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Fox CEO calls Tucker Carlson “brave,” defends network’s vaccine falsehoods in rare interview

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, the son of international media magnate Rupert Murdoch, defended his company’s flagship cable news network in a rare interview Wednesday with Insider, calling Fox News’ primetime host Tucker Carlson “brave” for espousing the nativist “replacement theory” and defending the provocateur’s false statements on COVID-19 vaccines.

“Obviously our opinion is center-right,” Lachlan said at one point of Fox News, his company’s profit center. But despite the network’s increasingly fevered pitch on controversial culture war issues, he laid the blame for our current age of partisan rancor at the feet of social media companies, which “algorithmically drives people into echo chambers.”

“If Facebook or Twitter and others ultimately become a bias filter for the facts that we take as truth in the world,” Lachlan said. “I think that’s really dangerous and a sort of scary world to live in.”

The interview comes following a series of reports from inside the Murdoch’s influential media empire that have questioned Lachlan’s grip on power at the company. In March, the family’s heir apparent relocated to Australia, a move that “intensified the perception that Mr. Murdoch does not have a tight grip on the reins [of Fox],” The New York Times reported last month. Insider cited a source close to the family who attributes a “whisper campaign” intended to raise doubts about Lachlan’s aptitude to his younger brother, James Murdoch, who resigned his post as COO of NewsCorp. in 2005 after a public feud with then-Fox CEO Roger Ailes.

It’s a storyline seemingly ripped from “Succession,” the HBO series widely rumored to be based in part on the Murdoch clan — but Lachlan took the opportunity Wednesday to assure media watchers that he’s the one firmly in control. The 49-year-old added that he plans on keeping it that way for “decades to come” — with the obvious bow to his 90-year-old father, who he says is “still going strong and working every day.”

Insider even outlined Lachlan’s daily schedule, which includes an 8 p.m. bedtime and middle-of-the-night wake up call to facilitate Zoom meetings with the company’s U.S. staff.

It’s been two (incredibly tumultuous) years since Lachlan took over at Fox, and many of the network’s high-profile controversies over this period have stemmed from the contentious and sometimes outright false statements made on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” In July of last year, the show’s head writer, Blake Neff, was even forced to resign over a series of racist and sexist comments posted online under a pseudonym. Still, that month Carlson’s show broke the record for highest-rated cable news program in history, averaging an audience of 4.33 million viewers daily.

In recent months, a call for advertisers to boycott Fox News over Carlson’s remarks has gained steam after the host endorsed the conspiracy that Democrats and U.S. elites are plotting to dilute white Americans’ political power through non-white immigration, colloquially known as “replacement theory.” 

Carlson sought to deflect criticism by referring to it not as a racial issue, but as a “voting rights question.” But critics, like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, called it a prime “example of how hatred is being mainstreamed in America in 2021.”

Lachlan told Insider that he believes Carlson’s statements reflect what many Americans are quietly thinking, and that he sees the host as “brave” for voicing those views in the face of harsh criticism. And when presented with Carlson’s demonstrably false reporting that thousands of Americans have died as a result of COVID-19 vaccines, Lachlan reportedly said it was “nothing the CDC itself isn’t saying” — which, of course, is not true.

The elder Murdoch brother pointed to Fox’s decision to call the 2020 election for President Joe Biden hours before other outlets as proof that, despite criticism to the contrary, his outlet hews close to the proverbial center. It was especially vindicating, Lachlan said, to see recent criticism from Donald Trump that the network has been “pandering to the left” alongside criticism from liberal pundits that Fox News leaped to the right during the Trump years.

“In a strange way, if you’ve got the left and the right criticizing you, you’re doing something right,” he said. “You really are in the middle.”

House passes bill to create bipartisan Jan. 6 commission despite opposition from 175 Republicans

35 House Republicans split from their caucus on Wednesday to support a Democrat-backed bill that would establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, even as top Republicans vehemently opposed the efforts at Donald Trump’s order. 

Just about every member of the House Problem Solvers Caucus – which includes 29 Republicans – voted to support the bill. The entire group will vote as a bloc if at least 70% of all members and 50% from each party support the bill, according to caucus rules. On Tuesday, the caucus announced that the bill garnered support from more than 75% of its members. The bill was drummed up by House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Ranking Member John Katko, R-N.Y, and passed 252 to 175. 

Ahead of the vote, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., demurred it as “unbalanced.” 

“If it was a serious commission,” he said during a Fox News interview, “Nancy Pelosi would have had you research – remember on Good Friday an officer was killed at the Capitol – we don’t need to investigate that. What about all the riots that have led up throughout the summer? The unrest from BLM, Antifa and others. No, you can’t investigate that. This is driven solely by politics and Nancy Pelosi, but we should not be a part of that.”

McCarthy’s view is shared by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who said in a Senate floor speech on Wednesday: “It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.”

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., also echoed McConnell, arguing that the bill is “counterproductive because of the work that’s already been done,” and “could be weaponized politically.” 

“In this environment,” he added, “everything is going to be used politically.”

Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., joined the Republican outrage, writing in a statement to his GOP colleagues: “There are currently investigations ongoing by the DOJ, FBI, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, as well as an apolitical review by the Architect of the Capitol to find and remedy the security vulnerabilities.”  

Both Republicans and Democrats alike have railed against members of the GOP who are fighting to shoot the bill down and brush the Capitol riot under the rug. 

“I can’t believe it,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. told Fox News’ Chad Pergram. “I was with him on January 6 in the so-called secret location, and he was enraged over what occurred and determined that we return in session that same day to prove that that mob was not going to stop our government.”

Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. echoed on Wednesday: “Shame on the Republicans for choosing the big lie over the truth – not all Republicans, but the majority who seem to be doing it. Shame on them for defending the mob over our Capitol police officers.”

“The American people will see for themselves whether our Republican friends stand on the side of truth or on the side of Donald Trump’s big lie,” Schumer added. 

Former Sen. Barbie Comstock, R-Va., who has routinely spoken out against former President Trump, tweeted: “Yes we need a January 6 Commission.” 

Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, including Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, R-Ohio, also threw their support behind the measure. 

Under the bill, a ten-member commission of people with “significant expertise in the areas of law enforcement, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, intelligence, and cybersecurity” will be assembled, with five appointed by Democrats and the other five appointed by Republicans.

A group of United States Capitol Police officers released a letter expressing their “profound disappointment” in Republicans for opposing the legislation. 

“Unfortunately this letter comes to you anonymously, because as U.S. Capitol Police Officers, we are expected to remain neutral and do our jobs with honor and integrity,” it reads. “It’s unfortunate that our ‘bosses’ (Congress) are not held to the same standard that we, the USCP, are.”

The officers continue: “If you look around the Capitol building, you still have doors that are broken, windows still smashed and in some cases missing … Officers are forced to go to work with the daily reminder of what happened that dreadful day.”

NFL’s racist criteria to avoid paying Black retirees in concussion settlement draws rebuke

The National Football League is coming under increased scrutiny for using racially discriminatory criteria to evaluate former players for neurocognitive impairments, a practice that critics say has enabled the league to deny compensation to Black retirees who might otherwise be entitled to payouts under a billion-dollar concussion settlement approved in 2015.

“This is classic systemic racism,” former NFL player Ken Jenkins told The Hill on Friday. “Just because I’m Black, I wasn’t born with fewer brain cells.”

Jenkins was referring to the NFL’s decision to use different scales to interpret cognitive functioning among Black and white ex-players. To determine eligibility for payouts worth between $27,000 and $5.3 million, the league has reportedly encouraged doctors to “adjust” for race by comparing an individual’s neurocognitive test results to a statistical benchmark based on population averages among racial groups.

Because the benchmark for Black retired players has been set at a lower threshold, they must demonstrate more significant neurocognitive impairment to qualify for benefits, leading some to describe the NFL’s practice as a “resurgence of racialized medicine” that allows the league to “ban[k] on biological racism.”

The NFL claims that so-called “race-norming” prevents false dementia diagnoses in healthy ex-players, but critics say the practice makes it easier for the NFL to deny Black retired players from accessing financial recompense for brain injuries sustained during their time on the gridiron.

Philip Gasquoine, a neuropsychology professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, told The Hill on Friday that if a Black player gets “exactly the same score on the test as the white player, because it was estimated that the pre-existing score was lower, they’ve got less chance of being diagnosed with dementia, and so they don’t get the compensation.”

While Jenkins is not suffering from dementia or other neurocognitive impairments stemming from head traumas experienced during his NFL career, he is an advocate for the hundreds if not thousands of retirees who have been deemed ineligible for payouts as a result of racist assumptions about the mental capacities of Black people.

On Friday, Jenkins delivered an online petition signed by more than 50,000 people to U.S. District Judge Anita Brody.

Brody, who presided over the concussion settlement and approved the use of race-based benchmarks to evaluate brain injury-related claims, picked attorney Christopher Seeger as lead counsel for roughly 20,000 ex-players in the class-action suit against the NFL. The petition asks Brody to choose a new attorney to represent the retirees and demands equal treatment.

In March, however, Brody dismissed legal actions filed last August by Kevin Henry, a defensive end for eight seasons, and Najeh Davenport, who spent seven years in the league as a running back. The two Black former players—both of whom say they suffer from neurocognitive impairments after enduring multiple concussions during their careers—have appealed Brody’s ruling.

When Henry and Davenport filed their lawsuit almost nine months ago, the pair accused the NFL of “explicitly and deliberately” discriminating against Black athletes by evaluating their neurocognitive exam scores through the lens of racial averages, as the New York Times explained at the time.

“When Davenport took a neurological exam in 2019, an NFL-approved doctor found that his use of language and his executive functioning—or ability to manage and regulate his mental processes—were diminished enough to qualify for compensation,” the Times reported. “The doctor did not apply the special scale used to test Black players. Davenport received a letter that confirmed he was eligible for a payout.”

The NFL, however, “appealed the award and said that when Davenport’s scores were recalculated accounting for his race—something the league called an ‘industry standard’—Davenport was not impaired in any category, and ineligible for a payout,” the newspaper noted.

Something similar happened to Henry, The Hill reported Friday: “An NFL-approved clinician initially found that he qualified for mild to moderate dementia, but his claim was nonetheless denied. A second clinician, after adjusting his raw scores using a ‘full demographic model… which includes age, education, race/ethnicity and gender,’ found he did not qualify as impaired under the settlement.”

As the news outlet noted, “Henry said it’s painful to watch the NFL portray itself as a social justice ally while denying him compensation for what he and his wife, Pamela, say is clear impairment.”

“They come out with all these slogans like ‘We care’ and ‘Black Lives Matter,'” said Henry. “And I’m sitting there, like, you’re lying.”

Brian McCarthy, a spokesperson for the NFL, told The Hill that “the number of players potentially affected by the use of race-based normative adjustments is a fraction of what has been alleged.” He did not respond, however, when asked to “substantiate that claim with data showing a breakdown of settlement awards by race.”

According to the Times, “It is unclear what percentage of Black players have had their dementia claims denied compared to white ex-players because the settlement administrator does not publish data on the race of applicants.” Henry and Davenport’s legal team, however, said that “a majority of the 20,000 or so retirees are Black. About two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 claims submitted by all ex-players have been for dementia, and about three-quarters of those claims have been denied.”

The Hill reported that “an analysis by one neuropsychologist, acting at the request of a lawyer involved in a lawsuit against the NFL, found that around three times more Black former players would have qualified for compensation if race norms were removed.”

In their lawsuit, Henry and Davenport requested that the league stop using race-based benchmarks to evaluate former players’ claims, and they also asked that “the scores on Black players’ neurocognitive exams be recalculated using ‘race-neutral’ scales that would put them on an even footing with white players,” the Times noted at the time.

The NFL, for its part, “called the lawsuit ‘entirely misguided’ and said the settlement ‘always contemplated the use of recognized statistical techniques to account for demographic differences such as age, education, and race,'” the Times reported. The league’s statement goes on to say that “the point of such adjustments—in contrast to the complaint’s claims—is to seek to ensure that individuals are treated fairly and compared against comparable groups.”

Doctors are not required to use any particular adjustments, the league says. But as the stories of Henry and Davenport make clear, the NFL has appealed cases in which Black players qualified for compensation but did not have their test results measured against the average score for African Americans in general.

In an essay published just ahead of the Super Bowl, Roberto Aspholm, an assistant professor of social work at the University of St. Thomas, and Cedric Johnson, an associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argued that “racial difference does not produce the allegedly lower average levels of cognitive functioning among African Americans today—though the medical practice of treating race as an independent variable in analyzing neurocognitive scores reinforces this gravely misguided and dangerous notion.”

As the pair explained:

The NFL’s statement that the scoring of neurocognitive test results includes adjustments for other factors like “education” hints at the real source of any potential scoring differentials across racial groups. In general, neurocognitive development and functioning are dynamic processes shaped by environmental and life course factors. Since African Americans are more likely than whites and other groups not only to receive substandard education, but also to be exposed to environmental toxins, receive inadequate medical care, and suffer from the trauma of living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence, among other adverse experiences, it follows that the most submerged and dispossessed blacks might be more likely to have lower average levels of neurocognitive functioning. But it should be recognized that, to whatever extent such patterns may exist, they are produced not by any ostensible racial difference, but by patterns of exposure to particular conditions and experiences. 

“The NFL’s apparent use of race-based criteria for denying access to settlement compensation is a textbook example of the way that the ideology of race is designed to work in society,” wrote Aspholm and Johnson. “Throughout U.S. history, racism has not constituted an end in itself, but rather a means to an end.”

“The aim of using racially adjusted metrics for neurocognitive test scoring is not to reinforce racism or white supremacy,” the scholars argued. “Rather, it is to deny players access to compensation to which they might otherwise be entitled and for which NFL owners would pay; racism, then, is the means through which owners are pursuing this economic end.”

With the ideology of race being deployed to “justify the denial of rights… based on socially constructed notions of natural difference,” the scholars emphasized the need for “broad player solidarity, rooted in both a vociferous rejection of biological notions of racial difference as well as a clear-eyed commitment to challenging the exploitation of players at the hands of ownership.”

The issue has gained the attention of at least one member of Congress. 

Keith Chu, an aide for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told The Hill on Friday that the lawmaker “is committed not only to ensuring the NFL stops using the race-based formula going forward, but also to ensuring any player previously denied benefits, or who chose not to apply because of the formula, is notified and given the opportunity to retest in order to get the benefits they deserve.”

Criminal investigation into Trump just gained “a lot of leverage”: former federal prosecutor

On CNN Wednesday, former federal prosecutor Laura Coates explained how the newly coordinated criminal investigations by the Manhattan district attorney and New York attorney general into the Trump Organization escalate the legal problems for former President Donald Trump and his family.

“We treat your criminal sections and civil sections in the justice system differently,” said Coates. “Not because we don’t value above-board behavior, but because the penalties at stake are, one, liberty and the other a check being written. To combine these two raises the stakes for the attorneys. And to combine it from not only the AG’s office in New York, but also in Manhattan — it says that this is something far more expansive and there is some indication talking about criminal investigations. Some indication that it merits there to be a penalty of the deprivation of liberty as well.”

“It’s interesting that the New York attorney general’s office didn’t explain what prompted the change and why they released it publicly,” said anchor Poppy Harlow. “They don’t have to do that. What do you think?”

“They don’t have to do that, but the idea of saying, hey, we’ve now informed them,” said Coates. “From that sort of very terse actual explanation, they didn’t say when they informed the Trump Organization. They didn’t inform them to how long they’ve known about it, but the idea it’s no longer purely civil is one they’ve made publicly known. If you’re doing that, are you putting people on notice who might be potential witnesses? We know that Eric Trump, part of one of these investigations, has been interviewed. Others as well. Are you putting people on notice that may want to come forward as a cooperator? Are you trying to send a shot across the bow?”

“They’ve got a lot of leverage by virtue of this being prosecution from two different offices. Somebody who is not shielded by his office in any way even at the state level,” added Coates. “So I do wonder why now, what has come to light, and why the coordination, which can be quite rare between these two offices.”

Watch below via CNN:

Texas governor signs “heartbeat ban” that lets nearly anyone sue abortion providers and win $10,000

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill on Wednesday that would ban abortion before many women even know they’re pregnant, and allow nearly any private citizen to sue abortion providers — or anyone who helps a woman terminate her pregnancy.

The “heartbeat ban” would prohibit abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, and includes exemptions for medical emergencies but not cases of rape or incest. Abortion rights advocates vowed to challenge the law in court, arguing that it would ban abortions as early as two weeks after a missed menstrual cycle, an impossibly early date that effectively amounts to full abortion prohibition, said Dyana Limon-Mercado, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes.

“When you factor in the time it takes to confirm a pregnancy, consider your options and make a decision, schedule an appointment and comply with all the restrictions politicians have already put in place for patients and providers, a six-week ban essentially bans abortion outright,” she told the Texas Tribune.

Other states have passed “heartbeat” bills, but they have been blocked by courts for infringing on abortion rights upheld by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court this week said it would review Mississippi’s abortion ban, which bans the procedure after 15 weeks, after it was blocked by lower courts. But the Texas bill has a novel enforcement mechanism that its Republican supporters believe could help it withstand legal challenges.

Instead of the government enforcing the ban, the bill will allow any private citizen who is not a government official to sue abortion providers, or anyone who helped someone get an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — including family members, rape crisis counselors, and medical professionals — even if they are not connected to the patient or the provider.

“This law is so broadly written it could target not just abortion clinics and staff but anyone that volunteers or donates to an abortion fund or activist organization like ours,” Aimee Arrambide, executive director of reproductive rights advocacy group Avow Texas, told The Guardian. “Domestic violence and rape crisis counselors who offer guidance, family members who lend money to abortion patients, a friend who gives a ride to an appointment, or even someone that provides an address to a clinic could also face lawsuits.”

People who sue would be entitled to a $10,000 award and attorney’s fees if they win.

“Every citizen is now a private attorney general,” Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law, told the Tribune. “You can have random people who are against abortion start suing tomorrow.”

The law would take effect in September.

The law does not allow rapists to sue but advocates say that the language in the bill would not apply to those who are not convicted, much less reported. More than 90 percent of rapes in Texas are not reported to the police, according to a 2020 report prepared for the Texas legislature.

“This bill empowers rapists and abusers, and lawyers and trolls who want to abuse and clog up our courts,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said in a floor speech. “And this forced pregnancy act will drive women back into the [pre-Roe] shadows out of fear of harassment through lawsuits that anyone in this country can file.”

The law also allows people who sue to file lawsuits in their home districts and prevent the case from being moved to a different court. Legal experts told the Tribune that this could make it more costly and difficult for abortion providers to fight lawsuits because the court may be hundreds of miles away and abortion activists can shop for districts they think will be more sympathetic.

The bill’s supporters argue that since there is no state official responsible for enforcing the law, there is no one for abortion providers to sue to challenge the law.

“It’s a very unique law and it’s a very clever law,” Blackman told the Tribune. “Planned Parenthood can’t go to court and sue Attorney General [Ken] Paxton like they usually would because he has no role in enforcing the statute. They have to basically sit and wait to be sued.”

But abortion rights advocates said they plan to fight the law in court regardless.

Elisabeth Smith, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the outlet that reproductive health groups are “not going to let this six-week ban go unchallenged.”

Amy Hagstrom Miller, who heads the abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health, expressed concerns that the bill would allow anti-abortion activists to harass providers, noting that her clinics have already been hit with false reports alleging water heater permit violations, social distancing violations, and violations of other regulations.

“False reports disrupt health care services and this culture of threats and accusations is designed to intimidate providers,” she told the Tribune, adding that about 90 percent of women who come to her clinics are more than six weeks into their pregnancy.

Abbott justified the ban on religious grounds and vowed that the bill would ensure that the “life of every unborn child who has a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.”

“Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” he said.

Texas Right to Life called the signing a “landmark victory” but said even more comprehensive bills are still pending in the legislature.

Abortion in the state was already banned after 20 weeks and medically-induced abortions are banned after 10 weeks. State law also requires providers to perform an ultrasound at least 24 hours before an abortion and provide information on medical risks and alternatives.

South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Idaho have all passed heartbeat bans this year and Arkansas and Oklahoma approved near-total abortion bans, though none have yet gone into effect and many have been blocked.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored the legislation, said the enforcement mechanism differentiates Texas’ bill from other states.

“Based on what we read in court opinions from other abortion cases, and other federal cases, we believe this bill — because of the private civil enforcement, primarily, and a few other things — is drafted differently than those other heartbeat bills that are pending, that are awaiting court ruling today,” he told CNN.

More than 350 Texas attorneys condemned the bill in a letter to lawmakers, arguing that the enforcement mechanism undermines the state’s constitution and the “rules and tenets of our civil legal system.”

“The bill is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt by Texas Republican leadership to misuse civil courts to restrict women’s access to healthcare, and to allow anti-choice activists to target and penalize healthcare providers,” Texas attorney Christian Menefee told The Guardian. “This bill is morally reprehensible and legally nonsense.”

Drucilla Tigner of the ACLU of Texas called the law “the most extreme abortion ban in the country.”

“Not only does this ban violate more than half a century of Supreme Court case law, it paves the way for anti-choice extremists to use our court system to go after anyone who performs abortions or considers supporting a person that has one,” Tigner said in a statement. “But make no mistake, abortion is both legal in Texas and supported by the majority of Texans. The governor’s swipe of a pen can’t change the Constitution.”

“The Turning”: The dark side of Mother Teresa’s order, according to nuns who left

One of the most striking things about the new podcast “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left” is how some of the former nuns describe their experiences with life behind the walls of Mother Teresa’s world-famous order, the Missionaries of Charity: in language reminiscent of the way we talk about cults. 

They use terms like “isolation” and “brainwashing.” They were only permitted to write home once a month and visit home once every decade. They describe what it feels like to look at a single human: as having a direct line to holiness. 

Of course there were beautiful, spiritually affirming moments, too — times where these women felt achingly close to the God for whom they’d given up their normal lives — but for some, the suffering and separation were too much. “The whole idea was to make you feel as alone as possible,” Kelli Dunham, a self-described “ex-nun,” said. 

It was enough to make some fantasize about escaping — and some did. Through “The Turning,” a new 10-episode podcast by Rococo Punch and iHeartMedia, producer and host Erika Lantz tells their stories. 

“I really am interested in stories that don’t have a clear right and wrong,” Lantz told Salon in an interview. “I think there’s a lot of gray in the story. There are different sets of facts and, depending on what perspective you’re using to look at them, you might have a very different opinion of what they mean.” 

Understanding their journeys starts with understanding the cultural power of Mother Teresa herself. Though she wasn’t canonized as a saint until 16 years after her death in 1997, she was recognized as saintly by many in the Catholic church and beyond long before then due to her charitable work, especially after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. 

The order she founded in 1950, the Missionaries of Charity, ran soup kitchens and opened and staffed orphanages and schools for the underprivileged across the globe (though not without some controversy), and still manages homes for the terminally ill. Over the course of 71 years, thousands upon thousands of women took vows of chastity, poverty, obedience and “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”

Because of that, Lantz said, Mother Teresa’s name has become a “synonym for kindness.”

“It’s like the shorthand in our culture,” she said. “When I started working on this project, I noticed that people would drop her name as a metaphor. Even in ‘Tiger King,’ and this isn’t a direct quote, but you had someone introduce Carole Baskin as ‘the Mother Teresa of Cats.'” 

Many of the women with whom Lantz spoke, even if they had left the order, said that the reverence towards Mother Teresa was absolutely warranted. “She was so close to God and you knew it when she was there,” one said. 

But life within the order Mother Teresa had created was hard. 

The sisters kept a rigid schedule that began at 4:30 a.m. and only included 30 minutes of unstructured recreation time, which was most often spent catching up on work that hadn’t gotten done. Though they were required to go everywhere in pairs, the nuns were never allowed to have private conversations and would instead recite prayers together. 

This was to encourage chastity, a virtue that, as Lantz found out in her reporting, Mother Teresa was strict about maintaining, almost to the point of paranoia. After all, the Missionaries of Charity were spiritually wed to Jesus and were organized to “satiate the thirst of Jesus Christ on the Cross for Love and Souls.”

It’s a telling detail that Mother Teresa was so intently focused on Christ’s crucifixion. While, as Lantz put it in “The Turning,” one would anticipate that the scriptural passages that would have most impacted Mother Teresa would have centered on Jesus’ interactions with the poor, sick and hungry, she was perhaps most moved by how his pain catalyzed his holiness. 

This was reflected in how the sisters lived in their respective convents, the series reports. Why would you pray from a chair when you could kneel on the hard ground? Why would you open the windows or wear one less layer when you could simply swelter? Why, as in the case of one nun, would you rest in bed after sustaining major burns when you could go back to work in almost unspeakable pain? 

However, as Lantz found out, the emphasis on achieving holiness through suffering didn’t stop there. As is revealed early in “The Turning,” the sisters would frequently engage in self-flagellation. 

Mary Johnson, a former nun and author of “An Unquenchable Thirst” — who also spoke with Salon back in 2013 about her experiences in the order — joined the Missionaries of Charity when she was 19 after seeing Mother Teresa on the cover of TIME Magazine. 

She detailed her first self-flagellation session to Lantz, remembering how the bundle of cords she was given left her upper thighs streaked with red and white lines. In the bathroom stall next to her, there was another, more experienced nun doing the same thing. 

This shocked Lantz, who said that the effects of that kind of trauma, even if self-inflicted, are lasting for many of the former sisters. 

“I don’t think anyone pictures Mother Teresa and imagines that her sisters are whipping themselves daily,” she said. “I know Mary Johnson had told me, at one point, she asked her now-husband to beat her — he did not, I should say —because she craved a way to have relief from guilt.” 

As Johnson told Lantz, the extreme nature of the religious order is part of its appeal, but it also contributes to some of the “cultishness.” 

“It did surprise me that multiple sisters started using words like ‘cult’ or ‘mind-control’ or being ‘brainwashed,'” Lantz said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean those women thought they were in a cult, but it often felt like the closest thing they could compare it to. And it’s interesting — often we think of cults as being on the fringes of society, but here we have the Catholic Church and Mother Teresa, who is so admired around the world.” 

“I think it’s important to look at any institution with power with a critical eye and examine what role that power plays,” she added. “When you have a strict vow of obedience, where the superior is a direct voice of God, you’re creating a power dynamic.” 

Throughout “The Turning,” Lantz examines how that power dynamic played out in other ways through abuses, betrayals and forbidden love. She also teases out, quite beautifully, a question that many will enter the series thinking: “Why didn’t these women leave sooner?” 

“It’s hard because you believe that Jesus has been fervently calling you to this, it’s what you must do,” Lantz said. “Once you take that vow of obedience, that includes obeying God’s will for you. Then Mother Teresa is also telling you that you’ve been called. It’s hard to leave that. For some it’s impossible.” 

The first two episodes of “The Turning: The Sisters Who Left” are now available. New episodes will be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.

This one-bowl, cream-filled skillet cake is absolutely made to be shared

Baking is an everyday act of pure magic. The alchemy of time and heat and chemical reactions that transform a dough or a batter into a stack of chocolate chip cookies or a loaf of banana bread is commonplace, but that never makes the end result any less awe-inspiring.

Baked goods that can pull off an extra flourish or two are the ones that impress me the most. Give me soufflés! Give me popovers! Give me chocolate desserts that self-sauce!

Or give me New England spider cake! I stumbled upon spider cake several eons ago by way of Jonathan Reynolds’ recipe in The New York Times. It had an ingredient list so odd and so intriguing that I had to try it. Vinegar? Cornmeal? Challenge accepted — and I’ve been hooked ever since!

Contrary to its spooky, Northern Atlantic name, this is no Halloween-themed treat. Instead, the “spider” here is a core of silky baked cream that tendrils out toward the cake’s edges like the arms of an arachnid. The unique baking technique gives spider cake its remarkable texture: crumbly and buttery all around with a heavenly surprise in the center. It’s like the Twinkie grew up and became its best self — true to its casual origins, yet somehow sophisticated at the same time. 

While the inclusion of cornmeal in the recipe may set off breakfast bells, I promise that this cake is too good to limit to one specific time of day. The amount of cornmeal here adds a little snap and sweetness, but it doesn’t define the dish. The vinegar, meanwhile, does exactly what buttermilk would do (without requiring another trip to the grocery store). While this is undeniably an excellent alternative to your morning muffin, it’s also a welcome afternoon snacking cake — and a damn fine way to end dinner.

It’s also a very, very easy cake that asks almost nothing of you in terms of equipment or effort. Mix this up in one bowl with a spoon, bake it in a skillet to give it that delicious crunch, then sit back and enjoy being praised. I like to make this in my 6-inch cast iron pan — it makes a perfect-sized cake for a family to nibble on throughout the course of a day or two. If you’re looking for a more substantial cake here, this is a simple recipe to convert. Just use a 12-inch skillet, double the ingredients and increase the baking time to about 45 to 60 minutes. 

***

Recipe: Cream-Filled New England Spider Cake

Inspired by The New York Times and The Kitchn

Serves: 4 to 6

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon of melted butter, plus more for greasing pan
  • 1 cup of milk
  • 6 tablespoons of white sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 2 teaspoons of vinegar (White vinegar is typically suggested, but I love this with balsamic or apple cider vinegar)
  • 1/2 cup of white flour
  • 6 tablespoons of yellow cornmeal
  • 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda
  • Generous pinch of sea salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract (optional)
  • 1/2 cup of heavy cream
  • Confectioners sugar for topping

Directions:

  1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Generously butter a 6-inch cast iron pan, then put the empty pan in oven.
  3. In a large bowl, stir milk, sugar, egg, butter and vinegar together. Let mixture sit for 5 minutes.
  4. Stir in flour, cornmeal, baking soda, sea salt and vanilla. Mix well.
  5. Remove your pan from the oven, and pour in the batter.
  6. Pour cream into the center of the batter.
  7. Bake for 30 or so minutes, until golden on top and just a little jiggly still in the middle.
  8. Top with confectioners sugar, and serve warm.

Chef’s Note: If you’re feeling wild, there’s nothing stopping you from pouring on a little chocolate sauce, too.

 

More Quick & Dirty: 

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“The Dry” is a desolate, engrossing mystery in which everyone – even Eric Bana – is guilty

The parched outback of Kiewarra, Australia is the setting for the involving, atmospheric mystery, “The Dry,” based on Jane Harper’s best-selling novel. The area has not had rain in nearly a year (brush fires are a big concern) when Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) arrives for a funeral. The dead man is his friend from two decades ago, Luke (Martin Dingle Wall), who apparently murdered his wife Karen (Rosanna Lockhart) and son Billy (Jarvis Mitchell) in their home, leaving his baby, Charlotte, alive before heading off to a dried-up lake to take his own life. 

The murder-suicide theory, however, does not hold water with Luke’s parents, Barb (Julia Blake) and Gerry (Bruce Spence). They ask Aaron, who is now a member of the Australian Federal Police in Melbourne, to investigate. Aaron teams up with the local cop, Raco (Keir O’Donnell) and starts digging into the case, looking into Luke’s finances, and questioning folks in this small town, such as Luke’s neighbor, Jamie (James Frecheville, of “Animal Kingdom“), Scott Whitlam (John Polson), who runs the school where Karen worked, the local doctor (Daniel Frederiksen), and others. He also interrogates some acquaintances from his past, including the hothead Grant Dow (Matt Nable), and the kindly Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly). 

Twenty years ago, when they were teens, Aaron (Joe Klocek) was close with Gretchen (Claude Scott-Mitchell), as he and Luke (Sam Corlett) were friendly with her and Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt). However, when Ellie was found dead in the local river, Aaron and Luke were suspects. Moreover, it is believed that the boys lied about their whereabouts on the day of her death. The unsolved mystery haunts Aaron, as well as the town. Grant, and Grant’s father, Mal (William Zappa) still hold a grudge against Aaron, and do not welcome him on his return to Kiewarra.

Director/co-writer Robert Connelly clearly lays out all this history and defines each character so viewers immersed in “The Dry” can follow the stories as the film toggles back and forth between the past and the present. There is a suggestion that there could be a link between the two crimes. Was Luke capable of killing his family? And was he involved in Ellie’s death? 

“The Dry” takes this juicy setup and uses it to examine the seamy underbelly of this small farming community. The characters are all as desolate as the land, and Bana cuts an imposing figure as he observes the townsfolk, deducing their secrets that could incriminate them. The film is a solid whodunnit, and viewers may — or may not — pick up some of the clues as the investigation unfolds. Aaron is a shrewd detective, and his perceptive observations assist him well. That said, while a casual remark leads to a big reveal, it is hard not to scoff as several leads drop almost effortlessly into his lap. 

Even as Aaron encounters the expected red herrings and misdirection — thankfully, the film resists some genre clichés, such as Aaron being knocked unconscious by someone wanting him to stop snooping — the film does not build its tension inexorably. Despite the power of the drama, there are only a few suspenseful moments. 

Connelly’s film is as much a character study as it is a mystery. “The Dry” is a narrative of return, with Aaron’s actions triggered by his memories. When Jamie says he was off shooting rabbits when Luke was killed, it is the same alibi he and Luke used for their whereabouts at the time of Ellie’s death. Is Jamie trolling him? Likewise, does Aaron have an ulterior motive for sleuthing, as some folks suspect? He certainly seems spooked when he is harassed by the locals and becomes the target of a smear campaign. 

It is not presumptuous to believe Aaron became a Federal cop because he was suspected of a crime as a youth, but the film never makes that connection explicit. That said, everyone in “The Dry” is guilty of something. Money, of course, is a concern in the area’s dying economy, but are factors like jealousy, or revenge at play? It is best to left for viewers to discover. 

Nevertheless, Aaron’s instincts about Luke’s murder-suicide case might be a chance for him to settle old scores and perhaps even uncover the elusive truth about Ellie’s death. This is his shot at redemption, and Aaron feels tremendous pressure to solve the case and free himself from his troubled past. 

As such, Aaron is always quietly seething inside. Bana’s gripping performance is largely internal, allowing him to express his real thoughts in just a glance, or his body language, sitting on his hotel room bed, processing the past and present. The actor generally maintains a cool, confident presence throughout “The Dry.” It is amusing when Raco’s wife, Rita (Miranda Tapsell) jokes about the man-crush her husband has on Aaron. And yet, Aaron’s need to figure out the truth at any cost drives him to confront something that is quite painful. Bana makes that difficulty palpable. As he and Gretchen reconnect as adults, they initially try to resist their desire for one another. They are way too bound up in the past, with Gretchen likely sublimating her attraction to Luke, and Aaron suppressing his once-budding relationship with Ellie. 

This kind of knotty plotting, along with the strong sense of place, is what makes “The Dry” so compelling. The film was a big hit in its native Australia. It deserves the same success here. 

“The Dry” opens in select theaters and on demand on May 21.

WATCH: Rep. Katie Porter whips out her “whiteboard of justice” to destroy Big Pharma’s big lie

Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., tore into AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez during a Tuesday House Oversight Committee hearing, attacking the “the Big Pharma fairy tale” used by executives like Gonzalez to justify exorbitantly high drug pricing. 

Gonzalez, whose compensation hovered just north of $24 million last year, was taken to task by Porter for hiking Humira, a drug used to treat autoimmune illnesses like Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis, by over 470% since 2003. In the past, AbbieVie has rationalized the hike by saying that it covers the cost of new research and development. However, Porter pointed out that, in 2018, the company spent $4.7 billion on marketing and advertising, just under double what it spent on research and development. Porter also castigated the company for spending $50 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, a move that has earned a reputation amongst corporate critics for a money-grab.

When Porter questioned Gonzalez on how much the company spent in executive compensation from 2013-2018, the CEO speculated “about $60 million a year.”

“Try $334 [million] on for size,” Porter quipped. 

“So Mr. Gonzalez, you’re spending all this money to make sure you make money, rather than spending money to invest in, develop drugs and help patients with affordable, life-saving drugs,” Porter said. “You lie to patients when you charge them twice as much for an unimproved drug and then you lie to policymakers when you tell us that R&D justifies those price increases.”

She added: “The Big Pharma fairytale is one of groundbreaking R&D that justifies astronomical prices, but the pharma reality is that you spend most of your company’s money making money for yourself and your shareholders. The fact [is] that you’re not honest about that with patients and policymakers—that you’re feeding us lies that we must pay astronomical prices to get ‘innovative’ treatments. The American people, the patients, deserve so much better.”

In a report released on Tuesday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee found that billions in revenue stemming from AbbVie drug price increases went to the company’s top executives. “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 report explains. 

Last year, on Humira sales alone, AbbVie made nearly $20 billion, making it one of the most lucrative drugs in the world. One yearly supply of the drug can cost upwards of $84,000. There is no cheaper generic drug for Humira that is currently on the market. 

In the past, AbbVie has been accused of “patent thicketing,” where companies win patents that give them an exclusive market for a drug, shutting out others that might be able to replicate it at a lower cost. “Biosimilars have so much to offer for America’s patients, but the potential savings that they can bring is being squashed by burdensome patent thickets in the name of profits,” Christine Simmon, senior vice president at the Biosimilars Council, told the Washington Post last year. “Patent thicketing, and Humira is the poster child for this, builds a patent fortress around their product to protect their ability to continue their monopoly pricing.”

Because AbbVie faces little to no competition in their market niche, the company is able to raise the price of their drugs without facing financial consequences, forcing immunocompromised patients to choose between their health and their financial livelihood.

Lock him up! Prosecuting Trump won’t save democracy, but it sure will make doing so easier

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: The main reason to prosecute Donald Trump is that he’s a shameless criminal. If the former president doesn’t start tasting real consequences for it soon, he will only become more emboldened. No doubt one of the main reasons he tried so hard to steal the 2020 election was that he really enjoyed how he used “executive privilege” as a license for non-stop criming. If he manages to cheat or even win his way into the White House again, the amount of criminal activity we can expect will make his first term — which featured obstruction of justice, using taxpayer resources to blackmail a foreign leader, campaign finance violations, likely bribery schemes, and inciting an insurrection to overthrow an election — look like small time corruption.

Trump’s criminality is central to who he is — as much as his callous disregard for others, his vanity, and his racism. So it was a very welcome sight this morning — or last night, for night owls and west coast denizens — to see New York Attorney General Letitia James announcing that her office is joining with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization. James has been behind the so-far remarkably successful legal war on the NRA for financial misconduct and fraud, and so Trump and the grifters in his employ should be very scared right about now. Especially since, as reporting from the New York Times over the years has shown, what looks very much like tax fraud is rampant in the Trump family and its company. 

But if this investigation turns into a real prosecution, it wouldn’t just be a welcome sign that there is such thing as consequences for the crimes committed by spoiled rich people who can’t make an honest living. It would also be a huge boon to those who are struggling to save democracy from a Republican Party that’s quickly organizing itself around the principle that they need to do whatever it takes to steal the White House in 2024. 

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Tying up Trump with a prosecution — or, dare we dream, jail time — wouldn’t in itself be enough to kneecap the GOP war on democracy. But without the figurehead who inspires and compels them to greater acts of corruption, it would definitely be harder for Republicans to continue tearing apart our already tattered democracy. His leadership is a central component to the current Republican war on democracy. Trump’s two-and-a-half month long coup effort — which culminated in a violent insurrection — may have failed, but it indisputably provided a road map for Republicans to remake the system so that the next time Trump tries to steal the election, he’ll succeed.

In between sets of cheating at golf, Trump has been busy directing the GOP in what it needs to do to clear the path for him to be not just the 2024 nominee but to cheat his way into the White House. In particular, the purge of GOP officials who could get in his way and the fake “vote audit” in Arizona are being directed by Trump from his blog that few ordinary Americans read but which Republican leaders clearly treat as a religious text. It’s clear that GOP leaders like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy don’t really possess Trump’s sociopathic gumption, and so look to him for all their cues on what to do next in this war on democracy. For instance, in the hours and days after the Capitol riot, McCarthy’s base instinct was to oppose what had happened, out of a combination of personal outrage and no doubt a not-unreasonable assumption that violent insurrection is bad politics. But he’s come around to Trump’s pro-insurrection point of view, as evidenced by his efforts to stop Congress from forming a commission to investigate the events of January 6. It’s unlikely McCarthy would be taking it this far if he didn’t have Trump pressuring him. 

Republican leaders agree with Trump that democracy is an obstacle to be removed on their way to power. But the reason they stick by him in particular, despite his repugnant personality and demands that they show loyalty by humiliating themselves before him, is because they really do believe that no other leader can take them to the promised land of one-party permanent minority rule. As Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently told Fox News, “He’s the most popular Republican in the country by a lot. If you try to drive him out of the Republican Party, half the people will leave.” 

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Gutting democracy is, of course, about making sure that Republicans don’t need to win elections to hold power. But still, it’s not a task that can be accomplished without some measure of popular support. Republicans believe that Trump is the key to getting that popular support, and they may be right. Without Trump guiding the party and purging dissenters, the GOP is more likely to be set adrift and torn up by in-fighting. With him, they are marching in lockstep, and way more likely to succeed. 

Prosecuting Trump does invite the very real danger that it’s seen as base political persecution — of the sort Trump routinely tried to impose on his opponents — and invites a backlash. That’s why Biden has reportedly been down on the possibility of prosecuting Trump’s many crimes, and the Department of Justice under the newly appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to be moving in the direction of treating Trump like the criminal he is. 

These fears are, however, overblown.

Trump supporters are already hepped up on conspiracy theories about stolen elections and a deep state. They are already so convinced their orange savior is being persecuted that they can’t be any more convinced. And while there will no doubt be hand-wringing from a mainstream press that is eager for a “both sides do it” narrative, the reality of Trump’s rampant criminality will likely mute it. It just gets hard, at a certain point, to paint a twice-impeached confessed sexual assailant who incited an insurrection on live TV as the innocent target of a political vendetta. 

And ultimately, that’s what this comes down to: The reason to prosecute Trump is because he’s a criminal. That he’s a threat to democracy cannot be teased apart from his criminality because so many of his crimes were aimed directly at undermining our democracy, from campaign finance violations to attempts to blackmail Ukraine’s president to, of course, his attempted coup. The reason so many of the crimes he committed are crimes in the first place is because they threaten civil society. So not only is it important to prosecute Trump for the simple reason of rule of law, but it would also send a warning sign to other Republicans who have been emboldened by his audacious corruption: Modeling yourself after Trump is not as risk-free as he made it seem.

Let’s hope that Vance and James are successful in their endeavor, not just for the satisfaction of seeing Trump face justice, but as an important step in saving our democracy. 

In Netflix’s “Dark City Beneath the Beat,” TT The Artist captures the Baltimore club sound and scene

As a proud Baltimore native and resident, I am well aware of our city’s problems. And sometimes I get frustrated when outsiders reduce us to nothing but the Inner Harbor and a bunch of violence. We are also the place where Oprah Winfrey hosted “People are Talking” before she was a household name, home of bestselling authors Wes Moore and Taylor Branch, and “The Wire” creator David Simon. Baltimore is also the place where artist Amy Sherald painted the official Michelle Obama portrait for Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. We are also a hub of food, culture, innovation and creativity –– all of which was captured by TT The Artist, in her new Netflix film “Dark City Beneath the Beat.”

“Dark City Beneath the Beat” explores the origins of Baltimore club music, an extremely local but highly sampled genre that has found its way into the sounds of countless mainstream artists, including Kanye West, M.I.A and Cardi B. The film also shines a light on legendary Baltimore club artists, DJs, dancers, producers and the city’s creative community as they work to realize their dreams. The film was produced by HBO’s “Insecure,” star Issa Rae and directed by TT The Artist, who sat down for a recent “Salon Talks” interview. 

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with TT The Artist here, or read our conversation below to hear more about the drama you face when making a Baltimore film, her new record label and how she made the transition from music to the silver screen.  

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

How have you been surviving all of this pandemic stuff? What is it like bringing out a film during a pandemic?

I have been working on this film for quite some time now. Originally, I had envisioned it coming out in 2019, then I decided to wait so that I can get it through the festival markets. That was 2020. And as soon as we were about to get our world premiere at South by Southwest, COVID strikes, so that gets canceled. So it kind of left all of us in a weird space like, “What do we do now?” Plus, we’ve been waiting so long to put the film out. But it actually ended up having a greater positive effect on the film because then it opened us to an audience that may not have been able to travel to the film festivals. So we did a lot of virtual festivals. We screened in over 30-something virtual festivals worldwide.

At the same time, we were pitching it for distribution on streaming networks. Once we found out we were going to be on Netflix, it felt great. It kind of had a great turnaround. Even though, during this time, we lost a lot of things that we normally do that are a part of our routine as artists, like concerts and things like that, I also think it opened the internet up. It opened up the opportunity for artists that are kind of floating underground, or under the radar, to now be seen because the activity online has increased and people were shifting to more virtual experiences. So I think overall, I’m happy. I’m not happy about the losses due to this pandemic, but I did get some gains and I was able to take time to develop other ideas that I had, like scripts that I wanted to write. So I would say overall, I kept a positive outlook throughout this time.

Many of us who know you, we know you as a musician, we know you as a painter, we know you as an all-around creative person, but now you’re adding director to the repertoire. Talk about that transition.

Well, I would say the transition happened through music. I feel like music opened that doorway because being a musician in Baltimore and then just really not having a lot of resources, I ended up directing my own music videos. And then, I started directing music videos for other local artists. So that essentially is where the directing began. I had no idea it would lead me into film, but in 2006 I said I wanted to make a film about the Baltimore club music and dance culture. So it just never went away. It became more of a passion project. And so all those things connected, kind of brought me to this point where I’m at today.

I thought “Dark City Beneath the Beat” was an explosion of color, information. I’m a super, super, super local guy, so anything that’s going to uplift the cultural brilliance of Baltimore City, I’m ready to double down on it. I would like you to explain to our viewers and a lot of our readers, the significance of Baltimore club music in the city and how should people engage or what should they take from it, outside of the city or the country even?

Well, just through my own experiences, I feel that the Baltimore club culture is built around community. The dance that the community experiences, at all ages, brings people together. And for me, it was one thing that I connected with. I was born and raised in Florida, but I moved to Baltimore when I was 18 to go to art school. I went to the Maryland Institute College of Art. And while I was there, I became best friends with one of my friends who was a Baltimore native, named Mo. And he introduced me to everything Baltimore. He took me out of that college bubble.

I was working downtown. At one point, I was working on Howard Street, in Lexington Market area, at this really ratchet clothing store called Blue City. And I saw a lot. That was the time I was a sophomore in college. I’ve lived in the county. I’ve lived east, I’ve lived west. So just to me, the club culture kind of connected with me, from a community standpoint and I also saw a lot of the positive work being done to transform the lives of the young people in Baltimore. And I felt like that should be highlighted more. The goal for this film was to showcase what type of creative culture and climate and the essence of Baltimore, but also show some of the struggle that some of these artists are facing in getting support so that they continue to sustain themselves in their practices.

It’s like, just know that it’s not all what the media has always made it out to be. My experience really was a reflection in that film. I felt that there were so many different pockets and places that I went as an artist. That’s essentially what this film turned into. It went from a traditional approach, to me just wanting to experiment with a more hybrid format that would captivate people and just make them say, “Wow, I didn’t know Baltimore had a LGBTQ scene or vogue scene or those things.” So, that’s really how I think people can experience it. Just understand that it’s a community place at the end of the day.

In your travels, how often do you have to defend Baltimore? 

To be honest with you, I would say a lot of people, of course, when they hear Baltimore, the first thing they throw out is “The Wire.” Now we have “12 O’clock Boys,” “Charm City Kings.” I think we had another one called “Step.” So, I think that there are people who are trying to put out more diverse imagery coming out of Baltimore. This past week, I felt like I’ve had to defend myself more to the people of Baltimore than anything. But it’s like 10 percent haters, 90 percent supporters who are celebrating. I just try to tell people, “What I did was just one thing, but I do feel like I just opened the door for this particular culture to now get back to releasing music, get back to putting content out there.” We want to see it from all sides.

We also dropped the album, on Issa Rae’s Radio Records, that goes with the soundtrack of the film. And that’s important because now some of these artists that are featured on the soundtrack get to make some residual income. That’s what I mean by bringing resources back to the city and providing platforms and outlets for these artists to elevate in their craft.

You just said it’s 10 percent haters and 90 percent supporters. Why do we sometimes slip into giving that 10 percent energy that they don’t deserve? As artists, why do we do that? Because it’s not just me and you, I see this across the board.

It’s that conversation where you pick and choose your battles because we have dedicated XYZ amount of time and energy, blood, sweat, and tears into creating a piece of history, her-story, that is now available for all to experience, keeps us in a vulnerable state to the public opinion. And so I feel that the reason why we see it is because we see so much positive coming, but that one troll stands out, and then they might just press a little button in there. And you feel like you have to sometimes defend your credibility in your work because you have these random people. And some of them are not even random, some of them are high profile people that you thought are your peers, they’re just giving their critique. But I think that that’s what it is.

It’s that attachment to our work and this is our work. We put a lot of time and energy and thought into it. And when it comes out, it’s such a polished package, a lot of people don’t see that side. So it’s so easy because we’re the artists and we’re sensitive about our shit. You know what I’m saying? 

It’s like, if I see a timeline and I see nothing but flood of imagery of positivity. Then there’s a paragraph. I mean, a paragraph of someone just giving their unwanted opinion. I’m going to see it. But I’m learning also to tune that out. This is new for me.

It’s hard. It’s hard. We’re human. That’s the end of the day, we’re human. For when it’s strangers, it’s a little easier. But when it’s people that you literally have seen and grown with and they’re offering and they’re taking things to social media, without just talking to you, it’s like, “You know me. You can literally talk to me and you can literally tell me things that you like, things you didn’t like.” And either way, you know what I will tell you? I was like, “Well, I think that you should go create what you want to see. Tell your story from the version that you see, because I did what I felt to do. Now, I want to put it in your corner and I’m going to be your opinionator and let you know what you need to do now.” So, that’s how I look at it.

I also get a lot of noise from our brothers and sisters in New Jersey trying to claim club music. Talking about club music is something that originated in New Jersey. So for people new into the culture and trying to understand, can you just explain the difference between Baltimore and New Jersey club music?

Well, the Baltimore club sound originated in Baltimore. Then it traveled to Jersey. It is a known fact. When you Google Jersey club music, it says derivative of Baltimore club. That’s a fact. Of course, club music came through the wave of Chicago house, juke, footwork type music. So, that’s where it all comes from. So that’s it. Jersey club came from Baltimore and then we also got Philly club now. So that’s just what it is. They’re going to have to accept it. You know what I’m saying? 

It’s a lot of people in Jersey that are showing love. Shout out to Unique and you got Unicorn. Those are people that I know personally who definitely be showing a lot of love. But it’s a real thing. It’s like street beef. It’s like dance culture beef, people want to show up and show out and it’s rolling. This little thing that started here, it’s starting to grow where we’re starting to have events. They just did a Jersey verse Baltimore dance competition recently, last week I think. Yeah, we’re starting to see it grow and I love it.

So when I was a kid, I remember my cousin, he banged on my door and he’s like, “Boom, boom, boom. You got to hear this song.” And I’m like, “Okay. Okay. Okay.” And that was like the first club song I ever heard. So, that’s kind of how it came into my life. How did it make it into yours? When was the first time a young TT walked into a club and looked around and was like, “Yo, what are these people rocking out to?”

Well, I actually first heard club music when I was a student at MICA. I was a freshman, turned on the radio and 92Q was on. It was K-Swift deejaying and she was playing club music. And I was like, “What is this?” It reminded me of music that I grew up on. It made me connect with Baltimore more because I felt at home. I had never been past Alabama before I went to college. So, that’s what made me actually connect with the city. And so by sophomore year, that’s when I was going to the Paradox because I was of age. I went to the Paradox, you know what I’m saying?

I actually met K-Swift once and we shook hands and I bought her CD, her Club Queen CD. I think if she was still around, we’d be probably business partners, to be honest with you. And she would have a whole swarm of other club queens following her. 

One of my favorite parts of the film, I think, a part that a lot of people were talking about and a lot of people like, was the whole King of Baltimore and Queen of Baltimore segments and the preparation for those competitions. Can you break those competitions down to our viewers?

Yeah. So every year, Unique, he is the founder of the organization BMore Than Dance, which is a collective that basically mentors young people out of Baltimore. Literally take them from the streets to dancing. And it’s focused around Baltimore club dance. He has been hosting for the past 10 years, this independent, recreated dance competition. They have one for the guys, which is King Of Baltimore, and one for the ladies, which is Queen of Baltimore. And it’s a competition where the dancers battle it out to see who wins the crown.

He’s really been doing this for years, just self-funding it. It’s one of the most exciting things. I came across it in 2011. That was my first King of Baltimore competition. And I was just like, “Wow, this is insane.” The level of competitiveness in these dancers. I love the concept of street style dance cultures, but I feel like they should be looked at, just as on a high level as more traditional classical stuff like ballet and jazz and tap and all that. It’s intense, it’s raw. I was like, we got to show this to the world. People got to see that this is going on.

We’re working on a dance competition show version of it. So we’re trying to take his idea from where he’s at now and we really want to try to push it to some networks. So, that’s what’s kind of coming up. We got a lot of things coming up. So I think people will be happy at the new stuff we’ll be working on.

One of the things that a lot of people don’t understand and I would love for you to take this opportunity to break it down to them is how difficult it is to make a film. Talk about some of the challenges you faced trying to get this project out because this isn’t something that TT dreamed up two weeks ago. This is something that you’ve wanted to do since 2006.

Yes. That’s why I tell people a lot of times that I’m the messenger because I came to Baltimore thinking I’m just going to art school, but then ended up connecting with the community and then ended up creating this film. But it was very challenging. I’ve experienced a lot of turbulence along the way. The first thing about making a film though is desire. Desire is the key to all creation. So for me, it just was a passion project and it wouldn’t go away. So I was like, “I’m going to get this done, whether I find the money or not.” But it helped when I was able to apply to grants now that they’re offering more grants to local artists in Baltimore. And so that really, really helped me to push the idea forward, but that didn’t come till like years, years, years later.

So there are years where I wasn’t doing any production. I was just still trying to figure it out. I was still trying to build my relationships with the community. Times where I was like, “Am I ever going to get this done?” And then once I was able to get some funding, I was like, “Okay, let’s go. We out of here.”

But also, during those years, I developed more creatively. So how the documentary was going to be, I feel, would not have had the same impact as this one has because there was no musical. There was no, these type of creative scenes. It was mostly just interviews and then we had cutaway shots and B roll. But I thought that this approach, we looking at it as art. We taking our kids out the street, putting them in some clothes, doing some production design, showing the world there’s a high level art happening in Baltimore. So, that was the journey. And now we’re here and I’m just looking forward to the next project that I’m working on. So people could really see my growth and development as a director.

I think we do get a reputation for being like a really, really violent place and you added something positive to the conversation that I think a lot of people will appreciate that. What role does art play in helping to change any type of negative viable issues around cities like Baltimore, in general?

I tell people, prior to me becoming a full-time artist or getting full-time into directing, I was a teacher. I was working in Baltimore City in the nonprofit world and also in the public school system. I taught film production, music production to kids. I mean, all the way from kindergarten to high school. And what I saw was the arts is life-changing in a young person’s life. When you put the tools in their hands, they feel empowered. And so I’ve had kids that I taught, when they were in sixth, seventh grade, DM me and say, “I don’t know if you remember me. I was at Dr. Bernard Harris Elementary. I was in fifth grade and I was taking one of your film afterschool programs. I now want to be a journalist.” That’s what I mean. I feel like art in the hands of young people is transformative for them because now they have tools to express themselves and communicate. I just think it’s super, super, duper important.

In the film, you mentioned your record label. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. So Club Queen Records. Basically, I was getting to a place in my life where I’ve been an independent artist for 10 years. I felt that for women, specifically women of color navigating in the hip hop and dance music space, we just don’t get the same opportunities. It’s a sausage party unless you’re shaking your butt and showing it off for the guys at their festivals, at their shows, or they’re attracted to you, you’re not as likely to get booked. And that’s just a fact.

So it’s transformed and evolved a little bit more from my time. But at a point I said, “I’m so tired of just people slamming doors in my face,” or just not even offering the opportunity. Then I said, “I’m going to build out a platform.” I feel like as women, or underrepresented groups, we have to build our own platform so that we can open the doors for the next generation, who are like us and our reflections.

And so that’s where Club Queen Records came from. Of course, it’s inspired by the original Club Queen because it’s a record label, but we have a big focus on the genres of dance music, hip hop, pop and R&B. I just wanted to continue to celebrate what K-Swift was doing in the clubs and as a woman. All the artists and all the female artists that are coming out of Baltimore, I send my platform to them. I extend my platform to everyone who is an artist coming out of Baltimore that as a woman that needs that support, because we just don’t get it. And that’s what we’re about. So every year we’ll be dropping a compilation project called Club Queens. So we got Club Queen One and Club Queen Two out, and we’re working on Club Queen Three now. So I’m hoping to have a whole new wave of featured artists, now that we’re buzzing, to hop on and get on board the train because we trying to take it all over the world.

Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram”: Dramatic pop virtuosity that still shines brightly at 50

It may be an overly lofty thing to say, but Paul McCartney was born to compose popular music. There is no better living document to his gift for concocting pop confections than “Ram,” his 1971 album with wife Linda. Coming on the heels of his eponymous debut LP with the classic “Maybe I’m Amazed” as its centerpiece, “Ram” provided a vivid showcase for the former Beatle’s wide-ranging, seemingly effortless talents.

For the second time in a decade, McCartney has dusted off “Ram” for reconsideration. The 2012 deluxe remastered edition was a triumph, reminding us why “Ram” has come to enjoy a much-deserved place among the entirety of the solo Beatles’ wares as an indie masterpiece. Indeed, the record stands out from all of the band members’ post-disbandment LPs because there’s simply nothing else like it.

In its latest incarnation, “Ram” has been issued in a limited-edition, half-speed mastered pressing for its 50th anniversary. And vinyl aficionados won’t be disappointed. The LP is a wonder to behold and worthy of all the extra attention that it has received of late. The album’s sonic palette is so rich and varied, so utterly filled with whimsy, that each new cut sizzles with virtuosity and drama.

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That’s right — drama. Take the opening track, “Too Many People,” which showcases McCartney’s unparalleled pop organicism. “Ram” absolutely drips with melodic experimentation, with Paul and Linda leading their band through one adventurous song after another. With “Too Many People,” McCartney herds his musicians through a slow burn that culminates in a dramatic, power-pop explosion.

Listen to “Too Many People”:

And it doesn’t end there. Songs like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” brim with the creative caprice inherent in McCartney’s pop-music storytelling, merging standard rock combo structures with orchestration and a panoply of vocal and studio-inflected nuances.

There may be no better example of McCartney’s pop-music mastery on “Ram” than “Monkberry Moon Delight.” As a much younger person, I remember being put-off — even slightly frightened — by the song’s utter strangeness, especially McCartney’s daunting lead vocal. In its vinyl incarnation, the remastered track brings these elements to the fore, heightening the drama, and sacrificing none of the darkness that left me cowering beneath the bedclothes.

Listen to “Monkberry Moon Delight”:

If the album has a masterpiece, it’s “The Back Seat of My Car.” Following the closing strains of “Ram On,” which weaves in and out of the LP like a mantra, “The Back Seat of My Car” finds McCartney trying on yet another vocal texture. Indeed, in his vast catalogue — including both his Beatles and solo work — there may be no better platform for gleaning his breathtaking vocal range and knack for improvisation than Ram.

As with “Too Many People,” “The Back Seat of My Car” has everything and the kitchen sink, climaxing in a cacophony of musical drama, competing tonalities and melodies, and, in the best sense of the word, noise. As compositions go, the song is just as exquisite and inventive today as it was back in May 1971. And with the vinyl remaster bringing “Ram” into full bloom, McCartney’s pop virtuosity has never shone brighter.

Listen to “The Back Seat of My Car”:

Milky Way may have matured earlier than we thought

How long did it take the Milky Way to evolve into the modern galaxy it is today?

Astronomers believe the Milky Way is an estimated 13.51 billion years old, but what happened during each stage of its evolution — and how long those phases lasted to get to its current form today — remains unclear. It’s believed that the Milky Way’s collision with a dwarf galaxy nearly 10 billion years ago was a turning point, setting in motion the changes that amounted to our modern galaxy. However, a new report published in Nature Astronomy this week suggests that most of our modern galaxy was actually in place before the Milky Way collided with a dwarf galaxy. In other words, the Milky Way likely matured much earlier than previously thought.

“We wanted to know, what was the sequence of events that led to the formation of our galaxy, did the merger happen after the formation of the thick disk, or did it trigger the formation of the thick disk? said Fiorenzo Vincenzo, co-author of the study and a fellow in The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, in an interview with Salon. “In this paper, we are saying that before the merger with the Gaia Sausage, we already had in place a large component of stars that today are in the thick disc, so that’s the main thing.”

Vincenzo and his colleagues came to this conclusion by relying on a technique in asteroseismology, which is the study of oscillations in stars. In asteroseismology, researchers can use tools to measure the sound waves that ripple through the interiors of stars which can provide more precise ages of the stars. Researchers also used a spectroscopic survey called APOGEE, which provided them with the chemical composition of stars – this is another marker that can help indicate the age of a star. Additional data was provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which became a mechanism for astronomers to identify stars from the last major merger, and  NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope.

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By combining and calculating all of this data, the researchers found that the Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage stars from our ancient galaxy are slightly younger than the Milky Way stars, but still around 10 billion years old. This suggests that a large chunk of the Milky Way’s disk was already in place when the merger happened. It’s still possible that the violent crash with the dwarf galaxy caused new stars, but the new research is certainly eye opening.

“We have shown the great potential of asteroseismology, in combination with spectroscopy, to age-date individual stars,”said lead author of the study Josefina Montalban, with the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

Vincenzo told Salon it’s important to better understand these details about our galaxy because it’s our “home” in the universe.

“It’s really about studying our home,” Vincenzo said, adding that a better understanding of our “home” will help us better other galaxies as astronomers search for exoplanets and potential habitable planets throughout the universe. “Bigger galaxies formed from the coalescence of smaller ones.”

Devin Nunes’ new “unmasking” scandal exposes the corruption within Bill Barr’s DOJ

I was just wondering the other day whatever happened to Congressman Devin Nunes. During the first two years of the Trump administration, the California Republican was Trump’s most loyal henchman, running interference for the White House from within the House Intelligence Committee where as chairman he worked diligently to sabotage any meaningful investigations of the president’s curious dealings with Russia during the 2016 campaign. For a time you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing Nunes’ doleful, hangdog, visage defending Trump through thick and thin.

Nunes had been a member of the Trump transition and in another era would have had to recuse himself from any of the investigations into Trump and Russia since the transition period was heavily implicated. He did not do that and instead jumped right in and proved himself to be a willing spinner on Trump’s behalf, denying that he had any knowledge of calls between Trump’s adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. There were indeed calls and they ended Flynn’s short tenure as National Security Adviser. It turned out that the White House had requested this allegedly independent committee chairman and others to pooh-pooh the Russia scandal in the media and Nunes, being an eager soldier, did as he was ordered.

But Devin Nunes will likely be remembered for one of the lamest political gambits in history for what’s known as his “Midnight Ride.”

On March 4th 2017, just a little over a month after Trump took office, he tweeted that Obama had “wire tapped” Trump Tower “just before the victory” and called it McCarthyism. This led to a frenzy among right-wingers to prove that Obama had illegally used the power of the federal government to spy on Trump. The night after Nunes was riding in a car when he got a text message that was so urgent he made the Uber driver stop and he raced over to the White House. He met with a couple of young Trump toadies named Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, who hysterically informed him that they had found evidence of “unmasking” of Americans’ identities intercepted on foreign surveillance calls during the Trump transition. The following morning Nunes held a strange press conference in which he declared “I have confirmed that additional names of Trump Transition Team members were unmasked,” and raced to the White House to “brief” the president. Afterward, he held another press conference in front of the White House and told the press that Trump felt “somewhat vindicated” by what he had to say. The press asked him whether he was more bothered by the surveillance or the “unmasking” and he replied that he was especially bothered by the latter. To the question of whether it was appropriate for the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee which was investigating the Russian interference in the 2016 election to rush over to brief the president he said, “the President needs to know that these intelligence reports are out there I have a duty to tell him that.”

The thing is, he obviously wasn’t telling the White House anything. They had given him the information the night before.

Nunes mumbled incoherently when confronted with his lie the next day saying, “the president didn’t invite me over, I called down there and invited myself because I thought he needed to understand what I say and he needed to get that information.” Two days later he finally admitted what he did, releasing a statement through his spokesman, but once again declaring his deep concerns about “unmasking” during the Obama administration and insisting that he had been on the trail even before the White House called him over in the middle of the night to show him the evidence.

He eventually recused himself from the investigation without ever really recusing. And it was clear from that point on that nothing the Intelligence Committee did going forward would be kept confidential. Devin Nunes was Trump’s man on the inside and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He issued his own highly anticipated “memo” that revealed nothing, called for the impeachment of FBI Director Christopher Wray, flogged the discredited “Uranium One” scandal, railed against the FISA process, and went hard after the Department of Justice, saying at one point, “I hate to use the word ‘corrupt,’ but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen? Who’s investigating these people? There is no one.”

After the Republicans lost their House majority, Nunes was apparently working on the Rudy Giuliani project to get Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden. At least that’s what Lev Parnas, Giuliani’s accomplice currently under indictment, said when it was reported that they had spoken on the phone. And he was suing people who criticized him, from news organizations to watchdog groups and even a fruit farmer who called him a “fake farmer.” But his most famous lawsuit was against a satirical Twitter account that called itself “Devin Nunes’s Cow” which was, of course, dismissed.

We now know that Nunes’s thin-skinned crusade wasn’t just his personal folly.

It turns out that he had friends in high places using the full force of the federal government to help him “unmask” another Twitter handle called @NunesAlt another parody account that made fun of the very sensitive congressman. Two weeks after Trump’s defeat last November, the New York Times reported this week, the Justice Department got a grand jury subpoena, a unique power that requires no judge to sign off, to demand that Twitter hand over the identity of @NunesAlt. Twitter refused, citing free speech concerns and the fact that despite the government assertion that this person violated federal law by issuing a threat, they could not produce any evidence that they had. The Justice Department under Merrick Garland later withdrew the subpoena.

But this is yet another example of the level of partisan corruption throughout the Trump administration — especially in former Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department.

Barr’s last-minute refusal to help Trump overturn the election was nothing more than a last-ditch effort to redeem some small piece of his reputation but he continued to do Trump and his allies’ dirty work nonetheless. Trump and his henchmen spent years caterwauling about the alleged “Deep State” conspiring against them for political purposes yet at every turn we found them abusing their power to punish their political opponents. Remember, it was Nunes himself who said of the DOJ, “I hate to use the word ‘corrupt,’ but they’ve become at least so dirty that who’s watching the watchmen?” I guess he knew what he was talking about for once.  

Is an iSi cooking tool really worth all the hype?

When I worked at a cooking school in Barcelona, a lot of information came at me fast. I was juggling a new language, a new culinary lexicon, a whole slew of new adopted workplace behaviors. I often found myself asking: What’s that? Can you repeat that? Can you explain this to me? And then one day: What is that metal thing and why is it called a sifón?

I would soon learn the magic of the sifón, often referred to as an iSi whip tool in English. Essentially, it’s a pressurized canister that uses gas to create foams and whips. You fill the bottle with a liquid of your choice and the combination of internal pressure and the force of a small amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) allows a bubbly foam to emerge. For example: In goes heavy cream, out comes whipped cream. Voilà!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1fzpTQIeUr/

I’ll admit, it seems like something more at home on an episode of an Iron Chef, but perhaps the iSi whip deserves a place in the kitchen of a home cook as well. Here are a few reasons I fell in love with it:

  • It’s intensely productive and the yield is worth noting. The tool has the ability to dramatically increase the amount of substance you put inside of it. For example, it can turn a small amount of cream into a large amount of whipped cream (and with much more ease than whipping by hand!)

  • It’s environmentally effective. Instead of using multiple canisters of whipped cream (and throwing them away after not using all of it), you can whip only the amount you need and reuse the container after a wash.

  • You can flex on your friends and go wild with experimentation. While the instrument is most famous for its use with whipped cream, there are so many other permutations of foam to be made! You could top your coffee with some coffee foam or casually whip up some savory mousses to top your dinners with. Channel the inner molecular gastronomist in you!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ui5o9Fclh/

I’ll admit, there is a bit of a learning curve with the tool, but once you get your bearings, it’s quite fun to mess around with. I still haven’t gotten my own whip tool since leaving the cooking school, but I still think back to those early days, learning to pipe whipped cream, completely shocked at how easily it emerged from the silver sifón.

How to squeeze more storage out of your small apartment (kitchen included)

I spent a decade of my life living in apartments all over New England, and the older I got, the more stuff I inevitably accumulated. All of a sudden, I needed bigger moving trucks to relocate from one apartment to the next and the single storage closet most rentals afforded was nowhere near sufficient to hold my holiday decorations, unitasker appliances, and extra pet supplies. (Don’t even get me started about what happened when my boyfriend moved in.)

While a minimalist might take this as a sign to purge their possessions, I took a different route, getting crafty to find ways to fit all my belongings into my limited apartment storage. I have to say that after ten years and eight apartments, I got pretty good at it, too! Here, my best tried-and-true tips for creating more storage space in a small home:

1. Embrace multifunctional furniture

My No. 1 tip for anyone searching for extra storage space is to keep an eye out for multipurpose furniture. I’m talking about things like storage ottomans and benches with built-in cubbies. These are items you’ll probably have in the apartment anyway, and now, they’re a convenient space to store your extra pillows, pet supplies, or other miscellany.

For several years, I had a budget-friendly IKEA couch that not only doubled as a sleeper sofa, but had a huge hidden storage area. It housed all my Christmas decorations, as well as a number of board games, and no one was the wiser.

2. Update spare closets appropriately

We’ll get to clothing storage in a minute, but another key to making the most of a small space is to optimize every inch of spare closets. Most apartments have some sort of coat closet, and they generally have one high shelf — and little else.

I’ve found that best option here is outfit it with an inexpensive shelving unit, as this will allow you to store three times more stuff than if you were to just stack boxes on the floor. Don’t worry if your shelves block the bar where you’re supposed to hang coats — instead, just hang some over-the-door hooks on the back of the door.

3. Get all the cabinet organizers

Most kitchen cabinets come with sufficient shelving, but there’s probably more you can do to optimize the area under the sink or in the bathroom. Dual-tier organizers will be your best friend, as they essentially double your storage space, letting you stash cleaning supplies and personal products more efficiently. In particular, I’m a big fan of organizers with slide-out baskets, as these take advantage of the full depth of cabinets while still allowing you easy access to items in the back.

4. Stash things under the bed

This isn’t revolutionary by any means, but the empty space under your bed is prime real estate for storage bins. You don’t need a special storage bed to make use of this forgotten space — just find some slim plastic bins that you can slide under there. Personally, I keep my out-of-season clothes and shoes in bins under my bed, but it’s also a good spot for spare linens, holiday decor, or even sports gear.

Can’t fit an organizer under your bed frame? Give it a little boost with furniture risers! They’re inexpensive and give you an extra 2 inches of clearance under furniture — you could even use them on a couch or dresser to create additional storage space.

5. Get an organizer for your closet

Clothing closets can be tricky in apartments, but no matter how big a space you’re blessed with, there’s a way to make it work most efficiently. If you have a small closet that’s not nearly big enough to house your clothing, you might want to invest in a freestanding wardrobe to supplement the space.

Alternatively, if you have a wider, two-door closet, I’d recommend hanging things on one side, and putting in some type of organizer in the other. I tend to gravitate toward cubby organizers, which can be used with or without baskets to house folded clothes, socks, undergarments, shoes, purses, and more. Plus, you can even put folded sheets and other random items on top of it.

6. Look above kitchen cabinets

Most kitchens have a big ol’ gap between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling, and this is a great spot to store items you don’t use frequently. You can put small appliances or cookbooks up there, or you can even buy a few nice baskets to slide into the space. That way, you can stash random items while keeping the area looking good. Just remember, though — you’re probably going to have to get a chair to get them down.

7. Take cues from small-living experts

Your apartment may not be as tiny as a tiny home, but you can still borrow some of the ingenious storage solutions employed in these adorable abodes. For example, you can put up magnetic strips in your kitchen where you can stick knives and other utensils, freeing up valuable drawer space. We also love the idea of using hanging planters to keep plants from taking up too much counter real estate.

If you want to optimize your cupboard space, we also have a host of great storage solutions focused on this area of the home (how smart is the little slide-out pantry that goes beside the fridge?). If you have wayward cans you need to corral, be sure to read all of the unique canned good storage ideas that could help streamline all of your food storage.

8. Use your windows

If your apartment has big, beautiful windows, lucky you! However, windows can take up quite a bit of real estate on your walls, limiting where you can place furniture and shelves. If you’re willing to give up a little bit of your natural light, you can reclaim some of that space with a hanging shelving unit that goes in front of the window. Or, if you’re not allowed to put holes in the walls, consider a shelf that suction cups to the window. Either way, it’s the perfect place to display your plants or small knickknacks — just don’t put anything so heavy that it could pull the shelving down.

FBI reveals probe into alleged “scheme” to funnel money to Susan Collins’ 2020 campaign: report

On Tuesday, Axios reported on a newly public search warrant from the FBI revealing an investigation into a “massive scheme” to illegally funnel money to Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ 2020 re-election campaign.

Federal investigators suspect defense contractor Navatek and its former CEO Martin Kao illegally directed $150,000 to a Collins super PAC through a shell company. They also believe Kao reimbursed family members for donating to Collins, an illegal way to circumvent campaign donation limits. Kao has previously been indicted for fraudulently receiving COVID relief funds, Axios reported.

“According to the FBI, Kao and his wife set up a sham LLC called the Society for Young Women Scientists and Engineers. Navatek then wrote the LLC a $150,000 check, investigators say, which was passed on to the super PAC,” Axios reported. “Government contractors are barred from donating to federal political committees, and investigators suspect the donations were attempts to evade that prohibition.”

It continued: “Investigators say bank records also show that Kao illegally reimbursed family members who donated to Collins’ campaign, and that Navatek reimbursed some of Kao’s colleagues for their contributions.”

The documents do not indicate that either Collins or her campaign were aware of the scheme, and a spokesperson for the senator told Axios they “had absolutely no knowledge of anything alleged in the warrant.” However, the search warrant does report that a member of the senator’s staff suggested to Kao that he could have direct his family members to donate to Collins after he had reached the legal limit. And Collins has previously assisted the company Navatek, the document explains, by getting it an $8 million contract with the federal government.

 

How the business lobby created the “labor shortage” myth — and GOP used it to slash benefits

Earlier this month, the Department of Labor released a less-than-stellar jobs report that sent politicians, economists and leaders in corporate America scrambling for answers. That report details an approximate 71% drop in job growth paired with a slight hike in unemployment, falling far below analyst expectations of a month-over-month boom. This prompted many “mainstream” or conservative pundits, along with Republican elected officials, to point toward a prime suspect: unemployment insurance. 

Their logic is simple: if people are getting paid to do nothing, they have no incentive to do anything. But Democrats have argued that the reality is far too complicated to chalk up to one factor. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attributed the disappointing jobs report to a lack of proper child care and lingering fears about the pandemic. Others have pinned the blame on employers, citing low wages and poor working conditions as reasons why Americans might be more hesitant to rejoin the workforce. 

Nevertheless, over the past two weeks week, a narrative about “labor shortages” and the allegedly corrosive effects of overly generous unemployment benefits, has been force-fed to the American public. Within a matter of days, at least 16 state governors — including such nationally prominent Republicans as Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia — seized the opportunity to slash or eliminate aid to the jobless, even as the U.S. struggles to recover from the effects of a global pandemic.

Given how effective this “labor shortage” narrative was in driving reactionary GOP policy, it seems worth unpacking exactly where and how it arose. Several observers on the left have argued that it emerged from “explicitly ideological think tanks and explicitly ideological right-wing projects,” as Henry Williams, co-founder of the Gravel Institute, put it in an interview with Salon. It then “trickled outward” through mainstream media sources, effectively cleansed of its right-wing roots.

Conservative think tanks and other institutions, Williams said, “will facilitate studies, analyses and articles that can then be laundered through various communications arms through their press releases.” That material then appears in local media or the seemingly neutral business press, he said, and is then widely perceived as apolitical conventional wisdom. 

The recent “labor shortage” narrative appeared to arise right after the recent jobs report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a massively influential pro-business lobby with one of the widest reaches of any political organization in the country. Within hours of the report’s release, the Chamber released a statement arguing that “paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market” and announced a broad lobbying effort aimed at pressuring both the White House and Capitol Hill to kill jobless benefits. 

Republican lawmakers then jumped onto the bandwagon to trash unemployment insurance. “Systematically paying unemployment benefits that are more than a person makes working doesn’t create an environment that’s particularly conducive to going back to work,” Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — a distinctly moderate Republican by current standards — told Fox News in a Friday interview. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also railed against the benefits, calling them a “special bonus for unemployed people to stay home.”

But in fact this campaign against unemployment benefits can be traced at least as far back as last July, when the Chamber wrote a letter to then-President Trump urging what it called a “middle-ground approach” to federal assistance — which effectively amounted to a drastic reduction in benefits. “The additional $600 [in weekly benefits] is also causing significant distortions in the labor market and hurting the economic recovery,” the group wrote at the time. “We routinely hear from our employer members who report that individuals are declining to return to work because they can take home more money on unemployment.” 

Other conservative or pro-business organizations were also trying to build public sympathy for the struggles of employers.  Mere months after the pandemic had forced millions of Americans out of work, groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute lamented that overly generous unemployment insurance was wreaking havoc on the labor market. As Rachel Greszler, a Heritage research fellow, put it: “Instead of bridging the gap, excessive unemployment payments will only increase the breadth and depth of the economic downturn.”

This analysis then bled into the business press, with publications like Forbes and Business Observer publishing seemingly non-ideological stories about a scarcity of labor. Then it reached mainstream news, with a series of anecdotally-driven reports from the perspectives of disgruntled business owners in industries hit hard by the pandemic, including hospitality, construction, manufacturing, nursing, food service and more. 

Potential labor shortages, as Williams told Salon, have been a concern for the business community since the pandemic began, with employers “wondering how they’re going to bring people back in these conditions.” He continued, “The business community was already fighting this proxy battle months ago. The difference was, when these jobs numbers came out, they saw a perfect opportunity … to connect them to this broader lobbying effort and create an economic narrative that they know has a unique power in shaping policy.”

Indeed, immediately after April’s jobs numbers were released on May 7, business leaders vociferously hammered home this narrative. The National Owners Association, a group of McDonald’s franchisees, wrote on May 10 about the “perverse effects of the current unemployment benefits” on hiring. Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius echoed this theory the day, arguing that “labor supply appears to be tighter than the unemployment rate suggests, likely reflecting the impact of unusually generous unemployment benefits and lingering virus-related impediments to working,” as Yahoo Finance reported. On the very day the numbers were released, the New York Post published an article featuring testimonials from New York City restaurateurs who blamed jobless benefits for their hiring challenges. 

The response of the business class was like a “lightning-flash reaction,” said Joseph A. McCartin, executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, in an interview with Salon. 

“Employers’ associations and conservative groups have been seizing on the jobs numbers to campaign for the rollback of benefits in order to force workers back to work,” he said, in hopes of regaining control over the labor supply and controlling wages. “There was a well-organized operation that’s been in place for several months by groups who were preparing for the pushback. They knew they couldn’t do it two months ago. They were ready for these numbers.” 

Williams told Salon that the speedy response from Republican governors was best understood as a genuflection to their business constituencies. “Many of these Republican governors genuinely see themselves as serving the business community, above and beyond their constituents more broadly,” he said. “They are willing to go out ahead of the evidence, and ahead of the political consensus, in order to demonstrate their fealty to the business community.”

Unsurprisingly, many of the GOP governors who were quick to eliminate federal payments also have ties to pro-business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Just last year, the Chamber’s chief public affairs officer sent several private emails to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his aides, asking Kemp “to prioritize legal protections for businesses if workers or customers were to contract the coronavirus,” as the Washington Post reported.

In April, the Cobb Chamber of Commerce, one the Chamber’s local Georgia chapters, hosted an annual luncheon featuring Kemp, where he spoke about what he described as the misguided backlash surrounding Major League Baseball’s decision to pull its All-Star Game from the state after the Republican-dominated Georgia legislature passed a now-notorious package of voting restrictions. He promised economic benefits “far beyond the value of any All-Star Game,” stressing, “I will always fight for the business community.”

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has also been a loyal ally of his corporate constituencies. During the pandemic last year, Parson worked to advance legislation that would shield businesses against damages related to the spread of COVID-19. In May of last year, the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry delivered “an urgent letter” to Parson asking him to “address the growing problem of opportunistic COVID-19 lawsuits.” In July, Parson delivered a speech to the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce touting the state’s economic health prior to the outbreak. “Incomes have gone up. Taxes have gone down. We had at many times more jobs than we had people to fill them,” he told the Chamber.  

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, also a Republican gave several speeches to the state’s Chamber of Congress and the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Congress, and received support from South Carolina’s Small Business Chamber in September, when he recommended that the state use $30 million of coronavirus relief aid to provide grants to businesses that didn’t qualify for PPP loans. 

Notably, the effort to eliminate federal benefits is being led out in the open for the public to see, instead of being astroturfed through pseudo-grassroots organizations. It’s a lot like a “culture war,” William Spriggs, a professor of economics at Howard University, told Salon in an interview.

“It is a purely ideological move” because “this is federal money,” Spriggs explained, stressing that in the terms of pure economic self-interest, Republican politicians’ decisions appear nonsensical. The federal money for jobless benefits “is not coming out of the state trust funds,” he said. “From the local politicians, it’s dumbfounding. The state of South Carolina is going to send half a billion dollars back to the United States Treasury” that would otherwise be spent in the state on rent, mortgages, groceries, gasoline and a host of other goods and services. “Don’t they understand that?” he asked rhetorically. “You’re going to take half a billion dollars of sales away from your companies?”

“In a case like this,” Williams explained, “you’re talking about a program that touches so many people that you need to change the public opinion first to win on it.” Republicans and the business lobby, in other words, “want to change the prevailing political winds.”

The “prevailing winds” at this point appear largely in favor of unemployment insurance, despite Republican protestations that, somehow or other, they’re bad for the average worker. According to a poll from March, three-quarters of all Iowa residents — in a state dominated by Republicans — oppose cutting unemployment benefits. A Politico/Morning Consult similarly found in March that 72% of Americans supported President Biden’s latest COVID relief bill, with a broad majority specifically supporting the latest batch of unemployment checks. 

In other words, it would require a truly impressive propaganda triumph for the GOP to change the minds of American workers, at least one-fourth of whom relied on unemployment insurance to survive throughout the pandemic. In seeking to accomplish that, Republicans are trying to link the unemployment issue “to the politics of reopening,” Williams explained. “The goal is to use the media to try and create a national narrative that Biden is holding back the recovery.”

GOP pollster Frank Luntz claimed to be impartial — but was paid by Ted Cruz during 2018 Texas race

Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz and his friend and short-term roommate Kevin McCarthy — who is now House minority leader — have been repeatedly targeted in recent weeks by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has claimed that Luntz’s famous “focus groups” almost amount to “fraud.” As it turns out, Carlson may have a point. 

On Oct. 15, 2018, a few weeks ahead of the crucial 2018 midterms VICE News tweeted, “Tonight on #VICENewsTonight. Frank Luntz heads to Texas to talk to voters ahead of the midterm elections. See it on HBO at 7:30 PM EDT.” And indeed that night HBO aired a VICE News focus group orchestrated by Luntz, which had been filmed three days earlier in Dallas.   

Luntz’s panel discussion featured 16 Texas voters, half of them said to be supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, and the other half said to be supporters of Rep. Beto O’Rourke, his Democratic opponent. During the roundtable chat, participants were chosen by Luntz, who also decided what questions would be asked. But what neither HBO nor VICE News told their audience was that Luntz was being paid by the Cruz campaign.

On Oct. 23, a week after the show aired, Ted Cruz for Senate paid Luntz’s company FIL, Inc. $51,129.87 for “survey research/travel.” Despite the purported balance on Luntz’s panel, only five of the 16 voters he selected voiced support for O’Rourke that night. That looked like something of a PR victory for Cruz at a moment when polls predicted an extremely tight race. Cruz went on to win re-election.

Following the original publication of this story, VICE News told Salon it had no idea Luntz was doing business with Cruz’s campaign at the time of the Texas focus group. “VICE News produced a series of seven panels moderated by Frank Luntz from December 2017 to January 2019. Recently, it was reported that Luntz was on Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign payroll in 2018. VICE News was unaware of this affiliation, and Luntz did not disclose this information at the time of these productions. We have added an editor’s note to these stories alerting readers to this important update,” a VICE spokesperson told Salon.

Luntz did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment through his website. 

Luntz appears to have advertised on Facebook to enlist participants for his 2018 Vice News/HBO focus groups in various cities, including Denver, Atlanta, New York, Charleston, West Virginia, and Manchester, New Hampshire — but not in Dallas. 

That VICE News panel aired on HBO and has been viewed more than 697,000 times on YouTube — one of only six focus-group videos that Luntz features on the portfolio page of his personal website.

During the focus group, Luntz highlighted one Cruz supporter, a 32-year-old Mexican-American man named Josue Gonzalez, who said he was opposed to a path to citizenship for DACA recipients even though, by his own account, his own parents most likely entered the country illegally. 

At that time, Gonzalez worked for a major federal government contractor, Triple Canopy. 

According to FEC documents, Luntz’s various companies, which include Luntz Global Partners, Luntz Global, Luntz Research Group, Luntz Research Companies, Luntz Malansky Strategic Research, and The Word Doctors, have been paid $750,000 since 2003. But his federal campaign work dried up after a widely publicized feud with then-candidate Donald Trump in 2015. According to Politico, Luntz “told a closed-door gathering of major conservative donors in Southern California that Trump was dangerous to Republicans and was ‘turning what we believe into a joke.'”

Although Luntz incorporated FIL in 1993, the company had never previously received any federal payments until the 2018 election cycle. Since that was after Luntz’s fallout with Trump, one possible interpretation is that Luntz sought to obscure the payments by using an entity that didn’t feature his last name. Payments disclosed under FEC rules would not have drawn attention to the fact that Luntz was the true recipient of the money. Cruz was Luntz’s only client in the 2018 election cycle client, and made just that one payment to FIL, Inc. (FIL also received minor event reimbursement and event supplies payments from Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, of $1,163 and $222, respectively.) 

After Trump won the 2016 election, Luntz tried to work his way back into the Republican fold, securing meetings with his old friend, former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney — then the director of Trump’s budget office — three times in early 2017. In June of that year, Luntz met with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to share what was described as “a 60 slide deck of the words to use and the words to lose regarding parental choice, vouchers, charter schools, teacher pay, and all the other issues in education reform.” The following month, Luntz had a 90-minute dinner meeting with Labor Secretary Alex Acosta.

Luntz also met with Transportation Department officials, including Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), Deputy Secretary Jeffrey Rosen, and chief of staff Geoffrey Burr, during that same period.

Luntz has a history of repeatedly claiming to quit electoral politics. He did so in September 1998, saying he would concentrate on “principle politics,” and then did so again in April 2009 with a supposed move to Hollywood, which he said offered “a chance to create a new reality, in two hours time.” It happened again in January 2014 with a reported move to Las Vegas and the sale of a majority interest in Luntz Global Partners to MDC Partners. According to Senate testimony, Luntz left that company in late 2017 (the company was rebranded as Storyline Strategies in 2019).

In August of 2018, Luntz again said he had “become increasingly disenchanted with his party and critical of Trump.”  A few months later, however, he was working for Ted Cruz’s campaign under the FIL, Inc. brand, while also working for VICE News/HBO.

On May 1 of this year, Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Luntz’s focus groups this way: “Frank Luntz slyly dresses up his own personal opinions as social science. He’ll conduct something called a focus group. That’s a moderated conversation between several people that has, in fact, no actual relevance to anything. It’s just random people yammering. Your 90-second exchange with the UPS guy this morning meant more than a Frank Luntz focus group. And yet, purely on the basis of that irrelevant conversation, Luntz manages to make pronouncements about the country and how the Republican Party should respond to it. Most of those pronouncements, as you can imagine, tend to comport perfectly with his own views, as well as with the views of Google executives.”

Carlson has also devoted his energies recently to attacking Kevin McCarthy, whom he outed for rooming with Luntz under not-quite-explained circumstances, as Salon explored in a report earlier this week.

CORRECTION: This story has been revised since its original publication to include a comment from VICE News, which says it had no knowledge that Frank Luntz was being paid by the Cruz campaign in 2018.

DOJ appears to be looking into fundraising “gimmick” used by Trump and other politicians: report

The Justice Department is investigating a fundraising practice that claims whoever donates will result in a match to the tune of 5 times. Axios reported Tuesday that the practice could amount to “material misrepresentations” if the match is nothing more than a lie.

Both parties use and nonprofits are notorious for it. But Trump and the GOP took the tactic to a whole new level last year when they said up to 900% of donations would be matched.

“A campaign that enlisted donors to put up five times the funds raised through one such matching offer would almost certainly be inducing those donors to exceed the federal limits on their own campaign contributions,” said Axios.

So the Justice Department is looking to whether it violates the law. Lying to voters, however, isn’t a crime, as evidenced by over 200 years of American politics.

In another case that hasn’t drawn the DOJ’s attention, President Donald Trump’s campaign and political action committee (PAC) automatically checked boxes that signed donors up for further donations. The language was sketchy, claiming people should check the box to support Trump, but they didn’t realize it was financially.

“This is the FINAL month until Election Day and we need EVERY Patriot stepping up if we’re going to WIN FOUR MORE YEARS for President Trump. He’s revitalizing our economy, restoring LAW & ORDER, and returning us to American Greatness, but he’s not done yet. This is your chance – stand with President Trump & MAXIMIZE your impact NOW!”

In smaller print underneath the text above it said, “Make this a weekly reoccurring donation until 1/13.”

Trump accounted for over 3% of fraud claims to credit cards in the U.S. in one month as a result. The same tactic is being copied by the National Republican Congressional Committee and even former Sen Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., was caught using the same scam until reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution started asking questions.

In the case of the NRCC, they told donors that if they stop giving monthly donations Trump will find out about it. Unchecking the box, it said, is declaring yourself a DEFECTOR and pray to “the radical left.”

That has not become a case for the Justice Department as of yet.

A large number of House Republicans still aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19

The number of vaccinated House representatives has seemingly topped out, with more than half of Republicans refusing to disclose their status.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., claimed 75% of his party’s members had been vaccinated in early March and called for the House to return to its pre-pandemic voting and committee rules, but several months later there’s been no change in vaccination rates, according to The Washington Post’s Paul Kane.

All 219 House Democrats told CNN they had been vaccinated, while only 95 of 211 GOP members would say whether they had been.

twitter.com/pkcapitol/status/1394692641464410114

So, according to Kane, if vaccination rates had not risen high enough for the Democratic majority to lift pandemic safety rules, that’s due to the Republican minority’s refusal.

Polls have consistently shown a partisan divide in willingness to be vaccinated, with 41% of Republicans in one recent survey who don’t plan to get the shots, compared with 4% of Democrats who say the same.

 

Now the “QAnon Shaman” wants to use autism as an excuse: Hell no

Attorney Albert Watkins made news on Tuesday while trying to defend a man who participated in an attempted insurrection aimed at overturning a legitimate election. Watkins represents Jacob Chansley, the self-proclaimed QAnon Shaman who donned a horned headdress, animal skins and face paint, then joined a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, in service of a president who had trained his supporters to believe there was no legitimate way he could lose an election. Chansley was charged within days of the riot with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.” He has made it clear that, like most accused criminals, he does not want to be found guilty.

So now his lawyer is using what I’m going to call the Bumbling Aspie Defense (BAD): Stigmatize autistic people so your client can get away with a serious crime. I’m not suggesting autistic individuals are bumblers, to be clear. (I am myself autistic, and have interviewed subjects as diverse as Temple Grandin and Elmo the Muppet on this issue.) But in the eyes of certain people, perhaps, autism is perceived as an excuse for bumbling through life without being held accountable for your actions.

Enter Albert Watkins. In a recent interview with Talking Points Memo, Watkins said his client has Asperger’s syndrome and added that “a lot of these defendants — and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully — but they’re all fucking short-bus people. These are people with brain damage, they’re fucking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum.”

Watkins proceeded to add that this quality of being “fucking retarded” did not make the Capitol defendants “bad people,” only that they were uniquely susceptible to “four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.”

It’s difficult to discuss those remarks calmly, especially since it sounds as if Watkins is being offensive and inflammatory on purpose. He is of course correct that Donald Trump has used Adolf Hitler’s infamous Big Lie tactic and other fascist methods to create a cult of personality around himself, particularly after losing the 2020 election. But Watkins is offensively and dangerously wrong when he argues that autism had anything to do with Chansley’s actions. Implying otherwise furthers the harmful stigma that people with mental illnesses or developmental disabilities are more likely to be criminals, when in fact they are more likely to be victims of crimes. (Watkins’ use of slurs like “retarded” and terms like “short-bus people” definitely does not help.) Even worse, it reinforces the notion that people who are neurodiverse are somehow “less than” when compared to people who are neurotypical — that we are not merely different but also “damaged.”

This whole mess brings to mind Alek Minassian, a Canadian software developer who murdered 10 people in 2018 by driving his van into a crowded pedestrian area of Toronto. His reason, as stated in his online writings, was that he was angry about being involuntarily celibate. When it was time to face the legal consequences for his gruesome act of mass murder, however, Minassian’s attorney argued that his client’s “autistic way of thinking was severely distorted in a way similar to psychosis.” Fortunately for people of common decency and common sense everywhere, that argument was rejected in court.

Hopefully the same thing will happen in Chansley’s case. But even if it does, the underlying issue revealed by Watkins’ comments will still remain. We live in a culture that too often assumes that something is “wrong” with people who are not neurotypical. So when such people get caught committing crimes — even crimes as different as vehicular homicide or joining a mob riot — less scrupulous attorneys can try to play to public prejudice (or misguided public sympathy, which is much the same thing) by claiming that they were somehow mentally broken.

Autistic people are not damaged. We are not criminals. The QAnon Shaman does not get to use my neurological difference as his shield. Psychological tendencies such as narcissistic feelings of shared omnipotence may well have played a role in why people like Chansley and hundreds of others found themselves storming the Capitol, but that was the result of choices they made, and perhaps their social and cultural circumstances, not because of how they were wired. Jacob Chansley is entitled to a strong defense, like any other criminal defendant. But if his attorney is going to throw neurodivergent people under the bus (short or otherwise) in order to get him off, he’d better be ready for us to call him out on it.

Rich people actually do have trouble understanding what it’s like to be poor

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are different from you and me.” The famous author goes on to write that “they think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” 

Fitzgerald was a keen observer of human nature and social relationships, not a scientist. But a recent study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science shows he might have been on to something. The study identifies one area in which those with power, such as the wealthy, are different — they’re more likely to employ a “choice mindset,” which causes them to be equally critical of decisions made by those with fewer resources and choices.  

The term “choice mindset,” refers to whether an individual is inclined to perceive their own actions and those of others as the result of deliberate decisions. When someone views life with a choice mindset, it means they are more likely to see victims as at least partially to blame for their misfortunes and to be less troubled by reports of inequality.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Nanyang Technological University have now uncovered an important clue about what causes people to think that way — namely, whether they come from a position of power in their own lives.

“People in positions of high power actually have more choices than those in positions of low power,” Yidan Yin, the first author on the paper and a PhD candidate at Rady School of Management in UCSD, told Salon by email along with her co-authors Pamela K. Smith (also of UCSD) and Krishna Savani (of Nanyang). “That’s almost a definition of having power. Unfortunately, our research suggests that powerholders overgeneralize their greater sense of choice to others. They see everyone as having lots of choice, regardless of these people’s actual situation.”

The authors also explained to Salon that this tendency cannot be waved away as motivated purely by a desire to help them maintain their own positions of economic, political and social power. Their research found that people with a lot of power tended to be harsher on those who were not even part of their same privileged class.

“We propose something more cognitive: having more power makes people see the world, and the people in it, differently,” the authors explained to Salon. This means that they are inclined to assume that anything from unemployment and poverty to getting sick with COVID-19 are somehow the victims’ fault.

This is not the first recent study to explore how wealth changes the worldview of those who possess it. In July researchers published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which found that the affluent’s sense of self-regard is threatened when they are presented with evidence that class privilege — rather than hard work, talent and other individual efforts — plays a large role in determining success.

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes.” Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, explained.

Another research paper, this one published in April by the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that people from higher income backgrounds tend to struggle more at certain types of empathy. In particular, it found that people with more money found it increasingly difficult to identify with the emotional or visual point of view of other people. They speculated that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”

If power tends to shape the perceptions of those who have it, the implications for public policy — especially around issues like poverty, crime, education and health care — are significant. 

“Policymakers may thus be less sensitive to citizens’ plight if their sense of power is salient,” the “choice mindset” study authors told Salon. “Policymakers should be aware of their power and the privileged positions they are in, and not overlook the lack of choice faced by others in disadvantaged positions.” If not, they will be prone to assuming people possessed agency during situations in their lives when they did not.

“When evaluating others, especially when bad things happen, they need to correct their assumptions about how much choice these people had,” they added.

Under Trump, DOJ tried to force Twitter to unmask parody Devin Nunes account

The Trump administration last year tried to force Twitter to reveal the identity of the user behind a parody account mocking Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., according to newly unsealed court documents.

The office of Michael Sherwin, who was installed as the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., by former Attorney General Bill Barr, secretly obtained a grand jury subpoena last summer to demand that Twitter identify the owner of @NunesAlt, a satirical account posing as the litigious congressman’s mother. The DOJ also sought a gag order to prevent the company from publicly discussing the case. Twitter fought the effort, filing motions to quash the subpoena and lift the gag order in November, the documents show.

The subpoena suggested that the investigation was being led by the Capitol Police. When the social network questioned the reason behind the subpoena, the DOJ claimed that it was part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of a federal law against using interstate communications to threaten to injure someone. It did not cite any tweets that made such threats, according to one of the motions.

“I have consulted with my supervisor here at the US Attorney’s Office, and we will not agree to provide any further information at this time,” a DOJ lawyer told the company in an email cited in the documents.

“They won’t tell you what the threatening communications are because they don’t exist,” the @NunesAlt account tweeted on Monday.

“There’s nothing remarkable about me. I’m a basic smartass with a Twitter account. So then why am I being sued by a US congressman? Why would the DOJ ever target me?” the unidentified user said. “Is it the mean tweets and bad memes? It’s not about me or this silly account. It’s about silencing all of us.”

The court documents show that the grand jury was still seeking the information from Twitter as late as March. The Justice Department ultimately withdrew the subpoena this spring after President Joe Biden took office, according to The New York Times.

The social network raised questions about the Trump administration’s intentions in its motion seeking to quash the subpoena.

The user behind the account, the motion said, “appears to be engaged in clear First Amendment activity, discussing stances on current events, government policies and one elected official in particular — Congressman Nunes.”

The company’s lawyers suggested that the department was abusing its power.

“Twitter is concerned the subpoena may not be supported by a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and that therefore, there cannot be any need — let alone a compelling need — for the government to unmask the user,” the motion said, asking the court to review “the government’s bases for issuing the subpoena in order to determine whether the subpoena violates the First Amendment and should be quashed.”

The DOJ attempt to unmask the user came after Nunes, the former chairman (and now ranking member) of the House Intelligence Committee — who led an effort to cover up the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that were extensively detailed in a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report — unsuccessfully sought to unmask the user himself.

“Congressman Nunes had previously and unsuccessfully attempted, in several ways, to obtain information about his critics,” a Twitter attorney said in a motion. “Twitter was concerned that the Subpoena was merely another attempt by Congressman Nunes to do the same.”

Nunes sued the owner of the account, as well as another parody account called “Devin Nunes’ Cow,” Republican strategist and frequent critic Liz Mair, and Twitter itself for defamation in 2019. Nunes sought $250 million in damages, accusing the satirical posters of trying to “intimidate him” and claiming they “intended to generate and proliferate false and defamatory statements.”

A Virginia judge threw out Nunes’ lawsuit against Twitter last June, telling the congressman’s attorneys that federal law protects social media companies from content posted on their platforms.

Nunes “seeks to have the court treat Twitter as the publisher or speaker of the content provided by others based on its allowing or not allowing certain content to be on its Internet platform,” wrote Virginia Circuit Court Judge John Marshall. “The court refuses to do so.”

Nunes is still suing Mair and the anonymous users. But his efforts to unmask the parody accounts have thus far failed and his lawsuits may have backfired. The Washington Post noted that “Devin Nunes’ Cow” only had about 1,000 followers before the lawsuit, but has since attracted more than 770,000 followers amid the publicity. The @NunesAlt account targeted by the DOJ has more than 121,000 followers.

Nunes has also filed defamation lawsuits against the Washington Post, CNN, McClatchy newspapers, Hearst and Fusion GPS, among others. The congressman dropped his lawsuit against McClatchy after the company filed for bankruptcy and judges threw out his remaining complaints against the media outlets and Fusion GPS.

While Nunes’ dubious legal efforts have been well documented, former prosecutors were shocked but not surprised that the Trump administration tried to use the DOJ to go after perceived enemies.

“This speaks to the remarkably petty ways Bill Barr was willing to subvert justice in support of Trump & his allies,” tweeted former U.S. attorney Joyce White Vance.

“What possible basis could Barr’s DOJ have to issue this subpoena?” questioned Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment. “This appears to be Barr using the awesome power of a grand jury subpoena as a personal favor to a political ally. Barr should not have a law license anymore.”