that Human Coalition deceptively advertised itself as a medical facility that might perform abortions and targeted ads to internet users who searched Google for “abortion clinics.”

Meanwhile, Human Coalition said its advertisements are effective at reaching women contemplating abortions and that its staff followed up with women more frequently than a typical pregnancy center would. Contracting documents written by a former employee portrayed pregnancy centers as unprofessional — places where volunteers sometimes don’t answer the phone or are unprepared to speak with someone having an emotional crisis — in contrast to Human Coalition’s own heavily trained employees and regimented protocols.

“Agents utilize a dialogue format that has been tested and refined over tens of thousands of calls,” the former employee said in contracting documents.

Abortion rights advocates have also raised alarms about pregnancy centers, likening them to fake clinics that lure in women seeking an abortion with the promise of a free ultrasound or general slogans like: “Pregnant? Know for Sure.”

Affiliates of the pro-abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America have sent people undercover into these “crisis pregnancy centers” in other states and reported they provide misinformation about the health risks associated with abortion or describe abortion clinics as being “dirty and splattered with blood.”

Two women who have gone to crisis pregnancy centers in Texas told the Tribune they felt pressured to say they wouldn’t have an abortion, with one recalling being told “if you have an abortion, you’re going to go to hell.” Neither center has received money through the Alternatives to Abortion program. Both women said they ultimately got abortions out of state.

Pregnancy centers receive about a third of the funding from the Texas Pregnancy Care Network. They are not regulated by the state health commission.

McNamara disputed the suggestion that the Texas Pregnancy Care Network’s providers are inept or undertrained and said they follow up with women frequently — four times, on average — and are “extremely effective.”

He also said broad accusations about pregnancy centers don’t apply to the nonprofit’s subcontractors. Those groups are “prohibited from using tactics or language that shame or coerce a client,” do not reference spiritual topics or God unless requested and convey information about abortions using the same document that abortion clinics are required to use, he said.

Chelsey Youman, national legislative advisor for Human Coalition, said the organization “deeply values the vital work of pregnancy centers” and disavowed how they had been characterized in the contracting documents.

“Human Coalition has experienced a change in leadership, and we deeply regret and no longer stand by any demeaning language in the past towards pregnancy centers,” she said.

A second spokesperson for Plano-based Human Coalition said its advertisements explicitly say they do not provide abortions and that they are “upfront about who we are and what we do.”

“The results about care for women speak for themselves, exit surveys show: 98% said they felt staff cared about their needs; 95% said staff figured out their needs based on their current situation; 96% said they received information that enabled them to connect with local community resources,” the spokesperson said.

Since it joined Alternatives to Abortion in mid-2018, Human Coalition helped with 18 adoptions in Texas and 4,064 “life decisions,” or instances where someone chooses to “carry their child to term after previously seeking an abortion,” the spokesperson said.

The Texas Pregnancy Care Network does not ask women to disclose their “ultimate decisions” to “avoid any semblance of pressure,” McNamara said.

“Reviewing that data”

Critics of the program say Alternatives to Abortion funding sucks up money that could be better spent elsewhere.

In written testimony, residents of South Texas said lack of affordable health care in the predominantly Latino region meant women couldn’t get biopsies or treatment for cancer and other serious conditions.

A Nurse-Family Partnership program has asked for Alternatives to Abortion funding, saying its mission of pairing low-income mothers with a nurse during pregnancy and for a few years after they give birth fits squarely within the goals of the anti-abortion program.

“We are prepared to fill the gap of health care and education services needed by pregnant mothers that the current program does not fully provide,” a representative of the nurse program said in written testimony.

Since 2020, the state has required Alternatives to Abortion contractors to successfully sign up at least one-fifth of the people they refer to the Nurse-Family Partnership program. But lack of funding for the nursing program — and the fact that it’s not in every region of the state — means not all the women sent by Alternatives to Abortion can get in. Some have been placed on waiting lists.

Contractors must sign up a similar percent of people for Medicaid.

Alternatives to Abortion’s offerings are more loosely defined than medical services, which are assigned strict numerical codes to denote the procedure or typical time spent. Because it’s a social service program, there is no minimum time for an Alternatives to Abortion counseling session, for example, and one of the contractors said they tailor counseling sessions or classes based on a woman’s needs.

Program spreadsheets provided to the Tribune under public information laws suggest there can be considerable variance.

Between September 2019 and August 2020, the Texas Pregnancy Care Network reported more than a dozen women received over 1,000 counseling services and classes in a single month — meaning that on average they each would have taken at least 16 classes and gone to 16 counseling sessions every day. More than 70 received more than 300 counseling sessions and classes in a month, about 10 each day.

McNamara said these numbers could reflect the experiences of women who live in a residential unit where counseling sessions could range from as few as four minutes to as long as 90. It could also possibly show instances where people received counseling that touched on multiple topics like pregnancy and life skills. (Facilities are reimbursed based on “the amount of care given,” he said.)

Zaffirini, the state senator, said the different lengths of counseling sessions could reflect people’s willingness and desire to engage.

Krause, the representative who supports the program, said each family’s needs are different and that it would be “wrong and ineffective” to try to streamline counseling or similar social services.

Weldon, with the state health commission, said the agency has worked to “ensure consistency in data reported across the contractors” as the program has grown, including by offering technical assistance and a training session to help with accurate reporting.

The health commission, she said, is “reviewing that data.”

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Rachel Maddow: Why won’t Democrats use this simple trick that gives them “more power”?

On Friday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow suggested that Democrats should employ a simple maneuver to make greater use of their tenuous Senate majority before a closely contested midterm: cancel the August recess. This would, she noted, make it easier for Democrats to do things like confirm more judges, something that they have already made clear is a priority.

“They don’t work in August,” said Maddow. “What are they, French? I kid you not. The Senate’s official website says the reason they take all of August off is in part — look — so senators can, ‘catch up on their summer reading.’ For that noble reason, they take off all of August every year. It’s on the calendar this way. In this Congress, they will take off all of August this year and next year. Take those months off the calendar. That gets the Democrats from 24 months in theory down to 23 months because McConnell stole their first month from them, then drop down two more months to 21 because of the August catching up on reading time.”

By contrast, Maddow noted: “[When] Republicans were in control of the Senate . . . they were canceling the August recess. They shortened it. They took a single week off instead of the whole month off. They did it because they could. Because Mitch McConnell and the Republicans had the majority. They wanted to use it to do stuff, even if their summer reading lists were going to be neglected. They didn’t actually even have legislation they were working on at the time. They just wanted to confirm more Trump judges. Even still, they gave themselves time to do it.”

“Why don’t Democrats do that this year?” asked Maddow. “They would give themselves more power and more options by giving themselves more time at work to do stuff while they were this precious majority that history says they are likely to lose and conceivably could lose before the next election.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

When a grifter gets swindled: Former GOP chairman accused of stealing from Paul Manafort’s PAC

Former Colorado Republican Party chairman Ryan Call allegedly stole nearly $280,000 from a pro-Trump super PAC over the course of three years while he was the committee’s treasurer, according to a newly filed complaint.

“The allegations against Ryan Call, who served two terms as state chair of the Colorado GOP between 2011 and 2015, were disclosed in a complaint filed against him this month by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, a division of the Colorado Supreme Court that handles attorney disciplinary matters,” Colorado Newsline first reported on Wednesday. The complaint, filed on June 2 by the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, details that the former treasurer took cash from the Rebuilding America Now PAC through the course of 37 self-dealing transactions from 2016 to 2019.

“Respondent knowingly misappropriated $278,169.45 from (Rebuilding America Now),” the filing further stated. “Specifically, he transferred $278,169.45 of RAN funds to himself, knowing that the funds belonged to RAN, and knowing that he was not entitled to the funds and that RAN had not authorized him to take the funds for his own purposes.”

The filed complaint alleged that Call “knowingly misappropriated” funds intended to go to the pro-Trump PAC founded by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was also hit over failing to report a hefty contribution of $1 million during his tenure. That million-dollar contribution would later be reported by Call to the FEC in November of 2018. Over the course of June 2016 and November 2016, the pro-Trump super PAC raised north of $23 million, according to FEC records reviewed by Newsline.

The now public complaint against Call was filed by the Denver-based law firm Hale Westfall, according to Colorado Newsline, after Call “entered into a contract with Rebuilding America Now ‘in his personal capacity,’ and ‘signed for both parties.’ The contract awarded him a fee of $5,000 per month for “political strategy and fundraising support and assistance.'”

It will be up to Presiding Disciplinary Judge William Lucero to decide on Call’s fate. An email associated with Call’s name out of Colorado didn’t return a Salon request for comment.

Comedian Nikki Glaser explains to Bill Maher why she’s not afraid of “cancel culture”

HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher did not make it 15 minutes on Friday before bringing up his fixation with so-called “cancel culture.”

Maher repeatedly books guests who share his infatuation with the Fox News talking points and brings up the topic on show after show.

But this Friday, comedian Nikki Glaser explained to Maher why she wasn’t worried about being canceled.

“Please don’t apologize,” Maher asked. “Because there’s too much apologizing in America.”

“I love apologizing,” Glaser said. “I love it.”

“I love apologizing. It feels so good when you mean it,” she explained. “I don’t mean empty apologies. I mean when someone is really like, ‘I didn’t even consider that somebody could feel that way.’ Like having empathy. Like that sucks that I made you feel that way.”

Tucker Carlson doubles down on wild conspiracy theory that FBI was behind Capitol insurrection

Since supporters of Donald Trump engaged in a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, conservatives have sought to distance themselves from culpability for the assault on democracy.

They falsely claimed it was actually Antifa, they lied about it being peaceful and some Republicans have even denied that there was an insurrection. And then on Tuesday, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson unleashed a ridiculous conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the insurrection.

On Wednesday, Carlson’s conspiracy theory received a brutal fact-check in The Washington Post.

“The first thing to emphasize is that Carlson’s theory is based on a report in Revolver News. The site is run by Darren Beattie, who appeared on Carlson’s show shortly after the above monologue. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Beattie is a former Trump White House speechwriter who was fired in 2018 over a past appearance on a panel with a white nationalist, Peter Brimelow, at a conference attended by well-known white nationalists,” the newspaper noted. “The second and perhaps most important point is that the basis of Carlson’s theory — that the unindicted co-conspirators are either likely or must be government agents — is extremely shaky. Legal experts say the government literally cannot name an undercover agent as an unindicted co-conspirator.”

Lisa Kern Griffin of Duke University Law School explained why Carlson’s theory was literally impossible.

“Undercover officers and informants can’t be ‘co-conspirators’ for the purposes of establishing an agreement to violate the law, because they are only pretending to agree to do so . . . An unindicted co-conspirator has committed the crime of conspiracy, and investigative agents doing their jobs undercover are not committing crimes,” she explained.

But Carlson returned to the topic on Friday and while lashing out at all the journalists fact-checking his delusions.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Advocates cheer DOJ reversal of Trump policy denying asylum to victims of violence

Immigrant rights advocates hailed the Wednesday reversal by U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland of a Trump-era rule denying asylum in the United States to victims of domestic or gang violence as a “critically important” step toward restoring the right of refuge to migrants fleeing countries where their lives are often in danger.

In a pair of decisions, Garland vacated a 2018 guidance from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that declared migrants would no longer automatically qualify for asylum if they presented concerns of domestic abuse or gang violence in their home countries.

Later that year, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. struck down much of the contentious Justice Department guidance, calling it “arbitrary, capricious,” and unlawful.

According to the New York Times, Wednesday’s decision involves the cases of two asylum-seeking Salvadoran women known as A-B- and L-E-A-. In 2016 and 2017, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that the women qualified for asylum since the government of El Salvador did not adequately protect people suffering domestic abuse.

A 2020 Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 were killed, and that at least 70 others were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or tortured. Many of the victims were murdered or harmed by the gangs they originally fled.

However, Sessions overruled the board’s decision regarding A-B; his successor, William Barr, responded similarly to the board’s finding in L-E-A-‘s case.

https://twitter.com/civilrightsorg/status/1405284967127478273

“These decisions involve important questions about the meaning of our nation’s asylum laws, which reflect America’s commitment to providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta wrote on Wednesday in a memo to the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

Migrant advocates hailed news of the DOJ policy reversal.

“This was the right move. We are thrilled for our client and for the many deserving individuals fleeing persecution who will have a fair chance to seek refuge in the United States,” Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) and co-counsel in Matter of A-B-, said in a statement.

“Now it’s time to build on this progress,” she added. “We’re ready to work with the administration to create an asylum system that provides every person a fair opportunity to apply for protection, in line with our human rights obligations.”

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1405286408370024455

Bradley Jenkins, federal litigation attorney at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and one of the lawyers representing L-E-A-, said that “families facing persecution qualify for asylum under any reasonable interpretation of the law, and it is encouraging to see Attorney General Garland take this step toward restoring the asylum system.”

“We hope that the rule-making process will result in further progress toward a fair and humane asylum policy,” he added.

How Congress and you subsidize the richest Americans

ProPublica scored a fantastic scoop when it obtained and meticulously analyzed 15 years of raw income tax data on the wealthiest Americans. This leak of Internal Revenue Service records is by far the biggest and most important tax news in the 55 years that I’ve reported on taxes.

Thanks to the leaker, we now know beyond any doubt that the endless claims America has a progressive income tax system are bunk. A progressive system means that the more you make, the greater the share of your income you pay in taxes. Back in 2005, I got the George W. Bush administration to acknowledge that the system stops becoming progressive near the top.

But, unfortunately, ProPublica shows that it’s even worse than what I reported back then.

Working people pay a larger share of their income in tax than the wealthiest of the wealthy. The top marginal tax rate on labor income is almost double that of capital gains.

Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011. He doesn’t dispute that.

Bezos was not alone. Multi-billionaires Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros all pulled off the same trick at least once in recent years, ProPublica reported after analyzing the IRS data. Warren Buffet pays less in tax than millions of Americans, something he and Soros have said is wrong.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and owner of the financial data and news business bearing his name, paid over five years an income tax rate lower than that of the poorest half of American taxpayers.

Bloomberg Pays Just 3%

On his income tax returns, Bloomberg reported making $10 billion. Yet, he paid just 3%.

The bottom half of income taxpayers averaged $17,200 of income in 2017 and paid 4%.

A system in which people who gross about $330 a week pay a much higher tax rate than someone who makes billions each year is not just regressive; it’s an outrage. It violates principles of taxation that date to the Old Testament and ancient Athens.

I couldn’t help but notice that my wife, a charity CEO, and I pay a higher income tax rate than Bezos, Bloomberg and Buffett.

By the grace of Congress, those billionaires get to take unlimited losses when they make losing stock investments while Jennifer and I—and you—can deduct only $3,000 a year. So even if my wife and I live into our 90s, we will die with losses we never got to deduct.

That’s just the kind of unfairness Professor Dorothy A. Brown compellingly demonstrates in her insightful and readable new book The Whiteness of Wealth.

Until now, the Wealth Defense Industry—armies of accountants, lawyers and wealth managers who specialize in using trusts, tax loopholes, off-shore corporations and foundations to benefit their 0.05% clients—tricked people. They pointed to posted tax rates, not actual rates paid by the super-super-super rich, and asserted with cherry-picked data that the rich pay a lot.

Salaried Workers Pay More

The granular data ProPublica obtained proves that the tax rates Congress puts in the law and the tax rates people pay only match up for working Americans in the bottom 99.5%.

Congress taxes workers much more heavily than billionaire capitalists who, ProPublica showed, can live income tax-free.

All of the people ProPublica wrote about are white men. Professor Brown of Emory University shows how our existing tax system favors wealth above income and discriminates against Black Americans. The design of our tax system plays a significant role in the vast wealth disparities between white Americans and people of color.

ProPublica’s reporting backs her up. It showed that for most Americans, annual income taxes far exceed yearly increases in wealth.

Good Debt

At the apex of American wealth, you can live tax-free, as I showed many years ago. That is thanks to rules favoring the rich, loopholes Congress refuses to close and minimal enforcement of our tax laws against the plutocrat class.

One simple technique is borrowing against your assets. Congress doesn’t count that borrowed money as income.

For example: Let’s say you’re a 60-year-old founder-CEO holding $10 billion of stock in your company, which grows in value at a modest rate of 5%, or $500 million, a year. You determine that you can live comfortably on $50 million a year.

You then borrow that money, putting that much of your holdings up as collateral.

Do you see where this is going? You can borrow and live on $50 million a year every year for the rest of your life without paying a cent of federal income tax.

It gets better. The IRS determines interest rates on intra-family loans. The current rates are next to zero, less than even our modest inflation rate. Given that, why would anyone sell stock and pay a 20% tax rate to buy a yacht or a new jet when they can borrow against themselves almost interest-free and watch their stocks keep rising in value?

Hunting for the Leaker

The Biden White House announced late Tuesday that law enforcement is hunting for the leaker, who faces up to a decade in prison.

Whoever dared to do this should be hailed as a national hero on a par with Darnella Frazier, the fearless teenage girl with a steady hand who last summer recorded the slow, agonizing murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

We should be building statues to honor this leaker, if he or she is ever identified, just as we should erect one to honor Remy Welling, the IRS corporate auditor whose leak to me 17 years ago proved corruption in the Silicon Valley stock options system.

Thanks to ProPublica and its source, maybe Americans will at long last wake up and realize that our federal income tax, as currently designed, is a massive subsidy system for the super-rich.

“Big Mouth” spinoff about Hormone Monsters adds to its monstrous voice cast

While we all love to watch the painfully awkward encounters of the puberty-stricken preteens on Netflix’s “Big Mouth,” sometimes the most relatable moments stem from the raunchy Hormone Monsters. The no-filter scene-stealers personify our most private and even embarrassing inner thoughts, which is why we’re both excited and a bit afraid that we’re going to get to know them a whole lot better.

A new spinoff titled “Human Resources” will delve into the world from whence these Hormone Monsters came, and according to Variety, it will have a star-studded cast as great as the mothership series. Randall Park, Aidy Bryant and Keke Palmer will be joining “Big Mouth” stars Nick Kroll and Maya Rudolph, the veterans known for voicing the beloved Hormone Monsters Maury and Connie, respectively, who taunt and tease 13-year-old Andrew (John Mulaney) and Jessi (Jessi Klein).

However, “Human Resources” will explore more than just these monsters and their ilk, including Shame Wizards and Depression Kitties that have already graced the show. The new workplace comedy spinoff aims to cater to more “adult” topics as it leaves behind temporary growing pains for our deeper emotional baggage.

Under the tagline of “We Manage People,” the monsters’ names reflect their careers in guiding the human psyche, although the show’s plot will dive deeper into the daily lives and experiences the monsters have themselves.

But wait, there’s more! New types of creatures will also be joining in on the workplace fun. On a panel at the Annecy Animation Film Festival, Park announced he will provide the voice of Pete, a Logic Rock . . . whatever a Logic Rock is.

“The challenge has been that these characters don’t only function according to the one thing they do professionally. The Logic Rock is filled with a lot of emotion and love that defies his nature,” Kroll said at the Festival, not really making it any clearer what a Logic Rock is.

The panel also revealed two short clips of the series animated by the same team as “Big Mouth,” one introducing the new world of monsters and the other from Big Mouth Season 5, where Nick (Kroll) reports to Human Resources the misery that the monsters have caused in his head.

The spinoff was originally announced at 2019’s New York Comic-Con. Watch the animated announcement below:

Creepy modern “Candyman” sneak peek: “We create monsters of men all the time”

Someone must have said “Candyman” five times because the spirit of that urban legend has been summoned back. Even though the reboot won’t be released until later this summer, director Nia DaCosta has offered a sneak peek of the disturbing horror flick just in time to haunt your Juneteenth dreams.

DaCosta is known for directing the acclaimed abortion roadtrip movie “Little Woods” and will become the youngest person to direct an MCU movie with the upcoming “The Marvels.” Her “Candyman” will be a direct sequel to the original 1992 film of the same name, based on a Clive Barker short story about a Black man who was brutally killed for taking part in a forbidden, interracial love affair.

Played in the film by Tony Todd, he returns as Candyman, a mythic, slasher spirit whom the residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project believe is responsible for the murders of at least 25 residents. When graduate student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) explores how residents of the housing project have used the legend of the Candyman to cope with and rationalize hardship, she soon becomes a victim of the Candyman’s stalking herself.

The modern, Jordan Peele-produced sequel to the original “Candyman” follows the story of artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his partner, gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), when they move into a luxury loft condo in Cabrini. In the modern-day, Cabrini has been gentrified beyond recognition of the housing project of the original film, and is mostly inhabited by upwardly mobile millennials. One day, Anthony has a chance encounter with a resident of the old Cabrini-Green (Colman Domingo) who introduces Anthony to the story of the Candyman. As Anthony begins to explore this legend in his art, he unknowingly sets off a horrifying chain of events that unleash a wave of violence, and change everything.

To mark Juneteenth, DaCosta spoke on the racial realities her “Candyman” brings to the forefront. “In the real world, we create monsters of men all the time,” DaCosta said. “People are murdered, they become either saints or they’re vilified.

Creating “Candyman” felt especially relevant during the pandemic, and the subsequent uprising for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

“Throughout the last year and a half, it was always coming back to that truth,” DaCosta said. “Horror is a really effective tool when it comes to telling stories that impact us on a social level. The right function of it is to make you uncomfortable.”

Abdul-Mateen II has recently starred in HBO’s “Watchmen” and previous Peele project, “Us.” Parris was recently a fan favorite in Marvel’s “WandaVision,” slated to play a leading role in DaCosta’s “The Marvels.”

Take a sneak peek of “Candyman,” which includes a look at the film’s unique visual style, along with DaCosta’s full Juneteenth commentary:

“Candyman” releases in theaters on Friday, August 27.

Scarlett Johansson says Black Widow was hypersexualized when first entering the MCU

As most adult women can attest to, catcalling and hypersexualization begin young. And whether it’s catcalling in the streets or generally objectifying comments from men, you’re supposed to take this as a compliment, lest you be written off as “no fun” if you don’t. It’s a relatable struggle for all women — including Scarlett Johansson, who ranked among the highest paid actresses in 2019.

Promoting her upcoming movie “Black Widow,” Johansson talked with reporters about the arc of her widely beloved character Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow. Johansson offers pointed criticisms of the early hypersexualization of Natasha — most notably in Natasha’s entrance into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in “Iron Man 2.” But she also expresses appreciation for the growth in how Natasha is written and portrayed over time, which Johansson suggests ran parallel to her own growth as a woman.

“Obviously, 10 years have passed and things have happened and I have a much different, more evolved understanding of myself,” Johansson told HelloBeautiful.com “As a woman, I’m in a different place in my life, you know?”

She continued:

All of that is related to that move away from the kind of hyper-sexualization of this character and, I mean, you look back at ‘Iron Man 2’ and while it was really fun and had a lot of great moments in it, the character is so sexualized, you know? Really talked about like she’s a piece of something, like a possession or a thing or whatever — like a piece of ass, really. And Tony even refers to her as something like that at one point.

In the line Johansson is referring to, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), referring to Romanoff, says, “I want one.”

“At one point [Tony] calls her a piece of meat and maybe at that time that actually felt like a compliment,” Johansson recalls. “Because my thinking was different. Maybe I even would have, you know, my own self-worth was probably measured against that type of comment or, like a lot of young women, you come into your own and you understand your own self-worth.”

In a society that’s always assigned women’s value and worthiness by how conventionally attractive they are in the eyes of straight men, women and especially young women are often forced to internalize the idea that gross, objectifying comments from men are a compliment, or a reflection of how attractive you are. But Johansson is right — times are changing, and have certainly changed since the filming of “Iron Man 2” more than a decade ago. (Tony Stark himself undergoes plenty of change between his second movie and “Avengers: Endgame,” which sees him as a devoted father and husband.)

“Now people, young girls, are getting a much more positive message, but it’s been incredible to be a part of that shift and be able to come out the other side and be a part of that old story, but also progress. Evolve. I think it’s pretty cool,” Johansson said.

It’s because of these changes in how we tell women’s stories, and the new ways women are being encouraged to value themselves, that Johansson said she’s “actually very thankful that [‘Black Widow’ is] happening now.”

“We can actually make a movie that’s about real stuff, and audiences want that,” she told HelloBeautiful. “I think they always wanted that. Now the studio’s kind of caught up to that, which is fine. It’s all good. Better late than never. This movie became more of a reality, I guess, when we were shooting Infinity War, so I did know about the character’s fate.”

Black Widow’s sexuality is certainly a valuable asset to the character, and men who underestimate her frequently pay the price. But Natasha Romanoff arguably becomes even more and more interesting with time, from the vulnerability she begins to show in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” as the discovery of Hydra’s role in SHIELD makes her question who she’s really been serving; to her role as a compassionate mentor to Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff in “Captain America: Civil War”; to her ultimate sacrifice in “Avengers: Endgame.”

In each of these more recent movies featuring Johansson as Black Widow, we see her character given more and more depth, and become more than the hypersexualized secret agent we first meet in “Iron Man 2.” “Black Widow” offers an exciting chance for Marvel fans to wade even deeper into Natasha Romanoff’s character and origin story.

“Black Widow” releases in theaters and on Disney+ on Friday, July 9.

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly credited the outlet that had asked the question in which Johansson referred to the sexualization of Black Widow. This story has been updated.]

This Juneteenth, “Atlanta” will give you all the insights you need on how America co-opts a holiday

On Thursday President Biden officially established Juneteenth as a federal holiday, an achievement born of rare unanimous support in the Senate and an overwhelming majority of votes in favor in the House of Representatives. Juneteenth is already recognized in 47 states and celebrated in communities nationwide, and was examined on episodes named after the holiday on “Atlanta” and “Black-ish.” Each is extraordinary.

But to truly understand why the initialy response to the bill passing the Senate was mixed, to put it mildly, it’s best to revisit the “Atlanta” take on “Juneteenth,” which stands among the series’ best. The show’s interpretation of how this holiday may translate to the masses turns out to be more accurate, psychologically speaking. That it premiered in 2016 matters little, because the surreal mental and spiritual contortions shaping the episode’s comedy are inspired by the same political and social reality in which we currently exist.

Biden called this year’s observance “the first that our nation will celebrate all together, as one nation,” a hopeful assessment given the circumstances. Getting Juneteenth to be a federally recognized day of observance is a hard-won accomplishment and the result of decades of work by community organizers around the country, including 94-year-old Opal Lee, the grandmother who walked from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington D.C. to rally attention to the cause. Lots of people who already celebrate Juneteenth are right to be thrilled.

This is the first new federally recognized holiday since Congress approved Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. It’s a huge deal. But let’s not forget that the 2021 version of that holiday was turned into an opportunity for insurrection deniers to cite lines from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in their various insistences that we all move on. Plenty of us observe MLK Day by reconnecting with Dr. King’s mission by way of studying his writing and his life’s history as it actually was as opposed to the version of postcards. Lots of others view it as a fine day to take advantage of a white sale.

So it’s likely to go with Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day. It commemorates the day in 1865 that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free, two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Now that it’s a national holiday, the folks most likely to get a day off are, and will be, white collar and middle class office workers, a workforce segment of which Black people comprise a minority.

Provided you’ve kept up with the dialogue about Juneteenth on TV, you might be baffled as to why this whole business is being met with a lot of side-eye. Given the enthusiastic campaign for the holiday on “Black-ish” in 2017 and the various news reports and documentaries citing its significance before and afterward, shouldn’t we all be ecstatic?

But with all due respect to series creator Kenya Barris, his “Juneteenth” episode is an ideal. Anthony Anderson’s Dre pontificates about the sheer disrespect of Columbus Day’s observance while Juneteenth, which celebrates actual emancipation as opposed to a mythical interpretation of a historical figure’s accomplishment, remained unofficial. The foppish white guys he works for and with listen intently, make a few clueless responses. Life goes on with them continuing to not give a crap, while Dre and Bow’s family enact their own celebration, clinking strawberry soda bottles next to the grill.

That’s nice. That’s the way it should be. “Atlanta,” in its own way, shows America as it is.

In the “Juneteenth” episode Donald Glover’s Earn, an underachieving Ivy-league dropout who throws all of his energy into managing his cousin’s rap career, agrees to accompany his ex, Van (Zazie Beetz), to a Juneteenth celebration at the home of a wealthy acquaintance.

Earn also agrees to pretend that he and Van are married, since they’re already raising a daughter together, and because they’re attending this party with a purpose. The host, Monique (Cassandra Freeman), is a well-connected member of Atlanta’s Black elite who can introduce Van to all the right people in order to improve her circumstances and her career prospects. Here’s the original trailer for the episode:

But this is no simple, relaxed get-together with people laughing over red velvet cake. The second Earn and Van pull up to a giant multi-story mansion and are greeted at the door by their host, dripping with jewels, you can sense something is off. Monique’s bright welcome has a stabbing pointiness behind it. Behind her on a staircase, a Black men’s chorus sporting, shall we say, period appropriate clothing, sings dour-sounding spirituals acapella.

But when Monique wonders aloud where her husband is, and down the stairs barrels Monique’s other half Craig (Rick Holmes), “Juneteenth” takes off. Craig is white, which isn’t noteworthy in and of itself . . . until he opens his mouth.

“HAP-py FREE-dom-DAY!” he effuses Ebonically, shaking his head and punctuating his greeting with the kind of “mmph, mmph, mmph!” that folks use to convey either “this tastes delicious” or “it’s a shame that person died.” Craig is not there because he got invited to the cookout. It’s his house, so he did the inviting.

Craig flops his hand through an approximation of a soul brother shake to welcome Earn, who immediately flees to the open bar. Only it’s not really open; when he orders a vodka and cranberry, the irate bartender commands him to select from a list of signature cocktails with names like Juneteenth Juice, Emancipation Eggnog, Plantation Master Poison or Forty Acres and a Moscow Mule.

This is an extremely absurdist, funhouse mirror reflection of Blackness appropriated by whiteness, Juneteenth may a holiday commemorating the end of a people’s bondage, but here, with his “Real Housewives of Potomac”-read woman at his side, it might as well be Craig Day.

Craig has studied Blackness to the point of viewing Black people as a hobby; Monique even says as much. Believe it or not, though, that’s less of a problem than Craig’s insistence that he knows Black people better than they know themselves. He gloms on to Earn, chastising him for not having made a pilgrimage to “the Motherland” after Earn notices Craig’s photos from Africa. Earn asks him if he’s an archaeologist in African studies and Craig says no. “I’m an optometrist.”

“That nigga told my 95-year-old grandmother she was cooking her collard greens wrong!” Monique tells Van.

“Atlanta”‘s dreamy cinematic style lends itself to finding an assortment of metaphors within each plot. In 2016, when the episode first debuted it was simply riotous. Watching it through the lens of this moment, however, “Juneteenth” becomes a parable about compromise.

The example of Monique’s relationship with Craig is the concise example; she likes her husband, she says, “but I love my money.”

But this is a view that benefits the few and sells out the many, demonstrated in Monique’s cavalier treatment of the catering staff as if they are her servants, extras in the background of the theatrical performance on Juneteenth she’s staged in her luxurious home.

Van tries to play along – “Do you think that I’m happy that I have to prostitute myself for an opportunity?” she had confided to Earn – but eventually her character work falls away and the only thing she can do is numb herself with whatever poison is in the crystal tumbler she’s clutching.

Texas made Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980, with other states following suit in afterward. A concerted push to have it recognized as a national day of observance grew strong enough for a bill to be introduced to the Senate floor in 2020 and would have passed if not for the lone dissent of Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson.

However, with those same conservatives on Congress and in state governments working very hard to ensure schools won’t accurately teach students about America’s reliance on slavery and its role in creating the systemic injustices we’re contending with today, one wonders how many people will actually understand the meaning of the day.

There’s also the tendency to mark such days of observance with long gazes at Black suffering. National Geographic is premiering “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” at 9 p.m. on Friday, June 18, and it’s a stalwart and worthy study of a suppressed part of the Black experience in this country.

It’s also a strange choice to schedule in proximity to a day that’s meant to highlight Black liberation and joy. (One option on that front might be to check out Turner Classic Movies’ cinematic celebration of Juneteenth, starting at noon.)

Assuming all of this is presented in a spirit of either ignorance or meaning well, it’s also the problem . . . and it also informs the awkward signifying of the many, many Craigs out there in the world.

For all of his cringeworthy bull, Craig is a notch or two better than the person who committed to supporting Black Lives Matter last summer only to abandon it and gripe about “critical race theory” this year.

But he’s also as wrongheaded as the people who, to use a recent example, responded to NPR critic Eric Deggans’ valid and respectful challenge to Tom Hanks to be anti-racist instead of letting the world know he’s not racist by accusing Deggans of trying to tarnish the beloved actor’s reputation or submitting him to some impossible-to-pass purity test.

Neither is the case, but as Deggans observed in a tweet after brushing off the backlash, “Sometimes, to be a good ally, white people just need to listen to people of color when we tell u [sic] what we need. Regardless of how much good work you think you have done.”

Deggans is describing Craig to a tee. His home is a showcase of his “good work.” He lectures without listening. He worships some idea of Blackness but it’s all the more obvious that he doesn’t fully comprehend Black culture or struggle.

He will signify, and those who happen to travel in his circles will nod along, applaud his craziness and avail themselves of the lovely spread he puts out. But would he throw a portion of his wealth into pushing back against GOP efforts to kill the For the People Act, designed to protect voting rights on a national level and counteract recently passed state laws meant to restrict voting?

He may celebrate the fact that our new national holiday was won, in part, by the efforts of protesters marching in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, while saying little to nothing about Republicans insistently opposing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020.

Honest conversations about the nastier parts of American history and systemic racism are uncomfortable, and as Jenifer Lewis’s grandmother Ruby observed in “Black-ish,” “white people hate being uncomfortable.” But they can definitely get behind another federally recognized day out of the office.

And as I re-watched both “Juneteenth” episodes the image that stayed with me the longest is one that’s simultaneously hysterical, perverse and possibly predictive. Part of the evening’s entertainment shows Craig doing a slam poetry performance for his Black guests declaring, head thrown back and eyes shut, feeling the spirit, “I am a man, but Jim Crow is haunting me!”

This is his version of celebrating all together, as one nation . . . but under a groove he grabbed from other people that gave the form its beats, meaning and measure. That scene is one of the funniest things you might see if you choose to watch. It’s also a postcard shot of sorts, sending us a view of at what it looks like to gain a day of recognition from the same forces working to erase the history and meaning of what brought us there.

Both the “Black-ish” episode “Juneteenth” and the “Atlanta” episode “Juneteenth” are streaming on Hulu.

New series “Strut” normalizes sex work with a group of friends who start an escorting agency

When award-winning creator Misha Calvert first showed her new series, “Strut,” at the Tribeca Film Festival Creators Market in 2018, she offered some choice words on the show’s daring subject matter. “Hollywood has long used the archetype of the prostitute to heighten storytelling, be it as a seductress, a villain, seedy set decoration, or another dead body,” she said. “The reality of sex workers is so much more complex.”

Calvert came up with the idea for “Strut,” her new show on the LGBTQ streaming network Revry, during post-production of “Textual Intercourse,” a show Calvert created, which she described to Salon as an exploration of “dating in this time, and the intersection of technology and intimacy, the transactionalism of dating.”

“I just thought, well, the natural conclusion to this narrative of technology and intimacy and transaction is to just put a price on sex,” Calvert said of her inspiration for “Strut.” “And what does that actually mean? What is the experience looking at that from the inside? I wanted to make something that was inside-out, that was also light-hearted and sympathetic toward that experience.”

“Strut,” starring Margaret Judson (“The Newsroom”), Christina Toh (“Orange is the New Black“), Manini Gupta (“You“), and Calvert herself, tells the story of a group of best friends in New York indulging in a relatable hot girl summer of their own, which eventually leads to the friends starting their own escorting agency, wading into the world of sex work, and loving it.

The series begins with Eddie (Calvert), a porn editor whose three best friends are determined to save her from a life of lonely solitude. They wind up bringing her to a sex party, which leads the friends to debate the pros and cons of sex work, and eventually launch their own business. Calvert herself is a queer woman, and “Strut” tells the story of Lucy (Gupta), a journalist exploring her lesbian identity. The show also builds out Eddie’s best friends as a lovable and relatable crew that female audiences feel an immediate bond with — Eva (Judson) is Eddie’s risk-taking roommate and best friend, and Chandaleer (Toth), a hard-partying fashion model and troublemaker. “Strut” is written very purposefully, Calvert proudly notes, for the female gaze.

Calvert has worked on many unique projects before, including plays, short films, and web series, often telling stories of very different women, injected with her dark, modern comedic sensibilities. But in the age of sex work-friendly platforms like Seeking Arrangements and OnlyFans, which Calvert notes wasn’t even a thing at the time when they were filming for her show, “Strut” is a new kind of show, and it feels like a perfect contribution to the times we’re in — that is, mounting public support for sex workers’ rights, destigmitization of sex work, and a growing movement to decriminalize sex work. Other movies and shows, including Starz’s “The Girlfriend Experience,” HBO’s “The Deuce,” Hulu period drama “Harlots,” reality show “Gigolos,” British drama “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” and 2000s dramedy “Hung,” have waded into sex work before. But none are quite like “Strut,” which is foremost a story of female friendship, agency, and empowerment.

One key way “Strut” achieves this, Calvert says, is through the significant role of actual sex workers in the writing and creation of the show. She notes that this level of representation is crucial.

“‘Bonding’ Season 1 didn’t, and they got in trouble,” Calvert said of the Netflix dark comedy series following the life of a dominatrix, without actually consulting any dominatrix. “They enlisted a dominatrix to help them save the show, for Season 2, which — I’m glad they found someone who was willing to jump in, because they were getting a lot of flack from the BDSM community.”

Lack of an authentic voice or person with lived experience to tell a story about such experiences is unacceptable to Calvert as a creator, and she followed this conviction in her creation of “Strut.” “Some of my best friends are sex workers, and I have enough experience in that world to be able to write authentically about these characters,” she said, adding that she sees sex workers as “a sacred population,” who have “always been healers for humankind.” (“Jesus knew what’s up,” she noted. “He was hanging out with prostitutes from day one.”)

“It’s essential to include input from sex workers when writing a narrative about a sex worker character, or that role in general. I’m so annoyed by shows that continue even now, and do not utilize authentic viewpoints in their narratives,” Calvert added. In particular, she hopes “men writing stories about sex workers” becomes “a bygone practice,” altogether.

Speaking of some key differences between men writing women, versus women writing women, and certainly, if the protagonists of “Strut” feel familiar to audiences, the reason is very simple. “All of the characters are drawn from various women I’ve known over the years,” Calvert said. “It’s so important we see female friendships in the media that are not competitive and not catty, and not based around men, where [in ‘Strut’] the women have their own thing going on, and their own individuality, their own personal problems and conflicts, but are able to support each other nevertheless.”

“Strut” is foremost, a fun story of friendship, and an exploration of modern sexuality and power. But it’s also inseparable from the times we’re in. Activists are increasingly making the case for how sex workers’ rights are inseparable from feminist and progressive struggles, and while public support for sex workers is growing, stigma and policies that harm or police sex workers persist. With its humor and realness, “Strut” challenges the otherization of sex workers, which lies at the heart of stigma and anti-sex work policies.

“One stigma is that sex workers are different from the people that we know. They are, in fact, the people we know,” Calvert said. “Whoever is reading this, you know a sex worker. They maybe don’t talk about it, but they’re human beings like everyone else; they’re entrepreneurs like any other entrepreneur, trying to make it in an increasingly saturated market, and struggling with the same issues that any business owner is: client services, advertising and marketing, overhead. They are us, we are them.”

Of course, Calvert notes, “Strut” is able to tell this story today with the help of Revry. “It was really amazing getting ‘Strut’ off the ground, because I faced no pushback whatsoever,” she said, describing how she met “Strut” director Michelle Cutolo, and one of the show’s producers, Kimberley Browning, and their excitement about the project.

“The only pushback I got was once we had made it, and I was pitching it to other bigger networks initially,” Calvert recounted. “I love that we ended up at Revry. Initially I was taking [‘Strut’] out to the premium cable networks, and streaming platforms, and I could see it in their eyes — they were frightened by the content. It was just a series of doors closing in my face, until I landed at Revry. Because they’re so open-minded and progressive, they didn’t have any problem with the material.”

“Strut” is now streaming on Revry.

Why anti-vaxxers are stuck on the “magnetic vaccine” conspiracy theory

Tik Toker Brookiebaby888 usually posts humorous lifestyle videos to her 73,000 followers, but earlier this month she filmed herself doing a “magnet vaccine test.” Standing in front of her camera, she explained to users that she just received her COVID-19 vaccine and wanted to see if a magnet would stick to her arm. Pressing the round magnet to her deltoid, she gasps in surprise when it barely sticks.

Brookiebaby888 is one of thousands who have done the “vaccine magnet test” on Tiktok, perpetuating the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccine includes an unidentified magnetic object — maybe a microchip — causing a side effect of becoming magnetic (which is not true). It’s unclear if people like Brookiebaby888 are true anti-vaxxers, or just participating in yet another viral social media challenge with deleterious public health effects.

Recently, the conspiracy theory was popularized and brought to the mainstream when Sherri Tenpenny, a confidant and adviser to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and self described anti-vaxxer, spoke about it at a hearing held by a health committee in the Ohio state legislature.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the Internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny said. “They can put a key on their forehead. It sticks. They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick, because now we think that there’s a metal piece to that.”

Misinformation experts say testimonies like Tenpenny’s promoting vaccine misinformation, along with the viral videos on social media doing the “magnet test,” harm public confidence in the vaccines. The very real public health risk posed by the spread of such misinformation speaks to why people like Tenpenny need to be deplatformed from social media, Imran Ahmed, CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), told Salon.

“It’s profoundly irresponsible to give them uncritical oxygen given that these are publicity hounds who are seeking to sell their product,” Ahmed said. “Every time they’re given the oxygen of publicity, they become more powerful.”

Ahmed suspects that the hearing in Ohio that went viral was likely a publicity stunt for Tenpenny to gain new followers and make more money. Tenpenny is listed as one of the top 12 leading anti-vaxxers according to the CCDH; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Andrew Wakefield, and Joseph Mercola are also on the list. The CCDH estimates that Tenpenny — who is a practicing osteopathic physician and alternative health entrepreneur who offers “boot camps” in becoming an anti-vaccine activist — makes $2.1 million from these programs collectively, according to the CCDH’s report titled “Pandemic Profiteers.“

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“This is all an enormous scam,” Ahmed said. “For them, it’s a war of attrition, and the war of attrition is that, let’s just say 10 people believe that they can magnetize them — they happen to stick a key to themselves because they’re in the middle of a heatwave and it’s a hot and sticky and it sticks to them — and they think, ‘Oh my god, the vaccine is magnetic.'”

“That’s why social media has been so powerful for them,” Ahmed continued, “because they’ve been able to push out misinformation and then slowly start accruing followers without ever necessarily paying the cost for it.”

As Ahmed alluded to, it is likely that some people who participate in the vaccine magnet challenge will believe that, for some reason, the COVID-19 vaccine has a mysterious magnetic metal in it like iron, nickel, or cobalt. According to a fact sheet on the FDA’s website for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the vaccine contains only mRNA, lipids, potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, sodium chloride, dibasic sodium phosphate dihydrate and sucrose — none of which are ferromagnetic.

For the record: Though it’s been debunked time and time again — including by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — the COVID-19 vaccine does not make a person magnetic. The reason the magnets or keys are briefly sticking to some, Deputy Lab Director Eric Palm of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory told BBC News, could be trickery or simply the cause of excess oils on the skin.

“You can easily get a coin to stick to your skin, we’ve all done that as children — sticking coins to our foreheads,” Palm said. “Because of the surface oils, surface tension associated with that… or someone could be using trickery, [such as] band-aid residue or sticky substance.”

There are certainly instances of such simple trickery; for example, TikTok user Emilaay442’s video of doing the magnet challenge went viral when the magnet stuck. But, as she later explained to BBC News, it was meant to be a “joke” and she actually licked the magnet before applying it to her skin.

So where did this bizarre, dangerous myth come from exactly? It’s unclear. In her testimony, Tenpenny suggests that there’s something magnetic in the protein being injected, or something related to “5G towers,” meaning cell phone radio towers. (Notably, 5G or “fifth generation” cellular technology requires much smaller and less intrusive radio towers than previous generations.)

In some videos, the magnet sticking has been used to advance the microchip conspiracy theory that falsely claims Bill Gates is behind an operation to implant microchips in people via vaccines. As The Verge reported, this conspiracy theory stemmed from a Reddit thread. Indeed, as Ahmed said, the magnet meets microchip conspiracy theory fits into the three types of misinformation that anti-vaxxers spread frequently. This one just happened to stick.

“One is that COVID isn’t dangerous, the second is that vaccines are dangerous, and the third is that you can’t trust doctors,” Ahmed said. Anti-vaxxers “throw out everything” and see what sticks, Ahmad continued. “We’ve been told that vaccines will do everything from magnetize you to kill you, to all sorts of idiocy — this just happens to have caught fire because of this profoundly hilarious video of Sherri Tenpenny.”

Retired general: Russians will soon leak intel they used to “control” Trump

During President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe, it has been obvious how greatly he differs from former President Donald Trump in terms of foreign policy. While Trump was favorable to Putin and openly hostile to the United States’ long-time NATO allies, Biden has stressed how much he values the United States’ relationship with NATO and has been much more critical of Putin. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a military analyst for MSNBC, discussed Biden’s meeting with Putin during a Wednesday, June 16 appearance on MSNBC’s “The 11^th Hour” — and stressed how great a contrast it was to the Trump era.

McCaffrey told host Brian Williams, “I think, without question, that President Biden and his senior team were right to engage with the Russians and to meet Putin. There’s no question we have to have an ongoing dialogue with Putin.”

The retired general went on to say that he believes Biden is dealing with Putin from a position of strength.

McCaffrey explained, “Putin heads a state that is hostile to American interests…. They’ve interfered with our election. They’re using hackers, surrogate hackers, to attack our economic system. So, I think Mr. Biden will do just fine to show up, engage him, leave a marker on the table. But then, we must take action, or this daring, clever kleptocrat, Putin, will not change his behavior.”

The MSNBC military analyst said of Putin, “What he does have going for him is daring and a lack of respect for the law. I look at this, with almost amazement, at how far he got with Trump…. Eventually, the Russians will leak what they had to control Mr. Trump with his anti-American activities. Those days are over. Biden and his team are in charge. We don’t need military operations against the Russians, but we do need to directly confront them on cyberhacking, interference with our election.”

Whether Anthony Mackie likes it or not, there’s always been a need for queer “shipping” in media

Last month, Marvel’s Sebastian Stan, who plays the fan favorite Winter Soldier himself, warmed hearts and nodded to queer MCU fans when he gave his approval to the popular “shipping” of his character, Bucky Barnes, and Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Asked by Variety about fans celebrating the pair as a romance, Stan said, “I’m just happy that the relationship is embraced, and it should be embraced in whatever way or fashion that people desire and want it to be.”

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect answer than Stan’s, which welcomed fans to interpret and enjoy the art they see onscreen, in whatever way brings them joy. As for as imagining a worse answer, we don’t have to, because Mackie provided one.

In an interview with Variety published Thursday, the Falcon-turned-new-Captain-America actor expressed frustration with Marvel fans for “shipping” his and Stan’s characters.

“So many things are twisted and convoluted,” he said of the popular fandom ship. “There’s so many things that people latch on to with their own devices to make themselves relevant and rational.”

Mackie explained, “It used to be guys can be friends, we can hang out, and it was cool . . . You can’t do that anymore, because something as pure and beautiful as homosexuality has been exploited by people who are trying to rationalize themselves.

“There’s nothing more masculine than being a superhero and flying around and beating people up. But there’s nothing more sensitive than having emotional conversations and a kindred spirit friendship with someone that you care about and love,” he added.

First, it’s important to point out what Mackie gets right, which is the importance of portraying better, more intimate male friendships and relationships, where onscreen male friends do more than objectify women together. In Marvel’s “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” Bucky and Sam gradually put their petty differences and squabbles aside, open up to each other about their feelings of loss from the departure of their friend Steve (Chris Evans), and form a real, meaningful bond. Male friendships that go this deep are a rare in TV and movies, and Mackie is right to emphasize the importance of more “sensitive” portrayals of masculinity.

But how, exactly, does allowing fans to interpret and celebrate queer love detract from storytelling about straight male friendship? How are either of these visions and aspirations, for greater representation of queer love and queer storytelling, and more sensitive straight male characters, in conflict with each other? They’re not.

“Shipping” characters who do and don’t end up together is a tradition as old as fandom itself, and while everyone can ship anyone, shipping characters can be an especially fun and powerful experience for queer fans, who are offered so few opportunities to see themselves in stories — especially stories told by Marvel. The relatively few queer love stories we do get to see onscreen so often end in tragedy, end in characters’ queerness not being accepted, in heartbreak and struggle that can force queer audiences to relive their own traumas. LGBTQ fans are able to find joy, bonding and community in fan fiction, in their own storytelling, projection and artistic interpretation.

Mackie, of all people, should know what it’s like to fantasize about an onscreen relationship between fictional characters that isn’t going to happen — he himself has admitted he “requested” a love story between Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) and Sam “several times.” Shipping fictional characters who aren’t going to be together only really seems problematic to him when they’re of the same sex.

Apple TV+’s “Visible: Out on Television” miniseries examines the history of how queer visibility and narratives evolved on TV. And it’s not surprising that early characters were either only coded as or “claimed” as queer in the face of a dearth of real onscreen portrayals. This helps us understand why shipping is so popular among queer audiences, as a direct result of lack of representation. Maybe if the MCU actually portrayed LGBTQ characters, or LGBTQ relationships, audiences wouldn’t be forced to imagine.

Mackie’s choice to describe “homosexuality” as “pure and beautiful” also feels particularly patronizing, coming from someone who was uncomfortable enough with fans shipping his character with another man to go off on a pretty lengthy rant. Mackie, ultimately, seems to blame “SamBucky” and other queer shippers for being the reason we don’t see enough sensitive, straight male friendships on screen, when the real question should be why we can’t have more of both. Or, for that matter, what’s so harmful about fans and especially queer fans seeing and celebrating fictional love however they want?

As the actor behind the first Black Captain America, and one of the first major Black superheroes as a whole, Mackie is breaking critically important barriers for representation onscreen. His performance of Sam Wilson confronting the racist legacy of Captain America’s shield, and reckoning with continued anti-Blackness in America, in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” was groundbreaking, and essential to moving Marvel forward. But Marvel has more work to do, to include more characters of color, and also, certainly, to include more LGBTQ characters and storytelling. Queer shipping should always be welcomed by franchises with fanbases as diverse as Marvel’s — and frankly, it should be especially welcomed, when franchises like Marvel give queer fans so little to work with.

In “Changing the Game,” young trans athletes become “a beacon for their own community.”

Hulu’s powerful new documentary “Changing the Game” raises issues facing not only transgender athletes themselves, but the rules of play and how they’re often guided by misconceptions. Directed by Michael Barnett, the film features the stories of three transgender teen athletes – track star Andraya Yearwood, wrestler Mack Beggs and nordic skier Sarah Rose Huckman – who have struggled to find acceptance in their sports, while becoming powerful activists for quite literally, changing the rules of the game, state by state.

Barnett is a chronicler of difference in society – from his film about people who dress up and act as real-life “Superheroes” to his documentary “Becoming Bulletproof,” about disabled actors putting up a western. Here, we first see Mack, a wrestler who made headlines when he became the state champion of women’s wrestling in Texas because state rules only allowed him to wrestle for that category. Mack’s story, along with how his conservative Republican grandparents view their grandson, is what drew Barnett in.

In the face of rallying cries around Title IX and angry arguments against transgender inclusion in sports, “Changing the Game” presents a clear point of view in favor of supporting acceptance, not just “tolerance.” Barnett appeared on “Salon Talks” to discuss his experience making the film, the flexibility of ingrained belief systems when love and family are involved, and how these young people are taking the brunt of America’s divisiveness as they seek their authentic voice and to carve out their own space.

You can watch the “Salon Talks” interview with Barnett here or read a transcript of it below.

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

The film is so powerful. And it raises understandably complex issues facing not only transgender athletes themselves, but also the overarching rules of play. What was it that made you interested in making this film?

Well, I came to the film sort of by accident. In a very personal way, someone in my life very near and dear to me began their transition. And I very, very quickly realized that I didn’t have the knowledge and tools to advocate or be an ally in any meaningful way. And I’m a filmmaker. That’s what I’ve been doing forever. And I just kind of started to go to work and do what I do, to just kind of get up to speed, to be there, to support with unconditional love. For a lot of the cis community, we don’t have a lot of experience with trans people in the trans community. And as I was just going through and doing my due diligence to really be there for this family and this human, I came across Mack’s story. And once again, I didn’t initially think about it as a film. I just thought, “Well, this is a really interesting way to educate, to get up to speed, to think about things in a new light.” And the more I learned about Mack, the more I just thought it would make a very compelling film. And I also didn’t know if I was the filmmaker to make it, but I thought maybe I could advocate for another filmmaker.

And that’s when I reached out to Alex Schmider, who’s a producer on the film who works at GLAAD. He’s the associate director of trans media representation. And I just started asking tough questions like, “Should this film exist?” And his answer was, “Yes, the community needs it.” And the other question was, “Should it be me?” And he was like, “Well, if we build the right team, ‘we’ being the key word there, the answer is, yeah, you should make it as long as you have the right perspectives on the film.” And that perspective was really including people from the community to deeply inform the process, and the filmmaking and the storytelling. And so that’s what I did. And I did so with much trepidation, but I am really, really glad that I went on the journey.

Mack is a transgender wrestler who made headlines over the past few years. And he in the film says, “I train as a man. I compete as a man.” And none of it’s verbatim, but “I am the state championship of female high school wrestling” at the time the film was made. What was your first impression of Mack knowing his backstory?

Well, Mack is a super special individual. To have that courage and that resiliency at such a young age to just be, to just living your truth, it’s a powerful testament to who he is. And we spent, my team, a year, I think we flew to Texas three or four times during his junior year without a camera to just get to know him, establish some trust. There was a lot of media chasing him, there was a lot of interest in his story. And we wanted him to know that when the smoke cleared, if the smoke cleared, we’d still be standing there to tell the story as objectively as he was willing to share.

And it was a unique time for us because rarely when you’re making a film, do you have that kind of lead in. And it was really necessary. In this particular film, letting that family and us connect before we ever started rolling, I think that relationship really shines in the film. You can sense that we’re not some sort of cold outside journalists who are just kind of fly on the wall peeping. It’s not what the film was. It was a really personal journey for all of us.

What would you say you could suggest in your observations that we could be doing to help kids understand where these athletes have, not only a place, but a sense of understanding where everybody can meet? When a lot of people are saying this isn’t fair.

Sure. The kids are the least of my worries, I have to say, because they are all coming up right now in a time of, I don’t like the word “tolerance” because that means we have to tolerate somebody. That’s not accepting. That’s like baseline, “I’ll allow you to be in my space.” So I think tolerating the trans community from their peers is a bit of a dated notion. I think kids are just accepting. We just spent the last couple of years all over America. We shot with more kids that are in the film as well. And by and large, that intolerance, that discrimination, and that hatred come from adults. Very rarely, if ever, did we see it from their peers. Especially in sports because Mack and Sarah and Andraya, they’re beacons to their peers. They’re adored in their high schools and people like them and they have a lot of friends. And that’s not to diminish how tough their journeys are. When you’re 17-years-old and just trying to run or wrestle, and media pundits are showering hatred all over you nightly, that’s pretty complex.

So I think, honestly, the conversation amongst peers and amongst youth is, “How do we just let everyone live in their truth?” As long as that truth is authentic and it’s not hurting anybody, which, yeah. I think some of these conversations start with the wrong question. Not that you are. But I’m saying, you know, if we’re talking about fair, everyone wants to jump to “fair” because it’s a sort of a – if you’re ready to go here right now – everyone wants to have this “fair” conversation. And the conversation about fair is a little bit of the wrong conversation, especially when you’re talking about trans youth because you’re talking about a community that particularly in this moment, what, 80 something pieces of legislation being drawn up right now to legislate them out of existence. Because it’s not fair?

We’re talking about a community that has an over 40% suicide, trans youth. And we’re talking about a community that needs love and support through a very complex time in their life. And we’re talking about a community that get so discriminated out of what we take as rites of passage, basic inclusion: sports. What do you get from sports? You get community, you get discipline, you get confidence, you get mental health, physical health. You get to learn how to be the best version of yourself and challenge yourself. And these are the things we’re not talking about when we’re talking about trans in sports who deserve to benefit from the extraordinary benefits of sports.

So what we’re saying is, if we take all of this away from these kids, we exacerbate their suicide rates, we create a less safe space for them in the interest of giving the trophy to someone else. Because that’s what we’re talking about, right? When you’re like eight, nine, 10, 12, 15, we’re talking about a trophy or a human life. So if we’re putting them on a scale and weighing them, I don’t know. They feel like wildly different weights to me.

I think you have to look at both the high rates of suicide and the challenges that being excluded presents. And also, how do you address it in legislation? What are you seeing in those 80 pieces of legislation and where is there a balance? Is there a balance?

Well, I think what we’re talking about when we’re talking about legislating kids out of existence, you’re stripping them of rights. That doesn’t sound American. That doesn’t sound like who we are and what we’re made of and why this country was built. It sounds like the opposite to me. So I think we need to look at kids and treat them in a way that provides a safe space that’s full of respect, dignity, equality, inclusion. Says it in our Constitution. I think we should march towards that in all regards.

How are young athletes like your subjects finding their place?

We have a bunch of kids in our film. Andraya’s a pretty shy human. She’s pretty soft-spoken. But I have to say she’s as strong and powerful as any human I’ve ever met. And a big part of that is because of the journey that she’s been on. But she’s not competing at the NCAA level. What harm has she done by running to any other human? It’s very strange to me. And also the interesting thing is we start to talk about these policies. These policies tend to create a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. And every time I hear some pundit with an opinion on this who brings on one of the kids, it’s one of the kids from our film, which we filmed in 2018 and 2019 because kids are terrified to play sports right now if they’re in the community. As they should be. Look what’s happening. We’re basically saying “We dare you to play so we can attack you.”

So, yeah, I think when it comes to the positive benefits from the kids that I certainly know and love, what they have received from sports, from playing, is extraordinary. It’s extraordinary to watch them transition from being kids to young adults. Because now I’ve known them for enough years. Documentary films, they’re a journey as well. They take years to make. And it’s extraordinary to watch them all. And it’s not perfect. I think some of our kids, particularly some of the kids that aren’t in the film have struggled with mental health issues and struggled with some of the pressure of being who they are. I think it’s also extraordinary to watch these kids become a beacon for their own community.

Sarah Rose, your Nordic skier subject, says in the film, “Being transgender is not a choice.” So in your travels making the film, did you observe, and I hope you did, that this message is being heard more in communities across America?

It’s really interesting, and I will brazenly say this, the administrations that we had to deal with to try and get access were by and large wildly discriminatory about highlighting these students’ stories on school grounds, on school campus, until we had some pretty serious advocates with the ACLU and GLAAD. Some pretty heavy hitter advocates and activists simply say, “If this was a star athlete who wasn’t trans, you would roll out the red carpet for ESPN. What’s the difference?” And I think a lot of these administrations didn’t even realize they were being biased. I think they were sort of like, “Well, we’re trying to protect our student body.” From what? From highlighting an extraordinary kid? It’s really fascinating. And this isn’t everyone. Obviously Sarah Rose’s principal, the administration in New Hampshire, which is reckoning with its own past that very recently changed because of Sarah Rose, were really supportive of highlighting her story, allowing us access. And all the kids there were amazing.

Now, for those who say that the presence of trans athletes is wrecking sports, in how many places do you think this is an actual consistent issue versus something that happens once in a while and then it creates a media ruckus?

Yeah, sure. I mean, look, particularly right now, there’s a moment of hyper-visibility around all of this, which is interesting to me. We started this film in 2018. We filmed in 2018, 2019. And filmmaking is a journey. But for whatever reason, the universe says, “This is when the film needed to come out.” And for whatever reason, it happens to be a moment, particularly in regards to not just the media. I mean, the media is covering what is happening. But there’s this crescendo of anti-trans legislation, policy, representation in media. And it’s a little perplexing, like why all of a sudden now? And it’s obviously scary and frustrating, particularly for a community that needs love and support that’s already marginalized and vulnerable.

“Changing the Game” is now streaming on Hulu.

Aw, shucks! “12 Mighty Orphans” is the Depression-era underdog sports hokum you’ve been missing

Around the midpoint of the earnest, inspirational sports drama, “12 Mighty Orphans,” Doc Hall (Martin Sheen) describes the orphans — a Depression-era Texas interscholastic high school football team — as, “the classic underdog story common folks could get behind.” This line emphasizes everything that is both right and wrong with director Ty Roberts’ wholly mediocre film. It is impossible not to root for this scrappy ragtag team of orphans (resistance can be futile), but this statement, spoken in a didactic voiceover, full of aw-shucks sentiment and syrup, is both obvious and unnecessary.

“Inspired by true events,” and based on the novel by Jim Dent, “12 Mighty Orphans” has Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) arriving at the Masonic Home in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw), and their young daughter Betty (Josie Fink). At the same time, troubled teenager Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker) is brought into the orphanage, his father has died, and his mother is gone. Rusty has come to teach math and science and coach football; Juanita will teach English and music. Frank Wynn (Wayne Knight), manages the orphanage with a firm hand and a paddle named “Bertha” that he uses to keep the boys in line. Frank also runs a printing plant at the school, which violates many child labor laws.

Rusty, of course, is an honest, upright man and he befriends Doc who helps him manage the football team. Most of the boys have never played football, much less held a pigskin. They don’t even have shoes. Thus begins Rusty’s dogged efforts to make something out of these troubled youths. He starts espousing stories of belief and self-respect to win them over. Rusty confesses that he, too, is an orphan, and a veteran. Unnecessary flashbacks triggered by his experiences with the teens recount his tragic backstory. Rusty talks about “hope” so much it sounds like an Obama speech. The film is so damn saccharine one might check the label to see if this is Disney pabulum. (Oddly, the distributor is Sony Pictures Classics).

It would be easy (and not inexcusable) to give up on “12 Mighty Orphans” in its first half hour. When Doc tells Rusty, “The best horses are the hardest to break” — referring to Hardy Brown who doesn’t hide his anger — viewers might put up their arms in reflex to brace against being cudgeled. Moreover, there are plenty of remarks about the orphans being feared and stigmatized, misfits and outcasts, as well as second-class citizens. Rusty and Juanita talk about having a “chance to make a real difference,” because life inside the Masonic Home, a “cold, uncaring institution,” is said to hold “very little promise.” The filmmakers clearly think it is no use to say something once when three times will do.

However, “12 Mighty Orphans” hits its stride once the orphans get to play their first game. That said, this is after Rusty takes care of getting the Masonic Team admitted into the league, and the cliched montages of the teens “learning” so they can pass the educational requirement to play, and their practicing, badly, on the field. The first game is against Polytechnic, coached by Luther (Lane Garrison, who co-wrote the screenplay), who always has a cigar in his mouth (that’s a clue for villainous). To call the game a “David vs. Goliath” match, which the film, of course, does, is to state the obvious. Meanwhile, Rusty speechifies about “heart, focus, and conviction,” something Ty Roberts’ film has in abundance.

The game is a washout, but soon Rusty, with the help of his precocious daughter, Betty, develops an innovative new formation that starts to turn the team’s fortune (and the film) around. It is entertaining to watch the Mighty Mites — as they are soon dubbed — start winning. The boys begin to develop the sense of confidence and brotherhood that Rusty repeatedly promised them. The team is so winning that the film’s lapse into outright melodrama — when the mother of an orphan returns for her son — is forgivable.

That said, a subplot involving Frank trying to destroy the team’s chances, because he greedily wants the child labor, is pretty awful; it is depicted with the subtlety of Bertha. The attempt to disqualify the team, which has — spoiler alert, won the regional semifinals — features what may be the film’s hokiest bit: a call from President Roosevelt (Larry Pine).

However, “12 Mighty Orphans” saves its biggest, emotional moment for a rousing halftime speech Hardy gives during an important game. It is the kind of scene designed to be projected on jumbotrons during local sports games. And Jake Austin Walker, the film’s breakout player, delivers it with gusto. It may be absolute hokum, but it works.
Luke Wilson is perfectly adequate in his role as Rusty, a man whose contributions to football are worth documenting. But it is Martin Sheen, who steals the film as Doc. And he even gets a scene that reunites him with his “Apocalypse Now” costar, Robert Duvall, who plays an Orphans supporter.

“12 Mighty Orphans” is a feel-good football film. It’s just not very good. But at times, it is good enough.

“12 Mighty Orphans” opens nationwide on Friday, June 18.

Arizona election audit takes wild turn: Voter data is transported to a “secret” lab in another state

The Republican-led Arizona audit being conducted by the Florida-based tech company Cyber Ninjas took an unexpected turn after voter data was transported to a mystery “lab” in Montana to be “forensically evaluated” by a third party.

At some point during the audit, CyFIR — a digital security firm subcontracted by Cyber Ninjas — was enlisted to examine ballots. But it wasn’t until Arizona Republic reporter Jen Fifield started digging through a state-run “SOS” website posting audit updates that she noticed “copies” of data were being “sent to a lab in Montana.”

Upon further research, the Arizona Republic traced the data’s whereabouts back to a Montana property whose owner was listed as CyFIR CEO Ben Cotton on public records.

Cotten is also the CEO of Cyber Technologies (CyTech), the parent company of CyFIR. Both companies are based out of Virginia, but they also share the same northwest Montana “Bigfork” address on documents.

At the time, Ken Bennett, an audit official, informed the Arizona Republic that he wasn’t aware of how the data in the hands of Cotton and his firms was being kept safe. Weeks later, Bennett told CNN that CYFIR was allowed to send copies of voter data to Montana on a truck.

“Bennett tells us he doesn’t know where the so-called ‘lab’ is,” CNN reporter Gary Tuchman said during the televised report. “It is apparently a secret.”

A request by Salon for comment from CyTech President Timothy Poole and Cotton went unreturned.

While local news reports on the matter have been circulating over the past few weeks, the story didn’t catch wind until Tuchman took viewers to Cotton’s Montana address on Wednesday.

Arizona voting system data has been taken by truck to a so-called "secure powerful laboratory" in rural Montana to be "forensically evaluated."@GaryTuchmanCNN visits the area to investigate. pic.twitter.com/Om5fW19Wx5

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) June 17, 2021

While the CNN reporter got within eye-shot of a cabin on the Montana property, he could not walk beyond that point due to a “private property” sign that warned against trespassing.

According to additional reporting conducted by CNN, the sprawling property owned by Cotton has numerous structures on site. It remains unclear whether the “lab” is actually located on the property — or if it even exists.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs shared the feature report, which has since caught the attention of many on social media.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” Hobbs told CNN. “If it wasn’t happening right in front of our eyes, we wouldn’t believe it was happening.”

You can watch more below via Twitter:

Arizona voting system data has been taken by truck to a so-called "secure powerful laboratory" in rural Montana to be "forensically evaluated."@GaryTuchmanCNN visits the area to investigate. pic.twitter.com/Om5fW19Wx5

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) June 17, 2021

Led by Trump’s old doctor, over a dozen GOP lawmakers demand Biden take a cognitive test

Former Trump doctor turned Texas Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson, whose tenure in the Trump administration was filled with drinking alcohol and taking Ambien on the job, urged fellow lawmakers in a Thursday letter to join him in demanding that President Joe Biden take a cognitive fitness exam.

Jackson, who began seeking the support of colleagues last week for the letter, has garnered 13 fellow Republicans, including Reps. Andy Harris and Brian Babin, among other lesser-known GOP members. The congressman took to Twitter on Thursday to further state that he would be sending the letter to the president, Biden’s physician, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Dr. @RepRonnyJackson just sent his letter to @JoeBiden calling on him to take a cognitive test. It was signed by 13 other Republicans pic.twitter.com/tGW1StNBiS

— Scott Wong (@scottwongDC) June 17, 2021

During an interview with The Hill, Jackson claimed that Biden doesn’t even know where he is located, a repeated Republican talking point that baselessly asserts Biden’s mental health is in decline.

“Just everything that has been going on for the last year and a half…[Biden] doesn’t know what’s going on, where he’s at,” the congressman told the publication. “He’s very confused all the time.”

Given the precedent set and President Biden’s CLEAR mental struggles, I believe it’s past time he take a cognitive test.

I sent a letter to him saying just that! ⬇️https://t.co/6RCKj7pFYd

— Ronny Jackson (@RepRonnyJackson) June 17, 2021

In a subsequent Thursday statement, Jackson said that the American people “deserve to have absolute confidence in their President.” He added that voters “deserve to know that he or she can perform the duties demanded of the office, and they deserve to have full transparency on the mental state of their highest elected leader.”

“I would argue that the American people don’t have that confidence in President Biden. When I was Physician to President Donald J. Trump, the liberal media relentlessly pushed a narrative that he needed a cognitive test and that it should be the standard for anyone serving as Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” the former Trump doctor said. “Given the precedent set and Biden’s clear mental impairment, I believe it is past time he undergo a cognitive test.”

Jackson additionally appeared on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s program Thursday night and rattled off a similar spiel.

“He’s [Biden] not physically or cognitively fit to be our president right now. And I just think that he’s not inspiring confidence in the American people. He’s not inspiring confidence in our allies overseas,” the congressman told the Fox host, who frequently refers to Biden as “sippy cup Joe.” “And more importantly, it’s sending the wrong message to our adversaries overseas.”

During his time in the White House, the ex-Trump doctor said back in 2018 that the former president was in “excellent” health. Such a claim was made, despite Trump seen frequently eating junk food and burgers. Jackson also touted that Trump scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on a cognitive exam deliver by the Trump-friendly medical expert.

Attacking and billing Biden as “weak” and not “confident” has long been a GOP attack line against the current president, which isn’t a very successful one.

Joe Manchin gets hoodwinked — again: Why does he keep falling for the Republican con?

On paper, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has produced an elegant solution to the voting rights problem that addresses both Democratic concerns about protecting fair elections and Republican concerns about voter fraud. For months now, Democrats have been touting twin bills — the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — offering a broad array of democracy reforms, from reducing the impact of money in politics to standardizing ballot access across the country. Republicans, however, have opposed these bills at every turn, pretending to be fearful of “voter fraud,” which is so rare as to not be anything even approaching a real problem in the U.S. But Manchin has sworn up and down that bills must be “bipartisan” to get his support, refusing to reform the Senate filibuster, even though Republicans use it to block every big bill Democrats want to bring to a vote. So this week Manchin offered what he touted as a compromise bill, a long list of items for legislation he would support.

Manchin’s proposal is not half-bad! It has concessions to Republican concerns, such as as having a national voter ID, but sets standards for how it can be done in a uniform and fair fashion. It would ban partisan gerrymandering, which would level the playing field for both parties. It does a great deal to protect and advance voting rights, while also addressing the main objections that Republicans have to the both of the other bills that Democrats have offered.

So Republicans responded by publicly thanking Manchin for listening to their concerns, treating them with respect, and giving them a bill that they are happy to vote for, right?

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Ha ha ha, no!

Only someone born yesterday — or a 73-year-old Democratic senator from West Virginia — could be so naive as to think that would happen. Instead, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., got to work demonizing Manchin’s proposal. First, McConnell seized on the fact that voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams publicly came out in favor of Manchin’s proposal, saying, “the plan endorsed by Stacey Abrams is no compromise.”

As Joan Walsh of The Nation wrote, “he had his caucus at ‘Stacey Abrams,'” because invoking her name “branded a proposal by a Democrat from a very white (and red) state as ‘Black.'” But just in case folks didn’t get McConnell’s (unsubtle) implication, he also tossed around terms certain to raise racist fears in conservative white people, like “cancel culture” and “name-and-shame.” (GOP focus group testing apparently shows that white people are absolutely terrified that the world will find out about that time they used a racial slur in college.) Pandering to racist whites is the core strategy of the modern GOP and Senate Republicans no doubt heard McConnell loud and clear on this front.

McConnell also denied that the absolute flood of voter suppression and vote nullification laws being passed by Republican state legislatures “are designed to suppress the vote.” Since that’s all that such laws exist to do, McConnell is letting Manchin know that he is not bound by even the pretense of honesty or good faith when it comes to opposing any and all efforts at protecting free and fair elections in the U.S.

The reason is straightforward: The Republican Party has become radicalized against democracy. That’s why they refused to convict Donald Trump when he was impeached for trying to cheat in an election and then refused to convict him when he was impeached for inciting an insurrection. It’s why the party is passing state laws faster than they can write them to make it harder to vote and to make it easier to nullify election results. For many Republican leaders, it’s because they are deeply racist and just loathe the idea of people of color having equal ballot access. But even those who aren’t personally bigoted know Republicans cannot win majorities with free and fair elections, so they are instead trying to kneecap democracy itself.

As Zack Beauchamp wrote at Vox, “The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda,” and their main goal is “rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely.” Asking such people to back a federal voting rights bill, however watered down, is a joke. Why on earth would they do anything that would slow down or even prevent the number one GOP goal: permanent minority rule?

The strategy that Republicans are using to hoodwink Manchin is the same they have used for decades to hoodwink Democrats: Pretend to be interested in a “compromise,” mire the Democrats in endless negotiations, and run out the clock until elections. Then Republicans will run on a platform of accusing Democrats of getting nothing done, while ignoring the fact that Republican bad faith is why Democrats got nothing done. They’re currently running this same playbook on Manchin when it comes to the infrastructure bill, wasting his time with negotiations on a bill they will never, ever actually vote for. Manchin has been told, over and over and over and over and over, that this is how Republicans operate, and yet, like a chicken who can’t help banging his head against the wall all day, he just keeps acting like the barrier is about to crumble.

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Democratic leaders are hopeful that Manchin will wake up to reality after watching McConnell take this carefully crafted compromise, crumple it into tissue paper and blow his nose in it. That assumes, unfortunately, that Manchin is capable of learning from experience.

The tea leaf reading on this front is, well, mixed.

On one hand, as Igor Derysh reports, Manchin got interestingly timed donations from corporate funders who have an economic interest in this GOP plan to wind down democracy. So this may be a classic case of someone protecting his own self-interest, even if at the expense of not just his party but his nation. On the flip side, Manchin told another group of donors that he’s open to filibuster reform. Even if he is not motivated by serving the voters or his party, Manchin is torn between two sets of donors, which is something.

Time will tell, but right now, things aren’t looking good. Manchin appears to have an endless appetite for letting Republicans run out the clock with fake negotiations, either because he’s an idiot or because he himself would rather not ever have to vote on actual bills. Unfortunately, the very fate of our democracy really does hang in the balance and Manchin is too busy pretending Republicans could be heroes to see them for the villains they actually are.

After Pride, corporations will “ditch these gays” but the harm will already be done

Who knew that a scathing commentary about rainbow capitalism would come from a teen comedy? In Hulu’s queer young adult series “Love, Victor,” teenager Lake (Bebe Wood) is with pal Victor (Michael Cimino) and his new boyfriend when her friend Mia (Rachel Naomi Hilson) calls, asking to hang out now that she’s home from summer camp.

“Queens before peens,” Lake responds gleefully. “I mean, you say the word, and I will ditch these gays like a corporation after Pride month.”

The line couldn’t have landed more perfectly during Pride, right now, with social media platforms awash with corporations ranging from weapons manufacturer Raytheon to Bank of America changing their profile pictures to rainbows. However, the reality is that many of the corporations that proudly don rainbow symbols and pro-LGBTQ messaging exclusively during Pride either spend the entire year actively perpetuating the oppression of the most marginalized, or even donating large sums of money to anti-LGBTQ politicians. Among corporations that might not overtly harm LGBTQ folks, as Lake suggested in her aforementioned, sizzling one-liner, these corporations have a well-earned reputation for “ditching” LGBTQ people and causes after June, once doing so is no longer as profitable.

This surface-level show of “support” for LGBTQ people, mostly as a PR stunt, might have seemed like progress as recently as a few years ago, when some in our culture were still debating whether LGBTQ people had a right to exist at all, let alone deserved acknowledgement or celebration. And to be clear, this overt and violent oppression has continued in many spaces — just take a look at the dozens of state legislatures introducing bills to practically write transgender kids out of existence. But in many parts of society, signaling support for LGBTQ people with symbols and social media posts — while denying LGBTQ workers a living wage — has become profitable and advantageous. This phenomenon has become widely known as “rainbow capitalism,” which directly contradicts the spirit of Pride itself.

Pride is historically rooted in anti-carceral, anti-capitalist sentiment and activism, as well as people-power, community, autonomy and revolution – with or without the approval of billionaires. Corporations rehabilitating their image for profit off the backs of LGBTQ people who remain economically and socially marginalized to this day isn’t “Pride” — it’s rainbow capitalism.

Corporations the day after Pride ends https://t.co/cXvVLMdBEi

— Jezzer, Mean Gay Era (2001-present) (@Jezzerat) July 3, 2019

What is “rainbow capitalism”?

To celebrate International Women’s Day in 2018, McDonald’s famously flipped its iconic “M” to be a “W,” presumably for “women,” one might guess. The hollow gesture was widely mocked on social media, and for good reason — for years, women workers at McDonald’s have reported sexual harassment and abusive work environments, low pay, poor conditions, and more, and in return, they received a flipped letter sign.

While this particular example applies to women workers, the spirit of McDonald’s legendary blunder is the epitome of rainbow capitalism, which refers to corporations’ annual attempts to cosplay as LGBTQ allies for approximately one month a year. They profit off of their glossy, progressive images, while exploiting LGBTQ workers, donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians, and committing other hypocritical acts. Another word for rainbow capitalism is pandering — billionaires and corporations don’t really care about the plight of LGBTQ communities, and certainly not the LGBTQ workers they underpay and exploit. They care about getting our money through any means necessary, including by pretending to care about us.

Rainbow capitalism is especially offensive because of the continued economic oppression of queer people. Twenty-two percent of LGBTQ people live in poverty, compared with 16% of cis, straight people. Another survey from 2012 found 20% of LGBTQ people living alone had annual incomes of less than $12,000. Trans people specifically are twice as likely to be living in poverty; trans people of color are three times as likely.

Who are the worst offenders?

What a fun Pride display 🏳️‍🌈! But what’s not fun is that American Airlines donated $46,617 to Mitch McConnell’s 2020 campaign — while he was actively blocking the Equality Act from becoming law. pic.twitter.com/Sp4GQat9qk

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 7, 2021

It would be impossible to put together a comprehensive list of every corporation that’s taken part in rainbow capitalism, but some offenders are especially cringe-inducing.

American Airlines‘ flashy display of rainbow-washed cover banners and profile pictures on its social media profiles, while being exposed for donating nearly $50,000 to Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2020, is one glaring example of this.
Then, of course, there’s AT&T, which very publicly gives to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ youth, with one hand, and staunchly anti-LGBTQ politicians, with the other.
Walmart has the audacity to sell Pride merchandise, after having been sued in 2015 for discrimination for denying benefits to a same-sex couple. As recently as last year, Walmart donated $150,000 to McConnell and other Republican Senators.

“Do you really want to be ‘represented’ in advertisements all while the same company pays politicians who are opposed to your existence?” The Independent’s Victoria Gagliardo-Silver wrote in a recent column. “And exactly how does a Bud Light ad saying ‘Let’s get beers tonight, queens,” actually benefit the community rather than stereotyping us further?”

You might wonder what’s more incriminating, between the overt hypocrisy of the aforementioned corporations, and the unabashed homophobia of the likes of Chik-fil-A — the answer is simply all of the above.

Justice for queer communities isn’t just about flashy media campaigns, rainbow imagery, and branded Pride merchandise. It isn’t about celebrating openly LGBTQ billionaire, who made their billions from exploiting working-class LGBTQ folks.

Pride and all social justice movements that aim to empower marginalized identities are about supporting and redistributing power to uplift those with the least power — not lifting up individuals to carry out the oppression of those beneath them. Exploitation is the same, and hurts queer people no matter who’s overseeing it.

What does authentic support for the LGBTQ community look like?

As the old social media adage goes, “We live in a society.” In other words, boycotting every homophobic corporation is unfortunately impossible in a society in which capitalism has allowed them to hold such a monopoly on some of the most essential products and facets of day-to-day life. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to have an impact where it’s possible.

The internet and social media have made finding, shopping and recommending queer and queer people of color-owned small businesses simple and easy. Internet databases like Open Secrets have also made it just as easy to do some homework and spot an anti-LGBTQ corporation from a mile away.

And then, of course, there’s the most fun approach of all: following and supporting LGBTQ storytelling. The punchy roast of corporate Pride celebrations on “Love, Victor” (now in its second season) wouldn’t have been possible without the show itself, a relatable and endearing story of a Latinx teen questioning and discovering his sexuality, before embarking on his first gay relationship. And fortunately, there’s a multitude of LGBTQ-friendly shows out there to choose from these days, most recently the critically acclaimed “Pose,” chill skate series “Betty,” and punk rock comedy “We Are Lady Parts.”

Ironically, since rainbow capitalism is rooted in corporate inauthenticity for profit, Pride is all about authenticity, encouraging and empowering LGBTQ people to live their most authentic lives. We can’t allow corporations to co-opt this.