What ties the U.S. and Israel together? Our arrogant, doomed mythology of exceptionalism

As bad as Republican bloc voting is on domestic issues, what may be even worse are the near-unanimous bipartisan votes on military spending and unconditional support for Israel. It goes without saying that does not reflect the diversity of opinion among American Jews, Israeli Jews or the American public at large, although the pretense that unqualified support for Israel is the dominant view among Jewish Americans — and among Americans in general — is strictly maintained.

This cannot be justified by straightforward concern for Israel’s survival — Israel has long since assured its own survival with nuclear weapons, an open secret for decades — nor by the supposedly all-powerful Israel lobby. Invoking the “power of the Israel lobby” protects the myth of American innocence at the risk of perpetuating the myth of Jewish evil: Innocent, trusting America, no match for those crafty, scheming Jews!

What congressional support for Israel really reflects, I think, is partly the zeal for Israel among a crucial subset of America’s most engaged voters — especially hard-line, wealthy Zionists, both Jewish and Christian — which has a disproportionate effect on members of Congress who want to keep their seats. If a member steps out of line, Israel’s watchdogs will come after her or him. That’s of the power of the Israel lobby. If critics of Israel’s policies were as committed to making trouble for lawmakers, U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians would be a more contested issue in Congress, as it is among the public at large.

Aside from the vigilance of pro-Israel zealots, where else does the power of the Israel lobby come from? It comes from the U.S. government itself (along with its media stenographers), the same source that empowers Cuban exiles, the Christian right, the gun lobby, “pro-life” fanatics, right-wing militias and big corporations and financial institutions, because doing so serves both the foreign policy objective of controlling the world and the domestic objective of concentrating and insulating power and muffling dissent. Whichever party is in charge at a given moment, the United States believes it has a mission to rule the world. No conspiracy theory is necessary.

Do countries ever act against their perceived self-interest and do they ever not try to cast their actions as noble and selfless? Contrary to the arguments of political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, among others, the U.S. is exceedingly unlikely to be duped, bribed or intimidated into acting against its perceived self-interest for the sake of another country. That’s not to say that America’s leaders understand their true national self-interest any better than other countries do — Israel definitely included — and Mearsheimer and Walt are surely right that we would be better served by a more even-handed policy toward the Israel-Palestine issue.

To help preclude that from ever happening, the U.S. makes sure to appoint pro-Israel stalwarts to Middle East policy-making positions. The Trump team of White House adviser Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ambassador to Israel David Friedman and, for a time, the fire-breathing John Bolton as national security adviser was sadly typical. Imagine the howls if Palestinian-Americans were appointed to such strategic positions, or even a Jewish non-Zionist! We also give Israel a free pass to meddle in our politics and domestic affairs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited twice to address Congress, once in an overt attempt to kill the Iran nuclear agreement. The Israel lobby is almost superfluous.

For the most part, the mainstream media takes its cue from official policy. Venerable White House reporter Helen Thomas was forced to retire — and died not long after — for letting her sympathy for the Palestinian cause get the better of her discretion. That would never happen to a Jewish reporter for a comparable pro-Israel lapse — for suggesting, say, that Palestinians should simply resettle elsewhere and give up their doomed claim to any piece of Palestine, because no one’s eyebrows would be raised. Jewish reporters advocate for Israel all the time. They themselves may be unaware of the extent of their bias. Our outrageously one-sided policy toward Israel and the Palestinians shields them no matter what they say.

Some Jewish Americans, especially most of those in Congress, have continued to support Israel unconditionally despite the contradiction between the political principles they live by at home and those their support for Israel forces upon them. Many of them speak out forcefully on respect for the rights of minority peoples but never mention the Israeli position that Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims have no rights a Jew is bound to respect. Jewish legislators in the U.S. can criticize their own country for infringing on the rights of minorities, or other countries for interfering in our politics, but not Israel. (For readers interested in exploring the turn away from Zionism among Jewish Americans outside government, I highly recommend “Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation,” edited by Carolyn L. Karcher.)

The Israel lobby is generally understood to mean the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, but AIPAC, influential as it is, is just the visible branch, of a political, economic and media powerhouse that lacks a profile — call it the Jewish Right. Notwithstanding the fact that a good three-quarters of Jewish Americans are generally liberal to leftist, Jews committed to U.S. hegemony, neoliberal economic policies and and an unquestioned alliance with Israel wield far more power because of their prominence in business, banking, finance, the media and government. Conspiracy theory? No, just a fact.

Some of the Jewish Americans listed below are considered liberal or centrist because of their positions on “cultural issues” and climate change, but the foreign and economic policies they advocate align them more closely with Republicans and the right. Consider the following names (there are more): Henry Kissinger, Joe Lieberman, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, the late Richard Holbrooke, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Douglas Feith, Rahm Emanuel, Alan Greenspan, the late Milton Friedman, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, David Friedman, the late Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Schwarzman, Lloyd Blankfein, David Horowitz, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, the late Andrew Breitbart, Pamela Geller, Ben Shapiro, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thomas Friedman, Judith Miller and Jennifer Rubin.

Despite their influence, these right-leaning Jews, as a collective force, remain under the radar, apart from the one-issue Israel lobby, because their views are somewhat outside the American Jewish liberal mainstream and because they challenge the stereotype of Jews as constitutionally anti-establishment, as well as because calling attention to their Jewishness risks arousing the never-sleeping dogs of anti-Semitism. We hear about the Christian right, but almost never about the Jewish right — as if that were likely to keep the anti-Semites quiet.

In contrast to their low visibility, George Soros, a Jewish billionaire who supports liberal causes, is notorious in right-wing circles both here and in Europe and is a central figure in neofascist and white supremacist conspiracy theories, most recently as part of the alleged plot to steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Soros has also been a target of a bomb plot.

Unqualified congressional support for Israel reflects the actual kinship of the two governments, which share a policy of permanent war, exploiting overwhelming military superiority, encouraging reactionary religious zealotry and keeping citizens focused on martial glory and security threats. (At least Israel’s threats are close at hand, which helps explain why most of Israel’s recent leaders have been ex-generals, in a de facto junta. It also points to the fact that Israeli Jews are exceedingly vulnerable to manipulation by fear.) Both countries have conditioned their citizens to the use of military force. The U.S. and Israel do have a “special relationship,” if not quite the one normally meant by that term.

American exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism go hand in hand. One hand washes the other. Unconditional support for Israel — and for Israeli belligerence and intransigence, in particular — redounds to America’s advantage, as Israel’s unconditional support for aggressive U.S. foreign policy redounds to its advantage. Some critics of U.S. policy toward Israel fail to see this, because they cannot see past the elaborately constructed and maintained fiction that we are better than other nations. But this is a major reason why the U.S. will not and cannot move away from a blatantly unjust policy toward Israel/Palestine. To do that would entail a wholesale change in foreign policy, and indeed in America’s national self-perception.

Congress tilts further to the right on Israel than on any other issue. It chooses to align itself with evangelical Christians and the most committed of Israel’s supporters among Jewish Americans, who are every bit as unyielding and obtuse as their Christian counterparts. These are Jews for whom Israel, like America, can do no wrong, and who believe that the Palestinians and their supporters in the wider Arab and Muslim worlds can do nothing but wrong.

Many influential neoconservatives, who keep up the pressure for military action against Israel’s designated enemies — Iran and Hezbollah in particular — belong to this Jewish faction.

Some pro-Israel zealots go so far as to encourage hatred of Islam on the grounds that Islam is out to destroy Jews and Christians alike. They can indulge in hate-mongering themselves without fear of being called on it partly because Jews are so firmly identified as victims of bigotry rather than possible purveyors, an identification reinforced by an inexhaustible stream of Holocaust narratives augmenting the post-9/11 stream of anti-Islam tracts.

How can Jews possibly be persecutors when we have been the eternal objects of persecution wherever we have lived? One critic of an earlier article of mine on the expanded definition of anti-Semitism, promoted by Zionists in order to delegitimize criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians, referred in his comments to “2,000 years of European Nazism.” So much for the peoples of Europe! So much for restraint in using the term “Nazi” — just as long as you don’t use it in criticism of Israel, or the U.S. Both countries encourage such paranoia in order to sustain public support for endless aggression.

Here I need to correct an omission in my earlier article. I likened Zionism to other late 19th-century ethnic nationalist movements without noting a crucial difference. Zionism arose largely in response to the growth of racial and political anti-Semitism throughout Europe in that period. Other ethnic nationalist movements contributed to that rising tide, which was fed in turn by the increased presence and prominence of Jews in daily life due to emancipation.

The implausible notion that anti-Semitism would somehow disappear once all Jews returned to their roots was part of the implicit promise of Zionism. What has happened instead is that creating a national home for the Jewish people in the center of the Arab world has only spread and inflamed anti-Semitism. Or, to speak more precisely, it has spread an anti-Zionism that is sometimes or often indistinguishable from anti-Semitism — and Zionists are eager to claim that there is never any valid distinction between the two, and that any criticism of Israeli policy is inherently anti-Semitic. Thus Zionists can use the charge of anti-Semitism to justify Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, as if one were talking about the same phenomenon that gave rise to Zionism in Europe some 125 years ago.

In keeping with joint U.S.-Israeli exceptionalism, Congress conferred its near-unanimous blessing on Israel’s brutal 2014 assault on Gaza, as it did on the December 2008 Gaza slaughter and the July 2006 attack on Lebanon, carried out in the approved fashion, with an expensive, high-tech arsenal of tanks, helicopters and jets, nearly all of it supplied by the U.S.

Superior weaponry reflects moral and intellectual superiority, which entitles Israel, as it does us, to attack or make war on weaker, less advanced opponents at will. Of course, when Hitler’s Germany, its Christian conscience anesthetized by the doctrine of Aryan supremacy, used advanced weapons and innovative tactics against weaker opponents, it showed (except to the Germans and their admirers) what inhuman monsters the Nazis were.

With its periodic attacks on blockaded Gaza, Israel practically dares the world to remember the Warsaw Ghetto. Israel’s flouting of international opinion and international law has become a model for the U.S. We two are the supreme law, the Self-Righteous Among the Nations.

Both Israel and the U.S. have justified these attacks on the grounds of a nation’s right to self-defense, yet it is understood that no nation or people has a right to defend itself or retaliate against Israel or the U.S. We can never be fairly described as aggressors, no matter what we do. We are God’s deputies. Our motives are always pure, however ghastly our “mistakes.” Whoever resists us is, by definition, evil.

When Nazi Germany introduced missiles late in World War II, it christened them “revenge weapons” (the “V” in V1 and V2 standing for Vergeltungswaffe) — meaning revenge against those who had carried out massive aerial bombings of German cities (never mind who had showed them the way). Aggressors are always justified in their own minds. Being human, they have to be.

Both the U.S. and Israel make use of the same charade about “defense”: the U.S. Department of Defense, the Israel Defense Forces. The Nazis invoked the sacred right of self-defense to justify ridding Germany, and then the rest of Europe, of Jews. In their minds, they were doing humankind a favor, even if humankind proved, as ever, ungrateful.

One reason Jewish Americans became such strong supporters of Israel is that the Jewish state’s military prowess did as much for our self-respect — and the respect of our fellow Americans — as all the scientific, intellectual, political and artistic achievements of Jews in the diaspora, source of a still-potent mystique of Jewish intelligence. Norman Finkelstein, a harsh critic of Israeli policies, has talked about Israel’s need to keep demonstrating its military dominance to the Arabs and its own citizens. I think it also needs to do so to recharge the admiration of American politicians and citizens.

The real turning point in U.S.-Israeli relations came with Israel’s stunning victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, a second six-day “miracle” at a time when the U.S. was mired in an endless, failing struggle in Vietnam. Israel transformed itself from being an inconvenient moral obligation — in a neighborhood where the Arabs had most of the people and all the oil — to America’s hero, role-model, soulmate and proxy. Even then, our Middle East policy was not as one-sided as it later became because we were still engaged in the Cold War and the Arab states had a rival superpower to turn to. Our own game-changing “victory” came with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Israel is a “small government” paradise. No sharp division exists between “country” and “government,” unlike in America, where a favored right-wing bumper sticker declares “Love My Country/Fear My Government.” The Israeli government rules in the interests of Jewish citizens at the expense of non-Jews, requires years of active and reserve military service from all Jewish men and women (except the Orthodox), boasts one of the world’s most powerful militaries and largest nuclear arsenals despite a population no bigger than New Jersey’s and keeps its military employed policing and punishing a large subject population of Palestinians both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli government serves the godly, the well-fixed and the military.

In an article for Counterpunch at the time of Israel’s second assault on Gaza, historian Gary Leupp blamed Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and U.S. support for it, on a shared Jewish and Christian belief in the “myth of Abraham.” In making the Bible the villain, Leupp overlooked political history. Although the John Birch Society was a strong supporter of Israel early on, conservatives and conservative Christians tended to see Jews in negative terms — as Christ-killers, commie-lovers, race-mixers, economic exploiters, war profiteers, etc. — and this negative view extended to the Jewish state prior to 1967. The shared myth of Abraham had currency then only with religious liberals.

Today, conservative Christians have a negative view of Muslims, shared Christian and Muslim belief in Abraham and Jesus notwithstanding, and religious liberals are again the ones calling attention to commonalities. Current support for Israel is often couched in religious terms, but so was the animus against Jews it has partly supplanted. Right-wing Christians today make an exception for Jews who are unquestioning supporters of the Jewish state.

U.S. support for Israel cannot be divorced from the rightward shift in American politics, the campaign to roll back democracy at home and to impose our idea of order — economic order, most importantly — on the world. Such an undertaking needs, fosters and calls forth the assistance of authoritarian religion like an evil genie. Religion has long been an important force in American life but today the flaunting of religious belief is everywhere. Likewise ubiquitous are tributes to the military, though America once boasted of not being militaristic.

The same situation prevails in Israel, our fellow “force for good.” There, the military has always been lionized, but the promotion of authoritarian religion, especially evident in the settlements, is in marked contrast to the situation before the 1967 war, when Israelis were proudly secular. And what about the support for Israeli policies among nonbelievers? Yes, there is belief in the “myth of Abraham,” but there is also the myth of American and Israeli innocence, virtue and victimhood, which blinds believers and nonbelievers alike.

Like Israel, the U.S. has learned how to pose as a victim in order to disable the collective conscience of its citizens. Despite (or because of) the slaughter we loosed on Vietnam and neighboring countries, we cast ourselves as the victims there. Vietnam is our Holocaust, as the siting of the Vietnam Memorial and the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in the nation’s capital demonstrates. To point up our hypocrisy in establishing that museum, Norman Finkelstein once suggested that Germany should establish a national museum memorializing the U.S. government’s genocide against Native Americans.

Both the U.S. and Israel encourage their citizens to think only of their own suffering, and never of the suffering they inflict on others. Americans must never forget 9/11 or the POW/MIAs of Vietnam; Israelis must never forget the Holocaust. If too many Americans and Israelis relaxed their grip on innocence, virtue and victimhood, they might begin to question state-sanctioned violence and war. To be ready for the next round, they need to keep a clean conscience, no matter what.

Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust, which also provides it with a justification that is beyond question. However, Israel’s weaponization of tha history is another story. By making the Holocaust the defining event of Jewish history between the dispersion and the establishment of Israel, Zionists implicitly devalue not only Jewish achievements in the diaspora but Jewish life altogether before 1948, or they connect those achievements to the dream of a Jewish state as the abiding inspiration of the Jewish people. In doing so, they magnify their own importance and exalt the Jewish state. The fact that using the Holocaust to absolve Israel of its ongoing crimes defames the memory of the Holocaust’s victims does not trouble them.

For a nation or people to embrace a permanent identity of victim carries the risk of becoming a victimizer oneself, a danger that both America’s and Israel’s ruling classes refuse to see. The only lesson Zionists deign to take from 2,000 years of Jewish history in the diaspora is that Jews were always hated and persecuted and therefore are exempt from any moral prohibitions in “defense” of the homeland. In effect, Israel claims the right to behave like any anti-Semitic oppressor of old.

The only grounds Israel has left itself for finding Nazism abhorrent, given its treatment of the Palestinians, is that so many of Nazism’s victims were Jews. It has no broader moral grounds for condemning the Nazis, and does not seem to care.

So here, finally, is my question: Who, if not us, is going to hold our governments to account for their lawless partnership, instead of letting them continue to use us as their alibi?

How to watch the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, from cuddly critters to the anxiety-ridden

The Oscars are always more fun when you’ve seen the movies; you have a stake in the show, plus, it’s nice to feel cultured. But in a year when most audiences have been sheltering in place, viewers have been drawn more toward episodic TV series and less inclined toward watching feature-length films, even if they are streaming. The perfect compromise? Short films.

The animated shorts, a personal favorite Oscar category, are no exception. This year, the Academy has nominated five very stylistically different but equally charming short films, and we’re here to tell you everything there is to know about them, including how to watch them.

“Burrow” (Disney+)
USA, 6 min

Director Madeline Sharafian’s “Burrow” follows a young, naive bunny as she tries to create a perfect home. However, her attempts to do so don’t go too smoothly, as every hole she digs leads to an unwanted encounter with a new neighbor. The bunny, terrified of the company of these other animals, keeps running away. Ultimately, the bunny learns about the importance of letting your community help you and embraces her neighbors as friends.

While watching this film, it was hard not to reflect on my own approaches to my community in the wake of the pandemic. An extended period of being forced to do everything for ourselves (by ourselves) has fostered a general fear of other people, especially new ones. This short acted as a sweet reminder that, especially with an increase in vaccine distribution, opportunities to rely on others and to create new connections are well on their way. This is the most family-friendly one of the bunch with cute animals, plenty of visual humor, and a familiar, accessible cel animation style.

“Genius Loci” (Vimeo)
France, 16 min

Reine, a young woman with difficulty connecting to others, navigates the world while battling a neverending stream of hallucinations. While it’s never explicitly stated in the movie, Reine appears to be in a state of depression, her grasp on reality uncertain. Her perception of the physical world constantly shifts, making it difficult for the viewer to know what’s actually happening.

Directed by Adrien Merigeau and realized by artist Brecht Evens, “Genius Loci” is a beautiful, dreamlike look into the mind of a woman who has lost touch with her relationships, her world, and herself. Named for the protective spirits of a place, according to classical Roman religion, the short utilizes bold, geometric shapes and creative framing to produce a sense of anxiety and unease. While you can’t watch the film on any bigger streaming service, Kazak Productions (who produced the short) uploaded it on Vimeo for your viewing pleasure.

“If Anything Happens I Love You” (Netflix)
USA, 13 min

This film’s a sad one; two parents struggle to carry on everyday life while they confront their daughter’s tragic death. Cherished memories of their young child haunt the pair, memories that are given shape in the film by their shadows. At first, the parents aren’t even able to look at each other, but as the shadows guide them through their daughter’s life and force them to remember it, they are able to reconnect.

One scene in the short is particularly heartbreaking. We see the parents’ shadows desperately trying to keep their daughter from attending school that day — they know her fate and wish to reverse it, but we see it play out anyway. Directors Michael Govier and Will McCormack reflect on the unfortunately relevant issue of school shootings and use their stark, minimalist animation style to illustrate this family’s story of grief.

“Opera”
South Korea/USA, 9 min, 2020

There’s not a lot out there about Erick Oh’s short film, and the trailer doesn’t give us much context, but from what we can tell, it’s gorgeous. The shorts.TV website tells us that “Opera” is “a contemporary animated edition of the Renaissance fresco mural paintings.” Furthermore, this short was quite the project to make — thousands of miniature characters perform 24 activities in a loop. The activities culminate to create a web of cultural issues, including discrimination, politics, philosophy, and civilization as a whole. Notably, one of the activities is centered around racism and represents the recent spike in Asian hate crimes. Safe to say that Oh gives us a lot to interpret and analyze.

While the film isn’t available to stream anywhere currently, Shorts TV has listings for theater screenings for all the shorts, if you’re vaccinated and feel safe enough to venture out.

“Yes-People” (Vimeo on Demand, YouTube)
Iceland, 9 min

My favorite from the list of nominated shorts, “Yes-People,” follows three different groups of residents who live in the same building – two couples and a mother-son duo – as they get through a day in the life. As the title suggests, the characters only say “yes,” and you learn just how many ways the word can be inflected. While the three groups of characters never directly interact, they hear each other saying “yes” in various contexts through the walls throughout the day.

This GÍsli Darri Halldórsson film is made especially relevant in pandemic times considering how, much like these characters, we’ve had to make our lives interesting somehow, whether through household tasks and working from home or alcohol. “Yes-People” is available for purchase on Vimeo, but there’s also a free Youtube video uploaded by the New Yorker.

For more information on theater screenings for the Oscar-nominated shorts, incuding the animated ones seen here, check out Shorts TV. The Oscars airs on Sunday, April 25 on ABC.

At what age are people usually happiest? New research offers surprising clues

If you could be one age for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Would you choose to be nine years old, absolved of life’s most tedious responsibilities, and instead able to spend your days playing with friends and practicing your times tables?

Or would you choose your early 20s, when time feels endless and the world is your oyster – with friends, travel, pubs and clubs beckoning?

Western culture idealizes youth, so it may come as a surprise to learn that in a recent poll asking this question, the most popular answer wasn’t 9 or 23, but 36.

Yet as a developmental psychologist, I thought that response made a lot of sense.

For the last four years, I’ve been studying people’s experiences of their 30s and early 40s, and my research has led me to believe that this stage of life – while full of challenges – is much more rewarding than most might think.

The career and care crunch

When I was a researcher in my late 30s, I wanted to read more about the age period I was in. That was when I realized that no one was doing research on people in their 30s and early 40s, which puzzled me. So much often happens during this time: Buying homes, getting married or getting divorced; building careers, changing careers, having children or choosing not to have children.

To study something, it helps to name it. So my colleagues and I named the period from ages 30 to 45 “established adulthood,” and then set out to try to understand it better. While we are still collecting data, we have currently interviewed over 100 people in this age cohort, and have collected survey data from more than 600 additional people.

We went into this large-scale project expecting to find that established adults were happy but struggling. We thought there would be rewards during this period of life – perhaps being settled in career, family and friendships, or peaking physically and cognitively – but also some significant challenges.

The main challenge we anticipated was what we called “the career and care crunch.”

This refers to the collision of workplace demands and demands of caring for others that takes place in your 30s and early 40s. Trying to climb a ladder in a chosen career while also being increasingly expected to care for kids, tend to the needs of partners and perhaps care for aging parents can create a lot of stress and work.

Yet when we started to look at our data, what we found surprised us.

Yes, people were feeling overwhelmed and talked about having too much to do in too little time. But they also talked about feeling profoundly satisfied. All of these things that were bringing them stress were also bringing them joy.

For example, Yuying, 44, said “even though there are complicated points of this time period, I feel very solidly happy in this space right now.” Nina, 39, simply described herself as being “wildly happy.” (The names used in this piece are pseudonyms, as required by research protocol.)

When we took an even closer look at our data, it started to become clear why people might wish to remain age 36 over any other age. People talked about being in the prime of their lives and feeling at their peak. After years of working to develop careers and relationships, people reported feeling as though they had finally arrived.

Mark, 36, shared that, at least for him, “things feel more in place.” “I’ve put together a machine that’s finally got all the parts it needs,” he said.

A sigh of relief after the tumultuous 20s

As well as feeling as though they had accumulated the careers, relationships and general life skills they had been working toward since their 20s, people also said they had greater self-confidence and understood themselves better.

Jodie, 36, appreciated the wisdom she had gained as she reflected on life beyond her 20s:

“Now you’ve got a solid decade of life experience. And what you discover about yourself in your 20s isn’t necessarily that what you wanted was wrong. It’s just you have the opportunity to figure out what you don’t want and what’s not going to work for you. . . . So you go into your 30s, and you don’t waste a bunch of time going on half dozen dates with somebody that’s probably not really going to work out, because you’ve dated before and you have that confidence and that self-assuredness to be like, ‘hey, thanks but no thanks.’ Your friend circle becomes a lot closer because you weed out the people that you just don’t need in your life that bring drama.”

Most established adults we interviewed seemed to recognize that they were happier in their 30s than they were in their 20s, and this impacted how they thought about some of the signs of physical aging that they were starting to encounter. For example, Lisa, 37, said, “If I could go back physically but I had to also go back emotionally and mentally . . . no way. I would take flabby skin lines every day.”

Not ideal for everyone

Our research should be viewed with some caveats.

The interviews were primarily conducted with middle-class North Americans, and many of the participants are white. For those who are working class, or for those who have had to reckon with decades of systemic racism, established adulthood may not be so rosy.

It is also worth noting that the career and care crunch has been exacerbated, especially for women, by the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the pandemic may be leading to a decrease in life satisfaction, especially for established adults who are parents trying to navigate full-time careers and full-time child care.

At the same time, that people think of their 30s – and not their 20s or their teens – as the sweet spot in their lives to which they’d like to return suggests that this is a period of life that we should pay more attention to.

And this is slowly happening. Along with my own work is an excellent book recently written by Kayleen Shaefer, “But You’re Still So Young,” that explores people navigating their 30s. In her book she tells stories of changing career paths, navigating relationships and dealing with fertility.

My colleagues and I hope that our work and Shaefer’s book are just the beginning. Having a better understanding of the challenges and rewards of established adulthood will give society more tools to support people during that period, ensuring that this golden age provides not only memories that we will fondly look back upon, but also a solid foundation for the rest of our lives.

‘Established adulthood’ is an emerging area of study.

Clare Mehta, Associate Professor of Psychology, Emmanuel College

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

What are my chances of getting COVID-19 after being vaccinated?

A new report reveals that 5,800 people who have been fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which caused COVID-19, have developed infections anyway.

5,800 might sound like a lot of people — and indeed, experts fear that the number reported without context might lead to greater vaccine hesitancy. Yet it is important to note that these numbers, which come courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), constitute a very small fraction of the total number of vaccinated Americans.

As of two days ago 125.8 million (38.3%) of the US population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 78.5 million (23.9%) have been fully vaccinated. Vaccines for virtually any disease will wind up being ineffective in at least a handful of cases, since even a vaccine that is almost entirely effective will be eventually given to individuals for whom they do not work.

Even so, one of the goals of mass vaccination is to bring life back to what it was like before the pandemic. While it is reassuring that the CDC added in its email to CNN that “to date, no unexpected patterns have been identified in case demographics or vaccine characteristics,” the possibility of a vaccine not working is still there, and the public should still be informed about what that means.

Salon reached out to public health and medical experts for answers about how we should react to the news about “breakthrough infections” — the technical term for a situation in which someone becomes sick with a disease that they were vaccinated to prevent.

How do the COVID-19 vaccines work?

First, note that not all of the vaccines operate in the same way. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use a new technology. Known as mRNA vaccines, these vaccines contain a piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ RNA that is associated with one specific protein on the surface of the virus — not the whole virus. Once injected into the body, one’s cells learn to recognize proteins associated with the dangerous pathogen. It currently requires two shots to be inoculated using these mRNA vaccines; Pfizer’s CEO recently said a third shot may be necessary).

By contrast, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — which has been put on “pause” by the FDA due to a rare blood clot issue — is an adenovirus vaccine, a more traditional vaccine platform. That vaccine only requires one shot.

What are the chances of someone developing a breakthrough infection?

Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told Salon by email that the chances of developing a breakthrough case after being fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine are “very low.” She pointed to the extremely small percentage of Americans who have had breakthrough cases (far, far, far below 1%) and also cited data from the CDC MMWR study that analyzed real-world effectiveness in both health care workers and first-line responders, as well as the Pfizer April 1 press release. (She added that we don’t have analogous data yet for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.)

“The chances of fully vaccinated individuals getting infected with any variant of SARS-CoV-2 are limited,” Dr. Irwin Redlener, leader of Columbia University’s Pandemic Response Initiative, told Salon by email. At the same time, he added that no vaccine is “100% effective,” which should guide how we perceive the vaccination movement.

“90% protection is excellent — but it also means that if you vaccinate 1 million people, up to 100,000 could have some level of breakthrough infection,” Redlener explained. “That said, most of those who do get infected, few will have serious disease and/or not survive. The difference between those who have had a single vs. [two] doses of Moderna’s or Pfizer’s vaccine is just a matter of level and sustainability of immune response.”

In other words, even if you get vaccinated and then later get COVID-19, you’re unlikely to have a serious case.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

Is there anything that will make it more likely for someone to get a breakthrough case after they are already vaccinated?

There are a number of “reasonable hypotheses” about this, but it is not yet known, explained Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center.

“While the reported CDC data strengthens our confidence in the high efficacy of our current vaccines, more research is needed to determine what specific factor(s), of the individual, the vaccine and the virus, may predispose a given individual to infection to the virus after vaccination,” Medford told Salon by email. These could range from the details of the vaccines and the virus strains to a person’s age and underlying health conditions.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, told Salon that “the risk of infection and especially severe disease is reduced by vaccination, but not eliminated entirely.” Sommer clarified that potential risk “increases the greater that person’s exposure to infected people, and the load of virus (and infectiousness of the variant) to which they are exposed.”

In other words, being in close proximity to infected people, and being exposed often to the virus, is more apt to lead to an infection regardless of vaccination.

“Everything from someone’s degree of exposure and the infectiousness of their variant to the specific workings of their immune system can impact things,” Sommer cautioned. “Vaccination dramatically reduces risk of infection and severity of disease, but does not guarantee against it.”

How frequently should I be tested for COVID-19 after being vaccinated?

Sommer pointed out that if you are fully vaccinated, there is no reason to be regularly tested for the presence of the virus unless you are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. In addition, if you begin experiencing those symptoms, you should take precautions not to potentially infect others despite the fact that their vaccination means they are less likely to have the disease.

Finally, they need to make sure they get the right kind of test, Sommer said. That’s because an antibody test will reveal the presence of antibodies, a result of vaccination. “Any test they get must test for the presence of the virus,” Sommer explained.

What activities can people safely resume after being vaccinated?

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Salon by email that people can take baby steps toward resuming normal life, but still need to be very careful.

“People who are fully vaccinated can be around small groups of others that are fully vaccinated,” Benjamin explained. “Mask wearing is still recommended when you are around people not in your usual group or large groups that even when all are fully vaccinated. This may change when we get a better understanding of the risks of infection and transmission amongst vaccinated people.”

Redlener said that life is gradually returning to normal, although like Benjamin he urged caution.

“With the caveat that there should be no relaxation of public health protocols, like masking and social distancing, we will soon soon see more people traveling, attending events — think concerts, sporting events and theater,” Redlener said. “Also, small gatherings of family and close friends indoors without masks is permissible now if everyone is vaccinated and the amount and time of contact is limited.”

Gandhi expressed optimism.

“They can safety resume all activities after being vaccinated but should maintain masks and distancing in public spaces to be polite to others who are not vaccinated and also because some places in our country still have high rates of circulating cases,” Gandhi explained. “As Dr. [Anthony] Fauci said yesterday, ‘The vaccines protect you, so go get vaccinated — that’s the message.'” She added that Fauci said if you’ve been fully vaccinated and are around other vaccinated people, “you shouldn’t worry about it at all. Zero.”

Right-wing media keeps on trying to justify the killing of Daunte Wright

On Sunday, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was pulled over for a traffic stop, apparently because of an expired registration, only to be shot and killed by a police officer who allegedly mistook her firearm for a taser. As the Minneapolis area grieves over Wright’s killing, which has sparked volatile demonstrations throughout the small suburb of Brooklyn Center, national right-wing media has taken to the scene to defend the officer who allegedly murdered Wright.

During his Monday night program, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield proposed that the officer’s action in shooting Wright could be “warranted.” “Now let me be clear, even though the officer apparently is admitting to making a mistake, an argument could still be made that deadly force was warranted here,” Stinchfield stated on his Monday night program. “Fighting officers like you just saw, you could argue, any officer could feel like they were in imminent threat, imminent body harm could come at any moment. There is no duty by the way to deploy a taser, an officer can go to their firearm first, and many do.”

Conservative Twitter pundit John Cardillo, currently embroiled in a feud with Roger Stone, attempted to present Wright negatively, which even drew the ire of the right-wing blog RedState, which called Cardillo out over his tweet. “Cardillo, like so many others, wants you to buy into the idea of the scary black man with a gun in order to deflect away from what was more obviously bad policing,” RedState blogger Joe Cunningham wrote on Tuesday.

The media’s #DaunteWright as opposed to the real Daunte Right. pic.twitter.com/UZrGwTqqzG

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) April 12, 2021

Conservative pundit and frequent Newsmax guest Terrence Williams tweeted, “#DaunteWright was charged for illegally carrying a pistol and fleeing a peace officer. He had a history of resisting and doing illegal things. This man did not get pulled over for having air freshener in his car. That’s a HOAX.”

Fox News contributor Dan Bongino also downplayed the incident, which many have seen as an illustration of the larger problem of police violence against Black Americans, while debating Geraldo Rivera on Monday night. “You have no idea that there’s a racial undertone to this at all. And you’re saying, ‘Oh, Black parents have to worry because …’ You have no data to back that up at all!” Bongino claimed. “You’re just further inflaming the situation, and the country will burn to the ground because of people like you who say dumb things like that with no evidence to back it up.”

Almost EVERYONE is Ignoring, Skipping or “Just not Going There” about the Criminal Daunte Wright, who Resisted Arrested, Ran Away! (Black cop was placing him under arrest btw)—it is BAD that he was shot, should NOT have happened—he should have listened to his MOM. Don’t run! pic.twitter.com/Pwj7BqV8c9

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) April 16, 2021

Fox News contributor Leo Terrell stated on Twitter, “Race card is played in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota … Shameful!!!” “Daunte Wright was: An adult, with a warrant, for a gun crime, who resisted arrest. These are empirical facts,” right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka wrote on Instagram while attaching a photo of Wright with what appears to be a gun in his hands. Conservative Twitter personality and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik tweeted, “#DaunteWright was stopped by a black cop because he had a warrant for robbing a woman at GUNPOINT! He then resisted arrested (sic) in an attempt to escape. #WhiteSupremacy had nothing to do with it.”

While some conservative pundits have gone on the defensive about the deadly incident, calling it a mere “accident,” others have stayed silent on the issue and focused on the tension between demonstrators and police in Brooklyn Center during the nighttime hours over the past week.

On Thursday, there was even an unlikely change of course for one staunch conservative who called out Wright’s killing. Pat Robertson, the right-wing televangelist, broke with the consensus and ripped into policing in America. “The police, why don’t they open their eyes to what the public relations are? We’ve got to stop this stuff,” Robertson stated.

When the police are starting to lose the approval of Pat Robertson, you know things are bad. pic.twitter.com/Pu7tw6aoDC

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) April 15, 2021

The forging of a Black Captain America by battling supremacy in “Falcon and the Winter Soldier”

“We’re gonna fix this damn boat.”

Sometimes a rickety fishing vessel on the Louisiana bayou is nothing more than it seems. Unless, that is, it’s a vessel moored in a series about pieces of metal and what they symbolize. In that context it, too, becomes a hopeful metaphor to helps the bitter pill of a larger moral go down more smoothly.

“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” was sold to us as straightforward action series capitalizing on the chemistry between Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson and Sebastian Stan’s James “Bucky” Barnes, and sure, that part’s been great. Said proposition was enough to lure us in but is an insufficient foundation upon which to build an origin story for a Black American superhero.

Doing that requires digging up the rocky soil of a nation and analyzing what makes it good and fertile, and it’s equally as vital to reckon with all the ways that it is tainted. Fulfilling that mission here means digging into what Captain America and all superpowered protagonists stand for, and how aspirational symbols can become dangerous idols.

Indeed, this season’s lesser villain Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) says it best: “The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.”

Supremacy as a concept makes people uncomfortable, mainly because it is comes up in brutal discussions about what’s wrong with America. Many times during the course of this supposed reckoning we’re in, wise people have pointed out the many ways this country is built on white supremacy — and a plurality of folks who swear they mean well never want to hear that.

But that is an accurate assessment of America’s social and political architecture. Look at Minneapolis, where an unarmed biracial Black man, Daunte Wright, was murdered by police, at the same time the trial of Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd, is happening.

During the same week and in the same state, a white man named Luke Alvin Oeltjenbruns assaulted a cop with a hammer and dragged him with his truck at speeds said to have reached 40 miles per hour. He was arrested and booked and is very much alive. Supremacist systems are built to protect some people and destroy others.

This is a shade too heavy for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to approach straight on, so while an early episode of “The Falcon and the Winter Solider” includes a scene where Sam is harassed by cops, his fame as The Falcon eventually saves him.

The Mighty Avengers always prevail, and Steve Rogers, first of their name, represents the best of the American myth. As my colleague Amanda Marcotte pointed out in a piece about “Captain America: Civil War,” the MCU and Chris Evans, the actor who plays him, draw Steve as “a New Deal Democrat standing up consistently for liberal values,” “anti-racist, anti-sexist, valuing transparency in government and his belief that we the people should hold power.”

He’s also a prime beneficiary of white supremacy.

Such a terrible thing to say out loud about such a nice man, right? We also know things would have gone very differently for an asthmatic Black kid with a hero’s heart who lied to the military several times in a quest to fight in World War II.

As if predicting someone would argue this point, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” introduces Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley, a Black super-soldier who emerged after Steve disappeared and was erased from history. The government made him too, but instead of being supported, promoted and deified, Isaiah was imprisoned and treated like a lab rat for 30 years.

At first Sam can’t conceive of Isaiah’s torture being wrapped up in Captain America’s legacy, so he pushes that story to the back of his mind as he and Bucky charge into in the season’s main mission. They’re enlisted to stop a group of super-soldier terrorists — or revolutionaries, depending whether you’re a government official or a refugee — devoted to defeating the global (supremacist) council attempting to forcibly repatriate poor people displaced by The Blip to their countries of origin.

Sam and Bucky wrestle with the righteousness of that mission while clashing with the “new” Captain America, John Walker (Wyatt Russell).

“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (Disney+/Marvel Studios)

Walker is a MAGA-era superman who refuses to accept the world isn’t his, and going by the military complex’s definition of who qualifies to be Captain America, Walker is flawless. He’s the recipient of multiple Medals of Honor and an Afghanistan War hero, physically capable, extremely arrogant. Saddling him with a Black sidekick named Battlestar whose main job is to prop up his ego, is quite the chef’s kiss on the whole character.

During his media tour Walker assures America he has the guts required for the job, and that’s when know he’s exactly the wrong man to carry the shield. Steve led with his heart, which is what fuels Bucky’s drive to preserve his legacy by stealing the shield and, conversely, informs Sam’s hesitance to take it up.

Walker’s gut reactions get his partner killed, get himself gorgeously humiliated by the Dora Milaje and – once he downs his own vial of super-soldier serum – bring out so much of the worst in him that he murders an innocent man with Steve Rogers’ noble emblem.

Following that, the supremacy subtext becomes particularly intriguing.

Eventually and through great effort, Sam and Bucky reclaim Captain America’s shield from Walker before the government strips him of duty and brands him with a dishonorable discharge. Nevertheless, the system would not work if Walker wasn’t offered a chance to fail upward. In his lowest moment he’s approached by the MCU’s version of Rebekah Mercer, Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a fabulous surprise cameo), who reassures him they have a future together. (Hail Hydra.)

Still, Falcon and Bucky’s victory does not solidify Sam’s right to carry that complicated hunk of metal. Completely defeating Walker requires Sam to dismantle the white supremacist ideals he’s internalized. (Witnessing a group of elite Wakandan warriors shred Walker to bits probably helps with that; it was certainly therapeutic to watch.)

Once again the writers use Zemo to explain what this means. “You must have really looked up to Steve,” Zemo tells Sam in the third episode. “But I realized something when I met him. The danger with people like him, America’s super-soldiers, is that we put them on pedestals. They become symbols, icons, and then we start to forget about their flaws. From there, cities fly. Innocent people die. Movements are formed. Wars are fought.”

The Zemo turns to Bucky. “You remember that, right? As a young soldier sent to Germany to stop a mad icon?”

Let’s contemplate, for a moment, how canny it is for these truths to come from this evil man. Zemo is awful. A killer. Also, he’s not wrong. (Furthermore, this series isn’t the first TV show about superheroes to make these points .)

But these observations are less for Sam to accept than for the audience to digest, because on some level the “Falcon and Winter Soldier” writers understand that those words hit differently coming from the mastermind who nearly broke The Avengers.

When Isaiah echoes Zemo’s point — “Blond hair. Blue eyes. Stars and stripes. The entire world’s been chasing that Great White Hope since he first got dosed with that serum!” — ask yourself whether the common dude on the street would take him as seriously as they would a member of Europe’s aristocracy. Supremacy. It’s really something.

All of these factors culminate in the interior transformation Sam undergoes in the fifth episode, “Truth,” once he sits down with Isaiah.

In previous episodes Sam acknowledges the ways America has failed him. Nevertheless, and in his own way, he still believes in it . . . more than himself.

Sam originally refused to vie for the shield because he said it didn’t feel right in his hands and thought he was doing the right thing. More to the point, he also knew that America wouldn’t easily accept a Black Captain America.

But it’s only when he brings the shield to Isaiah that his final forging begins. “I used to be like you,” Isaiah tells him, “until I opened my eyes.”

Then Isaiah tells his story of being unwittingly injected with an unstable version of the serum and being told it was a tetanus vaccine, of watching his brothers die, of being disappeared and transformed into a government test subject. Despite all of this, Sam insists the world is different.

“That’s why you’re here,” Isaiah says. “You want to believe jail is my fault, because you got that white man’s shield . . .They will never let a Black man be Captain America. And even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be.”

With that, Sam returns to home in Louisiana, his sister Sarah and his nephews and resumes his other mission to save his family business.

That returns us to that boat and another major refrain this season, which is the reminder that the world is broken, upside down, and that it needs a new Captain. Rhodes says it. Bucky says it too, several times. The local bank denying Sam and Sarah a loan despite knowing Sam is a national hero who saved the world, a lot, should have been enough of a clue.

When they try to sell the boat, the only man who would have bought it informs them that it has deteriorated beyond repair. What else does that remind you of? A broken world, maybe, that needs fixing.

A lazier tale may have resolved this by having Stark Industries dump an angel loan upon the family from nowhere. Not this symbol-heavy yarn. Here the community gathers its strength to save the Wilson family from ruin, lending Sam and Sarah the parts and labor they need to get their wreck seaworthy again. Bucky shows up with a mystery box from Wakanda and lends his super-powered elbow grease to save the day. The trust that real power rested with ordinary people is very much a Steve Rogers truth and plays out before our eyes.

Anthony Mackie in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (Disney+/Marvel)

This being a comic book story, much of Sam’s resolve concretizes by way of a few heart to heart conversations with Sarah and Bucky, glimpses of his nephews playing with the shield, and the all-important workout montage. Push-ups! Mad marathons! Shield frisbee, with acrobatics! Sam punishes his form into something bigger, better and faster without scientific intervention. Working five times as hard to fight for a job you’ve already proven that you deserve is pretty much the Black American experience in a nutshell, so I suppose that has to be part of Sam’s inevitable audition.

If any doubt still lingers about whether he’s ready, whatever Wakanda gifted him should speak to that. The vibranium in Captain America’s shield comes from that land, and there’s a poetic rectitude in the notion of someone with African ancestry wiedlng it.

And it is amazing to think that “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” would go these places in order for Sam to sell himself, and the audience, on believing in such a miracle. Only a self-respecting Black man has the fortitude to pit himself against the supremacist forces aligned against him and refuse to bow, resolving to win and take up what is rightfully his.

Let’s see what America has to say about that.

“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is currently streaming on Disney +. The finale debuts Friday, April 23.

At war with COVID-19: making sense of a viral military

Herd immunity? Don’t count on it. Not if that “herd” is the U.S. military.

According to news reports, at least a third of active-duty military personnel or those in the National Guard have opted out of getting the coronavirus vaccine. That figure, by the way, doesn’t even include American troops stationed around the world, many of whom have yet to be offered the chance to be vaccinated. As a Navy spouse whose husband has moved to five separate U.S. duty stations in the decade we’ve been together, one thing is hard for me to imagine: an administration pledging to do everything it can to beat this pandemic has stopped short of using its executive powers to ensure that our 2.3 million armed forces members are all vaccinated.

From the point of view of those in the military refusing the vaccine, there’s a simple reality (or perhaps I mean surreality) to this situation. There’s so much disinformationabout Covid-19 and the vaccination programs meant to deal with it floating around, particularly in the world of social media, that no one should be surprised that a third of the military here has flatly refused the shots. Even public efforts of the armed forces to dispel myths about the vaccine have not made a dent in these figures. For example, the decision of Army commanders at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to develop a local podcast on the subject and create what they call “vaccine ambassadors” in their own ranks have still left them facing an uphill battle. (Vaccine acceptance at that base was, as of February, below 50%.)

And note as well that vaccination rates are lowest among young soldiers. Sadly enough, in the midst of this country’s incipient fourth wave of the disease, it’s younger people who are increasingly catching it. Keep in mind that the military is disproportionately made up of evangelical Christians, a population among whom vaccine skepticism and resistance are already rampant. And take my word for it, much of the toxic rhetoric floating around American social media on such subjects is already seeping into the military’s command culture as well.

In the communities where my husband and I have worked since the pandemic hit these shores, for example, I’ve met one commander who believes that God, not a vaccine, will decide whether he lives or dies. Another young officer I ran into believes that the risk of side effects from such vaccines outweighs any risk from the virus itself. Such attitudes are also sweeping into the larger military community, which is why a military spouse and mother assured me that our immune system is capable of beating the virus, no vaccine needed.

Reactions like theirs suggest how hard it will be, not just in the military, but in the country at large, to achieve “herd immunity.” Sadly, despite the quarantining of those who test positive for the coronavirus, there has been far less action within the military (as in American society at large) to contain those who could become vectors for the disease than would be desirable, though it’s long been known that asymptomatic spread is a significant contributor to the pandemic.

What stuns me as a military spouse is how little the Pentagon — a distinctly top-down organization that operates by command, not wish — is doing about the problem of troops opting out of being vaccinated. Why isn’t Defense Secretary Lloyd Austinmore forcefully denouncing those within the military community who discourage vaccination and don’t get vaccinated themselves? What better use of his public position than to protect the lives of those troops being offered the vaccine, as well as those military personnel and their families who, as yet, have no access to such shots, and civilians still vulnerable to the virus in military communities around the world? Why isn’t every commander photographing himself or herself getting a needle in the arm?

It’s true that the military can’t order troops to be vaccinated (as with many other vaccines) because the Federal Drug Administration has not yet officially “approved”any of the Covid-19 vaccines except under an “emergency-use authorization.” And despite calls to do so by some Democratic lawmakers, President Biden has not made such shots mandatory for all military members and seems reluctant to do so in the future.

However, as Nation journalist Andrew McCormick has explained, there are many things the military could still do (but isn’t doing) until such a moment arrives. These include offering paid time off, financial bonuses, and upgrades in military healthcare plans as incentives to those willing to get vaccinated. So far, there’s no evidence that the Pentagon (which I reached out to on the subject without response) is willing to move in such a direction. Sadly, it seems that the health of our military, their families, and the communities they live and serve in just isn’t the foremost concern of either the high command or an administration that in other areas has been impressive in its response to the pandemic.

Vaccine Passports? Not in This Military

Under such circumstances, the U.S. military, whose members have already sustained hundreds of thousands of cases of Covid-19, poses an ongoing threat not just to its own communities or Americans more generally, but to the world. It could lend a hand elsewhere in spreading a deadly virus that has to date killed more than 560,000Americans and 2.9 million other people around the world.

Lack of testing and contact tracing make it impossible to tell just how big a role the military already plays in spreading the virus, but hundreds of thousands of service members and those associated with them, including family members and contractors, have gotten it. By one count, despite the youth and health of the military, about 0.9% of total recorded U.S. coronavirus cases to date are among its members, its contractors, or its dependent family members — a military community that comprises roughly .7% of the population. That means it’s definitely pulling its weight when it comes to contributing to recorded cases around the country.

Such cases and deaths among the troops (and those associated with them) have been due in no small part to the Department of Defense’s negligence in keeping its own personnel safe from the virus. For that, you can blame, at least in part, sloppy, piecemeal safety protocols and the continued circulation of troops from one station to another around the country and the world. It’s not even clear whether the 3,000 military personnel assigned to vaccinate American civilians at hundreds of sites globally have themselves received the vaccine.

Consider it an irony, then, that the military’s insistence on training its troops to fill a variety of roles — in other words, on rotating them through various garrisons and jobs during their careers — is meant to prepare them for a situation in which national security threats might not allow that sort of circulation to continue. With more than half a million Americans already dead from an easy-to-spread disease (more than the dead from both world wars, Vietnam, and the 9/11 attacks combined), what better moment than this to make sure that the troops stay put for a while? Why not order that each member of the armed forces assigned to rotate among duty stations have a vaccine passport? But no such luck. Not in this military. Not now.

And that’s not all. In many cases, there is no vaccine available even for service members stationed at bases overseas who actually want to be vaccinated. For example, at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where nearly 60,000 troops and their families are currently stationed, only key personnel like medical workers and food staff have received vaccinations so far. In some cases, even where first doses have been administered, second doses are simply not available. Only about 20% of the U.S. forces stationed in South Korea, a country known for its successful management of the virus, had been vaccinated by mid-March.

At a time when the United States has achieved an average rate of three millioninoculations daily and more than a third of U.S. adults have already received at least one shot, lack of military access should be (but isn’t) considered shameful.

And keep in mind that the dangers of a significantly unvaccinated military are high. Given their jobs and the proximity of their homes to U.S. military installations, a striking number of people have little choice but to come in contact with American military personnel. I’m thinking now of the hundreds of millions of civilians living in the many countries where the United States military now operates, often from significant-sized military bases. When it comes to the dangers of Covid-19 spreading, add in Americans living in close proximity to the 440 military bases in this country.

In nations where the virus remains uncontained, unvaccinated American troops are both threatened and threatening. Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States has been at war for the better part of two decades, are no exceptions. As elsewhere, it’s unclear how many of the approximately 6,000 U.S. troops (and thousands of American contractors attached to that military) still stationed in those countries are vaccinated.

My Life in Pandemic America

Now, let me turn to my own family. My husband is a naval officer and we’re privileged. We have three graduate degrees between us and dual incomes. I can do most of my job as a clinical social worker serving people from the armed forces and war-afflicted countries at home. My husband recently transferred from a remarkably pandemic-exposed Pentagon to a civilian agency post where he can also largely work from home (except — sigh — when someone from the Pentagon must be greeted in person). We’ve been lucky to be able to juggle the work and childcare demands of this pandemic period largely from the safety of our rural home. We’re both vaccinated as well.

And yet, we’re worried. For his job, my husband has had to calculate the risk to life of countless real and potential military catastrophes. He’s also focused professionally on damage control when war-traumatized troops drive drunk, beat their wives, or abuse their children. He carries with him memories and fears of violence, most of it from within the armed forces. Given the unnecessary threats to life and limb he’s witnessed through his work, he’s vigilant about our family not being exposed any more than necessary to the threat of Covid-19.

All of this means that we’ve remained relatively isolated in our new home. In this pandemic year-plus, we haven’t attended events in the community, eaten in restaurants, gone to friends’ houses for dinner, or traveled at all. And yes, we’re lucky because we’re so untypical of most of our military. With so much at stake, its leadership needs to focus on containing the virus within its ranks in a way it simply hasn’t, particularly with more contagious variants of the disease spreading rapidly.

I wish that President Biden would listen to the small group of lawmakers currently pressing his administration for greater safety within the military and for him to use his executive powers to mandate vaccinations among the troops. I wish he would devote as much effort and time to ensuring that military bases carried out their vaccination efforts in a competent and accountable manner, as his administration has in so many civilian locales throughout this country.

Imagine what it would mean for troops and families to pose no more than a negligible risk when it comes to the transmission of this virus. At least that would allow us to check off one major risk to health and life on the list of our mounting human rights abuses as a country and to go back to the long project of reckoning with the costs of endless armed conflict around the world.

Big corporate donors claim to support racial justice — but fund Republicans pushing voting limits

Corporate America is taking a stand against new voting restrictions around the country, boycotting states that imposed harsh new laws and speaking out against proposed limits in others. But many top corporate political donors who have touted their commitments to racial equity and diversity have also funded the Republican lawmakers who are pushing bills aimed at making it more difficult to vote.

Three of the top five corporate donors to state lawmakers in Texas promoted their commitments to racial justice — but have also donated $493,000 to state senators who sponsored Senate Bill 7. That legislation would limit early voting and absentee voting while empowering partisan poll watchers and clearly targets Houston, the state’s densest population center, where a majority of voters are people of color, according to a new report from the left-leaning government watchdog Accountable.US.

Top corporate donors in Arizona, including defense contracting giant Raytheon, which made a $25 million commitment to help “racially and ethnically marginalized communities,” have donated $76,647 to three sponsors of state Senate bills that would limit mail-in voting and purge residents from voter rolls, as the state tilts blue as a result of quickly changing demographics.

Four of the top five corporate donors in Florida, including Disney, have contributed more than $230,000 to state legislators behind bills that would restrict mail-in voting and make it a crime to give water or food to voters in long lines — despite vowing their support for inclusion, racial equity and Black Lives Matter.

The effect these laws may have on voter turnout is not entirely clear, but the bills — which are among more than 360 introduced across the country in response to former President Trump’s and his allies’ baseless claims of election fraud — will inherently make it more difficult to vote. Some, like many of Trump’s election lawsuits, appear directly targeted at areas with large numbers of voters of color. One Black Texas pastor has condemned the Texas legislation as Jim Crow “in a tuxedo.”

“These corporations tout commitments to diversity and racial equity, then they turn around and donate thousands to lawmakers responsible for stripping voting rights away from Black and brown Americans,” Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said in a statement to Salon. “As these states actively attempt to suppress voter participation, corporations need to live up to their values and disavow racist attacks on our democracy.”

Utility firms Exelon Corp. and Oncor and the tax firm Ryan LLC, the three biggest corporate donors in Texas behind Blackridge and AT&T, all expressed commitment to equality and diversity in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests. Exelon even features a Black Lives Matter page on its website to highlight its “fierce commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity.” But the companies have given nearly a half-million to sponsors of SB 7, including some that have “troubling prior histories of racism, discrimination, or voter suppression,” according to the Accountable report. The voting bill has sparked concerns that lawmakers are targeting “innovations that were especially effective last year in reaching voters of color,” according to the Austin American-Statesman, and could contribute to a “surge in voter intimidation” by empowering partisan poll watchers.

“This bill is anti-democratic, anti-voter, and once again, demonstrates how far current leadership is willing to go to protect their own partisan interests,” the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause Texas said in a statement.

Exelon CEO Chris Crane vowed to “speak up if I see behavior that isn’t consistent” with the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Ryan LLC has also touted its commitment to these values after it was named to Fortune Magazine’s “Best Workplaces for Diversity” list for the fourth time in five years in 2019. Oncor promotes its dedication to diversity and disadvantaged communities and commemorated Black History Month by posting Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote, “It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.”

All three firms have contributed to SB 7 sponsors, including some who have supported controversial bills and made offensive statements well before the voting restriction effort. State Sen. Charles Creighton, a sponsor of SB 7, previously sponsored a failed bill that would ban local governments from taking down Confederate monuments. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who is backing seven bills that would impose new voting restrictions, previously resigned as a Harris County official after he was accused of voter suppression for delaying thousands of voter applications that were disproportionately Democratic. State Sen. Bob Hall defended a self-declared “white nationalist” in 2018 after he called for a “rope and a tree” for a Black lawmaker.

The top five corporate donors in Arizona have also touted their racial justice credentials. Utility firm Pinnacle West says on its website that “equity and inclusion is a key force driving” the company’s principles and promotes its inclusion in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2020 Corporate Equality Index. Salt River Project, another utility company, trumpets its contributions to racial justice groups and support for diversity and underserved populations. Defense contractor Raytheon committed $25 million to support racial justice programs and support for “racially and ethnically marginalized communities.” Southwest Gas, the largest distributor of natural gas in the state, says it prides itself on “our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The mining company Freeport McMoRan has an entire page devoted to “inclusion and diversity.”

All five firms have contributed to Republican state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored several bills that drew alarm from voting rights groups. Senate Bill 1485, which would purge inactive voters, “could lead to voters being tossed off the rolls for missing a single election,” voting rights groups warn. Ugenti-Rita also co-sponsored Senate Bill 1713, which would increase voter ID burdens for mail voters. The senator previously sponsored a 2016 “ballot harvesting” law struck down by a federal court for violating the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by disproportionately impacting Native American, Hispanic and Black voters. Ugenti-Rita made headlines last year when she called to expand the rights of business owners to shoot vandals during the 2020 racial justice protests.

The five firms have also contributed more than $45,000 to state Sen. Javan Mesnard, the lead sponsor of SB 1713. Mesnard, the former speaker of the Arizona House, in 2018 formally reprimanded the only two Black members of the Arizona legislature for calling out a Republican colleague who used a racial slur.

All five companies have also donated to state Sen. David Gowan, the sponsor of Senate Bill 1593, which would limit the mail voting window. The bill could disproportionately impact Native American voters, many of whom do not have home mail service. Gowan, another former Arizona House Speaker, previously came under criticism in 2016 for authorizing a “civil rights conference” on the House floor held by a group that claims the civil rights movement had been “hijacked” by Black people and denigrates “English-speaking white citizens.”

A similar trend is playing out in Florida, where lawmakers have unveiled a laundry list of proposed voter restrictions that Democrats have decried as a “voter suppression tactic” and a “backlash” to record vote-by-mail turnout that favored Democrats. Four of the five top corporate donors to state lawmakers have funneled $230,500 to legislators pushing the restrictions despite espousing their commitment to racial justice.

HCA Healthcare last year said it was “united in the public outcry to put an end to systemic racism.” Walt Disney released a video last year in support of Black Lives Matter and promoted messages of racial justice from the company’s Black employees. FCCI Insurance says that diversity, equity and inclusion are “integral” to the company’s mission. The GEO Group, a real estate firm that invests in private prisons, includes “embracing diversity and inclusion” among its core values.

HCA and Disney have both contributed to state Sen. Dennis Baxley, the lead sponsor of Senate Bill 90. Baxley was accused by advocacy groups in 2019 of “proudly parrot[ing] white supremacist” rhetoric by echoing the white “replacement” theory, claiming that Europeans are being “replaced by” immigrants. Baxley was the only member of the Senate Education Committee to vote against renaming a Florida State University building named for a segregationist in 2019.

These contributions underscore the cognitive dissonance between corporate statements and their political spending, which has drawn increasing public scrutiny in the wake of Republican lies about election fraud that led to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and a slew of restrictive legislation. Major companies like Coca-Cola, Delta and Home Depot are among dozens that spoke out against Georgia’s new sweeping restrictive law, drawing complaints and retaliation from Republicans who previously sought to increase corporate influence in politics. But Coke, Delta, Home Depot and numerous other corporate critics all contributed tens of thousands to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Republican state lawmakers who sponsored the law.

It’s possible that the growing internal pressure from inside corporate America could prompt more firms to back away from supporting lawmakers that back divisive and often racist policies. Hundreds of companies signed a statement led by Black corporate executives condemning the Republican effort to restrict ballot access.

“We all should feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot,” the statement said. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and we call upon all Americans to join us in taking a nonpartisan stand for this most basic fundamental rights of all Americans.”

Michigan parents protest school mask rule for kids as COVID surges in state

Parents of students at a Michigan school recently staged a protest for their children to be able to attend school maskless as the state battles another uptick in COVID cases.

According to MLive, dozens of parents with students attending Hudsonville Public Schools stormed the school district’s Board of Education meeting on Thursday, April 15, to push back against the mask mandate in place. A group of more than 50 maskless parents arrived at the meeting.

Their protest on Thursday came just days after they were excluded from the previous meeting held at the Hudsonville High School gym. According to Superintendent Doug VanderJagt, even though the auditorium has a capacity of 80 due to social distancing and restrictive guidelines, he admitted he would have held the meeting virtually if he knew so many people were planning to show up.

“If we knew there was going to be 400 people that wanted to get in here, we’d have just had the meeting online,” he said. “We didn’t know how many to expect, otherwise we could have had a bigger venue and gone outside or virtual.”

Hudsonville mom Jeanette Schuiteman, who has a son in the 11th grade, expressed a number of concerns. While masks were the dominant complaint, many also aired their grievances about the social distancing measures noting how their children have only had minimal interaction with others since school started. Schuiteman insists the measures are “physically not healthy.”

She believes masks should be voluntary decisions made by individuals; not the school district.

“I think that’s a decision that a parent should be able to make given the harmful side effects that might occur because of it,” she said. “There is not really any scientific evidence to back up the effectiveness of masks for transmitting a virus.”

When Schuiteman wanted an in-person conference with one of her son’s teachers, she was told that was not prohibited due to COVID-19.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Students are coming into contact with us and coming into contact with all the other students, so it’s as if I were already coming into contact with the students because my students are in the school. So it seems like a silly rule that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Despite parents’ complaints, VanderJagt is doubling down on his stance and making it clear that optional mask-wearing is “not an option.”

“Our parents’ voices are extremely important for us to understand the pulse of the community, but right now it’s not enough for us to get rid of masks,” he said. “As soon as it becomes an option, that’s a different conversation, but right now it’s not.”

He also confirmed the mask mandate will remain in effect according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services’ guidelines for mitigating the coronavirus. Currently, school outbreaks and the influx of cases among younger residents has contributed to Michigan’s uptick in COVID-19 cases.

Trump defies custom by not giving National Archives records of his speeches at political rallies

Public figures live on within the words they are remembered by. To understand the effect they had on history, their words need to be documented. No one is absolutely sure of exactly what Abraham Lincoln said in his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address. Five known manuscripts exist, but all of them are slightly different. Every newspaper story from the day contains a different account.

In the case of modern presidents, for the official record, we rely upon transcriptions of all their speeches collected by the national government.

But in the case of Donald Trump, that historical record is likely to have a big gap. Almost 10% of the president’s total public speeches are excluded from the official record. And that means a false picture of the Trump presidency is being created in the official record for posterity.

Saving the records

In 1957, the National Historical Publications Commission, a part of the National Archives that works to “preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources … relating to the history of the United States,” recommended developing a uniform system so all materials from presidencies could be archived. They did this to literally save presidential records from the flames: President Warren G. Harding’s wife claimed to have burned all his records, and Robert Todd Lincoln burned all his father’s war correspondence. Other presidents have had their records intentionally destroyed, such as Chester A. Arthur and Martin Van Buren.

So the government collects and retains all presidential communications, including executive orders, announcements, nominations, statements and speeches. This includes any public verbal communications by presidents, which are also placed as public documents in the Compilation of Presidential Documents.

These are part of the official record of any administration, published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration on a weekly basis by the White House press secretary. In most presidencies, the document or transcript is available a few days to a couple of weeks after any event. At the conclusion of an administration, these documents form the basis for the formal collections of the Public Papers of the President.

As a political scientist, I’m interested in where presidents give speeches. What can be learned about their priorities based on their choice of location? What do these patterns tell us about administrations?

For example, Barack Obama primarily focused on large media markets in states that strongly supported him. Trump went to supportive places as well, including small media markets like Mankato, Minnesota, where the airport was not even large enough to fly into with the regular Air Force One.

Presidential speeches often give a very different perception of an administration. Without all the pageantry, you can quickly get to the point of the visit in the text.

In speeches that President George W. Bush gave in the 2002 midterm election period, he made the same joke more than 50 times as his icebreaker. He would apologize that audiences had drawn the “short straw” and gotten him instead of Laura. His commitment to that joke gave a glimpse of his desire to try to connect to an audience through self-deprecating humor.

I found something odd when I began to pull items from the compilation and organize my own database of locations for the Donald Trump administration. I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and I pay attention to my home state. I knew that on March 20, 2017, Donald Trump held a public rally in Louisville, where in a meandering speech he touched on everything from Kentucky coal miners to the Supreme Court, China, building a border wall and “illegal immigrants” who were, he said, robbing and murdering Americans.

But when I looked in the compilation in mid-2017, I couldn’t find the Louisville speech. No problem, I thought. They are just running behind and they will put it in later.

A year later, I noticed the Louisville speech was still not there. Furthermore, other speeches were missing. These were not any speeches, but just Trump’s rallies. By my count, 147 separate transcripts for public speaking events are missing from Trump’s official presidential speech records. That’s just over 8% of his presidential speeches.

What’s in, what’s out

The Presidential Records Act, first passed in 1978, says administrations have to retain “any documentary materials relating to the political activities of the President or members of the President’s staff, but only if such activities relate to or have a direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.”

An administration is allowed to exclude personal records that are purely private or don’t have an effect on the duties of a president. All public events are included, such as quick comments on the South Lawn, short exchanges with reporters and all public speeches, radio addresses and even public telephone calls to astronauts on the space shuttles.

But Trump’s large public rallies, and what he said at them, have so far been omitted from the public record his administration supplied to the Compilation of Presidential Documents. And while historians and the public could get transcripts off of publicly available videos, that still does not address the need to have a complete official collection of these statements.

Federal law says that presidents are allowed to exclude “materials directly relating to the election of a particular individual or individuals to Federal, State, or local office, which have no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of … duties of the President.”

The law has been interpreted to mean an administration could omit notes, emails or other documentation from what it sends to the compilation. While many presidents do not provide transcripts for speeches at private party fundraising events, rallies covered by America’s press corps likely do not fall under these exclusions.

Why does it matter?

Government documents are among the primary records of who we are as a people.

These primary records speak to Americans directly; they are not what others tell us or interpret to us about our history. The government compiles and preserves these records to give an accurate accounting of the leaders the country has chosen. They provide a shared history in full instead of an excerpt or quick clip shown in a news report.

Since 1981, the public has legally owned all presidential records. As soon as a president leaves office, the National Archivist gets legal custody of all of them. Presidents are generally on their honor to be good stewards of history. There is no real penalty for noncompliance.

But these public documents, which I work with constantly, have so far always been available to the public – and they’ve been available quickly. Internal presidential documents like memos or email have a rigorous archival procedure that lasts years before they are even accessible. I have a record of every presidential speech from 1945 to 2021 – every president since Clinton has all their public speeches available online. Until President Trump, there have been no missing public speeches in the permanent collection. By removing these speeches, Trump is creating a false perception of his presidency, making it look more serious and traditional.

And by the way: That 2017 Louisville speech is still missing from the records in 2021.

Shannon Bow O’Brien, Assistant Professor of Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts

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

“Warrior” moving from Cinemax to HBO Max for third season

For two seasons, “Warrior” has been kicking butt over at Cinemax. Based on an idea originated by Bruce Lee, the show follows Chinese immigrant and martial artist Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji), who gets involved in the Tong Wars in San Francisco in the 1870s. In between the terrific martial arts action sequence, we get some carefully drawn characters, political scheming, and a lot of fun period detail. It’s a solid show that found its fanbase but never quite blew up into the mainstream.

But it might get its chance. Although Cinemax has now stopped creating original programming, HBO Max has swept in and saved “Warrior” from the trash heap of history. The third season will premiere on the streaming service, although we don’t know when.

Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon Lee, who is a producer on the series, put out a statement about the news:

We are excited and grateful for the opportunity to do another season, and we applaud HBO Max for understanding the importance of telling this story and for continuing to support this level of representation in our industry. I just know that my father is grinning right now to see this show he dreamed of so long ago continuing to beat the odds. We have every intention of delivering the same high level of meaningful storytelling and Gung Fu action in season 3!

Hopefully the switch to a new platform will get s’more eyes on this series.

Military’s most elite units share QAnon talking points in private Facebook group: report

Members of the military’s most elite units are spreading election fraud conspiracies, attacking government leaders with racism, and exchanging QAnon talking points in private Facebook groups, according to a bombshell NBC News report released on Friday.

The report, which reviewed hundreds of Facebook posts, primarily explored two different online groups which collectively have around 5,000 members: “SF Brotherhood – PAC” and “US Special Forces Team Room.” Members of the two include former and current Rangers, Green Berets, and other special forces units.

In one instance, NBC found a post that alleged multiple aides to former Vice President Pence were involved in a “concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the [sic] peoples government” to sabotage former President Trump. Another post expressed outrage over the 2020 election following the Capitol riot, claiming that “Trump was sabotaged once again!” The poster added that “trying to get to the bottom of the obvious election fraud now looks like it doesn’t have a chance.”

Others took aim at Black Lives Matter, a movement expressly against state-sponsored violence.

“IF WE WANT TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN WE WILL HAVE TO MAKE EVIL PEOPLE FEAR PUNISHMENT AGAIN,” read one post with a picture of a noose included.

NBC noted that “the forums shouldn’t be seen as reflective of the overall views of the whole special operations forces community.” Two other Facebook groups reviewed by NBC mostly included more benign military-related news, with some discussion of politics.

But the findings nevertheless heighten concerns over right-wing extremism brewing within the ranks of the military. As NBC noted, several former members of special forces have been charged with crimes in connection to the Capitol insurrection. One, a former Green Beret, was caught on video violently assaulting a Capitol police officer with a flagpole. Authorities estimate that about 1 in 5 of those charged are active-duty or retired members of the military, according to MilitaryTimes.

“I am concerned about active duty,” Robert Wilson, an ex-Green Beret who was commander of the 3rd Special Forces Group, told NBC. “I don’t think special operations forces just develop these ideas in their head when they get out and are in their late 40s. So I think it starts in the military and probably gets worse when they’re out.”

Gary Reid, the director for defense intelligence at the defense department, echoed Wilson: “This is very disturbing material for me and very disturbing content that in no way would mirror the behavior expected of persons employed by the Department of Defense, and certainly not serving in the U.S. military.”

Some of the posts uncovered by NBC specifically take aim at newly-appointed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first Black person to hold the position.

“He has risen to the very peak of his profession, riding on the color of his skin,” one user wrote following Austin’s announcement that the Defense Department would finally begin to address right-wing radicalization in the ranks. Several posters also used derogatory terms like “pus-gut maggot” and “bubba” to refer to the defense secretary, per the report.

Other posts explicitly drew upon QAnon mythology.

“If you have been following Q for a while you know that Q taught many of us lurkers how he was going to communicate with us to [sic] by pass the mainstream media,” one member wrote. “He’s a mathematician by trade and had a brilliant aptitude to pick up Gematria code early in which the Cabal used to communicate with each other on [social media].”

Last month, Secretary Austin ordered a “DOD-wide stand down” to discuss the problem of right-wing extremism in the military with several ranking military officials. And last week, Austin issued a memo based on initial findings that called for a new definition of “extremism,” as well as the establishment of the Countering Extremism Working Group to root out radicalism from the ranks.

“The story of radicalization in special operations is a story that needs to be told,” Jack Murphy, a former Green Beret, NBC. “It has shocked and horrified me to see what’s happened to these guys in the last five or six years.”

Biden DOJ sues longtime Trump ally Roger Stone

The United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Friday afternoon alleging longtime GOP operative and political “dirty trickster” Roger Stone owes nearly $2 million in unpaid federal income tax.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Fort Lauderdale, the civil lawsuit seeks from Stone and his wife, Nydia Stone, “nearly $2 million in unpaid taxes, interest, and penalties.”

“By depositing and transferring these funds into the Drake Ventures’ accounts instead of their personal accounts, the Stones evaded and frustrated the IRS’s collection efforts,” the six-page civil lawsuit states. The suit further claims that Sone, alongside his wife, used a shell company, “Drake Ventures,” to ultimately “shield their personal income from enforced collection and fund a lavish lifestyle.”

DOJ says Stone and his wife moved $1 million to their LLC in 2018-19, then had the LLC pay “a substantial amount of their personal expenses,” including groceries and dentist bills. This “evaded and frustrated the IRS’s collection efforts.” pic.twitter.com/gy6go5cv6F

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) April 16, 2021

“They used Drake Ventures to receive payments that are payable to Roger Stone personally, pay their personal expenses, shield their assets, and avoid reporting taxable income to the IRS,” the lawsuit further outlines.

The latest trouble isn’t “an accusation of criminality,” as CNN noted, but Stone isn’t a stranger to landing in legal trouble. The GOP operative was not too long ago convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering, but then later pardoned by former President Donald Trump.

Stone didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on Friday evening about the freshly filed lawsuit.

The most recent news comes as Stone prepares to be the headline act this weekend at the pro-Trump boat parade “Trumparilla” in Tampa Bay, Florida, where he is slated to make a grand entrance via parachute. This past week Stone attempted to turn down the volume of his support for Rep. Matt Gaetz after previously telling the congressman amid scandal to go on “offense.”

For reference, Stone would need to sell 20,000 of his Cameo videos to fans to make the $2 million he alleges owes, only to then fork over to the federal government, which will prove to be a challenge at his current rate of selling videos. Alternatively, Stone could sell nearly 134,000 rocks (“stones”) at $15 a pop with his signature on them to pay off his debt.

Let’s have a cringey talk about multiracial identity, from “Ginny & Georgia” to Harry and Meghan

Depending on your tastes, “Ginny & Georgia,” a dizzying hybrid of YA drama and old fashioned Aaron Spelling-style sudser, is either a good time, or an overstuffed TV burrito, or a jumbled wreck. People loved or hated the writing, adored or detested its stars, joyfully binged or hate-watched.

Call it like you see it, but here’s the thing: Not many Netflix shows that aren’t about Airbenders spend much time ranked in its Top 10. This one was still hanging in there as of April 13 — and it debuted in February.

There are many possible and plausible theories as to why that may be, if you cared enough to indulge in them.

An obvious draw is the show’s breakout hottie Felix Mallard, a dead ringer for Johnny Depp before he went rotten and cast in a role meant to stir up memories of Dylan McKay and Jordan Catalano. Another point of appeal, or revulsion, is Brianna Howey’s delectably cartoonish rendition of Georgia, a con artist always looking for angles and weak spots.

However, you cannot have watched or read about “Ginny & Georgia” without encountering a discussion of a scene between Ginny (played by Antonia Gentry) and her nice guy boyfriend Hunter (Mason Temple).

The two get together shortly after Ginny, Georgia and Ginny’s half-brother Austin (Diesel La Torraca) arrive in very wealthy Wellsbury, Massachusetts and Ginny enrolls at the local high school. Most of Ginny’s new classmates are white, like the town itself. But Ginny and Hunter are biracial — her father is Black, and he’s half Taiwanese.

Given their absolute lack of chemistry one can’t be penalized for wondering whether their friends pushed them together based on that point in common, but ultimately that doesn’t matter.

In the eighth episode, “Check One, Check Other,” an essay contest on the topic of where they feel most at home forces the couple to confront the varying implications of their individual identities.

Hunter writes a by-the-numbers ode to his guitar, winning polite applause. But the nomadic Ginny, a girl who has never lived in a place long enough to form lasting friendships, follows by spitting out a passionate slam-style poem about society’s overly simplified definitions of multi-racial identity.

She gets a standing ovation.

Their teacher Mr. Gitten (Jonathan Potts) previously made racist insinuations about Ginny before, so inevitably the top prize goes to Hunter. At first Ginny swallows her rage, only to regurgitate it later when she and Hunter are alone, touching off an unforgettably awkward screaming match constructed with dialogue loaded for maximum recoil.

It starts when Hunter shocks Ginny by refusing to empathize with her anger at Gitten’s excuse that her approach to the assignment was “too unconventional,” which she sees as code for “too Black.”

Hunter accepts Gitten’s explanation on its face before stepping even further out of line to gaslight his girlfriend, proposing that Gitten’s animosity towards her may be her fault.

Hunter’s way to dealing with the casual slights and micro aggressions he faces each day is to keep his head down, he explains, then adds. “If you’re so concerned about him and what he thinks about you, why are you always causing drama in his class?”

From there it degenerates into a horrid walk-off bordering on, as Hunter says, a game of “Oppression Olympics.”

“If you really think that if I follow the rules I could have possibly won, you don’t get it,” Ginny shouts. “. . . You are closer to white than I’ll ever be. Your favorite food is cheeseburgers, and I know more Mandarin than you do! You’re barely even Asian.”

Somehow the writers find a way to make Hunter’s retort worse. “Sorry, I’m not Chinese enough for you,” he says. “But I’ve never seen you pound back jerk chicken. Last time I checked Brodie twerks better than you! And I liked your poem, but your bars could use a little more work, homie. So really, how Black are you?”

First off, yikes. That’s the only reasonable snap reaction to this — just, yikes. Their fight doesn’t resolve in any meaningful way in part because so much the situational writing in this series scrapes the surface, and also, they’re still a pair of dumb teens saying dumb things trying to figure out their place in the world. Apparently the actors themselves came up with the lines that really sock you in the jaw but, let’s be real here, production could have used any take they wanted or smoothed it out in the edit.

Despite the serving of this dollop of cringe, though, I’m of the mind that including it in “Ginny & Georgia” is actually a good thing.

To be clear, I’m not trying to posit this scene is a reason to scramble and watch this show. Going by the reaction to it on Twitter, people watched despite its existence, and nobody reading this summary would rightly interpret this as a reason to give it a go. The writing isn’t what distinguishes this series, and I’m saying this as someone who enjoyed the fun messiness. Gentry gives “Ginny & Georgia” its soul, and Howie sauces it with vamp appeal, but overall this show travels fast and light and refuses to burrow into thornier places, content to blow up big bubbles, pop them and move on to Georgia’s next five-alarm ruckus.

But the sheer clang of that Hunter-Ginny fight means that none of the untold numbers of viewers who watched (reminder, Netflix doesn’t release audience data) will forget that it’s there. Maybe it’ll lead them to interrogate, say, why Macaulay Culkin was perpetuating ignorance when he crowed about having “tiny little Asian babies” with his partner Brenda Song on a past episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, adding he feels he has the green light to make Asian jokes “because I have an Asian girlfriend kinda thing.”

Culkin said these things in 2018, truly a banner year for white people in interracial relationships to commit blunders that come back to haunt them. Anyway, this week Song and Culkin announced the birth of their son.

Maybe it has or will lend additional insight into the travails Harry and Meghan have ahead of them as they raise their son Archie and his yet-to-be-born sister, and all the conversations about them to which we have and will be subjected in the press (or even insight into Meghan herself, who is biracial). Or the coded conversations about Kamala Harris who on a typical day is slandered with every old stereotype about Black women in power that exists while occasionally being hit with the Asian model minority stereotype when her detractors are feeling generous.

There is of course the other cruel truth that biracial men are not safe from state violence either. Daunte Wright, a biracial Black man, was shot to death by a Minnesota police officer who claims to have mistakenly pulled her gun instead of her Taser. Wright was pulled over for having expired tabs and air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror. Keeping his head down was never an option.

The world is awash in dumb conversations about biracial identity, and most of those perpetrating the worst parts them don’t notice what they’re doing is counterproductive or racist.

And I can’t say that scene in “Ginny & Georgia” provides a playbook for entering these conversations correctly and effectively. The entire first season revolves around Ginny’s fumbling attempts to root herself in her racial and individual identity with little help from her mother. Its attempt to tease out a young biracial Black woman coming of age story in a place that fetishizes racial identity is, admittedly, imperfect.

Any show trying to dance around the edges of these realities of biracial identity and racism within the vortex of a soapy, melodramatic whirlpool is flirting with the possibility that it’ll be despised for the attempt.

This seemed be the case with this show. But a whole lot of people watched “Ginny & Georgia” stumblingly try to suss out what it means to grow up biracial in a society that doesn’t quite understand the specificity of that designation, in a forum not charged by celebrity stupidity, institutional injustice and righteous despair. Maybe that counts for something.

John Stamos’ secret to longevity is to “stop trying to charm the world”

Whether you know him as Blackie Parrish from “General Hospital,” Uncle Jesse from “Full House” or “ER,” “Necessary Roughness,” “Entourage,” or “You,” Emmy Award-nominated actor and producer John Stamos has been a fixture in and outside of Hollywood for decades. Though he spent years, in his own words, trying to “shed this dumb Peter Pan syndrome that I had,” Stamos has now aged gracefully into both fatherhood and roles that eschew the toxic masculinity traditionally found in films and television.

His new sports dramedy “Big Shot” is created by David E. Kelley and features many formidable female characters. Stamos says most of the writing credit goes to women. “I went into the writers’ room right off the bat, and I think it was about 65% women, which was great,” he recalled.

On the show, Stamos plays Marvyn Korn, a top-tier basketball coach who finds himself working at an elite girls’ school after getting ousted from the NCAA. Korn starts out as an arrogant, tough character who is out of his element working with teen girls, having been accustomed to working with adult male athletes.

Stamos appeared on “Salon Talks” to discuss how he likens his own personal growth in life as an actor to Korn’s evolution to a gentler, more self-aware and thoughtful man. When Stamos started out in Hollywood, he felt pressure to look and act like a perennial bachelor. “I think a lot of it came from outside . . .You know, that’s the problem,” he said. “You start listening to the outside world, and then you’re screwed. So it just took me a long time to grow up. I think I was buying into, or I felt obligated – and it was my fault – to feed that image of bachelor, cocksman guy. I really wasn’t that guy, but I felt like I had to puff that up at times.”

When Stamos shed that image, he got serious about life and love, and this opened up many possibilities for him, including marriage and fatherhood. “Especially with a child now, you start to realize your mortality,” he added.

Watch the “Salon Talks” interview with Stamos here or read the transcript below.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to doing this series?

Having a show with this many women in it, first of all. Strong women. And the value of a guy like Korn, who’s sort of releasing his assumptions and his preconceived ideas of these girls and connecting with them. It just breaks down every stereotype. When we start the thing, he’s resistant to the idea that it’s going to be a revolutionary experience for him. To him it’s a step down.

There was a couple of articles before the show even came out. It was like, “Oh, women’s basketball. Why are they putting it out?” They’re not . . . We’re building it up and we’re shining a light on it. But in his mind it was. I mean, he comes from college basketball and it just starts with him waking up to the idea that these assumptions are old and they’re dated, and he’s got to get with it.

The line, just in general in life, as you know in our society now, is moving. And if you’re not paying attention, then it’s your fault. Everybody has a voice now, and people are speaking and they’re saying, “I don’t feel equal.” “I don’t feel noticed.” “I don’t feel that I matter.” We have to listen. It’s our job. Not to judge you. We don’t know how they feel.

I feel the show has really been . . . Looking back at it, I didn’t realize it that much when I was shooting it. I kind of did, but I didn’t realize that the timing would be so good and the impact would be so important at this moment.

Somehow you’ve had tremendous sustaining power in the industry, which is a great accomplishment. What do you think is your magic formula for balancing doing the job and keeping yourself looking the part? Do you have any tips?

I’m glad that all that comes off. Because it took me a long time to shed this dumb Peter Pan syndrome that I had. I think a lot of it came from outside . . . You know, that’s the problem. You start listening to the outside world and then you’re screwed. So it just took me a long time to grow up. I think I was buying into, or I felt obligated and it was my fault, to feed that image of bachelor, cocksman guy. I really wasn’t that guy, but I felt like I had to puff that up at times to – I think a lot of people live vicariously through that kind of image. But it really wasn’t me. So once I shed that, I just started to really get serious about life.

I’ve always sort of taken care of myself. I don’t do a lot of creams and ointments and stuff, but I do have very good genes. I had to sober up about five-and-a-half years, almost six years now. And that did a lot for me. I mean, that opened up my life, really. It opened up marriage and a child and a solid career. So that was a big turning point for me.

It just takes a long time. It took me a long time anyway, to just not try to be funny all the time and not try to charm the pants off – I was going to a shrink, or I go once in a while, he said, “Stop trying to charm the world. You did it already. Just relax.”

It’s just so hard. And I’m doing that in this character, I think. It’s taken me a long time just to not move around and trust the writing and not have to do s**t, you know, stuff. So I think that’s part of it.

Then my dad was a great example of discipline and being a good man, a hardworking man. He had fast food restaurants that he was grooming me to take over. I would watch him treat the bus boy in the back washing dishes, the same way that he treated his best customer. I didn’t really realize it until years later that that’s what he was doing. And that’s what I try to do. I’m interested in people. But I think maybe that’s part of the – that’s helped the longevity.

“Big Shot” starts streaming on Friday, April 16 on Disney+.

The bioethics of the first human-monkey hybrid embryo

Depending on your point of view, the creation of an embryo that is part-human and part-monkey is either a great opportunity for medical experts to create organs and tissues for human transplantation; or, the starting point of a horror movie.

Either way, that premise is now a reality.

Per a new study published in the scientific journal “Cell,” a team of scientists led by Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of California’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies created the first embryo to contain both human cells and those of a non-human primate — in this case, those of long-tailed macaques. This type of creation is known as a “chimera,” or an organism that contains genetic material from two or more individuals.

Izpisua Belmonte’s team injected 25 human cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPS cells generally, and hiPS cells when they come from humans) into the embryos of long-tailed macaque monkeys. Human cells were able to grow inside 132 of the embryos and the scientists were able to study the results for up to 19 days. Many sources report this as the first half-human half monkey embryo, although The Guardian claims that the same team actually developed one in 2019. Salon reached out to Izpisua Belmonte to clarify and will update the story if or when he responds.

This chimera experiment wasn’t the product of mad scientists testing ethical limits: it had real scientific purpose and value. Indeed, with more research and a bit of luck, scientists could use the knowledge from these experiments to grow human organs in other animals.

“This knowledge will allow us to go back now and try to re-engineer these pathways that are successful for allowing appropriate development of human cells in these other animals,” Izpisua Belmonte told NPR.

The embryo in question is not the first chimera to be created by scientists: For instance, Izpisua Belmonte and the Salk Institute were marginally effective in creating human-pig chimeras in 2017, the same year that researchers in Portugal created a chimera virus (in their case, a mouse virus with a human viral gene). There are also chimeras that occur naturally, such as twins who absorb some of their sibling’s DNA. American singer Taylor Muhl says that a large section of skin on her torso is darker because it comes from her fraternal twin’s genetic material.

The potential advantage of creating human-monkey chimeras is significant. It is often difficult for doctors to have enough organs to provide transplants to patients who desperately need them, and creating successful chimeras could allow scientists to manufacture organs rather than depending on donors. As Izpisua Belmonte told NPR, “This is one of the major problems in medicine — organ transplantation. The demand for that is much higher than the supply.”

Julian Koplin, a research fellow with the Biomedical Ethics Research Group, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, pointed out in an email to Salon that the bigger concern about chimeras is when they lead to live-born creatures. These were just in the early embryonic stage, but if scientists are eventually able to develop human-pig chimeric animals for organ transplants, things could become ethically questionable.

“Most people think that humans have much greater moral status than (say) a pig,” Koplin explained. “However, a human-pig chimera would straddle these categories; it is neither fully a pig nor fully human. How, then, should we treat this creature?”

Indeed, the chimeric embryo experiment already entered some ethical gray areas. As Koplin noted, “in many jurisdictions, human embryo research is subject to the ’14-day rule’ (which limits research to the first 14 days of embryo development.) These chimeric embryos were cultured until some reached 19 days post-fertilization. Should the study have stopped at 14 days? Arguably not, since only a small proportion of their cells were human. But how many human cells are too many? At what stage should a chimeric embryo be treated like a human embryo?”

Dr. Daniel Garry, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has written extensively about the science and ethics of chimeras, broke down the issues with Salon by email. He noted that ethical concerns against the technology include fears of human cells contributing to “off-target” organs such as the brain, although he added that he and his colleagues “recently showed that this contribution does not occur.” Likewise, he feared the possibility that a human embryo could wind up being inadvertently developed in a large animal.

Moreover, Garry said that with chimera research in general, ethics issues abound regarding the humans who contribute cells to such research. In the case of the monkey-human chimera embryo experiment, humans who contributed cells that were reprogrammed were aware and gave consent to have that happen.

Garry added that there are also questions about “whether some organs might be appropriate but others not — for example, generating a pancreas or heart is OK, but having a monkey or a pig with human skin or human hair may not be OK for some.” He also noted that there are usually ethical arguments that arise whenever there is a “paradigm shifting discovery” from people who are that “leery of scientific advances.”

At the same time, Garry said that there are a number of strong ethical arguments in favor of chimeras. He pointed to how there are many terminal chronic diseases which do not have curative therapies and whose patients would benefit from the biotechnology created by chimera research. It could reduce healthcare costs, increase the supply of transplant organs and potentially reduce or eliminate the need for drugs to prevent an adverse immune system response.

Koplin said such chimera studies could advance medical science.

“As I understand it, the aim of this study was to help improve techniques for creating human-animal chimeras,” Koplin explained. “Chimeric animals could be used for disease modelling or to generate transplantable human organs. These advances could save lives — which is an important moral reason to pursue them.”

Henry T. Greely, a professor for the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University who wrote about the ethical questions pertaining to chimeras in “Cell,” told Salon that defining what counts as a chimera is “tricky.”

“Every time a person gets an organ transplant, the result is an intra-species chimera: an organism made up of cells from two members of the same species,” Greely noted. “Another example is the way that some pregnant women end up permanently carrying cells from their fetus. When a human gets a pig heart valve, she becomes an inter-species chimera. When a mouse gets human cells, for example to test to see how committed they are to a development path (whether or not they are “pluripotent”), that’s a chimera.” He also noted that scientists might put human brain tissue into a rat’s brain to study the human cells in a way that would not be ethical to do in other people, since they eventually need to kill the test subject and study its brain slices.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

What makes the new monkey-human chimeras unique, Greely explained, is that they were manufactured by injecting human cells into am embryo at its blastocyst stage, or right before an out-of-body embryo can normally develop without being implanted into a uterus.

“That means that the human cells, and the monkey cells, are so early in their development that the human cells might end up in any body tissue,” Greely noted. These types of chimeras are not difficult to create within the same species, but are harder to do the more two species diverge. Naturally the researchers’ ultimate goal is to develop technology that will allow them to create large quantities of human organs for transplantation.

“They tried the monkeys to see if the human cells would do better in this closer species (answer: yes) and whether that could help them learn how to make human cells thrive in pig or sheep embryos (answer: way too soon to tell),” Greely pointed out.

How “A Love Song for Latasha” disrupts and decolonizes documentary filmmaking about Black trauma

The frontrunner for the Oscar in the documentary short subject category is “A Love Song for Latasha,” Sophia Nahli Allison’s astonishing, heartbreaking film about the senseless killing of a 15-year-old girl by a Korean American convenience store owner in South Central Los Angeles back in 1991. The short, available on Netflix, recounts the life of Latasha Harlins as seen through images and voice-over recollections by her best friend Ty and her cousin, Shinese. It is a powerful commentary against gun violence, especially in this era of Black Lives Matter.

The film has a very deliberate, dream-like feel to it, featuring images in reverse or in slow motion. However, Allison uses animation (not archival footage) during the most emotional moment, which depicts what transpired when Latasha was killed. A later scene, in real time, of Shinese reading a poem her late cousin wrote, is equally moving. End titles explain the shocking aftermath of Latasha’s murder and the efforts her friends and family have made to create a foundation in her honor.

Allison, who qualified for the Oscar after winning the best short documentary prize at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2019, spoke to Salon about her nominated short documentary and Latasha’s legacy.

What observations do you have about campaigning, especially this weird year?

What’s been beautiful about campaigning is that Netflix has been really adventurous in how we are doing it, so not only am I on panels, but we had a mural created for Latasha. That wasn’t campaigning; it was for the community, but it was a beautiful and remarkable thing. We hired the artist Victoria Casanova who created the first ever Latasha Harlins mural at the Algin Sutton recreational center. This park is where Ty, Shinese, and Latasha played as children. We had a huge reveal of the mural on [what would have been] Latasha’s 45th birthday. That’s been exciting. Netflix is not thinking about making voters aware of the film, but that we’ve always connected the community and South Central. Having a balance of both those worlds and how we always involve the community was important to me. This year, Shinese and her family are renaming the playground the Latasha Harlins playground. This is the 30th [anniversary] of her murder.

Most shorts are made as a calling card, or proof of concept project. What prompted you to make this short?

I had done a lot short films before “A Love Song for Latasha,” and they help me sharpen my visual language. I felt I had what I needed to pursue this. I wanted there to be an archive for the community and not forget who Latasha was or how important her history was. Within documentary, it’s very common to use archival footage; you are using evidence of the story as the existence of history. But there isn’t much archival footage for Latasha — we have a couple of photos, and the video footage of her being killed. I really wanted to challenge the conventionality of documentary filmmaking. I wanted to intentionally disrupt what I’ve been taught. I wanted to reimagine the archive, and I wanted to create a blueprint for myself to understand what experimentation looks like when there is no archive to tell a story. How do you reimagine and conjure these images based on oral history and oral storytelling? Especially thinking about stories dealing with Black women, and Black girls, and trauma. I wanted to decolonize what it meant to tell a story about trauma and not needing to show the trauma and letting the majority of the film exist in the memory of life and the joy of Black girlhood and not just her murder.

The film took two years to make because I was doing a lot of external work to discover my language. I was doing the research, doing Black feminist readings, and consuming art outside my film to inform my process — looking at African spirituality and Black southern practices to inform the process as well. It was never a feature, or proof of concept, but an archival piece I needed to create at this time. When I was doing it, it was the year of the 25th anniversary of the LA uprising. I initially thought I was doing this for that. It was 2017. 2018, when we finished it, we realized it was so much bigger than that moment. This was supposed to be a lasting piece of work to help us rethink how we are telling documentary stories. To help us have more understanding of Latasha and fill in the gaps of the archive.

I love the way you use video footage, show images in reverse, employ animation, voice-over, and other techniques to convey such powerful emotions. Can you talk about your approach to constructing the narrative?

When I was working on building the script, I knew initially, this film couldn’t start with her death and go backwards from that. I wanted to disrupt that the only archive we know is that incident. I wanted to make the audience excavate this information with me. We have to go through this journey together before you are allowed to understand what happened. You have to be invested in Latasha’s life and her existing purely because she existed, rather than we need to care about the story because she was a Black girl who was killed. For me, it was you need to care about this story because she was a Black girl who lived, and then she was killed.

It’s very life-affirming and inspiring. “A Love Song for Latasha” is a poem, a memory, a reflection.

I wanted [to open the film with] something that caught the audience off guard. I wanted a story that invited the audience in in such an intimate way — this is a private, personal memory; that this is the first understanding we have of Latasha. We realize she is a protector and will do what it takes to care for her loved ones. I wanted us to be surrounded by these memories of these Black girls in South Central. I never wanted the basis of her story to be her death. I wanted to tell this story with Ty and Shinese because so often when we are met with young women killed by racialized violence, by gun violence, we often hear from the adults, who were adults at the time. We rarely get to hear from young people who were the same age as the victims and who grew up with them and have a different experience than what the adults saw. I wanted to revisit this moment in life from Ty and Shinese. These two young girls have a different perspective and memories, and I wanted to have this blend of time where we are moving throughout time and have these intimate details from people who know her as a child. They were children. This is not from the gaze of an adult who understands all the sociopolitical things surrounding it. These are from children who have had their life disrupted, and they are putting the pieces together. These pieces build a fuller narrative. I wanted it to be healing process not only for Ty and Shinese, but for Black women and Black girls and the community. That was one of our decisions not to start with Latasha’s death, and not to ever incorporate the video footage of her death.

“A Love Song for Latasha” is sadly, still a topical film. Latasha was unfairly murdered 30 years ago. Can you talk about finding the subject and telling this story now, and still having an impact?

What was interesting was that the film premiered in Tribeca in 2019, and I never expected the film to have this much life in 2020. To have all the unrest, it’s disturbing how cyclical this is.

I hope people understand we have never gotten to the root issue, and I think 2020 is when we are naming white supremacy and having the nation address that terminology as well and acknowledge that. I’m hoping this creates the shift we need. I’m hoping this film allows us to keep putting the image of life on the people that we’ve lost when we are thinking about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and not just letting their death being the thing that upsets us, but that their lives was stolen. They had a full life before anyone knew their names. I hope that people are not discussed within the image of their death but that we also celebrate their life. I hope people stop using footage of Black folks dying. It’s really traumatizing and triggering to see that.

Yes, I just did an interview with an actor where we talked about the Asian hate crimes and how trauma is triggering.

To your question about Asian hate, it’s so heartbreaking to see. I hope that it allows us to have more cross cultural conversations. When we think about the root and South Central at that time, there was a lot of Anti-Blackness with the Korean-American community, and there was a lot of tension in South Central between Blacks and Korean Americans. But it wasn’t because they were programmed to not get along. It’s wanting to address that root of imperialism and white supremacy, and how Anti-Blackness is something Korean Americans were taught, and these groups were placed together in a community with little resources, and everyone is fighting over these resources. I want to see these conversations of healing and conversation that interrogate and disrupt and name what it is that we are needing to dismantle in this time.

What has the response been to Latasha’s story? Is the foundation in her name gaining traction as a result of the film?

Ty and Shinese are creating their own nonprofit. They are working to create a nonprofit that provides resources for youth in South Central, and it’s been remarkable to see the headway. We all just gathered at the park on March 16 to remember Latasha’s death, and we had a city councilman announce the park’s renaming. On April 29, they are having a [renaming] event. Ty and Shinese are in the process of working on their nonprofit.

At the end of the film, Ty says, “If Latasha were still here, I’d be a lawyer.” Within that time of us completing the film, Ty is finishing her degree in criminal justice. It’s beautiful to see how Ty and Shinese have both healed through this process, and they are continuing this legacy, and this fight that Shinese’s aunt started 30 years ago. They are continuing to move forward with the goals and dreams they shared with Latasha.

This is your first film, and your first, of what I hope are many Oscars (or at least nominations). Can you talk about what this means for you and your career as a filmmaker?

There are so many days where just because of how long and exhausting and beautiful of a process this was, that I still have to breath. It’s still a bit surreal for me to realize what this entire journey has looked like. What is exciting for me is what this means for myself and other Black women creators and filmmakers, artists that are doing experimental work and work that is unconventional, and which sometimes is not recognized within the genre that is documentary. I’m excited for this to open more doors for Black women storytellers that people create and provide the resources to support and believe in Black women when they are wanting to try something new within filmmaking. I’m currently completing my first feature, which is also an experimental documentary. I’m just having a moment where I don’t even know how to process it. I don’t have words for how much it means. How excited it makes me feel for the rest of this journey. How grateful I am that the story of a young Black girl from South Central is being recognized by the Academy. That’s radical within itself to me. It’s been 30 years, and Ty and Shinese get to see their story celebrated at this level. That for me is more than I could ever ask for.

“A Love Song for Latasha” is currently streaming on Netflix. For more information on watching this and the other Oscar-nominated shorts, visit Shorts TV.

Twitter rips Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert for lone votes against bone marrow donor bill

Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert riled up Twitter users on Thursday after voting in opposition to a bill proposed in the lower chamber that would reauthorize the National Marrow Donor Program, a program that matches donors with people in need of a bone marrow donor.

Despite two no votes, the bill passed on the House floor 415-2, with a total of 12 lawmakers, including GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn, not casting a vote.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were the lone two members to vote against a bill that would reauthorize the National Marrow Donor Program, which matches bone marrow donors and cord blood units with patients who have leukemia and other diseases

The bill passed 415-2

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 16, 2021

Rep. Greene’s spokesperson Nick Dyer said in a statement to The Independent: “Nothing in this bill prevents the funding of aborted fetal tissue by taxpayers. It opens the door for the [National Institutes of Health] to use this bill to research the remains of babies who were murdered in the womb.” When Boebert was asked why she voted no, the lawmaker told The Independent that “this bill added hundreds of millions of dollars to the national debt, while not receiving a [Congressional Budget Office] score or going through the committee process.”

Yet, the alleged problems raised about the bill by Greene and Boebert have nothing to do with the bill they voted no on. As CNN noted, the National Marrow Donor Program “keeps an inventory of cord blood and a database of bone marrow donors for matches with patients diagnosed with leukemia and other fatal blood diseases and is not related to the fetal tissue argument raised by Greene or the argument raised by Boebert.”

Democratic member of the California State Assembly Buffy Wicks tweeted, “Who votes against the National Marrow Donor Program, you ask? Well, [Marjorie Taylor Greene] and Lauren Boebert—that’s who. The ‘new face’ of the Republican Party, everyone!”

Who votes against the National Marrow Donor Program, you ask?

Well, @ mtgreenee and @laurenboebert — that’s who.

The “new face” of the Republican Party, everyone! https://t.co/znvj1c7w55

— Buffy Wicks (@BuffyWicks) April 16, 2021

A countless number of Twitter users blasted the GOP duo over their no vote. “@RepBoebert & @mtgreenee are the white version of Diamond and Silk,” wrote Atlantic writer Jemele Hill.

.@RepBoebert & @mtgreenee are the white version of Diamond and Silk. https://t.co/PH9nnwhN7F

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) April 16, 2021

Bellingcat journalist Robert Evans tweeted, “standing up for liberty means fighting bone marrow donors.”

“I’m a blood cancer survivor. I didn’t think Boebert could get much worse, and yet, here we are,” healthcare advocate Laura Packard stated.

I'm a blood cancer survivor. I didn't think Boebert could get much worse, and yet, here we are. https://t.co/qdDaEabKfi

— Laura Packard (@lpackard) April 16, 2021

Fox News’ Sean Hannity describes police shooting victim Adam Toledo as “a young 13-year-old man”

In the wake of the Chicago Police Department releasing bodycam footage showing the killing of 13-year old boy Adam Toledo, Fox News quickly jumped into position to attempt to justify the killing of the boy, whose family’s attorney argues did not have a firearm when shot to death in a dark alleyway.

During a radio segment on Thursday afternoon, Fox News host Sean Hannity described Toledo as a “13-year-old man.” “We are awaiting the release this hour of Chicago Police bodycam footage that captured the fatal police shooting of a young 13-year-old man by the name of Adam Toledo. And if social media is any indication, there’s a lot of chatter today about possible unrest,” Hannity stated.

But the justifying was only beginning from that point forward. On Thursday night during Hannity’s primetime show, Fox News contributor and noted carpetbagger Dan Bongino attempted to justify the killing due to the police officer’s heart rate being elevated. “Those are pretty damning stills, but you still have to remember when you put all of these factors together and the fact that his heart rate’s elevated by being in a foot pursuit where he’s breathing heavy and screaming orders, he may have legitimately thought that the subject was turning on him to fire at him,” Bongino stated. “I don’t know that; we’re going to have to hear what he says.”

Another Fox News guest further declared proudly on primetime that the media is to blame over “trying to make, what is apparently a good shooting, bad.” “What I’m seeing is tons of newspaper people, news folks, trying to make, what is apparently a good shooting, bad,” former Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department Garry McCarthy claimed.

Fox guest says on Adam Toledo the media is “trying to make, what is apparently a good shooting, bad” pic.twitter.com/4S6CUhM626

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 16, 2021

Former National Rifle Association (NRA) spokesperson and “SuperBeets” salesperson Dana Loesch further argued on the network that the shooting was “a justified shooting.”

As for the deadly incident, police assert that Toledo was holding a gun in his hand when shot to death. “The video, according to police, shows a gun in Toledo’s right hand as he nears an open area of fence next to an empty lot. Toledo turns to his left, toward the officer, and what police say is the gun disappears behind his right side. Toledo begins to raise his hands as he’s facing the officer when the officer fires his weapon,” CNN reported.

But the lawyer for Toledo’s family argues that nothing was in his hands after coming out from behind the fence before being shot. “At the time Adam was shot, he did not have a gun. OK?” Adeena Weiss-Ortiz, the family’s lawyer, stated at a presser on Thursday afternoon, according to CNN. “In that slo-mo version (of one of the videos), whatever he had in his, in his hand, whether it was a gun or something else, there was something in his hand, he approaches the fence, he lets it go, he turns around, and he’s shot.”

The release of the body camera footage of Toledo being killed in Chicago comes on the heels of body camera footage also being released showing the heartwrenching final moments of Daunte Wright’s life in a suburb outside of Minneapolis, who was shot to death over a police officer claiming to have mistaken a firearm for a taser.

Defund the media! (Sort of.) Political reporters are hurting America — let’s get rid of them

When I founded my Press Watch website a year and a half ago, my goal was to improve political journalism. Since then, I’ve railed against lazy, both-sides, optics-obsessed, horse-race coverage. I’ve preached about the desperate need to replace amnesiac stenography with context, accountability and passionate advocacy for the truth.

But a few days ago, along came NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (probably the person I quote the most hereabouts) with a thought: What if you should just give up?

OK, that’s not how he phrased it.

“The politics beat breeds analysts of the game. It’s unavoidable,” he wrote.

So instead of trying to change them, he suggested, let’s make the case for there to be fewer of them.

Leave “a skeleton crew to handle the game, and the both-sides sensibility that is native to it,” he explained. They would track the spin, handicap the campaigns, offer review of the day’s optics and obsess over who’s up and who’s down.

And then major news organizations could “redistribute resources to subject-matter reporting, where the focus is on how to solve problems.”

As Jay explained: “Politics isn’t really a subject. It’s a phase or dimension of other things. There’s a politics to improving infrastructure in the U.S., but that’s just one part of the problem. When the beat is politics itself there’s a ‘missing’ subject. That vacuum is filled by the game.”

I think that’s exactly right. What I see happening these days, in Washington newsrooms filled with a surplus of political reporters and a relative dearth of subject-matter experts, is that stories that are actually about health or science or governance or race or demographics or democracy all end up becoming “political” stories.

For a political story, what matters is the fight and the moves, which party comes out ahead or which politician — or whether someone said something stupid. The working assumption is that there are two sides, and that they are presumptively equally valid. The time frame is generally 24 hours or less. The favored device is the pithy quote. The goal is to find the drama and review it from a remove.

Whether what’s being discussed potentially reflects an effective solution to a real problem experienced by actual human beings is not what matters.

Jay was responding to my many imprecations over time for editors to let subject-specialist beat reporters, rather than political reporters, take the lead on the most important stories of the day — and to send them, instead of White House reporters, to demand answers from White House officials.

“Get political reporters off the coronavirus story because they don’t distinguish between right and wrong,” I wrote last March. “Hey political reporters — get lost!” I wrote days after the election, because instead of focusing on the policy challenges, they were already setting the narrative that if Joe Biden didn’t unify the nation he would be a failure. And in January, I proposed a rebranding of political reporters as “government reporters” to free them to cover what’s happening in Washington in the context of whether it is serving the people well, rather than which party is winning. My tweets on the subject are legion.

But to Jay’s point, that is all so damn naïve! There’s a big market for the horse-race, “who’s up and who’s down” stories, which means political reporters (and their editors) aren’t going to change. The reporters are happy. The editors are happy. Bitching and whining from people like me doesn’t shame them, it amuses them, because I obviously don’t get it.

And political reporting does meet a certain set of needs. The people who run news organizations these days are particularly afraid of being boring. Political stories are rarely boring. Political reporters have figured out that when you write about optics and who’s up and down, it’s always changing! So you can make it seem very dramatic! In fact, even when it’s not dramatic, that lack of drama is dramatic!

Because political reporters are the stars of the newsroom, they get on TV. And because they get on TV, they are the stars of the newsroom.

When you put a political reporter on a story, they never start by writing “of course this happened, because this is how things work.” Because political reporters tend to think very short-term, they can be easily surprised. They can find a “wow, look what just happened!” story where a subject-matter expert would write “this is a big distraction from the real issue” or “this really doesn’t address the problem.”

They treat the right-wing media ecosystem as if it were their assignment editor, because it tends to produce exciting stories. They obsess over the president’s every move and utterance — which made a certain amount of sense when the president was Donald Trump, but there is now an actual policy-making process that requires attention. (The questions they ask show how profoundly out of touch they are with the concerns of normal people.)

They can also turn a workaday story into a substance-free scandal! For instance, when President Biden was asked recently if he supported moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta — he said he did — Washington Post White House bureau chief Ashley Parker cried foul. Not because of the answer, but because he answered at all! “The question should have been a simple one,” Parker and her coauthors wrote, the obvious implication being that he should have ducked it. Instead of ducking it, he took a principled position — one with which some people disagree.

You might think that any reporter would be happy when a government official answers a question, rather than ducks it. But political reporters operate in a different world, ruled by optics. Indeed, political reporters do a lot of ducking themselves — no more so, recently, than when covering the issue of voter suppression, which they obfuscate to avoid the appearance of “taking sides.”

Taking sides is the ultimate sin for political reporters — even when one side is the truth. We saw that with their coverage of the Trump presidency. We saw that with their coverage of the COVID pandemic. Most fatally, we saw that with their coverage of the intersection of Trump and the pandemic.

Amazingly enough, they even suck at covering politics. The country is in terrible shape and dramatic legislative action is required to make things better. That’s a great political story! Instead, they write about minutiae and the need for some sort of mythical, impossible bipartisanship. The Republican Party has no legislative agenda other than obstruction. That’s a great political story! But that, for political reporters, is a given, rather than a fact worth pointing out. The Republican Party engages in the rhetoric of white supremacy and is engaged in a desperate battle to make voting and the accurate counting of votes harder. That’s a great political story! But the Democratic move to restore or rescue democracy is boring and predictable.

Political reporters don’t even cover politics unless it involves elected officials. The country is being swept by mass movements that have engaged an unprecedentedly large number of regular Americans, but those are only stories when people connected to those movements set things on fire or get shot.

Did I mention how often political reporters are surprised? They are constantly surprised! For instance, they repeatedly discover, to their amazement, that the modern Republican Party, as NBC political reporter Mark Murray recently tweeted (to many people’s amusement), “is no longer your father’s Republican Party.” They are utterly gobsmacked when they realize — over and over again — that racism, not economic anxiety, was a major driver of radical Trumpism.

Beat reporters

Subject-matter beat reporters, in stark contrast to political reporters, develop deep expertise about issues of substance. They have the confidence to state truths without having to attribute them to “critics.” Rather than emptying their minds of any preconceived notions, they use their accumulated knowledge to put what they write in context.

They identify problems on their beats, then evaluate proposed solutions to determine how effective they would be, rather than how cleverly worded they are. They focus most intently on what’s important in the areas they cover, not exclusively on what just happened.

At least they do in theory.

Because — and this is where I’m finally getting back to Jay’s argument — unfortunately, in too many of the top Washington newsrooms, even the subject-matter experts are under incredible internal and external pressure to behave more like political reporters.

The coin of the realm in our elite newsrooms is the political angle, even for those who might know better. Subject specialists get assigned stories by editors who love political stories, and who think stories with context are depressing, which they often are, and boring, which they can certainly be — if you have the attention span of a gnat.

You will still find beautiful, humane, long-form reporting here and there — though it’s more likely to be in the print magazine sections than the print front pages. (See for instance, New York Times Magazine staff writer Marcela Valdes‘ important and evocative piece on immigrants suspended in Temporary Protected Status.)

But perhaps the worst only-a-political-reporter-could-write abomination I’ve seen lately — a front-pager headlined “Infections Climb on Biden’s Watch” — was actually written by people the Washington Post identifies as health reporters: Dan Diamond and Fenit Nirappil.

Who looks at a rise in COVID infections and thinks: “This could be really bad for Biden”? Not normal people. Not, I would have thought, health reporters.

The story looked at how Biden’s infection numbers were good at first, but are now climbing again — as if this refuted Biden’s “railing” about Trump’s negligence and belied his vow to adopt “a more muscular strategy.” Only in an article this insane would reporters feel obliged to essentially refute their own argument by dutifully pointing out, for the record, that “Biden … has no more sway than Trump over a mutating virus that scientists have only begun to understand.” You don’t say.

What exactly should Biden do differently? The one named critic of his virus policy in this article is Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota who lifted his state’s mask mandate in January. Burgum, the Post reporters wrote, “suggested that Biden might also accomplish more if top administration officials, including the president and vice president, joined weekly calls with governors. He noted that Vice President Mike Pence and Trump Cabinet officials were on such calls last year, which Burgum said were a platform for candid discussion.”

In reality, as the Post reporters themselves acknowledged, Trump’s approach was to feud with governors and let “internal turf wars … rage for days.” By contrast, at the Biden White House, “six officials described a non-blaming culture that is unruffled by the uptick in cases.”

Who thought this could be a front-page story if it was about political optics, rather than being about the alarming increase in cases? I’ll hazard it wasn’t the health reporters. I’d bet it was some senior editor in the Washington bureau.

So my point here is that neither what I’ve been suggesting (reform political reporting) nor what Jay is suggesting (cut back on political reporters) will happen, or will do any good, until we get rid of the senior editors who currently rule those newsrooms.

I look forward to the day they are replaced with a younger, more diverse group of journalists who unabashedly cleave to core journalistic goals like creating an informed electorate, standing up for the common person, encouraging pluralism and, most of all, speaking truth to power. I’m hopeful, in the long run. In the meantime, I’ll keep on bitching and moaning.

Simon & Schuster won’t distribute book written by officer involved in Breonna Taylor raid after all

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, one of the Louisville police officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor during a drug raid in 2020, is writing a book about the event, and the resulting outcry has caused Simon & Schuster to distance itself from the project.

The Louisville Courier-Journal first broke news about the book on Thursday afternoon after Mattingly reached out to the newspaper for permission to use one of their photographs from the 2020 protests in the wake of Taylor’s death.

In an email, he told the Courier-Journal that the book, tentatively titled “The Fight for Truth: The Inside Story Behind the Breonna Taylor Tragedy,” was still in progress. However, senior publicist Devon Brown for Post Hill Press, a conservative Christian press, said the book would be published by the fall through distributor Simon & Schuster.

The news sparked immediate backlash on social media and even inspired a MoveOn petition (which has now ended) asking for Simon & Schuster to cancel the book deal.

At first, Simon & Schuster released a statement saying that the book was being published by Post Hill Press, with whom they have a distribution deal and that “per our agreements with them we are unable to pick and choose which titles on their list to distribute.”

However, by Thursday night, Simon & Schuster backtracked and released a new statement.

“Like much of the American public, earlier today Simon & Schuster learned of plans by distribution client Post Hill Press to publish a book by Jonathan Mattingly,” the publisher said. “We have subsequently decided not to be involved in the distribution of this book.”

While it’s unclear how Simon & Schuster’s decision will impact the publication of Mattingly’s book, according to the New York Times , Post Hill Press spokesperson Kelsey Merritt said the publisher “supported the right to freedom of speech of all its authors.”

“In the case of Sergeant Mattingly, the mainstream media narrative has been entirely one-sided related to this story, and we feel that he deserves to have his account of the tragic events heard publicly, as well,” Ms. Merritt said. “Post Hill Press is standing behind our decision to publish his story.”

As Salon reported in 2020, Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was fatally shot by police serving a no-knock warrant in search of her ex-boyfriend in March as part of a drug investigation in a different part of the city. Police claim they announced themselves.

Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, has maintained that he believed someone was breaking into the home and that the officers did not announce themselves. He fired a self-described “warning shot,” which struck Mattingly in the leg.

Mattingly — as well as Detectives Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove — returned fire. Taylor was hit five times. No drugs were found in the home and only Hankison was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment, while Mattingly and Cosgrove were placed on administrative assignment.

While there’s no statement of the format or content of Mattingly’s book-in-progress yet, he has made comments about the shooting that indicate his point of view. In September, Mattingly wrote an email to his fellow officers saying, “We did the legal, moral and ethical thing that night,” referring to the Taylor raid.

He also complained about the ongoing protests over Taylor’s death.

“You DO NOT deserve to be in this position. The position that allows thugs to get in your face and yell, curse and degrade you,” Mattingly wrote. “It’s sad how the good guys are demonized, and criminals are canonized.”

Post Hill Press has released controversial titles before, most notably “Firebrand,” which was written in collaboration with Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who is currently under investigation by the Justice Department over possible sex trafficking. That book was also distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster has not announced if they plan to discontinue their distribution deal with Post Hill Press.

Jerry Falwell Jr.’s feud with Liberty University escalates with dueling lawsuits

Evangelical college Liberty University has filed a new lawsuit against former president Jerry Falwell Jr. for $10 million, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The new suit claims that Falwell “withheld scandalous and potentially damaging information” and failed to disclose “his personal impairment by alcohol” from Liberty’s board of trustees while negotiating a new contract to head the Virginia school in 2019. At the time, Falwell convinced the board to include a higher severance payout if he resigned for “good reason” or if the university terminated his contract without cause.

“Mr. Falwell claimed to the committee that this would serve as a ‘safety valve’ for both him and the university if his full-throated support of former President Donald J. Trump proved damaging to the school’s reputation,” the Times reported. According to the university, Falwell’s real motivation for organizing his contract in this way was because he was engaging in indiscretions that have gone on to damage the university’s reputation. This, the suit alleges, was a breach of contract and fiduciary duty.

As Salon reported in 2020, Falwell found himself tumbling from one scandal into another, before finally officially plummeting from grace when he was ousted from Liberty in August. There were murmurs of impropriety in 2019 when Politico reported that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen helped “clean up racy ‘personal’ photographs” of Falwell’s wife, Becki, including one of her in a French maid costume, which Falwell had allegedly sent to a number of employees at his evangelical university.

Things came to a head in August of last year when Falwell released an exclusive statement with the Washington Examiner claiming that his wife had engaged in a “fatal attraction type” affair with Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant-turned-Miami businessman. He also said he was being extorted by Granda who was threatening to go public with information about the relationship. The next day, Granda released a statement of his own at Reuters claiming that Falwell both knew of and observed his wife’s extramarital relationship.

“Becki and I developed an intimate relationship, and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda said.

Granda also followed up his statement with a post on Twitter in which he described Falwell as a “predator,” saying he’d sent Granda an image of a female Liberty University student exposing herself at their farm. In an interview with the Washington Post, Falwell confirmed, explaining that “She had on, I don’t know how to say this, granny panties.” He claimed it wasn’t sexual but admitting that he sent the photo to multiple people because he thought it was funny.

Additionally, Liberty employees detailed other instances of “Falwell’s behavior that they [saw] as falling short of the standard of conduct they expect from conservative Christian leaders, from partying at nightclubs, to graphically discussing his sex life with employees.”

Amid this, the suit claims that Becki Falwell privately contacted three members of the university’s executive committee to express concerns about her husband’s excessive drinking, which had intensified in the wake of the Granda situation. The university then paid for Falwell to have a short stint in rehab, but he balked at the idea of further residential treatment.

“There were concerns that he smelled of alcohol during work interactions,” the suit alleges.

The suit from Liberty University also claims that by keeping the couple’s sexual agreement with Granda — and the ensuing “extortion” — a secret from college leadership, he concealed an “active threat” to the university’s standing.

The backlash towards Falwell has pointed to the apparent hypocrisy inherent in his actions.

Under Falwell, Liberty students have been expelled for violating the student honor code called “The Liberty Way.” The code forbids premarital sex and same-sex relationships. Drinking alcohol and “obscene language” are infractions, and students are instructed to “dress modestly at all times.”

According to the New York Times, a spokesman for Liberty University, Scott Lamb, said the school had no comment on the suit. For his part, Falwell sued the university for defamation in October, arguing that it damaged his reputation by not working to verify the allegation about the affair, but ultimately dropped the suit in December 2020.

America’s minority rule problem is deadly

Friday morning, Americans awoke yet again to another round of headlines about a senseless mass shooting, this time with 8 people dead at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. After a year of an unimaginable amount of death from COVID-19, it appears Americans are returning to our regular pre-pandemic cycle of trauma, which is the random mass murder of people interspersed between an unending stream of street violence stemming from a country steeped in guns. We had barely started to embrace hope of the pandemic ending when these high profile shootings began again: Atlanta. Boulder. Southern California. South Carolina. Now Indianapolis.

The frustrating thing is the majority of Americans know what needs to be done to curtail these murders, and they support doing it.

Polling from Morning Consult released just the day before the Indianapolis shooting shows that 2 out of 3 Americans want stricter gun control. This follows polling showing that 84% of Americans want background checks for gun buyers. Arguments in favor of gun control are winning the public debate. About 40,000 Americans die a year from gun violence. Voters want Congress to do something about it.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

But Republicans barely bother to offer more than perfunctory arguments against gun control anymore. They know they don’t need to, because no matter what happens at the ballot box, no matter how many Americans reject them and their views, they are the ones who will control the country, especially on matters such as gun control. Adam Jentleson, the former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who served as Senate Majority Leader for some time while Barack Obama was president, has dubbed it the “minority rule doom loop.” As Jentleson describes it, the “doom loop” is one “by which predominantly white conservatives gain more and more power, even as they represent fewer Americans.”

The doom loop consists of four interlocking components. Candidates who represent white conservatives—Republicans, in our ideologically sorted era—begin every election cycle buoyed by a sluice of voter suppression and gerrymandering (what I call electoral welfare), which makes it easier for them to win. Then antidemocratic features of the American system that have always existed but never benefited one party over the other in any systematic way help those same candidates take control of institutions such as the White House and the Senate, despite winning fewer votes and representing fewer people than their opponents. Once in control of these institutions, these newly elected officials use them to entrench their power beyond the reach of voters. If they are eventually voted out of power, they retain a veto over the agenda of the majority, which they use to block change and feed the conservative case that the government is “broken.” This hastens their return to power—along the very path they greased with voter suppression.

Right now, we’re in stage three, where Democrats were able to marshal enough forces to overcome the significant structural barriers to majority rule to win technical control of the government. But Democratic helplessness to pass gun control legislation is a cold reminder that Republicans, despite being walloped at the ballot box, retain most of the power in this country.

Yes, President Joe Biden was able to get an important coronavirus relief package passed through Congress on a party-line vote. But on the vast majority of legislative priorities for Democrats — gun control, climate change, voting rights, health care — Republicans have the final word, due to the filibuster. That word is consistently “nope,” with a side dose of “f*ck you” to the majority of Americans who voted against the GOP. And with Republican-controlled state legislatures rapidly introducing a bunch of bills to disenfranchise voters further, it may very well be tha we’re entering a new era when Democrats can’t even technically win elections, despite having the majority support among Americans.

And it’s even worse than that passage from Jentleson indicates, because Republicans also have captured the courts through sleazy means, holding judicial seats open during Barack Obama’s presidency, only to rapidly fill them when Donald Trump got elected. As Ian Millhiser of Vox argued in a recent Salon interview, the result is Republicans can go around the legislative process entirely to force their agenda on Americans who keep haplessly voting against them.

The minority rule doom loop isn’t just unfair and anti-democratic. It’s also deadly.

Nearly 20% of people who died in the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic have been Americans, even though we have less than 4% of the world’s population. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive today, but for Donald Trump’s reckless mismanagement. What adds insult to injury is that Americans didn’t even choose Trump as their president. Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes and, in a truly democratic nation, would have been president when the pandemic hit. Even her fiercest critics on the left had to admit that hundreds of thousands more people would be with us today if the competent woman — the person who got the most votes — had been allowed to actually have her win, instead of letting the electoral college install a sociopathic buffoon.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Truthfully, the death toll we’re looking at from our continued insistence on letting Republicans win even when they lose is going to be unfathomable, because we can add “lack of health care” and “climate change” to the growing pile of deadly problems that Americans keep voting to fix, to no avail. The situation is only getting worse, as Republicans dig deeper into the idea they have an absolute right to rule, no matter what the voters say about it.

There is still, for the moment anyway, a solution.

Democrats could strip the minority party of their nearly-absolute veto power but abolishing — or at least reforming — the filibuster, a pointless anachornism in the Senate that was mainly used in the past to defend white supremacy. When they were in power, Republicans didn’t think twice about nuking the filibuster when it got in the way of their main priority, which was controlling the Supreme Court. Without Republicans being able to stop any bill before it even got to debate on the Senate floor, Democrats could strengthen gun control, improve health care, fight climate change, and, perhaps most importantly, bar state legislatures from passing laws to deny Americans the legal right to vote.

Unfortunately, this common sense move is being blocked by two Democratic senators who are weighed down by an ignorance that is only surpassed by the size of their egos: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Both of these senators keep foolishly insisting that filibuster is somehow a tool encouraging bipartisan engagement and debate, even though the reality is that it’s being used by Republicans to unilaterally end all Senate debate before it even happens. Whatever the real motivations of these two — likely an outdated belief that “doing nothing” is the safest possible political position — their actions are stunningly immoral. People keep dying pointlessly in this country. They have the power to do something about it, but they flat out refuse to use that power.

It’s farcical, in an existentialist-novel sort of way. American voters have been cast in the role of Sisyphus, where we keep pushing that rock labeled “Democratic victory” up that ever steeper hill, only to see all the hard work and sacrifice tumble to the ground right on the precipice of actually getting anything done. Our once great nation is being brought to its knees because a couple of scatterbrained Democratic senators can’t bring themselves to admit they are playing handmaiden to Republican plots to destroy the tattered remains of our democracy. Americans keep voting and voting and voting for the right not to be senselessly killed. That we can’t even get that shows that this thing we call a “democracy” is anything but.

Jen Psaki calls on Congress to act on gun control after Indianapolis FedEx shooting

“We can’t afford to wait as innocent lives are taken,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday, noting that on the 14th anniversary of the Virginia Tech mass shooting, when a gunman killed 32 people, President Biden was informed of another mass shooting, at least the 45th across America in the last month.

A gunman opened fire and killed eight people on Thursday in an Indianapolis FedEx facility just before dying by suicide, according to local officials. Officers reportedly arrived on the scene at around 11pm. Indianapolis police Deputy Chief Craig McCartt told CNN that when they got there, it was “a very chaotic scene, with victims and witnesses running everywhere.” He speculated that the gunman killed himself around when officers encountered him.

Levi Miller, a witness, told WTHR-TV that he heard multiple gunshots as he was working a shift inside the warehouse. “I see a man come out with a rifle in his hand and he starts firing and he starts yellin’ stuff that I could not understand,” Miller said. “What I ended up doing was ducking down to make sure he did not see me because I thought he would see me and he would shoot me.”

McCartt said the shooter drove up to the building and immediately began shooting as he entered the warehouse. “He did not get very far into the facility at all,” he said, adding that the shooting likely lasted no more than one or two minutes. According to police spokesperson Genae Cook, five people are still hospitalized, and one of them is critically injured.

Authorities have not yet identified the identity and motive of the killer. On Friday, McCartt told NBC that he knew “very little” about the investigation. “We’re still trying to ascertain the exact reason and cause for this incident,” Cook echoed.

According to AP News, family members of potential victims gathered nearby as authorities cleared the scene of the crime. Many friends and family members of potential employees at the warehouse have not been able to reach potential victims, since FedEx employees are prohibited from using cellphones on the job.

FedEx is reportedly working with authorities to gather more information. “We are deeply shocked and saddened by the loss of our team members following the tragic shooting at our FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis,” the company said in a statement. “Our most heartfelt sympathies are with all those affected by this senseless act of violence.”

Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett also expressed his condolences. “This morning, Indianapolis residents are confronted with the horrific news of yet another mass shooting, an act of violence that senselessly claimed the lives of eight of our neighbors,” he tweeted on Friday. “As law enforcement works to learn more about this tragedy, our prayers are with the families of those whose lives were cut short.”

The tragedy is just the latest in a spate of mass shootings in recent weeks. Back in March, eight people were slain in three different Atlanta-area spas. Many argued that the rampage was anti-Asian hate crime. Later that month, a gunman killed ten people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. March also saw another shooting in which four people were slain at a real estate office in Southern California. According to the Gun Violence Archive, just this year, Indianapolis residents have been victims in three of the twelve deadliest shootings throughout the country.

“We can’t afford to wait as innocent lives are taken,” Psaki said on Friday. “There’s more we can do and must do,” she said. “The Senate should take up and pass the three bills, strengthening background checks, that passed the House with bipartisan majorities and have the overwhelming support of the American people. They should heed the president’s call to pass a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and an immunity for gun manufacturers.”

Psaki added: “We can’t give up just because it’s hard, just because the politics are perplexing.”