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Officer injured in Capitol riot blasts GOP lawmaker who refused to shake his hand as a “coward”

A DC Metropolitan Police officer is the latest to remind us that for many GOP members of Congress, support for law enforcement is conditioned on partisan loyalties. 

Michael Fanone, who was injured after being stun-gunned several times and beaten with a flagpole during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, blasted GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde for what he says was “disgusting” behavior during an in-person exchange at Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon.

Fanone had visited the Capitol after 21 House Republicans voted against legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal and honor officers who defended against the violent January 6 insurrection. On CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight,” Fanone told host Don Lemon that he ran into the Georgia Republican but was quickly dismissed by the congressman.

Having suffered a traumatic brain injury as well as a heart attack “after being tased numerous times at the base of my skull, as well as being severely beaten,” Fanone says he returned to Capitol Hill in an attempt to speak to any of the 21 House Republicans about his experience. 

Clyde, who has downplayed the insurrection repeatedly, has also given false accounts of the events on January 6 according to a CNN report.

“I was very cordial. I extended my hand to shake his hand. He just stared at me,” Fanone said on CNN. “I asked if he was going to shake my hand, and he told me that he didn’t know who I was.”

Once the elevator doors opened, Fanone said Clyde “ran, as quickly as he could, like a coward.”

Fanone said he took his interaction with Clyde “very personally,” saying it was an insult and “middle finger” not only to himself, but also to every officer who bravely responded to defend the Capitol on January 6.

A second insurrection: The real mission behind Republicans’ absurd Arizona “audit”

During the Trump years, it always felt as if the news cycle was running at 110 miles an hour and we were just hanging on for dear life. And it was true. There was always something terrible going on. Most people looked forward to the day that everything would slow down to a normal pace and we’d all be able to spend more time thinking about something other than the latest lunacy coming from the White House.

That time is now. The chaos has more or less, sort of, come to pass. The daily outrage meter has been turned down to eleven and it feels as if the whole government is operational instead of just the oval office and whichever corrupt Trump minion happens to be in the headlines. But there is still a whole lot going on, from foreign policy settling down into something vaguely recognizable as sane American participation in world affairs, to the Justice Department coming to terms with the wholesale corruption of the institution over the past four years to the gripping saga of the Democratic agenda wending its way through Congress. On Thursday, we even saw the Supreme Court once again uphold the Affordable Care Act, eliciting a huge sigh of relief from the 30 million people who had been waiting with bated breath to find out if they were going to have health insurance when they woke up this morning.

The federal government is busy and for the most part, it’s doing what Americans employ it to do. It’s not always pretty but it seems to be cranking up and becoming at least somewhat functional.

But that doesn’t mean the craziness has stopped or that we can assume that the bad dream we just went through for the past four years is over. Sadly, it’s not. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte noted yesterday, Trump and his loyal servants in the right-wing media (or is it the other way around?) have whizzed past delusional and have moved into full-blown insanity. She wonders what the Democrats are going to do about it and I agree with her that it doesn’t look like much. As Marcotte says, “the [Republican] party has reorganized itself entirely around the goal of making sure that next time Trump tries to steal an election, he pulls it off.”

But I actually think it may be worse than that. The various undemocratic power grabs in the state are raising expectations among the faithful to such an extent that they may actually be leading to another insurrection.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump and the Bulwark’s Tim Miller both wrote pieces in the last week or so taking a look at the way the “audit” in Arizona and the flurry of similar activity in some of the other states (including those Trump won, which means the point is nothing more than to further discredit the entire electoral system) and they concluded that energy these gambits are producing may inevitably result in more violence.

Bump notes that there were two factors that led to what happened on January 6th. First, Trump’s followers were persuaded that the election had been stolen with a steady stream of lies from Trump and the right-wing media. Second, they were called to gather on the specific day the vote was to be formally certified by a joint session of Congress to stand against it. We know what happened. Now they remain agitated and upset over the Big Lie and there hasn’t been anywhere for them to focus all of that wrath. In light of this week’s FBI assessment that QAnon may be moving away from digital extremism into real-world violence, this bogus Arizona audit may be the catalyst they’ve been looking for.

In his piece, Miller points out that the GOP establishment is ostensibly dismissing the three-ring “Cyber Ninja” circus happening in Arizona’s Maricopa County as a joke while the Trump supporters are taking it very, very seriously. And when this audit eventually concludes, as it surely will, that the Arizona election was definitely stolen, the odds are that some Trump supporters are going to believe they have an obligation to take action.

Miller writes:

Activists in the QAnon movement have described the audit as the first step in “The Great Awakening.” And Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward has threatened “arrests” of those who did not comply with the audit. (N.B.: The Arizona Republican Party does not yet have the power to detain citizens for crimes against MAGA.)…

Steve Bannon’s War Room, which was the official podcast of the “Stop The Steal” rallies last fall, is playing the same role in unofficial fashion in Arizona and has found an audience for the grift. (At the time of this writing, War Room was the tenth-biggest news podcast on the Apple charts.) The thirstiest and craziest MAGA Republicans around the country have all made the hajj to Maricopa to either learn how they can bring the insurrection to their states or signal their allegiance to primary voters. The frontrunner in the Missouri race to succeed the retiring Senator Roy Blunt, Eric Greitens, is the latest of this latter group.

Miller asks, “doesn’t this sound familiar?”

Indeed it does. It was this churning and agitation for someone to “do something” to “save the country” that led all those people to lose their minds that day in January and start beating cops and hunting down former Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Miller then wonders, “when the Arizona audit bell tolls, what exactly is McConnell and McCarthy’s plan?”

Unfortunately, I think I have the answer. The New York Times’ Jonathan Weissman reported that the GOP plan to win in 2022 is to ensure that America believes it is “in crisis.”

There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis. Pressed this week on whether the nation was really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, “yet another crisis,” he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis.

“Unfortunately they’re all real,” he said, capping a 25-minute news conference in which the word “crisis” was used once a minute, “and they’re all being caused by President Biden’s actions.”

It’s highly debatable if they can convince Americans that all those concerns represent a crisis and I don’t think Scalise believes it either. He’s really ginning up the Republican base about the Big Lie “crisis” which is literally the only thing they really care about. They most certainly believe that all their troubles are “being caused by President Biden’s actions” — in allegedly stealing the election. If this audit or series of audits inspire some die-hards to commit a little domestic terrorism for the cause, that’s all to the good. After all, that really will be a crisis and Republicans have decided that’s just what the doctor ordered. 

For toddlers, pandemic shapes development during formative years

CASTLE POINT, Mo. — Lucretia Wilks, who runs a small day care out of her home in north St. Louis County, is used to watching young children embrace, hold hands and play together in close quarters.

But the covid-19 pandemic made such normal toddler behavior potentially unsafe.

“It’s weird that they now live in a time where they’re expected to not hug and touch,” said Wilks, founder of Their Future’s Bright Child Development Center, which cares for about a dozen children ranging from infants to 7 years old. “They’re making bonds, friendships, and that’s how they show affection.”

Day care and other child care providers said they are relieved to see covid cases drop as vaccines roll out across the United States. But even as the nation reopens, mental health and child development experts wonder about what, if any, long-term mental health and development consequences young children may face.

In the short term, medical and child development experts said the pandemic has harmed even young children’s mental health and caused them to miss important parts of typical social and emotional development. Besides not being able to get as close to other people as usual, many young children have seen their routines interrupted or experienced family stress when parents have lost jobs or gotten sick. The pandemic and its economic fallout have also forced many families to change caregiving arrangements.

“Coronavirus is impacting children and families in many ways mentally. The biggest and most obvious way is in the children’s structure and routine,” said Dr. Mini Tandon, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Young kids thrive in structure and routine, so when you disrupt that, things go awry pretty quickly in their day-to-day lives.”

Tandon, who has spoken frequently with parents and caregivers since the pandemic began, said she and her peers have seen more severe anxiety and high levels of stress in young children than in the past.

Child behavior experts pointed to a number of problems exacerbated by the pandemic in a National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness webinar last year, including separation anxiety and clinginess, sleep issues and challenges learning new information. Children have also shown regressive behaviors — wetting the bed even though they’ve been potty-trained, for example.

For young children, changes in caregiving arrangements can be a huge source of stress. And the financial strain of the pandemic forced many families to rethink how they cared for their youngest children.

The average monthly child care cost in Missouri, for example, is $584 for 4-year-olds and $837 for infants, according to Procare Solutions, which works with over 30,000 programs for children. That has been too high for some parents who lost their jobs in the pandemic. President Joe Biden’s covid relief plan signed into law in March gives monthly payments of up to $300 per child this year and his latest proposal would help reduce child care costs and increase access to preschool, if approved.

But in the many months when day care has been out of reach, some parents have had to rearrange their work schedules to care for infants or toddlers while also helping school-age children with virtual learning. Others have relied on grandparents for help, although that option was potentially dangerous before vaccines were available. Keeping children apart from grandparents has been tough for both kids and seniors.

Even when parents could afford day care, fear of getting or spreading covid affected their choices about whether and when to send them. And some facilities closed temporarily during the pandemic.

Aimee Witzl, 34, of St. Louis, an accountant and new mom, said she and her husband were hesitant to send their daughter, Riley Witzl, to day care early in the pandemic. Riley was born prematurely in November 2019 and had to spend nine weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit before coming home. So, the couple waited until August to send her to day care part time, then until January to send her full time.

“We were already high-risk,” Witzl said. “Then covid happened, so we kept her home even longer than planned.”

Fortunately, she said, no one in her family has contracted the virus.

In March 2020, the Early Childhood Development Action Network, a global collection of agencies and institutions promoting child health and safety, put out a “call to action” shared by the World Health Organization saying they were concerned about the pandemic putting “children at great risk of not reaching their full potential” because the early years are a “critical window of rapid brain development that lays the foundation for health, wellbeing and productivity throughout life.”

Tandon, the Washington University psychiatrist, said she’s especially worried about young children who may have been isolated in unsafe homes where they were mistreated. Maltreatment is more likely to go unnoticed, she said, when children are outside of the day cares and schools where adults are required to report child abuse and neglect.

But Tandon said the stresses of the pandemic can affect the mental health of any child, which motivated her to write a children’s book about a girl dealing with anxiety during the pandemic.

Now, though covid vaccinations still remain months away for the youngest children, a shift is occurring that may cause a new round of disruptions for them. Nancy Rotter, a child psychologist and assistant professor at Harvard University, said young children may be experiencing separation anxiety as they fully transition back into their schools and day cares after being at home with their parents.

To help kids heal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests families make sure kids stay connected to relatives and friends. The agency also advises that parents do their best to recognize and address fear and stress in themselves and their kids and seek professional help if needed. CDC experts suggest parents talk about emotions and provide opportunities for children to express their fears in a safe place.

Yet as children and toddlers return to a new normal, it may not be as strange to them as it is for adults. Though the pandemic has presented stressors, Rotter said, children can be very resilient.

“Supportive caregivers and supportive emotional environments help with resilience in the child,” she said. “Resilience is not just what’s in the child, but what’s within the child’s environment. It’s the home, religious community, school and day care environment that aid in the child’s development and how they cope with changes.”

And the pandemic may leave behind one benefit for children: the emphasis on washing hands. Child care experts said good hygiene habits are an important life lesson that will likely last beyond this health crisis.

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

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Think climate change isn’t “click-worthy”? These bots disagree

When you hear about bots in the news, it’s usually something bad. Bots, bits of software designed to perform routine tasks for their human creators, are often associated with scam calls, fake social media accounts, or spreading disinformation, even though most are relatively benign, like chatbots.

But there’s a new kind of bot out there, and it’s trying to raise the alarm about the climate crisis, one click at a time. Two New York City-based artist-engineers started a project called Synthetic Messenger, a botnet (short for “robot network”) that visits articles about the overheating planet and increases their visibility by clicking every single ad on the page. The thinking behind it is that all these clicks (called “engagement” in industry-speak) send revenue to news outlets, encouraging more climate coverage. Over the course of a week and a half earlier this month, the bots visited 2 million climate articles and clicked on 6 million ads.

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, the duo behind the project, say they’re trying to draw attention to how online algorithms are altering perceptions of the climate crisis — and how the news cycle influences the carbon cycle.

Bots have been playing a role in spreading fake news about global warming. During the horrific bushfires that started burning in Australia in 2019, for instance, an analysis found that bots and trolls had exaggerated the role of arsonists, downplaying the link with climate change. 

Compounding the problem is that an article’s prominence is getting determined by these “rapidly changing black-box algorithmic systems,” said Brain, an assistant professor of digital media at New York University. Ads about the “Global Warming Hoax” have ended up at the top of Google search results, tailored to an individuals’ search history. YouTube’s algorithms have been accused of promoting climate denial videos in its “up next” feature, sending people down a misinformation rabbit hole. 

Another issue is that much of the mainstream media relies on revenue from page views and ad clicks to keep their operations humming. And climate change has been called a “ratings killer” — not exactly “click-worthy.” Though there are plenty of ways to make such articles engaging, that stigma can lead to less coverage of our planetary predicament. “Questions about engagement, clicks, and ad revenue — they certainly do contribute to editorial decisions about what topics are covered, how they’re covered, and how stories are promoted,” said Lavigne, an artist and educator in New York.

Lavigne said that Synthetic Messenger is more about making an artistic statement than offering a realistic solution to the problem — though if the project was scaled up, he supposed, “it could shift the needle in some sense.” For him, it’s a way to highlight the problems with how people get information online, “towards the ends of disrupting a power system or undermining it, rather than propping it up.”

Bots are everywhere online, often performing tedious tasks, yet Brain said that they’ve become “the straw man for a lot of political issues in the U.S.” (Are bots really responsible for “poisoning democracy,” or are other factors at play?) Lavigne said that Synthetic Messenger is a response to this overblown discourse, a way of “demystifying” bots. Earlier this month, they hosted a creepy Zoom-call-turned-art-project featuring livestreams of what each of the 100 bots was up to on their computer screens. Brain and Lavigne used images of volunteers’ hands and recordings of them saying “scroll” and “click” to illustrate what the bots were doing as they paged through the articles. 

“Just to be clear, there’s no reason that these bots need to do anything visual at all,” Lavigne said. “I think part of what was fun about this as a performance was to think about a way to show the audience what was happening.” 

It’s not Lavigne’s first foray into experimenting with Zoom performance art. He also invented a tool called Zoom Escaper that helps you escape from videoconference meetings by self-sabotaging your audio, “making your presence unbearable to others” by adding an annoying echo, construction noise, or the sound of a crying baby in the background.

Brain and Lavigne put some safeguards in place to make sure that the Synthetic Messenger bots are not clicking on articles that promote straight-up climate denial — you know, the idea that warming temperatures are the result of solar radiation or whatever. They have a “denial list” blocking certain sites, including ones owned by Rupert Murdoch.

It’s unclear who’s behind the climate-denying bots, but there are some obvious suspects. The field of public relations has been closely linked with oil companies for more than a century, with spinmasters helping the industry downplay misdeeds, twist facts, and cajole the media into repeating their talking points. In the spring of 2017, when former President Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an analysis found that one-quarter of all tweets about climate change were generated by bots. The study’s authors speculated that the bots were probably the work of fossil fuel companies, petro-states like Saudi Arabia, or the public relations agencies that work for them. 

“The fossil fuel industry for a long time has known that if you can control the narrative, you can influence the carbon cycle,” Brain said. 

The classic image of the carbon cycle, which shows how carbon dioxide flows around the planet through photosynthesis, decomposition, respiration, and combustion, “leaves so much out” in terms of the influence of culture and politics, Brain said. Synthetic Messenger offers an alternative version that puts the news media in the picture, sandwiched between fossil fuel emissions and carbon sequestration from plants and soil.

The Synthetic Messenger bots are on pause for now — the project was intended to be a performance for a Dutch arts festival this month exploring society and technology. But Lavigne said that the bots may get a reboot in the future, either as part of another performance or a longer-term effort.

Brain and Lavigne see the media manipulation practiced by their bots as a form of “climate engineering,” a term that normally refers to large-scale schemes to dim the sun or suck carbon dioxide out of the air. 

“At a time when our action or inaction has distinct atmospheric effects,” the Synthetic Messenger site reads, “the news we see and the narratives that shape our beliefs also directly shape the climate.”

Experts rebuke Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that the FBI was responsible for the Capitol insurrection

Tucker Carlson is putting a new, disturbing spin on the Capitol insurrection, and this time, it involves the (FBI). On Wednesday, June 16, the Fox News host sounded off as he laid out the basis of his latest theory which appears to be another attempt to deflect blame from supporters of former President Donald Trump.

According to The Washington Post, Carlson has suggested that “the presence of unindicted co-conspirators in the Capitol riot indictments means those people are government agents and that this, in turn, means the FBI was involved in organizing the riot.”

At one point during the segment, Carlson said, “Strangely, some of the key people who participated on Jan. 6 have not been charged. Look at the document. The government calls those people unindicted co-conspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives.”

He went on to highlight the indictment of Thomas Caldwell, as an example. Although Caldwell is facing charges, the other two co-conspirators mentioned in his case, have not been charged. Apparently, Carlson believes this may be some form of indication of a conspiracy that supports his assumptions.

But wait, here’s the interesting thing: Person Two and Person Three were organizers of the riot. The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that?

You know why: They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So, FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to government documents.

And those two are not alone. In all, Revolver News reported there are, quote, “upwards of 20 unindicted co-conspirators in the Oath Keeper indictments, all playing various roles in the conspiracy who have not been charged for virtually the exact same activities, and in some cases, much, much more severe activities as those named alongside them in the indictments.”

Huh? So it turns out that this “white supremacist” insurrection was, again by the government’s own admission in these documents, organized at least in part by government agents.

Adding to his claims, Carlson also tied in FBI Director Christopher A. Wray as he reiterated the government’s intent on infiltrating extremist groups.

However, legal experts are already pushing back against Carlson’s claims arguing that the government cannot include names of agents as unindicted co-conspirators. David Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School explained that there are “many reasons why an indictment would reference unindicted co-conspirators, but their status as FBI agents is not one of them.”

Lisa Kern Griffin, a Duke University Law School professor, also echoed similar sentiments as she detailed the role of undercover agents. “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.”

She added, “An unindicted co-conspirator has committed the crime of conspiracy, and investigative agents doing their jobs undercover are not committing crimes.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter: 

Why Trump must be prosecuted: Nothing less can break the twisted bond with his supporters

Manhattan’s district attorney has convened the grand jury that will determine if charges should be brought against former President Donald Trump. The Boston Globe editorial board has stated that Trump should be criminally prosecuted. These developments have caught the country’s attention.

Donald Trump’s presidency was an abysmal failure. Americans were constantly bombarded with misinformation, propaganda and gaslighting. We were traumatized by the sickness and death of the coronavirus pandemic that he could have contained and defeated. Our crippled economy created widespread depression and anxiety. Trump’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny, nativism, white supremacy and violence were all disturbing forces. His grifting and bashing of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution revealed his shameless greed. His politicization of the Department of Justice for his own personal gain was corruption at its core. And his incitement of the insurrection of our democratic election on Jan. 6 was illegal and the behavior of an authoritarian.

But Trump continues to exert a cult-like influence over millions of Americans who are devoted to him in a “collective narcissism.” Trump’s supporters view him as an all-knowing, charismatic leader who is going to lead them to the promised land of happiness by airing their grievances and marginalizing people of color, Muslims, and immigrants. In return, Trump relishes his supporters because they give him the praise, adulation and unconditional respect he so desires. They fill up his insatiable need for narcissistic supply. He secretly abhors his supporters but uses them to bolster his self-image of greatness and invincibility.

To be sure, Trump and his supporters have a bond that is intense and irrational. How to break their collective narcissism is the critical question we face.  

The answer is that Donald Trump must be prosecuted and punished for his crimes, especially the ones committed during his presidency, such as obstruction of justice during the Mueller probe, efforts to tamper with Georgia’s secretary of state, his incitement of the insurrection and perhaps even conscious disregard or worse for the more than 500,000 coronavirus deaths under his watch.

Trump supporters will be convinced of his menace if they see him being prosecuted and punished. Being held accountable will chip away at his cult-like reverence. A bright light needs to be cast on the sordid details of his reprehensible behavior. His fall from grace will be hastened if his supporters see him sentenced to incarceration.

Trump’s reign of terror on the American public was fueled by his belief that he would not be punished for it — that he could break laws with impunity. This is exactly why his prosecution is so important. He must face firm consequences so that his supporters will finally understand and accept the objective truth: Trump is a con man and greedy opportunist who unleashed his cruelty, corruption and anti-democratic leanings on all of us.

Not prosecuting and punishing Trump would send the unacceptable message that certain politicians who engage in wrongdoing are above the law. In our democracy, no one should be above the law. Politicians are our elected officials who must serve with honor, integrity, and the public’s best interest at heart. We cannot condone corrupt politicians by sticking our heads in the sand or turning a blind eye. Democracy is weakened if our president’s illegalities and misdeeds go unheeded.

Many other steps need to be taken to purge Trump from our political consciousness. Keeping him permanently off social media outlets is a necessity. Not nominating him to run again for the presidency is a given. And Congress needs to pass new laws that constrain future presidents from breaking norms and laws.

Once Trump begins to lose his supporters, his political clout will melt away. Perhaps then the Republican party will stop its complicity and new, fresh leadership can step forward. Our democracy works best in a two-party system. Unfortunately, the Republican party has been transformed into the ugly image of the former president. It will take outside forces — like the full and transparent prosecution of all charges — for the party to untether itself from the malignancy of Trump himself.

In strong democracies, it is not unheard of to hold politicians accountable for their crimes. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was tried in 2021 for crimes he committed during his 2007 presidential campaign. He was found guilty. Another former French President, Jacques Chirac, was charged with crimes that occurred previously to his presidency, while he was mayor of Paris. In 2011, four years after leaving presidential office, he was tried and found guilty of corruption.

Prosecution and punishment of Donald Trump is the key to unlocking his bond of collective narcissism with his supporters. Nothing short of that will convince millions of Americans of his dangerousness and unfit stature. This major step must happen if America is to move past the unprecedented burden of our criminal ex-president.

Stochastic terrorism: There is nothing funny about Mike Pompeo’s violent PAC recruitment ads

America feels like it’s stuck in a version of Bill Murray’s classic 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” in which Murray’s character is forever stuck reliving the same day.

But this real-life version of “Groundhog Day” is not a comedy — it is a dystopian horror movie.

Trump and his lackeys continue to show the American people and the world in an obvious, explicit way exactly who and what they are: neofascist authoritarians who support terrorism and other acts of violence to obtain and keep political power.

This anti-democracy behavior will continue because Trump and his followers have not been punished, nor suffered any negative consequences for their behavior. 

Here’s the most recent example.

On Tuesday, Mike Pompeo — 2024 Republican presidential hopeful, former secretary of state and CIA director for the Trump regime — announced the formation of his own political action committee called “CAVPAC“.

He explains its mission as:

We named the organization CAVPAC as a nod to my time in the U.S. Army Cavalry – the CAV in the PAC.  My cavalry service taught me that America needs warriors who lead and are willing to ride first into the fight without fear.  CAV also stands for Champion American Values – the values that we know have made our country exceptional.  The focus, the fight and the desire to win will be at the center of my work leading CAVPAC and those who join alongside us.  We will support leaders of character and integrity who are wholly committed to these same values and will work without fear to build our future.  Our mission is clear: take back the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, as well as build conservative state legislatures and governorships across the country.  Concurrently, we will advocate together for these values in every space of American life. I ask that you join with me in the good and worthy fight to champion American values.

In conjunction with the announcement of his new PAC, Pompeo began sending out a series of tweets recruiting “pipehitters” to join his organization.

These tweets included these lines:

  • “We need more Pipehitters to answer the call and defend our values. Are you with me?”
  • “During our administration, we NEVER let anyone stand in our way of putting America first. If you’re a Pipehitter like us, join the team.”
  • “One of the best CIA officers I worked with was a former special operator. When I’d ask him about someone, if they were top-notch, he’d say, ‘love that guy. Pipehitter.’ He meant that person got stuff done & was dedicated to the mission. All of us need to be Pipehitters”.
  • “Being a Pipehitter means getting stuff done and NEVER giving an inch. If you think you’re a Pipehitter, join the @CAV_PAC Calvary [sic] now”.

The website for Pompeo’s new PAC also includes this call to action for its so-called “pipehitters”:

Become a Pipehitter – someone who is unapologetically American, someone who fights for our future, someone who never gives an inch, someone who is dedicated to stand against the radical Left’s agenda.

In your everyday lives, stand up for our future: at the PTA meeting, in your workplace, at the bowling alley. Be confident in reminding others of our vision. If you aren’t comfortable with what you’re seeing or hearing — no doubt others are feeling the same way. If you’ve witnessed attempts at systemic changes to the Left — or found a way to constructively resist those changes, write or send a video to Mike (to the left). Together, we’ll sound the alarm.

Mike looks forward to hearing from you today. Join him as a Pipehitter in the Cavalry and be at the front of the battle to Champion American Values.

Beyond Pompeo’s vague definition, what is a “pipehitter?”

In military slang, a “pipehitter” is a member of a special operations unit such as the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the Green Berets, or other elite forces.

The word “pipehitter” can also be used to describe a mafia enforcer or a street thug who is feared because of their prowess with and enthusiasm for violence. 

“Pipehitter” has also been used to describe strikebreakers and other company enforcers who attacked union members and labor organizers in the 19th and 20th centuries in America and elsewhere.

Pompeo faced immediate criticism for the name of his new organization and his attempt to recruit “pipehitters.” 

But whichever definition of “pipehitters” suits Pompeo’s new organization, such violent rhetoric hastens the normalization of political violence by today’s Republican Party and the neofascist Trump movement.

The mission statement for Pompeo’s new PAC signals to a right-wing fantasy world, where (white) “patriots” and “real Americans” are under siege and “victimized” in “their own country” by “evil” and “traitorous” “liberals.” These “real American” “patriots” should be prepared to use violence to “defend” themselves and their communities, Pompeo hints.

This fascist aesthetic and political logic is antithetical to normal politics and democracy; such rhetoric implies that violence is an acceptable means of resolving political disagreements.

In normal times, Pompeo’s PAC would just be one more (still dangerous) example of how American culture – especially on the right – fetishizes the military while celebrating a lazy, empty understanding of “patriotism.”

But in America in the Age of Trump, Pompeo’s PAC and its embrace of “pipehitters” reflects a much larger trend.

Donald Trump, his Republican Party and larger neofascist movement attempted a violent and lethal coup on January 6. The Big Lie, that the election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, continues to hold power over a majority of Republican voters. Moreover, more than 50 percent of Republicans actually believe that Donald Trump is still president, according to polling data. The Republican Party and its leaders refuse to properly investigate the coup. Why? Because they are implicated in it, and support using violence (including another coup attempt) to overthrow Democratic presidents and other elected leaders on the local, state, and national level.

For several decades, the right-wing disinformation news media — anchored by Fox News — has been using a technique known as “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violence against Democrats, liberals, progressives, Muslims, non-white people and other targeted groups.

Public opinion and other research repeatedly show that white Republican voters, Trumpists, and other right-wing voters increasingly support the use of political violence to “save” their “traditional way of life”.

New research from the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism also shows that white middle and upper class suburban Republican voters are also being increasingly radicalized into political violence because of a fear that they are being “replaced” by nonwhite people.  

Law enforcement and other national security leaders and experts continue to warn that right-wing political violence represents the greatest threat to America’s domestic safety and security.

In a new article in the Washington Monthly, Daniel Block details how right-wing extremism, polarization, and attacks on democracy more generally may push American society into a civil war or insurgency. In it, he notes:

Does America have enough extremists to sustain an insurgency? […] Research suggests that tens of millions of Americans view political violence as acceptable. This doesn’t mean that tens of millions of people are willing to commit violence themselves. But they don’t need to be. According to The New York Times, between 15,000 and 20,000 Americans belong to militias. If there’s at least tacit outside backing, that’s more than enough potential actors. “These groups are in the hundreds, and membership is in the five digits,” says Linda Robinson, a longtime foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and the director of the center for Middle East public policy at the RAND Corporation. “This puts it up at a parallel with some of the more significant armed insurgencies in other countries that many of us have spent years studying.”

Block details the members of the right-wing “militia scene,” ranging from the Three Percenters to the Oath Keepers to the Boogaloo Boys. Yet the right-wing militias in America are “diverse and chaotic,” Block writes. “Without a clear hierarchy and leadership, America’s militias would find it impossible to wage organized warfare against the federal government,” he says. “That is part of why a redux of the 1860s is currently unlikely.” 

“But international experience suggests that disorganization among insurgents is no impediment to sustained violent activity,” he continues. “Indeed, for many states struggling with serious civil conflict, diffuse terrorist networks are the norm.”

That is troubling, and doesn’t bode well for the future of the republic. Indeed, leading academics and other experts warn that US democracy is experiencing an existential crisis. That crisis was triggered by Trump and the GOP’s assault on voting and civil rights, as well as on the rule of law, long-standing political norms, and governing institutions. 

How did the public respond to Pompeo’s new PAC and his attempts to recruit some “pipehitters” for his cause?

Online and elsewhere, there was much mockery. Many focused on the word “pipehitter” to make jokes about drugs, Pompeo’s intelligence and that of his supporters. Those news websites that chose to cover Pompeo’s announcement largely reported on the mockery as opposed to the substance of Pompeo’s new PAC, or his rhetoric.

In total, Pompeo and his PAC are not being taken seriously by many in the public or among the chattering class.

As I have repeatedly warned here at Salon, this is all so much hysterical laughter and liberal schadenfreude by people who are in a state of existential terror because of the trauma inflicted on them by the Trump regime. In that way, the laughter is self-soothing, psychological defensive behavior.

Ultimately, laughter will not save the American people or their democracy from the monstrous forces of Trumpism. Why? Because it is a form of surrender and inertia, and not the positive action needed to effectively resist and then defeat American neofascism in its various forms.

The inside story of how Bill de Blasio promised, then thwarted NYPD accountability

Years ago, before he was mayor, Bill de Blasio laid out the essence of any effort to reform the country’s largest police department. New York City needed true civilian oversight.

Describing the city agency tasked with investigating police misconduct as “more of a lapdog than a watchdog,” he proposed in 2009 to give it more independence, authority, and guaranteed funding. A few months later, he again pledged change, saying in a statement, “the NYPD cannot oversee itself.”

Then, in 2013, he was elected mayor. And rather than create more independence for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, he ended up asserting ever-more control over the agency, intent on avoiding conflict with the Police Department, according to internal communications obtained by ProPublica and interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials.

The mayor’s office edited reports and testimony to soften criticism of the NYPD and roll back proposals for more effective oversight. It maneuvered to block some of the same policies de Blasio had advocated for years before. And when the civilian officials were faced with obstruction by the NYPD, the mayor’s office ignored their pleas for support.

When the CCRB in a draft report two years ago noted that police were withholding footage from body-worn cameras, an aide to the mayor ordered the CCRB to take out the direct reference to the department: “Let’s simplify and remove the acronym ‘NYPD.'”

New Yorkers and others have seen de Blasio’s deference to the police play out on the public stage, perhaps most infamously when he defended NYPD’s response to last summer’s racial justice protests. But the internal accounts show how City Hall worked behind the scenes to protect the NYPD from scrutiny.

De Blasio will leave office at the end of the year, and his administration has defended his efforts to improve police oversight, telling ProPublica that while the CCRB “was left to languish under previous administrations, it’s clear this mayor took a different approach.” But his record is a warning to the field of candidates vying to succeed him.

They too are facing both calls for racial justice and concerns about crime, which has risen in New York over the past year as it has in other cities. Rather than seeking to slash the size of the police force, many candidates have echoed the promise de Blasio once made to institute genuine civilian oversight of a department that has long chafed at it.

Some of the leading candidates in this month’s mayoral primary have seen that resistance up close, including Eric Adams, a former NYPD commander who often criticized the department; Scott Stringer, the city comptroller; and Maya Wiley, the onetime head of the CCRB under de Blasio.

Wiley, who was the mayor’s chief legal adviser before joining the CCRB in July 2016, has made police reform a central part of her campaign platform. But after de Blasio chose her to chair the agency, the CCRB shifted toward tighter mayoral control. During Wiley’s tenure, the office removed recommendations from a draft report that faulted the NYPD’s use of Tasers after City Hall objected to the findings. After The New York Times revealed the changes, Wiley defended them.

City Hall’s grip continued after Wiley left in the summer of 2017.

When her successor was scheduled to ask a city commission for more oversight power in late 2018, the mayor’s office intervened and canceled the testimony. As one agency official informed a colleague in a text: “City Hall put the kibosh on it.”

“Every testimony, every report, every hearing was completely controlled by what City Hall wanted or didn’t want,” said Nicole Napolitano, who was a senior policy analyst for the agency. The goal was to give a “veneer of accountability.”

Napolitano and three others at the agency who pushed for more aggressive oversight were let go last November in what the mayor’s office described as a reorganization and a “step forward.” (In a lawsuit, Napolitano and the others argue they were fired in retaliation for raising concerns about the agency’s independence, which they say was a violation of their free speech; the city is seeking to dismiss the case, arguing the concerns weren’t protected speech.)

A statement provided by City Hall spokesperson Avery Cohen noted that a recent administration proposal would consolidate police oversight agencies under the CCRB, and said edits of reports and testimony were just part of the governing process.

“On matters of police accountability, as with any issue that requires the cooperation of multiple agencies, City Hall is always in dialogue with both the NYPD and CCRB,” the statement said. “All our work with CCRB has been done to achieve our shared goal of greater police oversight and accountability.”

In a statement to ProPublica, current CCRB chair Rev. Frederick Davie said that the agency has repeatedly advocated for strengthening oversight. “We will continue to work together — and disagree with — the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office,” Davie said. Wiley, through her campaign, declined to be interviewed; a spokesperson pointed to the candidate’s recent defense of her tenure at the CCRB.

For decades, the NYPD has been the most powerful fiefdom in city government. With a $5.4 billion budget and a direct line to the mayor, the NYPD operates with far more independence than other city departments.

External oversight has expanded in recent years, with the creation of an inspector general and the appointment of a court-mandated monitor. And prosecutors, working with the FBI and NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, are responsible for investigating potential criminal conduct by officers. But it’s the CCRB that thousands of people turn to every year to lodge complaints against officers for everything from offensive language to police brutality.

Under the city charter, it’s an “independent” office charged with conducting “complete, thorough and impartial” investigations of police misconduct.

That mandate, though, belies the agency’s limited powers. It is governed by a board that is effectively controlled by the mayor through his appointees and those of his police commissioner. And when the CCRB does substantiate a complaint, it can only recommend discipline to the NYPD. (In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it is committed to oversight: “We fully support the CCRB.”)

Through de Blasio’s nearly eight years in office, even as public concern about police misconduct mounted, the CCRB has remained on the margins of efforts to investigate and reform policing in New York. While others in city and state government have issued stinging findings about the NYPD’s conduct during last summer’s protests, the agency tasked with investigating complaints about officers’ misconduct has largely stayed silent.

Mina Malik served for two years as the agency’s executive director, resigning five months into Wiley’s tenure as board chair. She said that during her time there, “it became clear that City Hall has significant influence over the CCRB and its operations.” That’s not how she thinks it should work. “It is vital for any police oversight agency to be independent and free from political influence or police control.”

For many of those who were drawn to a mayor whose campaign had taken off with an ad where his biracial son speaks about racial injustice, de Blasio’s increasingly vocal defense of the NYPD has been mystifying.

But long before he was elected mayor, de Blasio had seen up close the political risks of being the boss of the Police Department. De Blasio first worked in City Hall about 30 years ago, under Mayor David Dinkins, who inherited soaring crime rates and deep distrust of the NYPD, especially among Black people.

After Dinkins moved the CCRB out from under the management of the NYPD, thousands of off-duty officers stormed Lower Manhattan, taking over the Brooklyn Bridge and deriding Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, as a “washroom attendant.”

“It was a formative experience” for de Blasio, recalled one former top aide who worked with the mayor over two terms, and who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing their continued connections to him. “I heard him talk about it many times.”

Dinkins ended up brushing aside the police riot and implemented his plan to create stronger civilian oversight. But he also ended up a one-term mayor. The lesson de Blasio took from the experience was that a mayor should “keep conflict with cops to a minimum,” the former aide said. “The orientation toward CCRB was, ‘Don’t have them cause problems for the Police Department.'”

After he was elected, de Blasio did deliver on a promise to drop the city’s appeal of a federal court ruling against the NYPD over how it used “stop-and-frisk” tactics in Black and Latino communities.

But De Blasio also sought to send a signal to those who worried his agenda would threaten the city’s progress in reducing crime. The mayor enlisted the country’s most well-known cop, William Bratton, to return to New York to lead the department, which he had done two decades earlier under Mayor Rudolph Gulliani.

While Bratton gave the new mayor a measure of credibility on policing, it came with a price, according to several of those who worked with both of them. Bratton ran the department “completely independently,” said Richard Emery, who was de Blasio’s first chair of the CCRB.

(Bratton, who retired from the NYPD in 2016, declined to be interviewed or to respond to questions from ProPublica. In a recently published memoir, he writes that de Blasio was supportive of the police and backed his efforts as commissioner.)

It was through Bratton that de Blasio picked Emery. He was a high-profile lawyer who routinely sued the city on behalf of people alleging civil rights violations by the NYPD. He was also friendly with Bratton.

When de Blasio held a press conference on July 17, 2014, announcing Emery as head of the board, the mayor underscored the need for change, just as he had a few years before. “This is a chance to get it right,” he said. “This is the first time we’re actually going to get to see a CCRB function properly. And I think it’s going to be a breath of fresh air. “

That same day, NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo tried to arrest Eric Garner in Staten Island and ended up putting him in a chokehold. Garner’s friend Ramsey Orta filmed the encounter, leading the world to hear Garner cry, “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he died.

While the district attorney’s office in Staten Island began to consider criminal charges against Pantaleo, the CCRB also began digging in, and it seemed like the agency might have a moment. “The CCRB had never done anything even remotely as important or high-profile” as the Garner case, Emery recalled. “It would bolster the integrity and reputation of the agency if it were done right.”

The agency initially made progress. The NYPD allowed CCRB investigators complete access to internal records in the case, which they’d rarely had in other cases.

But after a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, de Blasio found himself once again in no-man’s land, trying to address residents’ pain and anger without losing his grip on the Police Department.

In an emotional address at a press conference about the grand jury’s decision, de Blasio talked about how he and wife had had to “literally train” their teenage son Dante to “take special care” with officers.

The police unions excoriated the mayor’s comments, which came amid protests following the killing of not only Garner but also Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. De Blasio had thrown officers “under the bus,” said Patrick Lynch, the head of the city’s largest police union.

Less than two weeks after the mayor’s remarks, a 28-year-old man, who had traveled to Brooklyn from Maryland and posted on social media about police killings, walked up to an NYPD car, and shot and killed the two officers inside, and then killed himself minutes later.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” said Lynch.”That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”

When the mayor later spoke at a memorial service for the two officers, hundreds of officers turned their backs on him. When de Blasio went to pay his respects at a funeral home, officers again turned their backs on him.

“It crushed him,” recalled one of the aides who was often with him then. “I remember his whole demeanor changing. It also got to his worst fear. The Dinkins thing, looking like you have lost control.”

Indeed, as the fallout from the Garner case intensified, Emery said he sensed that de Blasio had “far more fear of the Police Department.”

When Legal Aid lawyers sued to obtain limited disciplinary records for the officer who killed Garner and a judge backed the request. Emery had wanted the CCRB to release at least some of the requested records, which were similar to records the agency had released about other officers. But the city appealed the ruling and prevailed in blocking release of the records.

It was the first of multiple moves under de Blasio in which the city and NYPD blocked access to disciplinary records that had long been available in the past.

De Blasio and others argued that they were simply following a state law, known as 50a, and that the solution lay in changing the statute, which has long been invoked to shield records about policeofficers.

But de Blasio opposed repealing the law. “He was a huge impediment on 50a,” said the former aide who worked with de Blasio across two terms. “I don’t know how many memos we wrote him about why 50a should be repealed. And we’d talk to him and he’d twist himself into a pretzel.”

The summary of Pantaleo’s record eventually did come out, after a CCRB staffer leaked it in 2017. The staffer was forced to resign that week.

At the time, Pantaleo was still on the force and had not faced any discipline. The U.S. Justice Department had launched its own investigation, and, as was standard practice, the CCRB put its investigation on hold.

Emery thought he had a workaround. If the CCRB were granted access to the minutes of the Staten Island grand jury, the testimony, which by law is secret, might allow the CCRB to move ahead without interfering with the federal investigation. When CCRB’s motion for the minutes was rejected by a judge, Emery issued a statement calling the decision “plainly erroneous” and promising to appeal. Instead, the city’s lawyers stepped in and stopped the CCRB from appealing.

As Emery continued to be outspoken, he drew the ire of police unions. When unions complained that he had a conflict of interest, Emery responded that they were “squealing like a stuck pig.” That landed him on the cover of the New York Daily News and the editorial page of the New York Post, which called for his ouster: “Cop-hating CCRB Chief Must Go.”

De Blasio ended up accepting Emery’s resignation two months later, after Emery was sued by Malik and another staffer who alleged he had made sexist remarks. (He denied the allegations and the suit was dropped soon after he quit.)

With Emery gone, the mayor decided to turn to his own inner circle, appointing one of his closest aides, Wiley, to lead an agency whose independence the mayor had said was crucial.

The daughter of civil rights activists, Wiley had spent two and a half years as de Blasio’s in-house legal counsel, advising him on what turned out to be controversial decisions regarding fundraising and other issues.

When Wiley had her first senior staff meeting at the CCRB in the summer of 2016, people there remember her as being friendly but far more circumspect than Emery.

“I asked Maya what her plan was on getting NYPD records, because Richard had finally gotten the CCRB to start getting them, and she wouldn’t give a clear answer,” recalled Winsome Thelwell, who at the time oversaw the agency’s investigators. (Thelwell, who worked at the agency for 25 years, is one of the four former staffers suing after being let go in November.)

Wiley soon found herself dealing with a report that City Hall had already objected to.

In early 2016, the CCRB completed a draft report about officers’ use of Tasers, which the NYPD was beginning to roll out more widely.

The original report documented a number of troubling findings: The CCRB found that in nearly a third of the roughly 150 cases it looked at, officers used Tasers on people already in custody; it found almost all of the Taser uses involved unarmed civilians, the majority of whom were Black.

As the CCRB was preparing to release the report in March of 2016, the agency followed its practice of sharing the draft with City Hall.

“They were upset right away,” recalled Janos Marton, who was an analyst at the CCRB and the primary author of the report. “The mayor’s office’s response was to shelve it.” (The mayor’s office said that its review of CCRB’s draft reports “in no way compromises the independence of the agency.”)

Marton had gotten another job offer and soon quit. But he said the report was “one of my babies,” so he kept checking on its progress.

In mid-May, the CCRB’s interim chair was asked at a board meeting why the report hadn’t been published andreplied that it would be released “in the next couple of weeks.” That didn’t happen. Instead, a New York Daily News story in June revealed the existence of the report and quoted unnamed NYPD officials criticizing it.

When Wiley became chair of the board in July, the report was still under wraps. She was asked about it at board meetings in September and in October, according to the meeting transcripts.

It was finally published late in October, on a Sunday, and without an accompanying press release. The report also removed recommendations for the NYPD, including one proposal to ban officers from using Tasers on people in handcuffs.

Wiley later said she accepted “full responsibility” for the delay. In a board meeting, she said the report was of limited value because it included relatively few cases. She defended her edits: “I stand by the report that we finalized and got out there.”

In response to questions, Julia Savel, a campaign spokesperson, referred ProPublica to Wiley’s past defense of her role editing and overseeing the release of the Taser report, including her position that the report didn’t contain enough data to justify its conclusions.

Savel also pointed to Wiley’s 2017 role in pushing the agency’s board to refer the case against Pantaleo, the officer who put Garner in a fatal chokehold, to the NYPD. Pantaleo eventually faced a departmental disciplinary hearing in 2019 and was fired from the force after an NYPD judge found he’d violated department rules.

Many staffers inside the CCRB perceived Wiley and her top aides as being too close to City Hall.

In late September 2016, Malik, a lawyer and the agency’s executive director, wrote to board members that Wiley was seeking to hire her former chief of staff at City Hall in a manner that “could compromise the integrity of our agency.”

Wiley wanted to hire her ex-aide to a newly created senior position that would give the aide effective day-to-day control of the agency — Malik’s role — even though Wiley’s former staffer had missed the window to apply, emails show.

Wiley prevailed. And two weeks later she emailed the agency’s staff about the hiring. The email noted that Wiley and two other board members formed a subcommittee “to intervene and select the candidate.” About a month later, Malik left the CCRB to teach at Harvard Law School.

Later on in Wiley’s tenure, another agency staffer raised concerns about the agency’s ties to City Hall.

In March 2017, a staffer who had filed a complaint about unrelated wrongdoing by other agency officials told investigators from the city’s anti-corruption agency that Wiley and her top aides were taking direction from the mayor’s office and improperly sharing media inquiries and public records requests, according to officials and records. The investigators, sent by the Department of Investigation’s inspector general for the NYPD, looked into the allegations but ultimately couldn’t confirm them, a spokesperson for the agency said.

Wiley left the CCRB after 13 months, explaining that she needed more time to focus on her work in The New School, where she had been teaching and leading a social justice office.

City Hall’s influence continued.

Napolitano, the former CCRB policy expert, experienced it firsthand. She joined the agency in the fall of 2017 just a few months after Wiley left.

One of the first subjects she turned to was body-worn cameras. A federal judge had ordered the NYPD to use them as part of a landmark ruling in 2013 that found the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics were discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The cameras have become a critical part of police oversight. If CCRB investigators have footage, they are more likely to get to the bottom of a case.

But Napolitano learned that though the NYPD was rolling out the cameras to patrol officers, it was slow to share the footage with the CCRB. Napolitano and others pushed for a solution that some other cities have adopted: civilian investigators should have direct access to recordings.

City Hall and the Police Department rejected the idea. The NYPD, in turn, became even worse at sharing footage.

In August 2019, CCRB officials proposed noting in an annual city report that its investigations were being delayed because the NYPD wasn’t turning over body-worn camera footage. The report is meant to give status updates about all agencies. An introduction describes it as an opportunity to “hold ourselves accountable.”

An assistant to the mayor kept a reference to the delay but cut out the explanation that the NYPD was the reason for it. She wrote that the report wasn’t the place “for one agency to call out or point fingers at the slowness or inaction of other agencies,” a policy the mayor’s office told ProPublica “is universal to agencies across the board.”

That same month, the CCRB finally prosecuted Officer Pantaleo in a departmental tribunal court, leading to his firing. The agency’s chair by then was Davie. Like de Blasio’s previous picks, he came with civil rights bona fides — and close ties to the mayor. He officiated at de Blasio’s wedding.

Davie wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post lauding Pantaleo’s firing, concluding that the ruling was “evidence that civilian oversight of police works.”

The op-ed prompted a sharp email from the mayor’s then press secretary, Freddi Goldstein, with the subject header, “What is this?”

“Don’t remember ever giving approval for this let alone being asked,” Goldstein wrote. (Goldstein mistakenly CC’d a reporter at the Gotham Gazette, who shared the email with ProPublica.)

Asked about the email, Goldstein, who left City Hall last year, told ProPublica she was surprised to see the op-ed in print since it was standard practice for all city agencies to discuss upcoming stories with the mayor’s office.

“I do think that we tried to be sensitive” to the agency’s independence, she said. “But I do think we expected them to give us a heads-up when things were happening.”

A month later, Davie again ran afoul of the mayor’s office. He was set to testify before the state senate, where a bill to finally repeal the 50a secrecy law was being considered.

As chair of the CCRB, Davie was going to call for an end to the law. “If New York is indeed sincere about our commitment to transparency in policing, we must repeal 50-a,” Davie planned to say, according to his draft testimony.

But the mayor’s office objected. “City Hall was adamantly against it,” recalled Napolitano, who worked on the draft. She said Davie’s testimony, along with planned remarks from an NYPD official, were canceled just minutes before the hearing. A spokesperson told ProPublica the mayor was “not involved.”

After the New York Post reported that the mayor’s office had scuttled the testimony, Davie did testify a week later, softening his call for repeal and explaining it was just his opinion.

A few months later, Davie organized a letter signed by other CCRB board members calling for repeal. A City Hall spokesperson at the time disavowed the letter, saying it didn’t represent the agency’s official position.

Last summer, state legislators repealed the law.

When de Blasio first pushed for stronger oversight for the NYPD more than a decade ago, he recognized the importance of independent funding. He proposed that the CCRB’s budget be set to a fixed percentage of the NYPD’s, so the agency would “never be subject to politically charged budget negotiations.”

Two years ago, there was an opportunity to make that reality. A commission had been convened to propose reforms to the city’s charter, including rules on police oversight.

Like other agencies, the CCRB prepared recommendations in the fall of 2018, including the idea de Blasio had once advanced about the budget. But as one agency official had texted a colleague, the proposals prompted a “fight” with the mayor’s office and City Hall “put the kibosh” on the planned testimony.

After pushback from police-reform advocates, the CCRB did offer its proposals to the commission the next spring. But the agency struggled to find support, including from the mayor’s appointees to the commission.

One commission member who pushed for independent CCRB budgeting recalled having to drop the idea to secure support for another proposal to bolster the agency. It was “baffling,” said Sateesh Nori, who had been appointed by the city’s elected public advocate.

The commission ended up endorsing a proposal that linked the CCRB’s head count to the size of the NYPD, but did not guarantee a budget. It also allowed the mayor to ignore the head count provision based on “fiscal necessity.” Voters approved the proposal in November 2019.

Four months later, the CCRB prepared testimony to the City Council requesting money for a “public education campaign” so more New Yorkers would know where to go with complaints about police. City Hall cut the request, arguing that a unit within the agency dedicated to outreach was already sufficiently funded. (Here is the final testimony.) Currently, the CCRB has a roughly $20 million budget and about 200 employees.

By that summer, there was a push inside the agency to swiftly complete investigations into the Police Department’s aggressive response to the racial justice protests that had swept the city after George Floyd’s killing. But investigators were overwhelmed by hundreds of complaints and stymied by a lack of cooperation by the NYPD under Commissioner Dermot Shea, who had been appointed to the top job by de Blasio in December 2019. As of Wednesday, the CCRB had brought charges against 11 officers.

Last September, the CCRB was going to note in a report another reason for the delays. Some officers had covered their badge numbers, making it hard to identify them. City Hall softened the wording to say there had just been allegations of badges being covered.

When Napolitano objected, CCRB general counsel Matthew Kadushin replied: “Nicole – Please make the changes that City Hall recommended.” (Kadushin did not reply to a request for comment.)

Two months later, Napolitano and three other senior CCRB staffers were called for video meetings with two agency officials. Napolitano and the others were told they were being let go and that their access to agency emails and records was being cut off. When Napolitano asked why, one official said they couldn’t discuss it but that the agency was “restructuring.” In a statement at the time, board chair Davie said the moves were made to “address redundancies.”

Napolitano had voted for de Blasio multiple times, including as her local council member. She had joined city government soon after he was elected, believing in his message that building trust in the NYPD was critical and could lead to more effective policing. “I was hopeful,” she recalled.

Despite everything, Napolitano said she still has hope. For real change to happen, people “need to understand how the system really works.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

“This is what you get”: Lara Trump says Kamala Harris wasn’t chosen based on her “qualifications”

Lara Trump on Thursday reminisced about the “good old days” when her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, would hold impromptu press conferences even though he was “unprepared.”

During an appearance on Fox News, Trump remarked on President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip, where he declined to respond to shouted questions during a formal press conference.

“Remember the good old days, guys, whenever Donald Trump would walk to Marine One unprepared, no note cards?” the former president’s daughter-in-law gushed. “He would just go and say, ‘You, you, you’ — call on anybody and everybody. We had transparency from our White House. I mean, this is important stuff.”

“Are you kidding me?” she continued. “You are the president of the United States. Think about the signal that this sends to our adversaries, to Vladimir Putin, to Kim Jong-un, to Xi Jinping, to people that are kind of looking for weakness within the United States. It makes us look ridiculous. It is embarrassing.”

Trump also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris by suggesting that her only qualifications are her race and gender.

“She needs to do something about our southern border,” Trump said. “She needs to answer questions. She can’t just laugh them off and cackle about it like she’s been doing. But don’t forget, she dropped out of the race, guys, for the Democrat [sic] primaries before her home state of California even voted.”

“She probably thought, ‘I’m in over my head here,'” she added. “Now she is vice president of the United States, and I think we’re seeing the consequences of possibly choosing a person based on identity politics, based on their gender and not qualifications. This is what you get.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

In only 30 seconds, Tucker Carlson undermines his own argument about “cancel culture”

Controversial Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson returned to the topic of “cancel culture” on Thursday — and quickly undermined his own argument.

“In January, Simon & Schuster — the gargantuan publishing house — canceled a book by a senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, because a mob of democratic activists told them to,” Carlson claimed.

Carlson did not mention the book was canceled one day after Hawley cheered on the Trump insurrectionists trying to overturn the 2020 election.

“After witnessing the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Simon & Schuster has decided to cancel publication of Senator Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book,” the publisher announced on Jan. 7. “We did not come to this decision lightly. As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”

In Carlson eyes, the corporate decision wasn’t about accountability for dangerous extremist, but canceling America.

Carlson announced his viewers will be able to read all about it in his forthcoming book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster.

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Victoria’s Secret finally drops its male gaze & hires diverse spokesmodels reflecting real women

As frequent, self-appointed cultural critics, if there’s one thing men on the internet can’t stand, it’s women they’re not attracted to being visible in any way. The latest object of their outrage is Victoria’s Secret. 

Once catered entirely to straight, male wish fulfillment, the lingerie company announced this week that it would switch out its famous mostly white, cisgender, size 0 models for new spokespeople, who will include U.S. women’s soccer icon Megan Rapinoe, Indian actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Chinese American skier and to-be Olympian Eileen Gu, size 14 model and advocate Paloma Essler, and transgender model Valentina Sampaio.

“When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond,” Martin Waters, CEO of Victoria’s Secret, told the New York Times. “We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.”

To say Victoria’s Secret was “slow to respond” to cultural changes is putting it lightly. The brand has been widely and justifiably criticized for years now for its transphobia and body-shaming, not to mention its uncomfortable undergarments and numerous sweatshop labor controversies. 

Rapinoe, a vocal, queer feminist and advocate, is well aware of the company’s history, and didn’t mince words in her statement to the Times, describing Victoria’s Secret as once being “patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired.”

“And it was very much marketed toward younger women,” she added. That message, Rapinoe told the paper, was “really harmful.”

In addition to the brand’s new spokesmodels, the Times reports it will also create more size-inclusive products and advertising, a new maternity wear line, and even a podcast with the Collective. 

Conservative outrage has predictably ensued online, with one talk show host suggesting the brand will “destroy themselves,” and the usual suspects and male Twitter trolls threatening to no longer buy Victoria’s Secret underwear for their very real girlfriends. Of course, if the company’s embarrassingly long overdue rebrand fails, it won’t be because men on the internet are angry at being shown women they claim they aren’t attracted to. It will be because, in the time it took Victoria’s Secret to realize catering to a more expansive market of diverse women and diverse bodies is actually highly profitable, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty and other women of color-led brands beat them to it.

In the years, perhaps decades, that Victoria’s Secret spent peddling one, singular standard of beauty and attractiveness — and, to be clear, a distinctly racist, sizeist and boring standard — other brands, notably not owned by white men, knew this wasn’t what actual women wanted. All women and certainly young women haven’t been shopping at Victoria’s Secret for years, exploring the far better and more affordable options available to them, and there’s no real reason for them to stop, now. No matter what Victoria’s Secret does at this point, the damage is done. The toxic beauty standards, the defenses of excluding trans models from fashion shows because they don’t exemplify a patriarchal “fantasy” — our collective memory isn’t so short.

Ultimately, as the male executives behind Victoria’s Secret are beginning to discover, the nagging problem with creating brands for women is that doing so requires you to make products that actual women want to buy for themselves. For all the male internet trolls claiming they’ll no longer be patronizing the brand, their largely hypothetical purchases never really mattered, in the first place. Believe it or not, most women buy their own underwear for themselves, and for that matter, know what they want for themselves — and that hasn’t been Victoria’s Secret for a long time.

“The house has never not been on fire”: How two “Daily Show” correspondents made comedy for our pain

As taxing as the last 15 months of the pandemic has been for millions of us, imagine being among the few entertainers tasked with guiding us through it. Now put yourself in the positions of Dulcé Sloan and Roy Wood Jr., the two correspondents on “The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah” frequently entrusted with boiling down current events related to racial justice protests, cultural inequities and general white bread craziness for viewers who come to them let off steam and perhaps learn something.

Sloan and Wood have turned in excellent field pieces and segments over the last year, but they’ve also been working nonstop on other projects in addition to their “Daily Show” duties. Sloan launched a podcast, voices a main role the first season of “The Great North” on Fox (which has been picked up for second and third seasons) and co-starred in “Chick Fight” before lockdowns began. Wood also hosts a podcast, has a stand-up special on the way and is the executive producer on “The Neutral Ground,” a documentary about the fight over removing Confederate statues set to screen at the Tribeca Festival and making its PBS premiere on July 5.

Salon caught up with Sloan and Wood over Zoom to talk about how the challenges and opportunities of living through a quarantine year impacted their work on “The Daily Show” and, frankly, to figure out how they’re able to keep going at a time when so many of us are contending with burnout. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Over the last year I’ve been feeling some pressure, as a fellow Black media professional, to speak to issues in terms of what’s going on in the world. Obviously I don’t have all the answers or even most of them. Meanwhile a lot of the people have been turning to “The Daily Show” not only to let some pressure off, but to learn from the incredible work you’ve done in the last year. How has that been for you, not just in terms of handling these expectations but also maintaining your own creative flow?

Dulcé Sloan: With all of the racial injustice that is happening in America towards Black people, and other people of color, one day I realized that it’s not our responsibility to fix it. Because we’ve been marching the entire time my mother has been alive. And we have been asking mainstream America, white America, to acknowledge our humanity, and they refused to do it. The abuser can’t look at a victim and ask them, “How do I stop abusing you?” An abuser has to make a choice to stop abusing. So when I got to the point of, “I’m not going to spend my creative energy trying to explain my humanity to people whose ancestors stole my ancestors,” I decided that I’m talking about whatever the hell I want to talk about. Because I can’t make people view me in any other way than they’ve decided to view me. . . . It’s not my responsibility to fix that anymore.

Jim Crow was ended because white men signed a piece of paper. The Civil Rights Act happened because white men signed a piece of paper. Voting rights, all of these big changes in the way that Black people have been treated in this country is because white men in power signed a piece of paper and decided to stop being a**holes. So until they decide to do that, I’m talking about what I’m talking about. And I’m not begging y’all to think of me as person anymore. Period.

Roy Wood, Jr.: In the last year, there’s been a lot of pain, there’s been a lot of people acknowledging a lot of issues about which there are not any jokes at the center. But if you can figure out the causation of how you got to the pain, or you can figure out what the solutions are to get out of the pain, those two sides of the issue lead to a field piece, right? That’s where we’ve tried to exist.  Like when you talk about Ahmaud Arbery. So, you talk about his death. Okay, that’s deplorable, and those men [who murdered him] should be under the jail. So then let’s look at [Georgia] State Rep. Carl Gilliard, who has decided to try to end the citizens’ arrest law. So that became the field piece. And so we’ve had an opportunity during all of this transformative time that the country has been in, to honestly do a bunch of stuff that we were already doing before. The Ahmaud Arbery story I legitimately believe is something we still would have covered in 2019 if it happened before then.

Sloan: A lot of other shows are attempting to try to catch up to issues and things that we’ve already been talking about. We’ve already taken hard-to-talk-about things and been like, OK, where’s the funny in this? Other people are catching up, but we’ve always been doing this.

Wood: It’s so commonplace that I think people forget that that’s what we do. That’s literally “The Daily Show” brand before Trevor. Of course, we attack it differently under Trevor. But I mean, if anything, the hardest thing to do is to follow up on these damn stories, because there’s always a new turd in the street that you never get a chance to go back and check. Because the update on the citizens’ arrest law in Georgia? They changed it. Now instead of being able to detain someone, I think, for three or four hours, now you can only detain them for an hour.

Sloan: Oh, thank you. That’s still enough time to die!

Wood:  Yeah, so that’s the hardest part during these times now, because there are so many fires. The hardest part is figuring out which one to point the hose at first. The other thing that I think is hard is, like, how do you activate viewers? Strategically, how do we get somebody to care about the environment? You have to almost take the same steps as you would you do for like a piece that Dulcé did about Black women’s hair.

The Black women’s hair segment was one that hit just in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time. You know, just in terms of a segment that kept being mentioned to me by people who were shocked and asking, “Did you know about this?” Yes. I knew about this.

Sloan: So much has been done in the history of America to make Black women think that their hair is not worthy since it is not straight. It just grows out of my head this way! . . .  But you have to find that thing to make someone go, “You’re lesser than, we have to control this.” First, we can’t show our hair and we got to put scarves on right? But the scarves got too beautiful. Now we can’t do that. So it’s always something. And now we are here. We took the scarf off now we are wearing our fine wigarees, okay?

Wood: It’s been fun to figure out because collectively as a country, people are interested in the nuanced issues of race. We have opportunities not just with the field pieces, but we get to flex with sketches, and chat segments with the correspondents, and one on ones with Trevor. So we get to be more versatile in how we get the point across.

Each of you have had projects launching in addition to your “Daily Show” work in the last year. Dulce, we spoke about your podcast, and you’re on “The Great North.” Roy, you have your podcast and you’ve had your stand-up specials. First of all, it makes me think like, “I need to do more things! I am not adequate.”  But then I have to wonder about that, what with all the conversation across the board about exhaustion. Meanwhile, everything in your careers is amping up, which is wonderful for you. But honestly, how are you able to keep those things in balance?

Sloan: Well, yeah, because, I also shot a movie called “Chick Fight” in Puerto Rico in like, January and February. And then when I kind of got back, lockdown started, so the movie came out during the pandemic, so and then I was recording the TV show and then trying to do other things. I did this voiceover thing for EA. You know, before this I was traveling two, three, four weekends a month and also shooting the show during the week. But my friend was like with [the pandemic], “God told the whole world to sit down.” I know I was exhausted before this. And so it’s given me time to focus on things that I didn’t get to focus on before. Like myself.

Wood: For me, it was, it’s an opportunity to just pick a couple of things. So, you know, my third stand-up special on Comedy Central comes out in October. And I’d started kind of working on some of that material before the lockdown happened. And then as the country starts opening back up, you start tiptoeing out to the clubs that have the right protocols in place. But you’re still able to just focus on your field pieces which is, for me, that’s, that’s more than enough as far as I’m concerned. That’s been the cool thing as well because it left me time to go, you know what, let me start therapy and see what the hell that’s talking about. And then we started doing stuff in mental health awareness, and “The Daily Show” and Viacom, we started doing these mental health awareness initiatives, I’m like, yeah, we should be doing that. That’s good.

It gave me more time to think about pieces that weren’t necessarily at the top of that attached to things that are at the top of the news cycle. . . . I’ve done less work, but it’s been more rewarding or more meaningful, if that makes sense. It’s like, when you go to a steak restaurant, you get a smaller serving, but the food tastes better. And it’s just so much richer, you know? Like that part of it, I think it’s really been cool.

Dulce as I said, the last time I talked to you was a year ago. Let’s say we reconnect at this time in 2022. What are you hoping that we’ll be talking about in the best possible future?

Sloan: I think being able to report on a real shift. Like really being able to show that all of the protests of last summer were not in vain.

I hope that we’ll be able to see, we’ll be able to report on better relations between people. Because you got to see what it was like to not be able to touch. You couldn’t go see your mother, you see what I’m saying? You couldn’t hug your grandparents. So I would want to see that we’re reporting less on unarmed people of color getting murdered, that we’re reporting less on anti-Asian violence . . . I want us to be able to see that something happened out of all of this and we can start seeing a real change, just in humanity as a whole. We’re seeing a change in the country.

Wood: For me, politics used to be we agreed on the problem, but we don’t agree on the solution. Now it’s that we don’t even agree on what the problem is. So my hope is that at least in a year, if we can all just agree on what the problems are, and that there is a problem, that in and of itself is cataclysmic progress going into midterms. And then figuring out what the solutions are to the problems that we all agree on. You know, America’s on fire and you have people sitting on the front porch sipping sweet tea, saying that nothing’s going on, and that “I don’t even see smoke.” So until we can get on the same page like that, as a country, I think we’re you know, we’re going to be at a serious impasse.

So my hope is at minimum for that for America – that at least we agree on what the problem is. Because at least with that, it’ll make figuring out what field piece to do so much easier. Because there won’t be eight different fires to choose from.

The world can be better, and everything can still be funny.

Wood: Yes, yes. That’s the goal. That’s the goal.

Sloan: Y’all pay attention! The house has never not been on fire, but we got the main arsonist out the building. So the question is, has Biden come with a hose? Or is he roasting marshmallows? That’s what we’ve got to figure out now.

“The Daily Social Distancing Show” airs at 11 p.m. weeknights on Comedy Central.

There’s no shame in “A Sexplanation,” a fun, honest documentary that steps in where sex ed left off

“A Sexplanation” streaming June 17-27 at the Frameline Film Festival, is Alex Liu’s smart, lively, and thoughtful documentary about sex education — both his in particular and America’s in general. Liu’s goal is to talk honestly and even vulnerably, about sex, and he covers topics ranging from masturbation and pornography to taboo fantasies to demystify sex and the shame often associated with it. It is through his discussions with his own parents, as well as sex educators and researchers — and even a Catholic priest — that he normalizes dialogue about a topic most folks would prefer not to discuss. 

“A Sexplanation” is certainly a conversation starter, and like the numerous interviewees, the ingratiating Liu treats the topic respectfully, and with a healthy curiosity, which is why it is so gratifying. The filmmaker, who has a background as a science and health reporter, spoke candidly with Salon about sex and his new documentary, “A Sexplanation.”

You state in the opening moments of your documentary that you want to take away the shame and awkwardness about talking about sex. How did making this film enable you to be more comfortable about talking about sex and things that are culturally taboo? 

The way I think about it now is the shame I have will always be there — it’s just so deeply imprinted in who I am — but I am able to recognize it and process it much faster and think critically about how it serves me. The best part of doing this film was interviewing 25 people and asking them the same set of questions, divulging the same type of shame, secrets, and fears I had, and hearing the same answers over and over again. I realized that I’m quite typical and quite boring in many ways when it comes to how I process sex. And forcing myself to reveal things 25 times, it becomes normal. Coming out of the closet — the first time I did it was the most terrifying experience of my life. Now, I’m talking to customer service people about my husband, or talking to you now about sex is something that 18-year-old Alex would never have been able to do. It’s taking whatever baby steps you can and pushing yourself in ways that are heathy for you. It’s a slow, incremental process.

You first approach your parents about sex, and sex education, and later in the film about their sex lives. They are very open to the discussion. Not every family can be so open, but you show parents taking their pre-teenagers to sex ed classes. What do you think having that knowledge years ago may have done to help you in your life in general, or your sex life in particular? 

I think about it all the time. If someone had told me when I was 10-13 that anal sex is a normal, pleasurable thing that many, many people do, my life could have been dramatically different. If someone had just told me “Your body is built for pleasure, and it’s a gift that you should treasure as much as you can.” Those two messages would have dramatically altered how I experience sex even today. If I had heard it from my parents, who have no problems with anal sex or masturbation — they just never grew up learning how to talk about it, so they never talked about it — but knowing that the people most important to me in my life at the time had no problem would have lifted a huge amount of shame and burden.

Let’s talk about the shame. It’s certainly something gay men experience more, but our cultural has started to change.

We didn’t show it in the film, but we spent a whole week in Provo, Utah, which is 80-90% Mormon. Even talking to teens, it was very clear that through social media and the general exposure of how queer people presented, they don’t have same stigma and shame around that. But the one thing I think that still does linger, is the communication about your own personal, sexual desires. You might not be ashamed to talk about how you are gay or queer, or genderfluid, but no one is talking about how to negotiate consent, your own fantasies, what feels good with another person — and because most people turn to porn for that instruction, on an individual, personal level, there is fear and shame about how to get what we want or need to have a healthy sex life. 

I’m wondering how you quantify or qualify what a healthy sex life is?

It’s totally subjective, and changes from moment to moment. But I think the measure is: Are you in an environment where you feel someone can listen to you nonjudgmentally about your experiences or thoughts, or are you still hiding parts of yourself for fear of judgment, violence or fear or repercussions? Health is a moving target. It’s a constant process in someone’s life, and to define that is very subjective.

That makes me think about power and control, and that people are afraid to admit having rape fantasies or enjoy BDSM. But your film indicates a rape fantasy doesn’t mean you want to be raped, or be a rapist, or that one condones rape; it’s just about power and control.

It’s why we like rollercoasters. Playing with power and control is a fun way to play. But we code it in a sex realm; it is a scary risky thing when life is risky.

Yes, and I have turned down opportunities to be in sexual situations that scared me.

It’s important to know yourself in that way. In San Francisco, I fell into the opposite trap. I overcorrected in many ways where I thought, “What’s wrong with me that I don’t want to be whipped or fisted?” But It’s not what arouses me, or what I want to do. It’s a continual process of learning who you are and knowing who you are.

Let’s initiate the discussion — call it foreplay — about the wonderful scene in your film where you and your friend talk candidly over brunch about sex. How can we get to a place where that kind of discussion is possible? 

It’s open consent — we set the stage, and people went into it knowing what they were getting into. I think people are looking for permission to talk about these things because there are so few outlets to be listened to nonjudgmentally, and it’s an invigorating, affirming experience. I picked these people [in the film] because they inspire me and are open and think critically about these things. Part of the reason I became a reporter is to ask the questions and create a context where it’s safe to do that. 

You have to be willing yourself to be open and vulnerable. You can’t establish trust without reciprocating. Listening is a huge part of it and being nonjudgmental, so people feel they are being heard and willing to talk more. It’s about active listening and validating that person’s experience and knowing your own biases well enough — and if they serve you or not — and then being able to check them when you need to. Because sex is still very taboo to talk about, people will clam up very quickly if they sense there is any unsafe space being created. Developing your listening skills will payoff big time if you want to have these more open conversations.

Many families are steeped in religion or culture, and there is an additional layer when homosexuality is involved. We want to work towards a world where there are no stigmas, or judgment about sex or sexuality, but there will always be puritans, and conservatives. What are your thoughts?

I have a lot of hope. I think things are changing. I did speak to that Utah state senator, and we have very different beliefs about all this. It might be trite, but I honestly think by letting those you are opposed to — you may never change their mind — feel they are being heard . . . There are some sociopaths who are just not worth your time. They are manipulating people for power and money, and stoking divisions, and we must do our best to minimize those voices. 

It took 15 years of hearing my family’s prejudices and understanding their beliefs are not based on knowing any queer people or diverse sexual expression, but it’s their specific world view. But it’s valid based on their life experience. My experience has opened people up to seeing me as a human and consider me a friend. For better or worse, queer people, minorities, disadvantaged communities, and the marginalized, it is the cross we have to bear. I wish it were different, but in many ways, I think we do have to be the better people and more patient and more forgiving. I was lucky and privileged in that I grew up in the Bay Area and my family is relatively progressive. People are willing to open up and if not, you’re not going to change their mind.

You talk with adolescent psychologist, a Provost Professor of Public Health at the Kinsey Institute, scientists who study orgasm. I appreciate you met with both Todd Weiler, the Utah state senator who has some thoughts on pornography as a public health crisis, and a Catholic Priest whose views on sex surprised you. How did you find and select the sources you interviewed?

I started from my own personal experience. Porn and religion have probably been the two most influential forces of how I experienced sex and sexuality. Or growing up, how I conceptualized and processed sexuality. We had to do a big section on porn, and I reached out to them and asked them who are the sex educators you turn to? It took a while to find Father Godfrey, who critiqued how the Catholic Church is thinking about sexuality. Who was willing talk with me about sex? My background is more hard science/biological science, so it was knowing who is doing that sex research, and the folks at Rutgers are only doing fundamental brain research. Kinsey was a natural fit. They were the first people to consider sex was a worthwhile field of study. 

You mentioned the Rutgers study, which allowed you to masturbate on camera for sex research and donate an orgasm for science. Can you describe what that was like?

It was the least erotic sexual experience in my life! [Laughs] It was very technical and very clinical. They need to accurately scan your brain, so they lock your head into a contraption so it can’t move. You can’t watch porn since that would interfere with the brain readings. They want the brain reading to be solely due to physical stimulation. You’re strapped in, so you get about two inches of room to move your hand. They make you stick something in your urethra, which is horrible. And then you have eight minutes to reach orgasm, so it’s very pressured. [Laughs] I got it in the last 30 seconds. I had to go real far back to the hottest sexual experiences in my life. It was a good experience for me to do that in front of a bunch of people and realize it was OK. My parents have seen it. The world has seen it. Really, masturbation should be celebrated as much as possible. It’s one of the joys of life that is all yours. 

Now I want to hear about the best experience you had — if that’s appropriate to ask.

What can I say that will respect the boundaries between my husband and me?

You talk about pornography with a PornHub data scientist. What surprised you with his responses? 

We asked questions about demographics of what people like to get wide range of responses. Like I say in the film, getting good data about sexual fantasies is hard because people are not honest when talking to a surveyor, but they are super honest when you search for porn. Whatever fantasy you have, there are thousands of other people who have searched that term. We all have that one atypical fantasy. It underlined for me that there is an infinite world in terms of sex fantasy, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of any of it. 

I am actually not big into PornHub right now. Maybe it’s my last gasp to hang on to my youth, but I’m watching a lot of porn from the early 2000s/late 1990s, when the porn stars had the most power in the industry. Now I pay for all my porn. This process has taught me how much porn has warped how I think about sex. When I first watched porn, it was the first time I saw two men having sex without shame. It was a celebration. It answered my questions about how men can have sex, and what is out there. It cemented to me that I was gay. Most porn produced in America is either two white men or plays on racial stereotypes. I think I internalized a lot of that. Now I look for more with more Asian men. Or porn that has better acting. 

I’ve actually never been on PornHub. I just find that porn doesn’t give me an emotional connection.

In a weird way, doing this movie, I am realizing how much I’ve disconnected from a spiritual aspect of sex. Because I felt the world was so against me having sex with men, I overcorrected, and acted on every sexual impulse I had without thinking of how much it affected me. How much is the sex I’m having serving my health and well-being? If there isn’t that spiritual aspect to me, it isn’t worth my time. 

Why do you think there is so much fear and curiosity with fantasies and porn literacy? In the film, you meet with professors at the University of British Columbia and a psychologist at the West Coast Centre for Sex Therapy who demystify porn and emphasize pleasure.  

There are a lot of reasons. I think it’s gauging a baseline — am I weird myself? If we hear from everyone else, we can feel OK about our own interior fantasy lives. But it’s human nature. We’re attracted to taboo. We’re fascinated with what gets people off. That’s why we love murder shows. It helps us process our fears and concerns, and why we turn our heads when we see a car crash. We’re attracted to thrill, excitement, and taboo. 

Let me ask you a question you ask in the film: How do you define sex? 

I think the definition for me is always shifting a little. I think of intercourse now as one extreme end of the spectrum. Even this conversation, which is pleasurable and fun, and you’re opening my mind to different ways of thinking, is on the other end of the spectrum. That sense when you are able to feel connected to a person in a way that opens your mind to the beauty of the experience of love and connection, rather than pleasure and genitals, which is how I conceived of sex before. Physical touch — a pat on shoulder or back, or complimenting someone on how they look, or reminding someone of the love they have shown in the past — that’s all sexual to me now. Every day, the definition expands and feels more truthful and honest. The flip side of sex is that the second it becomes unsafe or nonconsensual, it is one of the worst experiences a person can have. That’s the risk and it is something we need to talk about. 

I appreciate that you want us to learn how fun our bodies are. What is fun about your body?

It’s funny, because I almost feel that now — I guess maybe I did in the past — but I almost find more intimacy with someone holding their hand, or cuddling with them, than I do being fully penetrated. Without that spiritual connection or true vulnerability and intimacy, your body — my body at least — is something that can serve that. If every hole is stuffed, and tons of tongues are on me, and I am not feeling safe, or I’m feeling I’m not having a connection with people, it’s not a fun experience. I’m grappling with that right now. In a way I didn’t anticipate, I’ve had more intimate experiences just having a real deep, open, honest conversation cuddling in bed with someone or holding someone’s hand with clothes not coming off, and that slight touch of our hands has been one of the most intense, overwhelmingly pleasurable experiences I’ve had. 

I also want to mention filming the naked montage in “A Sexplanation.” It is rare in this country, as opposed to Asia and Europe, to be nude in public. Nude beaches and spas, not bathhouses, are not big here, but being nude in non-sexual space had a huge impact on my being OK with my body and seeing it as something to play with and not be ashamed of. In a way, I’m now more comfortable being a bottom than ever before in my life. I’m more comfortable with my penis and how it looks, and its size, than I ever have in my life. As long as we talk about it before, I’m pretty much now open to anything, as long as I feel I have control over the situation. It’s fun to play with your body in a new way. My relationship with my body has been completely transformed. Before, it was a maybe a source of shame for many reasons, it is now a great tool to have some of the most connected pleasurable and memorable experiences in my life.

For more info about the film, including additional screenings, visit: www.asexplanation.com

The curious science of liposuction: Why, exactly, can’t doctors just remove all of my fat?

“Tina,” a 36-year-old Pennsylvania woman, didn’t want her real name used for this story — but not because she had anything she should feel ashamed of. Tina has not committed a crime, hurt a soul or been convicted of anything. Her desire to remain anonymous stems, simply, from the fact that she gained weight.

Speaking with Salon, the clerk with raven-black hair, twinkling brown eyes and a warm smile said that she knows her self-esteem issues are caused by society’s toxic body image standards and do not reflect any objective notion of beauty. That knowledge, unfortunately, doesn’t make the toxic standards hurt any less. Tina ruefully doubts that she’ll ever again be able to fit into her favorite 2000s-era clothes: tied-up belly shirts, corset tops, low-waisted gypsy skirts and blouses. Medically she is classified as obese, with much of the excess weight accumulating on her once-flat midriff. Despite multiple dieting and exercise campaigns, the belly fat stubbornly refuses to go away. Tina hopes that it may shrink some day, but despairs of ever being entirely rid of it — and admits that she wishes modern medicine could literally suck the fat cells out of her.

“I admit this as a truth,” she explained. “I suck in my belly in the mirror and think to myself how much more attractive I’d feel without the gut. I wish I could do the liposuction and tummy tuck.”

Tina still feels that her face is beautiful, but struggles to feel sexy shopping for clothes, and is hesitant to share pictures that show her body. Like many people who struggle with obesity, she blames herself for poor dietary choices: when it comes to foods like burgers and fries, for instance, she simply can’t resist. Tina also has had two children and endometriosis surgery, which have stretched out her stomach, and between that and now being obese she doubts whether her “willpower is up to the challenge of significant weight loss.” It seems, for all intents and purposes, that she has accepted that because she struggles to diet and exercise — and can’t afford certain types of surgeries, like tummy tucks — she will never return to her size from the early 2000s.

In movies, books and soap operas, liposuctions are often depicted as transformative; a patient enters obese, and leaves the surgeon looking slim. That trope, as it turns out, is another instance of fiction misinforming us about medicine. Doctors cannot simply remove all the fat cells from our bodies, whether through liposuction or through other procedures. As an overweight person, learning this was disheartening, as perhaps it was for others in similar situations.

But why is this the case?

First, liposuction is a bad idea for patients who are severely obese for a number of reasons, according to Dr. Umbareen Mahmood, a board certified plastic surgeon in New York City who performs liposuction surgeries daily and treats many bariatric patients. For one thing, the ideal candidate has to be less than 30% above their ideal weight and have good skin elasticity, so that the liposuction will make a noticeable difference and won’t cause excessive loose skin. In addition, people who are obese have an increased risk of wounds, healing complications and clots in the legs.

Then, there is the fact that you can only remove a small amount of fat at one time.

“We can only remove approximately 5 liters of fat safely at each liposuction surgery,” Mahmood explained. “This is because large volume liposuction beyond this results in internal fluid shifts and can cause serious issues with blood pressure and blood flow.”

It helps to remember that fat is not just some gelatinous substance that sticks to our ribs and can be scraped off like butter sliding off toast. It is an organ, like any other part of the body, and removing it comes with considerable risks.

“Fat is not an inert substance, like little adipose cell suitcases, as if it’s luggage we just carry around,” Dr. K.L. Ong, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, told Salon by email. “Science used to kind of believe that, but that’s been better understood for a long time now. Adipose cells do all kinds of things, as other organs do, and they also ‘hold’ all kinds of things in addition to fatty acids. Adipose tissue or ‘fat’ is a distributed organ-like skin.”

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Ong added, “Skin is also an organ, and both can be removed in a small part. But if in large part, the person would likely die from physical shock.”

There is simply no getting around the fact that fat contains many important things our bodies need: “Even in the most near-the-skin subcutaneous adipose tissue, it is woven with millions of blood vessels, lymph vessels, protein-fibrous supporting tissue, and nerves. You can attempt to remove the adipose tissue, but in doing so, you take a ton of other tissue with it,” Ong said.

What this means, however, is that there is considerable evidence that the traditional scientific mantra of “dieting and exercising will help you lose weight” simply is not true. The factors that cause a person to become obese are complicated, ranging from the microbes in your gut to the quirks in your DNA. The vast majority of people who pass a certain threshold when it comes to being overweight will never return to their previous weight, or if they do will not able to sustain that loss: As of 2015 the odds of that happening in a given year were 1 in 210 for an obese man, 1 in 124 for an obese woman. Their body chemistry changes to actively resist shedding the extra fat, believing that it must do so to survive.

Thus, while America’s diet and self-help industry insists that losing weight is all a matter of self-control, the accountability fetish is not supported by the science.

“It has very little to do with will power,” Dr. Nicole Avena, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical School and a visiting professor of health psychology at Princeton University, told Salon in December. Neuroscientific research has proved that “many foods are being found to be able to produce a state in the brain that is very similar to what you would see with an addiction to something like drugs or alcohol. And so our primitive brain is being activated by many of these processed foods that are on the market that many people enjoy and indulge in.”

The permanent weight loss numbers do improve somewhat for patients who have had bariatric surgery — procedures that cut into your digestive tract to help you lose weight — but they come with risks of complications like intestinal blockages and long-term malnutrition. There is also a paucity of data on the long-term ramifications of many bariatric procedures, as they are relatively new, and there is evidence that psychological issues can arise after the surgeries.

This creates a conundrum for people who want to be honest about weight loss prospects. It is perhaps upsetting to admit that it may not be possible for some people, and they should learn to love their bodies (which is true of everyone). At the same time, it is morally tenuous to insist that the millions who suffer from obesity are simply flawed characters, when the science strongly suggests that there is simply a lot we don’t yet know about obesity. 

As for Tina, the pseudonym of the Pennsylvania clerk? Deep down she understands, intellectually, that the circumference of her waistline does not make her better or worse, prettier or uglier, more or less successful or worthy of admiration. She also feels blessed to be surrounded by people who make it clear that they regard her as beautiful.

She still struggles with her size, though.

“I know I’m not what I could be if I was skinnier,” she told Salon. “I’d have an easier time feeling confident. Somedays I feel so good, then look in the mirror and that changes right away. Then I have to return to my… positive affirmations.”

Fox News caught trying to pass off GOP operatives as parents “concerned” about critical race theory

Fox News failed to disclose to their audience that nearly a dozen guests billed as parents panicked by what they misleadingly label critical race theory being taught to their young children in school are also professional Republican operatives, according to a newly released report. 

The liberal media watchdog organization Media Matters for America details how Fox News has repeatedly failed to mention that their guests, who included right-wing media personalities, GOP strategists and conservative think tank staffers, were far from apolitical despite billing them as your average outraged parent. 

For example, one of the guests who frequently appeared to rail against critical race theory was a gentleman by the name of Ian Prior, who was billed by the network as a “Loudoun County parent” that went “from [a] concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist.” But below the surface, Prior is a Republican operative with deep GOP political roots. The former Department of Justice spokesperson, Media Matters noted, worked “in top communications roles during the 2016 election cycle” including for “the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Karl Rove-fronted super PAC American Crossroads, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that works to elect Republican senators which was founded by allies of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.” 

Another frequent guest to appear on Fox News, Lilet Vanetsyan, turned out to be far from an ordinary parent, as well. Instead of being your average frustrated parent, Vanetsyan is associated with the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA founded by Charlie Kirk and was a reporter for the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting Network. Fox billed Vanetsyan as a “Fairfax County teacher,” despite being a longtime Trump supporter and fervent GOP activist.

According to a different Media Matters study, the topic of critical race theory, which dives deep into how systemic racism should be taught to children in schools across America, has been mention almost 1,300 times over the course of the past four months on Fox News. “With mentions doubling month over month, the ‘critical race theory’ boogeyman is exploding on Fox News,” the report noted.

A Fox News spokesperson didn’t return a Salon request for comment on the Media Matters for America investigation.

On Thursday, The Daily Dot published a report chronicling that when GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill were pressed on what critical race theory, they had very little idea what they were talking about. Notably, Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott told the Daily Dot, “there’s a lot of people that have a lot of different definitions,” pressed further, he added, “I don’t think the Republican caucus has a definition.”

Who is going to call Mitch McConnell’s big bluff?

Last week, United States Senator Kyrsten Sinema expressed ongoing support for the filibuster, arguing that “it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation” and prevents our country from “[ricocheting] wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies.” Then, over the weekend, Joe Manchin echoed a similar sentiment, writing that Democrats have “attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.”

Sinema and Manchin have been rhapsodizing over the filibuster and the virtues of bipartisanship for months, so these arguments are far from surprising. One obvious problem is they fly in the face of overwhelming evidence that bipartisanship is (mostly) dead. However, there’s another, more troubling problem that warrants our attention.

Sinema and Manchin maintain that the filibuster protects not only our democracy, but also the Democratic Party. If we rely on a mere majority for legislation, the thinking goes, any leftward movement will be met with an equal rightward shift when the GOP inevitably returns to power. Thus, we are to believe that the filibuster not only ensures stability, but, in the long run, actually protects Democratic Party’s legislative interests.

This analysis presumes that both parties are equally interested in passing legislation and that both equally benefit from a procedure that impedes democratic change. A moment’s reflection on the contemporary GOP shows these assumptions to be false.

Consider this question: why didn’t Mitch McConnell nuke the legislative filibuster during the first two years of Trump’s presidency when the Republicans held control over both chambers of Congress? The Senate majority leader—with the support of Senate Republicans—happily abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court justice nominees. This was after McConnell had refused to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, essentially hobbling another branch of government. At the time, McConnell even declared: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.”

So is there something about the legislative filibuster’s role that’s more valuable to McConnell than other norms he’s broken? No. He only wants to maintain the legislative filibuster because, despite what Sinema and Manchin claim, the procedure ensures an imbalance of power that benefits Republicans while harming Democrats.

A 60-vote threshold would benefit any conservative party over a progressive counterpart by minimizing change. Even if a conservative party desires regressive change—such as the privatization of a public entitlement (e.g., Social Security or Medicare)—their next priority is, at the very least, maintaining the status quo. The GOP is thus well-served by a procedure that favors inaction at the federal level.

The asymmetrical benefit of the filibuster doesn’t stop there. The GOP doesn’t want to build anything. They want to either destroy the safety net we have or, at the very least, ensure it doesn’t get more expansive. This predictably results in congressional gridlock. Major legislation is rarely passed, which makes distinguishing the two parties’ agendas difficult. And guess who benefits from this state of affairs?

Republicans.

An amorphous mass of congressional inaction fuels voter apathy which, in turn, negatively impacts Democrats more than Republicans among key constituents, such as young voters. Why vote in the midterms if neither party does anything meaningful?

Republicans further benefit from national gridlock because their policies are unpopular. Majorities support Democratic policies on a variety of issues, ranging from gun control to immigration to healthcare. For example, as polarized as we are as a nation, if voters hear a party-neutral description of the public option, 68 percent endorse it. Meanwhile, though Republicans were successful at ginning up opposition to the Affordable Care Act throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, their actual attempt to repeal it correlated with increased support for the Democratic position.

So Democratic policies are popular on a national level. Republican policies are not. Republicans know this, which is one among their reasons for maintaining a dysfunctional Congress. Meanwhile, Republican causes are well-advanced on the state and local level, as well as through packing the federal courts with right-wing judges.

Consider abortion. Two months ago, McConnell threatened that, if Democrats abolished the filibuster, Republicans would respond by putting a variety of conservative measures, including a ban of abortion, on the docket once they regained power. McConnell was essentially making a similar argument as Sinema and Manchin: if Democrats abolish the legislative filibuster, Republicans will respond in kind.

McConnell is likely bluffing. A national fight over abortion would be disastrous for the GOP. Fifty-nine percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Younger Americans are pro-abortion by a whopping 69 percent. Pushing an abortion ban through Congress would not only serve to fully differentiate the two parties. It would also likely energize young voters and eliminate Democrats’ midterm turn-out disadvantage. There’s no better way to get a 25-year-old white guy passionate about voting than by telling him that he’ll be stuck with a kid if the condom breaks.

Thus, Republicans are much better served by fighting on the state and local levels while packing the courts. This allows them to chip away at popular policies under the radar while resting peacefully with the knowledge they control the Supreme Court.

Importantly, if the ACA or Roe get struck down by the courts, the GOP won’t be directly blamed. The dire consequences would be a step removed. McConnell and other shrewd Republicans recognize this. They know their battles are better fought on furtive ground. They also know that, due to the unpopularity of their policies, congressional gridlock serves as a shield. Voters will see nothing getting done and blame both parties. Apathy—which especially afflicts young voters—will prevail. Democrats and their popular policies will suffer when they’re unable to enact them.

Sinema and Manchin overlook the differences between the parties and how these differences are asymmetrically bolstered by congressional inaction. The filibuster doesn’t make our democracy more robust; it impedes democratic change, vastly privileging one party’s agenda over the other’s. Crucially, these benefits occur in an electoral system whose quirks give disproportionate power to Republican senators.

Like many Democrats, I am growing tired of Sinema and Manchin’s arguments over the filibuster. The bipartisanship they hail does not exist. Retaining the filibuster won’t fix that. Nor does it equally benefit both parties. Republicans know this, which is why the legislative filibuster is the only “democratic norm” they will fight to protect.

“You can be who you always are”: Whoopi Goldberg has had enough of Meghan McCain

Meghan McCain and Whoopi Goldberg came to verbal blows on “The View” on Thursday while discussing President Joe Biden’s irritated response to CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins’ questions about his Wednesday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. McCain accused the media of following a double standard, comparing Biden’s relationship with reporters to that of former President Donald Trump.

“Just because Trump was so bad, it doesn’t absolve Biden’s bad behavior,” McCain said. “What he did was 100% Trumpy. And I think I would just like a little bit of intellectual consistency.  If Trump had done that, we would be screaming at the top of our lungs in one way or another.”

When Collins asked Biden why he would consider his 90-minute meeting with Putin “constructive,” Biden told her, “If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business.”

Biden would apologize to Collins later that day, saying “I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.”

That didn’t stop McCain from taking aim at the Biden Administration’s press relations, however.

“I have heard many people in this town, in DC, talking that the press is getting sick of this,” she said, before going on to call Biden’s response to Collins’ questions “unbecoming and ridiculous.” McCain also claimed that Biden has “gotten a pass so far” from the media.

“It is in no one’s best interest to treat him like it’s state TV,” she said. “As [View co-host Sarah Haines] pointed out, that is the biggest difference between us and Russia.”

Goldberg tried to respond to McCain’s gripes by pointing out that “The thing I never saw Trump do was apologize to anybody.” But she was quickly cut off by McCain, who said “With all due respect, I don’t care if he’s apologizing. He just embarrassed himself, and he looks like Trump.”

“I don’t care that you don’t care, just hear what I’m saying” Goldberg said, prompting McCain to reply, “Well I don’t care that you don’t care Whoopi, so we’re even!”

“Well, then good Meghan, because you can be how you always are,” Goldberg said.

McCain responded in kind, telling Goldberg, “You can be who you always are,” before the show cut to commercial.

After the break, Goldberg apologized to the audience and to McCain, saying “I was rude, and I didn’t need to say what I said. I apologize, because that’s not the way I want to behave at work.”

“Well, I apologize too, Whoopi,” McCain said.

YouTube’s favorite abuela shines a light on Mallorcan cuisine

In Mallorca, 83-year-old Maria Gibert is a local celebrity. Her YouTube channel, Recetas Mallorquinas, a lo-fi cooking show where Gibert shares traditional Mallorcan recipes from her sunny kitchen in Palma, has nearly 40,000 subscribers. She’s appeared on Spanish national television, and regularly graces the pages of the local daily, “Diario de Mallorca,” both as a recipe contributor and the focus of feature articles. Though Gibert’s grandchildren manage her social media, she’s aware of her influencer status. “People stop me in the streets and ask to take a photo with me,” says Gibert. The self-proclaimed #AbuelaYouTuber is the island’s home-cooking grandma — and the unofficial guardian of its cuisine, which is arguably underrated.

Spain is known for its regional gems, but the Balearic Islands have yet to fully claim a place on the culinary map. As my Mallorcan mother-in-law, Teresa, tells me, “People who travel to Mallorca think we eat dishes from other Spanish provinces — like Valencian paella or Asturian fabada. Even Spanish people think we eat just tree fruits and tomatoes,” she says with a laugh. “They have no idea that we have our own gastronomy.”

As a tourist destination, however, Mallorca is well established: its narrow roads lined with apricot-colored stone walls and blue-green coves are prime Instagram fodder.

Palma, Mallorca’s capital, where Gibert was born and raised, is a modern city — local friends have described it as a miniature Barcelona. It’s a far cry from the city of Gibert’s youth. She recalls when Palma was small, provincial even, with low-rise buildings, palatial fincas, and enough space that most families had their own gardens. “People would grow their vegetables — Swiss chard, spinach, and cauliflower — and eat whatever they grew,” says Gibert. “The vegetables tasted better.”

On a Friday morning in April, I’m seated across from Gibert in her pin-neat living room in Palma. We’re both wearing masks, and her hair is styled in a perfect ginger coif, just as it appears in her nearly 150 YouTube videos, some of which, like her coca de trampó recipe, have more than 300,000 views. Her pressed slacks are paired with a bedazzled sweater that reads “Paris.” We’re joined by her daughter, María Ángeles, who occasionally repeats my questions in the local tongue, Mallorquí, and has taken to preparing recipes for the Recetas Mallorquinas Instagram account as her mom recovers from a back injury. She may have physical setbacks, but Gibert’s mind is knife-sharp — she regularly finishes answers with an interrogative “eh?” as if checking to make sure I got everything.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CNC8EVHDffm/

In true grandma form, the living room shelves are filled with framed pictures of Gibert’s family, including 10 grandchildren and four, soon to be five, great-grandchildren. Just outside, there’s a covered terrace overlooking the port filled with yachts, fishing boats, and a huge ferry that arrives every morning from Barcelona. In pre-COVID times, the family would regularly gather here for lunch, and their matriarch would prepare one of her classic, multicourse meals.

* * *

Growing up, Gibert’s mother presided over the kitchen, cooking for Gibert, her six brothers and sisters, her father, and an aunt. A daily table of 10 required planning and economy. Eating seasonally was a matter of course and practicality. An average lunch would entail a dish like bullit: similar to a Madrileño cocido, it’s made by stewing meat, potatoes, and beans with various bones and fatty animal parts that are often discarded — the ingredients that butchers set aside for people in-the-know. For the first course, they’d serve the broth, enriched and deceivingly heavy. Then, for the second course, they’d eat the tender meat and vegetables. Nothing went to waste.

In the summertime, the seven siblings would each pack a few belongings into a tied handkerchief and travel to their grandparents’ home in the rural town of Felanitx. By car, it’s less than an hour’s drive, but back then, the roads were yet to be built. Gibert recalls, “We went by train, which in those days was fueled by charcoal, and when we arrived, our noses were completely black. Then one of my aunts would come to pick us up in a cart pulled by a donkey.” There, she remembers the women of the family preparing meals over the chimney with fire — a superior cooking method, according to Gibert. “If you make arroz brut or paella with the flavor from the smoke and the fire, they taste even better,” she says.

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

By the time she was 20 years old, both of Gibert’s parents had passed away. Gibert, who had always gravitated toward the kitchen, assumed the role of household cook. When I ask what kind of things she cooked for her siblings, she replies, “They ate what I made, eh,” without missing a beat. But, she says in all seriousness, la bolsa, or the family budget, came first.

* * *

I ask to see Gibert’s kitchen, where the filming magic happens, and she’s happy to show me around. It’s a compact space, with lacquered red cabinets and sun pouring in through a window overlooking the port. Hanging on the wall, there’s a photo collage of Gibert with television crews and during public appearances. There’s also a framed caricature-ish portrait of her, which has been reprinted on an apron that Gibert dons in most of her videos. Not a knife is out of place; even the sink is immaculate.

“I’ve had 10 people in here,” says Gibert, referring to the cooking classes she taught at home before she was encumbered by a back injury. It’s hard to imagine, because of the size of the space, but also easy to understand given the popularity of her recipes among locals.

As for her own culinary education, Gibert was mostly an autodidact, though she did learn a few techniques from her second husband, a professional cook. But there was a limit to how much he could teach her. “We fought a lot in the kitchen,” says Gibert. “Two roosters in a henhouse doesn’t go well.”

It wasn’t until age 54, at the encouragement of a friend, that Gibert channeled her love of cooking into teaching. She began with a small class of a few friends and family members, and by word of mouth, the demand for her courses grew. Gibert took naturally to the role of instructor. “I started late, but I worked hard,” says Gibert. “The more I was in charge of, the more I enjoyed it.”

When in 2012, one of Gibert’s grandsons proposed launching a YouTube channel, it made sense to translate her encyclopedic knowledge of Mallorcan cuisine into a modern, readily consumable format that could reach beyond the island. Unsurprisingly, Gibert was a natural in front of the camera, with a lack of self-consciousness that only decades of life can endow. In each video, what comes through is her passion for the kitchen and a deep understanding of her recipes, earned by preparing them hundreds of times.

She tells you not just which ingredients to add, but also what to feel and look for. When preparing the dough for empanadillas, “the dough has to be soft,” says Gibert, kneading and rolling a piece for the camera. The dough for her famous coca de cebolla y sobrasada — a flatbread layered with caramelized onions and a spiced, local sausage — is ready when it pulls away from the bowl. Certain twists are surprising, like the generous pour of vinegar she adds to aioli, but once you try her time-tested version, you’ll never do it the old way — and your family will thank you.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPvVvuWjU2C/

I own one Mallorcan cookbook — a tome published in 1974 that I found at a local flea market — but as far as cookbooks that have found an audience beyond the Balearics, no titles come to mind. Joan Sastre, a photographer and excellent home cook (who, as it happens, prepared the insanely delicious aguiat de pilotes — meatball stew — served at my Mallorca wedding reception), assures me that any local bookstore will have a number of Balearic cookbooks, at least in Spanish and Mallorquí. But I wonder if maybe the time is ripe for a comprehensive modern guide.

“When I leave, I’d love to leave behind a cookbook,” Gibert tells me, when I ask if one is in the cards for her. That said, if preserving her island’s culinary patrimony is the goal, by many accounts, she’s already succeeded.

I ask her to describe Mallorcan cuisine, and she says it’s delicious and that there are so many dishes to try. Her favorite is the sopa mallorquina in all of the soup’s seasonal varieties: with artichokes and spinach in the spring; fish and grated tomatoes in the summer; mushrooms and game in the fall. Then she nods, thinking about it for a moment, “Mallorcan cuisine is making a comeback.”

Three generations of fathers, one timeless Afro-Peruvian breakfast

Good food is worth a thousand words — sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

* * *

I was born in Peru, but I’ve been an immigrant most of my life. Still, no matter where I’ve lived — Peru, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. — Peruvian cuisine has defined my identity.

I was about 10 years old when my mother began teaching me to cook Peru’s comida criolla, or “creole food” — dishes she had begun learning in the oral tradition from her mother at age six. We’d cook side by side “al ojo,” eyeballing the ingredients while listening to Afro-Peruvian music. Eventually, I became a chef and, until a few years ago, taught Peruvian cooking at a community cooking school in San Francisco. Now, I am developing a vegan Peruvian cookbook with plant-based versions of the recipes I grew up with. While it’s my mother who taught me much of this, there are two recipes I learned from my father: pisco sours and tacu tacu.

Peru’s comida criolla is a fusion of Inca, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Japanese culinary cultures that has evolved over a period of 500 years; tacu tacu is one of those dishes with strong Afro-Peruvian roots. Colonists brought African slaves to Peru’s Pacific coast to labor on sugar plantations, cultivate rice, pick cotton, and mine guano. It was at coastal haciendas that slaves began to prepare some of Peru’s first criollo dishes, using ingredients like rice, onions, and limes that had been introduced via Spain’s colonial foodways. These Black women creatively combined leftovers or discarded foods, like frying rice in lard and mixing it with a stew of local canary beans over a wood fire. This was the humble beginning of tacu tacu, whose name comes from the Quechua word taku, which means “mixed.” Over the centuries, this simple dish became popular among Lima’s families — like my grandfather’s — that were part of the city’s working class of Andean, Asian, Italian, or Afro-descended heritage.

My grandfather was from Peru’s Andes, and he spoke Quechua, Peru’s Indigenous language. A policeman in the highlands of Puno and Arequipa, he patrolled Andean communities on horseback. My father believes that my grandfather first prepared tacu tacu when it was his turn to cook a meal for fellow officers at the local police station. Years later, when my grandfather migrated to Lima and started a family in the neighborhood of Barrios Altos, tacu tacu followed him. By the ’40s, when my father was a child, my grandfather was cooking tacu tacu regularly.

My father recalls the kitchen in their single-story quinta well, with its large opening in the ceiling for ventilation (because Lima is a coastal desert, no rain ever came through). My grandmother would cook stews in a large cast-iron pot that she’d place on a metal grill over a wood-coal fire. Without a refrigerator, any leftovers remained in the pots and pans overnight. If these happened to include long-grain white rice and canary bean stew, it got turned into tacu tacu for breakfast.

Each morning, it was my grandfather who awoke early to prepare the family’s breakfast — a pot of warm oatmeal cooked in water, spiced with a cinnamon stick, and sweetened with sugar — something he was accustomed to cooking in his barracks. But on weekends, my father would watch as he mixed and mashed leftover rice and beans with lard in a cast-iron skillet over the fire; how he fried the mixture until it was heated through and crisp. My father recalls waiting with joyful anticipation for the savory tacu tacu after having started breakfast with the oatmeal. From the skillet, my grandfather would scoop and serve his family of eight — my grandparents, my father, and his five siblings.

Three decades later, my father started his own family and moved to the Dominican Republic. Our family of four — my parents, my younger brother, and I — lived in a three-bedroom bungalow in a small mining town, where my dad worked as an engineer at the local mine. This is where I have my first memories of my father preparing tacu tacu for breakfast. On weekend mornings, he’d open the refrigerator, and upon finding leftover rice and beans he would joyfully announce: “Voy a preparar un rico tacu tacu!”

Our kitchen was a world away from the kitchen of his childhood. It was small but modern, with a large sink, refrigerator, and gas stovetop with an oven (instead of wood coals) fueled by two outdoor propane tanks. It rained a lot there, so there was no opening in the ceiling like in Lima. Dad cooked the dish in much the same way his father did, but the beans were different — in Caribbean food culture, red kidney beans are more popular than canary beans for stews, and my mother mashed some of these beans in the stew to make it creamy. Rather than a cast-iron skillet, my father used a nonstick frying pan; instead of lard, he used maize oil; and because he was an engineer, he carefully apportioned equal parts of rice and beans. He enjoyed having his tacu tacu with bread and black coffee, and he’d serve us each a few scoops of it. But only after our cold breakfast cereal.

* * *

Making tacu tacu has an inherent simplicity — mixing two ingredients that are already cooked — and I think that my father and grandfather enjoyed it because it was simple enough for them, as inexperienced cooks, to prepare. But my mother and grandmother also appreciated the gesture, which gave them a break from preparing all the family meals.

Gradually, it wasn’t just working-class families that cooked tacu tacu; Lima’s creole restaurants made it a popular staple and offered single servings shaped and adorned in various ways. In Lima today, restaurants repurpose the day’s rice and canary bean stew for tacu tacu, but they sauté chopped red onion with garlic, spices, and ají amarillo—Peru’s native yellow hot pepper—to add to the mix and enhance the dish’s flavor. A substantial savory topping on the tacu tacu makes it a montadito, or “mounted.” Tacu tacu a lo pobre, or “poor man’s tacu tacu,” refers to a thin steak and fried egg topping, while tacu tacu con mariscos refers to an accompaniment of seafood, like calamari or shrimp. One of the most interesting variations I’ve seen is tacu tacu relleno, or stuffed tacu tacu. Creole cooks use a wok to fry the rice and beans into a pancake with a cooked seafood sauce, and with flicks of the wrist they toss, roll, and shape the pancake into an ellipsoid that is crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside.

As a chef, I’ve prepared tacu tacu differently over the years. Before I became a dad, I lived alone, so I cooked a quick single serving for myself with leftover rice and beans. I also experimented with different leftovers, and found my favorite combination: rice with red lentil in a 1:2 ratio, which I then folded like an omelet (I like the creaminess of the soft cooked lentils, and how they holds the rice together). But once I became a dad, I wanted to prepare tacu tacu in a way that yielded more than one serving at a time — for efficiency, but mostly for sharing with my family.

Today, I live in Oregon with my fiancée and our daughter, and to prepare tacu tacu I start by sautéing finely chopped onions seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, oregano, and ají amarillo in a nonstick skillet. Then, I add a homogeneous mixture of chilled leftover rice and red lentil to the pan, mix, flatten, cover, reduce the heat, and wait until a crust forms on the bottom of the tacu tacu. To serve it, I carefully invert the rice and lentil cake onto a flat plate, browned side up, and cut the cake into slices. Because we are a vegan family, I simply drizzle the slices with olive oil, top them with salsa criolla (pickled red onions), and garnish with cilantro.

Now, when I cook tacu tacu, I think about its history and Afro-Peruvian legacy, but I also feel a profound connection to my father and grandfather. My grandfather died before I was born, but I carry his name, as does my dad. Sometimes I am sad that my grandfather never saw us carry on the tradition he started; he never saw my father prepare tacu tacu for his family or me prepare tacu tacu for mine. But maybe that is not important. As family cooks, we may not see our children or grandchildren grow up to make our traditional foods. All we can do is cook for them, and hope that the recipes are passed on. And if those dishes survive generations, then the cooks who prepared them will continue to live on among us.

DOJ emails and the “pure insanity” of Democrats “moving forward” without accountability for Trump

The Democratic leaders of the House Oversight Committee, at least, get it: Any effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for his many crimes and attacks on our democratic system will reap political rewards. Their ongoing investigation into Trump’s attempted coup after the 2020 election, which culminated in Trump supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, is paying off dividends by getting new information to the public and keeping Trump’s seditious, authoritarian behavior in the public view.

This week, the committee, led by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, released Department of Justice documents to the Washington Post that detail the lengths Trump was willing to go in order to steal the 2020 election. “The endeavor involved the White House chief of staff and an outside attorney, who peppered department officials with requests that they said came on behalf of Trump himself to investigate baseless claims of election fraud,” the Washington Post reported, noting that the DOJ resisted most of the pressure to appeal to the courts to overturn the election result. DOJ officials, undoubtedly aware that their correspondences would someday be made public, seemed annoyed that Trump’s team was inundating them with conspiracy theories, which Trump clearly hoped would compel the DOJ to falsify evidence to support his coup.  

“Pure insanity,” one DOJ official griped in an email to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in response to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sharing “a YouTube video that described an outlandish plot in which the election had been stolen from Trump through the use of military satellites controlled in Italy.”

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It’s fun to laugh at Trump’s own appointees privately blasting his views as “insanity,” but it’s becoming clear that actually, there’s a nefarious rationality to what Trump was — and is — doing.

It’s unlikely that he or Meadows actually believe the nonsense they spout about stolen elections and Italian satellites. Indeed, Trump let it slip on Fox News this week that “we didn’t win but let’s see what happens on that,” which is to say, he tacitly admitted that they are still trying to overturn a legitimate election. Instead, Trump and his people are betting that these conspiracy theories could be propped up as excuses for what was an open attempt to steal the 2020 election. Plenty of Republicans in both federal and state governments were, at the time, thrown by demands that they break the law on Trump’s behalf. Since then, however, the “pure insanity” that is insurrection logic has completely colonized the GOP. The party has reorganized itself entirely around the goal of making sure that next time Trump tries to steal an election, he pulls it off. 

The fake vote “audit” being conducted in Arizona is moving closer to the predetermined, fake outcome of declaring that Trump “really” won Arizona, even though he most definitely did not. CNN reports that the data is being taken to a remote “lab” in Montana, where the Trumpist conspiracy theorists will make a big show of “examining” it before releasing their inevitable and false conclusion. Republicans are so thrilled with the propaganda value of these fake audits that they’re pushing to take them nationwide, even in states Trump won. It’s all theater, meant to support false claims that Biden “stole” the 2020 election and to justify the push to “steal it back”. That push is expansive, to the point of being all-encompassing of the Republican Party.  Zack Beauchamp of Vox documents the frightening level of success the GOP has already had in pursuing their mission to turn the U.S. into a one-party authoritarian state like Hungary is now or Mexico was for most of the 20th century.

In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.

So what are Democrats, who technically have a majority in both houses of Congress and control the White House, doing to stop Republicans from converting the U.S. to a one-party authoritarian state? Well, mostly a whole lot of nothing. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a plan for beefed-up enforcement of voting rights but admitted that without Congress passing new voting rights legislation, the power of the DOJ is sadly limited. He also acknowledged that many jurisdictions “have utilized abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk,” but it’s not at all clear that the DOJ can do anything unless Congress empowers them to act with new legislation. And, of course, that’s not happening, because — sing it with me now — a handful of Senate Democrats, most notably Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refuse to end the filibuster and allow legislation to be brought to a vote on the Senate floor. 

But hey, at least Democrats still have an opportunity to use congressional powers of subpoena and investigation to reveal the full extent of Trump’s malfeasance in office and — maybe, just maybe — bring something like a consequence to bear on the 45th president for trying to end democracy, right?

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Unfortunately, there are troubling signs that Democrats intend to fall short in that department, as well.

Even though there’s absolutely zero chance that Republicans will stop filibustering efforts to establish a bipartisan committee to investigate Trump’s January 6 insurrection, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has so far refused to move towards Democrats striking out on their own. She’s said this week that she is still holding out for Republicans to change their minds, which will never, ever happen. 

Then on Wednesday, Democrats admitted they’ve given up trying to discover the content of Trump’s secret communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They even trotted out the dreaded “moving forward” language that suggests absolutely nothing was learned from the horrors of the Trump years. “The Biden administration is looking forward, not back,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., in response to reporter questions. 

So while the Oversight Committee members are doing their job, nearly everyone else that could hold Trump accountable appears to be looking for the exit door. 

Barack Obama’s administration used similar excuses to avoid dealing with the headaches of holding accountable those responsible for either the Iraq War or the financial crisis. But this refusal to deal with the past did not make moving forward easier, but actually made it impossible. Resentment and lack of trust in institutions has festered in the American public, and Trump was able to ride the rising tide of cynicism straight into office. 

Now things are even worse, because the coup isn’t even in the past, but ongoing. Trump didn’t just try to steal the 2020 election, but, with the expansive help of the GOP, is setting things up to steal 2024 — and pull it off successfully. This “moving forward” language is a little like getting a cancer diagnosis and refusing to get chemo or radiation, on the grounds that the diagnosis was yesterday and today is a brand new day. But the authoritarian tumor is still there and growing. It must be dealt with or it will kill the body — our democracy — it has taken root in. 

Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s controversial final Supreme Court pick, votes to uphold Obamacare

Nine years after the Supreme Court first upheld the Affordable Care Act, an even more conservative Court again saved the landmark legislation now known as Obamacare on Thursday. 

Without ruling on the merits of the case, the Supreme Court rejected Republicans’ years-long legal battle against the health insurance legislation. The Court’s newest members, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, voted against the Republican challengers to keep the law in place. This is the third time the highest court in the nation has affirmed the law since its passage in 2010. 

This case, California v. Texas, case was brought by a bloc of Republican state officials looking to strike down the entire law after a Republican-controlled Congress effectively ended tax penalties for the individual mandate, which the Supreme Court previously upheld as constitutional. In his decision, Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, said the states don’t have standing to challenge the individual mandate “because they have not shown a past or future injury fairly traceable to defendants’ conduct enforcing the specific statutory provision they attack as unconstitutional.” 

Breyer was joined in the seven-member majority by Four Republican appointees — Trump picks Kavanaugh and Barrett as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas. In the minority were Justices Samuel Alito and Neal Gorsuch.

Remember snow days? Today’s kids get heat days

Things have to be really bad to cancel the annual fifth grade-versus-faculty kickball game.

Last Monday, thermometers at Dyer Elementary School in Portland, Maine, registered 93 degrees Fahrenheit, and teachers were forced to make the tough decision to call off the big, ceremonial event, which marks the end of elementary school for the fifth graders. “It sounds trivial, but the kids were really disappointed,” said Andrew Hodgkins, a special-ed technician at the school. The next day, administrators canceled school entirely, instructing teachers and students to instead go back to distance learning. It’s the first time Hodgkins, a Maine native, has heard of something like this happening. “I’m from around here,” he said. “I never had a heat day when I was growing up.” 

One hundred miles south, in Groton, Massachusetts, Nicole Frietas, a Spanish teacher at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School, recorded temperatures of over 90 degrees F in her classroom. She managed to move her students into the library, one of the few air-conditioned areas on the school’s campus. “It was miserable,” Freitas said. “The students went from being really energetic and engaged to being really lethargic.” 

Across the Northeast, record-breaking temperatures last week forced districts to cancel school or call for early dismissal, concerned about the dangerous combination of heat, a widespread lack of air conditioning, and COVID-19 rules that still limit fan usage and require mask wearing. 

Education experts told Grist the heatwave illustrates just how underprepared schools in the United States are for the extreme weather that comes more frequently with climate change. “It’s showing that our schools are extremely out of date,” said Laura Schifter, who leads K12 Climate Action, a project of the nonprofit Aspen Institute that addresses climate change through schools.

Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that most school districts need major building-system repairs, like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning updates. Some of those are schools, like Dyer Elementary, that have never had air conditioning before. One district in Michigan told the researchers that 60 percent of its schools had never had air conditioning, and that in 2019 it had begun shuffling schedules to protect students from extreme heat. 

Climate adaptation isn’t just about air conditioning: It’s also important for schools to figure out how to support students and communities reeling in the wake of a wildfire or hurricane, Shifter said. In recent years, schools in the West have closed for smoke days, when wildfires made breathing hazardous. In the towns around Paradise, California, schools strained to keep the students whose homes had burned down from falling through the cracks. In Miami, schools worked to accomodate an influx of families from Puerto Rico fleeing the destruction of hurricane Maria. Internationally, drought has emptied schools in Niger and Bolivia as families follow the receding water. Schools often don’t need new physical renovations to prepare for disasters: In some cases it’s as simple as making a plan. If a school knows ahead of time who will take responsibility for responding to a disaster, or sets up a system for tracking students before they scatter, that can reduce the chaos significantly. 

In looking at the schools that need the most work to prepare for climate change, Schifter saw a familiar pattern. “The need is greatest in low-income communities and communities of color,” she said. These school districts have a harder time getting the money to pay for upgrades, she told Grist, and so instead they end up frittering away dollars on the maintenance of long-outdated systems.

And as temperatures in classrooms rise, so too does the impact on students’ education. Each 1-degree F increase in temperature reduces the amount that students learn by 1 percent, according to a study published last year in the journal American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The study also found that in hotter parts of the U.S. with the greatest need for air conditioning, schools with a higher portion of Black and Hispanic students were less likely to have it.

Despite the need, most school districts are juggling so many issues that climate adaptation isn’t even on their radar. Air conditioning is expensive, noted Thomas A. Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. “The fact that we have two blistering days and only a handful of schools are releasing on an abbreviated schedule indicates that we tend to just deal with it. It’s not that we wouldn’t like to have the options for A/C, but there isn’t a strong move to do it,” he wrote in an email during the Northeast’s heatwave last week.

But sometimes paying to prepare up front costs less in the long run. When Arlington, Virginia, began the process of designing a new school, the architects suggested that it wouldn’t cost much more to build in such a way that the structure generated all the energy it needed. Now, Discovery Elementary not only remains comfortable on hot days, but also saves the district around $100,000 in utility costs every year.

In the meantime, students keep sweating, and schools keep shuffling schedules. When the weather finally turned in Portland, Maine, Dyer Elementary rescheduled the kickball game. Hodgkins was dismayed to report that the teachers lost to the fifth graders, four to eight.

“Stop the Steal” means “Start the Coup”: Experts on Trump’s Jan. 6 coup plot and the power of denial

In the most basic sense, a coup is an illegal takeover of government power by an individual or faction.

A coup can be attempted by members of the existing government and political system or those outside of it. A coup can also involve both groups working together towards the same goal of overthrowing the government.

The connotative meaning, symbolism, and emotional valence of the word “coup” is something much broader: for Americans a “coup” is something that happens in other countries — “over there,” not in the world’s “greatest democracy.” More generally, a “coup” summons up ideas and feelings of social disorder and chaos, a broken democracy or other form of government, and a country to be looked down upon as some type of failed state in the so-called Third World.

On January 6, then-President Donald Trump, his Republican co-conspirators in Congress, allies in other parts of the United States government, and followers attempted a coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s victory.

The last few days have seen more revelations about the Trump regime’s lawlessness and just how perilously close Trump and his allies came to succeeding in their attempt to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The American people and the world now know that Donald Trump’s agents were pressuring the Department of Justice to intervene by “proving” that Biden won the election because of widespread “voter fraud.”

Documents obtained by the House Oversight and Reform Committee include a draft memo that was to be submitted by the Department of Justice to the Supreme Court which argued that the 2020 Election results should be nullified.

Moreover, other questions still remain about the events of January 6, such as how the Trump regime was able to so easily demobilize the United States military and why dozens of repeated warnings about a violent attack by Trump’s followers on the Capitol were ignored.

Instead of speaking plainly and directly about the Trump regime’s coup, many in the mainstream news media, and among America’s political class more generally, have avoided using such language. When the coup was imminent, they dismissed it as something “impossible” and “ridiculous” and “fearmongering” by people afflicted with “Trump derangement syndrome.”

When the coup and attack on the Capitol finally occurred, many of those same voices called it an “insurrection” or a “mob action” by Trump supporters who “didn’t really have a plan.” This too is incorrect: Trump’s attack force included highly motivated and trained elements who acted in a precise fashion with the goal of capturing Mike Pence, whom they threatened to kill, along with other Republicans deemed to be “traitors” and Democrats. Trump’s attack force was also attempting to start a civil war, and at the very least to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory with the goal of creating the conditions for Trump to declare a national state of emergency.

As the horrors of January 6 became even more clear, the chattering class and America’s political elites then tried to dismiss the coup as “frightening” but not a “real threat” to the country’s democracy. Too many other public voices have also defaulted to the weak and absurd claim that Trump’s coup “failed” and “could not have succeeded any way” because of “institutions” — which in their collective mind somehow minimizes the existential peril facing the country’s democracy.

And even with these new revelations about Trump and his regime’s high crimes, members of the country’s political class are still desperately trying to avoid using the word “coup” in a sustained and serious way because to do so would then necessitate questions about investigations, public hearings, trials — along with the threat of punishment — for Donald Trump and his regime.

The Democrats very much want to “move on” from January 6 because they see it as a distraction from their policy agenda. The Republicans are complicit and do not want to implicate themselves by having proper investigations – and are still using the Big Lie to attack American democracy and freedom in what is an on-going coup. The American people are divided on basic questions of reality, which means that there is no agreed upon narrative about January 6 and the Trump regime’s attempt to overthrow the country’s multiracial democracy and the rule of law. In total, America is being besieged by organized forgetting about the Trump’s regime’s coup attempt on January 6, and the horrors of the Age of Trump, more generally.

In an effort to better understand why so many Americans are afraid to use the word “coup” to describe the events of January 6 and beyond, I asked several experts from a range of backgrounds for their insights on this social and political dynamic of evasion and denial.

David Rothkopf, political commentator, author of “Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump,” and cohost of the podcast “Deep State Radio”:

At first glance it seems that we were so shocked by the coup attempt that we froze. But with each passing day, as evidence that it was not only a coup attempt but a vast conspiracy involving multiple crimes at the federal state level, the question grows more urgent. Why are we so inert? Why the inaction? For the GOP, it is easy. They are afraid of complicity and suffering the grim political fate they so richly deserve. But why don’t Democrats act? Are they afraid of appearing too “partisan?” Afraid of alienating the few Republicans who might support their legislative agendas? Afraid of a public backlash or giving more bandwidth to Trump and the Trumpists? Whatever the excuse, it is lame. The reality is inaction will just make the past into prelude, yesterday’s coup into tomorrow’s autocracy.

Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist and contributing editor for The Atlantic, and author of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported.”

The evidence keeps piling up, and is now crystal clear. Donald Trump, Mark Meadows and their allies were dead serious about overturning the election and installing a coup-driven presidency. Trump’s conversation on January with Kevin McCarthy makes it clear that if this took many deaths of members of Congress and even Mike Pence, that was a price he would pay. There is undoubtedly more to come, including with top officials at DOD. We came much closer to a genuine violent coup than we knew.

Andrea Chalupa, journalist and author of “Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm.” She is also the cohost of the podcast “Gaslit Nation”:

I think a number of factors have normalized the coup for many people in the U.S., including many elites, especially in the media. For one thing, political violence has already been normalized through mass shootings and the gun violence epidemic, which are propped up by the Republican Party and the NRA. Another factor is that most white people in America — and the media and elites are mostly made up of white people — haven’t had to deal with the realities of authoritarianism, so to them, they’re still expecting an exit ramp and some return to normalcy.

Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works”:

Time and again in recent years, too many have avoided and even derided terminology that is perfectly adequate to describe our times; “authoritarianism,” “autocracy,” “anti-democratic,” “racist” and “fascist” — all of these are accurate to describe the formation that is building in the modern Republican Party. Democratic party politicians have shied away from the accurate terminology because they wish to signal civility and bipartisanship, at a time when voters they wish to woo have clearly indicated a preference for strength. Others have simply failed to recognize and update on the authoritarian threat, mocking those who take the Trumpist faction seriously. As evidence emerges that the country narrowly avoided a coup, and the mechanisms that would have enabled that coup are now being legalized in bills passed across the country, the willful denial of the anti-democratic threat posed by the GOP must increasingly be seen as a form of complicity.

Jared Yates Sexton, political commentator and author of “American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People” and “The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage.” He is the co-host of the “Muckrake Political Podcast”:

The denial by media, politicians and Americans at large of what January 6 meant and what it represented — namely an attempted coup and overthrow of a presidential election — is driven by an unwillingness to reckon with just how perilous of a moment we’re living in but also how our history is riddled with antidemocratic actions. This isn’t the first time our system has been imperiled. It is a canary in the coal mine moment that tells us we are dangerously close to a troubling and dangerous conclusion to representative government.

Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center. He is the author of “Bush on the Couch” and “Obama on the Couch.” His most recent book is “Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President”:

The country is faced with intensified efforts to force a coup to take over the government. “Stop the Steal” means “Start the Coup.” One fundamental psychological challenge facing all presidents is to help citizens contain their anxiety and fear — both of which risk replacing thought with action.

Being vaccinated doesn’t mean you must go maskless. Here’s why.

For more than a year, public health officials have repeatedly told us that masks save lives. They’ve warned us to keep our distance from our neighbors, who’ve morphed into disease vectors before our eyes.

Now they are telling us that if we’re vaccinated, we no longer need to wear masks or physically distance ourselves in most cases — even indoors. To many people, myself included, this seems hard to reconcile with so many long months of masking and physical distancing and sacrificing our social lives for fear of covid-19.

What is an anxious, pandemic-weary (and wary) soul to do?

First, it’s important to stress that the dramatic rollback of mask-wearing and physical distancing recommended last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a policy California has adopted starting Tuesday as part of a broader reopening — applies only to people who have been fully vaccinated.

Even if you are vaccinated, though, you don’t need to change your behavior one iota if doing so makes you uncomfortable.

“Nothing in the CDC guidelines says to stop wearing a mask,” says Dr. José Mayorga, executive director of the UCI Health Family Health Centers. “It’s a recommendation, but if you choose to wear one, that’s OK. You shouldn’t be stigmatized.”

Mayorga has lost five relatives to covid, including a favorite aunt, and he knows from personal experience how hard it can be to rush back into so-called normalcy.

“Many people have not been directly impacted by covid,” he says. “But for those of us who have been, it’s natural to have concern or fear, thinking, ‘Oh, I can take my mask off? But is it really safe?'”

Some people are just cautious by nature and won’t be rushing to jettison their masks and rub elbows with unmasked strangers. “I know that, realistically, I can do pretty much anything once I’m fully vaccinated, but mentally it’s scary,” says 36-year-old Sacramento resident Shannon Albers, who got her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on May 27. “It’s going to be weird, after a year of them drilling into us ‘Wear a mask, wear a mask, wear a mask,’ to be around a bunch of people who aren’t wearing masks.”

Early in the pandemic, the CDC said masks were not necessary. Then, it changed its guidance so emphatically that masks became an indispensable part of our wardrobes. Now the advice has changed again.

“For scientists, it is very understandable that there is this revision of recommendations based on new research,” says Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology, public health and medicine at the University of California-Irvine. “But for the general public, that could sound very confusing.”

Early on, many people feared catching the coronavirus from surfaces and even disinfected groceries before putting them away. Now, the virus is believed to spread mainly through the air, and the notion of spraying or wiping down everything you bring into the house seems silly.

We don’t know how long the vaccines’ protection lasts, but it is increasingly clear that being vaccinated reduces the risk of infecting others.

“Vaccinated people have very little risk of infection; they can do what they want to do,” says Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California–San Francisco. “I think we’re in pretty good shape, and I think it’s going to be pretty much a disease-free summer.”

In California, the rate of positive covid tests has dropped from a seven-day average of over 17% in early January, at the peak of the winter surge, to under 1% now. The number of hospitalized covid patients statewide has fallen from over 22,000 to below 1,300 in the same period.

Around 46% of Golden State residents have been fully vaccinated, lagging behind numerous other states but ahead of the national rate of just under 43%. Some millions more have built up immunity after a covid infection.

As more people get protection, the covid virus finds fewer susceptible bodies, further reducing transmission and producing a downward spiral in the number of cases.

If you are indoors with other people you know to be vaccinated, you can dispense with masks. Want to cook dinner for a group of vaccinated friends you haven’t seen for several months? Carpe diem — and don’t worry about wearing masks or sitting spaced apart.

But if you are in a mixed crowd — say, a grocery store — and don’t know who’s vaccinated, wear a mask, even though your personal risk is low. If the workers are wearing masks, it’s a matter of respect to wear one yourself. Some people may be nervous about being there — those who are immune-compromised, for example, or can’t get vaccinated for some other health reason — and they won’t know if you’ve had your shots.

“Forget about the medical benefit,” says Bradley Pollock, associate dean for Public Health Sciences at the UC-Davis School of Medicine. “If you are wearing a mask, people who are not vaccinated don’t need to feel uncomfortable around you. So, it’s kind of a courtesy issue.”

The presence of children is another good reason to mask up. Most kids ages 12 to 16 haven’t been vaccinated yet, and those under 12 can’t be, yet. They’ll probably have to wear masks in school this fall.

And though children have not been hit by covid nearly as hard as adults, and are not efficient transmitters of the virus, thousands of kids have been hospitalized with it nonetheless — including about 4,000 nationwide diagnosed with a frightening multisystem inflammatory syndrome.

Mayorga, who is fully vaccinated and has young children, says he wears a mask “to protect them and to model good behavior.”

Public health experts agree that vaccinating as many people as possible, including children, is the way out of the pandemic.

But the rate of vaccinations has slowed recently. One of the biggest contributions you can make to the public good right now is to get vaccinated — and help others do the same.

Some people aren’t vaccinated because they lack mobility and can’t get to an appointment. Check in with elderly neighbors, and if they haven’t been vaccinated and need a ride, offer to drive them. You can also check with your local department on aging, community groups that serve the elderly, public health agencies or hospitals to ask if they are seeking drivers.

Perhaps the biggest impact you can have is persuading friends and loved ones to get the vaccine – and then urging them to persuade others.

If they think the vaccines were rolled out too fast to be safe, tell them that related coronavirus vaccine research has been going on for more than a decade. Point out that hundreds of millions of covid shots have now been given and serious side effects are rare — and are being carefully monitored by officials.

You might also need to rebut the widespread notion that the vaccine could suddenly produce some terrible, unforeseen health impact a few years down the road. “That just doesn’t happen,” Pollock says.

Expect to encounter resistance at first, but be persistent. It can take numerous conversations to assuage anxieties, but your close friends will listen.

“If your best friend tells you they did this, that’s highly influential — more than some talking head,” Pollock says.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

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