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An undercounted gorilla population yields hope for conservationists

In movies like “King Kong” and “Planet of the Apes,” gorillas are fearsome monsters who pose a direct threat to human survival. But in real life, human beings have played the role of monster in the human-gorilla relationship. Because humans have destroyed their habitat and poached them off, gorillas are now among the most endangered apes in the world.

Thankfully a new study offers a glimmer of hope for conservationists when it comes to the largest of the four gorilla subspecies, the Grauer’s gorilla (also known as the eastern lowland gorilla). They are still very much in danger, but there are thousands more than previously thought.

It all boils down to location. In 2016 a study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society estimated the Grauer’s gorilla population to be at roughly 3,800, a decline of almost 80 percent since the last major survey conducted two decades earlier. The newer study, however, did not include the full extent of the eastern lowland gorillas’ range because of political insecurity in certain regions. Now that the Wildlife Conservation Society has been able to include data from field surveys in the Oku forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), they can update that figure: They now estimate that there are 6,800 individuals left within this majesty gorilla species rather than only 3,800.

But conservationists say the news should be taken with a grain of salt — as 6,800 is still a low number for any animal population, and suggests a genetic bottleneck. 

“The main findings are that gorilla numbers haven’t declined as badly as feared . . . rather, than they have increased,” Dr. Andrew Plumptre, lead author of the study, told Salon by email. “We show they have remained stable in the Oku region but have declined in the Kahuzi Biega Park, where rebels have been present for the past 20-25 years.”

He added that chimpanzees have not declined as much, most likely because don’t move in a group like gorillas but rather split up and coalesce again in a structure known as a fission-fusion social system.

“Both apes have remained stable in the Oku region west of Kahuzi where human population is very low, and there is some respect of the traditional law. Many traditional chiefs encourage conservation of gorillas and chimps,” Plumptre added.

This brings up the next, and perhaps most important question: Are there any reasons for hope and, by extension, lessons for other conservationists?

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“There is a need to remove the armed rebel groups from Kahuzi Biega if there is a hope to save the gorillas in the lowland part of that park,” Plumptre explained. “However, there has been a lot of support over the past 20 years to conserve these apes and now traditional leaders and local communities are supportive of the conservation of these apes. The results from Oku show what is possible where rebels are not present and the local community respect traditional laws.”

This, in turn, leads to what Plumptre has learned about how conservation efforts can succeed.

“The importance of local people and traditional society and laws that are respected locally has led to better conservation in the face of presence of armed rebels,” Plumptre observed. “Rebel groups haven’t been present in the Oku region so much and local community conservation has been successful here. The armed groups hunt the apes for bushmeat because they are relatively large and provide more meat per bullet.”

This intersection between political complexities and gorilla conservation was also highlighted in the study’s conclusion.

“The civil war in [Democratic Republic of Congo] and continued presence of armed rebel groups have made conservation exceedingly difficult,” the authors wrote. “The focus of conservation efforts is now on the local communities that are able to live and operate in and around” the gorillas, they add.

Andrew Cuomo’s unlikely online fan base: Women have rallied to his defense by the thousands

As New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — internet heartthrob of the early pandemic era — finds himself clinging to power in Albany amid investigations into several high-profile sexual harassment allegations and COVID-19 death rates in state nursing homes, an unlikely source of support has emerged: women. Particularly middle-aged and older white Democrats who found themselves politically activated during the Trump years, including some who feel the #MeToo era has gone a little too far.

Thousands of women have joined forces both online and in-person over the last few months to rally around Cuomo, organizing through social media and phone campaigns, raising tens of thousands of dollars for advertising, and even planning a number of traditional real-world rallies. Their proximate goal is to keep the embattled governor in office, at least while investigations of his alleged misdeeds play out — and perhaps also make it possible for Cuomo to run for a fourth term next year. 

Salon identified at least 20 Cuomo support groups on Facebook with more than 75,000 members — though it’s unclear how many of these have duplicate members across multiple pages. The most prominent of these is “Women for Governor Cuomo,” which counts more than 70 percent of its 1,200 members as women over the age of 55, according to moderators. 

The group burst into the spotlight following a Wall Street Journal article about its efforts last month, outlining several of the real-world initiatives organized through the page — several crowdfunded pro-Cuomo billboards and aerial banners over high-traffic areas in the state, as well as a coordinated effort flood an official state hotline meant for tips on the governor’s misconduct. One member’s actions even earned her a letter of thanks, and a shoutout for the group, from Cuomo himself.

“Please be sure to pass along my sincere gratitude to other members of your group,” a copy of the letter posted to Facebook reads. It’s unclear what exactly she did to earn the recognition.

Despite these accomplishments, organizers say the group is trying to outgrow its reputation as a “fan club” for the governor — some of the members continue to gush over pictures of Cuomo online, adding hearts and sparkle filters — and rebrand its members as something more like “activists.”

In the weeks since the Wall Street Journal article, the group’s more active members have sought to capitalize on the groundswell of support, courting media coverage and filing paperwork with the state to set up a pro-Cuomo political action committee called “We Decide New York.” 

The organization’s leaders say several state Democratic party insiders have reached out to meet with them — while the founder of the original Facebook group, Pamela Morley, even told Salon she’s considering a run for state office herself during the next election cycle.

Members attribute the recent spike in interest to the fact that many people who supported Cuomo but remained largely silent during the initial wave of sexual harassment allegations against him are now, in effect, coming out. 

“I had a number of people call me and say, ‘Oh my God, I heard you on the radio. I saw you in the paper. How could I get involved?'” Sandy Behan, one of the moderators of “Women for Governor Cuomo” and an organizer with “We Decide New York,” told Salon. “What we’re trying to do is let people know that they should [get involved], and that there is a venue for it. 

“I think people are afraid to speak up, for both personal and business reasons.”

Cuomo is facing sexual harassment allegations from more than a half-dozen women, but despite the rash of negative headlines the governor’s support has remained surprisingly durable across the board, clocking in at just over 50 percent in the most recent Marist survey. He’s seized on those numbers, and the increasingly public shows of support from groups like “Women for Governor Cuomo,” as evidence that the public approves of his job performance and doesn’t want him to resign.

Though the views of individual members in Cuomo-centric online groups vary widely, moderators of “Women for Governor Cuomo” tell Salon they’re tied together by lingering doubts about his sexual harassment accusations and a commitment to due process. They say the various investigations into Cuomo’s actions should be allowed to play out, and ultimately believe that voters should decide his future.

“If you didn’t support Gov. Cuomo and you didn’t question the accusations against him, you wouldn’t be joining a “Women for Governor Cuomo group,” Behan, 68, said. “I mean, it’s very clear what we’re about.”

In an extended interview, several of the “Women for Governor Cuomo” administrators and “We Decide New York” organizers said they weren’t particularly involved in politics before the election of Donald Trump, and that they had embraced Cuomo as a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance. They also repeatedly suggested that the allegations against Cuomo could be an act of political sabotage by his enemies.

“I mean, let’s look at the timing of all this,” Morley said. “Gov. Cuomo emerges during this pandemic as a shining star. I’m sure there was considerable resentment in the political arena. Why come out with [these allegations] now?”

A focus of particular ire within the group is Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo aide who was the first woman to make a public accusation of sexual harassment against the governor. She is currently a candidate for Manhattan borough president. Members have organized campaigns to attack Boylan on Twitter, with some even posting proudly within the Facebook group that they’ve been blocked by her, calling it a “badge of honor.”

Morley, 41, says the standard of conduct for group members on social media is “don’t be a jerk,” though she admitted that it’s impossible to police the actions of individuals within a dispersed group of this size. 

“Online attacks like the ones I’ve received perpetuate a culture that makes it difficult for survivors to talk about the harassment and abuse they’ve experienced,” Boylan said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “We should hold our leaders accountable for their abuses rather than tear down those who have the courage to speak truth to power.”

Arguments over the members’ tactics and public statements appear to break down along generational lines: Younger women appear to be taking more of a wait-and-see approach on the veracity of the allegations against Cuomo, administrators said, adding that their primary online critics have been men.

“Regarding negative comments, when I looked at them like 80 to 90 percent were from men,” said Valerie Skarbek, another of the Facebook page’s moderators. “So to me, seeing that, I’m like, men are going to tell us women what to believe and what to think? Are you kidding me?”

All the “Women for Governor Cuomo” members who spoke with Salon said they had experienced sexual harassment in their own lives, and one woman said she had been raped. But many don’t see Cuomo’s alleged behavior — even if true — as rising to the level of sexual harassment. Several mentioned the Cuomo accusers’ use of the word “survivor” as off-putting. 

“It’s a trigger, as a real survivor,” Morley said. “It’s a trigger when people try to make things up or embellish, claiming they’re a victim or survivor. It’s almost like a slap in the face to real survivors. It’s an insult.”

Behan, a communications and advertising executive who said she had climbed the corporate ladder over the course of her career at a Fortune 500 company, said the group’s members were better equipped to make judgments about these kinds of accusations because they’ve experienced the full range of workplace harassment themselves.

“I mean, at our age, we tend to be movers and shakers — we’re real confident, we’re experienced, and I think we’re really insightful and objective on this topic,” Behan said. “A lot of us were in the work environment in the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s, and at that point in time there was really no laws against sexual harassment. Women had to just deal with it and keep their head up high and continue to work. And I think that we can see more clearly when an accusation like this may be embellished or could be not all true.”

Some even said they perceived an out-of-control #MeToo movement that distorts the due process rights of the accused. Author Jill Filipovic, who has written several books on both feminism and generational divides, said this tension over how far to go in righting historic wrongs around sex and gender is by no means new. She said she hadn’t heard of the pro-Cuomo online phenomenon, but clearly recognized the dynamics at play.

“I think there’s always been a tension between how you balance fairness and process with the reality that supposedly ‘fair’ processes have long not worked for women — and people of color for that matter,” said Filipovic. “All of a sudden, after #MeToo, you have a big shift among older feminists toward concerns about due process that perhaps weren’t there when women were on the losing end of the process. There’s definitely a generational tension between who puts more emphasis where.”

Younger women, Filipovic added, come into the workplace with different expectations about workplace conduct, and are more likely to demand change rather than simply putting up with it.

“I think a lot of these young women are entitled — and I use that word in an unequivocally positive way, not a negative one,” she said. “They feel entitled to a workplace where they’re not treated like sex objects, where their hard work is rewarded and they don’t have to fend off advances from older bosses. Whereas I think older generations of women didn’t come in with that set of assumptions. That doesn’t mean they didn’t object to the behavior — but I think it was overall less shocking than it was to younger women.”

Cuomo’s rise to pandemic stardom has clearly played a huge role in forging his online fan base. Skarbek, a former New Yorker who now lives in Illinois, says she watched nearly every press briefing Cuomo held during the first and deadliest wave of the pandemic last spring, a sentiment echoed by the group’s other administrators. And every woman who spoke with Salon for this piece mentioned the fact that Cuomo stood up to Trump as a key reason for their support.

“At that time I was really seeking out good leaders and people with leadership skills, and I saw a lot of that in Cuomo,” Skarbek, 47, said.

“Cuomo during the pandemic was compassionate. His guidance, his leadership through all that time was incredibly important to me personally,” Behan added. “It was a really lonely time, and I waited for him every day to come on to let me know what was going on — not only in the world, but what he was doing for us as New Yorkers to help us get through all this. He literally kept us calm through it all. I mean, it was extremely difficult not being able to see your family, your grandchildren, your children. And he was the one thing that gave us hope.”

Perhaps that personal connection is why other politicians in similar positions haven’t attracted the same level of support. Several posts have appeared in the pro-Cuomo Facebook group backing New York mayoral candidate Scott Stringer, who was recently accused of sexually harassing a former intern decades ago, but they haven’t gained much traction. 

One parallel that several group moderators did raise was the case of former Sen. Al Franken, a widely beloved Democrat who was forced to resign in 2018 after several allegations of sexual harassment. The “Women for Governor Cuomo” organizers all agreed that Franken should have remained in office at least until a full investigation had been completed. 

The group is currently arranging several campaigns and fundraising through “We Decide New York” to support Cuomo’s potential 2022 re-election bid — and even envisions continuing its support if he runs for president in the future. 

“We are not planning on going away anytime soon,” Behan said. “We’re like a support group for each other. Honest to God, something comes out or something ticks you off, you go to the group to see what people are posting, what people are saying.”

“It just shows how we’ve bonded, how we come together over this issue,” Skarbek said. “We’re setting up for a long-term commitment.”

Mike Lindell’s Mission Impossible: Can his “secret agents” undo the 2020 election?

Fervent Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, along with various associates, is accelerating his quixotic and/or terrifying quest to undo the 2020 presidential election. Over the past month Lindell has gone from unhinged tangents on various right-wing platforms — including his own semi-broken Frank Speech website — to alleged real-world actions that may include somehow acquiring voting machines and ordering a team of operatives to break into election facilities. 

In recent weeks, both in conversations with Salon and during media appearances on his Frank Speech site, Lindell has proudly boasted that he now possesses both Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines — and believes his team will soon "harvest" incriminating data from their innards. 

These claims echo earlier ones made by the pillow magnate on a May 8 segment of Steve Bannon's podcast. "I'll give Dominion a little scare this morning," Lindell told Bannon. "We have machines now, I do. We have ES&S [Election Systems & Software] machines; we've got them all. We're going to be putting out so much information over the next couple weeks, and this isn't from Arizona, these are machines we actually have."

No "information" has emerged in the intervening month but Lindell's claims have only intensified, including his vaporware proposal that former President Donald Trump will be reinstalled as president in August, by way of some unexplained mechanism and following a unanimous Supreme Court decision.

On May 20, Lindell stated on his Frank Speech website that he now has both Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines, hinting that he has been hiding them in undisclosed locations. 

Salon has had numerous conversations with Lindell and his associates, but they repeatedly failed to provide any "absolute proof," if you will, that they really had any such machines in their possession. 

A Smartmatic spokesperson told Salon this week that the company has no record of Lindell claiming to be in possession of one of its machines, while noting, "We did see Mr. Lindell saying he had a Dominion voting machine." The company spokesperson didn't respond to a follow-up email from Salon on the matter. Dominion Voting Systems informed Salon, through a third-party communications firm, that it had no comment on Lindell's claims. 

Lindell's arcane or outlandish claims and schemes relating to the 2020 election don't end there. In late May, Dr. Douglas Frank, a fellow election conspiracy enthusiast and Lindell sidekick, claimed on a small right-wing YouTube channel that the pillow-preneur had hired "'Mission: Impossible' secret agent kind of people" to break into facilities where IP addresses were allegedly being stored that somehow pertained to the 2020 ballot counts. (Frank is not a physician, but by his own account holds a PhD in chemistry and is a math and science educator in Cincinnati.)

"So he hired people that are brilliant computer technical experts to go to these places and actually do it," Frank said. Along with fellow conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Dr. Sheri Tenpenny, Frank is a frequent guest on Lindell's nightly programming and appears to be a trusted adviser. 

Frank didn't return a Salon request for comment regarding his knowledge of Lindell's alleged "Mission: Impossible" strike force. 

When Salon reached Lindell to inquire about his purported team of agents, the MyPillow CEO reiterated that he believes this reporter is "evil." 

"Did you forget that you don't exist in my world?" Lindell asked, rhetorically. "You are a terrible journalist! Zachary Petrizzo is an evil, terrible journalist! That is my quote!" 

When Salon called back to follow up, one of Lindell's assistants informed Salon that the bedding tycoon was "done" talking with Salon. Asked about the voting machines, Lindell's assistant asserted that the man who has given millions a good night's sleep possessed "many" such machines, but declined to say where they were. 

As Lindell prepares for his second "Frank Speech" rally in New Richmond, Wisconsin, this Saturday, with an impressive range of special guests that include TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, Newsmax hosts Diamond and Silk (Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) and ex-felon and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, he launched a last-ditch effort to attract rally-goers by appearing on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' "Infowars" program on Thursday. 

The first "Frank Speech" rally was held on May 10 in Mitchell, South Dakota, and failed to attract anywhere near the 30,000 attendees Lindell had predicted. He is making the same prediction the second time around.

As for Lindell's mysterious teams of private investigators and "Mission: Impossible" secret agents, it remains unclear whether these people exist or whom they might work for. Lindell made similar grandiose claims about the software engineers behind his website, which never successfully launched as a social media platform and to this day frequently crashes during his live broadcasts. 

Lindell has said that his investigators are looking into both Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey — major targets of Trump's ire — after the Republican Governors Association booted him from its gathering in Georgia. He has also suggested that a similar team of "private investigators," is looking into why Fox News, in Lindell's opinion, isn't covering his "bombshell" revelations stemming from the 2020 election. 

"Why is Mike Lindell not on Fox, and why do they seem to say, 'Hey, when Dominion says something, we're just gonna shut up about it and talk about Biden's tax bill'?" Bannon asked Lindell in March. The MyPillow CEO responded, "You know, I'm gonna have those answers soon 'cause I've hired private investigators, and I've spent a lot of money on them to investigate everything."

At the beginning of June, Lindell filed an 82-page federal lawsuit against Dominion and Smartmatic, according to Law and Crime. That report continues:

Lindell's case also contains allegations that the various elections technology company defendants were — and are — attempting to illegally shut Lindell up by threatening and then filing their own defamation lawsuits against him several weeks back. Lindell's suit cites Wikipedia to allege a mathematical-style equation he claims describes the companies' litigation against him: "Lawsuit Warfare = Lawsuit + Warefare = Lawfare."

As Lindell ramps up the intensity of his schemes, the question for his legions of followers is whether and when the plans will culminate in "reinstating" Trump to the White House. Lindell appeared nervous last Friday about his previous August deadline, and instead said that Trump will be back on "God's time."

In the fight for democracy, Democrats are being outmaneuvered — and time is against them

Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson once observed, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Matters are worse than that for the Democrats. They’ve been punched in the mouth repeatedly by the Republicans — and never really had a plan to begin with.

Democrats still appear discombobulated by the Republican attack on American democracy. After Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and the collective exhalation of relief at the “defeat” of the Trump regime, the “resistance” (and the American people more generally) thought that they could relax.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his forces did not accept defeat. Instead, they continued to mobilize against America’s multiracial democracy. The Democratic Party, for the most part, has been stunned into inaction by the raw power and effectiveness of Trump and his agents’ use of the Big Lie, the public insanity of the QAnon conspiracy theory and other forms of misinformation, lies and propaganda about the outcome of the 2020 election.

Then came Jan. 6, with Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his followers. The Republican Party’s response to that horrible day was not universal condemnation. Instead it was an embrace — sometimes stealthy, other times overt — of terrorism and political violence as a legitimate means to obtain and keep political power.

As many others have observed, Jan 6 was not a defeat for Trumpism and American neofascism. It was a trial run for how to successfully conduct a coup in the future. In essence, the Republican Party now reserves the right to nullify the results of any elections it does not approve of.

In the five months since the coup attempt and Biden’s inauguration, Republican anti-democracy forces have continued to advance across the country. At least 389 voter-restriction bills have been introduced in 48 states, and 61 of those laws are moving through state legislatures. Most are clearly intended to limit the ability of Black and brown people and other members of the Democratic Party’s coalition to vote.

This is a naked attempt by the Republicans and other elements of the white right to create a 21st-century Jim Crow nation. In that America, the Democrats will never win major national elections, because that an outcome will become functionally impossible. Ultimately, If the Republicans achieve their goals, the United States will cease to be a functioning democracy.

Barack Obama has a deep and intimate understanding of the role that race and white supremacy play in the Republican Party’s anti-democracy campaign. As the country’s first Black president, Obama represents a version of America’s present and future that Republicans want to destroy. White rage fueled opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency; white rage is the fuel for Trumpism and neofascism.

In a recent conversation with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Obama issued this deliberate warning about the way American democracy is being gutted:   

All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps. …

I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago.

What can the Democrats do to save American democracy?

Most obviously, the filibuster needs to be eliminated. The For the People Act must be implemented to provide federal protections for voting rights, and to reform a broken electoral system by restricting partisan gerrymandering and forcing more transparency on campaigns finance. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is also needed to restore voting rights protections for Black and brown people across the former Jim Crow South, protections that were overturned by right-wing Supreme Court justices in the infamous Shelby County v. Holder decision.

Defeating the Jim Crow Republicans and Trump’s fascist movement will also require a sustained mass protest movement, nonviolent resistance and other forms of mobilization by the American people and civil society. It’s likely that a national strike and mass boycotts of corporations that collaborate with (and finance) attacks on multiracial democracy will also be necessary.

As part of this strategy, pro-democracy civil society organizations should also engage in a direct action protest campaign targeting Republican elected officials and other leaders, right-wing think tanks, right-wing media, right-wing churches and religious organizations, and other elements of the neofascist movement.

In his new essay at the Daily Beast, “Five Things Dems Must Do Now to Save Democracy From the GOP?” Wajahat Ali suggests the following course of action:

Flex Your Power. Did you know that Democrats currently control the White House, House of Representatives and hold the tiebreaker in the 50-50 Senate? I always lament that Democrats bring a policy paper to a knife fight and the GOP brings a bazooka. You don’t have to guess who’ll win in the end. Although Biden and his team are predicting his popular policies and civil tone might be enough to barely win in 2022 and 2024, why play it safe and mild against an aggressively extremist party threatening our democracy and the rights of millions? The Texas Democrats showed the party how it’s done as they temporarily blocked an oppressive voter suppression bill that could endanger the sanctity of the 2022 election. They said they were sending a “very, very clear” message to President Biden: “We need a national response to federal voting rights.”

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and an expert on law, ethics, and anti-corruption, praised the Texas Democrats and said their actions should be “an absolute role model” for Democrats moving forward. “Was it wrong to do one thing they had in their power? No. It was right. You have to fight with every tool you have,” he told me, wearing his “activist hat.”

Ali continues by noting that Democrats have largely failed to use the oversight powers that come with a congressional majority:

“The Republicans are the arsonists at the crime scene and congressional Democrats have the ability and the authority to use the levers of oversight however they see fit,” Kurt Bardella, advisor to the DCCC and former staffer to Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, told me. He said Democrats need only look at what Republicans did during the Obama years with their majority to issue over 100 subpoenas, countless depositions, and wasteful and prolonged hearings on Benghazi and [Hillary] Clinton’s emails solely to attack her presidential run. …

With Trump and his acolytes, there’s actual evidence of criminal behavior that demands legitimate oversight and investigation.

In the Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. outlines a six-point plan that includes the courts and the news media actively embracing a pro-democracy position. Bacon writes that for American democracy to survive, “we need leaders in every sector of America, from faith to business to sports, to emphasize democratic values. It won’t be enough if the pro-democracy message is carried only by politicians and the media. And it can’t be vague ‘voting is important’ rhetoric. Those taking democracy-eroding actions … have to be named and shamed.”

At the Guardian, political scientist Pippa Norris recently suggested some long-term fixes for American democracy, including nonpartisan “blanket primaries,” as used in California and Washington state; a “mixed-member proportional electoral system” for the House of Representatives, as used in Germany and New Zealand; and a compulsory retirement age for Congress.

Those reforms would likely help in the future. But right now, the Republicans are fighting a war of maneuver. How have the Democrats responded? To this point they are remaining in place, hunkered down. This is precisely how to lose: They will soon find themselves surrounded and then overwhelmed. It doesn’t help that the Democratic Party’s attempts to save democracy are hobbled by “centrists” like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who in this context have become de facto traitors and saboteurs.

At this juncture in the crisis, every moment of delay brings the Republicans closer to victory and the Democrats — and, by extension, American democracy — closer to defeat.

The time to act is now. The 2022 midterm elections may be too late. If the Republicans continue their campaign of destruction, the 2024 presidential election may be nothing more than a ceremonial ritual, installing Donald Trump or his hand-picked successor.

Time is now the enemy of democracy. The Republicans understand this, and are doing everything they can to speed toward what they see as their final and inevitable triumph. Democrats look on, dumbfounded that a glorious victory could so quickly be turned upside down by a determined and fanatical opponent.

Trump searching for new spokesperson after Jason Miller quits: report

Former President Donald Trump is searching for a new spokesperson.

“Jason Miller is leaving his day to day duties as former President Trump’s spox to take over as the CEO of a tech start-up company, according to a person familiar. The company owns one of the social media platforms Trump is considering. Trump is interviewing spox replacements now,” Meridith McGraw of Politico reported Thursday.

Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post also reported Miller was leaving.

Adam Schiff calls for investigation after report Trump administration spied on his family

On Thursday, The New York Times dropped a bombshell report that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department got a subpoena from Apple to spy on politically opposed members of Congress and their families, including House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA).

According to CNN’s John Berman, Schiff is calling for an inspector general investigation into whether any misconduct was involved in the surveillance.

Schiff also took to Twitter to fire back against the former president, writing, “This baseless investigation, while now closed, is yet another example of Trump’s corrupt weaponization of justice. And how much he imperiled our democracy.”

Watch the report below via CNN:

Anger in Tokyo over the Summer Olympics is the latest example of how unpopular hosting has become

The Summer Olympics, postponed in 2020 by a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is scheduled to begin on July 23, 2021, in Tokyo. Even though surfing and four other sports will debut at these games, the locals aren’t exactly thrilled.

According to a recent poll, some 83% of the Japanese public wants the Olympics canceled, and protests are frequent. Amid a coronavirus surge that’s left the country short on hospital space and slow on carrying out vaccinations, an association representing thousands of Tokyo doctors wants the games called off. So do Japanese business leaders.

The International Olympic Committee, the nongovernmental authority that organizes the winter and summer games, has acknowledged this erosion of support without changing course. “We listen but won’t be guided by public opinion,” spokesman Mark Adams said.

Based on research my colleagues and I have done about the costs and benefits of hosting the Olympics and other multibillion-dollar sporting events, I find this statement ironic. The International Olympic Committee weighs public sentiment in cities when it decides where to hold the games.

For example, in 2019 the committee ruled out Stockholm’s bid to host the winter games in 2026. It selected instead Milan and the Alpine ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo because public support was stronger in Italy. Four other countries bowed out of the bidding process because of underwhelming domestic support to host the Olympics.

Losing interest

Tokyo’s predicament is only the latest and most extreme example of the way host cities tend to lose interest by the time these events happen. The risks that come with the prestige and attention generated when the Olympics, World Cup and other huge events are held no longer seem worth the trouble or the cost.

Initially, the 2020 games commanded strong support. Tokyo got creative about engaging the public, such as by crowdsourcing the transformation of discarded consumer electronics into Olympic medals, seeking volunteers and collectively choosing Olympic mascots. After a tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the games carried the promise and symbol of national recovery.

That sense of promise was short-lived.

Five years before the coronavirus pandemic began, Tokyo residents were losing interest in the Olympics. Critics bemoaned the bureaucracy, cost overruns and a lack of trained workers. When the original design for a new national stadium approached US$2 billion, it was replaced with a revised plan that would cost half as much.

This pattern echoed what happened in Brazil, which hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Years earlier, many Brazilians had been excited about the event. The reality was far different, with abandoned facilities, claims of corruption, and lost opportunities to remake Rio for all of its citizens.

Urban planning scholar Eva Kassens-Noor and I analyzed 21 million tweets to gauge public interest in the Rio games. We found that while the sporting events may have been popular, the International Olympic Committee generated far more negative than positive sentiments. The tenor of those tweets suggests that the public saw the IOC as self-serving and lacking an interest in helping the host city.

https://twitter.com/JulesBoykoff/status/1397045705886158849
 
What’s in it for hosts

On May 25, 2021, the State Department issued an advisory warning that “U.S. citizens are strongly discouraged from traveling to Japan.” It told Americans not to go there because of “a very high level of COVID-19 in the country.” But the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee indicated that U.S. athletes would participate anyway.

Even if the games do happen, they will be scaled back. No international spectators are coming, and the safety concerns already expressed by many athletes around the world before the ominous U.S. travel advisory could translate into lower numbers of competitors than expected.

A scaled-back Olympics would still generate plenty of broadcast revenue. The IOC earned $4.5 billion for the 2018 and 2020 Olympics, a powerful incentive to maintain the event. People around the world will still be able to watch the competition on television or on other devices, possibly with crowd noise added for effect. But that money largely flows to the International Olympic Committee, not to the place hosting the event.

The committee initially offered Tokyo $1.3 billion to cover some of what it’s spending on the Olympics, although contract language allows it to pay a different amount at its discretion. By one estimate, losing out on in-person foreign spectators could cost Japan as much as $23 billion.

Local organizers have historically benefited most not from ticket sales but from what spectators spend on hotels, restaurants and their travels around the city and country. The decision to ban foreign spectators precipitates trip cancellations and refunds owed for 600,000 tickets.

A brighter future is possible

Even if Tokyo’s Olympics turn out to be the debacle residents seem to fear, I don’t think it will necessarily damage the Olympics’ credibility for other potential host cities.

Instead, the coming decade will determine whether the event will keep going in the future. Will the Paris Summer Games in 2024, the Milan-Cortina Winter Games in 2026 and the Los Angeles Summer Games in 2028 be success stories? These events promise to be less expensive, as they will make use of venues built for past events, use temporary facilities and integrate long-term local needs into their construction plans.

Each of these cities has hosted big sporting events before. The challenge is to do it again, only better.

Mark Wilson, Professor, Urban & Regional Planning, School of Planning, Design and Construction, Michigan State University

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

Paramount Plus adding 1,000 new movies this June

Summer movie season has officially begun and Paramount Plus is about to make subscribers’ summers a whole lot more exciting by scaling up its existing catalog of movies beginning with plans to add 1,000 new films beginning June 10!

While movies are finally starting to open up again in theaters, Paramount Plus is looking to give subscribers looking to enjoy some of their favorite films from the comfort of their homes this summer plenty of new options to choose from.

While in the past we’ve typically seen new titles come a few at a time, this June Paramount Plus will be increasing its movie catalog to include more than 2,500 titles by the end of the summer. And what better way to kick off the summer movie season than by adding 1,000 new films this June alone!

New movies coming to Paramount Plus in June 2021

Although the complete list of new movies coming to Paramount Plus this June has not yet been released, the streaming service has announced some of the many titles making their way to Paramount Plus during the first wave which arrives on June 10, 2021!

Among the highlights are beloved action films, some of the studios’ most critically acclaimed films,  classics the whole family can enjoy together as well as several iconic comedies, dramas and horror films with a list that is sure to have something for everyone in the family to enjoy this summer.

The wave of new movies will also include the new Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor led sci-fi thriller, Infinite, which will exclusively debut on Paramount Plus beginning on Thursday, June 10. As summer continues, fans can also look forward to the arrival of PAW Patrol: The Movie as well as A Quiet Place Part II.

Just what films can you look forward to streaming on Paramount Plus this June? Here’s a look at some of the many new films arriving this week:

“71”

“The Addams Family”

“The Adventures of Tintin”

“Arachnophobia”

“The Avengers”

“The Birdcage”

“Body Cam”

“Charlotte’s Web”

“Child’s Play”

“Crawl”

“The Dictator”

“Dora and the Lost City of Gold”

“Fighting with My Family”

“Florence Foster Jenkins”

“The Full Monty”

“Gemini Man”

“Gretel & Hansel”

“The Haunting”

“Hello, My Name Is Doris”

“The Hustle”

“I Love You, Man”

“Infinite”

“Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa”

“Judy”

“Like a Boss”

“The Little Hours”

“Little Women”

“Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”

“No Strings Attached”

“Paranormal Activity 3 & 4”

“Pet Sematary”

“The Prodigy”

“Red Dawn”

“Revolutionary Road”

“The Rhythm Section”

“Rocketman”

“Saint Maud”

“The School of Rock”

“Skyfall”

“The Soloist”

“Sonic the Hedgehog”

“Terminator: Dark Fate”

“Tropic Thunder”

“Valley Girl”

“What Men Want”

“The Wolf of Wall Street”

“Wonder Park”

New shows coming to Paramount Plus in June 2021

In addition to literally hundreds of new movies to choose from, Paramount Plus will also be rolling out an impressive summer TV slate which kicks off in June with the arrival of iCarly on June 17. As the month goes by, fans can look forward to new seasons of “EVIL,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “The Good Fight” and more!

Among the new and recent hits fans can enjoy this summer on Paramount Plus are:

  • “60 Minutes+”
  • “The Challenge: All Stars”
  • “EVIL” (June 20)
  • “From Cradle to Stage”
  • “The Good Fight” (June 24)
  • “iCarly” (June 17)
  • “Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years”
  • “Rugrats”
  • “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” (June 24)
  • “RuPaul’s Drag Race Untucked!” (June 24)
  • “Why Women Kill”
  • “Younger”

Additionally, fans can look forward to “Behind the Music”‘s arrival on July 29 and the new season of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” on August 12.

How much does Paramount Plus with ads cost?

Effective June 7, 2021, Paramount Plus will launch the all-new ad-supported tier plan which will cost just $4.99 a month! The new Essential Plan will include the service’s marquee sports offerings, on-demand entertainment options through its catalog of shows and movies as well as breaking news provided by CBSN.

This new ad-supported plan will be offered in addition to the Paramount Plus Premium Plan priced at $9.99 a month which includes commercial-free entertainment options as well as an expanded catalog of sports and live streams of local affiliates across several U.S. markets.

The USDA has discriminated against Black farmers for years. Can this legislation bring about change?

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) on Wednesday introduced new legislation that aims to lift “the veil of secrecy” surrounding the race and gender of farm subsidy recipients, with the ultimate goal of eradicating decades of discrimination against Black farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

“Due to decades of discriminatory federal policies within the USDA, Black farmers have been consistently denied opportunities in farm assistance and lending,” Booker said in a press release. “This has led many Black farmers to lose millions of acres of farmland and robbed their families of building and passing on intergenerational wealth that the land represented.” 

According to Booker, while farmers of color were able to receive debt relief through President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, “the fight for racial equity in agriculture is far from over, and we must ensure adequate transparency and fairness in USDA programs going forward.”

The proposed Farm Subsidy Transparency Act of 2021 would require the USDA to track and publicly disclose the race and gender of all individuals who receive farm assistance through the agency, as well as the amount.

This includes assistance through farm subsidies, farm loans, crop insurance and ad hoc disaster assistance — including through the Coronavirus Food Assistance program — plus aid from forestry and conservation programs. 

Notably, the bill would also require the USDA to disclose the race and gender of individuals who were rejected when seeking assistance from the agency.

The USDA has been accused of discriminatory practices against farmers of color for decades, and it has acknowledged its shortcomings. 

“We will over the next four years to do everything we can to root out whatever systemic racism and barriers may exist at the Department of Agriculture directed at Black farmers,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told Congress in March. 

In 1920, 14% of all American farmers were Black; by 1997, that figure had fallen to less than 1%. That same year, The Congressional Black Caucus held a forum on discrimination against Black farmers, which was succeeded by a historic discrimination complaint against the USDA.

Nevertheless, inequity persisted. For example, in 2012, Black farmers received $64 million in farm subsidies, while white farmers received $8.1 billion.

In 2017, the USDA’s practices came under even more scrutiny after the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that farms owned by white nationalist Richard Spencer and his family were heavily subsidized by the federal government.

“From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data,” reporter Lance Williams wrote. 

And while an eligible Black farmer receives an average of $7,755 in commodity subsidies, an eligible white farmer receives $17,206 on average. 

According to Rush, 99% of the Market Facilitation Payments — which were made by the USDA to offset the effects of foreign retaliatory tariffs during former President Donald Trump’s trade war — went to white farmers. Plus, 97% of Coronavirus Food Assistance Payments made to address the COVID-19 pandemic went to white farmers.  

“It is critically important that we bring any remaining discriminatory lending behavior at USDA to a screeching halt,” Rush said in a press release. “In order to do so, we need to shine a bright light on USDA’s lending practices so that we can clearly see, understand and address existing inequities This bill is a timely and necessary response to decades of discrimination against Black farmers at USDA, which was a major factor in the decline in the number of Black farmers from nearly one million a century ago, to less than 50,000 today.” 

The National Black Farmers Association has applauded the proposed legislation. In a public statement, John Boyd, the organization’s president and founder, said everyone is aware that white farmers receive “the lion’s share” of these benefits. 

“Until we have full transparency, we can’t see the full extent to which USDA programs continue to perpetuate the agency’s long history of racism,” Boyd said. 

Trump DOJ spied on Democrats in Congress — and even their families: NYT

Shocking new information is coming out about the scope of Department of Justice efforts to track down leaks about the Trump administration.

“As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor,” The New York Times reported Thursday. “All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry.”

Two of Trump’s attorneys general are implicated in the scandal.

“Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry,” the newspaper reported. “But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.”

The effort is unprecedented.

“The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one,” the newspaper reported. “Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.”

Read the full report.

Texas AG could be disbarred over bogus push to overturn 2020 election: report

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is reportedly being investigated by the state’s bar association over his failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election — with the already scandal-ridden official facing disbarment for promoting bogus claims of widespread fraud and petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory.

The conservative Republican is currently facing a six-year-old criminal case over stock purchases and an FBI investigation over whether he used his office to benefit a wealthy donor, as well as a tightly-contested primary with an opponent who has made Paxton’s alleged ethical violations a central issue in the race.

The original complaint against Paxton, filed by a Texas Democratic Party insider, was initially dismissed by the State Bar of Texas, but an independent tribunal reversed that decision last month, according to the Associated Press. At issue is whether or not his unsuccessful push to overturn election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin amounted to professional misconduct.

If the accusations are substantiated, Paxton would become the highest profile official to face consequences for his role in President Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate legitimate election results.

“He wanted to disenfranchise the voters in four other states,” Kevin Moran, the 71-year-old president of Galveston Island Democrats who filed the original complaint, told the AP. “It’s just crazy.”

Similar state bar proceedings, which closely resemble grand jury investigations, are exceedingly rare — the AP reports that reversals like Paxton’s by the Texas’ Board of Disciplinary Appeals, which consists of 12 independent lawyers appointed by the Texas Supreme Court, happen in less than 7% of cases.

Paxton is currently running for his attorney general position against Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the son of Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush. 

Trump PAC dupes donors into giving twice with sneaky fundraising tactic

Former President Donald Trump’s political action committee is actively calling on donors to “surprise” him with extra cash for his birthday — and is employing some sneaky tactics in order to make it happen.

First spotted by Insider, the former president’s Save America PAC automatically checks a box urging donors to double their contribution on Trump’s June 14 birthday, forcing users to actively opt-out of the multiple-donation scheme.

These pre-checked donation boxes have been blasted as “deceptive and predatory” by Senate Democrats, who last month introduced legislation to outlaw the practice.

The move effectively means that without actively opting out, a $500 donation today to the Trump Super PAC would be doubled, with the program taking another $500 on Trump’s birthday in mid-June.

“President Trump’s birthday is coming up on June 14th, and we want to surprise him with a record-breaking fundraising day. Will you help us?” the pre-checked box reads. 

Insider also noted the page “automatically ticks a box to say the supporter wants to make their contribution a monthly donation.”

Trump’s PAC website claims “90% of the proceeds would go to the Save America PAC, and 10% would go to the Make America Great Again PAC (MAGAPac), which was formerly his presidential campaign committee.” By taking such a measure, the Trump camp is actively fundraising for the former president himself — not on behalf of the Republican Party — which means he can pocket most of the cash for his own political operations. 

Both Trump-tied PACs have been busy courting donors in the digital age. Research conducted by The Independent discovered that Trump’s Save America PAC inundated users in May with at least one message per day. The messages directed at small-dollar Trump donors featured what appeared to be personalized campaign notes from Trump family members, though they were all automated. 

“Eric & Don Jr: It’s so important that we’re BOTH texting you,” one text message read, according to The Independent. “It’s almost our father’s birthday. You have 1HR to sign the card. Act NOW.”

In May, Senate Democrats introduced legislation to ban the practice, which uses “automatically renewing campaign contributions without a donor’s explicit consent,” The Washington Post reported. 

The increased fundraising push from the Trump campaign comes at the same time as the former president gears back up to hold rallies across the country, for what looks increasingly like an early 2024 White House bid. The Save America PAC was launched back in November after Trump lost the 2020 election — and is reported to have somewhere in the neighborhood of $85 million in cash on hand. 

This isn’t the first time Republicans or their fundraising organs have attempted to decide unwilling donors into handing over hard-earned cash. As Salon’s Jon Skolnik reported back in April, GOP fundraising site “WinRed” has also employed many of the same questionable tactics. 

“Hacks” creators on the final act & gloriousness of Jean Smart: “I feel like she is Deborah Vance”

Jean Smart is here to stay. So is the incredible, hard-driving Deborah Vance, the hammering heart at the center of “Hacks.” Viewers should expect nothing less from the Queen of Las Vegas, a comedian tossed aside by Hollywood only to retreat to the desert and build an empire there.

The end of the first season makes good on a promise mentioned in the premiere episode, showing the dedication ceremony for Deborah Vance Drive, a bustling thoroughfare right in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center – not a dead-end street with an abortion clinic on it, as Deborah once joked. But her boss and adversary Marty (Christopher McDonald) also fulfills his promise to dethrone her, in part, ending her weekend mainstage run at his casino.

Now that “Hacks” is officially returning for a second season, we know she’s not done. For a moment it seemed as if she and her young writing partner Ava (Hannah Einbinder) might be, though. After finally forging an affectionate, supportive working relationship and earning her trust, Ava gets an unexpected call about an opportunity to earn her way back into writing for TV.

But she keeps it from Deborah, secretly flying back to L.A. to take a meeting that ends up being a Faustian offer – she can write for a show that’ll probably be a hit, but only if she’s willing to sell out her new boss.

Deborah rewards loyalty and drive. This is the first lesson Ava learns from her earliest days with Deborah, and the Queen reminds her when she discovers her vassal lied to her. That betrayal makes Deborah question everything, including Ava’s suggestion that she end her Palmetto stint with a confessional-style show, a la Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette.”

We don’t witness that final performance, but series creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs (who also plays Deborah and Ava’s manager) and Jen Statsky take the route that makes for the best TV, not to mention broader possibilities for the next season.

Throughout this season, though, “Hacks” challenges every kiln-baked concept we hold about intergenerational conflict in the workplace, especially with regard to the continued viability of older women in the workforce and the perceived lack of dues-paying among younger ones.

Overtly it does this by showing the ways that Deborah makes Ava better, and vice versa. But some of the best moments are subversive, as in “$1.69 million,” when the Queen of Vegas witnesses an untalented misogynist harassing a young female comedian purchases his anonymity for a lifetime.

The idea for “Hacks” first came to Aniello, Downs and Statsky in 2016 when the trio noticed that so many of the comics hailed as geniuses and receiving lifetime achievement awards are men. Wondering what happened to comedy’s pioneering women led them to create Deborah, and Ava along with her – and television, along with life, is better for that inspiration.

Recently Salon chatted with the three creators and writers of “Hacks” about the first season, the thinking that went into Deborah’s choice to instantly make a sexist pig a millionaire and, naturally, the flawlessness of Jean Smart. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This season is extraordinary in the way that it that portrays intergenerational relationships in a professional space, and particularly in the comedy business. What was it about that dynamic that appealed to you?

Paul W. Downs: I think one thing that is interesting about comedy is that because it oftentimes seeks to satirize or be a reflection of culture, it’s really I think, in a way, speaking to the generational divide that we’re showcasing. But also it was really personal to us, obviously, because as comedy writers and lovers of comedy, I think the underappreciated female comic was really something that we wanted to explore. And we wanted to explore that especially through someone who is closer to our generation.

Not only do we hope this is a love letter to those comedians who maybe didn’t get the same acclaim as their male counterparts, but also to the countless female comedians we can’t even name because either they quit doing comedy, or we were never exposed to them because they didn’t have the same opportunities and advantages that men did.

You all began putting this together in 2016, right? Which was long before #MeToo, and lots of the conversations around general sexism that came the fore. So how much of that drove the shaping of this season’s arc?

Lucia Aniello: I think, at least for us, it came from really this idea of re-contextualizing women’s experiences, and by being able to put them front and center of the narrative.

And by immediately just doing that, doing it from the point of view of a woman or two women, it immediately changes the way that we see any woman’s experience, right? So in our show, we are able to see through Ava a younger, perhaps some might say, more entitled comedy writer. She not only sees the path forged for her by this woman, but she also starts to understand that the difficult path also gives her so much more to talk about.

So often comedy is about the new face in comedy – what’s the hot new actor, or person on “SNL,” whatever it is – but to me the most poignant, interesting comedy is the kind that comes from experience.

And there are so many older comedians male or female, but especially female, who really don’t oftentimes get to tell their stories, or have their specials or have their shows, especially at a certain point. One of the many things we’re trying to say with the show is it’s really time to listen to these women who’ve actually experienced things, and guess what? They’ve really been through the s**t and they have a lot to say, and they’re really f**king funny. So why don’t we just sit back and start listening to them?

Downs: Can I maybe just add that, you’re right, this was before like the #MeToo movement. What’s interesting though is we had sort of seeds of ideas for things like the comedy club stuff long before. And I guess it’s because we know women go through that kind of thing . . . The same is true of wanting to tell a story about a woman that maybe the world didn’t get right. Now that’s happening more and more with Paris Hilton, or Britney Spears or whatever.

That was an interesting kind of fantasy moment, with Deborah paying someone who’s a sexist pig to never get on a stage or podcast and basically to shut up for the rest of his life, and for what seems like would be a huge amount of money, but to Deborah is a pittance. And I had a couple of reactions that. One, of course, was cheering along. The other was thinking, “This is a guy who basically was a complete jerk, and wound up with $1.69 million.” I would love to hear about the conversation and decision making that went into that moment.

Jen Statsky:  You’re exactly right, that episode was heavily discussed in the writers’ room. And you’re right, it’s a cathartic moment. But, at least to me,  it’s also  tragic in a way because it’s this kind of vigilante justice. The truth is in the real world, comedy clubs still are not a fully safe place for women and minorities and people who are not straight white cis males a lot of the time.

We talked about it a lot about, yes, the money is something she’s giving him to make him go away . . .  But it’s a little bit like, for lack of a better term, blood money because it’s money Deborah made under the patriarchy. We always said she leaned into being the joke, that the only way she felt she could stick around was by letting the narrative be dictated by other people. And she got wildly successful and made a lot of money doing that. But maybe she’s realizing a little bit like, oh, was the money worth it if I wasn’t able to speak my truth? That’s obviously very much a big message of the first season.

Aniello: In terms of the actual money, I understand what you’re saying: “Wow, this jerk just got $1.69 million. How is that really a victory?” But I do feel that based on the little she knows of him, I think it’s safe to say, at least in my opinion, that he won’t use it wisely. That it was almost a trick. She knows that it will make him miserable . . . I suppose you could live on it forever, but I have a feeling this guy’s going to go and buy a speedboat.

Statsky: Whatever Elon Musk is selling, he’s buying. And that’s going to cut into his fortune big time.

The symbolism of Deborah living in Vegas has been discussed quite a bit. But was it a conscious decision to never have her go back to L.A. in this first season? Obviously Ava does, but I’m wondering if you intentionally decided that Deborah should not go back.

Downs: We wanted to keep her in her self-made fortress, you know, in the desert – where she feels safe in this sort of lawless town. And I mean, I don’t want to spoil something that might happen, but we’ve always talked about if she has to take an Uber for a very long time, what that would look like. [He laughs.] But no, we never really wanted to bring her to L.A. or anywhere else in the first season.

Aniello: She is still so psychologically in this place where she needs to have this protection of her home and her manor and her people and everything. That’s where she feels safe. So yeah, no, we like keeping her there for now.

And then there’s the decision she makes in the last episode between doing a confessional, modern storytelling version of comedy, versus what she’s done, classic stand-up, which was a big leap. Besides the fact that it simply made for good TV, can you talk about the decision to have her bomb? Was there ever a question that she was not going to do well, and how did that manifest?

Aniello: It was actually something that evolved over the season. And I think part of it is wanting to keep the truth as always our North Star here. Like, what would really happen? And the truth is, this is an hour long special of something totally new genre-wise to her that she hasn’t even tested out in front of an audience. It would be almost fantastical for it to kill. It’s new territory for her, and it’s exciting to consider the idea that they will continue to get to refine it and argue about it and discover things in it. And to me, creating what is Deborah’s story has only just begun in so many ways. And I think we’re really excited to see where that can go still in so many ways.

Downs: I mean, in the eighth episode she says “I missed the nerves you get not knowing that you’re just gonna kill,” you know. Because I do think when you get to a certain level, it’s an easier audience for you. So I think that was exciting to us to be like, well, truthfully, she probably wouldn’t kill – and also, isn’t that fun for her to be turned on by it, to be really excited by having bombed?

“Hacks” has rekindled the celebration of Jean Smart’s excellence which, yes. And of course it’s coincidental that this is running on HBO Max at the same time as “Mare of Easttown.” I think I read that the season that you didn’t initially write this with her in mind?

Aniello: Listen, we didn’t write the pilot with her in mind, but we had her attached for the season. So we did write the season for her.

Understood! That’s important to know. What is it about her that makes her perfect in this role?

Statsky: We were so lucky to have her sign on, after we wrote the pilot. And I think the reason Jean is so perfect in this role, and it honestly couldn’t be anyone else, is because for so many reasons in addition to her immense talent, she also perfectly embodies the tone of the show. She is so deeply, deeply funny, but she also is such an incredibly talented, dramatic actress.

We’ve said this before, but when we made that list of like, who can do this, she was at the top of it, and it’s not a long list, and she just delivered for us on every possibly conceivable level.

Downs: I’d like just to add to that the other thing that she embodies, I think, is the theme of the show, which is about underappreciated women.

For me, she was always someone whenever I saw her in something, I always wanted more of her. I was always like, “More Jean Smart!” And it’s so exciting that now in this lead role, where she gets to show her complete range, I do feel like people are having a deepened understanding and appreciation for all that she can do. In that way, I feel like she is Deborah Vance.

Aniello: And part of what we’re saying is, is why did it take so long?

Statsky: And which other women didn’t we give that chance to?

The first season of “Hacks” is available to stream on HBO Max.

Jeffrey Toobin is back on CNN after eight-month exile forced by New Yorker Zoom incident

Jeffrey Toobin is back at CNN following a lengthy exile, forced by a viral incident in which the longtime New Yorker writer — he claims inadvertently — exposed himself during a staff video call at the magazine last year. 

A spokesperson for CNN confirmed the news immediately following an awkward interview on the network with anchor Alisyn Camerota, his first public comments since an initial apology during the brouhaha last October, which was first reported by VICE News. She began the conversation with a brief description of the incident, which got him fired from The New Yorker after 27 years at the prestigious magazine.

“In October, you were on a Zoom call with your colleagues from the New Yorker magazine,” Camerota said. “Everyone took a break for several minutes, during which time you were caught masturbating on camera. You were subsequently fired from that job after 27 years of working there, and you since then have been on leave from CNN. Do I have all that right?”

“You got it all right, sad to say,” Toobin replied.

“OK, let’s start there,” Camerota said. “To quote Jay Leno, ‘What the hell were you thinking?'”

Toobin went on to call the behavior “deeply moronic and indefensible,” before saying he didn’t know others could see him at the time.

“I am trying to become the kind of person that people can trust again,” he said, outlining the myriad ways he’s used the eight-month hiatus to become “a better person,” including working at a food bank, going to therapy and writing a book about the Oklahoma City bombing.

Notably, Toobin also made the claim that an internal investigation at The New Yorker did not find any other misconduct over the course of his time there, and said his firing felt like “excessive punishment” — though “that’s why they don’t ask the criminal to be the judge in his own case,” he added.

Toobin’s own sordid sexual history resurfaced following the Zoom incident, bringing back to light a 2009 affair in which he was outed for cheating on his wife with — and ultimately impregnating — Casey Greenfield, the daughter of his then-CNN colleague, Jeff Greenfield.

In the end, Toobin said he hoped viewers would welcome him back to the CNN with open arms, but acknowledged that some people would object to his reinstatement as a senior legal analyst.

“I live in the world. I know social media, what the reactions are likely to be,” he said. “I hope they will at least be mixed.”

Global confidence in U.S. jumps over 55 percentage points under Biden: poll

The United States’ image around the world has rebounded since the election of President Joe Biden — however many countries now no longer view the U.S. as a “good model” of democracy.

Confidence in the U.S. to “do the right thing” has surged from 17% under former President Donald Trump in 2020 to 75% under Biden, according to a Pew Research survey of 12 countries ahead of Biden’s first overseas trip this week. Residents of foreign nations, particularly key U.S. allies, “held the United States in low regard” throughout Trump’s presidency, but the favorable opinion of the U.S. has increased by 34% in the 12 countries surveyed.

“The election of Joe Biden as president has led to a dramatic shift in America’s international image,” Pew’s researchers concluded.

The survey also found a massive gap in the world’s confidence in Biden compared to Trump. Just 10% of Germans and 11% of the French said they had confidence in Trump last year compared to more than 70% who say they have confidence in Biden. Just 16% of residents in the countries surveyed said Trump was “well-qualified” to be president in 2017, compared to 77% who view Biden as well-qualified. More than 70% viewed Trump as “dangerous” and 90% viewed Trump as “arrogant” but both numbers are below 15% for Biden.

Support for Biden appears to be linked to his policies, as overwhelming majorities of the countries surveyed approved of the US rejoining the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, both of which the president did on his first day in office.

But the Trump years appear to have shaken the world’s confidence in the US democracy after Biden’s predecessor tried to overturn his win and inspired his supporters to riot through the Capitol in a feeble attempt to block the certification of the results. Only 17% of those surveyed said they believe the US democracy is a “good example for other countries to follow.” By comparison, 57% said the US “used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years.” About 23% said the US “has never been a good example for other countries to follow.” Only about 50% said the US political system is working well and 56% view the US as somewhat reliable while just 11% describe the US as “very reliable.”

Biden has sought to rebuild the country’s relationship with its allies after Trump spent years attacking foreign partners and global organizations. The administration announced this week it will buy 500 million doses of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine to donate to countries around the world through the COVAX alliance. The doses will be distributed among 92 lower-income countries and the African Union. The donation is five times more than the number of doses that COVAX has distributed in total.

“We’re going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners,” Biden said on Friday after arriving in England for the G-7 summit, adding that there would be “no strings attached” nor “pressure for favors.”

“In times of trouble, Americans reach out to offer help,” Biden said. “Our values call on us to do everything that we can to vaccinate the world against COVID-19… We’re doing this to save lives, to end this pandemic, and that’s it.”

Biden touted his commitment to working with allies to tackle the pandemic, the climate crisis, and aggression from China and Russia in a Washington Post op-ed ahead of his trip. The Biden administration has already hammered out an agreement among the G-7’s finance ministers to work toward a 15% global minimum corporate tax and the president said his meetings will focus on pandemic recovery, clean energy, revamping the world’s physical and digital infrastructure, and countering authoritarianism.

“Those shared democratic values are the foundation of the most successful alliance in world history,” Biden said, vowing to affirm the country’s “unwavering commitment” to NATO allies. “We will focus on ensuring that market democracies, not China or anyone else, write the 21st-century rules around trade and technology. And we will continue to pursue the goal of a Europe whole, free and at peace,” he wrote.

Biden is also expected to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva after the summit in what is expected to be a sharp break from Trump’s friendly outreach to Putin during his term.

“We are standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security, starting with its aggression in Ukraine, and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests,” Biden wrote, vowing to underscore the West’s commitment to “stand up for human rights and dignity.”

“This is a defining question of our time: Can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world?” he wrote. “Will the democratic alliances and institutions that shaped so much of the last century prove their capacity against modern-day threats and adversaries? I believe the answer is yes. And this week in Europe, we have the chance to prove it.”

GOP’s whitewashing of history takes Texas as Gov. Greg Abbott launches “1836 Project”

Progressives responded with disgust on Monday after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law establishing the so-called “1836 Project,” which the Republican official said “promotes patriotic education and ensures future generations understand Texas values.”

“To keep Texas the best state in the nation, we can never forget why our state is so exceptional,” Abbott tweeted. “Together, we’ll keep our rich history alive.”

As Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed out: “Of course, if they actually did talk about the reasons Texas declared independence from Mexico, it would be a very radical course.”

Although Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, its government continued to allow U.S. settlers to bring enslaved people into the country. As U.S. immigrants began to outnumber the non-Indigenous population of Spanish origin, the Mexican government attempted to reassert its control, including its prohibition on slavery. When Mexico’s ruler, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, sent an army to reestablish his authority in 1835, U.S. settlers revolted and by 1836 had created an independent, slaveholding republic—Texas.

Several commentators responding to Abbott on Twitter noted that the GOP-controlled Texas legislature’s “jingoistic” efforts to enforce what Abbott called “patriotic education” were consistent with the kinds of propaganda one might expect to find in a despotic regime and ill-suited for developing critical thinkers capable of participating in a democratic society.

“Such a pure expression of fascism,” one social media user said of Texas’ new law.

In a video announcing the project’s launch, Abbott said that “every newcomer to Texas who gets a driver’s license will also get a pamphlet that outlines Texas’ rich history, as well as the principles that make Texas Texas.”

“The law also establishes the gubernatorial 1836 award to recognize students’ knowledge of the founding documents about Texas history,” the right-wing governor added.

This provided critics with an opportunity to highlight the contents of Texas’ founding documents. 

“Texas values in 1836, you say?” asked journalist and author Jonathan Myerson Katz.

The “Constitution of the Republic of Texas” (pdf)—which governed the then-sovereign nation from the end of the slaveholders’ rebellion against Mexico in 1836 until U.S. annexation in 1845—legalized slavery, outlawed emancipation, and barred free Black people from establishing permanent residency. The founding document also excluded “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” from citizenship.

Twenty-five years after declaring independence from Mexico to preserve slavery, Texas again seceded in 1861—this time from the U.S. and for the exact same reason. 

The “1836 Project” is not the Texas GOP’s first foray into pushing for anti-egalitarian indoctrination.

As U.S. historian Eric Foner wrote more than a decade ago when the conservative-dominated Texas Board of Education approved changes to the state’s social studies curriculum:

Judging from the updated social studies curriculum, conservatives want students to come away from a Texas education with a favorable impression of: women who adhere to traditional gender roles, the Confederacy, some parts of the Constitution, capitalism, the military, and religion. They do not think students should learn about women who demanded greater equality; other parts of the Constitution; slavery, Reconstruction and the unequal treatment of nonwhites generally; environmentalists; labor unions; federal economic regulation; or foreigners.

Foner noted that he has “lectured on a number of occasions to Texas precollege teachers and have found them as competent, dedicated, and open-minded as the best teachers anywhere.”

“But if they are required to adhere to the revised curriculum,” he added, “the students of our second most populous state will emerge ill prepared for life in Texas, America, and the world in the twenty-first century.”

 

The ongoing mystique of D.B. Cooper, from documentaries to the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Marvel fans who caught the debut of new time-travel series “Loki”  were treated to one piece of revisionist history: the unmasking of the God of Mischief himself as none other than D.B. Cooper. That’s right – our country’s most notorious air pirate is now part of the MCU.

In the series premiere of the new Disney+ show, which follows the antics of the God of Mischief (Tom Hiddleston) after he escapes into an alternate timeline during the Avengers’ messy “Endgame” time heist, Loki is shown a fun little highlight reel of his greatest hits in his life by Mobius (Owen Wilson), an agent for a mysterious and all-powerful entity called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). In this flashback, Loki revisits one of his pranks inspired by his brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth), which incidentally involves hijacking a plane for a massive ransom, parachuting out, and magically getting whisked back to Asgard via Bifrost.

“You Were D.B. Cooper!” Mobius exclaims in disbelief. Loki seems to shrug it off: “I was young and I lost a bet to Thor,” he replies, very casually, before asking, “Where was the TVA when I was meddling with these affairs of men?”

Loki’s little “prank” precisely mirrors the real-life mystery of a man dubbed D.B. Cooper, which the Disney+ series finally appears to “solve.” And, while this probably isn’t the case, there’s no proof D.B. Cooper wasn’t the Asgardian god.

The real D.B. Cooper

According to the D.B. Cooper legend, on November 24, 1971, a man known by the pseudonym Dan Cooper, on a plane that was already mid-air from Seattle to Portland showed a flight attendant a note stating that he had a bomb. After the flight attendant, a woman named Florence Schaffner, checked his briefcase and confirmed the man did, in fact, have a bomb, she showed the note to the captain, William A. Scott. The note demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in ransom. He had reportedly demanded not one but four parachutes, to create the assumption that he might force one or more hostages to jump with him, and ensure that he wouldn’t be deliberately given sabotaged equipment.

Scott landed the plane back in Seattle so that all passengers could get off, while just four members of the flight’s crew, including the captain, and Cooper, stayed on board. Cooper ordered the pilot to fly the plane toward Mexico City, and a few hours later, somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Cooper used his given parachute and exited out the back of the plane with the $200,000 in tow. The pilot eventually landed the plane in Reno, without Cooper.

The FBI subsequently investigated the mysterious case, which they called NORJACK, from 1971 until the case was suspended just five years ago in 2016. Some believed Cooper had died, when in February, a child uncovered a package of $20 bills near Vancouver, Washington, which matched the serial numbers of the ransom money Cooper had been given. Yet, the remains of the man the media hereafter called D.B. Cooper were never found.

The FBI investigated more than 800 potential suspects by 1976, all of whom were ultimately dismissed. Further, the FBI “searched but couldn’t find anyone who disappeared that weekend,” which led some to believe whoever Cooper was, upon disembarking, he managed to quietly return to his day-to-day life. Others — namely the FBI — have been more skeptical.

“No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 172 mph wind in his face wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve parachute was only for training and had been sewn shut, something a skilled skydiver would have checked,” Special Agent Larry Carr, leader of the investigative team on Cooper’s case from 2006 until its dissolution in 2016, wrote in a report.

The ongoing appeal of D.B. Cooper

While of the show’s younger viewers may not have recognized the sunglasses-wearing figure – leading to frantic Googling of “Who is D.B. Cooper?” – those familiar with the skyjacker can add “Loki” to the ongoing way that pop culture has tried to grapple with the unsolved mystery nearly half a century later.

Regardless of what happened to the real D.B. Cooper, his story has lived on in popular imagination. Even before “Loki,” for years, Cooper has appeared in storylines of shows like “Prison Break,” “Journeymen,” “Renegade,” “30 Rock,” “Drunk History,” and others. His story has been the subject of the 1981 film “The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper,” and the 2020 documentary, “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper.” 

While the mystery of the man’s identity is part of the story’s enduring appeal, the symbolism of Cooper’s heist made him an instant hero. He had pulled off a flawless crime that took guts, hurt no victims physically, took money from a large company during an economic recession – and he got away with it. In many ways, this is precisely the “little guy sticking it to the man” mentality that drives many popular heist films.

We may never know what really happened to D.B. Cooper, but the shapeshifting Loki’s prank just adds to history’s ongoing romance with the hijacker, a man who is a blank, allowing us to fantasize about and identify with the perfect crime.

New episodes of “Loki” release on Wednesdays on Disney+.

Democrats scramble to mend intraparty riff after Rep. Ilhan Omar accuses colleagues of “harassment”

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., slammed a dozen of her Democratic colleagues for “constant harassment” over her condemnation of Israel, shooting down their allegations of anti-Semitism and “deep-seated prejudice.”

The schism arose out of a tweet first fired off by Omar on Monday following a video call with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, where the Minnesota representative demanded an official probe into the human rights violations of both the Israeli Defense Force and Hamas.

“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,” the Minnesota lawmaker declared. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”

The tweet sparked immediate ire from a number of pro-Israel Jewish Democrats who claimed that Omar was drawing a false equivalency between the countries. “Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice,” they wrote. 

The group added: “The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups.”

Among the Democrats backing the statement were Reps. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., Ted Deutch, D-Fla., Lois Frankel, D-Fla. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., Brad Sherman, D-Calif., and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and a number of others. And in a rare joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her leadership team called on Omar to “clarify” her comments. 

“Legitimate criticism of the policies of both the United States and Israel is protected by the values of free speech and democratic debate. And indeed, such criticism is essential to the strength and health of our democracies,” the Democratic leadership team said in its statement. “But drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,” they argued. 

On Thursday morning, Omar doubled down on her stance, accusing her colleagues of anti-Muslim prejudice.

“It’s shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for ‘clarification’ and not just call,” wrote Omar. “The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment & silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.”

She added: “Citing an open case against Israel, US, Hamas & Taliban in the ICC isn’t comparison or from ‘deeply seated prejudice’. You might try to undermine these investigations or deny justice to their victims but history has [sic] thought us that the truth can’t be hidden or silenced forever.”

Several members of The Squad, a small caucus of progressives in Congress, came to Omar’s defense.

“I am tired of colleagues (both D+R) demonizing @IlhanMN,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., a critic of Israel’s attacks on Palestine. “Their obsession with policing her is sick. She has the courage to call out human rights abuses no matter who is responsible. That’s better than colleagues who look away if it serves their politics.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, R-N.Y., echoed Tlaib: “Pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of @IlhanMN coming from our caucus. They have no concept for the danger they put her in by skipping private conversations & leaping to fueling targeted news cycles around her.”

Omar also saw support from some in the media, including MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. Referencing an interview of Trump’s, where the former president dismissed the innocence of former U.S. leaders, Hasan tweeted: “What’s interesting is that once you take out all the nakedly partisan pointscoring and thinskinned patriotic chestbeating, Trump’s point is right: we’re not innocent as a country. Omar’s point is right: the ICC should investigate war crimes by everyone, countries/groups alike.”

The tiff comes just weeks after the White House refused to acknowledge the damage Israel inflicted on Palestinian citizens.

Last month, at the height of the violence, President Biden asserted Israel’s “right to defend itself.” The White House repeatedly refrained from leveling any criticism against Israeli, despite a clear asymmetry of military power between Israel and Gaza. Later that month, Biden called for a “ceasefire” between the two countries and vowed to assist Gaza with humanitarian aid. The promise was made just three days after approving a $735 million arms sale to Israel and blocking a United Nations statement condemning the country.

Lauren Boebert faces new scrutiny amid report she failed to settle a court-ordered debt

On Wednesday, the Colorado Times Recorder revealed that a Colorado county has no record of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) paying off a debt after being ordered by a court to garnish an employee’s wages to settle it.

“Just before she was elected to Congress last year, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) finished paying off the state of Colorado nearly $20,000 in back taxes owed by her restaurant, Shooters Grill, located in Rifle,” reported Jason Salzman. “The debt took the form of eight tax liens assessed since 2016 for failing to pay unemployment insurance. But a ninth lien, assessed by the Garfield County Court after Boebert refused to garnish an employee’s wages, remains unpaid, according to the Garfield County Court, in a response last week to a records request by the Colorado Times Recorder. The outstanding lien of $2,578 was assessed against Shooters Grill after Boebert and an employee, who’d been sued by a debt collector, failed to respond to the court and the lawyers involved.”

An earlier report indicated that Boebert failed even to appear for the telephone court hearing on the matter. This is part of a pattern, as she was arrested in 2016 for failure to appear for a traffic ticket.

As the report noted, Boebert could theoretically have paid the debt to the collector, Professional Finance Company, without the court’s knowledge — but she has declined to comment.

Boebert, a QAnon-curious conspiracy theorist first elected in 2020, has spurred constant controversy for the Republican Party. Most famously, she appeared to live-tweet the location of lawmakers during the Capitol riot, although she has denied that was ever her intention.

The compassionate “Holler” encapsulates the desperation of everyday American poverty

“Holler” is writer/director Nicole Riegel’s valiant feature debut about a family living below the poverty line. Expanded from her short of the same name, this drama centers on Ruth (Jessica Barden of “Penny Dreadful“), a high school senior who scraps metal with her brother Blaze (Gus Halper) for money to live. However, they cannot earn enough to keep the water on, and final notices are being posted on their front door. Their mother, Rhonda (Pamela Adlon) is of no help; she is in the county jail because she refuses to go to rehab.

Riegel makes the siblings’ fear and desperation palpable, shooting much of the film in an icy cold, bluish gray light that reflects their emotions and magnifies their chilly situation. This film is hardscrabble miserablism, but Ruth is feisty and stubborn, and Barden makes her so damn likable that viewers will root for her from the get-go. It is also easy to root for the film, which is good enough, but some folks might wish it were better.

Riegel touches on some topical issues in “Holler.” The local factory, where family friend Linda (Becky Ann Baker) works, is rumored to be laying off employees or possibly closing. (Trump is portentously, ironically, heard promoting “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” on a car radio). Likewise, Hark (Austin Amelio), the sleazy dealer Ruth and Blaze work for, has Asians buying his scrap metal (a sign of globalization). He also talks about jobs moving to Mexico, where he once found work. Meanwhile, Rhonda is in county because of an incident stemming from her addiction to pain pills that she was prescribed after she was injured at her factory job. And Ruth, who would like to go to college, is warned against racking up huge student debt by a well-meaning teacher. (She also seems interested in becoming an engineer, which allows the film to mention the lack of women in STEM).

These topics give the characters a bit of shading, which is admirable, but Riegel does not pursue these themes any deeper. It is a drawback that most of the film is so conventional. “Holler” nobly depicts a world not often seen of screen, (the excellent 2013 film “The Selfish Giant” was also set in the scrap world) but the focus here is on the age-old conflict of Ruth being torn between her family and her future, which is only mildly interesting.

Blaze wants Ruth to go to college and have a better life even though she is reluctant to leave home. The life she knows is certainly not great, but it is all she knows. If Ruth feeling trapped is not abundantly clear, she gets put in a holding cell for stealing a library book from school. 

Barden’s performance is the key to the film’s success because Ruth is smart. She does her neighbor’s take-home exams for money and calculates Hark’s invoices in her head. She is also smart-mouthed, and has no problem speaking out. When Rhonda tells her daughter, “We’re not college people,” it only makes Ruth more determined to achieve that just-out-of-reach goal. 

Ruth also talks back to Hark. She calls him cheap because he keeps reducing his price on the cans and bottles she and Blaze bring in to scrap. Then Hark offers the siblings an opportunity to make some real money, doing the dangerous and illegal work of scrapping from abandoned houses. Without spoiling too much, Riegel wisely lets one potentially problematic storyline involving Ruth on the job go nowhere.

But a situation occurs when the scrap metal crew encounters rivals on a job and someone is killed. Ruth serves as the moral conscience at this moment, and her conflict with Hark here leads to a series of physical and professional attacks that are mostly symbolic. These scenes also play out in familiar ways that may frustrate viewers hoping “Holler” would be smarter.

Riegel’s film is best when it captures its characters’ emotions. When Blaze reveals his vulnerability and why he sacrificed his life for Ruth’s betterment, it is hard not to feel the impact of this news on her. And it doubles down on why she is reluctant to leave. Similarly, the no-nonsense Linda has a few affecting scenes, most notably when she handles her colleagues at the factory when jobs are lost. Her character is a good ally for Ruth, as well as indicative of what Ruth’s life might be like if she stays (and there are any jobs to be had).

“Holler” is a compassionate film, and a worthwhile one, even if Riegel gets her points across bluntly.

“Holler” releases in theaters and VOD on Friday, June 11.

Glenn Beck admits he was never sorry about any of it — especially not when he called Obama a racist

Glenn Beck returned to his former stomping grounds on Wednesday night, appearing on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson show to make clear that he is no longer “sorry about all that,” referencing the conservative media mogul’s most controversial takes over the years. 

“This president [Barack Obama], I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” Beck stated back in 2009 appearance on the “Fox & Friends” morning program.

“This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

After calling former President Barack Obama a racist back in 2009, Beck expressed remorse years later and launched a sprawling media apology tour of sorts. Most notably, he would take part in a now-notorious interview with New York Times Magazine, which was titled: “Glenn Beck Is Sorry About All That.” 

“Obama made me a better man…There are things unique to the African American experience that I cannot relate to. I had to listen to them,” Beck told The New Yorker back in November of 2016. 

“I know I wouldn’t believe me if I heard myself apologizing, so I’m telling you now: Don’t take my word for it. Watch my actions. I don’t care what you think about me,” Beck added in the New Yorker interview, all while pleading for his apology to be accepted. “All I care about is saying, Please, don’t make the mistake I made.”

But as of Wednesday evening, Beck had changed his tune, claiming that he was taking back his old apologies after Obama ripped into right-wing media for deepening racial divisions in the country. 

“I take my apology back! I was exactly right, and I even stated it right. You are a racist if you believe in critical race theory,” Beck told Carlson.

“If you think that what Dr. Martin Luther King said, that he envisions a country that is seeing people for the content of their character and not their color if you if think that’s wrong, then yes, you are a racist,” he added. 

Twelve years after first calling Obama a racist on national television, followed by countless apologies, it appears that Beck was never genuinely sorry about all that. 

How Donald Trump turned Florida into his political playland

With Trump finally ejected from the White House and formally dislodged from social media, the former president, now stripped of his many megaphones, has quietly sought respite down South. He’s rallied nearly all of his political allies to the sun-kissed coast of Florida to his Mar-a-Lago resort, manufacturing what some might say is his own political playland. 

According to a new Bloomberg Businessweek report, a vast number of Trump’s political allies have, since Trump’s swift exit from office, sallied down to south Florida to become permanent fixtures of the former president’s ecosystem, trying to preserve whatever political inertia remains behind Trump.

The mass exodus from D.C. was set off even before Trump had acknowledged he’d lost the election. Back in December, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner moved into a $32 million mansion in Indian Creek, a “guarded and gated” island just north of Miami Beach. Sean Hannity, a Fox News anchor who gets paid $25 million a year to perform what some might plainly say is Trump stenography, also hopped on the bandwagon, laying claim to a $5.3 million coastal home just two miles from Mar-a-Lago. Hannity’s Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto joined the fold as well, buying up a $7.25 million penthouse just outside of Palm Beach, where Trump’s personal resort and the nexus of the former president’s new political enclave is located. Also among the cadre is Hogan Gidley, a former White House spokesman; Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy advisor; and Avi Berkowitz, the former special representative for international negotiations.

“Think about how utterly bizarre that is,” Eddie Vale, a Democratic strategist, told Bloomberg Businessweek, remarking on the rash of the sudden relocations. “It’s like if Rachel Maddow and the Pod Save America guys all bought condos in Chicago because they wanted to be close to Barack Obama.”

Sean Spicer, who had a tumultuous six-month stint as the former White House press secretary back in 2017, told Bloomberg Businessweek that south Florida has something of Trump’s “Disney World.”

“I can shoot the show in Boca, go to see the president, go to a fundraiser, and do eight other things while I’m down there,” he explained. “There’s a lot of attractions.”

Back in January, Miller explained the appeal of the Sunshine State in more political terms. “Florida is really the perfect place to be the new HQ of the MAGA movement and a launching pad for the president’s next endeavor,” he told the Washington Examiner.

Some have speculated that Trump’s magnetic ability to keep his political network close has less to do with the man himself and more to do with his administration’s stigma. Back in April, Insider reported that a number of ex-Trump aides were finding themselves in a “job desert” following Trump’s exit from office, and namely, the Capitol riot on January 6. 

Sam Nunberg, a Trump campaign aide, told Bloomberg Businessweek that many Trump boosters “have nowhere else to go.” He asked: “What else are they going to do?”

It remains unclear precisely just what Trump is hatching up from Mar-a-Lago, though the former president has openly said that he intends to continue exerting political influence. From afar, Trump has issued casual imprimaturs of conservative hopefuls in various gubernatorial races, including Texas incumbent Gregg Abbott, R, and Arkansas challenger Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former White House press secretary. The former president has also endorsed various U.S. Senate candidates, including Sens. John Boozman, R-Ark., Mo Brooks, R-Ala., Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Trump has also signaled a potential presidential bid in 2024, despite having bandied the constitutionally baseless narrative that he will be reinstated by August of this year.

As Harry and Meghan’s family grows, their safety only comes after rejecting an assimilation fantasy

Unless you’ve been living under a rock since Sunday, you’ve probably heard Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have welcomed their second child, daughter Lilibet Diana. Members of the royal family have all released their celebratory statements, but, of course, this surface-level show of goodwill comes just months after Harry and Meghan’s accusations of racism from the royal family, and day-to-day life in the monarchy, overall.

Among plenty of other wild and devastating revelations, the couple’s intimate interview with Oprah Winfrey in March revealed that there had been concerns with how “dark” their first child, Archie, would be, since Markle is biracial. Harry even seemed to subtly hint that the concerns had come from his own father, Prince Charles, although this remains unconfirmed.

In the same interview, Markle revealed she had received almost no support when she sought help for her depression and suicidal thoughts from her horrible coverage by the British media. The couple presented their controversial exit from the royal family as nearly a matter of life and death for Markle, as racist media, rigid monarchical traditions, and lack of support nearly pushed her to the brink.

With the birth of Harry and Meghan’s second child, and an outpouring of public support for their family, it’s important to confront the uncomfortable truth that casting them as the sole martyrs of monarchial racism fails to strike at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem, of course, isn’t just interpersonal, individual-level racism that had been directed at Markle by Harry’s white family, nor is it something corporate diversity and equity trainings for the royals can even begin to fix. 

The problem is imperialism. And that’s a pretty big and omnipresent problem that can’t just be fixed by extending our support to Markle and her family with Prince Harry, alone, while ignoring the many regions and communities of the global south that remain impacted by the legacy of British imperialism today.

As Kitanya Harrison wrote in Gen shortly after the Oprah interview, “Colonialism never really ended — it changed clothes and lowered its voice a bit.” Britain may have given up the appearance of presiding over an empire that covers over a third of the world, but the fact remains that the wealth and opulence of its royal family was built upon the enslavement of millions of African people and their descendants, and the conquest and colonization of nonwhite societies around the world. The Queen and others in the family have shown no qualms about continuing to hold priceless stolen jewels from across Africa and Asia. 

When Markle first joined the royal family in 2018, many celebrated the wedding as a progressive victory, without considering that what they were really cheering on was the assimilation of a Black, biracial woman into an irreconcilably white supremacist institution. Assimilation into any predominantly white space with rigid traditions meant for white people is often difficult, painful, and uncomfortable to say the least — now, imagine assimilation into an institution with as deep a history of violence and brutality as the British monarchy itself.

In some fantasy simulation in which Markle would be embraced and supported by the royal family, would that suddenly neutralize and make the British monarchy’s legacy of horrific racist violence OK? How many of Harry and Meghan’s most vocal defenders would be calling out the monarchy’s racism, today, if it weren’t for the visible nature of interpersonal, individual racism? 

All too often, interpersonal racism is the only form of racism that catches media attention, or inspires public outrage and backlash, while devastating policies and traditions slip through the cracks. This, in itself, is a product of western neoliberalism and its very purposeful construction of narratives that reduce systemic, structural crises like imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy to individual, interpersonal issues. 

Neoliberalism is thinking the singular event of a Black woman marrying into a family whose power and traditions are rooted in white supremacy, would somehow usher in a post-racist society. It encourages and celebrates symbolic distractions, which quiet calls for structural change, like, say, the monarchy giving up its stolen wealth and stolen power, or meaningfully repaying its nearly unquantifiable debts to the countries and peoples it plundered, stole from, and devastated.

“Had Meghan been accepted, what we would have instead is a whitewashed multicultural narrative of racial progress,” Schuyler Esprit, a writer and educator from the island of Dominica, wrote in The Guardian in March. She added, “[F]or many of us around the world, some still colonized, the insidious work of empire lives on in the draconian education systems, the artifacts stored in British museums, the poverty in communities, the denial of our ability to profit financially from our own resources, and the reparations we demand but which the crown has always met with silence.”

As Meghan and Harry welcome their second child, we should all be relieved that she and her family are safe, and they were able to do what was best for them and step away from the traditions and family members who had harmed them. But our takeaway from all of this shouldn’t only be that interpersonal racism is bad, and the royal family should simply have been nicer to Markle, though both are true. Hopefully, we can treat this as an important lesson — that romanticizing assimilation into white institutions and diversifying imperialism isn’t at all the same thing as tearing it down. Monarchical racism isn’t anything new, and Markle and her family certainly aren’t its only victims. 

How bankruptcy lets oil and gas companies evade cleanup rules

A battle over who is responsible for cleaning up hundreds of oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is quietly playing out in a bankruptcy court in southern Texas. The contestants in this game of fossil fuel infrastructure hot potato: Fieldwood Energy, an offshore drilling company attempting to offload more than $7 billion in environmental cleanup responsibilities; a group of oil majors including Chevron, Marathon Oil, and BP; and the Department of the Interior.*

Fieldwood has declared bankruptcy, and a court is considering the company’s plan to split its assets, moving older legacy wells and drilling rigs that are expensive to clean up into two entities while creating a new company — appropriately named NewCo — to purchase the more profitable assets. The company proposes outright abandoning a fourth bucket of assets consisting of more than 1,170 wells, 280 pipelines, and 270 drilling platforms. Aging wells and drilling platforms pose multiple risks to the environment and human safety, including oil and gas leaks and explosions. 

A quirk in the regulations that govern offshore drilling allows the Interior Department to hold companies that previously operated on Fieldwood leases accountable for the cleanup. The department is charged with protecting public lands — both on land and offshore — and issues leases to more than 12 million acres of seabed, including in the Gulf. A single lease can contain multiple wells, and many of the leases that Fieldwood is proposing to abandon or “return” to predecessor companies could end up the responsibility of oil majors, such as Chevron and BP. Unsurprisingly, both companies have zealously objected to the company’s bankruptcy plan.

While the oil companies attempt to dodge responsibility for cleanup, the Interior Department, has been filing objections to Fieldwood’s plan to transfer leases to other companies and abandon wells, stating that its environmental obligations are “nondischargeable” and that leases cannot be sold or transferred without sign-off from the federal government. 

Fieldwood is one of more than 260 oil and gas companies that has filed for bankruptcy in the last six years. With low prices and suppressed demand for oil and gas over the last year, operators have struggled to stay afloat. Many have been turning to bankruptcy in an attempt to shed their debts, reorganize their assets, and, in some cases, offload their environmental obligations. Utilizing limitations and loopholes in bankruptcy law, these companies are employing a playbook perfected by coal companies to shed their environmental and labor liabilities.

“[Fieldwood is] not the first company with offshore assets to go bankrupt, but it’s the size that’s becoming uncomfortable for other companies to absorb,” said Robert Schuwerk, executive director of the financial think tank Carbon Tracker, noting that the threat of the government forcing a cleanup of these wells has made the distressed assets downright toxic to all parties involved. “People are watching this case, and it’s going to be precedent-setting.”

“Bankruptcy for profit”

When companies file for bankruptcy, there are two main avenues available to them: liquidation or reorganization. Referred to as Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 in bankruptcy parlance, respectively, they offer companies two vastly different routes to escape their debts. With the former, a bankruptcy court approves the company’s assets for sale and the proceeds are distributed among creditors. At the end of the process, the company ceases to exist. With the latter, the company reorganizes its assets and debts in an attempt to stay afloat. Some of its assets may be sold or transferred to creditors in exchange for writing off debts. The company eventually emerges from bankruptcy, and it continues to operate. 

Fieldwood has chosen the second option — to restructure and re-emerge as the generically-titled NewCo. 

One commonly used bankruptcy strategy is spinning off riskier assets — in Fieldwood’s case, those are wells that are at the end of their productive lives — into entities that are low on cash and likely to become insolvent down the line. Bankruptcy law’s priority scheme places environmental obligations lower in the payout queue, which puts government agencies — and ultimately taxpayers — behind other creditors. The bankruptcy code also allows companies to abandon “burdensome” properties, a provision fossil fuel companies have attempted to use to discard low-producing wells at the end of their lives. 

State and federal regulators are tasked with ensuring that operators plug wells by pouring cement down their boreholes, dismantling any equipment on the surface, and generally returning the land or seabed to pre-drilling conditions — but they often have little leverage in bankruptcy court to secure money for environmental cleanup. By the time a company files for bankruptcy, it has racked up a large amount of debt and a long line of creditors are queuing up for whatever little money may remain in the company’s estate. Regulators can be lucky to secure any money at all for cleanup. 

“The crucial feature of these fossil bankruptcies — where fossil companies are using bankruptcy to get out of environmental obligations — is that a company can’t pay all of its debts,” said Joshua Macey, a University of Chicago law professor specializing in environmental law and bankruptcy. “The only way to solve this is to insist that, before bankruptcy, the firm is either doing cleanup contemporaneously or has a guarantee that there will be sufficient assets to do cleanup.”

When state regulators fail to ensure that, taxpayers end up paying the price. Such was the case with Petroshare, a Colorado-based company that filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Petroshare owned more than 150 wells in Colorado, and state regulators had required it to set aside $325,000 in bonds — money that the state reserves in case the company becomes insolvent and cannot meet its cleanup obligations. But during bankruptcy, Petroshare and its creditors claimed the money was part of the bankruptcy estate and should be divvied up among the creditors, an argument that Megan Castle, a spokesperson for the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry in the state, said is “typical” and “very much disputed by the State.” 

This puts the state in the position of having to negotiate for a guarantee it was supposed to get before the company went under. In the Colorado case, in exchange for securing the $325,000 bond that it was already owed, the state relinquished its right to pursue Petroshare for $726,000 in fines for violating various state environmental laws. In the years preceding bankruptcy, the company had improperly disposed of drilling waste, excavated without building fences around the site for public safety, and did not adequately control stormwater runoff.  

The state also permitted Providence Wattenberg, the creditor that purchased Petroshare’s wells, to abandon any wells that it did not wish to operate. Providence has since abandoned 53 wells, and the state has still not cashed out the $325,000 bond amount even though the bankruptcy court approved a plan to liquidate Petroshare in May 2020. Castle said the agency is “currently working through the process to claim the proceeds.” She said the agency has not estimated the cost of cleaning up the 53 wells, but that on average an orphan well in the state costs $82,500 to reclaim. That means cleaning up all of them could cost more than $4 million — more than 12 times the amount of the bond that was supposed to guarantee cleanup would be covered. 

“It’s basically bankruptcy for profit,” said Megan Milliken Biven, a consultant who previously worked as a program analyst with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal agency within the Interior Department tasked with overseeing offshore leasing. “They’re just looting what remains and leaving us with the financial and environmental fallout.” 

The Petroshare and Fieldwood cases demonstrate how larger companies pass on less profitable wells to smaller, financially unstable operators that go on to abandon wells. It’s a trend that environmental advocates say is commonplace in the oil and gas industry and will accelerate as the U.S. shifts to cleaner forms of energy — and as climate regulations make fossil fuel assets less valuable. A look at the top methane emitters in the nation highlights the trend. As oil and gas giants like Exxon and ConocoPhillips shed their polluting assets to meet carbon targets, smaller, privately-held companies have become the nation’s biggest methane emitters. In Fieldwood’s case, for instance, the company hoovered up older wells from Apache and Chevron, two major players in the Gulf of Mexico. 

“Looking at it only at the tail end ignores the whole chain of events that created that situation and the risks that were compounded,” said Biven.

Good and bad assets

Fieldwood Energy was founded in late 2012 by Riverstone Holdings, a New York-based private equity firm that funneled $600 million into the company. The company has gone on multiple spending sprees since then. It bought $3.75 billion worthof wells, platforms, and other assets spread out over 1.9 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico from Apache, one of the country’s biggest energy explorers. It also acquired Noble Energy’s offshore assets worth $710 million. But after a pandemic-induced depression in prices and an oil supply glut, last year the debt-laden company filed for bankruptcy for the second time since 2018. 

According to a plan submitted to the bankruptcy judge, Fieldwood is proposing moving more than 380 wells in about 50 leases to NewCo, the new company it created. Chevron and other oil and gas companies objecting to Fieldwood’s plans claim that these leases are the company’s “revenue-generating” assets. A second batch of assets they describe as “bad” is being moved into a separate set of newly-formed companies that critics say do not have adequate finances in place to ensure that they can fulfill their environmental obligations. Finally, the company is proposing either walking away from or returning an additional 187 leases to “predecessor companies” that previously operated them — without specifying which companies they would be transferred to. 

Lawyers and spokespeople for Fieldwood Energy did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Chevron identified that it had sold interests in 44 leases that Fieldwood is attempting to abandon and that the wells and other equipment on these leases would cost upwards of $500 million to clean up. BP identified 14 leases and estimated the cost of cleanup would exceed $422 million.

In a 51-page objection, Chevron described Fieldwood’s plan as “truly unprecedented,” “fundamentally flawed,” and a “liquidation of Debtors’ assets masquerading as a ‘reorganization.'” It attempts to, Chevron’s lawyers argue, “foist billions of dollars of safety and environmental obligations upon the U.S. government, taxpayers, and others.”

Fieldwood has a long history of environmental infractions. According to federal records from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, an agency under the Interior Department’s umbrella, Fieldwood has been issued close to 1,800 “shut-in incidents of noncompliance,” an enforcement action taken when a violation is severe or threatens human health or safety. The company has also received an additional 2,000 “warning” notices for not complying with federal rules and is among the top ten companies with the most number of violation notices, alongside Chevron, Shell, Exxon, and Apache. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice indicted one Fieldwood employee for knowingly releasing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, failing to report it, and falsifying a report. A second employee was indicted for negligence that led to a spill and intentionally bypassing safety systems to continue producing oil.

“These indictments raise serious concerns about the conditions of [Fieldwood’s] other assets,” Chevron wrote in its objection to the company’s bankruptcy plan.

Copying coal 

Attempts to spin off troublesome assets are not new. According to Joshua Macey of the University of Chicago, St. Louis-based coal giant Peabody Energy pioneered the strategy when it and another company moved more than $2 billion in retirement and environmental obligations into Patriot Coal, a subsidiary that would later file for bankruptcy. 

That’s technically illegal. An element of bankruptcy law known as “fraudulent conveyance law” states that it’s unlawful to move money to third parties so that creditors cannot access it right before or during a bankruptcy. But Macey said that the burden of proving fraudulent conveyance is quite high and the statute of limitations is short. 

“By separating into multiple firms, companies have ensured that the funds they have available can be used to pay shareholders and to fund ongoing operations and not to pay environmental claims of coal mines or gas well heads that are no longer productive,” said Macey.

Bankruptcy laws also provide an avenue for companies to dump assets of low or no financial value. Oil and gas wells nearing the end of their life fall squarely into this category. In a 1986 case in which a company attempted to shirk its obligation to clean up property where it had stored 70,000 gallons of oil in leaky containers, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the company could not abandon the property because it was violating New Jersey environmental laws. The Court ruled that a bankruptcy court could not authorize abandonment “without formulating conditions that will adequately protect the public’s health and safety.” The jurisprudence established a narrower condition for abandonment: If companies are in violation of laws that protect public health or safety from “imminent and identifiable harm,” they cannot abandon property.

“The fight is always over, ‘Hey, is this an issue that’s potentially really harmful to people imminently or not,’ and courts come out in different ways,” said Carbon Tracker’s Schuwerk. 

Whether companies attempt to abandon wells during bankruptcy or not, even the threat of abandonment can prompt regulators to delay issuing fines or take other enforcement action to force a company to clean up its act. In a situation where a company appears to be potentially close to insolvency, a regulator pushing a company to plug wells or clean up sites could tip it into bankruptcy.

“You end up having this really weird perverse incentive,” said Steven Feit, an attorney with the Center for International Environmental Law, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., and Switzerland. “The agency has to either decide between doing the responsible thing and closing the well or kind of hoping for the best that it would be able to get the money later.”