“It’s now or never”: Bipartisan congressional report finds Capitol police ignored Jan. 6 warnings

Capitol security officials failed to warn key law enforcement officers back in December about an impending attack on the Capitol building despite having prior knowledge of the plan’s orchestration on social media.

According to a 100-page Senate report released on Tuesday, the Capitol Police’s intelligence division flagged various social media posts that plotted to breach the building. Police Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that the unit reportedly brought them to the department’s “command staff,” but the material never arrived at the desks of higher-ups. This lack of communication persisted throughout the plan’s escalation on social media until the riot unfolded on January 6.

The report paints a comprehensive picture of the rioters’ social media activity, many of whom publicly called for a plan to “bring guns” and “storm the Capitol.” Others spoke vaguely about a looming “war” in D.C.

“If they don’t show up, we enter the Capitol as the Third Continental Congress and certify the Trump Electors,” one poster wrote.

“Bring guns. It’s now or never,” said another.

The report – which referenced a series of unearthed official documents as well as interviews with over 50 Capitol police officers – pits much of the blame on Pittman and a number of other security officials, calling out the “discrepancy” between the department’s own findings and those of a security report from last December. It also criticizes the department’s intelligence operations for being too “decentralized,” a deficiency that led to some top officials being completely in the dark about the social media chatter.

The department continues to maintain that there was “no specific, credible intelligence” about an attack on the Capitol prior to the insurrection. “The USCP consumes intelligence from every federal agency,” the Capitol Police claim. “At no point prior to the 6th did it receive actionable intelligence about a large-scale attack.”

Lawmakers have, however, been quick to cast doubt on the department’s posture, arguing that the riot’s orchestration occurred in broad daylight.

“The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “The attack was quite frankly planned in plain sight.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., echoed: “The failures are obvious. To me, it was all summed up by one of the officers who was heard on the radio that day asking a tragically simple question: ‘Does anybody have a plan?’ Sadly, no one did.”

Some lawmakers have been more hesitant to blame the department, however.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said that the “Capitol Hill police were put in an impossible situation without adequate intelligence, training and equipment because they didn’t have the tools they needed to protect the Capitol.”

The report, led by all three senators, also encouraged “reforms to [the Capitol Police] and the Capitol Police Board,” which it said are “necessary to ensure events like January 6 are never repeated.” Some of the said reforms include better training for Capitol police officers, clarifying emergency procedure checks and balances, and restructuring the department’s intelligence-gathering operations. As Politico noted, it remains unclear how these changes might be implemented without congressional approval.

The report comes amid bitter gridlock in Congress over how the federal government should respond to the riot. Many Republicans have suggested that the American public needs to simply “move on” from the insurrection. Last month, the Democratic-led House passed a bill to assemble a bipartisan commission that would investigate Capitol riot. The Senate’s GOP caucus ultimately filibustered the measure, leading to its legislative demise.

Guess what? The Trump coup against American democracy never stopped

I would like to share a public secret: Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s coup attempt was not defeated on Jan. 6. The war against American democracy continues — and is gaining momentum.

All one has to do is take off one’s blinders to see it. Unfortunately, too many Americans, including the Democratic Party’s leadership, the professional smart people and other members of the country’s mainstream media and chattering class, have waited for months to acknowledge what has been happening in plain sight.

Republicans have rejected any independent investigation into the events of Jan. 6. Why? Because they feel implicated, explicitly or otherwise, in supporting and collaborating with Trump’s coup attempt and the assault on the U.S. Capitol.

By rejecting any efforts to properly investigate those events, Republicans are also giving permission and encouragement for similar acts of right-wing political violence and terrorism in the future.

Instead of being cowed by President Biden’s victory and the events of Jan. 6, the Republican Party and Trump’s larger neofascist movement have only been further empowered in their campaign to end America’s multiracial democracy.

With attempts to pass voting restrictions in nearly all states, Republicans are trying to impose a new Jim Crow regime on Black and brown people. This strategy involves onerous ID requirements, gerrymandering, threats of intimidation and violence, severe limitations on polling places, absentee voting and early voting, and other selectively enforced laws and rules aimed at making it more difficult for nonwhite people — an indispensable part of the Democratic base — to exercise the right to vote.

Republicans are also trying to make their anti-democracy attacks “legal” by rigging America’s electoral system so that only their approved candidates will win. In this near-future scenario, Democrats and others will still be permitted to vote — thus lending a veneer of legitimacy to Republican claims that they have won “free and fair elections” — but the outcome will be already have been determined.

This strategy, which political scientists describe as “managed democracy,” is common to autocratic regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.

In the Atlantic, Adam Serwer explores the Republican attack on democracy in further detail, explaining that Republicans did not block a Jan. 6 commission purely because they fear Trump or want to “move on”:

They are blocking a January 6 commission because they agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized. Because they regard such victories as inherently illegitimate — the result of fraud, manipulation, or the votes of people who are not truly American — they believe that the law should be changed to ensure that elections more accurately reflect the will of Real Americans, who by definition vote Republican. They believe that there is nothing for them to investigate, because the actual problem is not the riot itself but the unjust usurpation of power that occurred when Democrats won. Absent that provocation, the rioters would have stayed home. …

For the Trumpist base, defined by the sense that a country that belongs to them is slipping away, a future full of elections contested by a right-wing party and a slightly less right-wing party would be an ideal outcome. Trump’s election was, among other things, a gesture of outrage from his supporters at having to share the country with those unlike them. Successfully restricting democracy so as to minimize the political power of rival constituencies would mean, at least as far as governing the country is concerned, that they would not have to. Most elected Republicans have repudiated the violence of the Capitol riot, but they share the belief of the rank and file that the rioters’ hearts were in the right place.

What is the next step in this ongoing coup against American democracy? Trump and his acolytes have floated the premise that the Great Leader will somehow remove Biden from office and resume the presidency in August.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who serves as a kind of oracle for Donald Trump and his inner circle to communicate with the outer world, alleged in a tweet last week that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.”

Charles Cooke of the National Review, a venerable conservative publication, has confirmed that Trump really believes this:

I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.

Trump is not merely emitting swamp gas here. He may no longer be president, but he remains de facto leader of the Republican Party and commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans, including a core group of cult members who have shown themselves to be willing to kill or even die for him.

Trump’s claims about a return to power this summer should not be rejected as harmless delusions. They are orders to his followers, who have been primed for violence against their “enemies” by the right-wing propaganda machine through the technique known as “stochastic terrorism”.

Public opinion research has shown that at least half of Republicans actually believe that Trump is still the rightful president. A large proportion of Republicans either approve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol or find various excuses for it. Earlier research has found that a significant percentage of Republicans (especially Trumpists) are willing to support political violence to overthrow the United States government if it is “necessary” to protect their so-called way of life.

A majority of Republicans also believe in the Big Lie (and the various other little lies which sustain it) about the 2020 election. Almost a third of Republicans endorse major portions of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory and its fictions about an apocalyptic battle that will destroy the Democrats and other “elites” and return Trump to power.

Many questions remain about the scale of the coup plot and the role of the military and other national security forces on Jan. 6. Michael Flynn, the retired and disgraced three-star general who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, recently appeared to endorse a military coup similar to the one that recently took place in Myanmar. We should not forget that Flynn reportedly encouraged Trump last December to declare martial law in order to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

It is true that Donald Trump has no legal means of retaking power before the 2024 election. But coups and other acts of political terrorism and violence are almost by definition “illegal.”

In an expression of glee at the anguish of an aspiring tyrant, some liberals are celebrating Trump’s belief that he will be returned to power in August as evidence that he is mentally unwell. This is not a revelation: Based on his public and private behavior, Trump’s unstable mental condition has been apparent for some time. Throughout history, many authoritarians and autocratic leaders have given evidence of poor mental health. But such an amateur diagnosis, by itself, tells us little about Trump and his and neofascist movement’s threat to American democracy.

In an op-ed for CNN, Michael D’Antonio, the author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” issues a warning:

It’s important to stay on guard because the bar has now been lowered: we know that a pronouncement from Trump has the potential (whether intended or not) to elicit violence from his most rabid followers. …

Under our Constitution, Trump cannot be reinstated, which seems to leave the most rabid and ill-informed of his supporters with the coup option. I’m not saying that a coup is possible. However, January 6 showed that some in the Trump base can be spun up to the point where they turn violent. Add the sham audits, conspiracy theory grifters and a former President who has shown he’s not inclined toward responsible behavior, and the prospect of trouble, come the hot days of August, is real.

This means that as we attend to real-life concerns, like infrastructure and holding certain people responsible for January 6, we should also keep our guard up. Trump and the crazies aren’t done messing with us.

On Twitter, CNN analyst Asha Rangappa echoed D’Antonio’s concerns: “Trump’s claim that he will be ‘reinstalled’ this summer is a repeat of the same playbook that led to January 6. Give your followers false hope in a completely unattainable outcome, so that when it inevitably doesn’t happen, you can channel their disappointment into rage.”

It is tempting to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Trump and his cult members have created an alternate reality in which his victorious return to power is imminent and their collective enemies will be vanquished and punished.

Many of the same people who are now laughing at Trump’s fantasies also proclaimed in smug confidence that America would never elect a buffoon and fascist such as Donald Trump to the presidency. Many also said it was “hysterical” or “foolish” to worry that Trump would attempt a coup after his defeat in the 2020 election.

If these same events were happening in another country (an imaginary land that I have previously termed “Trumpistan”), America’s news media and political leaders would be raising the alarm about an imminent coup or political crisis.

The news stories about Trumpistan might inform us of a number of alarming developments. Indeed, they might read something like this:

A recently deposed president, who attempted a coup only months ago, is publicly talking about another attempt. His forces include paramilitaries, street gangs and at least one former high-ranking general. The former president’s propagandists and spokespeople continue to amplify him and depict him as the rightful leader. He retains a remarkably high level of support among his followers, who eagerly await his return to power. They number in the tens of millions, and include a core of potentially violent and heavily armed fanatics. Meanwhile, the opposition party and the majority of the public increasingly fear the loss of their already-weakened democracy. Minority groups, including Black people, immigrants, LGBTQ folks and leftists, fear reprisals and other attacks by the former president and his followers, who appear to be escalating their attacks in hopes of seizing full power.

Ultimately, the Trump-Republican coup attempt never really ended. (At most, it paused briefly to catch its breath.) The American people, along with many of the country’s leaders and its mainstream news media, tried to convince themselves otherwise. Denying the reality of this escalating crisis will not save American democracy. The battle for America’s future is now existential. Those who still believe in democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are running out of time.

My COVID-19 teaching year

It seems appropriate that the 2020-2021 school year in Portland, Oregon, began amid toxic smoke from the catastrophic wildfires that blanketed many parts of the state for almost two weeks. The night before the first day of school, the smoke alarm in my bedroom went off. Looking back, I see it as a clarion call, a shrieking, beeping warning of all the threats, real and existential, we’d face in the year to come.

On that first day of what would be that fall’s online version of school, I was still reeling from the loss of one of my dear friends. As wildfires approached her remote Sonoma County, California, home, she chose to end her life. She’d spent the initial months of the pandemic isolated from friends and loved ones, her serene mountain retreat no longer offering solace. She left no note, only a tidied kitchen and, according to those who’d attended a virtual yoga class with her on the last day of her life, a peaceful smile. She was my friend and I loved her.

Marooned inside our house, all the windows and doors tightly sealed, I stared into the grid of black boxes on Zoom that now represented the students in my high-school visual arts classes. I wondered how I’d find the strength to carry us all through the year.

As I greeted them, the air inside my home was stale, smoky, and distinctly claustrophobic. It was becoming harder to breathe. I struggled to find words of uplift. What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?

Ad-Hoc Childcare

Unable to find solutions to the larger and more menacing threats outside my door, I shifted my focus to managing the chaos inside. My first and most pressing concern was what to do with my nine-year-old daughter during the school day. My husband, who works outside our home as a studio artist, was under contract for a job that would last much of the year, ensuring us needed income at a time when so many had none. However, it also left us in a new type of childcare bind.

Last spring, a few friends, also teachers, realized that it was going to be next to impossible to juggle parenting and homeschooling, while simultaneously running our own classrooms. In the spirit of self-preservation and of maintaining a shred of sanity, we decided that three days a week we’d set the kids up, masked — and with blankets and heaters once it got cold — on our porches or in open garages. We decided that, at the very least, left largely to themselves they’d develop skills of resiliency and independence, and learn to navigate their fourth-grade year together.

We put our trust in our kids and gave up control. In truth, we had little choice. We all felt lucky and incredibly privileged even to have such an option. No matter how imperfect, at least it was a plan. Our kids were old enough to make our ad-hoc solution work and they seemed desperate enough to socialize in the midst of a pandemic that they were willing to tough out Portland’s cold and rainy fall and winter outdoors together.

And so, until they resumed in-person learning in April 2021, our kids spent a majority of the school week together outside. When it was our day to host such a gathering, my husband set up the heaters, made sure the kids could log on, and left for work. For the rest of the school day, I would rush out to check on them between my classes, delivering food, warm tea, and more blankets if needed. I couldn’t, of course, monitor their classroom attendance or help them with their work, but at least I knew that they were together, and could rely on one another. I’d then retreat back to the little room that I’d converted from an art studio to an office/classroom in order to teach my own students.

Going It Alone

The energy, problem solving, and logistics involved in creating a “solution” to our individual childcare problems in the midst of a pandemic will undoubtedly be familiar to many parents. The disastrous spread of Covid-19 forced families to repeatedly engineer solutions to seemingly impossible, ever-evolving problems. It stretched families, especially women, to our breaking points.

It’s no wonder, then, that the push to restore the only support most of us rely on for free, consistent, and dependable childcare and resources — the public school — remains one of the most urgent and divisive issues of this period. However, the toxic dialogue that developed around in-person versus online learning created a false dichotomy and unnecessary rancor between parents and teachers. The idea that somehow there was a conflict between what teachers (like me, often parents, too) and non-teaching parents desired functionally obfuscated the true situation we all faced. Parents didn’t want their children to suffer and they needed the resources and childcare support schools provide. Teachers wanted a safe school environment for our students and us — and not one more person to die, ourselves included.

If nothing else, the pandemic served as a stark reminder of at least two things: that the nuclear family is not enough and that schools can’t be its sole safety net. The ethos of toxic individualism that permeates this society can’t sustain families in such crises (or even, often enough, out of them). It’s a shoddy stand-in for a more communal and federally subsidized version of such support.

Since March 2020, we’ve suffered as our children suffered because we’ve had to do so much without significant help. And yet teachers like me endured our jobs through those terrible months at enormous personal cost, even as we were repeatedly punished on the national stage for doing so. We were called selfish, accused of being lazy, and told to toughen up and shut up, even as the most unfortunate among us lost their lives. What’s been missing in this conversation is the obvious but often overlooked reality that many teachers are also parents. Almost half of all teachers have school-aged children at home and, let me just add, 76% of all public school teachers are women.

What Students Actually Learned This Year

By the time my aunt, who contracted Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, died of sudden and inexplicable heart failure in October, I was no longer able to pretend that my personal life was separate from my professional persona. Isolated from my larger family, I found myself grieving the loss of a beloved relative without the normal rituals or sort of support I would have had under other circumstances. On the morning of her death, I logged on as usual and taught each of my classes, digging deep to make it through the day. I then cooked, cleaned the house, answered emails, and negotiated my own sadness. There just wasn’t the space or time to stop and grieve.

Despite waking with a heavy heart morning after morning, I would still log on and try to connect with my students. I had to ask myself: if I was feeling this exhausted, worn-down, grief-stricken, and anxious, how were they feeling? I had the benefit of financial security, experience, and years of therapy, and I was still really struggling. My students were coping with the loss of their autonomy, routines, and social worlds. Some had lost family members to the virus, a few had even contracted it themselves. Others were taking care of younger siblings or working jobs as well to support desperate families. Some were simply depressed. It was a wonder that any of them showed up at all.

I decided I would have to shift my thinking about what learning should look like in that strange pandemic season. If my students owed me nothing and their time was a gift, then I would have to approach teaching with a kindness, openness, and willingness to listen unmatched in my 20 years in the profession. I showed up because I knew that, even if students were silent and didn’t turn their cameras on, most of them were actually there and were, in fact, taking in far more than they were being given credit for.

Extraordinary learning has taken place in this school year. It’s just not the learning we expected. All the hand-wringing and fears of students’ “falling behind,” not taking in specific material in the timelines we’ve adopted for them, reflect the setting of goalposts that are completely arbitrary. That way of thinking is rooted in viewing certain kinds of students as eternally deficient and their struggles as individual failings rather than indications of historically inequitable systemic design and deprivation, or extraordinary circumstances like those we faced together this year.

The skills and the knowledge we promote as most valuable are tied to workforce demands — not to what should count as actual life learning or growth. When you narrow achievement to what’s quantifiable, you miss so much. You fail to see just how infinitely resourceful and resilient kids can actually be. You ignore skills and learning that haven’t historically been considered valuable, because it can’t be quantified. We’ve become accustomed to looking for skills that can be neatly measured and distributed like any other commodity. We’ve adopted standardized benchmarks, standardized modes of assessment, standardized testing, and standardized curriculum, but the truth of the matter is that knowledge is rarely neat and tidy, or immediately measurable.

This year our children figured out how to navigate complex technologies and online platforms, and many did so, despite considerable disadvantages. They had to learn how to self-regulate, how to deal with complex time management, often under genuinely difficult circumstances at home. Older students sometimes had to sort out not just how to manage their own schooling, but that of younger siblings. Some of my students demonstrated extraordinary emotional growth. Sometimes, they would even talk with me about how the pandemic had shifted their understanding of themselves and their relationships. They learned the beauty of slowing down and the preciousness of family and friends. They have a far clearer sense now of what’s most worth valuing in life as they step back into a world radically altered by Covid-19.

As it happens, much of their learning has taken place outside school walls, so they’ve developed a deeper understanding of the forces that shape and control their world. Students in Oregon watched climate crises unfold in the form of catastrophic wildfires in the fall and terrible ice storms in the winter. Together, we all had a real-time civics lesson in the fragility of our democracy. They watched — and a number participated in — a civil-rights uprising. They experienced their families and their communities being torn apart by political divisions, conspiracy theorizing, and a deadly virus. They suffered as the holes in what passed for America’s social safety net were exposed.

And yet most of them continued to show up for school day after day, still trying. And it’s a goddamn miracle that they did!

One More Layer

When it was announced that we would be returning to our school buildings in late April, I realized I had finally hit my own personal wall. My daughter, who attends school in a different district from the one where I teach, was to be in-person at school for only 2 hours and online for the remainder of the day. I, on the other hand, would be required to be in my building full-time, four days a week (with Wednesdays still remote). I had no options for outside childcare and no extended family or friends who could help me cobble together a plan.

Logistically, my husband and I were at an impasse. Personally, I was a mess. I’d lost four more loved ones and our cat had been eaten by a coyote. My husband, struggling to remain sober without the support of his recovery community, relapsed. My daughter had become increasingly anxious and fearful. When I tried to problem-solve an answer to our childcare predicament, my mind simply shut down.

For the decade since my daughter was born, I’d been trying to manage a difficult balance of working, commuting, taking care of myself, and raising her. I considered myself fortunate to have healthcare covered and an option at work for maternity leave. After all, my own mother, a kindergarten teacher, had been forced to return to her classroom a mere six weeks after giving birth to me (and she already had two kids at home to care for). Many women in America are ineligible even for unpaid Family Medical Leave. Upon returning to work after her birth and a three-month maternity leave, I had no sick days banked and had exhausted our savings. When I experienced a period of severe postpartum depression I pushed through it and never missed a day of work. I didn’t feel then as if I could rest or be vulnerable or simply put the needs of my baby, or even myself, first. It took me years to recover from the physical, emotional, and financial toll of having a baby. And then the pandemic struck.

As the discourse about schools, teachers, and teachers’ unions became more vitriolicand antagonism toward educators grew louder, I realized that I was experiencing yet another layer of trauma. It was as if the work I’d sacrificed so much for had not only been invisible, but I was actually being punished for it.

This time, I decided, I needed a different answer. I applied for a leave of absence and left school for the last two months of the semester in order to take care of my child and myself. I did so knowing how lucky, how privileged I was even to be able to make such a decision.

As We Emerge

It would be no exaggeration to say that I did not love my job this year, but I did it with diligence and fortitude because it was the way that I could still contribute. I developed an entirely new online curriculum and learned to teach by Zoom. I also showed up each and every day for my students, no matter what was happening to me personally. I did that because I witnessed the ways in which my daughter’s teacher showed up every morning for her and how much that simple interaction with another adult buoyed her, how much it kept her spirits high despite the mounting mental-health challenges she faced.

My situation is neither unique nor extraordinary. If anything, I’m lucky. Nevertheless, I feel irrevocably changed by the past year. Some days, I’m flattened by grief, wrung out and hopeless. Other days I find myself daydreaming of the transformative potential of this hardship, imagining a future that better serves all our children — one that acknowledges their shared humanity, the fragility of our existence, and the tenderness required of all of us to build something better together.

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The simple secret to much, much better whole-grain pancakes

Every week in Genius Recipes — often with your help! — Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

* * *

Josey Baker loves whole grains. His son, Cassidy, does not.

At Josey Baker Bread, the San Francisco whole-grain sourdough bakery that opened in 2010 and now operates out of The Mill, Josey and his team mill flours for crusty sourdough loaves every day. Their griddle cake mix is pebbled with at least eight different types of crushed-up grains and seeds, from rye chops to millet. Even their Wonder Bread starts with whole wheat.

But try as Josey might, he couldn’t warm Cassidy up to the legendary nine-grain pancake recipe from Big Sur Bakery or his own griddle cake blend. The baker who uses little refined flour in his baked goods had a kid who wanted only traditional pancakes that were made with nothing but.

“My sweet son, Cassidy, with his discerning palate, did not appreciate the graininess,” Josey told me.

In the early days of sheltering in place in 2020, while cooking for his family at home, Josey started experimenting with the ratios of his son’s favorite buttermilk pancakes. “Slowly and surely, I started incorporating whole wheat into it, until eventually it was all whole wheat,” Josey told me. “And he still liked them.”

Here’s his secret: Whole-wheat flour, which still has the fibrous heft of the bran and germ in play, benefits from extra time to hydrate that refined flours, like all-purpose, don’t need. (1) While Josey’s pancake recipe was designed to be flexible—and will work straight away after mixing the batter if needed — the difference when soaking the whole-wheat flour in milk overnight is profound.

Try the two versions side by side, like I did, and you’ll see. The batter griddled immediately will be good, though a bit drier and more noticeably whole-grain, the crags of wheat still pronounced. (Don’t worry — butter and maple syrup level the playing field.) But the batter made with grains soaked overnight will be astoundingly tender, light, and creamy-smooth. (2)

“Also, due to some enzymatic activity, you make more of the sugars available, which leads to more caramelization in the cooking process,” Josey explained. “What it yields is a pancake that is actually a little bit sweeter,” without leaning on more sugar.

Because I knew you’d ask, I kept testing. I tried swapping in buttermilk — the pancakes were great, their thick batter needing just a little more nudging into place. (Josey even called for buttermilk in an earlier version of this recipe, but switched to milk to make it more accessible.) I tried mixing the whole batter the night before — the pancakes, while slightly thinner, were again great, and I was able to scoop and flip them on a Wednesday morning with my two-year-old daughter at my side. Miraculously, she was pancake-fed and dressed within half an hour of getting up.

I’ve found that for every need, this pancake recipe will bend, and one thing will remain constant: The overnight soak will bridge the gap between people like Josey who love whole grains, and people like Cassidy who do not.

***

Recipe: Whole-Grain Pancakes From Josey Baker

Prep time:
Cook time:
Serves: 2 to 4

Ingredients

1 cup (113 grams) whole-wheat flour
3/4 cup milk (whatever kind you have)
1 tablespoon sourdough starter (optional)
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus more for buttering the pan and serving
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Chocolate chips, peanut butter, fresh fruit, or maple syrup, for serving

Directions

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, milk, and sourdough starter, if using. Cover and refrigerate overnight for a smoother, more tender texture. In the morning, stir in the sugar, butter, egg, baking soda, salt, and vanilla and mix until combined; don’t worry about overmixing.
Melt some butter on a griddle or in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Ladle on some batter, making pancakes of any size you’d like; the batter will be very thick, so you may need to use the back of a spoon to help spread the dollops. If you’re planning to add chocolate chips or berries, do it now. Flip the pancakes after bubbles rise to the surface and the bottoms brown, 2 to 4 minutes.
Cook on the second side until lightly browned and cooked through, about 2 minutes more. Transfer to a plate and top as you like.

(1) Some whole-grain flours are friendlier to swapping in for all-purpose, without the soak, like brown rice flour and buckwheat — see Alice Medrich’s full list here.

(2) Cooks who soak grains for health reasons often do so in an acidic liquid like buttermilk or acidulated water (you can read more about it here). While milk is slightly acidic, I’m more focused on this recipe for its flavor and texture benefits and can’t speak to the nutrition side, other than that it got me eating (a lot) more whole grains.

“Unwell Women” author Elinor Cleghorn: Women’s pain “isn’t taken seriously” by doctors

Our society pushes some weird narratives about women. Women are delicate flowers who need to be protected, we’re told. But we’re also disgusting animals who bleed and leak milk and get hair in places that upsets people. We’re amazing. We’re gross. We’re powerful. We’re weak. It’s definitely all in our heads. We are, as Elinor Cleghorn notes in her fascinating new book “Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World,” considered the caretakers of humanity — but men are the authorities, even of our own bodies.

At once an enraging, meticulous history and an intimate personal story, “Unwell Women” is an exploration of women’s unique and (often fatally) misunderstood treatment in medicine, and a call to change our deeply engrained assumptions about healthcare.

Salon spoke to the English author via Zoom recently about hysteria, lobotomies, and why confronting the past is an essential part of a healthier future for women. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

The book is very personal, and that gets to a big part of what drives this story. What made you write this?

The origin of this book was my diagnosis with systemic lupus erythematosus, which is an autoimmune disease and the most common form of lupus. It affects 90% more women than men globally.

I was diagnosed with it ten years ago, when I was thirty. My second son was nine weeks old, and we’d just been through a really difficult pregnancy because he had a heart condition that was caused by my own immune system mounting an attack against his heart while I was pregnant. After he was born, I developed a heart condition of my own that was really baffling to my doctors, and I ended up hospitalized. I had fluid around my heart, which is called pericarditis. They explored lots of different options, but none of the doctors looked at the notes and put together the puzzle pieces of what had happened during the pregnancy and what was now happening to me these few weeks later.

After having lots of tests, lots of blood work, ultrasounds, MRIs, and being in the hospital for about ten days, a rheumatologist visited the cardiac ward where I was being cared for, and he looked over my notes and ordered some counts of my rheumatoid factor to see if I was inflamed. He said, “Look, I think she has this disease, and this is what caused the issues with her baby, and this is what is causing the issue with her now.”

So, I received this diagnosis, was referred to a specialist clinic in London, and from then on was one of the many million women across the world that have this disease. I entered into the health system as a chronic illness patient.

In those early days, there were very few explanations as to why lupus affects the people it does. Nobody knows exactly what causes it. Nobody knows whether it’s necessarily genetic. Not a great deal is fully understood yet about why it affects so many more women than men, and so every time I asked a question, I felt like I just had no answers. All I was really being told was that I could be medicated to manage my symptoms. So I started researching it.

I was a researcher at the time, doing my PhD. I did my PhD in cultural studies and humanities, and I was working on feminist histories. Alongside doing that work, I started searching for case studies of lupus. I kept finding these women in historical cases whose situations and life stories felt so familiar to my own. There were usually lots of complex symptoms, predominately joint pain, but also organ involvement. And there were lots of misdiagnoses — quite often with psychiatric issues, and then finally either a diagnosis or sadly often death, followed by an autopsy, and then a posthumous diagnosis. It baffled me. It fascinated and infuriated me all at once that more than a century later, I was still a patient with this, and my care was still being thwarted by these mysteries.

I thought, “There’s something in this.” I had the impulse to research. I just started mining through some of the histories of other chronic diseases that were coming up in association with the rise of the wellness industry. These narratives around women not being listened to, women being misdiagnosed, women being in pain and being told that they were anxious or stressed. I just thought, “There’s a story to be told, and I want to know why this is happening.”

Let’s talk about the minimization of women’s pain, because that’s the start of it. There’s the idea that the things that women feel can’t be real. Why is our pain not taken as seriously as male pain?

I think that there are two really distinct reasons why our pain isn’t taken as seriously as male pain. One is the minimization, which I think is rooted historically in the idea that in many ways women’s bodies exist in order to feel pain. The primary purpose of the woman historically in society was to bear and raise children. If we go back to ancient Greece and to the classical so-called fathers of modern medicine, like the Hippocratic writers, we see very much that the understanding of the human body in terms of gender is that a man is this idealized creation. The woman is a failed version of that idealized creation, but she also has a very particular purpose, which is marriage and motherhood.

Because women’s purpose is ordained to entail pain, there’s been a historic and cultural normalization and minimization of women being in pain. We feel so much pain anyway because of the way that our bodies work — because of menstruation, because of the lack of understanding that comes through those blind spots of privilege in male bodies. What’s happened over the centuries is that women’s pain has been really normalized.

There’s a great quote from one of the Charles Meigs, who was an obstetrician in the 19th century. He’s giving a lecture to his students about what a woman is. He says something along the lines of, she’s a gestational and a painful creature. This is women’s lot in life, to feel pain. It’s part of what grants us our humanity. I think a lot of the minimization of women’s pain has come from this idea that we exist to feel it.

I think on the other hand, as well as minimization and normalization, historically there’s been an over pathologization of the roots of where women’s pain comes from because the male body is the model patient, and the woman is other. She’s a subgroup. She’s marginalized. I think there’s been a real tendency to pathologize where women’s pain comes from, so male pain historically has been legitimized as coming from disease, malfunctioning bodies, something organic, something that’s wrong that can be put right. Because there’s that lack of understanding and also that normalization, if a woman says that there’s pain in her body, it must come from her mind. Somehow she must be creating it herself rather than it being something that she has no control over because it’s happening in her body.

I think these ideas, they’re still expressed. They’re still ingrained in our medical knowledge today. We have moved on exponentially over the centuries in our attitudes toward gender and our understanding what a human body is, but because those attitudes are so ingrained, they’ve shaped a lot of the understanding of diseases from a clinical perspective. Statistically, it’s been shown that if a woman presents with chronic pain that doesn’t have an immediately diagnostic cause, she’s more likely to be seen as having a mental health condition than to be referred for further tests. She’s much more likely to be dismissed with a recommendation of a sedative or an antidepressant medicine than an analgesic or opioid pain medication, which men would be offered.

What we haven’t done, I don’t think, is looked at those myths and asked, “Well okay, how has this actually interrupted and steered how we understand women’s health?” Those myths perpetuate because we just haven’t spent enough money, dedicated enough research, given enough visibility to representing women in knowledge in the contemporary era of medicine.

There’s a phrase that you use, “the necessity and inevitability of pain.” That’s the lot of being a woman, that if you do complain, you’re literally hysterical. You cite a figure about lobotomies.

The figure is astonishing. Something like estimated 75% of all cases of prefrontal lobotomy in the 1940s and ’50s were women, and many of those women were older. What we would call middle age was then considered “older” women. As well as the minimization and dismissal of women’s pain, I think there has also been a real impulse in male-dominated medicine to solve what are essentially social problems suffered by women in their lives by really barbaric surgical interventions. This happened in the 19th century with some of the supposed gynecological cures, which involved removing women’s ovaries for example or performing clitoridectomies on younger women as a way of making their bodies neat, and making them behave, and curbing this unruliness that was believed to be inherent in the female body and mind.

I think the lobotomy was seen as a fix for a problem that was both social and medical at once. Medicine had created this idea that women, if they’re in pain, if they’re suffering, then they’re crazy. Also, there was this idea that there was a cure. There was a sense that if you butchered the body then you could somehow cure the mind.

I remember reading the book by Freeman and Watts, the American neurologists who really popularized the prefrontal lobotomy in the 1940s. They wrote a book about the success of what they call the psychosurgery, and they talked about lots of case studies. The language that’s used around the women who went through this horrendous procedure was so infantilizing and dehumanizing. They would describe women as being shrewish and highly strung and shrill and, indeed, hysterical before they underwent the procedure, and then talk about them afterwards being returned to an almost childlike state of blissful ignorance.

One husband had apparently told Freeman and Watts after his wife had gone through this procedure that she was full of, and I quote, “don’t give a damn-ness.” Of course, what they’ve done is literally severed the part of her brain that can make meaning of her life. To use this horrible, flippant phrase when they’ve severed her ability to make meaning of her life and her thoughts is horrific. I think it would hand down that cultural moment that’s full of stigma around mental illness.

When you’re talking about that phrase, “neat,” I think of the boom of labiaplasty and cosmetic surgery around our bodies, where it’s all about being as tidy and small and childlike as possible. It all comes back again to this idealized image of what a woman’s body is, and it’s always in context to what the male body is and what the male mind is simultaneously.

Plastic surgery and chemical manipulations for bodies and faces has become so normalized, especially over the last two to three years, in much younger women. There’s something always about the female body in its natural state is seen to be unruly, and messy, and un-tameable, and uncontrollable. The fact that you bleed has to be hidden, the fact that you hurt has to be hidden. The mess, the dirt, the humanity is gone.

The hair.

Yeah, body hair. You have to be infantilized and made smaller than you are, but also to not pollute or contaminate anything. This idea about contamination, pollution and contagion has haunted women’s bodies throughout history. I think it’s probably rooted in menstruation, but it’s this idea that women just need to be contained, that women’s basic humanness always needs to be parceled away, hidden.

I don’t quite know what the controversy has been like in the UK, but here in the US, this myth that vaccinated women can somehow contaminate unvaccinated women is wild. It’s exactly what you’re talking about, and it’s happening.

What is so shocking about that is the acceptability of the myth that women are contagious in the first place, the roots of why that misinformation captures and sticks. It’s already somehow there in the cultural consciousness that women are these contagious beings and that we will infect everyone; we’ll get our mess everywhere. It’s already there, so it’s perfectly set up to be believed , which is horrifying.

I think similarly one of the other real fears around the vaccine that seems to have spread quickly is about women suddenly bleeding, suddenly menstruating a lot, or possibly even miscarrying after they’ve had the vaccine. I think there is evidence to show that a very small percentage of women may have a little bit of menstrual interruption after having the vaccine. When you look at it, being unwell can affect your cycle. Your immune system does have an effect on your cycle. This isn’t unusual. This is to be expected, but the way this has been inflamed into “Women will suddenly just bleed on the floor of the vaccination clinic” is again because we’re just predisposed to believe such things.

You talk about the ways in which women’s health is so intersectional with race and class and money. It’s a hard thing for us to look at, but you do go head on, particularly into the ways in which the reproductive rights movement has its roots in eugenics.

These stories are really hard to hear as a feminist, especially as a white woman doing feminist work because reproductive rights, reproductive justice, birth control, are all associated with real progress and liberation for women. For example, the invention of the contraceptive pill is often cited as the most liberating moment in womankind in our history. Contraception was very hard won in both the UK and the US, and globally of course, and it still is. And it’s always a precarious right.

But it has a very complicated history of its conception, invention and realization as something that everyone can take that’s wrapped up in the exploitation and abuse of women of color, particularly of Latina women who were used in the 1950s as experimental subjects for trials of the combined contraceptive pill in Puerto Rico. Because of the constant ban on contraception distribution and research gathering in the States, those who were developing the pill knew that the FDA wouldn’t approve it unless it was tested on a large representation or a pool of women.

Margaret Sanger, who is the pioneer of birth control and the founder of the early formed Planned Parenthood, had always been searching for a very democratic contraception. She was a woman very interested in the burden of multiple child bearing, especially working class women. But she also carried very eugenic beliefs about who should be allowed to have children, what kind of future America should have, and what role family limitation through motherhood should play with that. She was involved in the early development of the pill, and there was an awful quote exchanged in a letter. Margaret Sanger didn’t say this, but they needed, and I quote, “a cage of ovulating females,” in order to test the pill because they knew this was the only way it could get past the FDA.

Trials were organized in Puerto Rico where contraception wasn’t illegal, unlike in the mainland US where it was. The issue around these trials was that the women were chosen specifically so that they may have had poor literacy or they may have been in a position where they had multiple children. And, they were being offered by nurses, community workers, and social workers involved in this project, something that was free that was touted as being very safe that would mean that they wouldn’t get pregnant. But they weren’t informed of the possible side effects.

The hormonal levels of estrogen especially were so high in these early pill models, and the women were not able to give informed consent. They did not expressly understand they were part of a clinical trial in the first place. One of the developers of the pill actually said that they had, and I quote, “emotional superactivity” of Puerto Rican women. If they did complain of side effects, and they did, it was explained away to either enforce racist beliefs that Puerto Rican women, that Latina women are overly emotional. Again, we have this resurgence and a real compression of this awful mythology around women’s pain being in their minds and also this is compounded by the racist deepening of that false idea.

The genesis of the pill is rooted in an exploitative medical experiment really, but it’s also rooted in a eugenic idea about who should be allowed to have a family, who should be allowed to be a mother. At the time, of course, there was a lot of economic difficulty following the war. In the UK as well, there were arguments that were circulating before and after the war that were very similar. Our pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes, similarly had really entrenched eugenic beliefs, and she was extremely ableist and extremely racist. She would really champion birth control as something that would improve the lives of white women. She was a champion of working class women again, but within that she also had a white supremacist belief in this vision of the UK, a fit, white one that was free of — they used terms like “mental defects.”

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It’s really hard to hear, but I think that it’s important to look at the real history, and think always about how we can hold the two things at once. We can look at the pioneers and the progress, but we also really have to think about who that progress was made at the expense of. It is difficult, but I think it’s really important.

After this pandemic year that is in many ways ten steps backwards for our health and social progress, what are the lessons of this particular crisis?

COVID has really illuminated questions of emotional labor, and caregiving, and the impact that has on women’s mental and physical health. At times of health crisis, women will be and always have been historically, the caregivers, the ones who have to sacrifice their well being in order to keep society rolling along.

I think it’s also illuminated questions around what we do and don’t know about determinants of health. It’s brought really into public consciousness questions like the under-representation of women and minority bodies in clinical trials, for example around the vaccine. It’s also bringing to light issues around the systemic and social basis of issues like vaccine hesitancy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, at least in the UK, some of the most vaccine hesitant groups are women of color. It’s not a coincidence when women of color come from histories where they have been exploited and abused, especially by public health interventions. We’ve got now a way to structure these conversations, rather than just saying, “We know what’s happened. Somebody just pay attention.”

Steve Bannon pushes for “major effort” to “bring Joe Manchin into the Republican Party”

Conservative broadcaster Steve Bannon on Monday pushed for a “major effort” to “bring Joe Manchin into the Republican Party.”

During a rant on Real America’s Voice, Bannon explained how Republicans can take over the Senate by enticing the West Virginia Democrat to switch parties.

Bannon made the remarks a day after Manchin told Fox News that he does not support reforming the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation.

“Joe Manchin is not going to fold on this,” he said. “I actually believe there should be a major effort led by guys like Rick Scott to bring Joe Manchin into the Republican Party right now. Bring him into the Republican Party, make sure that he’s a welcome member of the Republican Party.”

“Take control,” Bannon added before suggesting that three other Democratic senators would have their election overturned.

“The whole legitimacy question because of the pounding, the pounding, the pounding of the 3 November movement to get to the bottom of this,” he added.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Two newly-approved Venus missions will get us closer to knowing if Venus has cloud-based life

Future historians may remember 2021 as the year that Earthlings were fixated on Mars. Ingenuity, the little Martian ‘chopper that could, successfully took flight, marking the first powered-controlled flight on another planet. The Ingenuity helicopter hitched a ride with the rover Perseverance, which successfully landed on Mars with it and which is currently scouring the surface for signs of past microbial life. Meanwhile, two other nation-states, the United Arab Emirates and China, had their own Mars missions in 2021 — an orbiter and a rover, respectively.

But Mars’ moment as the star planet of the solar system may not last. By the end of the decade, all eyes will be on Venus, as the second planet from the Sun becomes a new scientific focus for humanity.

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that the agency has approved two new missions to the second planet from the Sun. One of them will be the first U.S.-led mission into Venus’ atmosphere since 1978. Both are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030.

The first mission is called DAVINCI+, an acronym for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus. DAVINCI+’s primary purpose is to measure the composition of Venus’ atmosphere. Scientists hope this mission will help them better understand how the planet formed, in addition to determining whether Venus ever had an ocean or not. Indeed, for decades, scientists have been curious to know Venus evolved to have an atmosphere that traps so much of the Sun’s heat, resulting in surface temperatures higher than 880 degrees Fahrenheit — very different than conditions here on its sister planet, Earth. In order to study Venus’ atmosphere, scientists will build a “descent sphere” that will plunge through Venus’ thick atmosphere as it makes precise measurements of gases.

Studying Venus’ atmosphere could also help scientists better understand whether or not there is floating, cloud-based life in the upper atmosphere. In September 2020, a group of international astronomers published a paper in Nature Astronomy explaining how they detected phosphine (PH₃), a gaseous molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Researchers saw phosphine’s signal in spectrograms from two radio telescopes they used to capture the data, and estimated there were 20 parts per billion of the compound in Venus’ clouds.

The astronomers stated that the discovery was a “promising” sign of life, as phosphine on Earth is created in the gaseous emanations of anaerobic life. Astrobiologists speculated that little microbes could be floating in Venus’ atmosphere, living their lives entirely high up in Venus’ temperate cloud layers, where temperatures can be as balmy as a Mediterranean climate. As Salon reported, not too long after astronomers published the initial paper, more research papers followed questioning the observation of phosphine. At the time, DAVINCI+ was merely a proposal for a mission to study the upper atmosphere of Venus.

In 2020, Therese Encrenaz, an astrophysicist at LESIA, Paris Observator, told Salon via email that she was convinced that “there are still many open questions regarding the photochemistry and meteorology of its atmosphere.”

“Venus has been forgotten for too long, relative to the space exploration of Mars,” Encrenaz said. “There is no need for phosphine to be interested in Venus.”

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In addition to studying Venus’ atmosphere and bringing more clarity around the phosphine question, DAVINCI+ will return the first high-resolution pictures of the “tesserae,” a unique geological feature on Venus that is characterized by two or more intersecting tectonic elements.

“Our vision for DAVINCI+ is to send a chemistry lab and orbiter to Venus to put the planet into its appropriate context in our solar system,” said Jim Garvin, NASA Goddard’s chief scientist and principal investigator of the proposed DAVINCI+ mission. “Then we can compare Venus, Earth, and Mars — terrestrial sister planets that probably looked similar at birth, but somehow diverged paths quite drastically.”

The second selected mission to Venus is called VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy). Unlike DAVINCI+, VERITAS has no lander; it will orbit the planet and capture the surface with radar. The goal of the VERITAS mission is to map out surface elevations across the planet and recreate 3D contractions of the planet’s topography; that in turn will help confirm which volcanoes are still active on Venus, and if it has active plate tectonics.

Venus mission boosters say that studying Venus won’t merely advance humanity’s knowledge of the formation of our solar system, but will also help scientists better understand exoplanets, meaning planets that exist outside our solar system.

“It is not just understanding the evolution of planets and habitability in our own solar system, but extending beyond these boundaries to exoplanets, an exciting and emerging area of research for NASA,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “We’re revving up our planetary science program with intense exploration of a world that NASA hasn’t visited in over 30 years.”

The last U.S.-led NASA mission to Venus was the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. Consisting of five separate probes, the mission launched on Aug. 8, 1978 and reached Venus on Dec. 9, 1978. The mission led 17 experiments that contributed to what is known about Venus today.

As much as scientists are excited to better understand Mars this year, the focus on Venus means there will be a new planet to fawn over in the not-too-distant future.

“It is astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky — through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,” said Tom Wagner, NASA’s Discovery Program scientist. “It will be as if we have rediscovered the planet.”

We need a people’s vaccine — not just to fight the virus but to fight for global economic justice

A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the COVID pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%).

But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger.

Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the virus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,883 cases and 53 deaths.

But more than half of Vietnam’s cases and deaths have come in the last two months, and three-quarters of the new cases have been infected with a new “hybrid” variant that combines the two mutations detected separately in the Alpha (U.K.) and Delta (India) variants.

Vietnam is a canary in the pandemic coal mine. The way this new variant has spread so quickly in a country that has defeated every previous form of the virus suggests that this one is much more infectious.

This variant must surely also be spreading in other countries, where it will be harder to detect among thousands of daily cases, and will therefore be widespread by the time public health officials and governments respond to it. There may also be other highly infectious new variants spreading undetected among the millions of cases in Latin America and other parts of the world.

A new study in The Lancet medical journal has found that the Alpha (U.K.), Beta (South Africa) and Delta (India) variants are all more resistant to existing vaccines than the original COVID virus, and the Delta variant is still spreading in countries with aggressive vaccination programs, including the U.K.

The Delta variant accounts for a two-month high in new cases in the U.K. and a new wave of infections in Portugal, just as developed countries ease restrictions before the summer vacation season, almost certainly opening the door to the next wave. The U.K., which has a slightly higher vaccination rate than the United States, had planned a further relaxation of restrictions on June 21, but that is now in question.

China, Vietnam, New Zealand and other countries defeated the pandemic in its early stages by prioritizing public health over business interests. The United States and Western Europe instead tried to strike a balance between public health and their neoliberal economic systems, breeding a monster that has now killed millions of people. The World Health Organization believes that 6 million to 8 million people have died, about twice as many as have been counted in official figures.

Now the WHO is recommending that wealthier countries who have good supplies of vaccines postpone vaccinating healthy young people, and instead prioritize sending vaccines to poorer countries where the virus is running wild.

President Biden has announced that the United States is releasing 25 million doses from its stockpiles, most of which will be distributed through the WHO’s Covax program, with another 55 million to follow by the end of June. But this is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

Biden has also agreed to waive patent rights on vaccines under the WTO’s TRIPS rules (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), but that has so far been held up at the WTO by Canada and right-wing governments in the U.K., Germany, Brazil, Australia, Japan and Colombia. People have taken to the streets in many countries to insist that a WTO TRIPS Council meeting this Tuesday and Wednesday, June 8 and 9, must agree to waive patent monopolies.

Since all the countries blocking the TRIPS waiver are U.S. allies, this will be a critical test of the Biden administration’s promised international leadership and diplomacy, which has so far taken a back seat to dangerous saber-rattling against China and Russia, foot-dragging on the JCPOA with Iran and war-crime-fueling weapons-peddling to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism, or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest.

Public Citizen has researched what it would take to vaccinate the world, and concluded that it would cost only $25 billion — 3% of the annual U.S. budget for weapons and war — to set up manufacturing plants and distribution hubs across the world and vaccinate all of humanity within a year. Forty-two progressives in Congress have signed a letter to President Biden urging him to fund such a plan.

If the world can agree to make and distribute a People’s Vaccine, it could be the silver lining in this dark cloud, because this ability to act globally and collectively in the public interest is precisely what we need to solve so many of the most serious problems facing humanity.

For example, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) warns that we are in the midst of a triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and pollution. Our neoliberal political and economic system has not just failed to solve these problems. It actively works to undermine efforts to do so, granting people, corporations and countries who profit from destroying the natural world the freedom to do so without constraint.

That is the very meaning of laissez-faire, to let the wealthy and powerful do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us, or even for life on Earth. As the economist John Maynard Keynes reputedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for us all.”

Neoliberalism is the reimposition of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, with all its injustices, inequality and oppression, on the people of the 21st century, prioritizing markets, profits and wealth over the common welfare of humanity and the natural world our lives depend on.

Berkeley and Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin called the U.S. political system, which facilitates this neoliberal economic order, “inverted totalitarianism.” Like classical totalitarianism, it concentrates ever more wealth and power in the hands of a small ruling class, but instead of abolishing parliaments, elections and the superficial trappings of representative government as classical totalitarianism did, it simply co-opts them as tools of plutocracy, which has proved to be a more marketable and sustainable strategy.

But now that neoliberalism has wreaked its chaos for a generation, popular movements are rising up across the world to demand systemic change and to build new systems of politics and economics that can actually solve the huge problems that neoliberalism has produced.

In response to the 2019 uprising in Chile, its rulers were forced to agree to an election for a constitutional assembly, to draft a constitution to replace the one written during the Pinochet dictatorship, one of the vanguards of neoliberalism. That election has now taken place, and the ruling party of President Pinera and other traditional parties won less than a third of the seats. So the constitution will instead be written by a super-majority of citizens committed to radical reform and social, economic and political justice.

In Iraq, which was also swept by a popular uprising in 2019, a new government seated in 2020 has launched an investigation to recover $150 billion in Iraqi oil revenues stolen and smuggled out of the country by the corrupt officials of previous governments.

U.S.-backed former exiles flew into Iraq on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003 “with empty pockets to fill,” as a Baghdad taxi driver told a Western reporter at the time. While U.S. forces and U.S.-trained Iraqi death squads destroyed their country, they hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad and controlled and looted Iraq’s oil revenues for the next 17 years. Now maybe Iraq can recover the stolen money its people so desperately need, and start using its oil wealth to rebuild that shattered country.

In Bolivia, also in 2019, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew its popular indigenous president, Evo Morales. But the people of Bolivia rose up in a general strike to demand a new election, Morales’ MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) Party was restored to power, and Luis Arce, Morales’ former economy minister, is now Bolivia’s president.

Around the world, we are witnessing what can happen when people rise up and act collectively for the common good. That is how we will solve the serious problems we face, from the COVID pandemic to the climate crisis to the terminal danger of nuclear war. Humanity’s survival into the 22nd century and all our hopes for a bright future depend on building new political and economic systems that will simply and genuinely “do what is best for all of us.”

Speaker Trump? He says it’s “interesting,” but MAGAworld is split on latest 2022 fantasy

Will former President Donald Trump run for Congress in the 2022 midterms, and then displace Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House, all with the goal of launching unlimited vengeful campaigns to impeach President Joe Biden? If you speak to people in TrumpWorld the answer is complicated, but Trump himself has agreed that the proposal is “interesting.”

The half-baked scheme for Trump to turn his obsession with the 2020 election into a bid to become speaker was first proposed by former Trump adviser turned pardoned right-wing pundit Steve Bannon in a speech at the end of February.

“[Steve] Bannon told the West Roxbury Ward 20 Republican Committee during a video speech over the weekend that his new strategy is for Trump to run for Congress in 2022, get elected, and then become House speaker — assuming that Republicans also retake majority control of the House of Representatives and then rally behind Trump over the current congressman in line for the position,” The Boston Herald reported at the time. (That would be a reference to current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, with whom Trump has known issues.) “Then, as House speaker, Trump would move to impeach President Joe Biden over the still-unfounded and repeatedly debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud tipping the 2020 presidential election, Bannon reportedly said.”

During that Boston address to a crowd of fervent Trump supporters, Bannon said that after winning a congressional seat in 2022 and becoming speaker early the following year, Trump would quickly move to “impeach Joe Biden for his illegitimate activities of stealing the presidency.” That proposition received roaring applause.

The idea didn’t get much traction at first, perhaps because Trump was still convinced he could undo the 2020 result somehow (and be “reinstated” in August). But the speaker fantasy now found its way back into the MAGA mainstream — causing some division among Trump fanatics.

One TrumpWorld character who strongly warns against this idea is Bannon foe and longtime GOP operative Roger Stone. In a video posted online Sunday afternoon, Stone fired back at the idea circulating in right-wing media that Trump should seek to grasp the speaker’s gavel with his minuscule hands.

Stone’s gravest concern is that if Trump is elected to Congress but Republicans fail to win a House majority in 2022, Trump’s fate as a lightweight back-bench member could fall into Democrats’ hands.

“So sloppy Steve Bannon thinks that former president Trump should run for the House of Representatives, become speaker, and lead the impeachment of Joe Biden. Here’s the problem with this plan: What happens if Trump himself is elected to Congress, but the feckless, gutless, weak-kneed Republicans fail to take a majority,” Stone said. “Then Trump would be a backbench member at the mercy of Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler.”

Stone continued: “This demonstrates yet again why Steve Bannon is just a deep state operative, prepared to do anything to aggrandize himself and grab money while selling Trump out on a harebrained idea that nobody with any political experience would ever buy into,” Stone added. The professed GOP dirty trickster didn’t return a request for comment on this story.

While Trump’s allies may be mulling over the idea, the former president appears to be at least a bit curious. Late last week, in an interview with far-right radio host Wayne Allyn Root, Trump said the idea of taking the reins in the House of Representatives was “very interesting.”

“Why not, instead of waiting for 2024 — and I’m hoping you’ll run in 2024 — but why not run in 2022 for the United States Congress?” Root asked. “A House seat in Florida. Win big. Lead us to a dramatic landslide victory. Take the House by 50 seats. Then you become the speaker of the House, lead the impeachment of Biden and start criminal investigations against Biden. You’ll wipe him out for his last two years.”

Trump replied, “That’s so interesting.”

Right-wing commentator Wayne Allyn Root urged Trump to run for a House seat, become Speaker of the House, and then launch criminal investigations into Biden and impeach him. Trump was intrigued: “It’s very interesting.” pic.twitter.com/5ECkSABDbi

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 4, 2021

On Monday morning, Trump appeared to backtrack on the idea, telling Fox Business host Stuart Varney that playing out the speaker scheme was “highly unlikely,” adding, “You know, there’s a whole theory behind that.”

Trump’s asked by Stuart Varney whether he’s considering a 2022 run for Senate or the House.

Trump: “I think that’s highly unlikely but they do say that a lot. You’ve heard that … you know, there’s a whole theory behind that. We won’t get into that right now.” pic.twitter.com/aJRGRSKzR7

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 7, 2021

If Trump actually ran for a congressional seat, one fellow Republican who might be less than thrilled is Kevin McCarthy, who would otherwise presumably become House speaker if the GOP wins the majority in 2022.

Numerous Trump advisers didn’t return Salon’s requests for comment on Monday regarding whether the former president has been eyeing a specific congressional seat. McCarthy’s office also didn’t return Salon’s request for comment.

There’s no legal or constitutional reason that Trump couldn’t run for Congress, or be elected speaker, but PolitiFact has deemed the scheme unlikely to work out to his benefit, due to “all-but-insurmountable practical obstacles.” If the idea is to impeach and both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and thereby become president himself, he would still need a two-thirds vote in the Senate, which does not seem remotely plausible.

Other right-wing pundits, including Wayne Dupree and Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, have given some oxygen to this unlikely idea.

Fox’s Jason Chaffetz: “Under the Constitution, you don’t need to be a member of Congress to be elected the Speaker of the House. So put Donald Trump in as Speaker of the House and he can go out and investigate everybody and he can impeach everybody…It would make for great TV” pic.twitter.com/Zh3k2A1KJJ

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) June 5, 2021

If Donald Trump ran for Congress, which he can do, other past presidents have done so, but if he goes for the House, that’s where appropriations begin. If he became Speaker of the House too…

Now that’s chess..

— Wayne Dupree Media, LLC (@WayneDupreeShow) June 5, 2021

It seems like a stretch to imagine the egocentric Trump assuming a less prominent post in the legislative branch, but there is historical precedent. After leaving office as president in 1829, John Quincy Adams was elected to Congress from Massachusetts and served in the House for nearly 17 years. He was not, however, “reinstated” as president, nor did he seek to be.

New Jersey’s GOP primary has turned into a referendum on Donald Trump’s Big Lie

There are no public questions on my official 2021 New Jersey primary election sample ballot that came in the mail the other day. Yet one of historic proportions looms large over Tuesday’s contest: the future of the Republican Party, not just here in the Garden State, but in the United States.

New Jersey, like the Commonwealth of Virginia, holds its gubernatorial election in the odd-numbered year following the presidential election, which has long provided the news media with an inflection point to view voter sentiment several months into the start of a new presidential term.

As such, both states’ contests have been used in past years as auguries for the following year’s midterm elections.

This year, however, the four-way race for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey is only partly about who Republicans want to challenge incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in November. (Especially since Murphy is likely to be re-elected no matter who they pick.) The hottest issue in this primary, believe it or not, is whether New Jersey Republicans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Incredibly, five months after former President Trump directed an angry mob on Jan. 6 to head up to Capitol Hill and “stop the steal” of the 2020 election, the question of the last election’s legitimacy dominated the May 25 101.5 FM New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission debate.

The broadcast face-off was between businessman and former state legislator Jack Ciattarelli, who has lined up the state’s county Republican organizations, and Hirsh Singh, a Trump acolyte and perennial candidate who previously ran for governor in 2017, and since then has mounted losing campaigns for House and U.S. Senate. (Brian Levine and Phil Rizzo are also on the ballot, but did not qualify for the debate.)

Singh has billed himself as “the only MAGA candidate” in the race, and vowed to “make New Jersey great again.” When asked by 101.5 FM’s Eric Scott who actually won the 2020 election, Singh responded, “We all know Trump won,” adding that “there are election results being disqualified all over the country.”

Scott did not ask Singh to offer even just one example of 2020 election results “being disqualified” anywhere, let alone “all over the country.”

“So, I hope we will get back to Phil Murphy and New Jersey, but Joe Biden won the presidency,” countered Ciattarelli. “The Trump campaign and the Trump team filed 62 lawsuits around the country with regard to voter fraud and voter irregularity. Two of those cases made it up to the Supreme Court, which has a majority of Trump appointees and conservative justices, and the decisions went against the Trump team 9-0. Joe Biden is our president.”

To buttress his so-called argument, Singh cited public opinion, such as the Reuters/Ipsos poll that found that 53 percent of Republican voters surveyed between May 17 and 19 believed Trump to be the “true president.” According to Reuters, about one in four adults surveyed, including 56 percent of Republicans, believe the 2020 election — which Biden won by 7 million votes — “was tainted by illegal voting.” That number had only dropped a few percentage points below where it was when pollsters asked the same question right after the election.

Singh insisted during the debate that his opponent was part of a cabal of Republicans, such as Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Mitt Romney, “who stabbed Mr. Trump in the back” and needed to be purged from the GOP. Early in the debate, Singh said that Trump “was the greatest president” of his lifetime and that Trump supporters were being unfairly maligned as “terrorists when we are just America-loving patriots.”

Ciattarelli, who opposed Trump in 2016, but in 2020 more or less aligned himself with him, made his own effort to appease the Trump base, claiming that he “supported Donald Trump’s policies” on China, border security, the economy and his conservative picks for the Supreme Court and the federal bench.

For Singh, like the folks that stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, the 2020 election is very much an emotional flashpoint, still sensitive to the touch.

The Capitol Hill insurrection, whose obvious objective was to obstruct or prevent the lawful certification of the 2020 presidential election, resulted in five deaths, including that of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, a New Jersey native and military veteran. Two responding police officers committed suicide after the attack, and more than 140 were injured.

Subsequently, federal prosecutors criminally charged hundreds of Trump supporters, including law enforcement officers and an active duty U.S. Marine, for their actions that day. A military contractor from Colts Neck in central New Jersey was among those arrested. The Asbury Park Press reported that a federal judge ordered him held in custody after concluding that “his extremist ideology and comments favorable to a civil war make him a danger to the community.”

Almost a half-year since the bloody riot, the first of its kind inside the U.S. Capitol, it’s not just New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidates who are caught up in a debate over the outcome of the 2020 election and the significance of what came in its aftermath.

Last month, the two remaining Republican members of New Jersey’s Congressional delegation split on the question of whether or not to authorize a bipartisan panel, modeled on the 9/11 commission, to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Rep. Chris Smith, who was first elected to his seat in 1980, was one of 35 Republicans to break with their party and vote in favor of a commission. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who was elected as a Democrat in 2018 but switched parties to support Trump in 2020, voted against the investigation.

Ultimately, the measure was defeated in the U.S. Senate after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced his opposition. Democrats were only able to peel off six of their Republican colleagues to vote to form the panel, four votes short of breaking the filibuster.

Before that Senate vote, Brian Sicknick’s mother and girlfriend had walked the halls of Congress and had face-to-face meetings with Republican senators. The pair told reporters they hoped to persuade the members, who themselves had come under attack that day, to vote for the probe.

“Usually I stay in the background,” said Gladys Sicknick, according to NJ Advance Media. “I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.”

“If they look at the footage that happened, it’s very obvious that that was not a peaceful day,” said Sandra Garza, Sicknick’s girlfriend. “Police officers were getting attacked, they were getting beaten, fire extinguishers were being thrown at them, they were being attacked by flagpoles.”

Before the Senate rejected the commission, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, a Democrat — who jointly led the 9/11 commission — urged the Senate to authorize an investigation of the Jan. 6 assault:

Today, democracy faces a new threat. The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was one of the darkest days in the history of our country. Americans deserve an objective and an accurate account of what happened. As we did in the wake of Sept. 11, it’s time to set aside partisan politics and come together as Americans in common pursuit of truth and justice.

After the measure’s defeat in the Senate, Kean told the Guardian its failure was “democracy’s loss.”

“It saddens me because there was no real, public reason for turning it down,” the former governor said. “I guess some people were scared of what they’d find out. That’s not a good reason for turning it down.”

The real problem is that so many people think that what happened on Jan. 6 was justified, and believe that Trump should still be president. After Tuesday’s primary we will have a better idea of how many of those folks live in New Jersey. The nation will be watching.

Millions of Americans view being anti-vaccination as a part of their social identity

In a new paper published for the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities, researchers found that 22 percent of Americans actively identify themselves as anti-vaccination, with 14 percent saying they are “sometimes” part of the movement and 8 percent saying this is “always” the case.

These self-described anti-vaxxers “embrace” the label of anti-vaxxer “as a form of social identity,” the authors write.

“We also find that people who score highly on our [anti-vaxx social identification] measure tend to be less trusting of scientific experts and more individualistic,” they noted.

The study is a stark reminder that vaccine-hostile attitudes are not a fringe view, but are possessed by a substantial portion of the US population, many of whom have come to consider the label a formative part of their identity. As daily COVID-19 vaccination rates have begun to decline, the cohort of self-identified anti-vaccination Americans are contributing to the delayed march towards herd immunity in the United States.

Indeed, widespread refusal to get vaccinated is a major reason why experts doubt the number of Americans who vaccinate themselves from the deadly disease will reach 70 percent, the rough number needed to reach herd immunity. Currently, slightly more than 47 percent of Americans are vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2.

Texas A&M University School of Public Health assistant professor Timothy Callaghan said in a university press release that “the fact that 22 percent of Americans at least sometimes identify as anti-vaxxers was much higher than expected and demonstrates the scope of the challenge in vaccinating the population against COVID-19 and other vaccine-preventable diseases.”

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Callaghan’s concern reflects a growing challenge for public health experts, who have now to contend with the myriad ways in which basic public health advice has become politicized. Indeed, a March 2021 study, which revealed the extent to which partisan politics have influenced attitudes towards vaccination, found that Republican men were the most likely to be COVID-19 anti-vaxxers (49 percent) — followed by Republican-identifying women (34 percent), Democratic women (14 percent) and Democratic men (6 percent). The same study revealed that 40 percent of white non-college educated men and 38 percent of white evangelicals — groups that both lean conservative — said they would refuse a coronavirus vaccine if it was offered to them.

Another recent study also found that anti-vaccine ideas are most popular among Republicans. Despite the prevalence of anti-vaxxer views, researchers at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that up to 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on major social media platforms are being spread by one of a mere dozen individuals and organizations, meaning that misinformation is concentrated in its dissemination.

Pre-pandemic, the modern incarnation of the general anti-vaccination movement was spurred by a 1998 paper from the medical journal The Lancet which linked autism to the measles vaccine. That paper was later thoroughly discredited by scientists, denounced by The Lancet and retracted by 10 of its 12 co-authors. Its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license in the United Kingdom for ethical violations. Despite this, many parents would read pseudoscientific literature inspired by Wakefield’s paper and conclude that it was dangerous to vaccinate their children.

In April, Dr. Kasisomayajula Viswanath, a professor of health communication at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, spoke with Salon’s Nicole Karlis about the complex nature of the anti-vaccine movement. Viswanath pointed out that there are many reasons why someone might distrust vaccines, not all of which are linked to partisan politics. Patients from underprivileged backgrounds, for instance, might have previously experienced racism in our health care system and feel an understandable wariness.

“That’s very different from a group of people who are outright refusers who say, ‘No, this is my freedom,'” Viswanath said. “Personal liberty is one of the biggest drivers.”

“View” co-host Joy Behar: “Crazy” Trump was “wearing pants that look like he pooped in them”

At the top of “The View,” Monday, the co-hosts addressed the ongoing battle involving former President Donald Trump and his pants during a speech to the North Carolina Republican Party on Saturday. While Trump’s zipper was clearly visible at points throughout the speech, it didn’t stop Twitter from breaking into hysterics over the former leader’s ill-fitting trousers.

Sunny Hostin noted that if Trump is a billionaire he should probably have a better tailor.

Meghan McCain explained that even ex-presidents must present themselves in a way that is befitting to their former office.

“Otherwise you can look like a crazy, ex-mad-king, and he’s been like a wedding singer at Mar-a-Lago and he just looks really disheveled. And he doesn’t look good,” McCain said. “I mean, I’m not one of these people who, like, a Jim Acosta where I’m always dunking on him, but this is not how — if he’s really looking to, like, lead the party, this is not the way that he should present himself for a lot of different reasons.”

“The really compelling part is that his pant legs are enormous. They’re each roughly the circumference of a healthy toddler’s head. They could fit comfortably around The Rock’s thighs — an image no one wanted to consider, but in the name of this investigation, we must,” said the report. “The angle of the photo makes it even more dramatic, with the grass hiding the president’s feet, shortening his overall frame and terminating his body at a wide point. Even so, those hems do not lie.”

In his 2004 book “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” he explained that he buys expensive suits but refuses to have them tailored to fit him. Vanity Fair assessed that it makes the suits look like he bought them at a discount store.

Whoopi Goldberg asked Joy Behar if the pants disturbed her as much as they did many on Twitter.

“Well, they make him look crazy,” she began. “They make him look crazy. On Fox News, they talk about how Joe Biden is suffering from dementia. Well, hello, Joe Biden is riding his bike and leading the country quite well. This guy is wearing pants that look like he pooped in them.”

“Oh, my God!” exclaimed McCain.

“Oh, my God!” Behar said mocking her.

“No, I mean, we had a conversation with standards before that and they said we weren’t allowed to say that,” McCain said, referring to network censors. Behar said that she didn’t know anything about anti-poop comments from the network.

Hilarity ensued.

Trump calls for US to stop using computers: The solution to cyberattacks is to “go back” to “paper”

Former President Donald Trump suggested on Monday that the solution to cyberattacks is to stop using computers.

During an interview on Fox Business, host Stuart Varney asked Trump about how the U.S. should respond to cyberattacks like the one that recently shut down the Colonial Pipeline.

“The way you stop it is you go back to a much more old-fashioned form of accounting and things,” Trump said. “You know, I have a son who is so good with computers. He’s a young person and he can make these things sing and when you put everything on internet and on all of these machines — you never see a piece of paper — I really think that you have to go back to a different form of accounting, a different form of compiling information.”

According to the former president, “young people . . . can’t walk without computers.”

“As a young person, my 15-year-old son is, you know, he’s just a genius with this stuff,” he added. “And you have people that are going to break into systems. I think you have to go back and you have to be much more reliant, there has to be much better security.”

Trump also admitted that he doesn’t understand how hackers get paid for ransomware cyberattacks.

“I don’t know how the hell they get paid, by the way, Stuart,” he commented. “You’re going to have to explain that to me.”

“They get paid through Bitcoin,” Varney laughed.

“That’s another beauty,” Trump complained. “The currency of this world should be the dollar. And I don’t think we should have all of the Bitcoins of the world out there. I think they should regulate them very, very high.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

How restaurants are tackling waste

Restaurant kitchens during both World Wars operated under the gospel of the clean plate. “Don’t Waste Any Food. Leave a Clean Dinner Plate,” read one 1917 propaganda poster for the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) anti-waste campaign. We may not need to conserve food in order to send meals to troops overseas, but the message is just as important today — the US throws away more than any other country in the world, with nearly 80 billion pounds of food wasted per year, an estimated 30 to 40% of the country’s entire food supply. Seventy five years after the second war, the ideals of the wartime thriftiness are largely forgotten; f ood waste has skyrocketed in a world where leftovers are too often left behind, food scraps are tossed, and composting isn’t part of the process.

The cost of food waste is inconceivable and irreversible: wasting food wastes money, along with the water and energy it took to produce that food. Agriculture accounts for 9% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and those climate impacting gases are even more senseless when the food is wasted. According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), US food waste is responsible for the equivalent of the emissions of 37 million, or one in seven, cars. At a time when one in four Americans struggle with food insecurity and the impacts of climate change are worsening, this is not food we can afford to waste.

The state of food waste in restaurants

Traditional food waste reduction strategies have focused at the household level, which accounts for nearly 40% of national food waste. But the food service industry has huge potential for savings, with more than one million restaurant locations, employing 10% of the US workforce and earning a projected 4% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. A new study focused on reducing food waste in the restaurant industry found that anywhere from four to 10% of food purchased by restaurants never gets to customers, while 30 to 40% of the food served to customers never gets consumed.

All that food waste is expensive: according to the USDA, the restaurant industry loses $162 billion annually thanks to wasted food. Some of the many reasons for this waste: overproduction, lack of awareness, unsuccessful employee training, improper food storage; and lack of access to composting facilities. “We put together a program that’s based on a set of design interventions,” says Christina Grace, co-founder of Foodprint Group (no connection to FoodPrint.org), which helps restaurant and hospitality groups look at all of their waste streams and implement zero waste procedures. “We’re going to change the colors of the bins so that they are color coded, as clear visual cues [for staff and customers]. We’re going to make sure the waste stream is set up and has clear signage. We’re going to make sure there is storage space for food donations every day. We’ll put in a daily tracking form for food waste.”

While implementing new systems can be tricky, especially in the chaotic world of restaurants, the cost-to-benefit ratio should be a convincing reason to make change: for every dollar spent on food waste reduction, restaurants will see an average of $8 of savings. It helps that customers care about the issue and are primed to spend more at an establishment that responsibly manages food waste: A study by Unilever showed that 72% of diners in the US care about how restaurants handle food waste, and 47% are willing to spend more at restaurants with an active food recovery program.

Reducing waste in the kitchen

Considering how serious the problem is, it’s not surprising that various legislative bodies, agencies and organizations are all working to combat food waste in the restaurant industry. Six states — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont — have passed laws restricting the amount of food waste that can go to landfills, helping to create millions of dollars in economic activity, hundreds of jobs, and drastic declines in food waste tonnage. And Vermont became the first state to pass a Universal Recycling Law in 2012, essentially banning disposal of food waste, which led to a 40% increase in food donations in the state.

On a national level, the USDA and Environmental Protection Agency set a goal in 2015 to reduce food waste by half by 2030. Through programs like their voluntary Food Recovery Challenge and resources from organizations like the NRDC, which provide food waste action tools, restaurants can perform their own waste audits, track food waste and promote food waste reduction to consumers. “We want to be sure that restaurants have the tools to do well,” New York City’s former sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, told the New York Times in late 2019, referencing the city’s donation programs, food waste fairs and food-waste challenges. “There are some seriously committed chefs out there ensuring that nothing gets wasted.”

As we’ve reported previously, the West Coast-based organization Zero Foodprint (ZFP) is also helping restaurants get to zero waste. They start with a life cycle assessment for restaurant partners, providing guidance on the areas of change needed, from packaging to storage to waste. To further reduce their footprint, the participating restaurants also add a small fee onto their bills, 1%, which helps fund grants for regenerative agriculture projects. This acts as a carbon offset for the small amount of unavoidable trash still produced by the businesses, and helps restaurateurs support a sustainable food system.

Grace’s Foodprint Group works to implement operating standards in restaurants and hospitality groups, helping to reduce waste at every step. Foodprint Group, which has worked with roughly 100 sites since launching in 2017, including clients like Google, Eataly and Dig, uses a daily waste tracking tool, along with signage and other tools, to help restaurant and hotel partners implement zero waste procedures, reducing their waste across all streams to reach the global definition of zero: 90% or better. Only 10%, or less, goes into the trash stream; the remaining — food, packaging, and everything else — is reused, recycled, composted or donated.

“When you look at the difference between composting organics versus donating food, or reducing food waste through better inventory management and changing your purchasing habits, [the difference] is so dramatic, and the dollar value is even more dramatic,” says Grace, citing research from ReFED that shows that while composting surplus food can reduce emissions and provide some economic return on money lost to food waste, the savings are exponentially greater when food waste is avoided in the first place. “In one year, you are looking at something like $2,000 a ton [in savings] for inventory management and donations, but then you’re talking in the single digits for a ton of compost.”

Despite the potential impact that food donations could have, the large majority of food that isn’t eaten or used is thrown away, rather than being composted or donated. The biggest concerns for most restaurants when it comes to food donations — listed by 41% of respondents to a ChefHero survey — are liability and transportation. But, the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, passed in 1996, protects donors in many cases, and all businesses are eligible for tax credits for food donations, which many restaurants do not take advantage of.

Organizations like Rescuing Leftover Cuisine and Rethink are helping make the liability issue more clear, and getting surplus food to those in need. Rescuing Leftover Cuisine brings excess food from restaurants, hotels and catering companies to nearby homeless shelters, while Rethink helps restaurants and food service partners repurpose surplus food into meals for food pantries and other organizations in need.

Choosing different packaging

Plastic lined disposable coffee cups, Styrofoam takeout containers, single-use plastic lids and straws — along with the food wasted in restaurants, plastic pollution is also a big problem. And it’s not just containers; there is a lot of plastic use in the kitchen as well, from food storage to prep. “We try to remind clients that they don’t need gloves for everything,” says Grace, lamenting that with COVID-19, the use of disposable items like gloves has increased exponentially. “We say, ‘If something’s going to get cooked, you don’t need to be wearing gloves, because it’s going to get heated to a high temperature.’ We try to help them think about how to use less gloves.” Services like Terraycle, which help collect and process hard-to-recycle items, have made things easier Grace says. She suggests operations with multiple units combine collections of niche items, such as plastic gloves, to meet a minimum for pick-up.

Despite best intentions, food packaging that may look compostable — those “green” seeming, plant-based fiber containers — are unlikely to be processed properly, which actually makes them worse for the waste stream. This type of packaging needs to be processed at a facility with an anaerobic digester, and collection bins for these types of composting sites are few and far between, unlikely to be found at the restaurants using the packaging. When thrown in the trash stream, the bowls end up in landfills, where they emit more methane, thanks to their plant materials, than plastic would. Adding to the concerns, a 2019 investigation by The Counterfound that these bowls, used by several fast-casual restaurants, including Sweetgreen and Chipotle, contained toxic PFAS, also called “forever chemicals” which never break down. If they did find their way into the compost stream, the bowls would leach these PFAS into the compost, and eventually the soil the compost is applied to.

For these reasons and more, both Grace and green chemist and Safer Made co-founder Marty Mulvihill say that the best packaging is no packaging, followed by reusable packaging. “I wish that brands and retailers had a better line of sight into the materials used in packaging,” Mulvihill told us. “With more information and transparency, I believe they would do a better job providing what consumers are already asking for: a safe and sustainable food system.”

Grace promotes the use of reusable containers at restaurants she consults with like Dig, but it’s not a solution for every customer or establishment. Foodprint Group also helps clients identify the right haulers and contractors for their needs, she says, and is constantly looking for new solutions. Sweetgreen and other fast casual restaurants are on the hunt for compostable, disposable options, and luckily new solutions for plant-based, PFAS-free containers are quickly emerging.

What can consumers do

As a customer, you might not be able to check if the kitchens making your takeout are composting or using every part of the produce, but there are some steps you can take to help reduce food waste when dining out. First up, be thoughtful. Choose restaurants that align themselves with these goals; those participating in projects like Zero Foodprint, a city-sponsored challenge or their own initiative will likely make it known that food waste is a concern for them. If they don’t, ask the server, manager or other employee you engage with: “How is your restaurant working to eliminate food waste?” Let them know, in a customer comment card or email, that reducing food waste is important to you.

On a practical level, order less food to reduce leftovers and food waste. Always take leftovers home, and make sure to eat and/or use them. Bring reusable containers when possible. Additionally, you can cut back on food waste at home with these tips.

You can also take part in some recent efforts to rescue food like YourLocal and Food for All projects, which alert customers when neighborhood shops have surplus food available for sale. These sites can be used to find food that might be otherwise tossed into the garbage, sold at a reduced cost, saving both the consumer and the restaurant money. “We realized many bakeries and restaurants already discounted their food in their last hour and saw in Food for All the opportunity to do this at scale, while helping to promote these responsible businesses and creating a tool to generate awareness around food waste,” the app’s co-founder, Sabine Valenga told Edible Brooklyn in 2018.

Moving forward

Although strides are being made, the US is still behind many other countries when it comes to managing food waste. In France, supermarkets are required to donate edible food that would otherwise be thrown away. Swedish cities convert food waste into biofuelsto help power public bus transportation. YourLocal and the similar project Too Good to Go, were both started in Denmark, in 2015 and 2017, respectively, and branched out into Europe and the US, helping to reduce food waste by connecting local shops and restaurants with consumers.

Stateside, there is some proposed legislation on the table that could help reduce the amount of food waste produced by restaurants in the US more quickly. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-Mass.) has been particularly active on this front, having submitted two bills, the Food Recovery Act and the Food Date Labeling Act, to Congress. While similar versions of the bills stalled in Congress in the past, with a new administration and legislators more understanding of the problems of food waste and climate change, there is potential that the bills could be signed into law in the future. In New York City, a new bill would require businesses that produce a certain amount of food waste to donate or recycle it.

Oregon Republicans call for expulsion of GOP lawmaker filmed plotting ahead of Capitol breach

Just days before an angry horde of Trump supporters stormed the Oregon capitol building last year, where they physically accosted law enforcement in an armed standoff, Republican state Rep. Mike Nearman – the lawmaker accused last month of surreptitiously letting the protesters inside – put on a closed-door presentation for his constituents feeding them detailed instructions on how to breach the building. Now his Republican colleagues are calling for his resignation.

The presentation, recorded on December 16 in an hour-plus video released last week by Oregon Public Broadcasting, begins innocuously, with Nearman coaching his constituents on how to access the state’s government website so they can “develop some kinds of tools as far as knowing what the legislature is doing and how to participate in what the legislature is doing.”

But the event takes a strange turn when the conversation shifts to the capitol building’s COVID-19 restrictions, which at the time prevented Oregon residents from entering. Nearman then launches straight into an apparently pre-planned list of guidelines on how to forcibly enter the edifice while disavowing each bit of advice.

“We are talking about setting up Operation Hall Pass, which I don’t know anything about; and if you accuse me of knowing something about it, I’ll deny it,” Nearman explained carefully. “But there would be some person’s cell phone which might be…but that is just random numbers that I spewed out; that’s not anybody’s actual cell phone.”

The legislator added: “And if you say, ‘I’m at the west entrance’ during the session and text to that number there, that somebody might exit that door while you’re standing there. But I don’t know anything about that, I don’t have anything to do with that, and if I did I wouldn’t say that I did. But anyways that number that I didn’t say was…So don’t text that number but a number like that.”

One man in the audience specifically asks Nearman what time of day would be best to show up. “So if people were to show up at the Capitol,” Nearman answered, “you know hypothetically speaking, would it be better to do it during the week or on the weekends because I notice a lot of rallies and things like that happen on the weekends when no one is working?

He concluded: “Wednesday at 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s when I am working at the Capitol theoretically if there’s a session going on.”

Operation Hall Pass would ultimately pan out with relative success nearly a week later on December 21, when a violent throng of protesters brandishing pro-Trump flags breached the building through a door that Nearman exited minutes before their entrance. The demonstrators, who made their way into the vestibule, confronted various law enforcement, chanting threatening the officers and chanting slogans like “enemies of the state.” Police alleged that the protesters sprayed chemical irritants at them and threw a smoke-emitting device toward them.

Last month, Nearman was charged with first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass for “unlawfully and knowingly perform(ing) an act which constituted an unauthorized exercise of his official duties, with intent to obtain a benefit or to harm another.”

Nearman said in a January statement that he doesn’t condone violence, though he has not directly talked about the charges made against him.

Nearman, who now faces the threat of expulsion from the body, has since received sharp condemnations from his colleagues in the legislature.

Oregon House Majority Leader Barbara Smith Warner, a Democrat, said that Nearman’s actions “are a stain on this state.”

“He put the lives of staff members, legislators and Oregon State Police officers in jeopardy,” Smith continued. “He is an embarrassment to this institution. He must be held to account.”

On Monday, Republicans joined Democrats in calling for Nearman’s resignation. “We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard in elected life and his actions do not meet that standard,” House Republican Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, said in a statement.

Just prior to Nearman’s presentation, the Oregon legislator joined a dozen other lawmakers encouraging the state attorney general to back a lawsuit that sought to reverse the results of the 2020 general election.

You can join Jeff Bezos on his 11-minute space trip for just $2.8 million!

Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet — or at least, he is until he leaves this world for a few minutes next month. Bezos will participate in the first passenger flight being made by his space company, Blue Origin, on July 20 to mark the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

“To see the Earth from space, it changes you,” Bezos said in his video announcement, shared to his social channels on Monday morning. “It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth. I want to go on this flight because it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.” These are certainly some bold observations about life and humanity from someone who has struggled to pay his workers a living wage or offer livable working conditions!

Bezos’ given “reason” for going to space is pretty much the same reason rich people do anything — because he wants to. “I want to go on this flight because it’s the thing I’ve wanted to do all my life,” Bezos said in the video. The Amazon CEO’s brother, Mark Bezos, will also be on board, according to the video.

The space trip next month will reportedly be quite short, totaling just 11 minutes. But those 11 minutes will come for a hefty price tag, as CNBC reports that the going rate for a ticket on the flight with Bezos is up to $2.8 million. Online bidding for the seat alongside Bezos will proceed until June 10. A live auction for it will be held on June 12.

Bezos, of course, isn’t the first or only male billionaire with a fascination with space travel. From Elon Musk to Richard Branson, the wealthiest man on Earth follows a long line of exorbitantly wealthy men lusting for space travel. And while, like Bezos, they often package their interest in space as thrill-seeking curiosity, experts have pointed out potential ulterior motives, not the least of which include the opportunity to expand their corporations to space, open more factories for orbital manufacturing, and ultimately, establish a new frontier to exploit workers.

And while billionaires who venture into space, like Bezos, often wax poetic about universal ideals of “human progress,” they fail to articulate who, exactly, these zany space adventures are progress for. How will a nearly $3 million trip to space improve the lives of his delivery workers who are being forced to pee in bottles?

As Marshall Auerback has previously written on Bezos’ ventures:

Rather than acting in the service of mankind, technology has often been used in a way that creates a momentum of its own that establishes limits or controls what becomes socially possible. It is wrapped in an aura of linear progress and scientific inevitability, conveniently ignoring that its benefits are often skewed most heavily to the power brokers who initiate and champion its use. This is a principle danger of subcontracting space to billionaire plutocrats, whose ambitions and interests might be inconsistent with society’s broader public purpose. This is to say nothing of the increasing de-skilling of labor that could follow, if they are not integrated into this process somehow.

Others have pointed out how space travel for billionaires is also a reflection of how the ultra-wealthy will respond to the existential crisis of climate catastrophe, as it becomes more and more inescapable. Climate change has always stood as a distinct racial and economic justice issue, as the most heavily polluted or nearly uninhabitable regions are often home to poor people of color. As the environmental conditions of more and more places begin to worsen and Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable, those with the means may find refuge in space — Bezos, Musk, and others are already laying the groundwork for this to be possible.

In any case, next month, Bezos will become the first elite billionaire to travel to space on his own rocket — a feat that, as The Cut’s Mia Mercado has put it, now essentially means “a celestial pissing contest is imminent.”

Trump praises Joe Manchin for defending filibuster — despite calling to eliminate it for years

Former President Donald Trump on Monday praised centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., for his support of the filibuster — even though Trump spent years calling for the Senate to eliminate it.

Trump said during a phone interview with Fox Business that Manchin was “doing the right thing” by opposing Democratic calls to eliminate or reform the filibuster, which would allow the party to pass legislation with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes currently needed to advance bills amid rampant partisan obstruction.

“Well, it’s a very important thing. He’s doing the right thing and it’s a very important thing,” Trump said on Monday. “Otherwise you’re going to be packing the court. You’re going to be doing all sorts of very, very bad things that were unthinkable and were never even brought up during the election. Nobody brought this stuff up.”

Donald Trump praises Joe Manchin for “doing the right thing” by refusing to end the filibuster.

The filibuster is being used to stop an investigation of Trump's role in the January 6th coup attempt. pic.twitter.com/dsDzOCyaAZ

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) June 7, 2021

Trump claimed that eliminating the filibuster is “so radical liberal, radical left, Bernie Sanders can’t believe it” even though Sanders and the majority of Senate Democrats support the move.

Sanders last year praised former President Barack Obama for calling to eliminate the filibuster in response to “modern-day poll taxes, gerrymandering, ID requirements, and other forms of voter suppression” that Trump has supported.

If advancing voting rights “requires us to eliminate the filibuster,” Sanders said, “then that is what we must do.”

In an op-ed published in the Charleston Gazette-Mail over the weekend, Manchin reiterated his support for keeping the filibuster and declared that he would oppose the For the People Act, a sweeping Democratic voting rights bill, because Republicans don’t like it.

“I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” Manchin wrote.

Manchin instead claimed that the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would require states to pre-clear electoral changes with the Justice Department, would be a bipartisan alternative. In fact, just one Senate Republican (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) supports it while the majority of the party is pushing ahead with severe voting restrictions across the country.

While praising Manchin’s position, Trump neglected to mention that he spent much of his presidency demanding that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., eliminate the filibuster to get around Democratic opposition to funding his border wall.

Trump in 2017 called the filibuster “very outdated” and warned that it makes Republicans “look like fools” because it allows a small number of opposing Democrats to “totally control” the Senate. In 2018, he used much of a budget meeting with Republican leaders to rail against the filibuster and warn that keeping it in place would be “the end of the party,” lawmakers told Politico.

“Republicans must get rid of the stupid Filibuster rule — it is killing you!” he tweeted in 2018. He again reiterated that position as he pushed for border wall funding in late 2018, demanding that McConnell “use the Nuclear Option and get it done!”

You'll never guess what Trump's position on the filibuster was the entire time he was president https://t.co/2ZGvfeFPVn pic.twitter.com/PfykiRNCQx

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) June 7, 2021

While Manchin noted in his op-ed that dozens of Democrats opposed scrapping the filibuster when Trump called for doing so, a majority of Senate Democrats now support it as they push to pass voting rights legislation in response to dozens of Republican-led state legislatures enacting laws that make it harder to vote. Republicans are largely devoid of policy proposals other than tax cuts, and the blowback effect if the GOP regains control of the Senate without a filibuster is overblown, some Democrats have argued.

But Manchin and fellow filibuster supporter Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., are hardly the only ones in the party that have expressed concerns about scrapping the filibuster or partisan Democratic proposals. As many as 10 Democratic senators have been “wary of changing the filibuster practice,” according to the Associated Press. Other than Sinema, most of these members have stayed quiet “because Joe Manchin is out there taking all the arrows for them,” a Democratic Senate aide told The Washington Post last week.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on Sunday grilled Manchin on whether he was being “naive” about the prospect of bipartisanship in the deeply divided Senate and empowering “Republicans to be obstructionists.”

“I’m not being naive. I think [McConnell’s] 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America,” Manchin told Wallace. “I’m going to continue to keep working with my bipartisan friends, and hopefully we can get more of them.”

But while Manchin may not be the only Senate Democrat to oppose changes to the filibuster, he is the only one to publicly oppose the For the People Act. Progressives hammered Manchin for his opposition to a bill that Democrats have championed for years.

“Joe Manchin has become the new Mitch McConnell,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., told CNN, arguing that “Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and to stop our work for the people. Manchin is not pushing us closer to bipartisanship, he is doing the work of the Republican Party by being an obstructionist, just like they’ve been since the beginning of Biden’s presidency.”

Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., told MSNBC that Manchin’s op-ed was “intellectually unserious” and did not acknowledge that one side is “actively working to dismantle our democracy.”

Jones added on Twitter, “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.'”

James Patterson says pushing a narrative of stolen election results is “the game that Trump plays”

Best-selling novelist James Patterson is not an expert on presidents, but he has unique insights into them. Not only has he written books featuring presidents as the main characters, but he’s also co-authored two books with our 42nd president, Bill Clinton.

Their latest collaboration is “The President’s Daughter” (Little, Brown and Company, June 7). A brisk and engaging read despite being longer than 600 pages, it tells the story of a former president whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing him to navigate a delicate political environment while using skills from his own military past. This is the kind of story that one could easily have imagined being a movie blockbuster back when Clinton was president, although Patterson has astutely pointed out that its premise may be less preposterous than many events in the Trump era.

Of our erstwhile 45th president, Patterson had quite a few things to say. While the hero of “The President’s Daughter” was a one-term president who — like every defeated president before Trump and the 2020 election — accepted the will of the people, Trump has not, to which Patterson observed, “The thing of it is, that’s the game. That’s what makes it even more tragic. It’s the game that President Trump plays. He puts out something that is outrageous, and a certain number of people are going to go along with it.”

Patterson also pointed to an earlier interaction, long before the 2016 election, that indicates Trump himself was also surprised that anyone would deem him presdential material.

“They had done polls, and he was at the top of the poll in terms of who people would like to see as a Republican candidate,” Patterson recalled. “Nobody knew anything about what he believed in, what he stood for, et cetera, et cetera. And he came up to me and he said, ‘Did you see the polls?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I did actually.’ He said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said something polite. And he looked at me, he said, ‘Crazy world, huh?’ So he knew how nuts that was, that people were interested in him being the president, even though they had no idea where he stood on any of the issues.”

Patterson is not someone normally associated with politics. His most famous books, which have sold more than 300 million copies, include crime and mystery thrillers like the “Alex Cross” series and the “Women’s Murder Club” series, as well as his many standalone books that span multiple genres. Yet as someone who interviewed one of Bill Clinton’s advisers about how the 42nd president responded to a situation somewhat similar to one in this novel, I could not help but be intrigued by “The President’s Daughter.” It is a political thriller in the truest sense of that term, as written by two authors uniquely qualified to tell this kind of story.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

As I was reading the book, I kept thinking about how two of the most popular action movies released during Bill Clinton’s presidency had the president himself as an action hero, “Independence Day” and “Air Force One.” Did you ever think, as you were writing this, that it’s wish fulfillment for former presidents?

[Laughing] I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to the president about that one. He is a big reader. He reads everything. He does read a lot of mysteries and likes them. I think that’s part of it.

I think the difference between what we try to do — and to some extent succeed, some extent not — is try to make the president a flesh and blood human. A lot of times in TV shows and movies, “Independence Day” being one of them, the president doesn’t feel like a human being, doesn’t feel very real. And they are, obviously. I know President Clinton very well now, and I know President [George W.] Bush a bit, and I even know President [Donald] Trump a little bit. Two of the three are quite human. I won’t say which two they are.

I can figure it out.

No, not necessarily. You never know. I’m not saying that. At any rate, so that’s a piece of it, to have the humanity. And the other thing about it is, versus somebody trying to do “Independence Day” or “Air Force One” if this happened — even though it is a little far fetched, a lot of it is far-fetched — but if it happened, this is how it would happen.

I will say I noticed earlier when you were listing low quality action stories with the president as a protagonist, you didn’t mention “Air Force One,” you only mentioned “Independence Day.” Was that on purpose?

I thought “Air Force One” was better done. I though it was a pretty decent movie.

I do have more questions about Bill Clinton, but before we get into that, I want to talk about James Patterson for a bit, because you are extremely prolific. I have seen your novels everywhere.

And I’m good too.

Of course, of course.

No, I’m kidding. I am. Prolific is always, yeah. Yes I am. Yes, yes I am.

When people think of James Patterson, they think of a brand, a type of story that they want to be told.

When you say “people,” who are you talking about? Like people who read my books or your friends? I don’t think most people think of me as a brand, but you know, maybe your friends do, but most people don’t.

Fair enough. I suppose I was presumptively tapping into the zeitgeist.

Are you sure you can do that?

Either way, I was not trying to insult you.

No, it’s good. I’m not insulted, I’m used to it.

Well, my full question was, who is James Patterson the man?

I actually just finished my autobiography, which is just stories. We’ve had about a dozen people read it, including the president and Hillary, and people — and I think this is even true of MasterClass, I just did an interview with The New Yorker about MasterClass and I actually did the first one — and I think people who spend time with me, their response is, “This guy’s extremely down to earth, not impressed with himself.” Not just like, “It’s okay, I write books.” We have a son, and he’s 23. I think we always brought him up to be like, “Don’t be ashamed of it. It’s fine, but it’s no big deal.”

I feel very lucky. When I published the first book, I was turned down by 31 publishers, then won an Edgar for Best First Mystery of the year. I don’t know what that means, except that one of the things that means is that I was very lucky that the 32nd publisher decided to publish it. And I’m not insulted by the prolific thing. It’s all fine and good.

Good. It was sincerely not intended as an insult.

It’s okay. Almost everybody who interviews me, that’s the first word that comes out of their mouth, or “brand” or whatever. I certainly don’t think of myself as a brand.

It’s inspiring. Hundreds of millions of people have read your words. Things that you have put to paper have directly impacted hundreds of millions of lives. That is something that the vast majority of people cannot say. I sincerely respect and admire that.

Yeah. Well, I’m not all that respectful of myself and whatever, but at any rate, I do a lot of stuff and it’s kind of all over the lot. I like new challenges. I’ve just done a couple of podcasts with Audible. The thing is that, what I want to do — and then when I say this in Hollywood, they kind of laugh at me — when the project is done. I want to say that I’m really happy that I did the project. It’s not about money. That’s what drives me. So whether it’s a podcast — and we have one that is coming out in September — that I think is really, really, really good. Dwayne, a friend of mine, we did it together.

You said that you want to be able to work on projects that you find fulfilling, that you enjoy. What is it that you find fulfilling specifically about working with Bill Clinton?

I think there are a lot of things. One, he’s very bright. I think that what separates “The President’s Daughter” and “The President Is Missing” from a lot of thriller fiction is something I mentioned before: he brings authenticity to whatever the scene is. If that particular thing happened, here’s what the Secret Service would do. If a president was out of office, here’s where he could reach out for help, whether the help would happen or not.

And we’re friends at this point. We send birthday presents, presents for Christmas. He gave me Monopoly for Socialists for Christmas. Last year for my birthday he gave me a humidor. He knows I don’t smoke. So I called them up and said, “Well, you’re the expert in cigars, should I put bubble gum or chocolate cigars in here?” And he said, “Oh, definitely bubble gum. Because at our age, we’ve got to exercise our gums.”

I grew up in New Britain, New York, small town, blah, blah, blah. I still look at the world through the lens of this guy from Newburgh and, wow, I’m doing a book with Bill Clinton! I have another celebrity, which in a lot of ways is bigger than Clinton. I cannot reveal at this time, but it’s a cool one. I’ve worked with the Einstein Foundation, worked with Muhammad Ali’s foundation, and it’s cool stuff. It’s like, wow. When I tell this kind of thing, I’m not like bragging. It’s just like, I’m kinda like that.

You mention Clinton brings authenticity to this as a president. What did he bring to this as a writer?

He’s a good writer and he does a fair amount of it. I love it when certain people . . . We know exactly what Patterson and what Clinton wrote, and this is one of the English papers, and they were wrong on all accounts about who did what. He really does know a lot. It’s interesting. I had dinner with Brian Mulroney who would have been the, uh . . .

The Canadian Prime Minister.

Yeah, for 12 years. And he said Clinton is the most impressive world leader he ever met. And he used the one example that when [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin first got into office, they wanted to meet, but Clinton said, “I can’t come to Russia.” And Yeltsin said, “I can’t come to the United States.” And so Clinton contacted Mulroney and he said, “Would you host this up in Canada?” And he said, “Absolutely.” And he said that they let him sit in on the first part of the session, and that listening to Clinton was like listening to a professor of history at Harvard. He said he knew so much about Russia and it blew Yeltsin’s mind too. He’s a very, very bright guy and very interesting. We’ve become pretty good friends. I mean, we talk at least once a week.

This brings me back to James Patterson, the man. Obviously James Patterson the man, is very good friends with Bill Clinton, the man. But what are James Patterson the man’s thoughts on Bill Clinton, the president from 1993 to 2001?

I think he was a very good president. One of the things, when he left office, he had a 65% approval rating, and people kind of forget that now. That’s kind of a big deal. That meant that, even given the Monica Lewinsky situation, 65% of the people said that he was a good president. Like anybody, he’s not perfect and he’ll admit that. And then after that, he and Bush did a really nice job in Africa in terms of helping with the AIDS epidemic there. I think he’s done nice things for education with his foundation. I think he tries to do the right thing. I think Hillary does too.

Do people make mistakes? Sure, absolutely. I make them, you make them, you know, whatever. People don’t seem to be very tolerant of other people’s mistakes. And unfortunately the culture now is, “My view of the world is right, and your view is stupid.” I think Bill and I both look at the world as a little more grey. It’s not black and white like that.

That’s interesting. The other person — the Clinton that hasn’t been mentioned, but I’m really curious for her thoughts — is Chelsea, because obviously the title of the book is “The President’s Daughter” and Bill Clinton is one of the authors. Did you discuss this with her at all?

I have not discussed it with her other than at one point. Her husband said, ‘You guys got to write another book,” and then I left it up to the president to in terms of whether there were any issues there, and I don’t believe there are any, but that’s something for Bill to talk about.

Now it is possible that I missed something, but I have to bring this up because like Clinton, I am a history buff. On pages 58 and 63, you write that the protagonist, Keating, was the first president to be defeated by his own vice president. Unless I missed something or misconstrued that, this would be incorrect, because Thomas Jefferson was John Adams’ vice president when he defeated him in the 1800 election.

Okay. Well, we’ll have to try to fix that quickly. I don’t think we can, actually. You’ve got us. We’ll do it in the paperback.

I’m not trying to pull a gotcha.

It happens. Hopefully those things get picked up by a copy editor, but it didn’t this time.

The fact that Bill Clinton is so knowledgeable about history, I kept thinking, “I couldn’t be wrong about this, but it’s Bill Clinton. He must know what he’s talking about.” So if I am wrong, please let me know.

No. He missed it. He missed it, and you got it.

I guess my next question involves your activism in encouraging children’s literacy. It’s intriguing to me because, while this is not a children’s book, it is the type of book that I would have devoured when I was a young adult. I was obsessed with politics. I loved political thrillers. There is no way that a book written by a former president and James Patterson would not have been written read by my 13-year-old counterpart. Did you have that in mind when you were writing this? And if so, how did it affect the way you constructed the story?

Not for kids. I write a lot of kids’ books.

I know that. That’s why I asked.

It started actually when our son — he’s now 23, but when he was younger and he’s a bright kid — but he wasn’t a big reader. I just thought that I could write stories that kids would gobble up and there’d be something for them to chew. One of my favorites is a book called “Pottymouth and Stoopid,” and it’s about word bullying, which to me is more destructive in this age than physical bullying. And it’s two kids who get those nicknames when they’re like three and four years old, and when they’re 12 they still have those nicknames, and that’s how cruel word bullying is. It’s a pretty funny book.

I do Ali Cross, who is Alex’s son, so I’ve done two books for kids with Ali Cross. The Einstein estate came to me at one point. They said, “We’d like kids around the world to be aware of Albert Einstein and his science,” and I said that’s a tough task. And he said, but of course, you have to make it entertaining. And I’m like, oh, okay, well, I just have to make Einstein’s science entertaining for kids.

But you’re saying this one is not meant for children, even young adults. Like the example I started with me being 13.

Yeah, you never know. Listen, I can remember — and I couldn’t believe this — it stuck out. A woman brought her young daughter up, like 10 or 11 years old, and she she’d read all the Alex Cross books. I’m like, I don’t know that I’d be encouraging my 10-year-old to be reading the Alex Cross books, but you know, people do it. I think I tended at 12 or 13 too . . . and I wasn’t a big reader at that point, but I would read adult books rather than the books for kids. The kids’ books didn’t do much for me.

A few years ago, you told CBS that you worked out of a home office in Palm Beach, Florida, and showed that you were working on dozens of projects that were in various stages at that time. Has the pandemic changed any of your work routines?

No. The only thing is I did sit down and write the autobiography. I was stuck here and, I don’t know, for whatever reason once I got into it, I was enjoying it, to sort of tell stories about who I am and how I got there and whatever. I think they’re all pretty cool stories. I think actually being stuck in the house, especially for three or four months there, it refocused me on the writing. I got a little sharper if I might have gotten a little sloppy.

I also agreed to do the podcasts, which are a different and new challenge. I like challenges. I mean, it was a challenge to try to write kids books. I did one with Kwame Alexander on Cassius Clay when he was a kid in Louisville. It goes back and forth between poetry and prose. And so that was kind of an interesting challenge and I liked the podcasts because they are challenging too, because they’re like the old-time radio dramas, only they’re like five hours long. So that was kind of cool.

My closing question then: In a recent interview you mentioned the January 6th insurrection attempt and cited it as an example of how reality can be stranger than fiction. Obviously this book was written well before that happened, but Trump for years had been saying that if he wasn’t reelected, the only possible explanation would be that the election had been rigged.

In your book, the protagonist — who is an archetypal American war hero — graciously accepts his defeat. I was wondering as I read this characterization of patriotism and masculinity being manifested in accepting loss with dignity if this was, on some level, a commentary on what even at that time was being discussed.

I don’t think it’s a comment on Trump as much, and we try to stay away from that honestly, Bill and I both. But we both think that it’s useful, and it would be useful, to have a president where people in general are going, “Okay, we believe in this person up to a point,” and we hope that somebody like that will surface. I will say with Joe Biden, where the left and the right up to a point . . . It’s not going to happen in Congress, but it can happen if people put pressure and they go like, “No, we like with this man or woman is doing, and it’s the right direction for us.” And so, you know, we’re hopeful about that.

One of the things that made President Clinton successful is he knows how to compromise. In our lives, we all understand the importance of compromise. We compromise with our spouses, we compromise with our kids, we compromise with whatever. Life is about that. Then all of a sudden we have a government where people don’t want to compromise. And I think for Clinton always it was like, “Look, I understand where you’re coming from. Here’s where I’m coming from. Okay. How do we move this forward?” And he would do that as a president. Like with Bosnia, he just approached the Republicans and said, “Look, we have to do something. We must do something.” And he told me, he said, he thought that that [former President Barack] Obama and [former House Speaker John] Boehner would have worked out some stuff together. He said they’re both reasonable enough, but he said the parties wouldn’t let them.

What could be more uncompromising than refusing to accept that you’ve lost an election?

The thing of it is, that’s a game. That’s what makes it even more tragic.

How is it a game?

It’s the game that President Trump plays. He puts out something that is outrageous, and a certain number of people are gonna go along with it. I mean, look, every presidential election there’s been some fraud. Probably one of the worst was at the [John F.] Kennedy election in terms of what happened in Illinois, and I love Kennedy, but you know. I think that Trump knows that, but that bonds him to these people. What I don’t understand is those people, they’re going to vote for him or they’re going to vote for Republicans, I don’t know why he feels it’s so important to curry favor with that group. I don’t understand that part.

I can give you an example of Trump [that] I think says a lot about where he comes from. So this is years ago. I know him a bit, and I ran into him and this was — I don’t remember exactly what the timeframe was — but it was before he was elected, or even before that election, I think it was a previous election, and they had done polls, and he was at the top of the poll in terms of who people would like to see as a Republican candidate. Nobody knew anything about what he believed in what he stood for, et cetera, et cetera. And he came up to me and he said, “Did you see the polls?” And I said, “Yeah, I did actually.” He said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said something polite. And he looked at me, he said, “Crazy world, huh?” So he knew how nuts that was, that people were interested in him being the president, even though they had no idea where he stood on any of the issues.

For the “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City” reboots to work, they must learn from past mistakes

If the resurgence of popular ’90s and 2000s fashion trends hasn’t made it abundantly clear that this is the era of nostalgia, look no further than the much-hyped reboots of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” which ran from 1998 to 2004, and the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” from 2007 to 2013.

The “Gossip Girl” reboot is set to air next month, while the “Sex and the City” sequel series, called “And Just Like That,” has yet to receive a release date. Both shows will pick up years after where their original iterations left off, although unlike “And Just Like That,” the new “Gossip Girl” will feature an entirely new cast of actors and characters, attending the same elite private schools in the Upper East Side as their predecessors.

As two of the most iconic TV franchises set in New York City, both reboots could be some of the most hotly anticipated new shows this year. But as they relaunch in a transformed political and cultural milieu from when they first aired, both shows have their work cut out for them to not make the same mistakes on race, class, and other identity-related matters.

For those who haven’t watched the original “Gossip Girl,” which made stars out of main cast members Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford, and others, I’ll let the summary of the series, from when the show was on Netflix, speak for itself: “Rich, unreasonably attractive private school students do horrible, scandalous things to each other. Repeatedly.” The “Gossip Girl” reboot takes place in the present day, 13 years after the show first aired, with a notably more diverse cast of fresh faces taking on the elusive Gossip Girl in the age of social media.

As for the original “Sex and the City,” the classic HBO series followed the unfiltered dating lives of four, 30something, female best friends living in New York City, each with personalities so distinct that more than 20 years since the show first aired, women around the world still identify as “Carries,” “Samanthas,” “Charlottes” or “Mirandas.” “And Just Like That” follows the women’s shared friendship now that they’re in their fifties — sans Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who has not-so-secretly been in conflict with Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie, for years.

What worked 15 to 20 years ago, however, isn’t necessarily going to work now — this means it will be crucial for both reboots to reconsider how they’ve previously portrayed matters of class, race, and gender and sexuality, and adapt to where we are today. Here are Salon’s hopes for how these shows can make the reboots fit our modern sensibilities.

Addressing their class privilege problems

If either reboot is going to make it in a time of increasingly — and justified — anti-capitalist sentiment, stemming from rising, massive economic inequities, they’ll have to sharply reexamine their portrayals of class from their original versions. The original “Gossip Girl” curiously functioned as both scathing critique and perpetuation of class privilege, somehow poking fun at and condemning the teens’ exorbitant wealth, while also calling on audiences to sympathize with them. The entire premise of “Gossip Girl” is to give ordinary people a glimpse into the lives of problematic, ultra-wealthy young people, and it certainly delivers. But there are a couple problems the reboot should avoid — namely, presenting rich people who do horrible things and get away with it as something we should cheer for. Think: Serena van der Woodsen’s (Lively) mother’s avoidance of prison-time for lying that a boarding school had raped Serena in season 4, or Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) avoiding accountability for his creepy, predatory treatment of women and girls — whenever the main characters used wealth, privilege and connections to dodge accountability, this was treated as something fans should celebrate.

Another glaring blindspot of the original “Gossip Girl” is the portrayal of the Humphrey family as poor and relatable, despite how Dan (Badgley) and Jenny (Taylor Momsen) are the children of a former rockstar who can afford a giant Brooklyn loft. Hopefully, the new “Gossip Girl” will A) not glorify how economic privilege allows the ultra-wealthy to perpetually evade consequences, and B) accurately portray its token relatable, middle-class characters as actually middle class.

While “Sex and the City” wasn’t overtly about class privilege, the show’s premise certainly wouldn’t be possible without it. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) comes from tremendous generational wealth, while Carrie (Parker) simply has an unrealistic amount of money for a weekly newspaper sex columnist with some pretty asinine takes. Carrie is somehow able to afford hundreds of designer shoes from writing one article per week. Hopefully, “And Just Like That” will be more honest about the economic realities of working in media, and the infamous NYC cost of living.

We need stories that meaningfully tackle racial identity

When it comes to race and representation, both shows are glaringly nearly entirely white, a setup that’s no longer tolerated in 2021. While both reboots have announced the casting of several people of color, it will be crucial for these characters’ racial identities to be explored in a meaningful way beyond being token best friends. For example, in “Gossip Girl,” Chuck and Nate (Crawford) both have relationships with Raina (Tika Sumpter), a Black woman, but the implications of her identity in a predominantly white social scene are never even touched upon. Similarly, Vanessa (Jessica Szohr), a main character in the early seasons, is biracial, and her racial identity in a world of white wealth is never explored, either.

In “Sex and the City,” it’s simple: the show is about rich white women with rich white women problems. The few times the show wades into race are all cringe-inducing — especially in Season 3, when Samantha says, “I don’t see color. I see conquests,” of a Black man she’s interested in.

As the adaptation of Netflix’s “Bridgerton” showed, putting more characters of color on the screen doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and how the show deals with race is also crucial to better representation.

We need queer representation — and less problematic relationships, in general

On gender and sexuality, both original series are rife with their own problems they should take care to avoid in reboots. “Sex and the City,” in particular, was repeatedly biphobic, with Carrie dumping a male partner for being bisexual, and dismissing bisexuality as a new, young people’s trend. Later, the women are shocked and disapproving of Samantha’s relationship with a woman, and even initially dismiss it as a ploy for attention. In one Season 3 episode, Samantha misgenders and treats a group of neighborhood Black trans women particularly atrociously, supposedly for comedic effect. Meanwhile, the show’s sole, queer supporting characters are two rich, white men who are basically caricatures of ’90s and 2000s stereotypes about gay men.

To its credit, “Gossip Girl” portrays an openly gay leading support character (Connor Paolo) who’s fully embraced and supported by those around him, and has several normal, healthy romantic relationships. But to fully live up to where we are today, the “Gossip Girl” reboot should feature queer identity and relationships beyond the tangential — which its writers are already promising they’ll deliver. And, speaking of romance and relationships, hopefully the reboot will no longer romanticize adult men and even teachers dating or hooking up with high school students, this time around.

“Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City” are two of the most well-known and beloved shows of the late ’90s and 2000s, synonymous with fashion, glamour and biting, witty dialogue. But both shows are also products of their time — a time of little to no quality representation of people of color and LGBTQ folks. But today, amid increasingly deadly wealth inequality, an uprising for racial justice, and rapid proliferation of anti-trans state legislation, these franchises can’t afford to make the same mistakes in their highly anticipated reboots.

“Gossip Girl” will begin streaming on HBO Max on July 8. HBO has yet to announce a release date for “And Just Like That.”

Ravaged by the pandemic, bars and restaurants face a reckoning — and a chance to revamp the industry

The bar, restaurant and broader hospitality industry has taken a beating from the pandemic, but some business owners, advocates and workers say the time has come to tackle change in an industry they believe is in dire need of an overhaul.

After COVID-19 forced much of the industry to press pause, now it’s at a crossroads. With warmer months ahead, establishments nationwide are girding for an anticipated surge in business, which means rehiring some of the millions of bar and restaurant workers who were laid off when the pandemic hit last year.

But despite a huge labor pool, owners across the U.S. say they’re having trouble staffing up. It appears the pandemic spurred some people to think twice before returning to the industry. Perhaps that’s not surprising given it’s known for grueling conditions — strenuous work, long hours, unequal pay and a sometimes hostile environment — especially for women, people of color and undocumented immigrants.

“Restaurants have always been there for everybody all the time,” says Sara Fetbroth, a hospitality consultant who previously worked as a restaurant general manager in the greater Boston area for nearly two decades. “We’re that place where you come when things are bad and when things are good, where you celebrate and you grieve. But with the pandemic, the industry and all its employees felt like nobody was there for them, so I think a lot of people [viewed] it as an opportunity to leave.”

She continued: “On a whole other side, if people could stay home, collect unemployment, make just as much or a comfortable amount without having to come into work and deal with the public every day, they’re choosing to do that, which is also keeping a lot of people from reentering the workforce.”

Now, bars, restaurants and other hospitality businesses are facing a reckoning as workers and their employers grapple with tough questions about how much they’re willing to go back to the way things were before the pandemic — and to what extent that’s even possible. As advocates push for fairer wages and work schedules, some owners are taking steps to improve working conditions, like getting rid of tipping to level pay, creating more advancement opportunities and simplifying menus to lessen work for staff.

While it remains to be seen whether large national hospitality companies will make moves to overhaul the industry, several bar and restaurant owners tell Salon that even as they struggle to get back on their feet, they’re looking to transform the industry for the better. Indeed, they believe their relevance and very survival depend on it.

Meanwhile, advocates and workers insist that change is not only possible, but inevitable and even imminent — and that while the industry is navigating a crisis, it’s also a critical opportunity for bars and restaurants to reset, and in the process create a more equitable, diverse workplace for bartenders, servers and other employees.

***

Molly Pachay, who worked as a lead bartender at a celebrated Chicago restaurant until March 2020, believes this is a watershed moment.

“In the past year, the industry has crumbled on multiple fronts,” Pachay says. “It’s reached a tipping point, and I’m hopeful there are restaurant owners and managers who are seeking change because they realize it’s no longer sustainable. I have plenty of friends who chose to leave altogether and develop a new skill—or who don’t want to go back, even if the money is good. There are so many harmful aspects, from lack of secure scheduling to having to deal with microaggressions, racism or sexual misconduct from guests and coworkers alike. No one wants to do it anymore.”

A crucial step toward improving the industry for some workers would be ensuring they earn a fairer wage by eliminating the very low minimum wage for tipped workers in certain states, says Jeanie Chunn, co-director of RAISE (Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards of Employment) High Road Restaurants.

“The sub-minimum wage … means [workers] have to rely solely on the generosity of restaurant patrons,” Chunn says, which often forces them to tolerate egregious behavior, including rampant sexual harassment, in hopes of receiving a decent tip.

Eight states have eliminated the tipped minimum wage, so tipped workers there are paid the regular minimum wage. This has led to less poverty among those states’ tipped workers, who have “done as well or better than their counterparts in other states over the years since abolishing the subminimum wage,” according to a Center for American Progress analysis.

But as far as policy changes are concerned, “we are fighting against a tidal wave,” Chunn says. The National Restaurant Association earlier this year urged Congress against raising the federal minimum wage to $15, warning that restaurants would suffer from a fast-tracked wage hike, leading to more employee layoffs, higher menu prices and closures.

“Passage of [the Raise the Wage Act] would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” NRA executive vice president for public affairs Sean Kennedy wrote in a letter to Congress in February. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”

In and of itself, the question of raising wages to make the industry more equitable is a “complex topic,” says Julia Heyer, a hospitality consultant who founded Heyer Performance in 2009.

“It’s not that companies and restaurateurs don’t want to provide different pay structures,” she says. “The question is, can they afford it?”

At a time when restaurateurs are behind on payments and struggling to recover from pandemic-related losses, paying a higher wage may not seem feasible. Many businesses are “already under pressure because they’re not operating at previous capacity, and it’s hard when you’re barely making due to then look at equitable pay,” Heyer adds. “Margins in the restaurant business are slim to begin with. So many of them run on a bare-bones skeleton staff structure to survive. If labor costs go up, and other costs don’t go down, pricing has to increase. Is the consumer willing to pay for more equity?”

While fighting for better wages and other reforms could prove a massive challenge, Touré Folkes, founder and director of advocacy organization Turning Tables, believes the industry is under scrutiny and that change is long overdue.

“In terms of equitable pay and the way people are hired, it’s set in a very old system,” Folkes says. “People that are hired into positions with higher wages and more equitable pay tend to be largely white, so I think there’s an opportunity for the industry to welcome a whole new breed of hospitality worker that’s excited about the industry, but also aware of their rights and what they bring to the table.”

***

Monique Carter, managing owner of MJB Restaurant Group in Chicago, is already confronting the old system by creating her own. “For me, it’s about scaling down your operation—which, honestly, I feel like the restaurant business completely needed,” Carter says.

She continues:”Something that’s supposed to be about gathering and food had become about awards and accolades, and we had lost a lot of ourselves [and] why we got into the business. The pandemic slowed us down tremendously.”

Sticking to a smaller operation allows Carter greater control of who she hires and how she runs her restaurant, Adelaide Hall. “My staff [are] always of color,” Carter says. “Because I’m dealing with such a small environment, it’s easier for me to hire equally, to be fair and remain fair.”

Carter is looking to put more people of color on a pathway to ownership and other top-level roles.

“The industry has been very kind to me,” Carter says. “I’ve had incredible jobs, worked for incredible chefs, restaurateurs and hoteliers, so I want to pass that on. The purpose of my group is to bring Black and brown people into the business. I feel like too often we [view working in] the business as subservient instead of calling it service, so we don’t get into it. You can turn hospitality into a productive and lucrative career.”

To help achieve that, Carter is creating a hiring database she describes as specifically geared toward people of color who are interested in culinary careers. She’s also putting in leg work, traveling to local high schools, trade schools and colleges with culinary art programs.

“I get in touch with students who might just want to hang out for a bit while I’m setting up the restaurant, [or] want to hang out with the chef,” Carter says. “Kind of pulling it from the core — stopping by at these programs, getting them before they leave culinary school and maybe redirecting someone who might’ve gotten pushed into cooking [to consider] management” or more prominent “front-of-house” jobs.

Like Chunn and Folkes, Ronald Hsu, executive chef and founder of Lazy Betty in Atlanta, believes the time for tectonic change has come. It “may not happen overnight, or even over a decade, but it has to start somewhere,” he says.

“The pandemic has shed a light on how precarious the restaurant business is,” Hsu says. “Restaurants have suffered, not just financially but people within the industry—employees, owners, front of house, back of house. I’m all for raising the minimum wage, and I think that as chefs, restaurateurs, servers, we have a responsibility—because we have the world’s attention right now, and because of all the social issues that have arisen within the last year—to push the needle forward.”

Hsu seeks to set an example in the way he runs his restaurant — in part by offering health insurance, dental and vision benefits to all full-time employees which is, according to Hsu, “very hard to find” in most restaurant jobs. Lazy Betty also implements a service charge.

“Basically, it’s a mandatory charge on top of the cost of beverages and food to help pay our staff, and to alleviate the disparity between” front-of-house workers, like servers and bartenders, and “back-of-house” staff such as cooks and dishwashers, he explains.

Additionally, paying workers minimum wage rather than the lower tipped minimum wage “allows the restaurant more flexibility to make sure pay is more equitable,” Hsu adds.

“We pay all the servers a minimum wage, [plus] additional gratuity and part of the service charge, and we have very little turnover — which ends up helping your bottom line because you put less money into training,” he says.

As for concern customers might balk at a mandatory service charge and increased prices, “if you educate guests about why we raise the minimum wage and add a service charge, people are empathetic to it,” Hsu says.

Hsu notes that in a lot of restaurants, back-of-house employees can’t earn tips as front-of-house workers do — which he sees as problematic.

“It’s not fair that half of the restaurant gets paid more than the other half when both are, in my opinion, equally valuable to a restaurant’s product,” he says. Shawn Walchef, who opened Cali BBQ in Spring Valley, California in 2008, agrees.

“I think culturally we all have to start examining how tipping plays into this infrastructure that’s been built for front-of-the-house workers versus [back-of-the-house] workers,” Walchef says. “It’s not right that somebody that does the dishes — one of the most difficult jobs in the restaurant — doesn’t get to share tips in the old model.”

Instead, Walchef believes all employees who aren’t managers should be able to earn tips. “I know that’s a sticking point for a lot of servers and bartenders, who, depending on the restaurant, traditionally tend to keep all of their tips, but if you’re talking about a true sales position, which a server or a bartender is, they’re making a commission on that sale. The server is one part of the chain of service. The restaurant had to be cleaned. We have a host, parking support staff, a barbecue prep cook, line cooks. The amount of work that goes into creating that experience is not just the server and the bartender, but they’re making the highest wages.”

But beyond re-examining tipping, Walchef believes restaurants need to completely revamp their business and service approach by embracing what he describes as a “digital-first” model, bolstering their internet and social media presence to make it easier for people to order online.

“We’re three times more profitable as a digital-first restaurant than we ever have been in 13 years as a full-service restaurant and sports bar,” Walchef says. “We’re more profitable because we have a more efficient menu, so our food cost has gone down, our labor costs have gone down, but the labor that we do employ is more specialized. By doing that, we’re going to be able to create opportunities to pay people better wages, health benefits and time off—things that have always lacked in the restaurant space because the margins were just too small.”

***

However, owners and workers can’t overhaul the industry without an enlightened public as their ally.

“As a person who goes out to eat and drink, that’s something you missed—it’s probably one of the first things you did when quarantine ended and you got your vaccine,” Touré Folkes of Turning Tables says. “Now’s the time for people to think about who brings them those experiences, and whether they’re protected.”

Folkes continues: “They work really long hours and should be making $15 an hour with benefits and vacation and healthcare. If the industry wants them to come back, you have to bring awareness to the consumer of what the cost of their meal is, what the cost of their drink is, and they have to [be willing to] pay for it. If that’s not something they want, they should really think about it when they make a reservation or go out to have a drink.”

Yet perhaps no one understands the need for change quite like Venorica Tucker, who’s worked in the hospitality industry most of her life, including the last couple decades as a banquet server and bartender in Washington, D.C.

“Change is going to happen anyway,” Tucker says. “The industry is never going to be the same. But I think workers have an opportunity right now, if they stick together, to be instrumental in making that change.”

A $15 hourly minimum wage would be a significant victory.

“Fifteen an hour is still inadequate, but it beats what people are getting now,” Tucker says. Additionally, “management, wherever you work, needs to protect us. Sexual harassment needs to be eliminated. And people need to be treated like humans, not constantly mistreated. We need to be respected. There are some owners out there who want to help bring about that change—not enough, but there are some.”

After Tucker and many of her co-workers became unemployed in March 2020 due to the pandemic, they banded together and organized a weekly meeting to share information and resources navigating an exceptionally difficult time.

“We would meet on Fridays, and we still do,” Tucker says. “We talk about what we’re experiencing—problems we’re having with unemployment, the fact that some of the people don’t have money for food, many of us are struggling with bills. Sometimes we find organizations that are helping, and we share that information. But the one thing I like most about the meetings is the growth.”

Tucker says that she’s watched as a lot of meeting members grow stand up for themselves and become activists who never thought they had it in them.

“So that feels good—to know that if and when this industry changes, these people, and others like them, will help it to change,” Tucker says. “It feels good to be a part of that kind of movement.”

Chrissy Teigen exits Netflix show following cyberbullying controversy

Weeks after social media megastar and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen was exposed for allegedly cyberbullying model and TV personality Courtney Stodden when Stodden was a teenager, Teigen continues to face fallout. On Friday, Variety reported Teigen had bowed out of a guest role performing a voiceover in Mindy Kaling’s Netflix comedy series “Never Have I Ever.”

Prior to Teigen stepping out of this role, Page Six reported Macy’s had taken her cookware line, Cravings, down from its website. Teigen, who was once widely recognized as the “Queen of Twitter,” hasn’t posted on any social media platforms since apologizing for the cyber abuse allegations last month.

In a May interview with the Daily Beast, Stodden alleged that Chrissy “wouldn’t just publicly tweet about wanting [her] to take ‘a dirt nap’ but would privately DM [her] and tell [her] to kill [herself].” These direct messages, according to Stodden, included “things like, ‘I can’t wait for you to die.'”

Following Stodden’s interview, Twitter users uncovered several of these since-deleted public tweets references by Stodden, allegedly sent by Teigen to the then-minor. They include messages like, “@courtneystodden i hate you,” “go. to sleep. forever,” and, “My Friday fantasy: you. dirt nap. mmmmmm baby.”

In Teigen’s Twitter thread apology, she wrote, “Not a lot of people are lucky enough to be held accountable for all their past bulls**t in front of the entire world. I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be. I was an insecure, attention seeking troll. I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior but that . . . is nothing compared to how I made Courtney feel.” However, Stodden has since said that Teigen has yet to privately reach out to them, and even blocked them on Twitter.

Teigen’s rise and fall on Twitter are reflective of deep changes in the platform, and what is and isn’t socially acceptable, in the last decade. One positive from this exhausting and disappointing saga is how unequivocally clear it is that harassing and bullying teens — or anyone — won’t be tolerated today, nor should it have ever been tolerated, really.

But even prior to the revelations, Teigen, who had built her brand on being a fun and relatable celebrity of the “not like other celebrities” variety, had increasingly been having a hard time on Twitter. Between March and April, Teigen announced she was leaving the platform citing its negative impact on her, and specifically, her struggle to handle vocal critics and trolls, who often mocked her tweets for being out of touch.

“My life goal is to make people happy. The pain I feel when I don’t is too much for me. I’ve always been portrayed as the strong clap back girl but I’m just not,” Teigen wrote in her March announcement. “My desire to be liked and fear of pissing people off has made me somebody you didn’t sign up for, and a different human than I started out here as! Live well, tweeters. Please know all I ever cared about was you!!!”

As some have pointed out, what ultimately took down Teigen were the same traits and qualities of hers that had first made her a star — her lack of filter, her penchant for insulting others and getting into online fights. But on an even deeper level, her fall from grace as a result of her attacks on Stodden also extends from sweeping changes in recent years in attention paid to threats, harassment and violence directed at women and femmes. As Vox’s Constance Grady has written of Teigen, “Our great reckoning with how we talk about women and femmes over the course of the Me Too decade has changed the way Twitter works. And in the process, it’s bringing down the woman who used to rule it.”

Meghan McCain attacks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in defense of Joe Manchin

On Monday’s “The View,” co-host Meghan McCain attempted to slam liberals for being critical of Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s unwavering opposition to President Biden’s proposed “For the People Act,” a voting rights expansion.

“I have a few thoughts. I could literally debate the filibuster for this entire show,” McCain began Monday morning. “What’s fascinating to me is that Democrats would seem to have rather have a Republican in the U.S. Senate in Joe Manchin’s seat than have any moderates,” she riffed. “In my home state of Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema is also someone who came out and said she wouldn’t vote for the filibuster, either.”

The conservative firebrand argued that Manchin’s critics are akin to Trump.

“There’s so many conversations about whether or not Republicans have had to bend the knee to Trump. Well, do Democrats have to bend the knee to the squad and everything on the far left?” McCain asked. “Because it looks like AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and the squad is dictating who is allowed in your party, as well.”

WILL MANCHIN’S MOVES LEAD TO BIPARTISANSHIP? The co-hosts react to West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin saying he’ll vote with Republicans to kill the voting rights bill as well as save the filibuster. https://t.co/RzEhDSiGqo pic.twitter.com/hEKTXAKqII

— The View (@TheView) June 7, 2021

McCain proceeded by claiming Democrats could learn a thing or two due to Manchin winning his seat in West Virginia as a moderate and, in her eyes, liberals not having the same skill to pull in moderate voters.

“Instead of taking the lessons of Joe Manchin, they would rather call him a heretic and call him a traitor,” the co-host remarked. “If you’re a Republican who votes against your party, you’re a hero and a maverick.”

In concluding the segment, McCain went onto state that if Americans truly desired to elect a progressive flamethrower as commander-in-chief, they would not have elected President Joe Biden, but instead, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren. “But that’s not what the Democratic coalition wants, and if they’re going to continue down this path, where anyone who thinks differently of them is bloodletted out and seen as a heretic,” McCain said, “you’re going to have the same problem on your side that I’m having on mine.”

Today we are all @AOC… pic.twitter.com/kaV296KiZB

— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) June 7, 2021

On Sunday, Manchin, a moderate Democrat, penned an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette outlining that he would be voting in opposition to the “For The People Act.”

Ellie Kemper apologizes for participating in racist beauty pageant “rejects white supremacy”

If you’ve been on the internet in the past week, then you’ve probably seen the controversy surrounding actress and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” star Ellie Kemper. Several Twitter users exposed Kemper’s past participation in a debutante ball with a racist history, called the Veiled Prophet Ball. Kemper even won the pageant in 1999, and was crowned “Veiled Prophet Queen of Love and Beauty.”

On Monday afternoon, Kemper released a statement on Instagram apologizing for her participation in the pageant, which is a long-held tradition in her hometown St. Louis. The pageant was founded in 1878 by a Confederate Army officer and his brother, and banned nonwhite people from participating until 1979. It also notably has used imagery that many social media users have compared to symbols and paraphernalia of the KKK.

In her statement, Kemper acknowledged that “the century-old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist, and elitist past.” While Kemper says she wasn’t aware of the Veiled Prophet Ball’s organizational history when she participated in 1999, she wrote, “Ignorance is no excuse. I was old enough to have educated myself before getting involved.

“There is a very natural temptation, when you become the subject of internet criticism, to tell yourself that your detractors are getting it all wrong,” Kemper continued. “But at some point last week, I realized that a lot of the forces behind the criticism are forces that I’ve spent my life supporting and agreeing with.

“I want to apologize to the people I’ve disappointed, and I promise that moving forward I will listen, continue to educate myself, and use my privilege in support of the better society I think we’re capable of becoming,” she wrote.

When Kemper’s participation in the Veiled Prophet Ball first came to light, she was widely criticized and even called the “KKK Princess” by some social media users. The pageant and its racist roots are well worth criticizing, as well as persistent racism and elitism in the pageant industry, broadly. For her own part, in her statement, Kemper has made it clear that she “unequivocally deplore[s], renounce[s] and reject[s] white supremacy” — while also acknowledging that “because of [her] race and privilege, [she is] the beneficiary of a system that has dispensed unequal justice and rewards.”

You can read Kemper’s full statement in her Instagram post, below.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CP02q0Nt3-8/

How Joe Manchin became Mitch McConnell’s “patsy”

In an op-ed published by the Charleston Gazzette-Mail over the weekend, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia voiced his opposition to the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights bill that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year but now faces a steep uphill climb in the U.S. Senate. The op-ed gave liberal and progressive Democrats yet another reason to feel frustrated with the centrist Democrat, who Washington Post opinion writer James Downie believes has become a “patsy” for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Manchin, in his Gazzette-Mail op-ed, argued that the bill encourages “partisan divisions” to “deepen.” And Manchin reiterated that theme during an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace.

In his column, Downie stresses that he doesn’t doubt Manchin’s sincerity. But Downie also believes that the West Virginia Democrat is playing into McConnell’s hands.

“What makes Manchin’s stances so aggravating?” Downie writes. “It’s not that his views are insincere … Perhaps the issue is the laziness of Manchin’s centrism. Rather than a mix of substantive policy stances, some left and some right, Manchin simply takes the middle of the two parties’ stances.”

Downie continues, “For example, President Biden wants a 28% corporate tax rate, while Republicans want 21%. So, Manchin backs 25%. Democrats want a $15-an-hour minimum wage, while Republicans want $10? Manchin supports $11. One gets the sense that if Manchin were told one side believes two plus two equals four and the other side believes it equals eight, he’d conclude that it equals six — and that saying otherwise divides the country.”

Manchin does support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which he views as a compromise. But Downie argues that Republicans in the Senate, including McConnell, have no interest in compromise or in meeting Democrats half way — and it’s “epitome of naivete” for Manchin to think that they are.

Downie writes, “Worse still was his claim on CBS that ‘my Republican friends and colleagues see the deadlock also — this is not something they desire or wish.’ That’s past naivete or foolishness — it’s straight-up delusion. Manchin has become the Senate’s Walter Mitty: a man who believes himself the champion of a fantasy and who has hope but no plan … Anything that would snap him back to our partisan reality he either ignores or treats as divisive.”

The columnist adds, “Meanwhile, McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party laugh all the way to the ballot box. That’s what makes Manchin so infuriating. In his mind, he’s the hero of this story. In truth, he’s the patsy. And the country pays the price for his delusions.”

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