The slow, punishing arc of “The Handmaid’s Tale” mirrors our struggle for reproductive rights

After almost two years, Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale” returned for its fourth season in April, picking up right where it left off throughout its last three seasons of gratuitous violence with minimal plot payoff. Wednesday’s episode follows June’s escape from Gilead into refuge in Canada, as she will reunite with loved ones and figures from her past after years of separation and recycled plotlines.

Set in the fictional dystopia of Gilead, “The Handmaid’s Tale” depicts America’s future after a civil war and takeover by religious political extremists who relegate all women to “handmaids,” or baby incubators for powerful men and their wives. Handmaids are denied access to education, or really any basic human rights or bodily autonomy, which has consistently helped the Hulu drama strike a chord amid ongoing, escalating attacks on reproductive rights in the U.S. In light of the current political climate around abortion, the series’ fourth season, in which protagonist June (Elisabeth Moss) has continued her seemingly endless quest to take down Gilead, couldn’t have come at a more relevant time.

As the latest season continues to unfold, the arc of “The Handmaid’s Tale” itself has been one that’s achingly familiar to reproductive rights advocates — slow, repetitive, and with little progress through the years, much like the ongoing struggle for abortion access and autonomy for pregnant people. In the decades since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, abortion access has declined, with 90% of counties lacking an abortion provider today, and maternal mortality rates increasing over the years in states with more restrictions on reproductive rights, especially for people of color. Over and over, just as we watch the same triggering violence against women occur on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” we watch as anti-abortion politicians and activists employ the same tactics to block or stigmatize abortion care — tactics that range from burdensome to violent.

Just ahead of Wednesday’s episode, Texas signed into law one of the most uniquely extreme abortion bans in the nation, which would ban abortion care before many people know they’re pregnant, and give any U.S. citizen authority to sue someone who’s had an abortion, provided one, or helped someone get one. The Supreme Court, which holds a 6-3 anti-abortion majority, announced it would hear a case on a 15-week abortion ban, which threatens to overturn fundamental protections created by Roe v. Wade. And in just one week of last month, states passed a record-breaking 28 restrictions on abortion, setting 2021 up to be one of the most dangerous years for reproductive rights in recent history.

In other words, the dystopian politics of Gilead aren’t as far off as some may believe — not when state-directed reproductive coercion and policing of pregnancies are already a reality, especially for communities of color and the poor. One of the most recurring criticisms of the show, made by women of color, is the white feminism inherent to its premise that pregnancy coercion, dehumanization, and systemic denial of autonomy are elements of a far-off dystopia, rather than reality for many women and pregnant people of color. After all, just last summer, it was reported that a doctor working with ICE had been subjecting detained migrant women to forced sterilizations. Before that, a jail in Tennessee came under fire for pressuring incarcerated women, who are disproportionately Black and brown, to undergo sterilizations.

In the context of pregnancy and reproductive rights, the terrifying surveillance state apparatuses of Gilead also already exist for pregnant people in the U.S. Forty-six states currently require some form of reporting of abortion care to the state government — at the end of last year, Ohio became one of these states by signing a law that would require people who have abortions to obtain a death certificate for their aborted fetus, therefore entering their abortion into public record. And as more and more people use medication abortion, in the form of abortion pills that can safely be taken from home, anti-abortion legislation has become especially risky for people who experience miscarriage, stillbirth or other pregnancy complications. Medication abortions happen through inducing a miscarriage, meaning even natural loss of pregnancy could draw government investigation and criminalization if Roe were reversed.

The targeted criminalization of disproportionately women of color for pregnancy loss, or self-induced abortions with medication, is already happening. In recent years, there have been several high-profile cases in which women have been jailed or criminally charged for pregnancy loss, from Marshae Jones, a Black woman who was jailed for losing her pregnancy after being shot in the stomach in 2019, to Amber Abreu, a Latina teenager who faced felony charges for “procuring a miscarriage” for using abortion pills in 2007. In 2015, Purvi Patel, an Indian-American woman, became the first person to be sent to prison for inducing an abortion in the post-Roe era, contradictorily charged with feticide and child abuse for using medication abortion in 2013.

Just as “The Handmaid’s Tale” has spent years bombarding audiences with gratuitous torture scenes and the same cycle of June and her supporters plotting in vain to be free, it feels as if each state legislative session, we cycle through the same abortion bans, the same state-directed anti-abortion counseling laws, mandatory waiting period laws, clinic shutdown laws, and more. And while it’s important to recognize any law that would force someone to be pregnant for one minute longer than they want to be is dehumanizing – even by the standards of Gilead – some of today’s abortion bills are particularly extreme.

In recent years, Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and other states have tried to pass bills to make abortion punishable by the death penalty. Texas’ latest abortion ban would essentially have civilians take on the role of Gilead’s secret police, or the “Eyes of God,” by policing and suing those who have abortions. Several abortion providers have been assassinated as recently as 2009, while abortion clinics are routinely vandalized, and staff and patients routinely doxed and threatened.

For years, reproductive rights advocates, who are disproportionately women and pregnant-capable people, have been dismissed as hysterical for sounding the alarm on the political war on our bodies, even with Roe technically still in place. As recently as 2018, ahead of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, a survey found 62% of voters believed it wasn’t likely Roe v. Wade would be dismantled.

The premise of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” itself, portraying a surveillance state that eliminates reproductive rights as a dystopian fictional world rather than a modern reality, may inadvertently reinforce this gaslighting. (To its credit, a flashback to present-day, pre-Gilead America in the Season 4 episode “Milk” depicts the deceptive tactics of anti-abortion fake clinics.)

As this “Handmaid’s Tale” season winds down, and finally delivers some highly anticipated resolutions and storyline progress, we can only hope we’ll someday witness progress for our reproductive rights, in the real world. However unpleasant and tiresome the Hulu drama can be, the grit and ceaseless resistance of its handmaids remains inspiring, and certainly reminds us of the leaders and activists for reproductive rights and justice today.

Former White House counsel Don McGahn agrees to testify in Trump, Russia investigation hearing

Donald Trump’s former White House counsel, Don McGahn, agreed to provide testimony before the House Judiciary Committee next week about Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation.

The announcement, first reported in the New York Times, is part of a controversy dating back to 2019, when McGahn failed to comply with a subpoena from the Judiciary panel as well as the Justice Department, per Trump’s instructions. The panel called McGahn to the stand because he was named as a key witness by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Mueller report.

A district judge later ruled that Trump could not deny the House Judiciary Committee the right to call McGahn to the witness stand, arguing that “presidents are not kings.”

“We note that this decision does not preclude Congress (or one of its chambers) from ever enforcing a subpoena in federal court,” the court said. “It simply precludes it from doing so without first enacting a statute authorizing such a suit.”

McGahn’s newfound compliance follows a deal that was struck earlier this month, in which House Democrats and the Justice Department agreed to allow committee members to question McGahn on the accuracy of the many incidents detailed in the Mueller report, namely Trump’s effort to remove Mueller.

Shortly following the announcement of the deal last month, a Trump lawyer signaled that the former president would attempt to intervene, according to the Times. Former presidents typically reserve the right to invoke executive privilege on cases like these, which would allow Trump to effectively block the proceeding from taking place.

However, in an unexpected turn of events, Patrick Philbin, a former deputy White House counsel to Trump, revealed that the former President had no intention of swaying the course of the proceeding. The Times noted that Trump’s sudden change of heart could be accounted for by the fact that Trump would have to front the cost of the legal battle.

Though the future session marks a decisive win for House Democrats finally looking to uncover the details behind McGahn’s role in the scandal, McGahn can decline to answer any questions to his own liking. The Justice Department can also invoke executive privilege, meaning that any questions deemed confidential will be dismissed.

Simone Biles should be praised, not punished for achieving a feat that was deemed impossible

Last week, ahead of the long-delayed Tokyo Olympics this summer, Simone Biles performed a new move at the U.S. Classic: the Yurchenko double pike, captured in a tweet below. The Olympic gold medalist is widely recognized as the greatest gymnast in the world, and her historic delivery of yet another never-been-done-before move shows us this reputation is well-earned.

Per the New York Times, the Yurchenko double pike is "so perilous and challenging that no other woman has attempted it in competition, and it is unlikely that any woman in the world is even training to give it a try."

However, the undervaluation of Biles' performance by judges is bringing attention yet again to how the athlete has repeatedly been punished rather than rewarded for her greatness, and the double standards applied to reception to her performances. Specifically, Biles' execution of the Yurchenko double pike for her vault routine was given a provisional score of 6.6, similar to her scores for other vaults and without any additional points for or acknowledgement of the near-impossible difficulty of the move.

Simone Biles just landed her Yurchenko double pike in podium training and we are SPEECHLESS. 😮 #USClassic @Simone_Biles @OnHerTurf pic.twitter.com/S9YsasXoXu

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) May 21, 2021

This has happened to Biles before in other routines through the years, as she executes moves that no other female gymnasts have attempted or completed.

Gymnastics routines are judged and scored based on their execution and difficulty. But rather than recognize or reward Biles' exceedingly difficult routines and moves with the added points they deserve for their difficulty, judges have often undervalued her performances that include historic completion of new moves. The rationale for this scoring has often been that there are safety risks for other gymnasts who aren't able to complete the moves that Biles is, if her moves are rewarded with high scores and other gymnasts are then motivated to try them.

Biles' talent has also been criticized as somehow being unfair to other gymnasts, for her ability to do what others can't — something that's often celebrated and glorified for white or male athletes. For example, Michael Phelps, a swimmer who's won more Olympic medals than anyone in history, is widely recognized and beloved as the greatest swimmer of our time, despite his immense, built-in advantages, including not just the size and proportions of his body, but how his body produces half the amount of lactic acid of the average person, which decreases his fatigue and sharply increases his recovery time.

In other words, on a technical and cultural level, Biles, a young Black woman, is being punished and subjected to undeniably racist and sexist double standards for her greatness. After all, we've seen some form of this before, for other Black women athletes — Caster Semenya, a South African two-time Olympic champion runner, was literally barred from competing in women's sports last year unless she agreed to take medication to lower her naturally higher levels of testosterone. When Black women athletes work hard and go above and beyond, they're treated with suspicion, as if they're somehow being dishonest, or as if their success is a detriment to others that should be punished, restricted and prevented rather than encouraged. From Semenya to Biles, they and other Black women athletes face the same, intertwined racism and misogyny.

Since her post-Yurchenko double pike snub over the weekend, Biles has criticized this judging, but has mostly just been celebrating her phenomenal achievement, as she should.

"They're both too low and they even know it. But they don't want the field to be too far apart. And that's just something that's on them. That's not on me," Biles told the New York Times about the low scoring of her new moves.

In a tweet on Monday, she also expressed her continued, shocked joy, writing, "I'm sorry but I can't believe I competed a double pike on vault."

Asian Americans need more than just Hollywood representation to address anti-Asian racism

Earlier this AAPI Heritage Month, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino released a study of 16 jurisdictions across the country, which found a 164% increase in reports of anti-Asian hate crimes in the first quarter of 2021, compared with the first quarter of 2020. New York City saw the most significant increase at 223%, while San Francisco saw a 140% percent increase.

At this time of increased violence targeting Asian people and especially Asian women, Asian-American celebrities from actor and forthcoming Marvel superhero Simu Liu, to former NBA star Jeremy Lin, have become some of the most visible figures condemning anti-Asian violence. Seeing their faces, and other prominent Asian actors and celebrities, appear on television screens and social media feeds across the country has brought comfort, relief, and the reassuring feeling of being seen to many Asian Americans, who have often felt erased by American media.

Yet, we shouldn’t have to settle for so little, when we need so much more to adequately address anti-Asian racism and persistent white supremacy in society. The goals of plucky social media movements and hashtags like #RepresentAsian may be noble — to help Asian people feel seen and understood, and, crucially, to familiarize non-Asian audiences with the many everyday roles Asians play in society. But a few extra seats at the table in Hollywood and other predominantly white-led institutions won’t change the material, day-to-day conditions that make poorer Asians more vulnerable to violence, or address the systems and political tides that have long set up Asians as the go-to political scapegoat.

While prominent Asian figures in Hollywood and the entertainment industry have received more visibility and attention than ever in recent months, in many cases, their celebrity activism has fallen short. Celebrity criticisms of anti-Asian racism have often reduced it to individual acts of interpersonal and “senseless” violence, focusing exclusively on hate crimes and the past year — as if these are separable from the persistent crises of white supremacy, and the long history of western imperialism and military conquest of the Asia-Pacific.

The legacy of imperialism, of anti-Asian immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and years of racist immigration quotas, as well as exploitation and dehumanization of Asian workers, the Red Scare targeting perceived communists, and more, have deeply shaped the conditions we face today, in which Asian people are exoticized, perceived as politically adversarial, and the perfect scapegoats. But you would hardly get a sense of the powerful connections between today’s surges in anti-Asian violence, and the greater currents of institutionalized white supremacy in which this violence is rooted.

In a guest column in Variety in March, Asian-American actor and “Riverdale” star Charles Melton wrote, “The hate crimes that have swept the country have forced me to realize how important the platform I have is and the responsibility that comes with it.” He continued, “Domestic terrorism and hate-driven violence have plagued our nation and continue to do so. What’s clear in all of this is the rampant violence against Asian people.”

Mindy Kaling wrote in a tweet, “The targeting of our Asian brothers and sisters is sickening, but not surprising given the normalizing of anti-Asian hate speech in the past year. We have to #StopAsianHate, enough is enough!”

And Ashley Park, who starred in the Broadway production of “Mean Girls” and more recently, Netflix’s “Emily In Paris” and “Girls5eva,” said of the white, male shooter involved in the Atlanta shooting disproportionately targeting Asian women that “at some point, someone could have told him what he was feeling and thinking, and that hate was wrong.”

Statements like these are well-meaning, and contribute to awareness about the crisis of rising anti-Asian violence. But awareness and visibility aren’t enough, and certainly aren’t a substitute for the transformative, radical change we need in this country to protect and empower Asian communities, and all communities, against white supremacist violence and disenfranchisement.

One starting point for that change could be recognizing that anti-Asian racism and violence isn’t new to the past year, and listening to the many Asian-American racial justice advocates who have pointed out how fixation on hate crimes could be counterproductive to community safety. Specifically, as the anti-carceral Asian advocacy group WeChat Project has pointed out, the focus on hate crimes can lead to increased funding for police departments as well as increased police presence in Asian neighborhoods, as we saw shortly after the Atlanta shooting. Similarly, as seen with the killings, police departments are often conservative about identifying these acts of violence as hate crimes at all, especially when the perpetrators are white.

When we fixate on hate crimes and individualized acts of violence, like many of the most prominent Asian-American voices have, we ignore or minimize ongoing acts of state violence — including police violence disproportionately against Black people, as well as violence committed by ICE and other state agencies.

It’s always been frustrating to navigate the erasure and depoliticization of Asian-American identity, and recently, it’s been frustrating to watch the most prominent Asian Americans fail to use their newly gifted visibility to build solidarity with other communities of color against white supremacy. Instead, some have opted to adhere to respectability and “model minority” politics, which have long harmed Asian Americans by treating us as a monolith, erasing poor and struggling Asians, and eroding our solidarity with other communities of color.

It’s essential that in highlighting Asian American struggles to not simultaneously minimize the experiences Black, brown and Indigenous communities. In a recent Time interview, actor Daniel Dae Kim cautions how by focusing on the Atlanta shootings, there might be a tendency to minimize the experiences of other people of color – acknowledging how harm to all communities is connected:

Alone we are much weaker than if we are allied with others who care, not just about Asian Americans, but about the issue of hate and discrimination and bigotry in general. Now I wouldn’t deign to try and compare the Asian American experience to any other minorities’ experience in America, because each one is unique in their own ways. But what we do have in common is that we have all experienced bigotry. We have all experienced prejudice. What’s most important to understand is that this is a human issue. This is not just an Asian American one. The shooting in Atlanta was primarily women. It’s hate writ large.

This AAPI Heritage Month has come with a wide range of emotions for Asian communities, mourning loss and increased violence, and celebrating exciting representational victories in media. But as Asian Americans strive to form a cohesive, empowered political identity in this country, it’s critical that we demand more than the breadcrumbs of onscreen representation in white-led institutions like Hollywood, recognize anti-Asian racism as more than individual hate crimes, and mobilize to dismantle oppressive systems of power.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story contained an incomplete quote by Daniel Dae Kim. The story has been updated. Salon regrets the error.

Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon face off in heated Senate hearing

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., grilled J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Tuesday, calling claims that the bank helped customers during the pandemic “a bunch of baloney.”

“No matter how you try to spin it,” Warren declared, “this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families even when we’re in the middle of a worldwide crisis.”

Back in December, CNBC reported that, for the year of 2020, banks would rake in $30 billion total in overdraft fees, charges made to account holders when the amount they are withdrawing exceeds their balance. Federal regulators last March called for banks to systematically waive these fees due to the added financial burden of the pandemic.

During the Tuesday hearing, Warren took specific aim at how much money JP Morgan collected in these fees, pressing Dimon for an exact figure. “Do you know the number?” she asked.

“I don’t have the number in front of me…,” Dimon responded as Warren cut him off.

“Well I actually have the number in front me,” Warren shot back. “It’s $1.463 billion. Now do you know how much JP Morgan would have been in 2020 if you had followed the recommendation of the regulators and waived overdraft fees to help struggling consumers?”

Dimon claimed that the bank waived fees if customers said they were under Covid-related financial stress, neglecting the fact that the bank still made money on collecting them.

“I appreciate that you want to duck this question,” Warren jabbed, then asking him how much the bank’s profits would have been if it waived the fees. “The answer is your profits would have been $27.6 billion,” she answered.

“So here’s the thing. You and your colleagues come in today to talk about how you stepped up and took care of customers during the pandemic,” Warren said. “And it’s a bunch of baloney. In fact, it’s about $4 billion worth of baloney, but you could fix that right now.

During the pandemic, the Fed instituted a policy that lowered the reserve requirement for banks, freeing up capital with which to lend to customers in order to keep the economy afloat. The policy, however, ended this year on March 31. “Over the past year,” Warren noted, “you could have passed on the breaks you got from the Fed to your customers, but you didn’t do it.”

“Mr. Dimon,” she asked. “Will you commit, right now, to refund $1.5 billion you took from consumers during the pandemic?”

“No,” Dimon responded.

Sen. Warren slams JPMorgan's Dimon for raking in $1.5 billion in overdraft fees during the pandemic.

She asks the panel of bank CEOs whether they'd refund the fees https://t.co/S2Q4tV2Vrw pic.twitter.com/4FmHN9brB3

— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) May 26, 2021

Texas House Democrats run out the clock in effort to sink GOP bills

In the final 14 hours before the final midnight deadline for advancing Senate bills in the Texas House, Democrats pulled out all the stops Tuesday to keep the body from considering GOP-backed legislation they opposed, spelling death for some of the Senate’s priority bills.

The House had on its calendar several of the Senate’s priorities, including a bill banning social media companies from blocking users because of their viewpoint or their location within Texas, another that would ban local governments from using public funds to pay for lobbyists, and another that would force transgender student athletes to play on sports teams based on their sex assigned at birth instead of their gender identity.

Republicans control all branches of Texas government, and Democrats have been trying to fight back these bills since the beginning of the legislative session in January. The midnight deadline to pass the bills was the minority party’s last hope. And though they ended the night with hoarse voices, House Democrats landed a rare victory this session, killing all three of those bills, and only ceding one other Senate priority bill that banned cities and counties from requiring companies to pay workers more than the federal minimum wage or provide them with benefits like paid sick leave.

The failure of several of the Senate’s priorities is likely to continue the rift between the two chambers, which differ on their legislative priorities. Last week, the House took a break from lawmaking for a few days ahead of key legislative deadlines, imperiling Senate priorities, because the Senate was not moving House priority bills on criminal justice and health care.

The House started Tuesday at 10 a.m. with 129 bills on its agenda, setting up a marathon of debating, voting and political maneuvering. Members spent the first half of the day giving final approval to bills the House had initially passed Monday, a usually procedural move that went beyond banking hours Tuesday as Democrats barraged their fellow lawmakers with questions, compliments and tactical procedures to slow down the chamber’s progress.

The tactics in the House caught the attention of lawmakers in the Senate, whose bills floundered with each passing minute the House Democrats delayed because legislation must get approval in both chambers before becoming law. With plenty of House bills locked up in the upper chamber, the senators also began slowing their progress and ribbing state representatives who visited them during a lunch break.

Senators began making dog puns as Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, laid out a House bill that dealt with where pet store owners in large counties get their dogs and cats from, in an effort that targeted puppy mills.

“We don’t want it to be a dog-eat-dog world,” said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston.

Menéndez called to Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, the bill’s author who walked into the chamber, to show him that the Senate was passing House bills.

“It’d be nice if we could get some good Senate bills passed as well,” Menéndez said.

Back in the House, groups of Democratic and Republican lawmakers huddled in different parts of the chamber, planning their strategies for the rest of the day: Democrats to stop bills they opposed, and Republicans to get as many of the bills that they’d worked on over the top.

Outside the chamber, opponents of the bill to restrict the participation of transgender student athletes in school sports held banners that read, “Stop SB 29,” and chanted, “Protect trans kids!”

Around 6 p.m. the House began taking up legislation that had been postponed by lawmakers on Tuesday in efforts to make last-minute tweaks or work out deals to ease the passage of those bills through the chamber.

But the tweaking was not done, as lawmakers continued to postpone bills. The bills banning social media content moderation because of viewpoint and the use of local government funds to pay for lobbyists were among those delayed. The social media bill had the backing of Gov. Greg Abbott, who traveled to Tyler to promote it with its author, Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, in March.

Further down the list — and therefore in more peril — were the measure related to transgender student athletes, which Abbott had also indicated support for, and a bill that would require people seeking an abortion in Texas to consult a state contractor about support services and other available resources before the procedure could be performed. None of those bills ended up receiving a vote.

Near 7 p.m., the House took up Senate Bill 14, a measure banning cities and counties from requiring companies to pay workers more than the federal minimum wage or provide them with benefits like paid sick leave.

The bill is a revival of a similar measure that died in the 2019 legislative session. Supporters say it will prevent regulatory confusion in a way that helps businesses with locations in multiple Texas cities regain their footing as the economy tries to recover from the pandemic’s devastating financial effects. But opponents say it reduces workers’ access to paid sick leave after they’ve been navigating the pandemic for more than a year.

The bill does not apply to municipalities’ employees or conditions of government contracts. It targets attempts by several Texas cities to mandate benefits for employees. In the past three years, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio passed paid sick leave ordinances, but court rulings have kept them from being enforced.

Democrats, who largely oppose the bill, were attempting to tack on amendments to soften its effect on the large counties where their party holds control of local governments. With each amendment, more time passed and the deadline inched closer.

A little after 9 p.m., a procedural concern was raised about the bill that could have spelled doom for it. After more than two hours, the chamber postponed the debate on it until 10 p.m.

By then, time was running out. Before the bill could be revisited, House lawmakers made surprise moves to postpone debate on the bill restricting transgender student athletes in school sports until 11:30 p.m., leaving it with only 30 minutes to pass before the midnight deadline.

When the House picked up SB 14 again, lawmakers added an amendment by Rep. Rhetta Bowers, D-Garland, that exempted local nondiscrimination ordinances that banned discrimination on the basis of hair texture. Bowers had previously filed the Texas CROWN Act, to prevent race-based hair discrimination that often affects Black Americans in school and in the workplace.

The House then gave the bill its initial approval.

By 11 p.m., the bill that would restrict how governmental entities use public money on outside lobbyists had been killed because the bill’s author could not find agreement on it with other lawmakers. The bills dealing with social media companies and transgender student athletes never returned for a hearing.

As the clock ticked towards midnight, the House gallery began to fill with onlookers, including supporters of transgender children who had been advocating against SB 29 all session.

Democratic lawmakers spent the last 15 minutes ostensibly trying to tack on an amendment to a bill about prevailing wage rates, but really just coordinating with one another to run out the clock.

As the clock struck midnight, Democratic lawmakers stood at the front of the chamber waving transgender pride flags and celebrating with onlookers in the gallery.

House Speaker Dade Phelan announced that his desk was clear and the chamber recessed until 9 a.m. Wednesday, when it will take up its final calendar of Senate bills that are largely local or uncontested.

Megan Munce contributed reporting.

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

Ignore GOP condemnations of Marjorie Taylor Greene — it’s all a part of the troll

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, like a cat peeing on your bed, has found the most surefire way to get that sweet, sweet attention she craves: Holocaust comparisons.

It started last week when the QAnon congresswoman from Georgia made a glib and risible comparison between an ongoing mask mandate in the House of Representatives — necessary only because GOP congressional members refuse to get COVID-19 vaccines (or admit they did, anyway) — to literal genocide.

“[W]e can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” she told a host on Real America’s Voice, whose name makes the “far-right network” descriptor redundant. “And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

Spoken like a spoiled rich girl who thinks she’s being murdered because Daddy made her drive the Benz instead of the Jaguar this weekend. And considering Taylor Greene’s background, it checks out.

Her comments drew exactly the reaction Greene clearly desired: Anger and outrage from liberals — and just the right Republicans. Having gotten exactly what she wanted, Greene took another bite at the apple on Tuesday, tweeting some more garbage about how vaccination requirements are also the Holocaust.

Finally, Republican leadership went ahead and condemned her remarks, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy calling them “appalling” and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling them “outrageous.” Notably, however, no one in GOP leadership called for any actual consequences for Greene, even of the most toothless sort, like a congressional censure.

Republican leaders actually benefit from Greene’s trollish antics and have no reason to get in her way. They have a symbiotic relationship with Greene. Everyone reaps rewards from this little game, where she acts like a brat and they pretend to disapprove. So there’s no reason for anyone in leadership to actually take action to stop her trolling.

So Greene is now Queen of the Right-Wing Trolls.

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She’s getting exactly what she wants: attention and loads of cash from a GOP base whose only priority is triggering liberals. Republican leaders, on the other hand, can take advantage of the way that Greene’s ridiculousness degrades the overall political discourse, making it much easier for them to pursue their main goals, which are undermining democracy and securing their grip on power with permanent minority rule.

Greene’s Holocaust comments are a strategy directly out of the standard right-wing troll handbook, which is to project your own sins on your opponents, ideally in the most facetious way possible. Call it the “I know you are but what am I” troll. It is, notably, Donald Trump’s favorite. With the orange goblin, every accusation was a confession, from calling progressive people of color “racist” to calling Hillary Clinton “corrupt” to accusing Barack Obama of cheating through college to making fun of other people’s looks and body size.

The “no you’re the puppet!” strategy is childish and blunt, but it is surprisingly effective. It exploits the mainstream media’s yearning for a “both sides” narrative, where the fact that both sides are making accusations can be reported, all without having to bother to litigate who is telling the truth. It causes centrists to throw up their hands and condemn everyone in politics for being hyperbolic. It sows exactly the sort of cynicism that authoritarianism needs to thrive.

We can see how this works with Greene’s Holocaust troll. By accusing Democrats of being Nazis in the most ridiculous fashion possible, Greene helps advance the idea that calling your opponent a fascist is inherently the act of silly, unserious people. That enormously benefits Republican leaders, who are currently in the process of doing something that is pretty damn fascist, which is engaging in a widespread effort to erase the history of Trump attempting to overturn the 2020 election, which resulted in a violent insurrection on January 6. This is coupled with efforts to complete Trump’s work by making sure that the voters cannot decide the winner of the 2024 election.

Obviously, no one is saying that Republicans are doing anything like the Holocaust, but there also should be no denying that Trumpism shares its DNA — yearnings for a white ethnostate, an authoritarian desire for minority control — with fascist movements of the past. That’s why Republicans are only too happy to condemn Greene, because it gives them an opportunity to advance this broader notion that any such comparisons are permanently off-limits, no matter how accurate.

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We can see how Republicans are exploiting Greene to advance this “both sides do it” narrative in McCarthy’s condemnation of Greene. “Anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” he wrote. House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise also tried to put this on his political opposition, releasing a statement condemning “the dangerous anti-Semitism that is growing in our streets and in the Democrat party.”

There have absolutely been anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S., committed by people who are using the recent violence in Israel as an excuse. But it’s flat-out false to blame Democratic politicians, who have not in any way equated criticism of the Israeli government with some kind of broad attack on Jewish people. All that’s happening here is Republicans are cynically collapsing the distinction between criticism of Israel’s actions and anti-Semitism, and using genuinely anti-Semitic rhetoric — Greene’s mask and vaccine comments — as cover.

That’s how this game works and why Republicans rarely do anything more than offer bland and unconvincing admonishments to their most obnoxious trolls. Trolls like Greene are a huge boon to the GOP. They, as Steve Bannon famously said, “flood the zone with shit,” degrading the larger political discourse so that rational discussion becomes impossible. The collapse of good faith discourse benefits Republicans, who know that their policies, much less their anti-democratic agenda, cannot hold up under scrutiny.

Greene might be an embarrassing figure, but as someone who can further the goal of decimating all rational debate in the U.S., she’s as good as gold to the GOP. Republicans are going to let her keep doing her thing, saying terrible things and getting attention for as long as she likes. Why wouldn’t they? They’re the ones who are benefitting.

Trump lashes out after reports of a grand jury leak

Former President Trump on Tuesday railed against reports that a special grand jury will convene to hear evidence regarding his business dealings, blasting the jury as part of “greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”

“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said in a statement. “Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”

On Tuesday, The Washington Post first reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is planning to assemble a panel that will decide whether to formally indict the former president, Trump-affiliated executives, and the Trump Organization itself.

Vance’s investigation is reportedly zeroing in on whether the Trump Organization inflated the value of its real estate assets in order to defraud banks and illegally qualify for certain tax benefits. The ambit of the probe also includes the compensation of certain Trump-affiliated executives as well as hush-money payments doled out to various women with whom Trump had alleged extramarital affairs.

Vance’s choice to convene a grand jury likely signals the investigation is steadily advancing as sources familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that people are already testifying on the matter. Daniel R. Alonso, a former top deputy to Vance, told NBC News that the district attorney’s decision to assemble a special grand jury is a strong indication that “they’re going to be presenting charges against someone.” Adam S. Miller, who served as deputy bureau chief of the Major Economic Crimes Bureau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, told the Post that a grand jury in cases like these is typically appropriate.

“It’s really for very complicated cases that have a lot of information for a grand jury to digest,” Miller added.

In 2019, New York Attorney General Letitia James opened a similar probe into the valuation of the Trump Organization’s assets, which may have been inflated by Trump in order to secure low-interest loans from lenders. In some cases, James’ and Vance’s investigations have reviewed the same documents, namely records related to a piece of New York real estate, for which Trump received a $21 million tax break, and a tower in Chicago, for which lenders relieved Trump of $100 million in debt over.

Last week, James revealed that she had assigned two lawyers to Vance’s case because her investigation into Trump’s business dealings – which began as a civil one – had turned into a criminal one.

In recent months, Vance’s investigation has reportedly put specific focus on Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, according to The New York Times. Investigators are apparently looking into whether Weisselberg paid taxes on benefits he received from the company, including the purchase of various cars and tens of thousands of dollars for at least one of his grandchildren’s private school education. Earlier this month, Vance subpoenaed documents that detailed $500,000 in tuition payments for Weisselberg’s grandchildren at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. In some cases, Weisselberg’s tuition checks were signed by Trump himself.

These TikTok famous eggs are even better with a Spanish twist

Don’t overthink it — heat up a pan and make some eggs. Look, you’re halfway to a male already. Eggs are the Swiss army knife of ingredients; they lift cheesecakes and flavor brownies. They stretch leftovers into croquettes and frittatas and pasta pies. Even the most extravagant, most golden-yolked ones you can buy are still a bargain. They’re quick to cook, and when you give them a starring role in a meal, they never disappoint.

I discovered Elizabeth David’s “An Omelette and a Glass of Wine” in college, and I’ve been a believer ever since in her unruffled philosophy that “so long as I have a supply of elementary fresh things like egg, onions, parsley, lemons, oranges and bread and tomatoes, I find that my store cupboard will always provide the main part of an improvised meal.” If you think eggs are just for breakfast . . . have you ever tried putting them on everything?

Eggs are always popular. The average American consumes roughly 279 of them in a year — and pandemic baking has been making demand rise even higher than a spinach soufflé. Thanks to dietician and recipe developer Amy Wilichowski’s “life-changing” TikTok video, eggs have enjoyed a new level of fame as of late.

In the clip, which currently has more than 10 million views, Wilichowski simply uses pesto in place of the typical butter or oil to cook up a pair of eggs. “The taste is incredible, you won’t go back,” she promises as she fries them. Finally, she puts the eggs on avocado and ricotta smeared toast topped with honey and red pepper flakes.

While eggs with pesto are a concept as old as brunch itself, there’s something endearing about taking pesto, the quiche of the ’80s, and avocado toast, the pesto of the 2010’s, and filtering it through TikTok, the Snapchat of the 2020’s. The result is a dish that’s both trendy and timeless, easily adaptable to your own preferred way of cooking eggs.

Because I love my eggs crispy, I’ve borrowed here from the Spanish technique, letting the pesto get an assist from a robust olive oil. Cooked this way yields intensely flavored eggs that are creamy in the middle and lacy at the edges. While they’re a substantial meal served Wilichowski’s way, they’re also elegant served alongside a salad of deeply roasted spring vegetables or delicate greens . . . and a glass of wine!

***

Recipe: Crispy TikTok Pesto Eggs

Inspired by Amy Wilichowski and José Andrés

Serves: 1

Ingredients:

1-2 generous tablespoons of pesto (Tapenade would also be great here.)
1/4 cup of olive oil
2 eggs
1 slice of your favorite bread, toasted
Salt and pepper, plus red pepper flakes to taste

Directions:

Over a high flame, heat a heavy cast iron pan.
While the pan is heating, whisk your pesto and olive oil in a small bowl.
Add your pesto and oil mixture to the pan, and let it heat up until shimmering. Lower the heat to medium.
Break your eggs into your bowl, and then gently slide them into the hot pan. (Be careful: The oil will sizzle and sputter!)
As the eggs cook, tip the pan to get the oil to pool. Next, spoon some of your hot oil on top of your eggs, avoiding the yolk.
Continue cooking until the eggs are puffed up and crisp at the edges — no more than a minute.
With a wide spatula, slide your eggs onto your toast. Top with a little more of your pesto oil from the pan, as well as salt and pepper to taste and red pepper flakes.

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7 simple cooking tips for your eco-friendliest kitchen

With The Climate Diet, award-winning food and environmental writer Paul Greenberg offers us the practical, accessible guide we all need. This new release contains fifty achievable steps we can take to live our daily lives in a way that’s friendlier to the planet — from what we eat, how we live at home, how we travel, and how we lobby businesses and elected officials to do the right thing. Here, Paul shares a whole host of simple tips to make our cooking — and yes, our kitchens overall — a whole lot more sustainable.

* * *

With the news this month that Eleven Madison Park, by some measures the most famous restaurant in the world, has gone vegan, I think it’s safe to say climate-conscious menu planning has gone mainstream. Queries for vegan recipes now regularly top Google food searches and any number of plant-based meat replacements are now widely available at American supermarkets, potentially pairing with millions of tons of emissions off of our meals.

But as the notion of putting the country on a climate diet gains traction, we’re coming to the realization that food choices can only take us so far. If we’re aiming to hit President Biden’s net-zero emissions goal for the country by 2050, we’re going to need to reimagine entire systems that we use in our day-to-day life. A major system that we can collectively remake is the one in our kitchen.

So let’s talk about that kitchen. How can we cook in the greenest way possible? There are actually quite a few things we can do both in terms of our daily routines as well as how we equip our kitchens. And, yes, I know you’re busy. You don’t need another flight of tasks to do in getting dinner on the table. So let’s start small and build to big. Step-by-step you can get your kitchen to a much greener place. Here’s a roadmap.

1. Put a lid on it

When we cook we can lose as much as 50% of our cooking energy to the ambient air when we leave our pots exposed. It’s a little tricky adapting to lid-always cooking, and, yes, there is a time and place for cooking off excess liquid. But if you’re doing stovetop for an extended period of time, lid-on is best.

2. Give things a good soak

We know that soaking beans is a good way to reduce cooking time. But did you know this also is a great way to improve the efficiency of baked pasta dishes like macaroni and cheese and lasagna? Soak your dry noodles for 20 minutes ahead of time instead of boiling them, and they can be incorporated into the ready-to-bake dish easily; you’ll even end up with a better al dente bite in the end.

3. Rethink the conventional oven

When baking or broiling small meals for up to three people, cooking in a toaster oven is markedly more energy-efficient than pouring heat into a standard-sized oven. Microwave ovens, though they don’t really do the job of browning food very well, are even more efficient than toaster ovens. A baked potato, for example, takes 15 minutes in a microwave as compared to an hour in a conventional. And when you are using a standard-size oven, because of its heat-retaining abilities, ceramic cookware allows you to lower your oven temperature by as much as 25°F and still get the same thorough cooking effect on your food.

4. Make a heat plan

When you do use your big workhorse oven, remember that you can make use of all the heat still present in your oven after you’ve finished cooking the main event. Akin to a traditional method Indian cooks use to slow-stew dal in the leftover heat of a tandoor, you can put beans, rice, and even tougher cuts of meat in the oven, lid on, and keep the food in there to slow-cook overnight. You may need to finish under some heat the next day, but you’ll still save yourself a lot of cooking energy.

A baking stone many of us use to make bread at home does double duty retaining and evening leftover heat, so consider getting one for your conventional oven. Similarly, boiled water can do double duty. Spinach, thinly sliced zucchini, or other quick-cooking vegetables can be placed in a metal bowl underneath a colander so that when you drain your pasta you also can parboil your sides.

5. Get some help from gadgets

Both Instant Pots and pressure cookers blow doors off standard stovetop cooking methods in terms of energy efficiency. While these tools are of course not suited for every type of cooking, if energy savings is the bottom line, then this is the direction you’d want to head in.

6. Electrify . . .

This might be the hardest sell for the home cook, but it’s really time to rethink the roaring gas stovetop. This is an important step not only because new electrical appliances (like that Instant Pot) are often more efficient than gas ones, but also because natural gas, which has of late been sold to consumers as a cheaper and cleaner alternative, turns out to be invisibly problematic.

Put simply, natural gas is leaky. When you cook on a gas stove, only about 40% of the energy from the flame gets to your food. Besides that, every time you turn on your stove, or every time your water heater fires up, methane leaks into the atmosphere. And before it even gets to your home, gas leaks from the ground during extraction and spurts out of pipelines as it moves from the gas field to home. Methane is more than 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.

What’s more, natural gas is cheap now because a large customer base offsets the cost of its maintenance and expansion. But as renewables drop in price (as they markedly have in the last 10 years), more and more customers will almost certainly switch to electric; those that remain on gas will bear larger individual costs to support a vast and expensive natural gas infrastructure. At the very least, you may want to consider replacing your gas stovetop with an electric one. Induction electric stovetops, which conduct 80 to 90% of cooking energy into your food, can cost under $150 for a simple plug-in, two-burner model.

7. . . . Then bring clean electricity into your home

If you’re going to electrify, you’ll also need to consider bringing green electricity into your home. With more and more renewable energy being incorporated into the national energy grid, it is possible to shop for better power options and route them through the old-style grid without having to lift a screwdriver or spend extra money.

Why can working with the old grid be a good thing? Supply follows demand. If as many of us as possible demand renewable energy, economies of scale will start to lower renewable costs, and the grid itself will begin tilting away from fossil fuels and toward solar and wind. This is already happening to some extent, but we can accelerate the process by choosing to buy into renewables right now.

To convert your energy supply from fossil fuel based to renewable, you will need to contract with what is called an energy service company, or ESCO. Consumers can shop for a renewable energy ESCO at green-e.org. In some states, you can choose an energy service company that can deliver power to your existing utility; in other states, you choose and pay a new company that controls the transaction.

Bonus: Look into local energy options

In my book, “The Climate Diet,” I give ideas for going even further with changing your power sources — like sourcing from a community solar farm; I’ll let you explore that further in the book if you want to do a really deep dive. But in a nutshell, community solar programs are neighborhood-based initiatives that fund the construction of local solar power plants for use by multiple homeowners. Think of it as the electricity equivalent of a CSA. Just as those programs help citizens grow local agriculture, community solar allows communities to build capacity for local power generation. Thirty-nine states now have community solar programs. As with an ESCO, you can shop online for providers and request that community solar be integrated into your electricity supply. Some of the most progressive states — New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Maine—actually subsidize community solar so it can end up being cheaper for individuals, too.

All of this together may sound a bit overwhelming, but you don’t have to do everything all at once. Start with small bites: lid on your pot today, a pot of beans in a cooling oven tomorrow. Over time you’ll find, as I have, that cooking greener can be pretty easy and a fun challenge to boot. And when you finally sit down to eat, it’ll be that much more enjoyable knowing you’ve done what you can to do best by the planet in getting dinner on the table.

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Trump, accountability and why Biden’s DOJ is protecting Bill Barr

It’s only Wednesday but it’s already been quite a week for legal activity in Trumpworld. It’s eerily reminiscent of those heady days back in 2017 and 2018 when everyone assumed that special counselor Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and potential connections to the Trump campaign was going to lay out all the ugly facts, leading to Trump’s impeachment and conviction .. and then planet Earth would tilt back on its axis and we could all resume our normal lives. Yeah, that was dumb. And despite all this latest action from the state of New York as well as the Justice Department and the federal courts, it’s highly likely the outcome will be the same this time.

There is some news that could change the equation, however, depending — once again — on what the authorities have uncovered. If they do have the goods, it then depends on whether or not the prosecutors have the guts to take Trump and his cronies to court over it.

On Tuesday night, the Washington Post reported that the Manhattan District Attorney has convened a special grand jury to hear evidence in the investigation into the Trump Organization. This news comes after the recent announcement from the Attorney General of New York that her office was working with the DA on a possible criminal case in addition to the civil case they’ve been investigating for some time. The instant commentary on Tuesday from various experienced prosecutors suggests that it would be unusual for a DA to do this unless they believed they have evidence that a crime was committed so it would appear that someone is on the hot seat.

We have no idea what the evidence is, but we do know that the DA’s office recently received the Trump tax returns after years of delay. The hiring of an experienced white-collar prosecutor who had years of experience unraveling complex criminal financial webs reportedly jump-started the investigation. According to the various leaks and comments by people who have spoken with the investigators, the prosecution is putting the squeeze on Trump’s top money man, CFO Allen Weisselberg and his family. The assumption is that they are trying to get him to flip on Trump. The special grand jury has been seated for 6 months and it can renew so we may be in for a wait to see what that’s all about.

Meanwhile, in a blast from the past, we finally saw the release on Monday of some of the material in the Paul Manafort case after it was ordered by a federal judge. Everyone had wondered what exactly was known about Manafort and his Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik. It turns out it was a lot. As Salon’s Jon Skolnik reported, the previously redacted portions of the documents show Manafort was “sharing internal confidential polling data covered by a non-disclosure agreement…outside the campaign, but he’s sharing it with a foreign national with a specific understanding and intent that it would be passed on to other foreign nationals, in this case Russians.” Rachel Maddow helpfully explained what it meant:

What we thought happened, happened. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, sharing this kind of data with a Russian intelligence officer is the proverbial smoking gun in terms of how the Trump campaign was involved in it.

Manafort was not the coffee boy. He was the campaign chairman and he knew that Trump would pardon him.

The president of the United States never had to answer for any of this, which brings us to the other big legal news dump this week (so far, at least). The same federal judge who released the Manafort files, Amy Jackson Berman, was equally hot under the collar when the Trump Justice Department lied to the court. (Judges really, really don’t like that. ) She had ordered the DOJ to release the memo that former Attorney General Bill Barr had used to justify his decision to announce that the department did not believe Trump’s behavior rose to the level of obstruction despite the massive evidence in Mueller’s report. Judge Jackson read the unredacted memo and said she believes that the people have a right to see it. Biden’s DOJ disagrees.

I think everyone has expected the new attorney general, Merrick Garland, to comply with the judge’s order in order to assure the public of its commitment to transparency. That didn’t work out. The DOJ released only the first page and a half of the nine-page memo and said they were appealing the judge’s order, claiming that the department was not intentionally misleading in saying that the memo guided Barr’s decision when, in fact, he helped craft it after the fact.

Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal on MSNBC expressed extreme disappointment in the decision saying:

I used to make those decisions at the Justice Department and I get why they would do this in an ordinary case because you want to protect prosecutors and these memos are about the prosecutor’s thinking in a case. Ordinarily that is protected. But this is the furthest case from ordinary imaginable. This is about a cover-up potentially and protection of the Attorney General’s boss, the President of the United States.

I am not surprised, however.

I never thought the DOJ would do anything at all to pursue what went on in the Barr regime. These “institutionalists” always think the best way to restore their credibility is to sweep the past under the rug and just do a good job going forward. And that always ends up just normalizing the pathological behavior of the Republican Party.

Institutionalists are terrified of being further politicized. The right is shameless and couldn’t care less if people accuse them of being rank partisans but anyone with integrity is deeply uncomfortable with that. And there’s a guy out there with a weirdly acute understanding of people’s weaknesses who knows exactly how to exploit that to his advantage. Here’s what Trump wrote on his blog in response to the news of the NY Grand Jury on Tuesday night:

This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors… Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I’m far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024.

As you can see, he is inciting his followers to once again see any legal action against him as a partisan attack against them. (If they were Republicans, he’d just call them RINOs for the same effect. He said it about his own DOJ!) In fact, his probable run for president in 2024 is at least partly motivated by this dynamic. Any legal action will be framed as partisan sabotage and after January 6th it has the added frisson of a subtle threat of violence.

Will anyone really be brave enough to call him on this and hold him accountable? Stay tuned. There’s a lot of legal activity out there. I just wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Stark racial disparities persist in vaccinations, state-level CDC data shows

Black Americans’ covid-19 vaccination rates are still lagging months into the nation’s campaign, while Hispanics are closing the gap and Native Americans show the highest rates overall, according to federal data obtained by KHN.

The data, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to a public records request, gives a sweeping national look at the race and ethnicity of vaccinated people on a state-by-state basis. Yet nearly half of those vaccination records are missing race or ethnicity information.

KHN’s analysis shows that only 22% of Black Americans have gotten a shot, and Black rates still trail those of whites in almost every state.

Targeted efforts have raised vaccination rates among other minority groups. Hispanics in eight states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are now vaccinated at higher rates than non-Hispanic whites. Yet 29% of Hispanics are vaccinated nationally, compared with 33% of whites.

While 45% of Native Americans have received at least one dose, stark differences exist depending on where they live. And Asian vaccination rates are high in most states, with 41% getting a shot.

The analysis underscores how vaccine disparities have improved as availability has opened up and Biden administration officials have attempted to prioritize equitable distribution. Still, gaps persist even as minority groups have suffered much higher mortality rates from the pandemic than whites and are at risk of infection as states move to reopen and lift mask mandates.

Despite these lingering gaps, the CDC said last week that those who are fully vaccinated don’t need to wear masks in most indoor and outdoor settings or physically distance. Only 38% of Americans are fully vaccinated.

“Every day we do not reach a person or a community is a day in which there is a preventable covid case that happens and a preventable covid death in these communities,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California-San Francisco.

KHN requested race and ethnicity data from the CDC on people who have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine since mid-December for all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The data covers shots as of May 14 given to 155 million people that were administered through federally run programs and federal agencies as well as by state and local authorities.

Eight states — Alabama, California, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming — either refuse to provide race and ethnicity details to the CDC or are missing that information for more than 60% of people vaccinated. Those states are excluded from the KHN analysis, though the CDC includes all but Texas in its published national rates.

Some states display race and ethnicity for vaccine recipients separately, making it difficult to compare rates for Hispanics to non-Hispanic whites, for example. But the CDC data allows for direct comparisons. It reports numbers for Hispanics, who can be of any race or combination of races, as well as numbers for non-Hispanic people of single-race or multiracial categories.

The data for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders is unreliable, making it difficult to draw conclusions on the vaccination rate in that population.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, wasn’t surprised that Black Americans’ vaccination rates were still lagging, citing a complex combination of access issues, hesitancy and structural inequity.

Benjamin pointed to the early challenges in securing an appointment online and the initial placement of vaccination sites — which he noted the Biden administration had worked to improve.

“We’re going to be judged whether or not we did it equitably at the end of the day,” he said. “Right now, I still think we’re failing.”

Dr. Utibe Essien, a health equity researcher and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, stressed that targeted outreach must involve multiple institutions in a community.

“It’s not just the Black doctor, it’s not just the barber, it’s not just the pastor, kind of these traditional folks who have been the big messengers. We have to be broad,” he said. “It’s investing in folks who know the neighborhood, the small-store owner who gets to see all the 12- to 15-year-old kids come through the store getting snacks before they head off to school.”

Why Native Americans Lead in Vaccinations

Nationally, Native Americans and Alaska Natives have been vaccinated at significantly higher rates than other groups. Tribes administered doses quickly, prioritizing elders with culturally important knowledge, said Meredith Raimondi, director of congressional relations and public policy for the National Council of Urban Indian Health. The rollout was imbued with urgency: Native Americans have died of covid at more than double the rate of white Americans, according to the latest CDC data.

Native vaccination rates are higher than white rates in 28 states, including New Mexico, Arizona and Alaska, where many receive care from tribal health centers and the Indian Health Service. In states such as South Carolina and Tennessee, where IHS access is more limited and Native residents are more likely to live in urban areas, vaccination rates are far lower than for white residents.

Groups in those areas reported problems finding health care providers to administer shots. Tribal organizations compiled lists of retired nurses to tap for clinics. At one point, staffers from an Oklahoma City clinic for Native Americans offered to fly to Washington, D.C., to help vaccinate Indigenous people living around the nation’s capital, Raimondi said.

“It became an issue of, ‘Well, we could get you the vaccine, but we don’t know who is going to administer them,'” Raimondi said.

The council and Native American Lifelines, a nonprofit providing health services, partnered with the University of Maryland-Baltimore for a vaccination site exclusively for Native Americans living in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. It launched in April.

While the vaccination rates for Native Americans surpass those of whites in some states due in part to IHS, that infrastructure does not exist for Black Americans, said Rhonda BeLue, the department chair of health management policy at Saint Louis University.

At the beginning of the pandemic, people were shocked by how much more likely Black Americans were to die from covid, she said.

“However, the same structural inequities that caused that disproportionate mortality in covid are the same structural inequities that predated covid and caused disproportionate burdens of morbidity and mortality,” she said. “This isn’t new.”

Easing Fears in Hispanic Communities

Some states are reporting higher vaccination rates among Hispanics than white and Black residents, which Bibbins-Domingo said fits with surveys showing high enthusiasm for vaccination among Hispanics. It also indicates that some of the reported barriers may have been addressed more effectively in those states, she said.

Paul Berry, chair of the Virginia Latino Advisory Board, partly attributes Virginia’s success to targeted outreach efforts. The state and certain counties also increased Spanish-language resources to boost sign-ups.

Connecting with every community cannot be an afterthought, said Diego Abente, president and CEO of St. Louis’ Casa de Salud, a health care provider focused on immigrant communities. Community buy-in, effective social media use and language programming from the start have been essential, he said. Hispanics have a higher vaccination rate than whites in Missouri.

But nationally, a dearth of transportation options, an inability to take off from work to get a vaccine, and concerns about documentation and privacy have dampened uptake among Hispanics, according to experts.

“To me it’s more about access to health care,” Berry said. “If you don’t live close to health care, you’re just going to shrug it off immediately. ‘I can’t get that vaccination. I’m going to miss work.'”

To reduce fear among Idaho agricultural workers that may be part of mixed-immigration status families, public health workers emphasized messaging that documentation wouldn’t be required, said Monica Schoch-Spana, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She has helped lead its CommuniVax project seeking to boost uptake among Black, Hispanic and Indigenous communities.

It’s also important to engage trusted institutions to administer vaccines, Schoch-Spana said: “Is it a familiar place, does it feel safe, and is it easy to get to?”

Federal efforts have placed sites in underserved neighborhoods. About 60% of shots at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vaccination sites and at community health centers were given to people of color, federal health officials said this week.

Incomplete Data Collection

Race or ethnicity information is still missing for nearly 69 million vaccinated people — or 44% — in the CDC data, despite vows by federal officials to improve outdated systems to better inform their response.

CDC spokesperson Kate Fowlie said their efforts, including sharing strategies for capturing demographic data and reducing data gaps with state and local governments, have resulted in improvements in data collection. Officials are also planning to allow agencies to update previously submitted vaccine records. The true national rates by race or ethnicity group would each be higher with complete data.

Unlike the federal government, North Carolina made it nearly impossible for providers to submit vaccine data without recording race and ethnicity. As a result, it has the most complete demographic data of any state.

Adding that step was not an easy sell — providers and other vaccinators were initially resistant, said Kody Kinsley, the chief deputy secretary for health at the North Carolina health department. But it has paid off in the state’s ability to target its response to populations getting left behind, he said.

Bibbins-Domingo said the federal government and states need to make collecting this vaccination data by race mandatory, because data drives the response to the pandemic.

“The feds know how to do this. They do it every 10 years for the census,” she said. “That we somehow cannot figure it out in public health data is quite simply unacceptable.”

KHN reporter Victoria Knight contributed to this report.

Visit the Github repository to read more about and download the data.

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

WHO chief decries “scandalous” vaccine inequality where rich nations control “fate of the world”

A day after data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that nearly half of the adult population in the country has been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, the head of the World Health Organization on Monday sharply criticizedthe “scandalous inequity” of global vaccine access and said no single nation can assume it’s safe from the virus until all are.

“Almost 18 months into the defining health crisis of our age, the world remains in a very dangerous situation,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his opening remarks to the organization’s annual assembly of health ministers. Underscoring the danger, the WHO said in a report last week that the global death toll from Covid-19 is likely two to three times higher than officially reported, claiming the lives of as many as eight million people thus far.

Despite a downtown in Covid-19 cases and deaths over past three weeks, Tedros warned that the situation is still “fragile.”

“No country should assume it is out of the woods,” he said, “no matter its vaccination rate.”

Among the concerns Tedros laid out is that the constantly changing nature of the virus could mean that current vaccines will be ineffective against new variants.

“We must be very clear,” he said. “The pandemic is not over, and it will not be over until and unless transmission is controlled in every last country.”

Key to making that happen is for nations to share vaccines with COVAX, the WHO-led global initiative, said Tedros. Right now, he said, COVAX is facing a “vastly inadequate” supply of doses.

Some wealthy nations like the U.S., meanwhile, have a surplus of vaccine doses.

“The ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic,” Tedros said. “More than 75% of all vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries.”

“There is no diplomatic way to say it: A small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world’s vaccines control[s] the fate of the rest of the world,” he said.

There is simply “not enough supply” globally, which means that “countries that vaccinate children and other low-risk groups now do so at the expense of health workers and high-risk groups in other countries,” said Tedros. “That’s the reality.”

Looking ahead to the WHO’s September goal of having at least 10% of the population of every country vaccinated and its December goal of having at least 30% vaccinated, Tedros said member states must ensure that they urgently direct to COVAX “hundreds of millions more doses.” Vaccine makers must also offer new batches first to COVAX or commit 50% of their volumes to COVAX this year.

Part of the shortage problem was put at the feet of Big Pharma.

“Several manufacturers have said they have capacity to produce vaccines if the originator companies are willing to share licenses, technology, and know-how,” said Tedros. “I find it difficult to understand why this has not happened yet.”

A good effort, by contrast, is the proposal at the World Trade Organization for a temporary waiver of intellectual property protections on coronavirus-related vaccines and technology, he said, and welcomed recent U.S. support for it.

As policymakers plot out Covid-19 recovery plans for a future in which it’s “an evolutionary certainty that there will be another virus with the potential to be more transmissible and more deadly than this one,” Tedros cautioned against “tinkering at the edges,” saying it’s instead “the moment for bold ideas, bold commitment, and bold leadership; for doing things that have never been done before.”

“In fact,” he added, “the only choice we have is between cooperation and insecurity.”

Unknown number of farmers’ markets expected to permanently close due to pandemic hardships

Before the coronavirus pandemic, farmers’ markets were more than simply a place to pick up a pint of fresh strawberries or the makings for a week full of lunch salads. They were places to gather and converse — the very heart of a community.

“It’s the must-do Saturday morning activity. It’s as much a social event as an opportunity to purchase local food,” says Tara Eaker, the event administrator for the City of Greenville, South Carolina, which operates the TD Greenville Saturday Market.

In its 19th year, the Greenville market typically attracts anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 people to the city’s Main Street for its four hour market held every Saturday, May through October. Residents and tourists shop from more than 80 tents purchasing local food and other items, watching cooking demonstrations, listening to live music and more. When the pandemic hit, the coronavirus completely changed that experience. Gone were any nonessential parts of the market. There was no more lingering to talk; instead, organizers asked people to come with a shopping list, get their items and go home. Like the Greenville Saturday Market, markets across the country completely restructured operations during the pandemic’s height, and many questioned how to best support the community under the restricted conditions. Fast forward a year, as vaccines roll out, grocery stores feel less scary and restaurants reopen for indoor dining, and farmers’ markets are still asking themselves that question. They’re trying to figure out what they look like now and how to continue to provide fresh, local, healthy food to their communities amidst continued uncertainty.

“In Berkeley right now, people are just really, really tired,” says Carle Brinkman, food and farming program director at Ecology Center which runs farmers’ markets in Berkeley California, as well as convening the Berkeley Food Policy Council, the Berkeley Climate Action Coalition, and the California Alliance of Farmers’ Markets. “There is a real physical and emotional exhaustion that comes from operating a business and keeping people safe,” she says, sharing that they are looking at the feasibility of adding back in music, hot food, samples, and more to the city’s market. “We’re trying to figure out how do we have resilience, how do we replenish ourselves, what does [a normal] reopening look like?”

How farmers’ markets serve their communities

In 1994, there were fewer than 2,000 farmers’ markets throughout the U.S. As interest in the local food movement grew, so did markets, to more than 8,800 throughout the U.S., before the pandemic. However, an as of yet unknown number are expected to close permanently due to the hardships of the past year.

“Some markets closed permanently,” said Ben Feldman, executive director of the Farmers Market Coalition, a nonprofit that supports local markets across the country. “Farmers’ market operators had a very tough year, many had income decline while costs increased to continue to run the markets in a manner that is safe. It’s been a hard year.”

The impact of losing farmers’ markets would be massive. Not only are they the heart of many communities but they serve as a vital part of many farmer’s business models.

When we think of farmers’ markets, we often think of farmers and fresh local food, but it’s easy to overlook the people that make the markets happen. Just as every community is different, every farmers’ market is different and runs differently. The Greenville market, for instance, is run by the city. In contrast, the Berkeley Farmers’ Market is run as part of a nonprofit, as is the Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market, which is run by the nonprofit, the Greater Des Moines Partnership. Others, like the Bath Farmers Market in Maine, don’t have the backing of larger organizations.

While there was a huge level of diversity in how markets were impacted, community partnerships played a role in some markets thriving.

“One of the biggest lessons learned is that market operators that had robust community partnerships were better able to mitigate the worst impacts of COVID,” says Feldman. “For example, markets with stronger relationships with elected officials and municipal governments were more likely to be specifically identified as essential and receive guidance on how to operate safely. And that’s true across the type of partnerships.”

It’s something that Cameron Campbell, special events coordinator for the City of Greenville, South Carolina, saw firsthand. Campbell believes that the city running their market was instrumental in making the market resilient.

“Our farmers were taken care of, the consumers were taken care of and the community was taken care of and that happened because of the commitment of the city to pull it together,” Campbell says. “I really commend the city leadership for their commitment to run the market.”

In addition to community support another factor in how markets did was location.

“In general, markets that relied on commuters and tourists were hardest hit, while markets that were rural saw increases [in sales] and many markets saw fewer customers but sales were up as people stocked up for longer periods of time,” Feldman says.

How some markets thrived and survived

For many farmers whose business had previously relied on restaurants, supermarkets, and wholesale, farmers’ markets were lifelines.

“It was a vital component of our sales,” says Chris Sermons of Bio-Way Farm, who has been selling at the Greenville Saturday Market for 13 years. Sermons lost many of his restaurant sales but doubled Community Supported Agriculture shares and felt the market, while not as good as in 2019, still provided an essential source of revenue.

The coronavirus pandemic forced many markets to alter their services. Some like the Bath Farmers Market created additional ways for people to shop, such as online stores where people could preorder from multiple vendors and then pick up on the market days.

“We got new customers that we had never seen before, that really hadn’t shopped locally,” says Juliana Hoffmann, the online store coordinator of Bath Farmers Market.

Others, like the Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market, created programs to engage with customers, including hour-long virtual market meetups, digital vendor databases, an online vendor marketplace and a drive-through market.

“These changes were successful in helping connect customers to local vendors, but we are excited to get back to a more traditional market format in 2021 and beyond,” says Kelly Foss, director of the Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market.

Just what that traditional market will look like is still unknown for many of the markets. The Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market is moving forward with a scaled-back market, which will include as many as 115 vendors but will be spaced out more than normal. Market-goers will be required to wear masks, social distance and will be encouraged to order online in advance. All of the markets interviewed for this article are planning to take it one step at a time, continuously evaluating local, state and federal guidelines that are expected to change as COVID-19 virus infection levels and vaccination rates fluctuate in their areas.

“It’s going to be a work in progress,” Campbell says of the Greenville market. “We’ll remain conservative to maintain the health of the event staff, vendors and public but we are prepared and committed to offer a traditional experience if the opportunity arises.”

For Greenville that means the market will remain fenced in (as a crowd control measure)and they’ll continue to limit the number of vendors and visitors to make sure customers adhere to social distancing measures .

But the markets and the vendors are looking forward to the season that is just beginning and for the additional, more traditional services they might be able to offer.

“In person there’s the community aspect. I think it’s going to be busy,” says Maine’s Hoffmann.

Many are also hopeful that a silver lining of the past year will be sustained interest in cooking at home and in local food systems.

Anti-vaccine movements shift their target to the vaccinated

Myths around infertility, pregnancy and miscarriages have run rampant in anti-vaccine circles for years — and in the universe of their conspiracy theories, vaccines are often to blame. While variations of such false claims have been part of misinformation campaigns around the COVID-19 vaccines, there has recently been a shift from demonizing the vaccine itself to villainizing those who are vaccinated.

It’s a peculiar repositioning for the anti-vaccination conspiracy movement — and as the false claim evolves into more extreme iterations, it has caught the attention of people who study and advocate against vaccine misinformation.

“I think it is particularly interesting that people are saying that those who are vaccinated are a risk to those who aren’t,” said David Broniatowski, who’s the associate director for the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University. “It’s like taking the common vaccine conventional wisdom and flipping it on its head where people will say, ‘if you have not been vaccinated, you’re a risk to those who are more vulnerable and vaccinated.'”

Broniatowski said he’s never seen this before in the history of anti-vaccine rhetoric.

“This is the first time,” Broniatowski said.

The conspiracy centers on one particular myth that people who are vaccinated can emit contagious particles of the coronavirus’s Spike protein and can infect others, a process referred to as “vaccine shedding.” Vaccine shedding is a very rare possibility with live-attenuated vaccines that use a diluted version of a disease to stimulate an immune response. In the rare case there’s enough germ to spread, the shedding usually happens via feces— for example, with the polio vaccine or the measles vaccine.

“For the measles vaccine, later in life — and again this is super rare — it’s possible that the live virus could revert to a condition called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE),” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco. “But in no way can you shed it and give it to someone.”

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But this issue is moot in the case of messenger RNA, or mRNA vaccines, like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — which the majority of the vaccinated American population has been administered with. These kinds of vaccines work by instructing the body to make a bespoke Spike protein to trigger an immune response. After an immune response is triggered, the protein disappears. In other words, viral shedding is an impossibility for these mRNA vaccines.

“Just because you yourself make the Spike protein yourself, and that’s the design of the vaccine, that spike protein is just a fragment of the live virus,” Gandhi said. “It is in no way alive or capable of infecting anyone else.”

But even though the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are adenovirus vaccines, it is impossible for shedding to occur in the case of these vaccines. That’s because they don’t actually contain weakened versions of the coronavirus; rather, they contain weak adenoviruses that have been modified to contain a piece of coronavirus DNA.

In other words, vaccinated people cannot shed the coronavirus, and thus they aren’t contagious.

Despite the “vaccine shedding” myth being continuously debunked by credible sources, iterations of the claim are becoming increasingly popular. Peculiarly, these myths have a tinge of sexism, as many of them revolve around false claims about women’s bodies, mirroring other falsehoods about women that have existed for centuries.

Specifically, there have been forms of the false claim that a vaccinated woman’s menstrual cycle can throw off an unvaccinated woman’s cycle, stoking fear and sowing divides between vaccinated and unvaccinated women. Naomi Wolf, a bestselling author who has been pushing conspiracy theories around the COVID-19 vaccines repeatedly, has tweeted about the claim a couple times.

“Well hundreds of women on this page say they are having bleeding/ clotting after vaccination or that they bleed oddly being AROUND vaccinated women,” Wolf tweeted, referring to a discussion in a Facebook group.

The consequences of variations of this myth extend beyond misinformation online and into the real world. As reported by NBC News, the owner of a butcher shop in Ontario, Canada, banned all people who were vaccinated from COVID-19 to protect unvaccinated female customers.

“We have decided that since the majority of our customers are women and since women are most at risk for these side effects, we ask that if you’ve been vaccinated to please order for curbside pickup or delivery for 28 days after being vaccinated,” the post read on Instagram.

A separate store in Canada banned vaccinated customers for a fear of vaccinated people “shedding” the coronavirus to its unvaccinated customers. In the U.S., a private school in Miami barred vaccinated teachers from coming into contact with students. The same school threatened the employment of its vaccinated teachers.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), told Salon those incidences are “isolated” but the peculiar shift in blame from vaccines to the vaccinated is a strategic response to unvaccinated people being seen as a threat, as they can be potential carriers of the coronavirus.

“The problem that anti-vaxxers are having is they’re asking people to become disgusting to other people [by not getting vaccinated], and they know that that’s a major barrier to people accepting their recommendations, which is that people don’t want to be seen as disgusting,” Ahmed said. “So what they’re doing is trying to muddy the waters in this crucial battleground — what is it that people find to be disgusting, a potential disease vector? And they’re saying, ‘Hey, you’re not the disease vector by being unvaccinated, they’re the disease vector.'”

Ahmed added it’s likely that they’ve latched on to the idea of vaccine shedding because it’s “vaguely scientific.”

However, claims like those pushed by Wolf — stories about unvaccinated women’s menstrual cycles being affected by those of vaccinated women — are curious in that they both target and demonize women.

“There have been a number of disinformation campaigns that have explicitly targeted women of childbearing age,” Broniatowski explained.

Ahmed said that anti-vaccination rhetoric can be “tailored” to the specific audience that it’s being marketed to. Indeed, some prominent anti-vaccination social media accounts begin life as health and wellness influencers, posting pseudoscientific and “holistic” remedies before devolving into anti-vaccination propaganda. In other cases, social media algorithms observe their users following pseudoscientific pages and then recommend more “extreme” anti-vaccination propaganda pages.

For instance, a group called Children’s Health Defense, whose Instagram page has over 217,000 followers, bills its mission as “End[ing] childhood health epidemics by exposing causes, eliminating harmful exposures; seeking justice for injured and establishing safeguards.” Social media posts from Children’s Health Defense often involve claims of varying veracity about pesticides or nutrition; a parent interested in such topics might reasonably follow their page, not knowing that media watchdogs widely regard Children’s Health Defense as a fount of pseudoscience and quackery. Yet those who the organization’s website are apt to discover blog posts that parrot misinformation about fertility and the COVID-19 vaccine.

Ahmed explained that this kind of content often targets women, getting them in the door before propagandizing anti-vaccination pseudoscience. This is precisely, Ahmed said, what anti-vaxxers want. Indeed, Ahmed noted that anti-vaxxers can “profit” from spreading misinformation, though that “profit” can be political, economic or psychological.

“And then you’ve got the vaccine hesitant, who are like, ‘I just don’t know what to do, I’m hearing all this stuff and I’m worried’ — and then you have the people in the middle layer, which is the mid-level marketers of the anti-vaccine movement, who are taking action based on the information given to them.”

Notably, many of these false claims that make their rounds circling the internet only come from a small group of people.

“We know that 65 percent of the misinformation shared on social media originates from just 12 individuals and the companies . . . that they use to promote their information,” Ahmed said. “There are specific individuals within that who target women and women who are interested in health and wellness.”

Maddow demands to know why attorney general is “trying to paper over what Barr did to protect Trump”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow attacked President Joe Biden’s Justice Department on Tuesday for a “humiliating” and “gross” court filing defending former Attorney General Bill Barr for his coverup of Donald Trump’s crimes while in office.

At the start of the segment, she explained that Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland can only deny Trump’s crimes for “so long.”

“Two things to know about the Justice Department under Merrick Garland making the decision to appeal this judge’s ruling, to try to continue to keep secret the document that Trump’s Justice Department prepared about whether or not to charge him with criminal obstruction of justice,” Maddow explained. “The first thing to know about the Justice Department now appealing this ruling and fighting to keep this document secret, the first thing to know about it is that the brief filed here, the reasoning explained by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is humiliating. It’s abject and humiliating. Throughout the brief filed with the court late last night, the Justice Department, the current Justice Department is just crawling and scraping about how they didn’t mean what they said and how sorry they are, that it looked the way that the judge thought it looked but they didn’t mean it to look that way, and now in retrospect, they can see how misleading their previous statement seemed to the court when Bill Barr was attorney general but please, couldn’t they be forgiven for that? I know you think I’m being hyperbolic, but this is the actual language filed with the court.”

She went on to read the examples of the filings that she called it downright “gross.”

“The other thing to know about it, the other thing to at least ask about all of this is, however, this resolves with the Justice Department and what gets released to the public and what doesn’t, and this question of why the new attorney general is trying to paper over what Barr did to protect Trump and to try to exclude even from the courts the question of Trump’s potential liability.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Historian wonders: Is Joe Biden “a speed bump on the fascists’ march to power”?

On Jan. 6, Donald Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election turned kinetic, and inspired an attempted coup against American democracy. At the very least, Republicans aided and abetted Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and some of them are likely co-conspirators in his plot. They have pledged to prevent an independent investigation into the events of Jan. 6, and are continuing their assault on democracy by imposing a new form of Jim Crow-style apartheid across the county. Their goal: winning and keeping power by preventing Black and brown people and other key Democratic constituencies from exercising their right to vote.

As part of their commitment to overthrowing America’s multiracial democracy, the Jim Crow Republicans continue to amplify and weaponize Trump’s Big Lie. Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that this disinformation propaganda strategy is highly effective. Trump’s cult members remain in thrall to their Great Leader and eagerly await his return by any means necessary, legal or otherwise.

The past is not always a perfect prologue. But when the past echoes so loudly in the present one would be wise not to ignore it. History’s bell is ringing loudly in the Age of Trump in America.

In a recent essay for the Los Angeles Times, historian Benjamin Carter Hett explored the frightening resonances between Adolf Hitler’s attempted coup in Germany in 1923 (what has come to be known as the “Beer Hall Putsch”) and Trump and his followers’ coup attempt this past January:

Hitler learned his lesson: A sophisticated modern state could not be overturned by a violent coup led by outsiders, against the police and the army. He realized he would have to work within the system.

Over the following decade, this is exactly what he did. The Nazis ran in elections until they were the largest party in Germany’s parliament, gridlocking legislative business. Even more insidiously, the Nazis worked to infiltrate crucial institutions like the police and the army. In 1931, Berlin police responded incredibly sluggishly to a massive Nazi riot in the center of the city. It turned out senior police officials silently sympathized with the Nazis and had colluded in hobbling the police response.

Hitler grew steadily more attractive to business and military leaders who saw him and his movement as their only salvation from the growing Communist Party. Early in 1933 they opened the doors of power to him. …

After the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, 139 Republican members of the House and eight members of the Senate, led by Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, came out of hiding to vote to object to the electoral college vote count. While a police officer lay dying, they supported Trump’s lie of a stolen election and embraced the insurrectionists’ cause.

Hett then engages in a particularly disturbing what-if scenario, one that has troubled many people familiar with the patterns of history:

Imagine the events of the past weeks and months if someone like Hawley had been the secretary of state in Georgia, or someone like retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn held a significant military command. Imagine what would have happened if the Republicans held majorities in both houses of Congress and could have overturned the electoral college results. Imagine if the courts had been more generously stocked with judges willing to entertain the Trump campaign’s ludicrous arguments.

Above all, imagine if the president had been a bit more competent, a bit more strategic, a bit more daring. Hitler, after all, was at least willing to be present at the violence his words inspired. He was also more persuasive in his dealings with important officials.

Ultimately, Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol were little more than a trial run. With the Republican Party’s rejection of democracy, the events of Jan. 6 will not seem like an outlier or aberration for long. Instead, they offer a preview of how today’s Republican Party will respond when and if it loses future elections.

I recently spoke with Hett about the events of Jan. 6 and his concerns about the health of American democracy in the aftermath of that day. He is a professor of history at Hunter College and the City University of New York and the author of several books, including “Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation Into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery” and “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.” His newest book is “The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War.”

In this conversation, Hett warns that American democracy is in crisis and that the Republican anti-democracy strategy is more dangerous to the future of the country than the singular events of Jan. 6. He also explores the similarities between Hitler’s use of the Big Lie and the way Donald Trump and his followers are deploying it today.

At the end of this conversation, Hett discusses the ways Joe Biden’s attempts to move the country past the horrors of the Age of Trump resemble German leaders’ efforts to reinvigorate democracy after World War II and deal with the Nazis still in their midst.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you making sense of America’s national amnesia and this deep desire to forget and move along from the events of Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the U.S. Capitol?

It is terrifying. Perhaps only half of Americans want to forget what happened that day and to brush it away — but it’s a politically relevant half. I’m more worried about American politics now than I was several years ago. Even though Trump is no longer president, he has done great damage to the country. His legacy has been so damaging. Jan. 6 crystallizes it.

The Republicans have become thoroughly imbued by this spirit of denying obvious facts, believing in total fantasies and explicitly abandoning democracy if the results are not what they like. We are seeing this on the state level, where Republicans are putting in place laws that limit access to voting and even going so far as to give state legislatures ultimate authority over the vote. Who knows what is going to happen with the midterms next year? The outlook is not particularly good. This is a perilous time.

As a historian of modern Germany, what did you see when you watched the events of Jan. 6?

Jan. 6 looked like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. There are a number of similarities, both in the kinds of people who were involved, in the way it was organized, and how Trump’s followers who were attempting the coup are networked to some quite powerful people.

Another similarity between the events of Jan. 6 and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, at least in the short-term, was failure. Hitler’s 1923 coup was just not going to succeed, because a modern state is a sophisticated and deeply entrenched entity. To overturn it, you must do it from the inside. Hitler’s forces were mostly outside the system. They did have some connections to powerful people on the inside, but not enough. You were not going to overturn the Berlin government from a Munich beer hall.

With the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, even if it had turned out even worse than what did occur, and had killed a lot more people, that in and of itself would not overturn American democracy. The troubling thing to me is what happens going forward, because now one of the country’s two main political parties, the Republicans, is pretty much openly against democracy. The Republicans have a great amount of institutional power. In a year and a half or so they may have control of both houses of Congress. In three more years, they may have control of the presidency. Imagine a President Josh Hawley? What a troubling thought.

As I see it, Trump’s coup attempt was a great success for the far right. Too many professional smart people and hope peddlers want to claim that it was a failure because many of Trump’s followers were arrested. Anyone who argues such a thing does not understand storytelling and the political imagination. The Trumpists and other neofascists won the presidency and were in power for four years. They left an indelible stain on American society. They now have the imagery of overrunning the Capitol to draw strength from. It was an impossible dream come true, and it happened in a very short amount of time.

There is a narrative they could take from Jan. 6 that is akin to what the Nazis did after the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It became almost a triumphalist story of what they almost achieved. The Nazis who were killed in the firefight when they encountered police and soldiers were made into great martyrs of the movement. You are correct that Jan. 6 could be made use of in that way.

But I am still less worried about the Capitol attack than I am about who is going to be the next Republican candidate for president. Now, it may all come together. The far-right narrative of Jan. 6 could be a way for achieving a Republican presidency and control of Congress, and undermining democracy on the state level.

How do you locate the rise of Trumpism and American neofascism in a longer history?

It is possible that Joe Biden will be a speed bump on the fascists’ march to power. That is the optimistic way to see it, which is not an impossible outcome. The strategy that Biden is employing may whittle back just enough votes so that America has civilized outcomes from its near-future elections.

Biden has played his cards very well so far. Obviously what he’s trying to do is use the resources of the government to improve the lives of enough people, including the kinds of people who are solidly Republicans at the moment, with the goal of peeling some of them off — or at the least, keeping them from voting for more extreme Republicans.

The most optimistic scenario is that we will look back on this era with Trump in much the same way we look back on McCarthyism. It was a bad moment when our politics were scary, but sanity somewhat reasserted itself after a number of years.

What parallels do you see between Trump and the larger right-wing movement’s use of the Big Lie, as compared to the way Hitler and the Nazis used it?

There is a rather striking parallel between the two uses of the Big Lie. Hitler’s narrative about the end of World War I and Germany being “stabbed in the back” was not unique to him. It was common on the right.

The Big Lie has to ride on a bunch of little lies. The other aspect of it is that the Big Lie is believed by people who just really, really want to believe it. That’s what makes the Big Lie find fertile ground. The people who support Trump really want to believe that he did not lose the 2020 election. When Trump’s voice is then magnified by the right-wing media, and he’s saying that the election was stolen, those who really want to believe it are going to buy into the lie. They can choose to live in their own reality. There is an entire right-wing media ecosphere which creates that alternate reality.

White supremacy and other right-wing violence presents the greatest current threat to the country’s domestic safety and security. Can this violence be turned off?

You cannot turn it off all at once. I believe you can gradually turn it down, like a burner on a stove. After World War II, the Germans had been through two wars in what was basically a generation. Almost any male under the age of 35 or 40, if they were still alive, had seen combat. Many millions of people are implicated in the Holocaust and other atrocities. The Germans also had 12 years of a dictatorship bombarding them with propaganda. That propaganda was internalized by much of the German public. In total, this is a very unpromising foundation for a democracy. To me, one of the amazing stories in human history is how, from that very unpromising start, within about a decade and a half a quite successful democracy had been created. How do you do that?

There are lessons here for the United States. Konrad Adenauer was Chancellor of Germany from 1949 to 1963. His strategy was basically to do everything possible to bring prosperity, on the theory that prosperity would take the edge off a lot of that violence and hate. It worked: The ’50s are still known today in Germany as the era of an economic miracle. That eventually brought a lot of people into the tent. There were still hardcore Nazis in the 1950s in West Germany. They did not like the government. However, they got jobs and a new car and a new TV and they were doing OK economically. That helped to tune down the violence.

The other part of Adenauer’s strategy was to draw a line under the past. There was a kind of implicit deal in his Germany towards ex-Nazis — including the worst of them — that if you put that behind you, if you give up violence and political extremism and come into the tent, we’ll forget what you did. After the West German government was put in control of its own legal processes, there were virtually no prosecutions of war criminals. The German government really let it go, and it worked. There was not the same narrative of Germany in the 1920s, where there was a democracy with a lot of enemies on the right who are outside the tent and who ultimately destroyed it.

Whether Joe Biden realizes it or not, in his own way he is following a similar strategy. I believe that is a strategy which may work.

Of course, the United States is not Nazi Germany, and America is also not Germany in the postwar years. That qualifier being noted, are there any lessons for Biden and the Democrats to be learned from de-Nazification, in regard to the neofascists and other illiberal forces who are trying to overthrow American democracy?

I believe that the Adenauer model applies. It behooves the future of our democracy to try as much as possible to integrate such people somehow back into a non-authoritarian, non-fascist system. We should try to give them some kind of a path, so we can at least reduce the incentive for them to stop working so hard to subvert the country’s democracy.

Pharma giant AbbVie funds ads attacking prescription drug bill — after hiking prices up to 470%

Pharmaceutical giant AbbVie inflated prices for widely-used drugs while its executives pocketed growing bonuses, according to a new report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Now it’s helping fund ads attacking legislation that would lower prescription drug costs.

The committee’s two-year investigation found that AbbVie “pursued a variety of tactics to increase drug sales while raising prices for Americans, including exploiting the patent system to extend its market monopoly, abusing orphan drug protections to further block competition, and engaging in anticompetitive pricing practices.”

The company raised the cost of the popular drug Humira, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other ailments, 27 times and by a total of more than 470%, according to the report. An annual supply of the drug now costs $77,000. AbbVie, along with Jannsen Biotech, also hiked the price of Imburvica, a drug used to treat certain cancers, by 82%, raising the cost of an annual supply to between $181,529 to $242,039, according to the committee.

The company also invested in hundreds of patents for Humira and cut deals with competitors to prevent them from being sold for less in the U.S., even though the FDA has approved six similar drugs, according to the report.

The company has raked in more than $100 billion in net revenue from those two drugs since 2013, which the committee said was “driven in large part by AbbVie executives’ decision to repeatedly raise the prices of Humira and Imbruvica.” The company’s top executives pocketed $480 million in compensation during that span, “much of which was directly linked to revenue increases,” the report said.

“The findings show how AbbVie repeatedly raised the price of life-saving drugs to satisfy corporate greed,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement. “These price hikes led to billions of dollars in corporate profits and enriched company executives while harming American patients and taxpayers.”

Maloney, along with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company’s “anticompetitive conduct is in violation of U.S. law.”

AbbVie is one of 33 member companies of the industry’s top lobbying group, PhRMA, which raised nearly $450 million from membership dues in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. But AbbVie’s political action committee is one of just two pharmaceutical company PACs to donate the maximum $40,000 to PhRMA’s federal PAC since 2013, a potential indicator that AbbVie was highly motivated to influence legislation.

“Generally our members make similar contributions to our Political Action Committee,” Brian Newell, a spokesperson for PhRMA, said in a statement to Salon.

PhRMA, in turn, spreads that money around to political campaigns across the country as well as other trade groups like the American Action Network (AAN), a conservative dark money group that launched a $4 million ad campaign to defeat the Democrats’ H.R. 3 proposal, which would allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs and cap out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000. PhRMA has donated more than $20 million to AAN since 2010, making it by far AAN’s largest donor, including $4.5 million in 2019 — the biggest donation PhRMA gave to any group that year.

“This ad blitz may as well come from Big Pharma itself,” Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement.

The ad campaign targets 43 competitive House districts, according to AAN, arguing that H.R. 3 would hamper companies’ abilities to develop new treatments and limit access to the coronavirus vaccine. Dan Conston, the president of AAN, accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., of “pushing a socialist takeover of the prescription drug industry.”

AAN, one of the 10 highest-spending dark money groups last year, has also spent $9 million on ads boosting Republican congressional candidates and donated more than $26 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC backing House Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CSP). Along with its ads targeting H.R. 3, AAN has also launched an ad campaign “boosting vulnerable Republicans who supported an alternative bill considered much friendlier to drugmakers,” according to the watchdog group.

The pharmaceutical industry has already shattered records this year, spending an unprecedented $92 million to lobby the federal government in the first three months of this year, according to the CSP, including $8.7 million from PhRMA. Stephen Ubl, the CEO of PhRMA, criticized H.R. 3 last month, claiming it would “destroy an estimated one million American jobs.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest lobbying spender this year, has also come out against the bill, comparing it to “government price controls” and claiming it would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Congressional Budget Office said in 2019 that the bill would likely hamper some pharmaceutical development due to lower “potential global revenues” but predicted that “the effects of the new drug introductions from increased federal spending under the bill on biomedical research would be modest and would almost all occur more than 20 years in the future.” On the other hand, it estimated that the bill would save more than $450 billion in drug spending over the next decade.

PolitiFact rated PhRMA’s claims about the impact of H.R. 3 “mostly false.” Stacie Dusetzina, an associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University, told PolitiFact that “there is a good reason to believe that the drugs you would lose are those that have the smallest benefit and highest price tag.”

Dr. Peter Bach, who heads the Drug Pricing Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, predicted in a Bloomberg op-ed that the reduced spending under H.R. 3 “would barely slow new drug discovery at all.”

PhRMA has also donated nearly $1.6 million to Center Forward, a dark money group backing moderate “blue dog” Democrats, according to CSP. Center Forward flew House staffers to meet with pharmaceutical executives in 2019. Earlier this month, a group of 10 centrist House Democrats, led by Reps. Scott Peters, D-Calif., and Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., echoed the pharmaceutical industry’s claims in a letter to Pelosi calling instead for a “bipartisan” bill to rein in drug prices.

That letter raises questions about whether Democrats have enough votes to advance H.R. 3 out of the House, but in any case it’s highly unlikely that the bill could get the 60 votes necessary to defeat a filibuster in the Senate.

A group of 17 senators led by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., called on President Joe Biden last month to include the prescription drug legislation, as well as other measures to expand Medicare, in his American Family Plan, which Democrats could likely pass with a simple majority using the budget reconciliation process if they so choose.

“We believe Medicare and the federal government should do what every major country on earth does: negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower the high price of prescription drugs,” the senators wrote, adding that the “savings that are achieved through price negotiation should be used to expand and improve Medicare.”

Right-wingers keep trying to boycott products they hate — and keep failing

Conservative pundits, including the likes of right-wing radio kingpins Dan Bongino and Mark Levin, have had some stumbles in recent weeks when it comes to encouraging boycotts of companies they feel have mistreated conservatives — or practicing them themselves.

The latest boycott folly came from Bongino, a thrice-failed congressional candidate turned pro-Trump pundit who is trying to position himself as true heir to the late Rush Limbaugh. Bongino has encouraged his loyal listeners to boycott Amazon and build a “parallel economy” to rival the e-commerce giant ever since Amazon Web Services booted Bongino’s social media venture, Parler, from its network in retribution for Jan. 6 organizing on the platform.

“I love Whole Foods. It’s a great place; the food is delicious. Whole Foods is really expensive sometimes; it can be, I like it, I shop there. It’s cool once in a while. There is one down, I think, in Palm Beach,” Bongino stated last Friday on his podcast — before an off-camera individual interrupts the radio host to inform him that Whole Foods is owned by Amazon.

“What’s that? And it’s owned by Amazon? Is it?” Bongino, appearing shocked, asked aloud. “Oh, no way. I gotta check that out.”

Reached for comment about the unintended support of Amazon, Bongino was less fiery than usual, appearing to take the error nearly in stride. “Thanks for your continued support of the show; it is deeply appreciated,” Bongino told Salon, while attempting to plug his personal website.

At the end of April, Fox News weekend host and conservative radio talking head Mark Levin said he would stop drinking Diet Coke and replace it with Hi-C Orange — which is also produced by the Coca-Cola Company, rendering any attempted boycott ineffective.

“I love Hawaiian Punch; what about you, Mr. Producer? You ever drink that?” Levin declared. “I’ll tell you what else I like … I like this Hi-C Orange — just the orange, just the orange … I’m getting away from Diet Coke altogether; I have had enough of those people!”

A Levin producer didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on the radio host’s current attitude toward Coca-Cola Company beverages.

This isn’t the first time conservatives have attempted to boycott brands and fail miserably in the process; indeed, there is a long history of such failures. In 2018, conservatives upset with Nike using former NFL quarterback and Black Lives Matter activist Colin Kaepernick at the center of its new ad campaign began destroying their Nike apparel. “Our Soundman just cut the Nike swoosh off his socks. Former marine. Get ready @Nike multiply that by the millions,” country music star John Rich tweeted at the time.

Our Soundman just cut the Nike swoosh off his socks. Former marine. Get ready @Nike multiply that by the millions. pic.twitter.com/h8kj6RXe7j

— John Rich (@johnrich) September 3, 2018

Then there was the occasion in 2017 when Sean Hannity fans destroyed their Keurig coffee machines to back the Fox News host after the company pulled its ads from Hannity’s program over his defense of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Hannity tried to save the advertiser (and the valuable ad dollars) by giving away 500 Keurig machines, but it was too late. By the end of the boycott, an unknown number of Fox News viewers were just left with expensive coffee machines they had tossed off balconies or otherwise obliterated.

Another failed right-wing boycott was back in 2016 when angry Breitbart readers dumped Kellogg’s cereal down toilets because the manufacturer of Corn Flakes wanted nothing to do with Steve Bannon’s onetime website.

Few such examples, however, can compare to former President Donald Trump’s commandment to his followers to boycott Coca-Cola over the company’s objections to the recently passed law restricting voting access in Georgia. The next day, a shiny glass Coke bottle was clearly visible on Trump’s desk.

If right-wingers appear committed to undermining democracy, they seem to have difficulty sticking to product boycotts.

Global warming is boiling our testicles, suggesting a new animal fertility crisis looms

Dr. Thomas Price, a senior lecturer of evolution, ecology and behavior at the University of Liverpool, has had a lot of time to consider how humans are at a disadvantage because of our external reproductive organs. Some animals have testicles inside their bodies, but others need the testicles outside of their bodies so they’ll be cool enough to produce sperm in a process known as spermatogenesis.

This has a well-known downside, though. As Price did research on testicles and fertility, he learned about that downside firsthand.

“Five years ago, back when we could all meet up, we used to play 5-a-side football at work,” Price told Salon by email. “I did a (I like to think) Van Dijk–like defensive tackle on one of the PhD students who was about to shoot. Unfortunately he followed through and booted me in the plums.”

He recalled, “As I lay there, it really brought home to me what a terrible, terrible idea it is to have external testicles. Elephants, dolphins, and hedgehogs all have internal testicles. I really think it would be a lot better if we did too.”

The risk of excruciating, embarrassing and arguably comical blunt force injury is not the only downside of having your testicles outside your body. This fact has been demonstrated by the work that was being done by Price and a team of ecologists. Price was the senior author on the study subsequently published in the journal Nature Climate Change, which proposed that climate change could cause extinctions among species with external testicles.

It is not hard to ascertain why. If species need their testicles to be kept at a certain temperature so they can reproduce, there is a risk that they will become less fertile as the planet’s average temperature rises. Unfortunately human beings since the Industrial Revolution have been emitting so-called “greenhouse gasses” like methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor and others, that trap heat on our planet. This is expected to cause apocalyptic conditions over the next few decades: extreme weather events like hurricanes, blizzards and droughts; refugee crises as coastal cities are flooded and marginalized populations disproportionately suffer; and resource scarcity as it becomes harder to grow food and maintain commercial supply chains.

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Now Price and his colleagues have added boiling testicles to the list of climate change-related problems. They studied 43 species of fruit flies (Drosophila) and found that their distribution across the globe more closely correlated to the temperatures at which males were sterilized than the temperatures at which the flies died.

This suggests that, when it comes to predicting the futures of a number species (including humans) in a post-climate changed world, fertility may matter more than is widely appreciated.

“I think people just hadn’t made the connection,” Price told Salon. “It is a bit surprising, because people have known for at least a century that spermatogenesis requires low temperatures, which is why testes are kept in a sack outside the body while ovaries and most other important organs are protected deep in the main body cavity.” He added that it is also more difficult in general to measure how temperature impacts fertility as opposed to how it can kill organisms.

“There is no visible sign that an organism has become infertile — you have to heat them at a specific temperature then give them opportunities to mate,” Price explained, mentioning that his co-authors Steven R. Parratt, Benjamin S. Walsh and Nicola White “spent an enormous amount of time doing the practical work for this study.” By the time they were doing their research, Price noted that a number of scientific groups had begun to simultaneously realize that climate change could impact fertility.

Salon asked Price whether he felt his research intersects with research indicating that chemicals in plastic are also making humans infertile, including by lowering sperm counts, as well as with a recent World Wildlife Fund report which found that population sizes of “mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” have fallen by 68 percent since 1970. He said that scientists do not have data on how plastic pollution might combine with climate change to further reduce male fertility, although he guessed that “individuals whose fertility is already damaged by pollution, including plastics, will be even more vulnerable to temperature stress during a heatwave.” When it comes to mass extinctions, Price expressed the personal view that there are many other factors driving them including habitat destruction, the introduction of invasive species, disease, overhunting and other effects of climate change.

This is not the first recent study to link climate change to fertility issues. Scholars from the University of Queensland published an article in the scientific journal Environmental Research arguing that there may be a connection between temperature rises and stillbirths.

“Climate change can have a multitude of impacts on an individual’s health, especially among vulnerable populations,” the research team behind the study told Salon by email at the time. “For pregnant mothers, extreme weather events can impact access to antenatal services and increase risk of heat-related illnesses. Mothers living in low-resource settings are particularly vulnerable to these effects.”

Tony Blinken talks about a “rules-based order” — does he mean the U.S. gets to make the rules?

The world is reeling in horror at the latest Israeli massacre of hundreds of men, women and children in Gaza. Much of the world is also shocked by the role of the United States in this crisis, as it keeps providing Israel with weapons to kill Palestinian civilians, in violation of U.S. and international law, and has repeatedly blocked action by the UN Security Council to impose a ceasefire or hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.

In contrast to U.S. actions, in nearly every speech or interview, Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps promising to uphold and defend the “rules-based order.” But he has never clarified whether he means the universal rules of the UN Charter and international law, or some other set of rules he has yet to define. What rules could possibly legitimize the kind of destruction we just witnessed in Gaza, and who would want to live in a world ruled by them?

We have both spent many years protesting the violence and chaos the United States and its allies inflict on millions of people around the world by violating the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force, and we have always insisted that the U.S. government should comply with the rules-based order of international law.

But even as the United States’ illegal wars and support for allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have reduced cities to rubble and left country after country mired in intractable violence and chaos, U.S. leaders have refused to even acknowledge that aggressive and destructive U.S. and allied military operations violate the rules-based order of the UN Charter and international law.

Former President Trump was clear that he was not interested in following any “global rules,” only supporting U.S. national interests. His national security adviser, John Bolton, explicitly prohibited National Security Council staff attending the 2018 G20 Summit in Argentina from even uttering the words “rules-based order.”

So you might expect us to welcome Blinken’s stated commitment to the “rules-based order” as a long-overdue reversal in U.S. policy. But when it comes to a vital principle like this, it is actions that count, and the Biden administration has yet to take any decisive action to bring U.S. foreign policy into compliance with the UN Charter or international law.

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

The UN Charter and the rules of international law were developed in the 20th century precisely to codify the unwritten and endlessly contested rules of customary international law with explicit, written rules that would be binding on all nations.

The United States played a leading role in this legalist movement in international relations, from the Hague Peace Conferences at the turn of the 20th century to the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945 and the revised Geneva Conventions in 1949, including the new Fourth Geneva Convention to protect civilians, such as the countless numbers killed by American weapons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the plan for the United Nations to a joint session of Congress on his return from Yalta in 1945:

It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.

But America’s post-Cold War triumphalism eroded U.S. leaders’ already half-hearted commitment to those rules. The neocons argued that they were no longer relevant and that the United States must be ready to impose order on the world by the unilateral threat and use of military force, exactly what the UN Charter prohibits. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other Democratic leaders embraced new doctrines of “humanitarian intervention” and a “responsibility to protect” to try to carve out politically persuasive exceptions to the explicit rules of the UN Charter.

America’s “endless wars,” its revived Cold War with Russia and China, its blank check for the Israeli occupation and the political obstacles to crafting a more peaceful and sustainable future are some of the fruits of these bipartisan efforts to challenge and weaken the rules-based order.

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

So is Blinken’s “rules-based order” a recommitment to FDR’s “permanent structure of peace,” or is it in fact a renunciation of the UN Charter and its purpose, which is peace and security for all of humanity?

In the light of Biden’s first few months in power, it appears to be the latter. Instead of designing a foreign policy based on the principles and rules of the UN Charter and the goal of a peaceful world, Biden’s policy seems to start from the premises of a $753 billion U.S. military budget, 800 overseas military bases, endless U.S. and allied wars and massacres, and massive weapons sales to repressive regimes. Then it works backward to formulate a policy framework to somehow justify all that.

Once a “war on terror” that only fuels terrorism, violence and chaos was no longer politically viable, hawkish U.S. leaders — both Republicans and Democrats — seem to have concluded that a return to the Cold War was the only plausible way to perpetuate America’s militarist foreign policy and multi-trillion-dollar war machine.

But that raised a new set of contradictions. For 40 years, the Cold War was justified by the ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist economic systems. But the USSR disintegrated and Russia is now a capitalist country. China is still governed by its Communist Party, but has a managed, mixed economy similar to that of Western Europe in the years after the Second World War — an efficient and dynamic economic system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in both cases.

So how can these U.S. leaders justify their renewed Cold War? They have floated the notion of a struggle between “democracy and authoritarianism.” But the United States supports too many horrific dictatorships around the world, especially in the Middle East, to make that a convincing pretext for a Cold War against Russia and China.

A U.S. “global war on authoritarianism” would require confronting repressive U.S. allies like Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, not arming them to the teeth and shielding them from international accountability as the United States is doing.

So just as American and British leaders settled on nonexistent WMDs as the pretext they could all agree on to justify their war on Iraq, the U.S. and its allies have settled on defending a vague, undefined “rules-based order” as the justification for their revived Cold War with Russia and China.

But like the emperor’s new clothes in the fable and the WMDs in Iraq, the United States’ new rules don’t really exist. They are just its latest smokescreen for a foreign policy based on illegal threats and uses of force and a doctrine of “might makes right.”

We challenge President Biden and Secretary Blinken to prove us wrong by actually joining the rules-based order of the UN Charter and international law. That would require a genuine commitment to a very different and more peaceful future, with appropriate contrition and accountability for the United States and its allies’ systematic violations of the UN Charter and international law, and the countless violent deaths, ruined societies and widespread chaos they have caused.

How lunar eclipses altered the course of history

Christopher Columbus, the notoriously tyrannical sea explorer who couldn’t tell the American continents from India, knew enough about lunar eclipses to literally save his life. The year was 1504 — a dozen after his famous sailing across the ocean blue — and Columbus was stranded with his men on the island now known as Jamaica. Characteristically, he was clashing with the indigenous people of the island, the Arawaks, who refused to supply the crew with food after the Europeans repeatedly cheated, stole from and violently attacked them.

Columbus, who had already been punished by the Spanish crown for abusing people, decided he needed a tidy resolution. He consulted an almanac containing accurate astronomical tables and, learning that a total lunar eclipse was scheduled to occur on February 29 to March 1, warned the Arawak chief that his Christian god was going to make the moon appear “inflamed with wrath” as a foreshadowing of future punishment. When the mood did indeed take on a “bloody” appearance, the Arawaks promised to resume supplying food to Columbus and his men if he appeased his god. Columbus said he would talk with him, retreated into his quarters, used an hourglass to figure out exactly when the eclipse would end and then employed theatrics to convince the Arawaks that he had ended it.

This is but one occasion when a lunar eclipse — like the one that will grace the heavens tonight, May 25, 2021 — has affected the outcome of a major historical event. (Perhaps for the worst in this case: one wonders if history would have been bettered if Columbus died for want of food that day.) There have been other times when superstitions were applied to lunar eclipses, with historic consequences; certainly Christopher Columbus, who for years believed he had sailed to Asia, is in no position to offer lectures on ignorance.

Even the ancient Greeks, who are rightly extolled for their significant influence over Western science and philosophy, were prone to self-destructive eclipse superstitions. In the year 413 BC, the Athenian general Nicias postponed a much-needed retreat because of a lunar eclipse. Although his army had been demolished by the Syracusans (who lived in modern-day Sicily), and they had just been reinforced by Spartans (think of the warrior-state from the movie “300”), Nicias and his priests believed that sailing back to Greece during a blood-red moon would spell bad news. Instead they brought the bad news on themselves, as their enemies took advantage of the military miscalculation and gradually slaughtered the Athenians and their allies.

Sometimes lunar eclipses have had more favorable meanings. The first century Romano-Jewish historian Josephus has argued that Herod I, the Roman client king of Judea who is believed to have ruled the province when Christ was born, died shortly after a lunar eclipse. (Herod I is reported to have been a brutal tyrant, so this death was not a bad thing for the masses regardless of Christ’s impending birth.) A lunar eclipse also appeared in 1453 during the nearly two months when the Ottomans seized and eventually captured Constantinople, thereby counting as an augury of good news for them and of bad news for the soon-to-be-fallen Byzantine Empire.

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Lunar eclipses have also been used to advance scientific and historical knowledge. This brings us back to the ancient Greeks: Aristotle deduced that the Earth was round because its shadow had a circular shape as it moved across the moon during an eclipse. Another important Greek astronomer, Aristarchus, devised formulas that he applied to data from a lunar eclipse to estimate the Earth’s distance from both the Moon and the Sun. Thousands of years later, American polymath Benjamin Franklin wrote an influential treatise on the behavior of coastal storms on the Atlantic coast after he was disappointed about missing a lunar eclipse due to bad weather in Philadelphia and surprised that his Boston acquaintances did not have the same experience. Biblical historians have traced Christ’s birth to the year 4 BC based on Josephus’ accounting of the eclipse and when it occurred during Herod’s reign.

Whether one chooses to attach deeper meaning to lunar eclipses like today’s, or simply enjoys the show — they are caused when the Moon moves into the Earth’s shadow while those two bodies are closely or exactly aligned with the Sun during the night of a full moon — it is at least sobering to think about how astronomy has corresponded with the past.

If you’re nervous about the meaning of today’s lunar eclipse, however, perhaps you should remember the wise words of French author Victor Hugo in his classic 1862 novel about the grand sweep of history, “Les Misérables.”

“Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse,” Hugo wrote. “All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.”

“They got the mother lode”: Former federal prosecutor says grand jury has “everything” on Trump

On MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” Tuesday, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman discussed the full extent of what evidence the New York grand jury weighing charges against former President Donald Trump would have for their consideration.

“The grand jury’s going to get everything and that’s true,” said Litman. “We know that the — that was the inception of the case, but then, they got the mother lode. They got the tax returns, going back and forth to the Supreme Court twice to get them. So, that takes all kinds of transactions of this sort and forms the basis for possibly multiple counts where people surmise and it stands to reason that it’s a similar kind of hanky-panky, changing the way you valuate same properties, one for tax to make it look low, one for loans to make it look high, that’s fraud on both entities.”

“I think what is happening, likely, is a plethora of transactions like that, like that core one with Stormy Daniels, which we are learning is sort of the Trump way of doing business, the general MO, and also including [Trump Organization CFO Allen] Weisselberg,” added Litman.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Don Jr. melts down reports detailing Biden’s exercise routine: “Think that would happen with Trump?”

Donald Trump Jr. lashed out at the media on Tuesday over reports detailing President Joe Biden’s exercise regime.

In a video uploaded to social media, the former president’s son blasted a correspondent who asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for information about Biden’s practice of lifting weights.

“I can tell you traveling with him a fair amount, sometimes he’s hard to keep up with,” Psaki told the reporter on Monday.

“Really, Jen?” Trump griped on Tuesday. “He can’t walk up the stairs of Air Force One without falling over! Now, if you said that he’s hard to keep up with because you have no idea what the hell he is saying when he’s speaking, that I would understand. But if you’re going to tell me that he’s hard to keep up with physically when we don’t see him doing anything early, we see lids being called in the middle of the day, you don’t see him doing anything late.”

“I mean, does anyone really believe he’s hard to keep up with?” he complained. “You and I and any reasonable being with a brain has no idea what he’s saying. But these are the hard-hitting questions from the media. I mean, oh, we’re blowing it out. This is journalism. They’re asking all the tough questions! What the hell are you asking about?”

Trump continued: “The president rides a stationary bike. Oh, that’s wonderful!”

“You think that would happen with Trump?” he asked. “The world is on fire and we’re pretending everything is just fine. Joe Biden is riding a bike and he’s weightlifting! He’s a strong and viable leader! You can’t make it up, folks. So we’ve got to push back. We’ve got to call it out.”